The Passing of Mooney
A strange fatality seemed to follow White and Mooney.
These two men were perhaps the most accomplished highwaymen that
ever operated in any country, and yet something unforeseen—something
they seemed unable to anticipate—always interfered to prevent them
from obtaining the great fortune they expected.
In one of the earlier robberies, the packages done up in old
newspapers which they kicked out of the way, when they were
searching for the shipment of money, contained the very treasure for
which they were looking; while the only thing they carried away from
that night’s work was an inconsiderable sum of money gathered from
the rifled registered mail.
The sealed packages that Mooney took out of the safe on the night
that he and I, in such theatrical fashion, held up the through
express, proved, upon examination, to be registered bonds of some
industrial corporation which were being delivered in the south,
while the loot from the last holdup had been about a thousand
dollars in small bills.
And now, finally in the great haul which they were at last able to
make, the only result was White’s capture and imprisonment for a
term of years, equal practically, for life. The thing ended also in
disaster no less for Mooney.
I have often wondered who this man really was and what was his
origin.
I think he had been in nearly every country, and he was familiar
with practically every device that could be of service to his
profession. He was a skilled electrician; a very wizard at it. The
manager of the circus was glad to carry him along although he had
practically no duties. But the skill with which he was able to
adjust anything of a mechanical nature that happened, for the
moment, to be out of repair, made him invaluable. And he seemed to
do it with no effort; with practically no preliminary inquiry, as
though, by a sort of instinct, he was able to locate the difficulty
and adjust it. I have always felt that given any sort of an even
chance the government officials would never have been able to outwit
this man. It was not any plan laid for him that tripped him up. It
was the inevitable tragedy of life.
I did not think about this very much at the time. I was young enough
for events to make little impression on me. The whole thing was a
sort of adventure, without, as it seemed to me, any moral relations.
I traveled on for some weeks with the circus precisely as I had been
accustomed to do.
I helped with the horses. My disappearance caused no comment in the
organization where my status was practically that of a roustabout. I
continued to adore the girl who rode the white horse, and whenever I
had an opportunity I talked to her. I could not have been very
skillful in dissimulation for my admiration was apparent to
everybody. Maggie did not say anything to me; she never even
mentioned White or Mooney, but I found her often regarding me as
though I were something she did not precisely comprehend, or as
though she were considering me in some plan about which she was very
much concerned.
They were careless and happy days.
Strange as it may appear, I never anticipated any after affect to
these adventures. I did not realize that I was in danger from the
law, or that what had happened to White might on any day happen to
me.
About two weeks later Maggie disappeared from the circus.
I learned the fact next morning from the girl who had been placed
under the chaperonage of one of the clowns’ wives, a morose wizened
old woman, whose husband, the life of the circus when the
performance was under way, was at all other times the most
melancholy person one could imagine, and whose withered wife seemed
never to escape from this depression. I learned also that the girl
was not related to Maggie, as Mooney had once intimated. She had
been adopted by this curious, capable woman, probably out of a
hospital.
I learned afterwards what this disappearance of Maggie meant. She
had received a telegram from Mooney who was involved in his last
adventure.
This woman was not in any sense an accomplice of Mooney.
I think he had never seen her until he joined this circus. I am sure
there was no understanding of any character between them. In his
extremity, Mooney merely turned toward her as perhaps the only
person he could think of.
He had been overtaken by an unforeseen misfortune.
After the bank notes had all been signed and made ready for
circulation, he left White in the south. He was convinced the plan
which White proposed to follow would bring him to misfortune. He
pointed out very clearly what would happen, and he was right. He had
no faith in White’s assurance and he had no intention to submit
himself to the possibility of any such disaster.
He had shipped his money to a city in the southwest and he followed
it there.
I do not know whether he intended to cross into Mexico or whether he
planned that the government officials who might be looking for him
should finally be able to trace him in that direction, and, from
this, to formulate the theory that he had crossed the southern
border.
This would be quite in line with the man’s character.
At any rate the fact was, that, having made this false trail toward
southern territory, he turned suddenly about and came north. He
brought the money with him in the traveling bag. But here in a
northern city he was overtaken by a misfortune which no man could
foresee and to which all are subject, no matter how wily or
skillful.
He was taken desperately ill and he realized his condition
immediately. He took the traveling bag to an express company and
shipped it to Canada to a fictitious person. Then he looked about
for a lodging house. He was afraid to go to a hospital; and, yet,
from what Maggie afterward said, Mooney was even then, in the first
few hours of his illness, certain that he had reached the end of his
career.
The man had no difficulty in finding what he was looking for; but
here he was met with one of those inexplicable vagaries of chance
for which there seems to be no adequate explanation.
It was night when Mooney got out of the cab and was helped into the
lodging which he had selected. In the preoccupation of his illness
he did not very closely regard the person who maintained this
lodging house. But in the morning when the man came up to the room
Mooney knew him instantly.
Years before in a holdup in which Mooney had been engaged there had
been a German mail clerk. More than once when Mooney had been in the
mood of reminiscence I had heard him talk about this ridiculous
person; a pale mild-mannered German, who had been simply unnerved
with terror when the bandit had entered the mail car. This man had
been physically unable, from sheer fright, to get down out of the
car when the mail clerks at the point of a weapon had been ordered
out.
He sat on the floor with his mouth open and his hands clasped
together.
Mooney used to laugh about it; about the ridiculous appearance the
creature presented and what he had done. He had pulled an empty mail
sack down over the man’s head and shoulders and left him there; and
there he had been found three hours later when the train pulled into
one of the central cities of the west. The German had not moved and
the mail sack was still pulled down over his shoulders when the
train men at the station came into the car.
The man had been laughed out of the service and had gone from one
undertaking to another, until, finally, destiny established him here
in this boarding house to meet Mooney when he should arrive ill in a
hired cab.
Mooney, as I have said, knew the man instantly, but it was not
likely that the man recognized the awe-inspiring bandit in his sick
lodger. But he looked at Mooney as at some person whom he had seen,
and the highwayman knew that it was only a question of time until
his host would be able to place him.
The impressions of fright are conspicuously vivid.
It was certain that this man’s mind retained the precise picture of
the one who had put him into such abject terror. The picture would
be clear in every detail. Time does not blur impressions like this.
It would be merely a question of the mental connecting up of his
impressions about this lodger whom, he felt, he had seen somewhere,
and the identity of the highwayman who had put him so desperately
into fear.
It was then that Mooney sent the telegram to Maggie. He got the
German to take it out to the telegraph office, and he awaited her
arrival. He did not send for a doctor. He knew perfectly well that
death was on him. He had contracted the swift deadly pneumonia which
at that time was devastating the country like a plague.
Maggie reached the city that evening and Mooney told her what to do.
He pointed out that the German lodging-house keeper had already hit
upon his identity and the house was being watched, for he had
noticed a window across the street, back of a barber shop, that
always had the shade pulled down. The window was visible from his
bed and he could see, by watching it, that this shade moved
occasionally.
He observed it closely and at one time saw a man’s hand, which was
all the evidence a person like Mooney needed. He knew perfectly well
that the German had recognized him and reported the fact to the
police.
He explained it all to Maggie when she came in. She knew then that
she would be shadowed when she went out of the house. He told her,
precisely, what he wished her to do.
It was about five o’clock in the afternoon.
Maggie presently left the house and was of course shadowed. She went
along the street until she came to a doctor’s office. She rang the
bell and entered. This destination seemed reasonable to the
plain-clothes man who was keeping her in sight. This was precisely
what one summoned to the bedside of an ill man would be expected to
do; go at once for a physician.
But it was not a doctor that Maggie was after.
It was an opportunity to call up the office of the express company
in Canada and tell them to ship the bag back to this city. If the
doctor were in, she would consult him about Mooney and ask to use
his telephone, and if he were not in she would ask the same
privilege, saying that she would return when the doctor should be at
home.
As it happened the doctor was not in the house, but the person in
charge of his office permitted Maggie to use the telephone. She
called up the express company in Canada and ordered the bag
reshipped. She left with the servant money to pay for the telephone
call and went out.
It was a very clever device because it did not occur to the
detective, who was keeping her in sight, that it was worth while to
go into the doctor’s office to inquire what she was doing there.
What she would be doing there was too obvious.
He therefore contented himself with shadowing her back to the
lodging house and keeping the place under his eye from the curtained
window behind the barber shop.
Maggie remained with the sick man that night. She endeavored in vain
to persuade him to have a doctor or to permit her to undertake such
simple remedies as might be at hand. Mooney knew he was dying. He
had no faith whatever in anything that might be done for him.
He was only concerned that Maggie should carry out his directions.
In the morning she again left the house; and was again shadowed as
every one was shadowed who came into it or went out of it. This time
Maggie went to the nearest drug store—about three blocks distant, at
the corner of a street—went in, spoke to the clerk and then went
around the counter into the back part of the store.
The detective who was watching her from the opposite side of the
street naturally concluded she was having some remedy prepared for
the sick man.
What Maggie had in fact done was to say to the clerk that she was
packing up some articles, which she had to move, and that she wanted
to get some empty boxes. The boxes were in the rear of the store and
the clerk told her she could go through and pick out what she
wished. She went through, went out the back door, down a neighboring
alley and took a taxicab to the railway station.
The detective waited in vain for her to appear. When finally she did
not come out he went in and discovered what had happened; too late
to overtake her.
Maggie went to the station, got the traveling bag, put it into the
taxicab and set about to carry out the remainder of Mooney’s
directions.
The detective called up headquarters and gave the alarm. The police
at once went about spreading the usual net for Maggie and then they
determined to arrest Mooney. They were now convinced that the man’s
illness was a pretense; and, a few minutes later, the detective and
three officers suddenly burst into the room where Mooney sat in bed
propped up with pillows, gasping for breath, in the closing stages
of pneumonia.
Mooney was painfully writing something on the blank sheet of a
letter pad with a stump of a pencil.
The officers covered him with weapons.
Mooney looked at them with a queer, ghastly smile:
“You are in time,” he said, “to witness my will.”
He extended his arm with the sheet of paper in his fingers.
The astonished officers took the paper to the window and read it in
amazement.
It ran as follows:
“I, John Mooney, being at the end of life, do hereby
make this my last will and testament.
“Inasmuch as the United States Government, with a tender
regard beyond that of friend or relative, has, now for a
long time, been extremely solicitous to provide me with
food, clothing and the necessities of life:
“Now, therefore, in appreciative remembrance, I do, by
these Presents, give and bequeath to the said United
States Government fifty-one thousand dollars in bank
notes, which I have caused on this day to be delivered
to the Federal District Attorney of this city;
“In the hope that the said United States Government,
having thus esteemed me in life, may now, in death,
cherish my memory.
(Signed) “John Mooney.”
They realized now that the man was in the very extremity of death.
He was dying as he had lived, with a cynical disregard of everybody.
His very last words were in character:
“Tell ’em—no flowers.”
His voice was a gasping stutter.
In the meantime Maggie had gone to the railroad station, found the
traveling bag which had been reshipped, and had taken a taxicab to
the office of the District Attorney; precisely as Mooney had
directed in his will.
But there she had not carried out his directions in its exact
details.
I would like to write into this record that it was Mooney, on his
deathbed, who thought of the course that Maggie followed, but it
would not be the truth. He thought only of the cynical jest that he
endeavored to carry out in his death. It was Maggie who was thinking
of some one else. What she did will presently appear.
I suppose it was about a week later when a man came into the horse
tent, and walked up to me as though he were an old acquaintance:
“How do you do?” he said.
His greeting was so cordial, that, although I did not know him, I
put out my hand to shake hands with him. But instead of grasping my
hand as I expected, he took hold of it and turned it suddenly over
so he could see the palm.
There, still visible, was the red discoloration from the burn when I
had taken hold of the hot iron rod, on the night when we had climbed
down from the tender into the cab of the locomotive, in our last
holdup.
The man seemed surprised, as though at finding some confirmatory
evidence of which he had been in doubt.
He looked me over.
“You are only a boy,” he said. “How did you get mixed up in this
business?”
I was, myself, now astonished. I realized that the man was an
officer and that I had finally, in some manner, got into the
clutches of the law. It all seemed so incredible that I did not
undertake to make any reply to the man’s inquiry. He asked me to go
with him and I put on my hat and went without a word.
The circus was on that day at a rather large city.
We took a street car to the post-office, a big, white building in
the center of a public square. We got into the elevator and went up
to the second floor. The man took me along a narrow hall and into a
room which was entirely empty. Here he bade me wait, and went
through a door into an adjoining room.
I remained for some time quite alone. The sounds of the city came up
to me, but I seemed in some deserted place far from any one.
Finally the officer, who had arrested me, came back, opened the door
and asked me to go in. He closed the door behind me and went out
into the hall.
I found myself in a big sunlit room.
There was a table with several leather-bound books on it, some
folded papers in their wrappers and some written memoranda, on
sheets, lying about, and a chair where some one had just been
sitting. Then I saw the other person in the room; a figure standing
by the window; a big man with thick gray hair, tall and broad
shouldered.
He had been looking down into the street and now he turned about;
his face lighted with a friendly, quizzical smile. The smile
deepened; extended itself until it became a merry chuckle.
“So you are the desperate train robber!” he said.
“Well, sit down, Mr. Train Robber, I want to have a little
conversation with you.”
I was as embarrassed as a child and I sat down primly in the chair
and put my hands together in my lap. I must have presented a
ridiculous appearance, a big overgrown boy as uneasy as though he
were being photographed for his mother.
The man came over and sat down in his chair. He put his elbows on
the table and looked at me across the line of books.
“Is this all really true?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
I knew of course what he meant although he made no explanation.
“Well,” he said, “it is incredible; it is entirely beyond belief.”
Then he got up and began to walk about the room.
“My boy,” he said, “you have been associated with two of the worst
crooks in the world and you have engaged in a desperate business.
What do you suppose we ought to do with you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I was still greatly embarrassed and these were the only words I
could think of.
The big man stopped at that, put his hands in his pockets and looked
at me:
“Neither do I,” he said.
Then he went on:
“You have courage—a dependable sort of courage. It is a quality rare
enough in the world; too rare, it seems to me, to be thoughtlessly
broken up. I am going to try an experiment.
“I don’t see why the courage which you possess should not be brought
to the service of the government instead of against it. Do you think
you could stick to us as faithfully as you have stuck to these two
inconsiderate blacklegs?”
He did not wait for me to reply; but he went on:
“Crime always fails,” he said. “There never was any man able to get
away with it. No matter how clever he is, there is always some point
at which his plans go to pieces; sooner or later something turns up
against which he is wholly unable to protect himself. The thing is
so certain to happen that it seems to look as though there were a
power in the universe determined on the maintenance of justice; a
power that is opposed to criminal endeavor and always at work to
destroy the criminal agent—just as it destroyed White and just as it
has destroyed Mooney.”
He went on as though he were speaking to himself.
“But it does not act as though it wished to destroy you.... I
suppose one’s large view in this matter ought to be consistent. If
one assumes that this Authority has exercised itself for the
ultimate destruction of these two hardened offenders, then one must
also believe that what has happened in your behalf has happened also
with an equal design.”
He began to walk about the room, his hands in his pockets, his chin
lifted as in some reflection.
“Well,” he said, “at any rate I am going to take it that way. I am
going to turn you over to Dix for a tryout in the Secret Service. We
have got to seize a number of dangerous Reds and your holdup
experience ought to make you a useful assistant for Dix. Besides,”
he added, “we are involved in a sort of promise about you.”
I said “Yes, sir.”
I was still embarrassed and astonished almost beyond any expression;
and, sitting thus primly on the edge of the chair, with my big hands
folded in my lap, I must have seemed to the man irresistibly
ridiculous, for he suddenly began to laugh.
“All right, Mr. Train Robber,” he said, “you will find some of your
friends just outside of the door, and when you have spoken with
them, go along the hall to the end of the building.... Dix is in the
room on the right.”
I got up awkwardly and backed out of the room and through the door
behind me.
It was only long afterwards that I learned by what agency these
events had come to pass.
When Maggie had taken the traveling bag containing the stolen bank
notes to the United States District Attorney on the day of Mooney’s
death, she had not handed them over to him, straight out, as Mooney
had directed. Instead, she had used the advantages of the situation
to bring me clear of the business.
I do not know the details.
But she seems to have gone over the whole thing with the Federal
authorities that morning, explaining all about my relations with the
two highwaymen, how I had come to get into it and how I had been
carried along; and then she promised to deliver the money to them
provided the government would grant me immunity. The matter was
taken up and discussed there in detail on that morning. The result
was that Maggie got the promise, that, if everything proved to be as
she described it, I should not be held responsible for the desperate
crimes that these men had carried out.
She was in fact a very skillful person and she conducted it with
immense cleverness.
They were amazed to find that she had the money in what they
imagined, when she came, was merely a personal traveling bag. And
they were astonished to discover that I was, in fact, merely the big
awkward, thoughtless youth that she had described to them; as they
were astonished to find the confirmatory discoloration of my burned
hand.
On the outside of the door I found Maggie and my fairy sweetheart.
The girl was in tears, but Maggie was a grim figure, with her little
crumpled ears lying tight to her head, her beady eyes and her hard
features—precisely like the devil, which she was not.
“You can kiss her, just once!” she said.
I stood like one in a dream, but the girl came up and put her arms
around my neck ... and I kissed her.
And then, through the rosy haze of the world, Maggie pushed in
between us.
“That’ll do,” she said. “You are to go to work now and make a man
out of yourself ... and then ... in three years we shall see about
it.”
I went along the corridor, to Dix ... in the room on the right.
* * * * *
And so came Walker into the United States Secret Service. The story
of his way upward in that service is not written out here. If you
wish to hear it ask his charming wife whose memories go back to the
time when the big tent of a circus was the Kingdom of Romance. But
you will find in the chapters to follow, some adventures in mystery
with which he was connected.