There were many loans of brokers and others all secured by the same sort of collateral.  Most of these John appropriated.  When it was necessary to check off the loans, John, having retained enough of the same kind of bonds to cover the largest loan, would bring up the same bundle time after time with a different name upon it.  If one of the customers wanted to pay off a loan and his bonds were gone he would be given some one else’s collateral.  Apparently the only thing that was necessary was to have enough of each kind of security on hand to cover the largest loan on the books at any given time.

Once, when the examiners were at work on the vault, John had to make up one hundred thousand dollars in Overland 4s or 5s from the different small loans in the loan vault and put them in a package in the deposit vault in order to make it appear that certain depositors’ bonds were all there.

The most extraordinary performance of all was when, upon one of the annual examinations, John covered the absence of over fifty bonds in the collateral covering a certain loan by merely shoving the balance of the securities into the back of the vault, so that it was not examined at all.  He had taken these bonds to substitute for others in different brokers’ offices, and it so happened that there were no similar securities in the building; thus the deficiency could not be covered up even by John’s expert sleight of hand.  Of course, if there had been other bonds of the same kind in another vault it would have been a simple matter to substitute them.  But there were not.  So John pushed the remaining one hundred and fifty bonds into a dark corner of the vault and awaited the discovery with throbbing pulses.  Yet, strange to relate, these watchdogs of finance, did not see the bonds which John had hidden, and did not discover that anything was wrong, since, for purposes of its own, the bank had neglected to make any record of the loan in question.  It would really have been safer for John if he had taken the whole pile, but then he did not know that the accountants were going to do their business in any such crazy fashion.  The whole thing came to seem a sort of joke to John.  He never took any bonds for his own personal use.  He gave everything to Prescott, and he rarely, if ever, saw Prescott except to hand him securities.

One day Prescott walked right into the bank itself and John gave him one hundred and sixty-five bonds, which he stuffed under his overcoat and carried away.  Remember that this is a fact.

The thing, which began in August, 1905, dragged over through the following year and on into 1907.  John weathered two examinations by the accountants, the last being in October, 1906, when they certified that the company was absolutely “O.K.” and everything intact.  On that particular day John had over three hundred thousand dollars in Overland 4s and 5s scattered over the Street.