“What’s up, Billy?” I inquired cheerily, upon meeting Matthews the next morning after my return; “have you been playing hookey from school and got caught at it?” His face was as long as a search-warrant and twice as grim. Somehow I expected a piece of unwelcome news, but my recent escape from a very hot trail had made me a little philosophical.
“That would be easy,” he said, smiling sickly, and passed a joke about his schooldays when the paternal hand had more than once sought unerringly a certain region near the equator, in what many households have often designated a “warming-the-jacket” bee. Then he added: “The devil’s to pay. I’ve had bad luck trying to sell your bonds.”
“Been playing Dexter at long odds, and had the wrong end of the game, eh?” I asked, taking the matter as calmly as I could, at the same time throwing a little horse-racing chaff at him. He disregarded the pleasantry.
“I hate like the devil to tell you, George, but the bonds--they’re gone, and I can’t produce you the money in place of ’em.”
“Well?” I interrogated as cheerfully as I could under the circumstances.
“The devil you say!” I was vulgar without thinking. “You were pinched?”
“That’s just it,” admitted Matthews, and I pitied him, for there was that about the little fellow that made me feel, almost know, he was dealing squarely with me, gambler though he was. However, I did not let him in my secret on that score yet, and said, a trifle coldly: “I thought you were a shrewd man. Many of the boys have trusted bonds in your hands for the market.”
He actually was suffering after I made this slighting remark, and I was forced to relent.
“Don’t take me too seriously, old fellow,” said I, “and tell me all about it. If there’s a muddle, we must get out of it some way. It’s a mighty scarce hole that’ll let a man in that won’t let him out if he tries hard to get out.”
“There’s no use chopping matters, George,” he said; “I trusted a man too much, and I’m in deep, that’s all.”
Then Billy told me how he had taken a man with him to dispose of the bonds, a Bill Brockway, whom I didn’t know, and that they went to a broker’s office in Wall Street. Brockway, whom he thought to be “right,” proved to be all wrong by betraying him to a pair of Central Office detectives. Recollecting Tim Golden, of the Detective Bureau at 300 Mulberry Street, I expressed a curiosity to know the identity of the detectives in this case.