Naturally, I was quite agreeable, and as the _Tribune_ took good care to boom its “generous offer” beforehand, the crowds in the streets on the day the test was to be performed surpassed anything I had before experienced. The police estimated that there were between thirty and forty thousand people present. The date was September 9th, 1911, and the dust and the heat were awful.
The individual chosen by the _Tribune_ editor to hide the money, and to “guide” me to it afterwards, was no less a personage than the Secretary of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, one of the city’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens, and a man whose integrity and _bona fides_ were, of course, quite beyond question. By agreement with the Chief of Police, he had selected as a hiding-place for the bag of gold one of the police telephone call-boxes, such as are an institution in most American cities, and to which the police alone are able to obtain access by means of their private keys.
The particular box he chose was fixed to an electric light standard in a remote quarter of the city, and just before I left the _Tribune_ building the editor received a telephone message to the effect that the money was still in the box where it had been hidden overnight, and that the key had now been placed on top of the box, which was being guarded by a couple of officers detailed for the purpose. This information, however, was, I need hardly say, not imparted to me. In fact, I knew nothing whatever about the money, except that it was hidden somewhere in Oakland, and that I had got to find it.
How I succeeded is told in the following report, taken from a special evening edition of the _Tribune_, which was selling on the streets within a few minutes of my having accomplished my task:
In the middle of a hollow square and surrounded by thirty thousand persons, shortly after noon to-day, at the south-east corner of Fourteenth and Broadway, “Arthur Carlton,” the famed magician, who is nightly performing at the Orpheum in this city, blindfolded found a bag containing two hundred and fifty dollars in gold which had been hidden in a telephone-box at that intersection for the purpose of determining whether or not he was able to read the thoughts of the man who had there cached the precious metal.