... twenties are the only coins that you can risk a count on by sizing one stack up with another. We never count but one stack here. Then all the balance is sized up, with the exception of the last stack, which is counted as a check on the first count.”

“Why can’t that be done with other coins?”

“They get too badly worn to make them come out evenly. In a stack of fives you will often find the difference of an entire piece, and even tens are so uneven as to make stacking them unreliable.”

The nimble-fingered young man then proceeded to illustrate his meaning with two trays of coin. One tray containing $20,000 in twenties, $400 to the stack, had the tops of the stacks as level as a billiard table and no one stack was higher or lower than its fellows to more than the thickness of a piece of cardboard. The other tray, filled with tens and fives, was so uneven as to bear the resemblance in places of a coin having been removed. This was not due to the minting, he explained, but to the wear of the coin in circulation. Twenties wear, too, of course, but the average man does not have a pocket full of twenties and they get less wear than their kindred of smaller denomination. “yes, twenties are the boss coin if you have much of it to handle,” he concluded, and the reporter thought so, too, as a depositor dumped $2,400 on the counter and the teller picked up $1,600 in one hand and $800 in the other, to convey it to the trays four feet behind.

“That is a pretty good load, isn’t it?”

“Oh no,” replied the teller cheerfully; “$4,000 is what we called a fair handful.”

“I could take another thousand by laying a couple of rolls on my wrist,” he went on, “but it is seldom necessary. If a deposit amounts to more than $5,000, I set an empty tray over on the counter and load it there.”

“I should think it would be easier to make two trips of it, where it is but a step from your counter to the trays. It certainly would take no more time than it would to stack it up the way you do on your hand.”

“My friend, I don’t want to make you feel bad, but I never turn my back to the counter for a single second if there is coin on it. No matter if you were the only person in sight, and you were my father, it would be just the same. Eternal vigilance is the price of twenty-dollar pieces in this business.”

I always had a great admiration for Bret Harte, until I read one of his yarns, where I was able to contradict him. One chapter in it was devoted to the robbery of the stage to Red Dog, and the driver was the hero. When the robbers brought him to a halt he fired the coach lamps at them, and then jumped on to one of the stage horses with the treasure-box, and after a race of six miles beat them into the nearest station. The treasure-box, so Bret Harte said, contained $50,000 in gold dust. Now if you can find a man that can ride a horse bareback over a mountain road, and hold a box weighing 168 pounds, and thus handicapped, beat two well-mounted men fully equipped, I’ll back him to whip Sullivan. I’m afraid that Bret didn’t figure the weight of coin down very fine when he made the horse and driver do such a trying feat.”