"I didn’t mean to interrupt you," he said. "Please go on. You mean Sammis, the real-estate man, I presume?"
"Yes. He came around to this office at five o’clock yesterday evening, accompanied by another man—the Reverend Atkinson Moore. They came to see me with reference to a letter which they had dropped in the street letter box outside Sammis’ office—a letter in a pink envelope. Mr. Sammis explained to me that the letter contained a hundred-dollar bill which the clergyman was sending to a poor family in Pennsylvania."
"He was sending a hundred dollars in currency in an unregistered letter?" exclaimed Owen, with some astonishment.
"Yes," answered the superintendent, with a smile; "the reverend gentleman has great faith evidently in the infallibility of Uncle Sam’s post office; but his friend, Mr. Sammis, is not so trustful. After dropping the letter in the box, Mr. Moore went into the real-estate office to visit Sammis, who is a member of his church, and happened to mention sending the money; whereupon the real-estate man told him what a rash thing he had done to send money in that unsafe manner, and insisted that he should try to get the letter back. They came around here to stop the letter and have it registered before it went out. Of course, I consented to this. I told them that the man who attended to that box had not come in with the last collection, and asked them to wait until he arrived."
The superintendent smiled grimly. "And now, here comes the mystery, Mr. Sheridan. When the carrier came[Pg 48] in and we went to look for that letter, it wasn’t to be found. There was no pink envelope in his bag."
"By Jove!" exclaimed Owen, who had not been in the secret service long enough to conceal his emotions.
"We searched through the contents of the bag four times," Henderson went on. "We examined the bottom of the bag carefully, thinking it might possibly have stuck there; we went to the street letter box to see whether the pink envelope might not have been left behind. Not a trace of it could we find anywhere."
"And Mr. Moore is quite certain that he dropped it in the box?" asked Owen.
"Absolutely positive."
"And quite sure that it was a pink envelope?"