A bank clerk in Cleveland had detected a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill in the deposit of a small retail grocer. An expert was sent for and undertook the case.
He found that the grocer had received the bill from a shoe-dealer, who had it from a dentist, who had it from somebody else, and so on, until the Secret Service man finally traced the bad note to an invalid woman who had used it to pay her physician. When questioned, this woman said that the money had been sent her by her brother, who lived in New Orleans.
The sleuth looked up the brother’s antecedents, and soon became convinced that he was the man wanted. The brother, however, soon proved to the satisfaction of the Secret Service man that his suspicions were unfounded. Indeed, it appeared that the money had been received by the New Orleans man in part payment of rent of a house he owned in Pittsburg. While the sleuth was a bit discouraged, he couldn’t give over the case when he had gone so far, so he took the next train for Pittsburg.
The tenant of the house in Pittsburg proved to be a traveling oculist, who spent most of his time in the Middle West. The Secret Service man had the good luck, however, to catch him just as he had returned from a trip; and the man at once recognized the bad bill as one that had been given him by a patient in Cleveland, the very point whence the sleuth had started.
The patient was a boss carpenter. The Secret Service man got his address from the oculist and went right after the new clue. At this point he had a premonition that something was going to happen, and he wasn’t disappointed.
The carpenter, an honest old fellow, said that he had received the bill from a certain Parker. The said Parker was the small grocer in whose bank deposit the counterfeit had turned up. The expert flew to the grocer’s as quickly as a cab would take him, and found it closed. He had left town.
Afterward it was shown beyond question that the grocer was the agent of an organized band of counterfeiters. His shop was a mere blind. That the bill which he gave the carpenter should get back into his own funds after traveling all over the continent was one of those miracles of chance for which there is no explanation.—Harper’s Weekly.
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CRISES, PREPARATION FOR
Let it not be imagined that the great souls who have made history by their heroic action and their momentous decisions in moments of critical exigency were unprepared, or that they played their grand parts at random. The hour of destiny comes, and the man comes with it, but he has always been in training for it. He has had his forty days in the wilderness.