So in council they had decided to be content with the enormous amount they had. The last batch of bills was in the mail. Only one day more and the strain on the nerves would be over. That day Noyes bought bonds and drew cash for more than $150,000. At 3 o'clock they sat down to lunch, their last in London, and then went direct to Mac's apartments in St. James' place. All the material for making fraudulent bills was there, and what could be burned was to be thrown into the grate, and the rest to first be filed into blank nothings and then thrown into the Thames. The three were there and they were happy. They had engineered a gigantic scheme, had struck for wealth and won. The short cut to fortune in defiance of fate had been traversed and now they set about a grateful task--that of getting themselves and their rich argosy out of England. Mac being the artist of the party, and having executed the actual writing, drew the sealed box containing the unused bills up to the fire and began throwing them in one by one. In doing so he occasionally would throw some bill more elaborate than the common run on the floor beside his chair. He had finished his task and took from the floor those he had thrown there, looked at them for a moment, then crumbling them together, raised his hand to throw them in the fire, but as the devil always forsakes his friends at the critical moment, he stopped, smoothed out the bills and turning to the others, said: "Boys, these are perfect works of art; it is a pity to destroy them." From our point of view it was, since it was only necessary to drop them into the mail and they would coin us thousands. Then George said: "Suppose we send them in." The others said "All right," and our doom was sealed. There were in the lot nineteen bills of exchange for L26,000. A date had been left off one of them! They failed to note it! Poor fools, we had sold ourselves. Was this an accident? No, it was Nemesis; it was anything you want to call it, but it was not an accident. So a letter was written, the bills, with memorandum, inclosed, the envelope directed and stamped, and the three fools went to Birmingham, mailed the letter, and then laughed over their success in the fight against society, facilitated themselves that they had discovered the undiscoverable, that they had safely traversed the short cut to fortune. There is no short cut by wrongdoing to fortune, Boss Tweed and the long list of robber barons to the contrary! The bills were mailed on Monday. As that fatal letter slipped from their fingers into the mail-box the last act of the deadly tragedy began. When it ended the curtain fell upon us descending from the dock into the chill dungeons of Newgate, never, so far as the sentence was concerned, to emerge again.