Seven o’clock in the morning of the first Friday in October found Tom Connors at his desk in his offices on the second floor of the Safe Deposit Building. He had rented a suite of rooms there several months before and had put on the door the simple sign, “Thomas E. Connors, Broker.” There was nothing unusual about the appearance of the office. In the anteroom there were a few chairs, a table and an office-boy. In another room a leased wire was run in and a telegraph operator was seated. In the office of the “broker” himself there were only such paraphernalia as might be found in any broker’s office.
Even in an inner room there was hardly anything to arouse suspicion. Some persons might have wondered a little if they had noticed that what was to all appearances a door of a coat-closet in reality opened on a secret staircase that led directly to the floor below and into one of the strong rooms of the Safe Deposit Company of which Mr. Martin, the banker, was president.
It was not very many minutes after the arrival of his employer that the office-boy realized to his regret that Friday was to be almost as busy a day for him as the day before had been. Ordinarily, he had had plenty of time to read his favorite literature, interrupted perhaps by a dozen callers and half a dozen errands to do, but on Thursday he had observed sorrowfully that Mr. Connors’s clients seemed to be increasing. If he had kept count he might have known that no less and no more than one hundred persons had called on Mr. Connors. Mr. Connors saw all of them. Some of them he saw alone. Others were admitted to his room by twos and threes. In one instance ten men entered the inner office and emerged from it twenty minutes later in a body. But what all those men were doing there was not of half so much interest to the office-boy as was the fate of Daredevil Mike, whom the end of the chapter had left facing the muzzles of seven rifles in the hands of seven desperate moonshiners.
Perhaps the office-boy’s respect for Mr. Connors’s callers would have been increased had he known that each of the men when he left the office had a package of one-dollar bills. There was not one of them that had not at least $100; others had as much as $500. There was not one of them that Mr. Connors did not know was to be trusted thoroughly. The men were carefully selected. Some of them on previous occasions during political campaigns had been supplied with money by Mr. Connors to be distributed in the places where it would do the most good. A few of them were not unknown in the records of crime, but as Mr. Connors had remarked to Martin, the banker, to whom he had shown the list, “There ain’t one of them that would throw down a friend.”
One of these men had arrived in the office shortly after Mr. Connors, and as soon as he was admitted to the private office and the door had been shut, he exclaimed:
“Say, Connors, that was a regular cinch. It did not take me more than an hour to clean up that market. No explanations had to be made, either.”
“Where’s the stuff?” asked Mr. Connors bruskly, and Mullins, his caller, began emptying on the desk from every pocket in his clothing a varied assortment of small change.
“You’ll find there’s ninety-five dollars there all right, as per agreement,” said Mullins. “I didn’t have to spend much over a dollar, either. It was a package of tobacco here and some potatoes for the old woman there, where some old codger wouldn’t give me change unless I bought something. But in most cases I would go to a stall and tell them a neighbor wanted five dollars in small change till the bank opened, and nearly every time I would get it. I don’t believe there’s a hundred pennies left in that market.”
While he had been talking a clerk from the Safe Deposit Company had entered Mr. Connors’s office by the private staircase. He carried to the room below the money Mullins had turned in, returning shortly with two receipt slips, one of which went to Mr. Connors and the other to his caller.
“Now, Mullins,” said Mr. Connors, “I want you to go up to the big cable-car barn where the conductors turn in their money. Here’s $500 more, and stay there until you are relieved. If you run out of money telephone me. Get in some inconspicuous corner and pass the word around among the conductors that ninety-five pennies or nineteen nickels are worth a dollar to you. If they want to know what is up tell them that it is a theatrical advertising dodge; tell them that you are writing a story for a Sunday newspaper—tell them anything.”