Three hours later Pittsburgh Ike and Denver Red were in a cell at headquarters.  At six o’clock that evening the necklace had been returned.  This was a coincidence that might not occur in a hundred years, but had the deductive detective determined the question he would still be pondering on the comparative probability of whether the cook, the chore man, or the hired girl was the guilty party.

A clean bit of detection on the part of an agency, and quite in the day’s work, was the comparatively recent capture of a thief who secured three hundred and sixty thousand dollars worth of securities from a famous banking institution in New York City by means of a very simple device.  A firm of stock brokers had borrowed from this bank about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a day or two and put up the securities as collateral.  In the ordinary course of business, when the borrower has no further use for the money, he sends up a certified check for the amount of the loan with interest, and the bank turns over the securities to the messenger.  In this particular case a messenger arrived with a certified check, shoved it into the cage, and took away what was pushed out to him in return—­three hundred and sixty thousand dollars in bonds.  The certification turned out to be a forgery and the securities vanished.  I do not know whether the police were consulted or not.  Sometimes in such cases the banks prefer to resort to more private methods and, perhaps, save the necessity of making a public admission of their stupidity.  When my friend, the superintendent, was called in, the officers of the bank were making the wildest sort of guesses as to the identity of the master mind and hand which had deceived the cashier.  He must, they felt sure, have made the forgery with a camel’s hair brush of unrivalled fineness.

“A great artist!” said the president.

“The most skilful forger in the world!” opined another.

“We must run down all the celebrated criminals!” announced a third.

“Great artist-nothing!” remarked the boss, rubbing his thumb over the certification which blurred at the touch.  “He’s no painter!  Why, that’s a rubber stamp!”

What a shock for those dignified gentlemen!  To think that their cashier had been deceived by a mere, plebeian, common or garden thing of rubber!

“Good-day, gents!” said the boss, putting the check in his wallet.  “I’ve got to get busy with the rubber stamp makers!”

He returned to his office and detailed a dozen men to work on the East Side and a dozen on the West Side, with orders to search out every man in New York who manufactured rubber stamps.  Before the end of the afternoon the maker was found on the Bowery, near Houston Street.  This was his story:  A couple of weeks before, a young man had come in and ordered a certification stamp, drawing at the time a rough design of what he wanted.  The stamp, when first manufactured, had not been satisfactory