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Page 5
Here was a check in payment of a small bill, he knew. It was from a
firm which habitually kept hundreds of thousands on deposit at the
Gorham Bank. It fitted the case admirably. He slit open the letter.
There, neatly folded, was the check:
No. 15711. Dec. 27, 191--.
THE GORHAM NATIONAL BANK
Pay to the order of....... Green & Co.......
Twenty-five 00/100 ..................Dollars
$25.00/100
W. J. REYNOLDS Co., per CHAS. M. BROWN, Treas.
It flashed over him in a moment what to do. Twenty-five thousand
would just about cover his shortage. The Reynolds firm was a big
one, doing big transactions. He slipped the check into his pocket.
The check might have been stolen in the mail. Why not?
The journey uptown was most excruciatingly long, in spite of the
fact that he had met no one he knew either at the office or outside.
At last he arrived home, to find Constance waiting anxiously.
"Did you get a check?" she asked, hardly waiting for his reply. "Let
me see it. Give it to me."
The coolness with which she went about it amazed him. "It has the
amount punched on it with a check punch," she observed as she ran
her quick eye over it while he explained his plan. "We'll have to
fill up some of those holes made by the punch."
"I know the kind they used," he answered. "I'll get one and a desk
check from the Gorham. You do the artistic work, my dear. My
knowledge of check punches, watermarks, and paper will furnish the
rest. I'll be back directly. Don't forget to call up the office a
little before the time I usually arrive there and tell them I am
ill."
With her light-fingered touch she worked feverishly, partly with the
liquid ink eradicator, but mostly with the spun-glass eraser. First
she rubbed out the cents after the written figure "Twenty-five."
Carefully with a blunt instrument she smoothed down the roughened
surface of the paper so that the ink would not run in the fibers and
blot. Over and over she practised writing the "Thousand" in a hand
like that on the check. She already had the capital "T" in "Twenty"
as a guide. During the night in practising she had found that in
raising checks only seven capital letters were used--O in one, T in
two, three, ten, and thousand, F in four and five, S in six and
seven, E in eight, N in nine and H in hundred.
At last even her practice satisfied her. Then with a coolness born
only of desperation she wrote in the words, "Thousand 00/100." When
she had done it she stopped to wonder at herself. She was amazed and
perhaps a little frightened at how readily she adapted herself to
the crime of forgery. She did not know that it was one of the few
crimes in which women had proved themselves most proficient, though
she felt her own proficiency and native ability for copying.
Again the eraser came into play to remove the cents after the figure
"25." A comma and three zeros following it were inserted, followed
by a new "00/100." The signature was left untouched.
Erasing the name of "Green & Co.," presented greater difficulties,
but it was accomplished with as little loss of the protective
coloring on the surface of the check as possible. Then after the
"Pay to the order of" she wrote in, as her husband had directed,
"The Carlton Realty Co."
Next came the water color to restore the protective tint where the
glass eraser and the acids had removed it. There was much delicate
matching of tints and careful painting in with a fine camel's hair
brush, until at last the color of those parts where there had been
an erasure was apparently as good as any other part.
Of course, under the microscope there could have been seen the angry
crisscrossing of the fibers of the paper due to the harsh action of
the acids and the glass eraser. Still, painting the whole thing over
with a little resinous liquid somewhat restored the glaze to the
paper, at least sufficiently to satisfy a cursory glance of the
naked eye.
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