he
kept up with the game. When the coupons became due on the latter he
carried back the first. It kept him and Prescott busy most of the time
juggling securities--at least John knew _he_ was kept busy, and Prescott
claimed to be equally so.

There were many loans of brokers and others all secured by the same sort
of collateral. Most of these John appropriated. When it was necessary to
check off the loans, John, having retained enough of the same kind of
bonds to cover the largest loan, would bring up the same bundle time
after time with a different name upon it. If one of the customers wanted
to pay off a loan and his bonds were gone he would be given some one
else's collateral. Apparently the only thing that was necessary was to
have enough of each kind of security on hand to cover the largest loan
on the books at any given time.

Once, when the examiners were at work on the vault, John had to make up
one hundred thousand dollars in Overland 4s or 5s from the different
small loans in the loan vault and put them in a package in the deposit
vault in order to make it appear that certain depositors' bonds were all
there.

The most extraordinary performance of all was when, upon one of the
annual examinations, John covered the absence of over fifty bonds in the
collateral covering a certain loan by merely shoving the balance of the
securities into the back of the vault, so that it was not examined at
all. He had taken these bonds to substitute for others in different
brokers' offices, and it so happened that there were no similar
securities in the building; thus the deficiency could not be covered up
even by John's expert sleight of hand. Of course, if there had been
other bonds of the same kind in another vault it would have been a
simple matter to substitute them. But there were not. So John pushed
the remaining one hundred and fifty bonds into a dark corner of the
vault and awaited the discovery with throbbing pulses. Yet, strange to
relate, these watchdogs of finance, did not see the bonds which John had
hidden, and did not discover that anything was wrong, since, for
purposes of its own, the bank had neglected to make any record of the
loan in question. It would really have been safer for John if he had
taken the whole pile, but then he did not know that the accountants were
going to do their business in any such crazy fashion. The whole thing
came to seem a sort of joke to John. He never took any bonds for his own