Page:The Black Cat v01no01 (1895-10).pdf/50

48 A few days before, the carrier was engaged in delivering mail from door to door along Vine Street, Philadelphia, when a zig-zag trip across the street and back again brought him to the narrow stairway of a dingy brick house, in front of which hung an enormous brass key bearing the word "Locksmith." Here he paused to draw a little parcel from his bundle. As he did so he heard something fall with a metallic clink upon the stone pavement. He looked and saw that it was a silver dollar, which rolled toward the gutter and came to a stop close by the curb. Hastening to pick it up, he instantly dropped it with a cry of pain.

The coin was almost red hot!

The letter-carrier stood nursing his hand and thinking for two or three minutes. Silver dollars do not commonly drop out of the sky. But that this one should thus fall like a meteorite in a condition too heated for handling was certainly more than surprising—it was astounding! The man looked up at the dingy brick house and examined it attentively, noting that the ground floor was occupied as a green grocery and that all of the windows were shut save one in the third story.

Then he kicked the mysterious coin into a puddle, fished it out again with his fingers, and put it into his trousers' pocket. He was about to investigate further, when some small boys called his attention to the fact that it was the first day of April, whereupon he proceeded on his way. He gave no further thought to the matter until that night, when he found that his thumb and forefinger had been so badly burned as to require treatment.

The next morning he called upon the doctor, who dressed the painful hand and received the mysterious coin in payment for his services.

That night, behind locked doors in one of the officers' rooms of the United States Mint in Chestnut Street, two men were engaged in a long whispered conference. The wife of one of the men, as she sat in her room in the Continental Hotel, anxiously waiting for her husband, was beginning to wonder whether, after all, marriage was a failure!

Two days later, in speaking of the seizure of over forty thousand bogus silver dollars and the clever capture of three of the