So he turned into his big cage, fenced around with the bronze-gilt bars of steel. And again his glance fell on the old safe. He shook his head, as he nearly always did when he looked toward the old, inefficient structure.
He looked out of the rear window over the roofs of the town toward the big sea of the mountains, made dark by the rugged growth of the pines.
They seemed to him to be in motion, sweeping toward the town of Elkdale. A strange sense of gloom came slowly over the heart of the cashier as he got back on his stool before his barred window.
This was only a little over five minutes before the bank was robbed.
II—THE ROBBERY
At this time, four riders came jogging quietly down the main street of Elkdale and dismounted in front of the watering troughs that were lined up before the general-merchandise store of P. V. Wilkie. The horses at once stretched their heads toward the water, but one of the four, the smallest man of the lot, with a pinched, rat-like face, gathered the reins and jerked on them to keep the heads of the horses in the air.
Those horses wanted water, and since the riders had just come into town, there was no good reason why they would have to be kept from it, unless the riders expected to be leaving the town again at high speed before many minutes had passed. However, none of the idlers in the street paid any attention, neither did they notice the way in which Jimmy Lovell presently pretended to tether the horses to the hitch rack and made no progress in his work.
In the meantime, the other three went down to the corner, turned across the street, and walked back up the other side of it to the big double doors that opened into the First National Bank of Elkdale, where half a million dollars in cash rested in the safe.
Joe Mantry was young, light-stepping, handsome. He was as reckless as a bull-terrier puppy, and he had the light of a fighting terrier in his brown eyes. Dave Lister was tall, and had a long, pale face. The leader, Phil Bray, was a handsome fellow in a way, but there seemed to be something missing from the corner of his face; one could hardly say what.
It was Bray who walked ahead of the others to the cashier’s window and laid the barrel of a big Colt .45 on the sill of the window.
“Shove up your hands and keep your mouth shut,” said Bray.
In the banking room there was only one other man, the teller. He was a grizzled man with only one leg. The lack of a leg was what kept him inside a bank instead of out in the mountains.
Dave Lister covered the teller.
Poor Oliver Wayland looked up at the savage eyes of the robber who was before him, and above the head of Phil Bray to the picture which his own hands had lately nailed against the wall at a convenient level. He saw there the smiling, good-looking face of Jim Silver, looking far too young for the fame which he had won. Wayland had nailed up the picture, thinking that this would be an example to him and to the others in the bank. Silver was the sort of a man who preferred death to a failure m any line of duty.
Now what would he, Oliver Wayland, do?
He thought of duty and honor—but when he thought of moldering death, he thought also of young May Rucker.
“You fool, get your mitts up,” said Phil Bray.
Slowly the cashier raised his hands.
May Rucker and the sweetness of life—that was what he thought of.
From the tail of his eye he saw the old teller standing, reaching his hands toward the ceiling. In the farther distance the third of the bandits was circling through the end gate and hurrying toward the safe.
Was it possible that the bank was to be robbed without the lifting of a single voice to give the alarm?
There was no doubt in the mind of Wayland now. He understood that the faint smile on the lips of Jim Silver was caused by his contempt for the weakness of ordinary mortals. But Jim Silver was a hero, and Oliver Wayland was not. Heroes find something to do because their brains are not frozen up with terror; but in the mind of Wayland there was nothing but the spinning shadow of terror and of shame. He could think of nothing at all.
Behind him he heard the hands of the third of the robbers busy at the safe.
Half a million in hard cash—and the minutes were running on faster than the cold sweat ran on the face of Wayland! He heard the subdued clinking of steel agahist steel as drawer after drawer of the safe was pulled out.
What difference did it make—a good safe or an old and crazy one, so long as the hired men of the bank did not have the courage necessary for their jobs?
Every minute was long enough to drive Wayland to madness. And then something stirred at the rear of the bank. A door opened—the rear door. And old Hal Parson walked in, his head dark, his hair shining from the recent ducking which he had given himself to regain his sobriety.
“Stick up your hands, brother!” called Dave Lister, the tall, pale bandit. “Stick ‘em up—and pronto!”
Hal Parson had seen what was happening with slow and dazed eyes. He started to Uft his hands. Then he was aware of that picture on the wall that seemed to say to Hal Parson that courage is always worth while, and chances are worth taking, so long as they are in a good cause.
He saw his friend and patron, Wayland, the cashier, with his long, slender arms stretched above his head, and he remembered in a flash the thousand benefactions that he had received from that man. He remembered the kindness, the money loans, the warnings, the good advice he had often received from Oliver Wayland. And he realized that the result of this day might well be the ruin of the bank and therefore the loss of Wayland’s position.
At the same time, Hal Parson recalled the stubnosed revolver which he carried on his hip. He got that revolver out with one jerking motion and tried to send a bullet into Phil Bray, at the cashier’s window. But Joe Mantxy observed the janitor in plenty of time. Joe was apparently busy only with the stuff he was pulling out of the safe and stuffing into a canvas sack. But he observed Hal Parson in plenty of time, made a fine, snappy draw of his Colt, and dropped Hal with a bullet right through the body.
The janitor fell on the floor and began to kick himself around in a circle and claw at his wounded body with both hands. Joe Mantry, having really seen to the safe pretty thoroughly by this time, snatched up the canvas sack and raced away with it. Bray and Dave Lister backed toward the front door of the bank.
That was when the cashier came to himself. He dropped to his knees behind his wall, grabbed a gun off the lowest shelf, and opened fire just as the robbers leaped out of the front door, and as Rucker came running from his inner office into his ruined bank.
Wayland could not tell whether or not he had succeeded in sending a slug into one of the bandits. They had scattered to either side the instant they got free of the door of the bank.
Wayland got out to the street, and saw that four men, in a scattered line, were riding down the main street as fast as they could drive their horses.
His shouts gave the alarm. The barking of his Colt as he fired after the fugitives helped to call out the men of the town. All up and down the street there were horses standing at various hitch racks, and now men rushed out of doorways and literally vaulted out of windows and flung themselves into saddles.