It was then far on in the night and the empty building of the bank was as still as death.Pupkin could hear the stairs creak under his feet, and as he went he thought he heard another sound like the opening or closing of a door.But it sounded not like the sharp ordinary noise of a closing door but with a dull muffled noise as if someone had shut the iron door of a safe in a room under the ground.
For a moment Pupkin stood and listened with his heart thumping against his ribs.Then he kicked his slippers from his feet and without a sound stole into the office on the ground floor and took the revolver from his teller's desk.As he gripped it, he listened to the sounds on the back-stairway and in the vaults below.
I should explain that in the Exchange Bank of Mariposa the offices are on the ground floor level with the street.Below this is another floor with low dark rooms paved with flagstones, with unused office desks and with piles of papers stored in boxes.On this floor are the vaults of the bank, and lying in them in the autumn--the grain season--there is anything from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in currency tied in bundles.There is no other light down there than the dim reflection from the lights out on the street, that lies in patches on the stone floor.
I think as Peter Pupkin stood, revolver in hand, in the office of the bank, he had forgotten all about the maudlin purpose of his first coming.He had forgotten for the moment all about heroes and love affairs, and his whole mind was focussed, sharp and alert, with the intensity of the night-time, on the sounds that he heard in the vault and on the back-stairway of the bank.
Straight away, Pupkin knew what it meant as plainly as if it were written in print.He had forgotten, I say, about being a hero and he only knew that there was sixty thousand dollars in the vault of the bank below, and that he was paid eight hundred dollars a year to look after it.
As Peter Pupkin stood there listening to the sounds in his stockinged feet, his faced showed grey as ashes in the light that fell through the window from the street.His heart beat like a hammer against his ribs.But behind its beatings was the blood of four generations of Loyalists, and the robber who would take that sixty thousand dollars from the Mariposa bank must take it over the dead body of Peter Pupkin, teller.
Pupkin walked down the stairs to the lower room, the one below the ground with the bank vault in it, with as fine a step as any of his ancestors showed on parade.And if he had known it, as he came down the stairway in the front of the vault room, there was a man crouched in the shadow of the passage way by the stairs at the back.This man, too, held a revolver in his hand, and, criminal or not, his face was as resolute as Pupkin's own.As he heard the teller's step on the stair, he turned and waited in the shadow of the doorway without a sound.
There is no need really to mention all these details.They are only of interest as showing how sometimes a bank teller in a corded smoking jacket and stockinged feet may be turned into such a hero as even the Mariposa girls might dream about.
All of this must have happened at about three o'clock in the night.
This much was established afterwards from the evidence of Gillis, the caretaker.When he first heard the sounds he had looked at his watch and noticed that it was half-past two; the watch he knew was three-quarters of an hour slow three days before and had been gaining since.The exact time at which Gillis heard footsteps in the bank and started downstairs, pistol in hand, became a nice point afterwards in the cross-examination.
But one must not anticipate.Pupkin reached the iron door of the bank safe, and knelt in front of it, feeling in the dark to find the fracture of the lock.As he knelt, he heard a sound behind him, and swung round on his knees and saw the bank robber in the half light of the passage way and the glitter of a pistol in his hand.The rest was over in an instant.Pupkin heard a voice that was his own, but that sounded strange and hollow, call out: "Drop that, or I'll fire!" and then just as he raised his revolver, there came a blinding flash of light before his eyes, and Peter Pupkin, junior teller of the bank, fell forward on the floor and knew no more.
At that point, of course, I ought to close down a chapter, or volume, or, at least, strike the reader over the head with a sandbag to force him to stop and think.In common fairness one ought to stop here and count a hundred or get up and walk round a block, or, at any rate, picture to oneself Peter Pupkin lying on the floor of the bank, motionless, his arms distended, the revolver still grasped in his hand.But I must go on.
By half-past seven on the following morning it was known all over Mariposa that Peter Pupkin the junior teller of the Exchange had been shot dead by a bank robber in the vault of the building.It was known also that Gillis, the caretaker, had been shot and killed at the foot of the stairs, and that the robber had made off with fifty thousand dollars in currency; that he had left a trail of blood on the sidewalk and that the men were out tracking him with bloodhounds in the great swamps to the north of the town.
This, I say, and it is important to note it, was what they knew at half-past seven.Of course as each hour went past they learned more and more.At eight o'clock it was known that Pupkin was not dead, but dangerously wounded in the lungs.At eight-thirty it was known that he was not shot in the lungs, but that the ball had traversed the pit of his stomach.
At nine o'clock it was learned that the pit of Pupkin's stomach was all right, but that the bullet had struck his right ear and carried it away.Finally it was learned that his ear had not exactly been carried away, that is, not precisely removed by the bullet, but that it had grazed Pupkin's head in such a way that it had stunned him, and if it had been an inch or two more to the left it might have reached his brain.This, of course, was just as good as being killed from the point of view of public interest.
