ok 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 chapte