"You told me that Gordon had warned you that trouble threatened the safe; and when I saw that it was a simple combination safe with a six-letter word combination intrusted to the cashier, it came to me convincingly at once that Gordon's memorandum might well be the combination of the safe. If he had been carrying the weekly word in his head for twenty years, and now, mentally weakened by the disgrace of his son, found himself unable to remember it, I could appreciate how, with his savings gone, his home mortgaged, untrained in any business but banking, he would desperately conceal his condition from you for fear of losing his position.
"Obviously he would make a memorandum of the combination each week at the office and throw away the old one. This explained clearly why some one was after it; but why that one should be after the old memorandum, and what the breaking open of the typewriter desk could have had to do with it, I could not see at first, even after we surprised him with his scraps of paper. But I made three short tests of him. The first, a simple test of the psychologists for memory, made by exhibiting to him a half dozen figures formed by different combinations of the same three lines, proved to me, as he could not reproduce one of these figures correctly, that he had need of a memorandum of the combination of the safe. The other two tests—which are tests for attention—showed that, besides having a failing memory, his condition as regards attention was even worse. Gordon lost the watch ticks, which I asked him to mark with his finger, twice within forty-five seconds.
