One summer night in 1864, a convict named Pete McCartney boldly leaps off a train that is en route to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, DC, and he escapes into the Pennsylvania woods. McCartney is a counterfeiter, and he manages to elude his pursuers, even though he is injured from the jump and his legs are shackled with heavy chains. He has a long history of escaping police custody and has been arrested many times for making and passing “coney” (counterfeit money). Typically, he has bribed his way out of jail, but some of his escapes have been quite ingenious—once, he fashioned a skeleton key out of scraps of foil from cigarette packages.

After his escape from the prison train, McCartney tries to go straight, even working briefly as a paid lecturer on how to detect counterfeit money. Eventually, though, he succumbs again to the huge profits of the coney racket. He is arrested again in Illinois and interrogated by Herman Whitley, the chief of the United States Secret Service, a new federal agency tasked with shutting down the endemic counterfeiting of the nation’s money. To Whitney’s disappointment, McCartney refuses to turn over his accomplices, agreeing only to surrender his cache of fake cash.