"Will Peter never find that mistake ?" Once during the long wait the night watchman shifted his leg--he was on the other side of the stove--and once Peter reached up above his head for a pile of papers, spreading them out before him under the white glare of the overhead light, then silence again, broken only by the slow, dogged tock-tick, tock-tick, or the sagging of a hot coal adjusting itself for the night.
Suddenly a cheery voice rang out and Peter's hands shot up above his head.
"Ah, Breen & Co.! One of those plaguey sevens for a nine.

Here we are! Oh, Peter Grayson, how often have I told you to be careful! Ah, what a sorry block of wood you carry on your shoulders.

I won't be a minute now, Major." A gratuitous compliment on the part of my friend, I being a poor devil of a contractor without military aspirations of any kind.
"Well, well, how could I have been so stupid.

Get ready to close up, Patrick.

No, thank you, Patrick, my coat's inside; I'll fetch it." He was quite another man now, closing the great ledger with a bang; shouldering it as Moses did the Tables of the Law, and carrying it into the big vault behind him--big enough to back a buggy into had the great door been wider--shooting the bolts, whirring the combination into so hopeless and confused a state that should even the most daring and expert of burglars have tried his hand or his jimmy on its steel plating he would have given up in despair (that is unless big Patrick fell asleep--an unheard-of occurrence) and all with such spring and joyousness of movement that had I not seen him like this many times before I would have been deluded into the belief that the real Peter had been locked up in the dismal vault with the musty books and that an entirely different kind of Peter was skipping about outside.
But that was nothing to the air with which he swept his papers into the drawer of his desk, brushed away the crumpled sheets upon which he had figured his balance, and darted to the washstand behind the narrow partition.