ill in the vaults, awaiting
maturity, and would fall due, while our home-manufactured bills would be
laid away in the vaults, there to remain for four or five months until
due. Of course a full month or two months before that we could pack our
baggage and be on the other side of the world; I on some hacienda in
Mexico, George and Mac at some fashionable resort in Florida. They soon
to knock at the gates of the Four Hundred, I to spend a year or two in
Mexico, playing "grand senor," until, under the skillful management of
our friends, Irving, Stanley and White, at Police Headquarters in New
York, the affair had blown over, and they invited me to return.

But, as the sequel will show, the reality took on a different complexion
from the ideal.

[Illustration: BOW STREET POLICE STATION.]

My credit at the bank was solid as a rock. That means I had gone through
the red-tape routine. It only behooved us to use circumspection enough
to avoid making mistakes in our papers, and fortune was ours. I knew
everything was all right, but George, being a thorough business man
himself, could not comprehend that it could be quite right, and he
insisted upon one supreme test. Any single bill of exchange is seldom
drawn for more than L1,000, rarely for L2,000, and one of L6,000 is
almost unheard of. If a party in Bombay wanted exchange on London for
L100,000, his broker would probably furnish him with one hundred bills
for L1,000 each. But George had made up his mind that as a test, and to
make an impression upon the bank manager, I should go to Paris and get a
bill on London from Rothschilds drawn to the order of F. A. Warren
direct. Could this be done it would, of course, make it appear that I
had intimate relations with the Rothschilds, and as a minor
consideration we could use the Rothschild acceptance--a pretty nervy
thing to do, as Sir Anthony de Rothschild, the head of the London house,
whose name we proposed to offer, was a director of the Bank of England,
and would have to pass his own paper for discount--that is, paper
bearing his name, manufactured by ourselves.

We tried to talk George out of this notion, which Mac and I regarded as
a freak, unnecessary in the first place, and impossible anyhow. But he
was persistent, and I had to start out and try. I expected an expense of
$1,000 and a delay of two weeks, but fortune or the devil favored us.
So, purchasing at the exchange broker's in London 200,000 francs in
French paper m