This was an established form of salutation between them and they both grinned. Burgess rose and leaned against the rail, while the detective summarized his latest counterfeiting adventure, which had to do with a clew furnished by a bad bill that had several weeks earlier got by one of the White River National tellers. Hill had bagged the maker of the bill, and he had just been satisfying himself that the teller would be ready to testify the next day before the Federal grand jury.
Hill visited the bank frequently and Burgess knew him well. The secret-service man was a veteran hunter of offenders against the peace and dignity of the United States, and, moreover, a capital story-teller. Burgess often asked him into his private office for an hour’s talk. He had once given a dinner in Hill’s honor, inviting a select coterie of friends who knew a good tale when they heard it and appreciated a shrewd, resourceful man when they saw him.
The White River National was one of the largest and strongest banks in the state, and Burgess was one of the richest men in his native city of Indianapolis; but these facts did not interfere with enjoyment of life according to his lights, which were not unluminous. Having been born on top, he was not without his sympathetic interest in the unfortunates whose lot is cast near the burnt bottom crust, and his generous impulses sometimes betrayed him into doing things that carping critics thought not wholly in keeping with his responsibilities and station in life.
These further facts may be noted: Burgess was the best-dressed man in Indianapolis—he always wore a pink carnation; and on occasions when he motored home for luncheon he changed his necktie—a fact that did not go unremarked in the bank cages. He belonged to hunting and fishing clubs in Canada, Maine and North Carolina, and visited them at proper seasons. There was a drop of adventurous blood in him that made banking the least bit onerous at times; and when he felt the need of air he disappeared to catch salmon or tarpon, or to hunt grouse or moose. Before his father had unkindly died and left him the bank and other profitable embarrassments, he had been obsessed with a passion for mixing in a South American revolution; he had chafed when the Spanish War most deplorably synchronized with the year of his marriage, and he could think of no valid excuse for leaving the newly kindled fire on his domestic altar to pose for Spanish bullets. Twice since his marriage he had looked death in the eye: once when he tumbled off a crag of the Canadian Rockies—he was looking for a mountain sheep; and again when he had been whistled down the Virginia capes in a hurricane while yachting with a Boston friend. Every one admitted that he was a good banker. If he got stung occasionally he did not whimper; and every one knew that the White River National could stand a good deal of stinging without being obliged to hang crape on its front door.
Burgess had always felt that some day something would happen to relieve the monotony of his existence as the chief pilot of an institution which panics always passed by on the other side. His wife cultivated bishops, men of letters and highbrows generally; and he was always stumbling over them in his home, sometimes to his discomfiture. With that perversity of human nature that makes us all pine for what is not, he grew restive under the iron grip of convention and felt that he would like to disappear—either into the wilderness to play at being a savage, or into the shadowy underworld to taste danger and share the experiences of men who fight on the farther side of the barricade.
“You always seem to get ’em, Tom,” he remarked to the detective in a familiar tone, bred of long acquaintance. “Just knowing you has made a better man of me. I’m bound to be good as long as you’re on the job here; but don’t you ever get tired of the game?”
“Well, when you’re up against a real proposition and are fencing with a man who’s as smart as you are, or smarter, it’s some fun; but most of my cases lately have been too tame. The sport isn’t what it was when I started. All the crooks are catalogued and photographed and dictagraphed these days; and when you go after ’em you merely send in your card and call a motor to joy-ride ’em to jail. It’s been a long time since I was shot at—not since those bill-raisers down in the Orange County hills soaked me with buckshot. When they turn a man loose at Leavenworth we know just about where he will bring up and who’s at home to welcome him; and you can usually calculate pretty well just when he will begin manufacturing and floating the queer again.”
“You hang on to the petrified idea that once a crook, always a crook—no patience with the eminent thinkers who believe that ‘while the lamp holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return?’”
“Yep—return to jail! Well, I don’t say reform is impossible; and I’ve let a few get by who did keep straight. But it’s my business to watch and wait. My best catches have been through luck as much as good management—but don’t tell that on me; it would spoil my reputation.”
He turned away, glanced across the room and swung round into his former position with his arm resting on the railing by Burgess’s desk. He continued talking as before, but the banker saw that something had interested him.