A few more questions, carefully directed, gave Holden the history of his namesake, and that night he lay awake trying to figure out whether the plan which had popped into his head was safe. It promised some easy money, but there was the element of risk to be considered. "After all," he concluded, "I won't be doing anything that isn't strictly within the law. My name is David Holden--just as the old man's was. The worst that they can do is to turn down the application. I won't be committing forgery or anything of the kind. And maybe it'll slip through--which would mean a pile of money, because they'll kick in with all that accumulated during the past fifty years." So it was that, in the course of time, an application was filed at the Bureau of Pensions in Washington for a pension due "David Holden" of Saint Joseph, Missouri, who had fought in the Civil War with the rank of captain. But, when the application had been sent over to the War Department so that it might be compared with the records on file there, it came back with the red-inked notation that "Capt. David Holden had died two years before"--giving the precise date of his demise as evidence. The moment that the document reached the desk of the Supervisor of Pensions he pressed one of the little pearl buttons in front of him and asked that Larry Simmons be sent in. When Larry arrived the chief handed him the application without a word. "Right! I'll look into this," said Larry, folding the paper and slipping it into the pocket of his coat. "Look into it?" echoed the supervisor. "You'll do more than that! You'll locate this man Holden--or whatever his right name is--and see that he gets all that's coming to him. There've been too many of these cases lately. Apparently people think that all they have to do is to file an application for a pension and then go off and spend the money. Catch the first train for Saint Joe and wire me when you've landed your man. The district attorney will attend to the rest of the matter." The location of David Holden, as Simmons found, was not the simplest of jobs. The pension applicant, being comparatively a newcomer, was not well known in town, and Simmons finally had to fall back upon the expedient of watching the post-office box which Holden had given as his address, framing a dummy letter so that the suspect might not think that he was being watched. Holden, however, had rented the box for the sole purpose of receiving mail from the Pension Bureau. He had given the number to no one else and the fact that the box contained what appeared to be an advertisement from a clothing store made him stop and wonder. By that time, however, Simmons had him well in sight and followed him to the boarding-house on the outskirts of the town where he was staying.