Prescott is
also serving a term at hard labor--a sentence somewhat longer than
John's. The trust company took up their accounts, paid the losses of the
luckless pair, and, owing to a rise in prices which came too late to
benefit the latter, escaped with the comparatively trifling loss of a
little over one hundred thousand dollars. At once every banking house
and trust company upon the Street looked to its system of checks upon
the honesty of its employees, and took precautions which should have
been taken long before. The story was a nine days' wonder. Then Union
Pacific dropped twenty points more, the tide of finance closed over the
heads of John and Prescott, and they were forgotten.
Had the company, instead of putting itself at the mercy of a
thirty-five-dollar-a-week clerk, placed double combinations on the loan
and deposit vaults, and employed two men, one to act as a check upon the
other, to handle its securities, or had it merely adopted the even
simpler expedient of requiring an officer of the company to be present
when any securities were to be removed from the vaults, John would
probably not now be in jail.
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