"Now listen," said Johnny, the old business-like expression coming back into his face. "I am hounded for the old trick; and the detectives are looking everywhere for these negotiable bonds, which I have here, in this satchel. Can I trust you with them? Will you mind them for me, until things quiet down?"
"Of course, I will," said Mamie, gladly.
So they parted once more. Johnny went into hiding again, and Mamie went to the detective's house, with the negotiable bonds. She had no intention of betraying Johnny; for she might be arrested for receiving stolen goods; and, besides, she still loved her first husband. So she planted the bonds in the bottom of the detective's trunk.
Here was a pretty situation. Her husband, the detectives, and many other "fly-cops" all over the country, were looking for these negotiable bonds, at the very moment when they were safely stowed away in the detective's trunk. Mamie and Johnny, who continued to meet occasionally, often smiled at the humor of the situation.
Soon, however, suspicion for the Philadelphia touch began to attach to Johnny. Mamie's detective asked her one evening if she had heard anything about Johnny, of late.
"Not for years," said Mamie, calmly.
But one night, several Central Office men followed Mamie as she went to Mt. Vernon to meet Johnny; and when the two old lovers parted, Johnny was arrested on account of the fifteen thousand dollar robbery in Brooklyn, from the penalty of which he had escaped by means of Mamie's neck-tie many years before. The detectives suspected Johnny of having stolen the bonds, but of this they could get no evidence. So he was sent to Sing Sing for six years on the old charge. When he was safely in prison the detectives induced him to return the bonds, on the promise that he would not be prosecuted at his release, and would be paid a certain sum of money. The mercantile house agreed, and Johnny sent word to Mamie to give up the bonds. Then, of course, the detective knew about the trick that Mamie had played him. But he, like Johnny, was a philosopher, and forgave the clever woman. When he first heard of it, however, he had said to her, indignantly:
"You cow, if you had given the bonds to me, I would have been made a police captain, and you my queen."
As soon as Johnny got out of stir, Mamie quit the detective, and the couple are now living again together in a quiet, domestic manner, in Manhattan.