Six weeks drifted by. Mr. Boggs learned, for various considerations to various touts, that a sleeper was coming to life, today, in the third, or in the seventh. He learned that a maiden could be a gelding; was a horse which had never won a race; and not, as he’d always thought, a young filly. He learned what it meant to play ’em across the board. He lost and he continued to lose, but it didn’t matter. He might be digging deeper and deeper into his savings of twenty-four years to finance these gambling expeditions. Wind of his bets and losses might have reached the ears of Mr. Calahan; and Cameron & Calahan might, regretfully, have discharged him. What of it? There was nothing to worry about. Sooner or later in the season, some horse was bound to win a race at odds great enough to make logical his story of an afternoon’s winnings having been pyramided into thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and forty dollars. It’d be easy enough to pick a winner, when you didn’t have to pick him until after the race was over.
Six weeks. Then, one afternoon, the favorites all trailed in a sea of mud. And a nag, fittingly enough named Liberty, galloped in, paying forty to one.
That next morning, Mr. Boggs stood again at Dan Meyers’ grilled teller’s window, handing Dan one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two crisp, brand-new twenties. Heart in his mouth, he said, “Hit a nag named Liberty right on the nose. Had a hunch and I—”
Saying nothing, calmly accepting his story, Dan Meyers entered the deposit, thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and forty dollars, very neatly and without comment in Mr. Boggs’ pass book. Mr. Boggs said good-by to Dan — to poor old Dan, plodding old wheel horse that he’d used to be, stuck there in his teller’s cage for life.
He didn’t see the bank guard trail him to Cameron & Calahan’s. He was sitting in Mr. Calahan’s private office, lording it over the boss who’d discharged him, condescendingly asking Calahan’s advice on the safe investment of his winnings when Dan Meyers and a city detective and a Pinkham operative working for the Midland Insurance Co. came in.
Panic swept over Mr. Boggs. He made a leap for the far door. A shadow hurtled throught the air behind him. Strong arms locked ’round his knees, bore him to the floor with a crash... When he opened his eyes, he was lying on Mr. Calahan’s couch. Dan Meyers was looking down at him. He glared back at Dan Meyers.
“And you knew all the time?” he asked Dan bitterly. “You accepted that first twenty just to give me confidence enough to bring the rest of them in to you?”
Dan colored sheepishly. “It’d make a good story, that way,” Dan said, “me the amateur sleuth who encouraged you to— But I’m afraid I wasn’t as clever as that. Nope, you fooled me on that first bill, Horatio. Took me in completely. I said, ‘Good as gold’ and entered it in your pass book, and it wasn’t until today when you brought me in the other eighteen hundred and sixty-two of them that I realized what you were up to, six weeks ago. When you asked me to look that sample twenty over carefully, you were trying to find out whether it was hot. You wondered if I had a record of its serial number. And when I didn’t pounce on it, you guessed there wasn’t any such record. Only, there was, it happened. Been keeping such a record, every week for the insurance company, ever since the Philadelphia Distilling Co. hold-up two years ago.
“Well, as I say, that one bill got by me. You were so clever pretending you were afraid it was counterfeit, that that’s all I examined it for; its genuineness. Didn’t glance at its number. But today when you handed me eighteen hundred and sixty-two brand-new twenties — just one twenty less than the eighteen hundred and sixty-three twenties that were stolen when our armored car was knocked off on its way to the Philadelphia Distilling Company last June, I knew, then. It wasn’t a hunch. It was a ton of bricks falling on me. I signaled a bank guard to follow you. I dived into my drawer for my list of the serial numbers of that week; I checked your deposit against my list, and—”
Only Dan Meyers’ voice had blurred. Horatio Boggs sat there in a daze. Then the bills had been genuine all the time? Genuine, but so hot that Terry Colt had been afraid to try to pass them? He saw all of a sudden, what Terry Colt had been doing at the counterfeiters’ apartment. He’d been trying to sell his roll at a discount. Men who shoved the queer would probably be equally able to shove the hot. Horatio Boggs sat there, sickness and nausea rolling up in him. He, he guessed, if he hadn’t been quite so prudent and so cautious, could have taken those bills to some far city, and passed them, one at a time. Nobody’d ever have suspected drab, inconspicuous little Mr. Boggs any more than Dan Meyers had suspected him that first time. But now—
He guessed that he wouldn’t hang for the murder of the uniformed messenger who’d died in the armored car holdup, although a jury might not believe he’d found the money. He guessed that — for what he had left in his old savings account at the bank — he could hire a lawyer clever enough to persuade the jury of his innocence of everything except having been an utter damned fool. But he guessed that he’d never see Tahiti or Bali, the last paradise. Nope... Poor old Dan Meyers might. Poor old Dan Meyers who’d spent all his life making up factory payrolls, jotting down serial numbers, week after week, was probably due for a pretty nice reward. And he’d once condescendingly pitied old Dan, thought Horatio Boggs. Dan, who hadn’t anything to worry about...