On the way to Peoria she relieved the conductor of $30 in bills,
secreting them in her hat. In Peoria, within forty-eight hours, she
had stolen a thousand dollars' worth of goods from stores, registered
at three hotels under assumed names, and was in a chair car with a
ticket for Omaha when the Peoria police had followed her easy tracks
through the city. Perhaps the broadest, most easily identified track
was that which she left in a barber shop in the National Hotel, where
she appeared for an egg shampoo. Two eggs had been broken into her
shiny hair when Bertha promptly fainted and rolled out of the chair.
As a count of shop equipment showed nothing missing an hour later, the
barber shop proprietor was at a loss as to the purpose of the faint.
This girlish young woman, with the baby dimples and skin of peach and
cream, the innocent blue eyes, and the smiles that play so easily over
her face as she talks vivaciously and with keen sense of both wit and
humor, is a study for the psychologist. There is no affectedness of
speech--for the moment it is childishly genuine. She could sit in a
drawing room and have half a dozen admirers in her train.
But reform schools, asylums and penitentiaries are institutions
through which this young woman has graduated up to that pinnacle of
notorious accomplishment which today is centering upon "Fainting
Bertha" Lebecke the official attentions of a great state. What to do
with her is the question.