Jim’s selection of the larger package was the most natural thing to do under the conditions, but, as I was informed some months afterward, his eagerness to get the most he could out of the job lost him a fortune. The smaller package contained a thousand one-thousand-dollar notes. Just think! A cool million to be had for the plucking, as easily as was the twenty-thousand-dollar package! But Jim took the matter philosophically. The congressman, however, was quite ready to tear his hair. I met Burns at the Sinclair House the next morning as we’d agreed, and that night I paid him nine thousand dollars for the two thousand ten-dollar notes. Two days later I gave two thousand dollars to my stable partner, Charles Meriam, with instructions to liquidate some personal notes that were about due. He deposited the money to the stable account in the Stuyvesant Bank at Broadway and Astor Place, where I was a large depositor, and with which I had had many cash transactions. In fact, the cashier, James Van Orden, was my friend and debtor. I considered he would do about anything in reason that I asked. Two days after that I made a deposit of ten thousand dollars, seventy-five hundred of which were the new ten-dollar notes. I passed the money to the teller and went back in Van Orden’s office and told him what I had done. I didn’t say anything of the deposit Meriam had made. The Stuyvesant Bank cleared through the Mechanics and Traders’, farther down Broadway, so I requested the cashier not to send the new bills when he made the day’s clearance. He didn’t know why I asked this, but no doubt believed there was something not altogether right. However, as he was a reckless speculator in Wall Street, and I had loaned him money at times when he was much in need of it, and in fact he was indebted to me about five thousand dollars, he said it would be all right. “Mr. Miles,” exclaimed my second foreman, John McGurk, as I walked into the stable a few days after my talk with Van Orden, “Charley Meriam has been arrested by Colonel Whiteley, chief of the Secret Service men.”