There was no further opposition when the three Yale men undertook to leave the bank building. Dick Merriwell gripped Brady’s hand to thank him for his timely interference.
“The whole thing’s rot, of course,” said Brady. “But it’s so infernally clever and so well managed that I’m not sure that you can blame Bromlow and Hastings very much for being deceived.”
“I’m sure you cannot,” said Dick. “I don’t need to tell you that I can prove myself to be all right without trouble. But that won’t settle it, by a good deal. There’s some queer influence back of this whole thing.”
“Well, Foote’s part of the influence,” said Brady. “He was in there, talking to Riggs, that little clerk they scared almost to death, and I’m willing to bet that he could tell a whole lot if we could only make him do it.”
“I’m about ready to use force to clear this thing up,” said Jim Phillips. “It’s certainly a mighty queer business.”
“What you need is a good sleep,” said Brady. “And I’ll see you get it, too.”
CHAPTER XLIII
THE ROBBERS’ FALSE STEP.
It was at the last moment, truly, that Barrows had found a use for Foote. He had changed his mind about abandoning Riggs to his fate, not because he had developed any sudden sympathy for the poor little bank clerk who had done wrong, but because he had seen a chance, although defeated in his main object, that of possessing himself of a large sum by the cleverly planned robbery of the Elm National, to do great harm to Dick Merriwell and Jim Phillips. Foote kept him in touch, by long-distance telephone, with the developments of the morning at the bank, which he was able to learn of through his friendship for a bookkeeper there, and Barrows had managed, by the slenderest of margins, to get a thousand dollars in good money back to Riggs, which had been substituted for ten of the counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.
Dick Merriwell’s deposit had been taken by Bascom, but to delay detection of the theft, clever counterfeits, their numbers corresponding to the false numbers that Riggs had entered up in the books, had been put in their place in the safe. That had been the essence of the remarkable plan that Bascom and Barrows had arranged. They knew that close inspection of the reserve notes would not be made very often, and they trusted to the fact that a hasty glance at the piled notes would not reveal their true character. Thus they could hope to get the stolen money into circulation before efforts to trace it were made, and, owing to Riggs’ manipulation of the record of the numbers of the genuine notes, tracing would, even when the record of the substitution was discovered, have been almost impossible.