verything
was all right, Noyes sent in a messenger with a small check, and the
money was thrown out as at all other times without remark. And that was
a complete demonstration that everything was all right. So it was then,
but within thirty minutes from that second the messenger was going to
start with the bill to Blydenstein's for correction.

This was 10 o'clock Wednesday. The bills had been twenty-five hours in
the possession of the bank, had been discounted and the proceeds placed
to my credit for twenty-four hours.

Who with intellect less than an archangel's could have divined the true
combination? First of all, that men brilliant and clever, gambling with
their lives, could have made such an omission, damning, fatal. Second,
if made, that the great Bank of England, thought absolutely infallible
by the whole world, conservative, supposedly cautious, would have
discounted a bill for L20,00 with the date out of the acceptance, and
having done so, hold the bill well on into the second day, without a
discovery, and that, too, when the firm whose acceptance was a forgery
was not 100 yards away! So when at 10 o'clock on Wednesday Mac saw the
small check paid without question to the messenger it seemed he had an
assurance doubly sure and a bond of fate that all was well, and that the
last batch of bills was packed safely away for another three months in
the vaults of the bank.

So Noyes went at once to Jay Cooke & Co., and as the check had been paid
at the bank they handed over, as in so many other occasions, the
$100,000 in bonds to him.

Mac and George were outside. George took the bonds and gave Noyes a
L10,000 check, and one minute from his leaving Jay Cooke & Co., Noyes
was at the counter of the bank. The cashier counted out the $50,000 to
him. He walked out of the bank with a lighter heart and more buoyant
step than ever before, for was not the danger all over and the long
strain on the nerves at an end, the transaction complete and fortune
won? He was never going to the bank again.

They had arranged to meet at Garraway's Coffee House in Exchange alley.
This is the Garraway's that became so famous at the time of the South
Sea Bubble, and its fame continued down to the end of the wars of
Napoleon. Then its glory departed as a centre of speculations, but its
renown as an old-fashioned chophouse remained till 1873. Everywhere in
contemporary English literature, from Swift and Addison to Goldsmith and
Johnson, o