Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/26

 He knew, the next moment, that his search had been at least partially rewarded. He held in his hand a package of American yellow-backs. In denomination they were all "tens." The next package, the same in size, was made up of notes in the denomination of "one hundred." Still the next was a twenty-dollar note, and then came more packages, of the "tens," and still more of the "one hundreds."

Kestner turned these packages over, studiously deciding that each package must hold at least three hundred bills. He qualified that estimate, however, for he could see that the bills were not new. They all carried the ear-marks of age and wear. It was to determine whether they had been mechanically abraded and worn that he drew one of the bills from the package and carried it to the centre of the room under the more direct light from the skylight above. He warned himself, as he did so, that he had not yet found the plates, and the plates were the one thing that he wanted, that he must have.

Kestner was familiar enough with counterfeiting in all its forms. In his work as roving agent for the Treasury Department he stumbled across more counterfeit money than did any bank-teller in America. He knew his currency as a mother knows the faces of her children. He knew genuine "paper" instinctively, without hesitation or analysis. He could, in the same way as instinctively detect fraudulent "paper." He did so without conscious thought, by some vague sixth sense, a gift that was not altogether feeling and not altogether the sense of sight. Even before the microscope was put over a counterfeit and the line of