This was a coincidence that might not occur in a hundred years, but had the deductive detective determined the question he would still be pondering on the comparative probability of whether the cook, the chore man, or the hired girl was the guilty party.
A clean bit of detection on the part of an agency, and quite in the day's work, was the comparatively recent capture of a thief who secured three hundred and sixty thousand dollars worth of securities from a famous banking institution in New York City by means of a very simple device.

A firm of stock brokers had borrowed from this bank about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a day or two and put up the securities as collateral.

In the ordinary course of business, when the borrower has no further use for the money, he sends up a certified check for the amount of the loan with interest, and the bank turns over the securities to the messenger.

In this particular case a messenger arrived with a certified check, shoved it into the cage, and took away what was pushed out to him in return--three hundred and sixty thousand dollars in bonds.

The certification turned out to be a forgery and the securities vanished.