Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery

Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 24

Showers of Gold Fall--and Then?

BidwellEnglish

I shall try and condense into a single chapter the narrative of events in London from the time of my departure until the day, some months later, when our scheme exploded and all took to flight when Noyes was arrested.

Our expenses had been so enormous that we were anxious to make enough to recoup them, so it had been agreed that the first batch of bogus bills should not exceed the amount paid out since leaving Rio.

I left for Paris on Monday. On Wednesday, Noyes went to the bank and drew out all the money to my credit, except three hundred pounds. The same day he went to Birmingham and mailed lot number one of home-manufacture bills representing L8,000.

The next twenty-four hours was an anxious time for my friends. The bills would be delivered by the early mail on Thursday, and if all went right the proceeds would be placed to my credit by 12 o'clock, and the bills themselves would be stowed away in the vaults until they were due some months ahead. George and Mac waited with the greatest anxiety until 2 o'clock. They had everything packed for instant flight, when at that hour they sallied out of Mac's lodging and started for the bank to make the test. They had filled out two Warren checks, one for L2,300 payable to Warren, another for L4 10s., payable to bearer.

Noyes went on ahead, the others following, and took his stand on the steps of a hotel in a side street not far from the bank. Keeping his eye out for a suitable appearing party he finally stopped a uniformed messenger, and, telling him to take the L4 10s. check to the bank, bring the money to him there, and he would be paid for his trouble.

Of course, as soon as the messenger had turned his back Noyes bolted around the corner to a place agreed upon, while Mac followed the messenger to the bank and saw he was paid without question. He gave the pre-arranged signal to George, who went with all haste to notify Noyes, and when the messenger arrived with the cash, he found him standing on the steps as cool and unconcerned as possible. Paying the messenger, all three started to the bank, Mac on the way giving Noyes the L2,300 check, which he presented. Nodding good day to the cashier he asked for L2,000 in gold and the remainder in notes, which were handed him at once, and three very happy men sat down that evening to dinner, because the day's operations had conclusively proved that the Bank of England methods were fallible.

The next morning Noyes went to Jay Cooke & Co. and ordered $75,000 in United States bonds, giving a check for them on the bank. The same afternoon he went to Birmingham and mailed another letter, this one containing L15,000 in bills, and later drew L2,000 in gold from the bank. On Monday he went after the bonds, and the $75,000 was handed over to him without questions. The whole operation was a repetition of these tactics, but with an ever-increasing volume in the amounts of the bills. On some days the mail brought to the bank letters with bills for $100,000, sometimes for more, sometimes for less. So November and December passed away, and the bank continued day by day and week by week laying away in its vaults the worthless collateral of Mr. F. A. Warren in exchange for its gold.

But why not be satisfied and stop while it was all right? That is the question of a wise man, but who ever knew any man who wanted to do a thing, whether he did it or not, who could not find half a hundred good reasons why he should do it. But as Christmas came near Mac began to long for home. He had repaid his father every penny of the large sum he was owing him; there had been a reconciliation by mail, and each steamer that came bore many long letters from parents and sisters, all speaking of their joy over the happy turn of events that was going to bring the absent member of the flock home within its walls again. The father's heart, long estranged, grew very tender toward his boy, and with pride he thought his eldest had thrown off the follies of his youth, and in manful strength was making ample atonements for the thoughtlessness and the wanderings of his youth. He and they were all destined to a terrible awakening. For soon the press of the world was to teem with accounts of his son's arrest and incarceration for participation in a gigantic fraud. When the blow fell it came with crushing force on that home, and a shadow deep as night settled down on the household; all joyousness and even hope itself fled when the cable bore the news that their boy had been condemned to life imprisonment in a foreign dungeon. And one by one the members of that family passed away from a world that held no more for them since their good name had been tarnished.

In London the boys talked of spending Christmas at home, but the argument to stay--and it prevailed--was that since the money came in so easily and in such amounts it was a pity to run away from it. Then, again, by obtaining an enormous sum and putting it in a place of absolute security, the bank would be glad to compromise the matter in consideration of receiving a million or two back again.

So they spent a pretty merry and an exceedingly expensive Christmas in London, but later in February they determined to pack up and leave.

Everything smiled upon them. The gold and bonds they had, meant fortunes for all. I was away in tropic islands leading an idle life with my bride amid the cocoanut and palm trees. Mac and George had never appeared in the transaction, and as for Noyes, not a soul in all America knew he was in Europe, and in all Europe only three or four people had seen him, and knew him as representing Warren.

The business was finished. All three laden with money were going to leave England, leaving the bank to slumber on for weeks until the first bills became due before there could be a discovery. By that time the cash would have been safely stowed, and how or where or to whom could anything be traced?

So in council they had decided to be content with the enormous amount they had. The last batch of bills was in the mail. Only one day more and the strain on the nerves would be over. That day Noyes bought bonds and drew cash for more than $150,000. At 3 o'clock they sat down to lunch, their last in London, and then went direct to Mac's apartments in St. James' place. All the material for making fraudulent bills was there, and what could be burned was to be thrown into the grate, and the rest to first be filed into blank nothings and then thrown into the Thames. The three were there and they were happy. They had engineered a gigantic scheme, had struck for wealth and won. The short cut to fortune in defiance of fate had been traversed and now they set about a grateful task--that of getting themselves and their rich argosy out of England. Mac being the artist of the party, and having executed the actual writing, drew the sealed box containing the unused bills up to the fire and began throwing them in one by one. In doing so he occasionally would throw some bill more elaborate than the common run on the floor beside his chair. He had finished his task and took from the floor those he had thrown there, looked at them for a moment, then crumbling them together, raised his hand to throw them in the fire, but as the devil always forsakes his friends at the critical moment, he stopped, smoothed out the bills and turning to the others, said: "Boys, these are perfect works of art; it is a pity to destroy them." From our point of view it was, since it was only necessary to drop them into the mail and they would coin us thousands. Then George said: "Suppose we send them in." The others said "All right," and our doom was sealed.

There were in the lot nineteen bills of exchange for L26,000. A date had been left off one of them! They failed to note it! Poor fools, we had sold ourselves.

Was this an accident? No, it was Nemesis; it was anything you want to call it, but it was not an accident.

So a letter was written, the bills, with memorandum, inclosed, the envelope directed and stamped, and the three fools went to Birmingham, mailed the letter, and then laughed over their success in the fight against society, facilitated themselves that they had discovered the undiscoverable, that they had safely traversed the short cut to fortune. There is no short cut by wrongdoing to fortune, Boss Tweed and the long list of robber barons to the contrary!

The bills were mailed on Monday. As that fatal letter slipped from their fingers into the mail-box the last act of the deadly tragedy began. When it ended the curtain fell upon us descending from the dock into the chill dungeons of Newgate, never, so far as the sentence was concerned, to emerge again.

On Tuesday morning the letter with the bills arrived at the bank. Following the routine, they went to the discount department, were discounted and placed to my credit. As I had a balance of L20,000, when the proceeds of the bills were added to it, it brought up the whole to the handsome sum of L46,000.

When the bills arrived at the bank a strange thing occurred. The fatal omission was made on an acceptance of Blydenstein & Co., a great banking firm in London. The discount clerk noticed the omission of the date of acceptance, but this being a mere formality, he thought it a clerical error on the part of the bookkeeper of Blydenstein & Co. He made no report of the matter, and it was discounted along with the other eighteen, which were put away in the vaults with the batches that had preceded it, while he laid this one aside until the next day, which was Wednesday. At half past ten he gave it to the bank messenger, telling him when he went his regular rounds to take the bill to Blydenstein's and request them to correct the omission.

At 2 p.m. on Tuesday Noyes went to Jay Cooke & Co. and ordered $100,000 in United States bonds, and gave them a check on the Bank of England for the amount. He was to call for the bonds next day, of course, after the check had gone through the Clearing House and had been paid.

As soon as the bank opened on Wednesday, in order to test if everything was all right, Noyes sent in a messenger with a small check, and the money was thrown out as at all other times without remark. And that was a complete demonstration that everything was all right. So it was then, but within thirty minutes from that second the messenger was going to start with the bill to Blydenstein's for correction.

This was 10 o'clock Wednesday. The bills had been twenty-five hours in the possession of the bank, had been discounted and the proceeds placed to my credit for twenty-four hours.

Who with intellect less than an archangel's could have divined the true combination? First of all, that men brilliant and clever, gambling with their lives, could have made such an omission, damning, fatal. Second, if made, that the great Bank of England, thought absolutely infallible by the whole world, conservative, supposedly cautious, would have discounted a bill for L20,00 with the date out of the acceptance, and having done so, hold the bill well on into the second day, without a discovery, and that, too, when the firm whose acceptance was a forgery was not 100 yards away! So when at 10 o'clock on Wednesday Mac saw the small check paid without question to the messenger it seemed he had an assurance doubly sure and a bond of fate that all was well, and that the last batch of bills was packed safely away for another three months in the vaults of the bank.

So Noyes went at once to Jay Cooke & Co., and as the check had been paid at the bank they handed over, as in so many other occasions, the $100,000 in bonds to him.

Mac and George were outside. George took the bonds and gave Noyes a L10,000 check, and one minute from his leaving Jay Cooke & Co., Noyes was at the counter of the bank. The cashier counted out the $50,000 to him. He walked out of the bank with a lighter heart and more buoyant step than ever before, for was not the danger all over and the long strain on the nerves at an end, the transaction complete and fortune won? He was never going to the bank again.

They had arranged to meet at Garraway's Coffee House in Exchange alley. This is the Garraway's that became so famous at the time of the South Sea Bubble, and its fame continued down to the end of the wars of Napoleon. Then its glory departed as a centre of speculations, but its renown as an old-fashioned chophouse remained till 1873. Everywhere in contemporary English literature, from Swift and Addison to Goldsmith and Johnson, one meets references to Garraway's.

The Dean immortalized it in his well-known lines on 'Change Alley:

"There is a gulf where thousands fell, Here all the bold adventurers came, A narrow sound, though deep as hell, 'Change Alley is the dreadful name.

"Subscribers here by thousands float And jostle one another down. Each paddling in his leaky boat, And here they fish for gold and drown.

"Meantime secure on Garraway's cliffs A savage race by shipwreck fed, Lie waiting for the foundered skiffs And strip the bodies of the dead."

Dickens also makes it the scene of the writing of the famous chops and tomato sauce letter from Mr. Pickwick to Mrs. Bardell.

One can imagine the elation of my friends as they sat around that little table at Garraway's. It was only 10:35. Their income that morning had been $150,000. And many more such days had gone before. All danger was over, wealth was won. They saw themselves back in America, among the Four Hundred, possessors of a fortune, however wrongfully obtained, yet obtained in a way that would leave behind no ruined widows and orphans to linger out the remainder of their blighted lives in poverty and misery. That was a point which added zest to their enjoyment of the prospect.

"I am never to go to the bank again. Come, shake hands on that," said Noyes. And in their excitement and wild delight they shook hands again and again.

But they would have moderated their joy had they known that at the very moment the bank porter, pale and frightened, was rushing past the room where they sat, carrying the news to the bank that the two-thousand pound bill was a forgery. Instantly all was confusion and excitement in the bank. Telegrams were at once sent to the detective police, and at that moment swarms of them were pouring out of the Bow street and Scotland Yard offices.

That already stories of gigantic frauds, multiplied a thousand fold by rumor, were flying everywhere that every bank in London was victimized. In ten minutes the story reached the Stock Exchange and a scene of terrific excitement ensued, and, through it all, our three innocents sat on in that dingy old coffee-house, serenely unconscious of the fearful storm that was rising. Still they were safe. Everything was confusion in the bank. The terrified official, frantic with fear, could only describe a tall young man, an American, who said his name was Warren.

Had my three triumphant friends only known what was up they might have sat where they were the day through and drank porter out of the pewter mugs in safety. There were a hundred thousand men in London who would answer any description the bank could have given of Noyes, Mac and George had never appeared in the transaction, and I, the F. A. Warren they were looking for, was living quietly with my young wife in a lovely isle in the tropic sea.

Surely then, these three high-toned financiers still had the game in their own hands. They had nothing to fear. They had wealth. There was no clue to their identity and the world was before them--a world which lays her treasures and pleasures at the feet of him who commands wealth.

But that mighty Something had decreed otherwise, and a subtle spirit under whose power they were but purposeless puppets inspired them to commit an act of folly which was to hurl them from the fools' paradise wherein they were reveling down to the pit of despair.

Upon Mac casually remarking that they had still a balance of $75,000 to Warren's credit, Noyes spoke up and said: "Boys, that is too much money to leave John Bull; suppose you make out a check for L5,000. I will run over and get the cash, and it will do for pocket money." And the two others, triumphant in success, became idiots and assented. Making out a check for L5,000, Noyes started for the bank, check in hand, and entering, instantly found himself with a hot and angry swarm of hornets about him.

There were twenty-five detectives in and around the bank. Special messengers had summoned the affrighted directors. The great bank parlor was packed with a host of stockholders and directors, who were questioning the manager and clerks. And excitement rose to fever heat when, with twenty hands holding him, poor Noyes was hustled in among them. They rushed at him like a pack of wolves. Had that been a bank parlor in festive Arizona, they would not have endured the delay incidental to procuring a rope, but would have ended it and him by gunnery at short range. Noyes could not be shaken; his nerve never failed. He said a gentleman had hired him as a clerk, and that was all he knew. He had left him at the Stock Exchange; if they would let him go, he would try and find him and bring him around to the bank. J. Bull is gullible, but not so much so as to swallow that yarn.

So they held tightly to him, and a committee of indignant Britons escorted him to Newgate.

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