He paused, and hurriedly reached into his inside coat pocket.
“They robbed me, too!” he exclaimed. “They’ve taken the pocketbook and all our money! Ned, we’ve been robbed!”
For a moment Ned stood staring at his brother as if he could not believe the words he heard. He remained holding the dangling chain, to which, only a short time before, his dead father’s valuable gold watch had been attached.
“Exactly,” answered Frank. “Why, see, they twisted the end right off your chain! That’s a regular pickpocket’s trick. And as for my wallet—well, I ought to be kicked for letting them get away with it!”
“Those two men, of course. They were working together!”
“But they didn’t know each other, Frank. Why, they were going to fight!”
“That was only their trick, Ned, to take our attention off what they were doing to us. It is an old trick. I ought to have known it. But they were good actors, and they got away with it. Oh, hang it all! How stupid I’ve been!”
“Not any more than I was, Frank. But it doesn’t seem possible that those men were friends, after the way they talked to one another. They were so—”
“Look!” suddenly exclaimed Frank. “Doesn’t that look as if they were friends?”
He pointed across Battery Park, where, walking rapidly toward the station of the elevated, were the same two men who had so nearly, apparently, come to blows in the aquarium. The men were walking along close together.
“They don’t seem very unfriendly now,” said Frank, bitterly.
“After those fellows! They shan’t get away with my watch and your money without a fight.”
“I’m with you!” cried Frank. “It’s as much your money as mine, though. I had it all together. Come on, we’ll see if we can catch ’em, but they’ve got the start of us.”
The two clever pickpockets had indeed an advantage. But Frank and Ned set off on the run, the younger lad crying loudly:
“Stop those fellows! Stop those men! They robbed us!”
His cry attracted considerable attention, and a crowd was soon following our heroes, for it does not take even such an exciting cry as “Stop thief!” to collect a throng in busy New York.
“Stop those fellows! Stop ’em!” yelled Ned.
By this time the thieves were aware of the commotion behind them. They had evidently anticipated pursuit, for at the sound of their victims’ cries, and at the sight of the crowd that had gathered to help in the chase, the two men separated.
