I was very grateful to the McCall estimate of Appleboro’s future, for the long stretch shadowed by their overgrown shrubbery brought us to the door leading to the upstair offices, without any possible danger of detection.

The bank had been a stately old home before business seized upon it, tore out its whole lower floors, and converted it into a strong and commodious bank.  It is the one building in all Appleboro that keeps a light burning all night, a proceeding some citizens regard as unnecessary and extravagant; for is not Old Man Jackson there employed as night watchman?  Old Man Jackson lost a finger and a piece of an ear before Appomattox, and the surrender deprived him of all opportunity to repay in kind.  It was his cherished hope that “some smartybus crooks ‘d try to git in my bank some uh these hyuh nights—­an’ I cert’nly hope to God they’ll be Yankees, that’s all.”

Somehow, they hadn’t tried.  Perhaps they had heard of Old Man Jackson’s watchful waiting and knew he wasn’t at all too proud to fight.  His quarters was a small room in the rear of the building, which he shared with a huge gray tomcat named Mosby.  With those two on guard, Appleboro knew its bank was as impregnable as Gibraltar.  But as nobody could possibly gain entrance to the vaults from above, the upper portion of the building, given over to offices, was of course quite unguarded.

One reached these upper offices by a long walled passageway to the left, where the sidewall of the bank adjoins the McCall garden.  The door leading to this stairway is not flush with the street, but is set back some feet; this forms a small alcove, which the light flickering through the bank’s barred windows does not quite reach.

John Flint stepped into this small cavern and I after him.  As if by magic the locked door opened, and we moved noiselessly up the narrow stairs with tin signs tacked on them.  At the head of the flight we paused while the flashlight gave us our bearings.  Here a short passage opens into the wide central hall.  Inglesby’s offices are to the left, with the windows opening upon the tangled wilderness of the McCall place.

Right in front of us half a dozen sets of false teeth, arranged in a horrid circle around a cigar-box full of extracted molars such as made one cringe, grinned bitingly out of a glass case before the dentist’s office door.  The effect was of a lipless and ghastly laugh.

Before the next door a fatuously smiling pink-and-white bust simpered out of the Beauty Parlor’s display-case, a bust elaborately coiffured with pounds of yellow hair in which glittered rhinestone buckles.  Hair of every sort and shade and length was clustered about her, as if she were the presiding genius of some barbarian scalping-cult.  Seen at that hour, in the pale luster of the flashlight, this sorry plunder of lost teeth and dead hair made upon one a melancholy impression, disparaging to humanity.  I had scant time to moralize on hair and teeth, however, for Flint was stopping before a door the neat brass plate of which bore upon it: