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The Twinkling Of An Eye
by
“I should think so!” broke in the explosive Wheatcroft. “The Major has been with us for thirty years now. I’d suspect myself of petty larceny as soon as him.”
“As I said,” continued the elder Whittier; “I told him that we trusted him perfectly, of course. But he urged me, and to please him I changed the combination of this safe that afternoon. You will remember, Wheatcroft, that I gave you the new word the day you came back.”
“Yes, I remember,” said Mr. Wheatcroft. “But I don’t see why the Major did not want to know how to open that safe. Perhaps he is beginning to feel his years now. He must be sixty, the Major; and I’ve been thinking for some time that he looks worn.”
“I noticed the change in him,” Paul remarked, “the first day I came into the office. He seemed ten years older than he was last winter.”
“Perhaps his wound troubles him again,” suggested Mr. Whittier. “Whatever the reason, it is at his own request that he is now ignorant of the combination. No one knows that but Wheatcroft and I. The letters themselves I wrote myself, and copied myself, and put them myself in the envelopes I directed myself. I don’t recall mailing them myself, but I may have done that too. So you see that there can’t be any foundation for your belief, Wheatcroft, that somebody had access to our bids.”
“I can’t believe anything else!” cried Wheatcroft, impulsively. “I don’t know how it was done–I’m not a detective–but it was done somehow. And if it was done, it was done by somebody! And what I’d like to do is to catch that somebody in the act–that’s all! I’d make it hot for him!”
“You would like to have him out at the Ramapo Works,” said Paul, smiling at the little man’s violence, “and put him under the steam-hammer?”
“Yes, I would,” responded Mr. Wheatcroft. “I would indeed! Putting a man under a steam-hammer may seem a cruel punishment, but I think it would cure the fellow of any taste for prying into our business in the future.”
“I think it would get him out of the habit of living,” the elder Whittier said, as the tall clock in the corner struck one. “But don’t let’s be so brutal. Let’s go to lunch and talk the matter over quietly. I don’t agree with your suspicion, Wheatcroft, but there may be something in it.”
Five minutes later Mr. Whittier, Mr. Wheatcroft, and the only son of the senior partner left the glass-framed private office, and, walking leisurely through the long store, passed into the street.
They did not notice that the old book-keeper, Major Van Zandt, whose high desk was so placed that he could overlook the private office, had been watching them ever since the messenger had delivered the despatch. He could not read the telegram, he could not hear the comments, but he could see every movement and every gesture and every expression. He gazed from one speaker to the other almost as though he were able to follow the course of the discussion; and when the three members of the firm walked past his desk, he found himself staring at them as if in a vain effort to read on their faces the secret of the course of action they had resolved upon.
II
After luncheon, as it happened, both the senior and the junior partner of Whittier, Wheatcroft & Co. had to attend meetings, and they went their several ways, leaving Paul to return to the office alone.
When he came opposite to the house which bore the weather-beaten sign of the firm he stood still for a moment, and looked across with mingled pride and affection. The building was old-fashioned–so old-fashioned, indeed, that only a long-established firm could afford to occupy it. It was Paul Whittier’s great-grandfather who had founded the Ramapo Works. There had been cast the cannon for many of the ships of the little American navy that gave so good an account of itself in the war of 1812. Again, in 1848, had the house of Whittier, Wheatcroft & Co.–the present Mr. Wheatcroft’s father having been taken into partnership by Paul’s grandfather–been able to be of service to the government of the United States. All through the four years that followed the firing on the flag in 1861 the Ramapo Works had been run day and night. When peace came at last and the people had leisure to expand, a large share of the rails needed by the new overland roads which were to bind the East and West together in iron bonds had been rolled by Whittier, Wheatcroft & Co. Of late years, as Paul knew, the old firm seemed to have lost some of its early energy, and, having young and vigorous competitors, it had barely held its own.