This is always done in America, and had this very requisite precaution been used by the Bank of England our plan would have been fruitless and we should have been a few thousands out of pocket; but, if not, then we could throw into the hopper enough acceptances of home manufacture so that through the red tape routine of the bank millions of sovereigns would be ground out into our pockets.
Taking my deposit book and the genuine bills, I went to the bank and left the bills for discount. This was at once done and the amount placed to my credit. I drew £10,000, and that night found me once more one of 500 unfortunates paying tribute to Neptune. This time I landed at Ostend and took the train for Amsterdam. There I repeated the Paris operation, securing £10,000 in genuine bills. I returned to London, and as before left them for acceptance. Then my companion manufactured a lot of imitations and put them away with those previously manufactured, to be all ready when the day came to use them. The genuine bills were then discounted. Again and again I went to the Continent, repeating the operation, until at last my credit at the bank was firm as a rock, and we were ready to reap our harvest. But these operations, simple as they seem, lasted over a period of six months, and had been made at heavy cost. Our ordinary living expenses were not less than $25 a day for the three, while our extraordinary expenses were enormous. I probably traveled 10,000 miles over the Continent in my bill-buying expeditions to Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfort and Vienna.
Another source of expense was the commissions paid to brokers for buying bills on the exchange. Then we had many expenses purely personal, and, enormous as it seems, the sum total from the day of our return from Brazil until the day of our operations against the bank began to bring us in cash were quite $500 a week, so that we had invested $15,000 in preparation, not to speak of our hard work—and it was hard work, and trying, too, for there were a multitude of details to be worked out.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE EGYPTIANS PASS OVER THE RED SEA AND THE HEBREWS ARE DROWNED THEREIN.
All the details of events leading through the long Summer and Autumn days of 1872 up to the hour when the golden shower began to fall on us are of intense, almost dramatic, interest. I will not, however, lengthen the narrative by giving here any further account of them, but will merely relate the story of the last five days before the actual presentation of our home-brewed acceptances.
The bank had been discounting for weeks comparatively large sums for me. Many thousand pounds of the genuine article discounted had matured and been paid, and more thousands were still in the vaults, awaiting maturity, and would fall due, while our home-manufactured bills would be laid away in the vaults, there to remain for four or five months until due. Of course a full month or two months before that we could pack our baggage and be on the other side of the world; I on some hacienda in Mexico, George and Mac at some fashionable resort in Florida. They soon to knock at the gates of the Four Hundred, I to spend a year or two in Mexico, playing "grand senor," until, under the skillful management of our friends, Irving, Stanley and White, at Police Headquarters in New York, the affair had blown over, and they invited me to return.
But, as the sequel will show, the reality took on a different complexion from the ideal.
