the
caretaker, who lived in the extension at the back.

He sat in his room for hours brooding. Two or three times he picked up a
book--he remembered afterwards distinctly that it was Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason--and tried to read it, but it seemed meaningless and
trivial. Then with a sudden access of resolution he started from his
chair and made his way down the stairs and into the office room of the
bank, meaning to get a revolver and kill himself on the spot and let
them find his body lying on the floor.

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 lo