A forced laugh from the post master followed this announcement, but the honest wife looked worried.
"Well," he answered, "if it did not come from the Appointment Office, then some mischievous clerk in the Department may have sent it as an April-fool hoax, as it was near the first of April; or some one may have slipped it into my private box unobserved, though no one could well do it unless it was the boy that you see about here."
"I see no motive that he could have had for doing it," I observed.
"But he might possibly have been hired to do it," was the reply.
In accounting for the envelope, it now became an important point to settle whether or not the post master had been in the habit of preserving all official circulars from the Department. If so, and this envelope had been torn from one of them, the remaining fragment might still come to light as his certain accuser. A search of the files showed the preservation of all such documents for two years previous, but nothing appeared to match the covering of the "order."
Still believing it was obtained in that way, I adjourned the investigation for a few days, and meantime applied to the Department for duplicates of any printed circulars that had been sent to this office, and the return mail brought me one that was so sent, but a few weeks previous to the fraud in question. Its absence from the postmaster's files, while all other similar documents had been carefully saved, was a strong circumstance to show that a part of it at least had been used for this dishonest purpose. But the damning proof was yet to come. In the printed words "Official Business," which were in capitals on the outside of the duplicate circular, there was a defect, or "nick" in the letter O, and the last S, in business. On comparing this with the covering of the spurious order, exactly the same bruises were found in the same letters, identifying the one with the other in the most positive manner, as the coincidence would be almost miraculous of the same type being battered in precisely the same way, upon circulars printed at different times.
Nor was this all. In folding the circular before the ink was fairly dry, some parts of the printed words in the body of it had "struck off" upon the inner side of the "fly leaf," which parts of words could, by a strong light, be distinctly observed upon several lines directly under each other. Referring to the printed page of the entire circular received for examination and comparison, a copy of which was known to have been sent to this post-office, the same words were found to occur, and precisely in the same relative positions.
Thus was the final link in the chain of evidence closed and riveted; a chain which held the guilty one in its unyielding grasp, and set at nought all attempts at evasion or escape, had he been disposed to make them. His only alternative was silence or confession, and of these he chose the latter.
A full report of all the facts above stated was made to the Department, and the tricky post master soon received an official letter from Washington, concerning whose genuineness the most sceptical could have no doubt. In this case, "the engineer was hoist with his own petard." In stopping his neighbor's office he was himself stopped; and, furthermore, received a reward for his misdeeds, the nature of which any future post-office stopper will learn by sad experience.