nvestors, so as to net them
merely thirteen per cent. on their money--when they got it. You
could buy a million in these bonds for about three hundred and
seventy-five dollars and fifty cents; but they were real bonds in
real companies and legally issued against some form of property,
even if it had no market value. Sometimes, I am told, these
securities paid interest for a year or so, and the suckers got
their friends in while there were a few left--bonds, I mean--there
are always suckers.

Like other egoists, our client became careless as time went on and
one day took it upon himself to issue a few hundred bonds in a
company without holding a directors' meeting. He should not be
severely blamed for neglecting a detail of this sort when he was
so well aware of its purely formal if not farcical character.
Still, it was one of those little slips that even the most careful
of us will sometimes make, and the district-attorney took an
underhand advantage of our friend and indicted him for forging the
names of the officers of the company to an unauthorized issue of
bonds. Gottlieb and I had, perforce, to defend him; but, unfortunately,
his real defence would have been even worse than the charge. He
could not say that there was no real company and that there were
no such human beings as the persons whose names he had written
across the back of the bonds in question.

Poor fellow! He was an absolutely innocent man. Yet he went to
Sing Sing for seven years for committing no crime at all. How
could he forge the names of persons who did not exist? However,
he had invented these financial Frankensteins and they finally
overwhelmed him. Somewhere lying around I have my share of the
fee in this case--I forget just where. It consists of fourteen
millions in the securities of the National Mortgage and Security
Company of Jampole, Mississippi.

CHAPTER VII

The fear that most people have of the criminal law has its origin
in their ignorance of it. They are, luckily, most of them unfamiliar
with bailiffs and constables, except at a distance. The gruff
voice of authority has echoed but dimly for them. They have heard
of the "third degree," "the cooler," "the sweat-box," and "the
bracelets," yet they have never seen the inside of a station-house;
and their knowledge of jails, if they have any at all, is derived
from reading in their childhood of the miraculous escapes of Baron
Trenck or the Fall of the Bastille. Th