“No?” Storm paused to light a cigar. “Well, if we’re not you must admit that the opportunities lie around thick enough. The wonder of it is that there isn’t more crookedness going on!”
“The example of what happens to the fellow who has tried it is a deterrent, I imagine,” George observed sententiously. “When he’s caught——”
“And when is he caught except through his own negligence and loss of nerve?” demanded Storm, the train of thought which had occupied his mind an hour before recurring to him. “Certainly it isn’t through the extraordinary ability of society at large to track him down. A man gives himself away; he is safe until he makes a mistake.”
“Then every crook in the world must be a bungler, for they’re all caught, sooner or later,” George retorted. “The cleverest ones over-reach themselves in time.—Take this fellow Jan Martens, or whatever his real name is. To be sure, he hasn’t been caught yet, but his game is up; he tried it once too often.”
“Martens?” Storm repeated absently, his mind fixed upon his own argument.
“Haven’t you looked at the evening papers?” asked George. “He’s been working an old con. game with a new twist and getting the suckers for anything from five to fifty thousand. Worked Boston and Philadelphia before he came here and got away with a tremendous haul. They only got the goods on him to-day, but he had skipped. It was a clever stunt, too; he played upon a combination of sympathy and cupidity in his victims that only failed when he tackled a wise one. His line was getting loans on forged securities for rebuilding demolished property in France and Belgium——”
“What?”
Storm was not conscious that he had spoken, that he had turned and was staring at his visitor with wild eyes. He only knew that George’s solid, compact figure was wavering oddly, and his voice seemed to come from far away.
“He rather upsets your theory, Norman,” George continued complacently, ignorant of the effect of his disclosure. “He wasn’t giving himself away, by a long shot, and his paraphernalia was certainly elaborate and imposing enough in all conscience! In Boston he posed as Jan Martens, a Belgian looking for a loan to rebuild the family chateau and giving forged Congo properties as security. It worked so well that when he came here he tried to improve on it, and over-reached himself, as I contended a few minutes ago.
“A lot of foreigners are over here now trying to negotiate perfectly legitimate loans on the same order, but with bona fide securities to offer, and he fell in with one of them who was vouched for at the French consulate here, a citizen of Lille named Du Chainat.”