Stork was evidently a sailor, for he wore a pea-jacket, walked with a rolling gait, and was eternally chewing tobacco, and expectorating with a considerable degree of skill. If Rosencrantz was a scoundrel, Rudolf Stork was something worse. There was that about him that suggested the jail-bird, the man who knows what it means to wear a convict's clothes, to be labelled with a number and pace a prison yard. One evening, Rosencrantz left the office earlier than usual. There had been a sudden bout of cold weather, when it had seemed that the spring was at hand. A bitter wind was blowing through the New York streets, that picked up the dust and drove it in eddies between the great, square-cut, towering buildings. It was wholly characteristic of Rosencrantz that he grudged his clerks a fire, though the stove in his own room had been burning all that day. Peggy and Jimmy had been left at their desks with orders to make up certain arrears of work. The boy sat before an opened ledger; the girl was busy at her typewriter with a sheaf of shorthand notes at her elbow.
Suddenly, she got to her feet, unrolled the last quarto, and placed the cover over the machine.
"I've done," she said, looking across at Jimmy.
The boy, who was still poring over the ledger, ran his fingers through his hair.
"I wish I had," he answered, in a tired voice. "If I can't balance these accounts, I shall hear all about it to-morrow. Say, Peggy," he continued, swinging round in his chair, "what do you say to a picnic?"
Peggy straightened, and shaped her lips as if about to whistle.
"Just fine!" she exclaimed. "But, Jimmy, dare we risk it?"
The boy's face altered; for a moment he looked quite serious.
"No," said he. "It's not good enough. I don't mind for myself, but I'm not going to get you into a row."
"It wouldn't be half such fun if it was," observed Peggy, with a world of truth. "Besides, he won't come back again to-night. He told me I was to leave the most important letters till to-morrow morning."
Jimmy was on his feet in an instant; the ledger was slammed down upon a shelf.
"Come on," he cried. "We'll have the feast of our lives."
Their cooking utensils consisted of a cheap kettle, a frying-pan, and a few knives, forks and spoons. These Peggy had hidden in a large cupboard in Rosencrantz's room, which was used as a receptacle for old account books and ledgers and all kinds of rubbish, and where their employer never by any chance happened to look. As they rescued these priceless possessions from behind a collection of office brooms and dust-pans, Jimmy noticed that the mysterious leather box--which Rosencrantz called his "attaché-case"--had been placed on the floor of the cupboard.