Next day I disguised myself somewhat.  I made my face dirty and put on a cap.  I had been wearing a hat before, so I thought the teller at the bank would not know me.  I had been there often with checks for my boss.  Well, the teller just looked at the check, gave me a glance, and passed out the $12.  It did not take me long to get out of the bank.  I knew I had done wrong, and I felt it, and would have given anything if I could have undone it; but it was too late, and my old companion, the Devil, said, “What a nice time you can have, and wasn’t it easy!”

When I went home the first question was, “Did you see your check?” My dear mother asked me that, never thinking that her boy had taken it.  Oh! if I had had the courage to tell her then and there, how much misery and trouble it would have saved me in after life!  But I was a moral coward, and I said, “No, mother; where did you put it?” I had her guessing whether she really put it in the pitcher or not.

There was a regular hunt for that check, and I hunted as much as any one, but it could not be found.  Mother did not know much about banks in those days, but some one told her about a week after that she ought to go to the bank and stop payment on the check.  That sounded good to mother, and she said, “Dave, you and I will go to the bank and stop payment on that check.”  I was in it for fair this time.  The only chance I had was in the teller not recognizing me.

We went to the bank, and mother told the teller about the lost—­stolen—­check, and for him to see that it wasn’t paid.  He said, “All right, madam, I’ll not pay it if it is not already paid.”  He looked over the books and brought back the lost check.  I had stood in the background all this time.  Then my mother asked him whom he paid it to.  He said it was hard for him to recall just then, “But I think I paid it to a boy,” he said.  “Yes, it was a boy, for I recollect that he had as dirty a face and hands as ever I saw.”  Mother pulled me up in front of him and told him to look at me and see if I was the boy.  He looked at me for a minute or so—­it seemed to me like an hour—­then said, “No, that is not the boy that cashed the check, nothing like him.  I am sure I should know that boy.”  In after years, when I was lined up in front of detectives for identification for some crime, identified or not, I always thought of a dirty face being a good disguise.

On the way home from the bank mother asked me all sorts of questions about boys I knew; if they had dirty faces and so on, but I did not know any such boys, so the check business died out.  She little thought that her own boy was the thief, and she blamed my cousin, who was boarding with us at the time.

My grandfather was still with us, and he had quite a sum of money saved.  He wanted some money, and he and I went to the bank and he drew out fifty dollars in gold.  There was a premium on gold at that time, and he received two twenty-dollar gold-pieces and one ten.  Well, that night he lost one of the twenty-dollar gold-pieces and never found it.  There was a hot time the next morning, for he was sure he had it when he went to bed.  My father was blamed for that, so you see the innocent suffer for the guilty.