The Banker and the Bear

Next morning Bagsbury's bank had a joke, that is, the younger and less serious employees thought they had a joke, -- Curtin had come down early. Ridiculously early, too; not only before his own hour, which was any time in the middle of the morning, but before John Bagsbury himself appeared, or Jackson, the cashier. There was no visible press of work which seemed to demand Curtin's attention, for he stood about in a lost way, apparently unable to make up his mind to do anything. Every one who passed Jack Dorlin's desk paused to make jocular speculations, principally to the effect that Curtin's alarm clock must have gone wrong. Curtin with an alarm clock!

But Jack Dorlin found it hard to enjoy the joke; he could not satisfactorily convince himself that it was a joke at all. Neither he nor Dick had ever told John Bagsbury that Sponley had lied in saying that he did not know Jervis Curtin, though now, after six months, the lie still troubled them. Throughout the game which they knew was being played about the bank both of them were handicapped by a lack of familiarity with the rules. It was like nothing else in their experience. Up to within a year they had never met any one who was an expert at skating over the ice of the law where it was thin. The exact knowledge which enables men to avoid by the merest fraction the breaking of this law, which must on no account be broken, and encourages them to defy this other law with impunity, this classified knowledge was a science of whose very existence they had never been made aware. To their minds such things as conspiracies and spies and betrayals were things which occurred only in a certain sort of novel which they seldom read. They could not think of a real detective without a smile. They heartily distrusted Sponley, and they suspected Curtin, but they could not speculate upon the possible relation between these two without feeling rather foolish. They decided again and again that it was nothing, but just as often they again began wondering what it was. And the fear of making themselves ridiculous kept them of speaking of it to John.