UNCLE SAM: DETECTIVE
[Illustration: "'WHAT HAVE YOU GOT THERE?' ASKED THE MAN IN THE
ROAD"--_Page 6_]
UNCLE SAM DETECTIVE
BY
WILLIAM ATHERTON DU PUY
AUTHOR OF
"UNCLE SAM'S MODERN MIRACLES,"
"UNCLE SAM, WONDERWORKER"
WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS BY
S. EDWIN MEGARGEE, JR.
[Illustration: Logo]
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1916, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
I THE CONSCIENCE OF THE CUMBERLANDS 1
II THE BANK WRECKER 24
III A FIASCO IN FIREARMS 48
IV THE SUGAR SAMPLES 71
V THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SLEUTH 93
VI "ROPING" THE SMUGGLERS OF JAMAICA 116
VII A BANK CASE FROM THE OUTSIDE 136
VIII BEHIND CUSTOMS SCREENS 154
IX WITH THE REVOLUTION MAKERS 171
X THE ELUSIVE FUGITIVE 192
XI THE BANK BOOKKEEPER 214
XII PUTTING UP THE MASTER BLUFF 231
ILLUSTRATIONS
"'What have you got there?' asked the man in
the road" _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
"Gard turned a pocket flashlight on his own lips:
'Try to find out how they are to be shipped'" 54
"When Doctor Yen affixed his signature Gard signaled" 134
"'If one of you advances a step toward me I will fire'" 188
INTRODUCTION
May I ask you to close your eyes for a moment and conjure up the picture
that is filed away in your mind under the heading, "detective"?
There! You have him. He is a large man of middle age. His tendency is
toward stoutness. The first detail of him that stands out in your
conception is his shoes. In stories you have read, plays you have seen,
the detective has had square-toed shoes. You noticed his shoes that time
when the house was robbed and a plain clothes man came out and snooped
about.
These shoes are a survival of the days when the detective walked his
beat; for the sleuth, of course, is a graduate policeman. He must have
been a large man to have been a policeman, and he must have attained
some age to have passed through the grades. Such men as he always put on
flesh with age. Your man perspires freely, breathes heavily, moves with
deliberation. The police detective can be recognized a block away.
Or, perhaps, you have the best accredited fiction idea of the unraveler
of mysteries. This creation is a tall, cadaverous individual, who sits
on the small of his back in a morris-chair and smokes a pipe. From a
leaf torn from last year's almanac, in an East Side garret, he draws the
conclusion that the perpetrator of a Black Hand outrage in Xenia, Ohio,
is a pock-marked Hungarian now floating down the Mississippi on a scow;
he radiographs with the aid of a weird instrument at his elbow and
apprehends the fugitive.
Of these two conceptions of detectives it may be said that the first is
quite correct: that the graduate policeman is abroad in the land,
lumbering along on the trail of its criminals and occasionally catching
one of them. His assignment to this task is, obviously, a bit like
thrusting the work of a fox upon a ponderous elephant. The police
departments, however, are practically the only training schools for
detectives and it is but natural that they should be drawn upon.
Of the second conception of the detective--the man of science and
deductions--it may be said merely that he does not exist in all the
world, nor could exist. There is one case in a hundred which would
require the man of science in its solution and upon which he might work
much as he does in fiction. In the ninety-nine there would be no place
for such talents as his.
For each criminal case is a problem separate unto itself, and there may
not be brought to it more than a trained, logical, imaginative mind,
which may unfold it and see all the possibilities. There is but the
occasional call upon science, and the good detective knows when to
consult the specialist.
It was little more than half a dozen years ago that the Federal
Department of Justice set about the upbuilding of the greatest detective
bureau that the Government, or America for that matter, has ever known.
As the Bureau of Investigation it was to have charge of all the secret
work of the Government for which provision was not made elsewhere. It
was to wrestle with violations of neutrality, with those of the national
banking laws, with anti-trust cases, bucket shop cases, white slave
cases; it was to prosecute those who impersonate an officer of the
Government, to pursue those who flee the country and seek to evade the
long arm of the Federal law. Its duties were vastly wider than those of
any other of the Government detective agencies.
Department of Justice cases are stupendously big in many instances. They
may affect the relations that exist between nations, they may mean the
wrecking of hundred-million-dollar corporations, the stopping of
practises that are blights upon the morality and good name of the
nation. They are endless in variety and stupendous in their results.
The Department of Justice asked itself what manner of man should be
called upon to perform this important work. It looked the tasks in the
face and sought to determine the individual who would be best fitted to
their performance. When it had come to a conclusion it built a staff of
a hundred or two hundred (the number should not be stated) made up of
men of the material specified.
That staff ever since has been wrestling with the great problems that
confront a powerful nation with multitudinous interests. Its
accomplishments have satisfied the Department that its judgment was
right when it established a peculiar standard for the men whom it
selected to perform these delicate and difficult tasks.
I have purposely cultivated these men in many cities, have seen them at
work, have been given special privileges in my efforts to get a true
conception of them and their methods. Scores of the stars that have been
developed in the service have told me their best stories, their most
striking experiences.
In the end, I have attempted to evolve a character who is typical of
this new school of detectives. I have wanted him to work in my stories
as he would have done in actual life. I have wanted him to be true in
every detail to those young men who to-day are actually performing those
tasks for Uncle Sam.
So has Billy Gard come into being. The cases upon which he goes forth
have actually been ground through the mill of which he is a part. Each
is founded on facts related to me by these special agents of the
Department of Justice. Billy Gard is not an individual but a type--a
new detective who is effectually performing as important work as ever
came to the lot of men of his kind.
If the reader wants to know that his story pictures correctly the
situation which it undertakes, I wish to assure him that I have taken
infinite care that Billy Gard should work out his problems by the
methods that are actually employed and that the Government machine
operates in just this way.
WILLIAM ATHERTON DU PUY.
Washington, D. C.,
March, 1916.
UNCLE SAM: DETECTIVE
I
THE CONSCIENCE OF THE CUMBERLANDS
On the face of it one might have questioned the wisdom of selecting for
a task so difficult a man who knew absolutely nothing about it. When the
work in hand was the apprehension of a band of violators of the law who
had for years defied and intimidated the whole countryside, this course
seemed even more unusual. But the wonder would have still further
multiplied itself if the casual observer could have given Billy Gard the
once over as he sat nervously on the edge of the cane seat of the day
coach as the accommodation train pulled into the hill country.
For this special agent of the Department of Justice, mind you, was to
take up a piece of work upon which local constables and sheriffs,
United States marshals and revenue agents had failed. There was murder
at one end of the road he was to travel and the gallows at the other.
And Gard was a nondescript youngster who looked less than thirty,
neither light nor dark, large nor small--inconspicuous, easily lost in a
crowd. The careful observer might have noticed the breadth of brow and
the wrinkles that come to the man who thinks, or the tenseness of his
slim form that indicated physical fitness. For to be sure, these federal
sleuths of the new school are mostly college men, lawyers, expert
accountants, as was Gard; but youngsters in whom is to be found the love
of a bit of adventure and the steel of a set determination.
And now this slip of a lad was going back into the Cumberlands where the
whisky still whispers its secret to the mountaineer; where the revenue
agent penetrates at his peril and the Long Tom speaks from the thickets;
where the clansman sets what he considers his rights above the law of
the land and stands ready to lay his life or that of any who oppose him
on the altar he has built. Gard was after a community of moonshiners who
had defied all local authority and thrown down the gauntlet to the
Federal Government itself. He came alone with a little wicker grip.
"I am looking for a place to board," the special agent told Todd, the
livery stable man at Wheeler, the mountain town at which he had stopped
off. "I have been clerking in a store in Atlanta and got pretty well run
down. The doctor said I ought to stay in the mountains for a month or
two."
"How much can you pay?" asked Todd.
"I would like to get it as cheap as five dollars a week," said Gard.
"You can buy a farm up here for five dollars a week," said Todd.
"Well, I want good board where I can get lots of milk to drink and eggs
and where I can tramp around and shoot squirrels. Do you know such a
place?"
The liveryman was accustomed to driving summer boarders out to the few
places where they might stay in the Cumberlands. He sketched these
possibilities and told of the location of each. Gard already had the map
of the country well in mind and selected the farm near Sam Lunsford's,
he being the mountaineer whom the agent most wanted to cultivate.
Todd reviewed the situation as between the mountaineers and the
Government as he drove his customer out to the Tenney farm where he was
to ask to be put up.
"You see," he said, "they have always made moonshine whisky around here
and they just won't stop for nobody. They ain't many ideas gits into the
head of a man who lives in the mountains, and when one gits set there,
you can't get it out. They think they got a right to make whisky and
whisky they are goin' to make or bust.
"Then along comes Tom Reynolds and Sam Lunsford and me and some more of
us. We see that it ain't right to fight the Government and that whisky
is no good anyhow, so whenever we find out where there is a still, we
tell the revenue agents about it. Well, we git warnin's that we better
not do it no more, but them fellers can't skeer us so we go right ahead.
"Then one night, Tom Reynolds starts home from Wheeler late in the
evenin' but he don't never get there. Next mornin' we find his wagon
standin' off to the side of the road and Tom is down in front of the
seat dead with a load of buckshot in his head.
"Sam Lunsford has still got the idea, though, that the boys ought not to
make moonshine so he goes right ahead reportin' every still he finds. So
things goes on for two months. Then, one night, Sam was up late with one
of his babies that had the colic. He was settin' before the fire a
rockin' the baby when, bang! somebody shoots him through the winder.
"Well, that shot didn't quite get Sam. Did you ever try to shoot the
head off of a chicken as it walked across the yard? Its head moves for'd
and back and it is mighty hard to hit it. That's the way with Sam
rockin' the baby, I reckon. Anyway, the buckshot just got Sam in the
back part of his head and didn't kill him. Next day his old woman picked
the buckshot out with a pocket knife because the doctor was afraid to
go. Now Sam is as well as he ever was and he ain't changed his mind
about the stills. Him and me reported two of them last week."
This story was about in accordance with the information Gard received
from Washington. The revenue agents were too well known to work
effectually in the Cumberlands any more, so the Department of Justice
had taken over the case. The murderers and those who attempted murder
should be apprehended.
As the wagon wound along the country road Todd called the special
agent's attention to the report of a rifle from a hillside to the right.
Soon another gun was discharged further ahead and a third still further
on. This, the liveryman said, was a system of signals that told of their
presence.
A little farther along the road wound into a hollow down which flowed a
brook. Out of the brush in this hollow stepped the form of a mountaineer
with a rifle across his arm. Todd drew up his team.
"What have you got there?" asked the man in the road.
"Summer boarder," said Todd.
"Where's he goin'?" was the query.
"To Tenney's," answered Todd.
The mountaineer walked around to the back of the wagon where Gard's
little wicker grip was carried. Without a word he opened the grip and
carefully examined everything in it. Seemingly satisfied, he waved
permission for them to proceed.
"Young feller," he said to Gard in parting, "you are in durn bad
company. You can't never tell whether you will git back when you start
out with that skunk."
To which Todd grinned as he drove on.
"They ain't never made the bullet that'll kill me," he said.
It was three days later that Billy Gard, squirrel rifle on his shoulder,
walked into the clearing about the house of Sam Lunsford, the man who
had survived the charge of buckshot in the back of his head. The
Lunsford house consisted of one log room with a lean-to addition at the
back. There was a clearing of some thirty acres where grew a most
indifferent sprinkling of corn and cotton. There was a crib for the
corn, a ramshackle wagon, a flea-bitten gray horse and some hogs running
wild in the woods. Such was the Lunsford estate, presided over by this
huge mountaineer and to which his eleven children were heir. Seldom did
an echo of the outside world reach this home in the woods. Not a member
of the family was able to read. Every Sunday Sam Lunsford drove the
flea-bitten gray or walked seven miles to a little mountain church where
was preached a gospel of hellfire and brimstone. He was hated by his
neighbors and constantly in the shadow of death. Yet he went
unswervingly on the way of his duty in accordance with his lights.
Gard already had the measure of his man. No sooner had he presented
himself than he put his business up to the mountaineer, "cold turkey,"
as the agents say when they lay all the cards on the table. Would
Lunsford help the government in getting the facts that would bring the
murderers of Tom Reynolds and the men who shot him to justice? Lunsford
would do all he could.
"Whom do you suspect?" the agent asked.
"There are so many of them agin me," said Lunsford, "that it is hard to
tell which ones done it."
"Will you show me just how you were sitting when you were shot?"
The mountaineer placed the rocking chair in front of the fire directly
between a hole in the window and a spot in the opposite wall where the
buckshot had lodged themselves, peppering up a surface two feet square.
Thus was it easy to trace the flight of the shot through the room. The
special agent examined both window pane and wall.
"Could you tell where the man stood when he fired?" he asked.
"Yes," said Lunsford. "I looked for tracks next day. Let me show you."
He led the way into the yard and there pointed out a stout peg which had
been driven into the ground not a dozen feet from the window.
"The tracks came up to there and stopped," he said.
"Did you measure the tracks?" asked the special agent.
The mountaineer had done so and had cut a stick just the length of the
track. This stick had been carefully preserved.
"Did you find any of the gun wadding?" asked the agent.
Even this precaution was taken by Lunsford. These men of the mountains
mostly load their own shells and the wads in this case had been made by
cutting pieces out of a pasteboard box. So there were a number of clues
at hand.
Special Agent Billy Gard stood on the spot from which the shot had been
fired. From this point to that at which the buckshot had entered the
wall of the cabin was not more than thirty feet.
"An ordinary shotgun at thirty feet," he reflected, remembering his
squirrel hunting days, "shoots almost like a rifle. The shot at that
distance are all in a bunch not bigger than your fist. Yet the shot in
the cabin wall were scattered. The man with the gun must have been
further away."
Gard stated this view of the matter to the mountaineer, but that
individual showed how it would have been impossible for the shot to have
been fired from a greater distance because there was a depression that
would have placed the man with the gun too low down to see in at the
window. The shot could have been fired from but the one spot. The window
pane through which the shot had passed was about half way between the
peg and the wall where the charge had lodged. The hole in the window was
not more than half as large as the wall surface peppered by the shot.
This scatter of shot at such short range was significant.
"The shot must have been fired from a sawed-off shotgun," said the
special agent. "Only a short-barreled gun would have scattered so much
at this short range."
He meditated a moment and then asked:
"Who is there around here who has a sawed-off shotgun?"
"Ty Jones has got one," said Sam.
"Is he friendly to you?" asked Gard.
"No," was the reply. "The revenue agents chopped up his still after I
reported it."
"Did he ever threaten you?"
"He said onst at the crossroads that he knew a bear with a sore head
that would soon be feelin' almighty comf'table 'cause it was goin' to
lose that head."
Here was a probable case of Ty Jones being the man guilty of the attempt
on the life of Lunsford. There was a possibility, as Gard saw it, of
getting this suspicion confirmed. Despite the animosity that existed
between the heads of the families, the Jones youngsters and the Lunsford
youngsters were playmates; so does the sociability of youth break down
the bars set up by maturity. Lunsford had a boy of ten who was wise with
the cunning of the woods and trustworthy in lending a hand in the feuds
to which he was born. This boy, in playing about the Jones household,
was instructed to pick up every piece of pasteboard box he could find
and bring those pieces home. Likewise was he to measure the shoes of the
Jones household, when an opportunity offered, and tie knots in a string
to indicate their length.
It was a week before this task had been completed by the boy, but the
results indicated that the foot of a certain pair of shoes in the Jones
home was like unto that of the man of the sawed-off shotgun. Scraps of
cut-up shoe boxes had been found, white on one side and brown on the
other, and from these had evidently been made wads for reloading shells.
Thus far was Special Agent Gard able to carry his case toward a
solution. There were twenty men in the neighborhood who might have been
implicated with Jones, if he were guilty, in this attempt and in the
killing of Tom Reynolds. There were twenty and more makers of moonshine
who had been reported or stood in danger. It was hard to determine which
of the twenty were actually guilty. The suspicions against Jones were
not evidence. After a month on the case Gard decided that a complete
solution of the mystery was possible only through working in with the
moonshiners themselves and gaining their confidence.
So the summer boarder left the Tenney farm, stating that his health was
greatly improved but that he would come back two months later for
another stay.
A week after this there was nailed up at every post office and court
house within a hundred miles of Wheeler a notice of reward for an
escaped convict. A short, stout, curly-headed young outlaw had broken
jail in South Carolina and when last heard of was bearing in this
direction. Fifty dollars reward would be paid for his capture. His
picture appeared with the notice.
After still another week the Jones children were playing in the woods
back of their house when a strange man called them from a distance. The
youngsters approached cautiously. The man was no less cautious. He was a
short curly-headed young fellow with a stubby beard, with his clothing
in shreds and very dirty. He looked as though he had slept in the woods
for a month. There were stripes across an under garment that showed
through his open shirt.
"Do you suppose," said the man of rags, "that your maw could stake a
hungry man to six or seven dollars' worth of bread and bacon and wait
for remuneration until the executors of his estate act?"
"Yuh don't mean yuh want somethin' to eat, do yuh?" said young Lem
Jones.
"Son," said the curly-headed one, "your instincts are clairvoyant. You
have demonstrated a hypothesis, confirmed a rumor, hit upon a great
truth, sleuthed a primal fact to its lair. The plain truth is that I
haven't had anything to eat in so long that I have forgotten my last
meal. I am the hungriest man in the world. I could eat tacks with a
spoon."
"Come on," said Lem, a bit dizzy with the unusual words, but anxious to
please.
He led the way to the house where Mrs. Jones met the hungry man at the
door.
"Madam," said the hungry one most courteously, "I am needing a little
something to eat. I have been lost in the woods and without food."
"What are they after you for, young feller?" inquired Mrs. Jones
incisively, she who had spent a life in those mountains where the
sympathy was all with the man whose hand was turned against authority
and where many fugitives from the law had found refuge.
"Have you found me out so soon?" grinned the fugitive. "Well, if I must
tell I will say that I just knocked a hole in a jail down South Carolina
way, cracked the heads of a couple of armed guards together, robbed the
city marshal of his horse, outran the sheriff's posse, swam the Elb
river where ford there was none, and lived on a diet of blackberries for
seven days. Back of that there was the little matter of cracking a safe.
Other than that I assure you my conduct has been of the best."
So engaging was the manner of this young man of the rags from the great
world beyond the mountains that Mrs. Jones immediately liked him. He was
a perfect cataract of words and talked incessantly. She was not able to
understand half he said but was pleased with all of it. He ran on glibly
but always stopped short of being smart in the sense that would call
forth dislike. All the time he was eating corn bread and bacon with the
relish of one who has long omitted the formality of dining.
Such was the introduction of Special Agent A. Spaulding Dowling into
the Cumberlands, he who played the cadet in white slave cases, the wild
young man about town in the bucket shop investigations, and made love to
a bank cashier's daughter to learn where the loot was hidden. For all
these situations Dowling had a stream of talk that never failed to amuse
and disarm. Billy Gard had asked the department for his help on the
moonshiners' case and Dowling had fallen into the plan with all the
enthusiasm of adventurous youth.
The features of the jail breaker for whom the reward was offered were
those of Dowling. So had preparation been made for his coming. Gard had
laid his plans with an understanding of the habits of the mountaineer to
hide the fugitive. He had figured that such a fugitive might get into
the confidence of those iron men of few words and filch from them their
secrets. With the right culprits behind the bars the backbone of this
defiance of the law might be broken.
Dowling's stream of talk won the friendship of Ty Jones and his sons as
it had won his wife. The fugitive was tucked away in the hills and fed
by the mountaineers. He came to know the intimates of the Jones family
and his stream of talk entertained them for days and weeks. He
hibernated with others of his kind for he found the hills full of men in
hiding. He became a visitor at many a cabin and eventually struck the
rock that responded to his confidence.
A young mountaineer named Ed Hill maintained an active still high up in
the mountains--a virgin still that had never known the desecration of a
raid. Hill was high spirited and companionable, unlike most of his
neighbors. His was the soul of a poet, a lover of the wilds, a patriot
of the mountains. The flame of adventure, the love of danger, the belief
in the individual rights of the mountaineer, made him a moving spirit
among the men who battled the government.
Ed Hill told the fugitive the whole story of the killing of Tom Reynolds
and the shooting of Sam Lunsford. He told of the determination to rid
the mountains of Todd, the livery stable man, and to preserve for the
men of the Cumberlands the right to do as they chose in their own
retreats.
It seemed that of all the men of the mountains who made moonshine
whisky, there were but four who were willing to go the limit of
spilling the blood of their fellows in resisting the law. Hill was one
of these and saw his acts as those of the man who fights for his
country. Ty Jones, contrary to the suspicions of Sam Lunsford, always
advised against violence. But Jones had a boy of eighteen, a
heavy-faced, dull-witted lad, who was possessed of the desire to kill,
to be known among his fellows as a bad man. This younger Jones it was
who had aimed his father's sawed-off shotgun at Sam Lunsford as that
hulking figure of a man swayed back and forth as he rocked the baby that
suffered from colic. The patriot Hill, Will Jones the born murderer, a
father and son by the name of Hinton, had been the murderers of Tom
Reynolds. There were no others who would go so far as to kill to avenge
their fancied grievances.
The summer was dragging to its close as the conversational special agent
got his information together. The yellow was stealing into the trees of
the hillsides when Billy Gard, he whose health had been broken behind
the ribbon counter, came back to Tenney's for another few weeks in the
open. He wandered into the woods and met the fugitive from the South
Carolina jail. The jail bird and the ribbon counter clerk talked long
together and when they parted the plans were laid for the nipping off of
the men who would murder for their stills.
It was a week later and the quiet of after-midnight rested upon the
little mountain town of Wheeler. In such towns there are no all-night
industries, no street cars to drone through deserted thoroughfares, not
even an arc light to sputter at street crossings. There is but the
occasional stamping of a horse in its stall or the baying of a watch dog
in answer to the howl of a wolf on the hillside. But murder was planned
to take place that night in Wheeler and A. Spaulding Dowling knew all
about it.
As the town slept four stealthy figures crept down the trail that cuts
across the point of the Hunchback. Soft-footedly, rifles in hand, they
passed down a side street beneath the dense shade of giant sycamores. It
was but three blocks from the woods to Main street. Reaching this artery
of the town, two of the men crouched in the shadow while two others
crossed the street and went a block further, turning to the left. Each
group then shifted itself a hundred feet to the left and paused again.
So stationed the four men found themselves in front and back of Todd's
livery stable. The building itself sat back a little from the street. On
the ground floor were the stalls for the horses and the sheds where the
wagons were stored. Overhead were bins of corn and hay and a living room
where Todd slept that he might always be near his teams. About the whole
was a roomy barnyard enclosed by a high board fence. The gates to the
outer enclosure were locked, but once past this wall a man would have
the run of the whole place.
The mountaineers, two in front and two in the rear of the building,
swung themselves to the top of the fence and leaped to the ground
inside. Rifles at hip they started to close in on the building. Each
party entered at opposite ends of the corridor down the middle through
which a wagon might drive. Nothing interfered with their progress and no
sound was heard except a sleeping horse occasionally changing feet on
the board floor of his stall. Stealthily the four figures gathered in a
cluster and turned up the steep stairway that led to the sleeping room
of Todd. With every rifle ready for action they pushed open the door.
The moon coming in at a window disclosed what seemed to be a sleeping
form in the bed. Deliberately the four rifles came to bear upon it.
There was a pause and then from the leader came the order:
"Fire!"
Every finger pressed the trigger of its rifle. Every hammer came down on
its cap. But no report followed. Not a gun had been discharged.
"Come on out in the open, you sneakin' cowards," came a clamorous voice
from the barnyard that was recognized as being that of Todd. "Come out
in the lot and I'll larrup you all."
The men in the room looked puzzled, one at the other, and then at the
form on the bed. They approached the latter and found it to be but a
dummy to represent Todd. They had been trapped. They would fight their
way out.
The mountaineers charged down the stairway. As they came into the
moonlight at the opening of the barn they faced the tall form of a man
they knew well, the United States marshal of the district. With no gun
in his hands the marshal raised his hands on high.
"Listen, men," he commanded. "A parley. You are trapped. There are
armed men at every corner of this building and every man who runs out of
it will be shot dead. Your powder has been wet and none of you can fire
a shot. You can't fight armed men. There is but one thing for you to do
and that is to surrender."
In the parley that followed the marshal asked each man to try his gun to
see if it could be fired. None would respond. The mountaineers found
themselves caught in the very act of attempting to kill Todd, whom they
had often threatened. They had been duped and trapped.
So had these young detectives of the new school worked out a most
difficult case and one which later proved, in the courts, to be
effective, for every man arrested is now serving a long term in prison
and the backbone of the defiance of law in this region is broken.
"Mr. Summer Boarder," said the curly-haired Dowling, "it is back to the
ribbon counter for you. Your little vacation is over. But I will say
that you have shown remarkable intelligence in this matter. You called
me in to help you. Little drops of water put in just the right place
saved all your lives. These mountaineers would have eaten you up if I
hadn't fixed their ammunition. Please thank me--"
"Easy, Windy One, easy," interjected Gard. "Kiss the hand of the man who
lent you the brains to do it with."
II
THE BANK WRECKER
Billy Gard was not thinking of business at all. As a healthy,
ultranormal young man, he was drowsing over his breakfast as one has a
way of doing when at peace with the world and when unaroused by any call
of the present. He had reached the rolls and coffee stage of his meal in
a spirit of detachment that took no account of the somewhat garish
flashiness of the hotel dining-room in this typical hostelry of a city
that had become noted as a maker of industrial millionaires. Then as his
glance idly trailed among the other breakfasters, it automatically
picked up an incident that flashed a light into his dormant brain and
brought it to full consciousness.
A spoon had started from a grape fruit to the mouth of the tall,
curly-haired man two tables away. Half way on its journey the hand which
held it had twitched violently and spilled most of the contents. The
brown eyes of the man stole out somewhat furtively to learn if anybody
had noticed his nervousness.
Special Agent Billy Gard now gazed at the ceiling, but his mind was
busy. It was running over the facts that it contained with relation to
Bayard Alexander, who was this morning not himself and apprehensive lest
the fact be noticed. For Alexander was of the class of men of whom it
was his business to know. He was cashier of the Second National bank and
Uncle Sam keeps a pretty close watch on such institutions when they
happen to be located in communities of feverish activity.
So the special agent recalled that the tall man with the damp curls was
a moving spirit in the city, an important instrument in its development,
a man of many philanthropies, personal friend of a United States
Senator, cashier and active head of one of the most powerful financial
institutions in the community. He was a man of very great energy, but
one who led a normal, wholesome life and who, at the age of forty-five,
seemed just coming into his stride. The bank examiner, Gard recalled,
had steadily given the Second National a clean bill of health.
Why, then, should Alexander be nervous and, granting him that
privilege, why should he fear its being noticed?
All of which was the seemingly illogical reason why Gard went to
Wheeling that very night and was not seen about the metropolis for a
week thereafter.
"I am a poor man," he told Allen, the stout bank examiner, when they met
in the West Virginia town. "Poor but honest and not trying to borrow
money. I am on my way to the city of opportunity looking for a job."
"You have come away that you might go back, as I understand it," said
Allen. "Couldn't you change your peacock raiment for a hand-me-down
without coming to Wheeling?"
"Yes, but I couldn't see you, Cherub," said Gard, "and you are to make
all things possible for me. You are to convert me from a dweller in
gilded palaces to a bank bookkeeper out of work, but with credentials.
"There is in Wheeling a bank cashier of your acquaintance," explained
the special agent, "who used to work beside a bookkeeper whose
friendship I want to cultivate. You introduce me to the cashier, he
finds out what a really good fellow I am, we become friends. He gives
me a letter of introduction to the man I want to meet. I return to the
city and thrust myself properly into the affairs of one Sloan,
bookkeeper for the Second National. The next time the corpulent examiner
comes around he gets the surprise of his life. Do you follow me?"
Billy Gard had reached the conclusion that, if there was anything wrong
with Bayard Alexander's bank the examiner was being deceived and that,
therefore, there must be a juggling of accounts. Bookkeeper Charley
Sloan of the individual ledgers occupied the post most likely to be used
for deception, and so the special agent was taking a lot of trouble to
make the right opportunity for getting friendly with Charley. That mild
little man was therefore favorably impressed when he was handed a letter
from his former associate who had gone to Wheeling and become a cashier.
The two visited so agreeably together that a friendship developed and
Gard came to live at the bookkeeper's boarding house. The two
accountants grew to spend many evenings together and naturally talked
shop.
"I had a friend," said Gard one evening, "who worked in a bank in New
Orleans. Next to him was a bookkeeper who went wrong. He was induced to
do this by a depositor who had a scheme for making them both rich. All
the depositor needed was a little money. So he proposed that he draw
checks against the bank and that the bookkeeper charge them temporarily
to other accounts. The depositor would cash the checks at other banks
and, when they came in, the teller would merely turn them over to the
bookkeeper, probably asking if there was money to meet them. In this way
a depositor who never had a thousand dollars in the bank eventually
checked out $50,000."
"There was a teller," Sloan volunteered, "who worked in a bank here who
entered the deposits in the books of the people making them and put the
money in his pocket. There was no record of it except in the pass books.
He got nearly all the money that came in for two months before he was
found out."
"There are a lot of ways in which a bookkeeper may hide the facts with
relation to a bank," continued the special agent. "It is pretty safe to
charge anything to the inactive account of an estate or an endowed
institution. These are not often looked into. The accounts balance for
the examiner. I'll bet there isn't one bank in a dozen that doesn't fool
the examiner."
"It's the easiest thing in the world," volunteered Sloan, "to take the
necessary number of leaves out of the loose-leaf ledger to
counterbalance it if the cash is short, and hide the leaves until the
examiner is gone."
"Did you ever know that to be done?" abruptly asked the special agent.
The bookkeeper colored to his temples and was noticeably confused at the
question. Then he said he had heard of its being done. The sleuth would
have sworn he had led the bookkeeper into a confession.
Nothing was more natural than that these two bank bookkeepers should
recur occasionally to the possibility of so arranging accounts that were
in questionable condition that they would be passed by the examiner.
Gard would lead to this in such a way that the bookkeeper would seem to
have begun these discussions. Then he would talk freely. He would tell
so many stories that the timid Sloan would want to relate a few in
furnishing his part of the entertainment. But Gard knew that the
bookkeeper was a man without imagination and that he could relate only
what had happened in his experience. So he was all ears when Sloan one
night gave his opinions on the subject of kiting.
"Of course," he said, "all banks have depositors who kite their checks
and thereby get hold of money which they may use for a week before they
have to make good. A depositor may turn in a check for a thousand
dollars, drawn on a New York bank where he has no money. At the same
time he sends the New York bank a check for the same amount, drawn on
you. This causes the New York bank to honor the check drawn against it.
The check drawn on you has to find its way through the clearing house
and it will be a week before it gets back. In the meantime the depositor
has had the use of a thousand dollars.
"But when it comes to real kiting," continued the bookkeeper, "it is the
banks themselves that do it. If a bank has a sudden call for $100,000
and hasn't the money, all it has to do is to send a messenger with a
check to a friendly bank around the corner. The messenger gets the whole
amount in cash. It appears as an asset of the bank. It will be two or
three days before the check will come back through the clearing house
and appear as a liability, or the friendly bank may hold it up even
longer. The banks may be swapping this sort of favors. The bank examiner
does not know of the outstanding check. He is out of town before it
appears."
Special Agent Billy Gard was again practically certain that he had here
been told a chapter out of the experience of the Second National. He
began to see his way clear to a denouement.
That same night events were transpiring of which he was to know a week
later but which as yet were held in confidence among the directors of
the Second National. They took place at a meeting of these same
directors called by a minority which was dissatisfied with certain
features of its management. Director Hinton, a sprightly and
quick-tempered little man, was the leader of the revolt. Senator
Bothdoldt was present as a supporter of the management of the bank as
represented by the suave, forceful cashier, Bayard Alexander, whose hand
sometimes shook at breakfast.
"I want to protest," Hinton began by launching directly into the heart
of the matter in hand, "against this new loan to the McGrath
Construction Company. It has been three years now that we have been
pouring out our money to these people. We have $400,000 of their paper
and I want to be shown that we can realize on it. It is time to call a
halt."
"And there are the notes of the Oldman Mercantile Company," somewhat
heatedly argued a second disaffected director. "I have been reliably
informed within the last two days that they are in danger of going to
the wall."
"And we, as directors, are responsible for the bank," said Mr. Isaacs,
who was conservative.
"I for one," said Mr. Hinton, "have reached the point where I insist on
a new management. I would like to know the sentiment of the board upon
this question."
But the cashier asked for a word of explanation. Broad-shouldered and
upstanding he rose among these heavy, sleek, bald-headed business men.
His high and intellectual brow and clear-cut features gave him a
distinction that always made an impression. But the firm mouth and the
damp curls were those of a man of physical force and determination. His
voice was alluring and convincing as he made his plea and there was now
no tremble of the hand.
He stated and called upon Senator Bothdoldt to witness that the McGrath
Construction Company had just received from the Government contracts for
the building of numerous locks in the Ohio River. He agreed with the
spirit of conservatism of the board and shared it. He had heard the
rumors with relation to the Oldman Mercantile Company and had sifted
them to their depths and had found them without basis in fact. However,
he had just called in a block of their notes. He painted a rosy picture
of the condition of the bank and the prospects of the future. He
reminded the directors that they had given him a free hand in the past
and pointed to the institution as a monument to his accomplishment. At
the termination of which speech, so convincing and so dominant was the
personality of the man, Director Hinton withdrew his protest and the
institution was left under the former guidance.
It was three days later that things began to happen. Gard had called
upon Bank Examiner Allen to come to his assistance. The two of them had
conferred the night before and settled upon a plan of campaign for
testing the stability of the affairs of the bank.
It was in accordance with this plan that the rotund and genial Allen
breakfasted in that dining-room where the special agent's suspicions had
first been aroused. Bayard Alexander was at his usual table and Allen
allowed the banker to see him although he appeared not to be aware of
it. It was also in accordance with the cards played by the men of the
Government service that Special Agent Gard, still a bit seedy in his
hand-me-down suit, was loafing on the sidewalk opposite the Second
National bank when the cashier came to work. It was a part of his plan
that he should see as much as possible of what went on in the
institution when the word was passed that the examiner was in town.
Gard was not surprised, therefore, when a messenger emerged from the
bank and hurried off down the street. He believed that the story of the
bookkeeper of the kiting bank was to be enacted before his eyes. He
followed the messenger to another bank two blocks away and there saw
him present a check. Gard crowded in on the pretense of getting a bill
changed and saw blocks of bills of large denominations being taken from
the vault. The messenger hurried back to the bank with them. It was
evident that that institution was making ready for the coming of the
examiner. It was as evident that its affairs were not as they should be
or this preparation would not be necessary.
It was a part of the program that when Sloan, the bookkeeper, came out
of the bank for lunch, Gard should be waiting for him. It was not
unusual that they thus went to their noonday meal together.
"Will you do me a favor?" asked Sloan while they were at lunch. "Take
care of this package for me. It is a large photograph, rolled, that I
have just received from home. Please be careful of it."
The special agent assumed charge of the package which looked not unlike
a roll of music. Later he found his suspicions justified for in the roll
were a number of leaves from the bank's individual ledger. Gard was
appalled at the amount of money that they represented. He carefully
photographed them and returned them that night to the bookkeeper.
No pretext was omitted for getting a look into what was transpiring in
the Second National bank on this particular day. Examiner Allen had
called in the afternoon and had carefully looked over the balances. All
appeared to be in order and no discrepancies were revealed. The bank
seemed particularly strong from the standpoint of cash on hand.
It was just at closing time that two things happened. Gard presented
himself at the Second National and asked to see the cashier. He had
become known there as an associate of Sloan's. He was looking for a
position as bookkeeper and it was for this he came. He waited.
It often happens that an individual may wander unannounced into quarters
the privacy of which are ordinarily closely guarded. Gard found the door
open that led into the corridor off of which were to be found the
offices of the officials of the bank. He walked in and wandered down the
row until he found that of the cashier. This he entered and found
entirely empty. It was a spacious room with a big, flat-topped desk.
Across one corner of this was thrown a coat, and a hat rested upon it.
An open traveling bag stood on the table.
The special agent, by leaning on the table in the attitude of waiting,
could look into the bag. There he saw a package of what he recognized as
a well-known issue of industrial bonds which the examiner had listed as
one of the chief assets of the bank. It should have been in the bank's
vaults, instead of which it was in the cashier's traveling bag. This was
a discovery well worth consideration.
Cashier Alexander entered the room hurriedly from another part of the
bank. He was visibly startled to find some one present and demanded
bruskly what the intruder was doing there.
"I am a bookkeeper, sir," said the special agent very humbly. "Sloan is
a friend of mine and thought you might employ me."
"I can't talk to you to-night. Come around next week."
"But may I not come to-morrow?" said Gard.
"I will be out of town for three days," Alexander said finally. "I
can't talk to you until after that."
The special agent took his dismissal. He had learned that the bank
cashier was going away and that he was taking a package of the bank's
most valuable securities with him. He was going some distance for the
trip was to last three days. His destination was probably New York.
Meantime the genial examiner had rolled in upon the bank to which the
Second National had sent its messenger, at about closing time. He had
asked to see the transactions of the day. Among these was found the
record of the check that had been cashed early in the morning. It was
the personal check of Bayard Alexander and was for $125,000.
The two representatives of the Federal Government conferred hurriedly.
"And the securities," questioned Gard. "Were they intact when you were
at the bank this morning?"
"Everything was in order," replied Allen.
"The package of the industrials. What was its value?"
"About $500,000," replied the examiner.
"Alexander is leaving to-night with these securities. He may be taking
the $125,000 in cash with him. The time has come for his arrest.
Particularly must we guard those assets and prevent any unnecessary
demands upon the bank."
"He may be making a run for Canada," said Allen.
"The securities will take him to New York that he may realize upon
them," was Gard's deduction. "I am for the station and will follow him
if he takes any train. You try for his trail about town and report to me
there."
But after all it was a piece of luck that saved the day for Gard. He was
racing for the station in a taxicab when his machine was halted at a
crossing. Another taxicab pulled up beside his, waited a minute, two
minutes. He could see the driver from where that individual sat not six
feet away and just opposite his window. Presently this chauffeur bent
down to get instructions from his fare. The man in the taxicab was
talking quietly, but so near was he to the special agent that he could
be easily overheard.
"Get out of this jam," he was saying. "Cut across town to the North
side station. We have already missed the 6:15. If you head it off at the
North side it is worth a twenty-dollar bill to you."
The voice was smooth and unruffled. Yet it was dominant. It set the
driver immediately upon edge and into motion. And there was in it a
familiar note that puzzled the detective for a moment, then brought back
the interview of the afternoon. Yes, it was Bayard Alexander talking.