The other could not suppress a little cry.

“And they are for you.”

Blake simply gasped.  “Ten thousand dollars!” he repeated, a queer feeling growing up in his throat. “Ten thousand. Are you sure?  I mean—­you mean they are for me?” he stammered.  He felt quite silly with excitement, and grew more so with every minute, as the man maintained a perfect silence.  Was it not a dream?  Wouldn’t the man put them back in the bag presently and say it was a mistake, and they were meant for somebody else?  He could not believe his eyes or his ears.  Yet, in a sense, it was possible.  He had read of such things in books, and even come across them in his experience of the courts—­the erratic and generous philanthropist who is determined to do his good deed and to get no thanks or acknowledgment for it.  Still, it seemed almost incredible.  His troubles began to melt away like bubbles in the sun; he thought of the other fellows when they came in, and what he would have to tell them; he thought of the German landlady and the arrears of rent, of regular food and clean linen, and books and music, of the chance of getting into some respectable business, of—­well, of as many things as it is possible to think of when excitement and surprise fling wide open the gates of the imagination.

The man, meanwhile, began quietly to count over the packages aloud from one to ten, and then to count the bills in each separate packet, also from one to ten.  Yes, there were ten little heaps, each containing ten bills of a hundred-dollar denomination.  That made ten thousand dollars.  Blake had never seen so much money in a single lump in his life before; and for many months of privation and discomfort he had not known the “feel” of a twenty-dollar note, much less of a hundred-dollar one.  He heard them crackle under the man’s fingers, and it was like crisp laughter in his ears.  The bills were evidently new and unused.

But, side by side with the excitement caused by the shock of such an event, Blake’s caution, acquired by a year of vivid New York experience, was meanwhile beginning to assert itself.  It all seemed just a little too much out of the likely order of things to be quite right.  The police courts had taught him the amazing ingenuity of the criminal mind, as well as something of the plots and devices by which the unwary are beguiled into the dark places where blackmail may be levied with impunity.  New York, as a matter of fact, just at that time was literally undermined with the secret ways of the blackmailers, the green-goods men, and other police-protected abominations; and the only weak point in the supposition that this was part of some such proceeding was the selection of himself—­a poor newspaper reporter—­as a victim.  It did seem absurd, but then the whole thing was so out of the ordinary, and the thought once having entered his mind, was not so easily got rid of.  Blake resolved to be very cautious.