It was his judgment that Ovid was not of a
caliber to plan the looting of a bank and skillfully to hide his
progress by a falsification of the books. That required an imagination
that Ovid lacked. No, Scattergood said to himself, if Ovid had looted he
had looted clumsily--and on sudden provocation.... Therefore he chose
the vault for his peculiar task.
It is a comparatively easy task to count the cash reserve in the vault
of so small a bank. Even a matter of thirty-odd thousand dollars can be
checked by one man alone in half an hour, for the small silver is packed
away in rolls, each roll containing a stated sum; the larger silver is
bagged, each bag bearing a label stating the amount of its contents, and
the currency is wrapped in packages containing even sums....
Scattergood went to work. He went over the cash carefully, and totaled
the sums he set down on a bit of paper.... He found the amount to be
inadequate by exactly three thousand dollars.
"Huh!" said Scattergood to himself. "Ovid hain't no hawg."
One might have thought the young man had dropped in Scattergood's
estimation. It would have been as easy to make away with twenty thousand
dollars as with three thousand, and the penalty would not have been
greater.
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