Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/27

 was established—for somewhere there was always a line of divergence!—he knew in his own mind that a given note was spurious.

He had long known, too, both the tricks and the limitations of the counterfeiter, the bleaching and raising, the camel-hair brush work, the splitting and pasting, the hand-engraving on steel, and the photographic reproducing. He knew that the camera work was always flat and weak, no matter how artfully retouched and tooled over. He likewise knew that the governmental lathe-work on a note was a series of curves and shadings and backgrounds mathematical in their precision and unvarying in pattern. No human hand could duplicate the nicety of that machine-engraving, each line unvarying and unbroken from end to end. And since these machines cost well upward of one hundred thousand dollars, and their manufacture and sales were closely inspected, no counterfeiter could be expected to possess one.

Yet as Kestner stood in the late afternoon light that streamed into the silent studio and held his newly found yellow-back up before him, he could not restrain a rather solemn gasp of admiration.

The note seemed a perfect one. It was on the first Colonial National, of the series of 1909. It carried the Check Letter "C," and the Charter Number of 8939.

Kestner's first thought was as to the paper itself. It was genuine bond, of good quality and weight, and the closest approximation to the "safety paper" of the American Bank Note Company that he had yet encountered. It did not strike him as being two