He was halfway back to his room when he happened to glance side-wise into a strip of mirror in a show window as he went by. It was to the left of him, and he thought he caught a fleck of color up by his hatband as his reflection skimmed past.
He stopped in his tracks, backed up a step, took a good look, and there was a jaunty green feather nestled in the bow, where it had no right to be. He hadn’t bought a hat with any green feather-sprig.
Dismayed, he took it off, turned it over, and looked into it. It was the same brand as his, but instead of the gilt-paper initials M D cheaply pasted on the sweatband, it had R S perforated through it, which was a classier way of ticketing it. It was a ten-dollar hat — and he’d only paid five for his.
He had a brief temptation to hang onto it, creditably overcame it, growled, slung it back on his head, and started hurriedly back where he’d just come from.
The seat next to his own was vacant now. He went back to the counter and called the manager. “Hey, I walked out with somebody else’s hat, and he got mine. What’ll I do?”
“Leave it here with me if you want,” said the manager. “If he asks for it I’ll give it to him, and keep yours for you.”
“Naw,” said Dillon firmly. “It’s windy out, I’m susceptible to colds, and I ain’t going home without a hat. He may never come back with mine, and then I’m stuck without one.”
“Suit yourself,” said the manager indifferently. Anything that didn’t directly concern his hashery didn’t interest him much. “Leave your name and address with me, and if he comes around asking, I’ll tell him where he can find you.” He produced a greasy scrap of paper and a pencil stub.
“Yeah, that’s a better idea,” Dillon agreed, and wrote out the identification. The manager stuck it carelessly in the cash drawer.
Dillon left a second time, a little put out at having come all the way back for nothing, when he’d been tired to begin with. “Any other guy,” he grumbled, “would have kept it and shut up. It’s a better one than the one he got off me!”
But if he went to all the trouble of picking out a hat for himself, he wanted to wear that one, and not some other guy’s. He was funny that way. He ambled home, hands in pockets, all pride in his expensive headgear lacking because it wasn’t rightfully his.
When he got back to his room and climbed up the three flights, vague warnings he had heard somewhere or other about the dangers of wearing a hat that had been on someone else’s scalp assailed him belatedly. Dandruff and things like that. He took it off and shook it out vigorously — without being sure himself just what hygienic good that would do. He hit it a couple of good stiff clouts with the back of his hand, by way of helping the cause of sanitation along.
Something rustled momentarily in it, dropped out. He reached down and picked up a twenty-dollar bill from the floor at his feet. Brand-new, spotless, it looked as if it had just come off the Government press, except that it was folded the long way to conform to the width of the sweatband that had encased it.
Also, its hiding place had made it a little rumpled, from the warmth of the wearer’s head, without otherwise detracting from its spick-and-span newness. That is to say, had it stayed up there long enough it would have ended up looking quite wrinkled and as though it had been in circulation some time; which may have been the whole idea, but Dillon didn’t stop to think of that.
The sight of this unexpected windfall held him spellbound for a minute. “Holy cat!” he breathed reverently. He just stood there holding it stretched out between his two hands as if he were going to kiss it in another minute.
“Funny place for a guy to carry his money,” he thought. “Maybe he was afraid of having his pockets picked.” That reminded him, cruelly, that it wasn’t his. Temptation overcame him momentarily. “I wonder if he knew he had it up there?” he thought wistfully. He conquered it almost immediately. Sure, he must have. People didn’t walk around the streets with twenty-dollar bills stuck in their hatbands without knowing it.
He sighed regretfully. “Guess I’ll have to give it back to him. I left my name there. He’ll know where to come looking for his hat.” He shook his head, however, as virtue finally triumphed. “Boy, I could sure use that, though!”
He turned the hat over once more, fingered the sweatband with a new sort of respect. To his consternation a second bill dropped out!
He didn’t waste any more time and turned the entire band inside out. A whole interlocked chain of bills, with a gap where the first two “links” had been, separated and fell down. And they were all twenties, and they were all immaculately new, with just that preliminary warping and dampening.
He unfolded them, counted them over. Twenty of them. Four hundred bucks! (Which is as much as a “passer” can safely unload during the course of a single evening’s workout, even if he buys cigarettes at every corner cigar store he comes to and a beer at every bar.)
Dillon, aghast, was thinking: “That guy musta been carrying his whole bankroll around on his dome!” But it started to smell fishy to him. One was all right, but there were too many now to be accounted for plausibly in that way. All one denomination, and they all looked too new — there wasn’t a shaggy one among them; and — he held the hatful up toward his nose and inhaled — why you could almost smell the sickly sweet odor of fresh printer’s ink coming from them.
He muttered aloud, “Where was it I seen that? Last night’s paper or tonight’s?” He started to ransack the room thoroughly, the treasure hat temporarily laid aside. He found the item in night before last’s paper, fortunately not yet thrown out because he hadn’t finished doing a crossword puzzle it contained. He was not a very scholarly soul and it took him a week to do a puzzle.
New Flood of Counterfeits Deluges City, was the heading.
He hadn’t paid much attention to the item at the time, because he was in little danger of getting “stung” with one himself. He didn’t often get a look at a twenty-dollar bill, and these, the article said, were all twenties.
By the time he finished reading it he was not only thoroughly enlightened about the meaning of what he had just found, but frightened in the bargain. He thought, “I gotta get them out of here! If they’re found here in my room, I’ll be pinched and locked up!”
He had a dismayed feeling the police would refuse to believe his explanation of how he had come into possession of the money. It did sound sort of fantastic at that; picking up somebody else’s hat by mistake, with four hundred dollars of counterfeit currency tucked into it. They’d arrest him for being an accomplice of those guys, whoever they were.
He went into a panic about it, kept walking all around the hat, which now rested upside down on the seat of a chair. He looked at it in terror as though he expected it to jump up and bite him. He was afraid even to go out on the street with it now, to carry it back to the one-arm joint. He might be stopped on the way, or the manager there might even call the cops.
He couldn’t just throw it out the window or burn it here in the room; there was just a slim chance that the bills were not counterfeit, and then he’d get into another kind of trouble; the guy would come around after it, and think he’d stolen it, and then he’d have him arrested.
The more he thought about it, the only safe thing to do seemed to be to take the hat and the $400 to the police and turn it over without delay. Even if they found it hard to credit his story, at least it would be in his favor that he’d gone to them of his own accord, not waited to be picked up.
Meanwhile he was agitatedly refolding each of the bills, interlocking them together again into a circular “necklace” or paperchain, the way they had been. He reinserted this under the sweatband. He tucked the band down just the way he’d found it, eased the hat back on his head as painfully as if it had been a crown of thorns. Yes, he would go to the nearest precinct house right now; the sooner he got it over with the better.