They proceeded to do so, Mr. Leonard taking the memoranda and his bookkeeper called out the amounts and dates of the checks.
“Fifteen hundred and seventy-three,” he repeated. “I don’t find that. What date is it?”
“Are you sure? There is no such check of that date in either book. To whose order is it drawn?”
“To Gilbert, Cook & Co., or bearer,” said Mr. Wilson, looking up with a glance in which a doubt was struggling.
“But we owed them no such amount. They were paid in full on the 15th,” said Mr. Leonard, in excitement. “And they never would have asked for a check to be drawn to _bearer_. Let me see that.”
He snatched it out of Mr. Wilson’s hand, in his excitement.
“By Heaven!” cried the merchant, rising hastily to his feet. “I never wrote that signature. It is a forgery.”
The two men looked at each other with half affrighted glances.
“Possible? It is a fact!” was the vehement answer. “The signature is good. I might be deceived by it myself, only that I know I did not write it. This is a bad business, Wilson.”
“A terribly bad business,” was the reply. “Who could have done it? There is a black sheep in our midst.”
“_Can_ there be?” said the merchant, turning pale as he thought of the late robbery from his safe. “Do you suspect any one?”
“No one but yourself, sir,” said Wilson, in his slow, stilted manner. “I suspect you of undue faith in human nature. If you choose to take into your store a street boy of notorious character, what can you expect?”
“What do you mean?” said Mr. Leonard, in arms for his _protege_.
“I mean that that boy’s coming here was not without an object. I suspected from the first that he might have been sent here as the tool of some designing knaves, who knew your easy disposition.”
“You have no right to talk this way, Wilson.”
“Indeed I have,” said the clerk, with energy. “There is plainly a thief in your store. Yet the character of everybody here has been proved by years of trust. Two weeks ago you introduced here a boy of very doubtful antecedents, and in that two weeks two serious robberies have been consummated. What is the natural conclusion?”
“Where is the boy? Let us have him here,” said Mr. Leonard, moving angrily to the door.
“No, no! that is no way to act,” cried Wilson. “He is a keen knave; you will put him on his guard.”