Mr. Trautman, however, was a shrewd business man, and he did not like the appearance of things. He left the bank apparently satisfied, and within thirty minutes he had called up three different members of the Traders’ Board of Directors. At three- thirty there was a hastily convened board meeting, with some stormy scenes, and late in the afternoon a national bank examiner was in possession of the books. The bank had not opened for business on Tuesday.
At twelve-thirty o’clock the Saturday before, as soon as the business of the day was closed, Mr John Bailey, the cashier of the defunct bank, had taken his hat and departed. During the afternoon he had called up Mr. Aronson, a member of the board, and said he was ill, and might not be at the bank for a day or two. As Bailey was highly thought of, Mr. Aronson merely expressed a regret. From that time until Monday night, when Mr. Bailey had surrendered to the police, little was known of his movements. Some time after one on Saturday he had entered the Western Union office at Cherry and White Streets and had sent two telegrams. He was at the Greenwood Country Club on Saturday night, and appeared unlike himself. It was reported that he would be released under enormous bond, some time that day, Tuesday.
The article closed by saying that while the officers of the bank refused to talk until the examiner had finished his work, it was known that securities aggregating a million and a quarter were missing. Then there was a diatribe on the possibility of such an occurrence; on the folly of a one-man bank, and of a Board of Directors that met only to lunch together and to listen to a brief report from the cashier, and on the poor policy of a government that arranges a three or four-day examination twice a year. The mystery, it insinuated, had not been cleared by the arrest of the cashier. Before now minor officials had been used to cloak the misdeeds of men higher up. Inseparable as the words “speculation” and “peculation” have grown to be, John Bailey was not known to be in the stock market. His only words, after his surrender, had been “Send for Mr. Armstrong at once.” The telegraph message which had finally reached the President of the Traders’ Bank, in an interior town in California, had been responded to by a telegram from Doctor Walker, the young physician who was traveling with the Armstrong family, saying that Paul Armstrong was very ill and unable to travel.
That was how things stood that Tuesday evening. The Traders’ Bank had suspended payment, and John Bailey was under arrest, charged with wrecking it; Paul Armstrong lay very ill in California, and his only son had been murdered two days before. I sat dazed and bewildered. The children’s money was gone: that was bad enough, though I had plenty, if they would let me share. But Gertrude’s grief was beyond any power of mine to comfort; the man she had chosen stood accused of a colossal embezzlement–and even worse. For in the instant that I sat there I seemed to see the coils closing around John Bailey as the murderer of Arnold Armstrong.
Gertrude lifted her head at last and stared across the table at Halsey.
“Why did he do it?” she wailed. “Couldn’t you stop him, Halsey? It was suicidal to go back!”
Halsey was looking steadily through the windows of the breakfast- room, but it was evident he saw nothing.
“It was the only thing he could do, Trude,” he said at last. “Aunt Ray, when I found Jack at the Greenwood Club last Saturday night, he was frantic. I can not talk until Jack tells me I may, but–he is absolutely innocent of all this, believe me. I thought, Trude and I thought, we were helping him, but it was the wrong way. He came back. Isn’t that the act of an innocent man?”
“Then why did he leave at all?” I asked, unconvinced. “What innocent man would run away from here at three o’clock in the morning? Doesn’t it look rather as though he thought it impossible to escape?”