Two Hundred After One

In Montreal's teeming Hochelaga tenement district last week, five moppets played cops & robbers in an alley behind a branch of the Banque Canadienne Nationale. Suddenly a man with a gun in his hand came tearing out of the bank, pursued by a yelling clerk. This was the real thing.

The children screamed along in ecstatic pursuit. The bandit dodged into the next street, cut through side streets, trying to shake them off. But the pack only increased in size and vocal power. It was a familiar game on familiar grounds.

Five blocks from the bank, the children, 200 by then, ran the robber to earth. As he fell exhausted in the street, between the street car tracks, a police patrol came up, nabbed him and the $1,800 he had taken.

The glory of his capture was fine, and lost nothing in the telling. But the children hoped for something more tangible. The Canadian Bankers' Association often rewards such captures. Said one boy: "By the time it gets here, there won't be much left."

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