"Until I came to bank the money. The cashier glanced at the bills, then told me he was sorry, but that he couldn't accept them. For a moment I didn't understand him, because I had forgotten all about this scare about counterfeit money and hadn't given the matter a thought. Then he told me that the bills were counterfeit. So there was nothing left for me to do but come back home, realizing that I had been very neatly tricked."
"But perhaps you haven't been tricked after all," suggested Frank. "It may be possible that the rug buyer didn't realize the money was bad. Did he say what hotel he was staying at?"
"Yes, he told me, but I called up the police and asked them to find him for me. They investigated and found that there had been no rug buyer staying at that hotel all week, nor at any other hotel in Bayport, so far as they could find."
"That doesn't look so good."
"What's more, they made inquiries at the station and found that a man answering to his description had taken the early afternoon train out. He took the rug with him—not only my rug, but a rug that he had bought from another woman in Bayport."
"He'll probably sell them in some other town."
"Just what he did. They found that he had bought a ticket to the next city but when they got in touch with the police there they found that he had sold the two rugs to a wholesale firm and disappeared. He sold my rug for five hundred dollars, and the other one for three hundred dollars."
"Did he give the other woman counterfeit money, too?"
"Yes."
"He cleaned up on that afternoon's work," remarked Frank. "He didn't lose any time in getting away, either."