proprietors, and one was in the matter of the general admission tickets.
He had them printed on a thin but tough quality of paper, and each
ticket was numbered. In this way it needed but a glance at the last
ticket in the rack and a look at the memorandum of the last number
previously sold at the former performance, to tell exactly how many
general admissions had been disposed of.

These numbered tickets were not used over again, but were destroyed
after the day's accounts had been made up. At first Joe and some others
of the officials had had an idea that the man who was charged with the
work of destroying the tickets, instead of doing so, had kept some out
and sold them at a reduced price. But an investigation proved that this
was not the case.

"Some one is ringing in extra tickets on us," stated Joe to the chemist.
"We want to find out who it is and how the trick is worked. So far, we
haven't been able to find this out. As a matter of fact, we don't know
whether there are bogus tickets in our boxes or not. We haven't been
able to detect two kinds. They all seem the same."

"Some numbers must be duplicated," said Mr. Waldon, as he picked up a
handful of the slips Joe had brought. "That's very obvious. The numbers
must be duplicated in some instances."

"Yes, we have discovered that," returned Joe. "But the queer part is,
taking even two tickets with the same number, we don't know which was
sold at our ticket wagon and which is the bogus one. Here's a case in
point."

He picked up two of the coupons. As far as eye or touch could tell they