Again Kennedy looked through the glass with growing amazement written on his face, but before he could say anything, Burke laid down an express money-order on the International Express Company.

“I say,” exclaimed Kennedy, putting down the glass, “stop!  How many more of these are there?”

Burke smiled.  “That’s all,” he replied, “but it’s not the worst.”

“Not the worst?  Good heavens, man, next you’ll tell me that the government is counterfeiting its own notes!  How much of this stuff do you suppose has been put into circulation?”

Burke chewed a pencil thoughtfully, jotted down some figures on a piece of paper, and thought some more.  “Of course I can’t say exactly, but from hints I have received here and there I should think that a safe bet would be that some one has cashed in upward of half a million dollars already.”

“Whew,” whistled Kennedy, “that’s going some.  And I suppose it is all salted away in some portable form.  What an inventory it must be—­good bills, gold, diamonds, and jewellery.  This is a stake worth playing for.”

“Yes,” broke in O’Connor, “but from my standpoint, professionally, I mean, the case is even worse than that.  It’s not the counterfeits that bother us.  We understand that, all right.  But,” and he leaned forward earnestly and brought his fist down hard on the table with a resounding Irish oath, “the finger-print system, the infallible finger-print system, has gone to pieces.  We’ve just imported this new ‘portrait parle’ fresh from Paris and London, invented by Bertillon and all that sort of thing—­it has gone to pieces, too.  It’s a fine case, this is, with nothing left of either scientific or unscientific criminal-catching to rely on.  There—­what do you know about that?”

“You’ll have to tell me the facts first,” said Kennedy.  “I can’t diagnose your disease until I know the symptoms.”

“It’s like this,” explained Burke, the detective in him showing now with no effort at concealment.  “A man, an Englishman, apparently, went into a downtown banker’s office about three months ago and asked to have some English bank-notes exchanged for American money.  After he had gone away, the cashier began to get suspicious.  He thought there was something phoney in the feel of the notes.  Under the glass he noticed that the little curl on the ‘e’ of the ‘Five’ was missing.  It’s the protective mark.  The water-mark was quite equal to that of the genuine—­maybe better.  Hold that note up to the light and see for yourself.

“Well, the next day, down to the Custom House, where my office is, a man came who runs a swell gambling-house uptown.  He laid ten brand-new bills on my desk.  An Englishman had been betting on the wheel.  He didn’t seem to care about winning, and he cashed in each time with a new one-hundred-dollar bill.  Of course he didn’t care about winning.  He cared about the change—­that was his winning.  The bill on the table is one of the original ten, though since then scores have been put into circulation.  I made up my mind that it was the same Englishman in both cases.