.. Good God!... Are you sure?... Perhaps he's only
fainted.... No, he's dead, poor devil!..."
And then one of the men, the youngest of the three, a slight-built,
clean-shaven, dark-eyed man of perhaps twenty-eight or thirty, rose
abruptly, and glanced sharply around the room.
"Yes, he's dead!" he said bitterly. "Any one could tell that! But he
wouldn't be dead, and this would never have happened if you'd done what
I wanted you to do when you first came to the bank this afternoon. I
wanted you to have him arrested then, didn't I?"
One of the others--and it was obvious that the others were the two bank
examiners--a man of middle age, answered soberly.
"You're upset, Dryden," he said. "You know we couldn't do that--"
"On a teller's word against the cashier's--of course not!" the young man
broke in caustically. "Well, you see now, don't you?"
"We couldn't do it then without proof," amended the bank examiner
quietly.
"Proof!" Dryden exclaimed. "My God--_proof!_ Who tipped your people off
to have you drop in there this afternoon? I did, didn't I? Do you think
I'd do that without knowing what I was about! Didn't I tell you that
there was nothing but the office fixtures left! Didn't I? There were
only the two of us on the staff, and didn't I tell you that I had
discovered that the books were cooked from cover to cover? Yes, I did!
And you had to get your pencils out and start in on a thumb-rule
examination, as though nothing were the matter! Well, what did you find?
The securities in a mess, what there was left of them--and what was
supposed to be twenty thousand dollars that came out from the city
yesterday nothing but a package of blank paper!"
"You didn't know that yourself until half an hour ago when we started to
check up the cash," returned the other a little sharply.
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