Detective Detected

by Alexander Ross

I.

I had been a clerk in the Bristol bank, in Providence for eighteen years, and had gained the confidence of the president and cashier by uniform good behavior and close attention to my work. Other clerks had come and gone; some to more lucrative positions, and some I know not where, discharged as they had been for inaccuracies in their books. One of them, James Petrie, who had left us about a year before the events happened which I am about to relate, had been on friendly terms with me, and I had always found him an obliging, kind-hearted fellow. He had been rather too fond of a glass, however, and I had frequently warned him that it would injure him in the opinion of the officers of the bank, if it should be discovered that he drank so freely. He had always promised me that he would reform, and had always failed to do so.

At last he came in the bank one day in a state which certainly would betray him if he should have to speak to the Cashier, which he had often to do, and I was urging him to leave on the plea of sickness, when the Cashier, who saw us talking, called him to his room on some matter of business. He went, and on entering the room stumbled against a chair and fell. The Cashier discovered his condition, and when the President arrived, poor Petrie was at once discharged. It was a custom, when an employee left the bank, for the President to give him a statement of his conduct while there, and what was the cause of his dismissal. Such a statement was handed to Petrie, as he left the office ruined to any prospect of getting a position in a banking-house afterward. I had never seen or heard of him from that time.