were fruitless as his first one had been;
Trencher's luck piece was gone.

Those wise men, the alienists, say that all of us are insane on certain
subjects, however sane we may be upon other subjects. Certainly in the
mental composition of every one of us is some quirk, some vagary, some
dear senseless delusion, avowed or private. As for Trencher, the one
crotchet in his cool brain centred about that worthless trade dollar.
With it in his possession he had counted himself a winner, always.
Without it he felt himself to be a creature predestined and foreordained
to disaster.

To it he gave all the credit for the fact that he had never served a
prison sentence. But once, and once only, had he parted company with it,
even temporarily. That was the time when Murtha, that crafty old
Central-Office hand, had picked him up on general principles, had taken
him to headquarters, and first stripping him of all the belongings on
his person, had carried him to the Bertillon Bureau, and then and there,
without shadow of legal right, since Trencher was neither formally
accused of nor formally indicted for any offence and had no previous
record of convictions, had forced him to undergo the ordeals, ethically
so repugnant to the instincts of the professional thief, of being
measured and finger-printed and photographed, side face and full face.
He had cursed and protested and pleaded when Murtha confiscated the
luck piece; he had rejoiced when Murtha, seeing no harm in the thing,
had restored it to him before lodging him in a cell under the
all-embracing technical charge of being a suspicious person. Because he
had so speedily got it back, Trencher had gone free again with the loss
of but two days of liberty--or anyway, so Trencher firmly believed. But
because it had left his custody for no more than an hour his pictures
were now in the Gallery, and Murtha had learned the secret of Trencher's
one temperamental weakness, one fetish.

And now--at this time, of all times--it was gone again. But where had it
gone? Where could it have gone? Mentally he reconstructed all his acts,
all his movements since he had risen that morning and dressed--and then
the solution came to him, and with the solution complete remembrance. He
had slipped it into the right-hand pocket of the new tan-coloured
topcoat--to impregnate the garment with good luck and to enhance the
prospects for a successful working-out of the scheme to despoil the
Wyoming cattleman;