“If you were innocent, of course you had a right to feel safe in coming back,” was his doubtful remark. “You were cautious enough in making this meeting, too.”
“For the same reason that I got out last July. Now that we’ve met, colonel,” continued I, “you will no doubt come to some sort of an agreement, in which I can claim my money in the Stuyvesant Bank. The judge, I presume, told you that a meeting between us would, in all probability, straighten out this very disagreeable tangle.”
“You surely don’t mean the seventy-five hundred you deposited in the Stuyvesant Bank?”
“I do, colonel—certainly.”
“You needn’t worry about getting that dust there,” said Whiteley. “It’s at the district attorney’s office.”
“What,” I cried, “not in the Stuyvesant Bank?”
“No. I asked Van Orden about the two thousand your man Meriam deposited, and he pulled open a drawer and showed me the rest of the stuff. I took it.”
“The devil,” I cried. “So that’s the way Van Orden deals with his friends. He didn’t tell me, in all my visits to him after a settlement, that you had the money.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Whiteley.
I thought that it would have been a pure piece of scoundrelism on Van Orden’s part to have sent the money to the clearing-house. It seems he hadn’t, but had done worse—had actually betrayed me. Not because he wanted to do me harm, but for fear of endangering his own neck, the coward. All this I said to myself. Aloud I declared that Van Orden would be held to account for his failure to settle with me.