en bills of exchange for L26,000. A date had
been left off one of them! They failed to note it! Poor fools, we had
sold ourselves.

Was this an accident? No, it was Nemesis; it was anything you want to
call it, but it was not an accident.

So a letter was written, the bills, with memorandum, inclosed, the
envelope directed and stamped, and the three fools went to Birmingham,
mailed the letter, and then laughed over their success in the fight
against society, facilitated themselves that they had discovered the
undiscoverable, that they had safely traversed the short cut to fortune.
There is no short cut by wrongdoing to fortune, Boss Tweed and the long
list of robber barons to the contrary!

The bills were mailed on Monday. As that fatal letter slipped from their
fingers into the mail-box the last act of the deadly tragedy began. When
it ended the curtain fell upon us descending from the dock into the
chill dungeons of Newgate, never, so far as the sentence was concerned,
to emerge again.

On Tuesday morning the letter with the bills arrived at the bank.
Following the routine, they went to the discount department, were
discounted and placed to my credit. As I had a balance of L20,000, when
the proceeds of the bills were added to it, it brought up the whole to
the handsome sum of L46,000.

[Illustration: "THE DAY OF MY DESTINY IS OVER."--Page 304.]

When the bills arrived at the bank a strange thing occurred. The fatal
omission was made on an acceptance of Blydenstein & Co., a great banking
firm in London. The discount clerk noticed the omission of the date of
acceptance, but this being a mere formality, he thought it a clerical
error on the part of the bookkeeper of Blydenstein & Co. He made no
report of the matter, and it was discounted along with the other
eighteen, which were put away in the vaults with the batches that had
preceded it, while he laid this one aside until the next day, which was
Wednesday. At half past ten he gave it to the bank messenger, telling
him when he went his regular rounds to take the bill to Blydenstein's
and request them to correct the omission.

At 2 p.m. on Tuesday Noyes went to Jay Cooke & Co. and ordered $100,000
in United States bonds, and gave them a check on the Bank of England for
the amount. He was to call for the bonds next day, of course, after the
check had gone through the Clearing House and had been paid.

As soon as the bank opened on Wednesday, in order to test if e