CHAPTER XLIII

THE ROBBERS’ FALSE STEP.

It was at the last moment, truly, that Barrows had found a use for Foote. He had changed his mind about abandoning Riggs to his fate, not because he had developed any sudden sympathy for the poor little bank clerk who had done wrong, but because he had seen a chance, although defeated in his main object, that of possessing himself of a large sum by the cleverly planned robbery of the Elm National, to do great harm to Dick Merriwell and Jim Phillips. Foote kept him in touch, by long-distance telephone, with the developments of the morning at the bank, which he was able to learn of through his friendship for a bookkeeper there, and Barrows had managed, by the slenderest of margins, to get a thousand dollars in good money back to Riggs, which had been substituted for ten of the counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.

Dick Merriwell’s deposit had been taken by Bascom, but to delay detection of the theft, clever counterfeits, their numbers corresponding to the false numbers that Riggs had entered up in the books, had been put in their place in the safe. That had been the essence of the remarkable plan that Bascom and Barrows had arranged. They knew that close inspection of the reserve notes would not be made very often, and they trusted to the fact that a hasty glance at the piled notes would not reveal their true character. Thus they could hope to get the stolen money into circulation before efforts to trace it were made, and, owing to Riggs’ manipulation of the record of the numbers of the genuine notes, tracing would, even when the record of the substitution was discovered, have been almost impossible.

Barrows felt that he was, moreover, killing two birds with one stone, as he had told Marsten he would do. There are certain high financiers who do not hesitate very much to associate with men of Barrows’ stamp when they can use them to their own profit, and it happened that one of these gentry, a man called Phelps, was one of the bitterest opponents of Dick Merriwell and Chester Arlington in their Maine lumber partnership.

Barrows, when he had learned of the deposit made by Dick, and the sight draft that he had purchased against it, had not been slow in putting two and two together. He had, therefore, when he arrived in New York, communicated with Phelps, and told him something of what was afoot.

“You can’t trap Merriwell in any such way as that,” said Phelps. “That’s the weak spot in your plan, Barrows. Merriwell will have the numbers of those notes, or be able to get them, and that will dish you at once. I don’t think you’re running much risk personally, as it is, but I’d let Merriwell alone.”

“He’s not a business man,” said Barrows scornfully. “He won’t have those numbers at all. Take that from me. What’s it worth to me to put him out of business on this deal? I should think you’d be glad to have him out of the way.”

“I would be,” said Phelps. “I’d be glad to the extent of about five thousand dollars, I think. How does that strike you?”

“Well enough,” said Barrows. “You can go ahead and figure as if he was out of it altogether. This thing will ruin his credit with that New Haven bank. They may not be able to prove anything against him, but they’ll have an awful lot of mighty healthy suspicions, and that won’t do him any good around the country when he tries to do any banking business. You can see that for yourself, without my telling you anything about it.”

“Go ahead,” said Phelps. “It’s your own funeral. If I were you, I wouldn’t go after Merriwell that particular way. He’s no easy man to lead into a trap. I expect to have things ready to give him and his partner a pretty warm reception up in the woods when they once get there, but I’m perfectly willing to have you take the job off my hands, as long as I don’t appear in it. If you succeed, I’ll pay you five thousand dollars. But you’ve got to take my word for it, with nothing to give you any hold on me. I won’t sign any agreement of any sort under the circumstances.”

“I’ll take a chance on that,” said Barrows. “I think you’ll be grateful enough to come through when I deliver the goods.”

It was Foote who had taken the money to Riggs, just in time for him to effect the exchange that had given such a bad appearance to the presence of Jim Phillips in the vault. Foote did not thoroughly understand what was in the air, but he knew that there was trouble brewing for the men who had exposed him and caused his present detention in New Haven, and he was glad. Moreover, he had to do what he was told, for he knew that he was at the mercy of the two gamblers, and that his father would never forgive him if it became known that he had lost so much money at Marsten’s gambling house.

Barrows had laid his plan well, but he had made a mistake in this use of Foote. Brady’s discovery that the Yale man, who had a grudge against Dick Merriwell and Jim Phillips, was acting as a messenger for some one who had occasion to communicate with Riggs, directed his suspicions toward the little teller, and that was the worst thing that could have happened to Barrows just then.

With his new authority as his father’s representative, Bill Brady went into consultation with the experts who had been going over the books, and found that the expert was far from sharing President Bromlow’s opinion as to the innocence of Riggs.

“That money wasn’t taken yesterday, Mr. Brady,” said the expert. “He’s worked it carefully, and in another day there’d have been no chance for us to trace the defalcation. But now it’s as plain as daylight. It seems obvious to me that this Riggs took the money, probably intending to put it back, and then, at the last moment, seeing a chance to get clear, tried to make use of that counterfeit money in the vault to conceal his own shortage. We came on him before he was ready—and I think, myself, he’d have been wiser not to monkey with that counterfeit money at all. It looks very fishy to me, if you want my opinion.”

Bill Brady took the result of his investigation to Dick Merriwell at once.

“Here’s the net result, you see,” he said. “That old fool Bromlow thinks that they’ve discovered a motive for Jim to rob the bank—the utterly absurd one that he’s in league with you to cover the deposit of counterfeit money. He doesn’t seem to see that his own theory is full of holes. That money is pretty well made, but, while it would deceive me, and almost any one else not especially trained to watch money, I don’t think it would fool a banker for a minute. Now, Riggs took that deposit from you. Entirely aside from the fact that you and I know that the money was deposited was all right, why didn’t Riggs at once discover that it was not real money, if it was not? He had to go over the money as he counted it, so his explanation that it didn’t occur to him that anything could be wrong with the money you handed in falls down.”

“It looks to me,” said Jim Phillips, “as if this Riggs held the key to the whole mystery. If he actually stole a thousand dollars from the bank, it was his interest to cover that theft, and he would have been able to do that had a larger sum been taken. I know that that was the idea of those men I surprised there—they were out to make a big haul.”

“I can explain Mr. Bromlow’s feelings, I think,” said Dick Merriwell quietly. “You must know, Brady, that he has been in financial difficulties of late. That is one of the reasons why your father was able to buy the control of his bank. Mr. Bromlow very foolishly became associated in a lumber deal with a man called Phelps.

“I discovered this not long ago, when I tried, in behalf of the company in which Chester Arlington and I are interested, to renew one of the company’s notes in that bank. Mr. Bromlow refused to renew the note, although the security, as he himself admitted, was first class. It was simply annoying—we had little difficulty in getting the money we wanted elsewhere. But it showed the way the wind was blowing.”

“Now, there’s the matter of Foote,” said Brady, darkening. “He isn’t a principal—whatever he’s done has been under orders from some one else. I think the same thing applies to Riggs. He probably went into the game because he saw a chance to escape the consequences of a crime that he knew was bound to be discovered within a week or two, at the outside.”

They were in Jim Phillips’ room. As Jim spoke, there was a knock at the door, and Detective Jones appeared.

“They’ve found the watchman, Mr. Phillips,” he said. “He was trussed up in the cellar of the bank. He’s in a pretty bad way—not dangerously hurt, but pretty sick. They’re bringing him here.”

“Good,” cried the three Yale men together. “That ought to settle it.”

The watchman came in, supported by two plain-clothes officers. Jones, who had unhesitatingly cast in his lot with the Yale men this time, because he had had experience with the sagacity of Dick Merriwell before, smiled.

“That’s him,” cried the watchman wildly, pointing to Jim Phillips. “He’s one of the gang. He hit me over the head.”

Dick Merriwell cried out incredulously, then looked hard at the watchman. The man’s cheeks were burning with fever, his eyes were those of a madman.

“You can’t take this man seriously in his present condition,” Dick cried. “He should be in the hospital and receiving proper care.”

“He will be provided for, Mr. Merriwell,” said old Bromlow, who arrived in time to hear that. “In the meantime, I must demand the arrest of Phillips. Mr. Brady, I am still a sworn officer of this bank. I can no longer humor your views.”

Brady’s indignant protests were useless. Jim Phillips was placed under arrest, but he was released at once on bail, and Jones, who had reluctantly made the arrest, was very angry.

“It won’t take you long to clear this up, Mr. Merriwell,” he said to the universal coach. “And I’m here to help you do it, too.”