The Pinkerton detectives laid aside their literary work on the great train book, entitled "The Jerk-water Bank Bobbery and Other Choice Crimes," by the author of "How I Traced a Lame Man Through Michigan, and Other Felonies." They grappled with the cipher, and several of them leaned up against something and thought for a long time, but they could make neither head nor tail to it. Ignatius Donnelly took a powerful dose of kumiss, and under its maddening influence sought to solve the great problem which threatened to engulf the nation's surplus. All was in vain. Cowed and defeated, the able conservators of coin, who require a man to be identified before he can draw on his overshoes at sight, had to acknowledge if this thing continued it threatened the destruction of the entire national fabric.
About this time I was calling at the First National Bank of Chicago, the greatest bank, if I am not mistaken, in America. I saw the bonds securing its issue of national currency the other day in Washington, and I am quite sure the custodian told me it was the greatest of any bank in the Union. Anyway, it was sufficient, so that I felt like doing my banking business there whenever it became handy to do so.
I asked for a certificate of deposit for $2,000, and had the money to pay for it, but I had to be identified. "Why," I said to the receiving teller, "surely you don't require a man to be identified when he deposits money, do you?"
"Yes, that's the idea."
"Well, isn't that a new twist on the crippled industries of this country?"
"No; that's our rule. Hurry up, please, and don't keep men waiting who have money and know how to do business."
"Well, I don't want to obstruct business, of course, but suppose, for instance, I get myself identified by a man I know and a man you know and a man who can leave his business and come here for the delirious joy of identifying me, and you admit that I am the man I claim to be, corresponding as to description, age, sex, etc., with the man I advertise myself to be, how would it be about your ability to identify yourself as the man you claim to be? I go all over Chicago, visiting all the large pork-packing houses in search of a man I know, and who is intimate with literary people like me, and finally we will say, I find one who knows me and who knows you, and whom you know, and who can leave his leaf lard long enough to come here and identify me all right. Can you identify yourself in such a way that when I put in my $2,000 you will not loan it upon insufficient security, as they did in Cincinnati the other day, as soon as I go out of town?"
"Oh, we don't care especially whether you trade here or not, so that you hurry up and let other people have a chance. Where you make a mistake is in trying to rehearse a piece here instead of going out to Lincoln Park or somewhere in a quiet part of the city. Our rules are that a man who makes a deposit here must be identified."
"All right. Do you know Queen Victoria?"
"No sir; I do not."