Page:Memoirs of the United States Secret Service.djvu/154

Rh out of the penitentiary; while he was a graceless traitor as well, towards those who harbored or upheld him for a season, in his well disguised course of criminal infamy.

There is some ground for the truth of the assertion that the man who is constantly treading upon the margin of the precipice of crime, or just touching the edge of the crater, as it were, may find himself the subject of temptation. But he who is placed in the position of an official Detective or legal informer against the unrighteous acts of counterfeiters, cracksmen, thieves, and their confederates, and who forgets his duty to society in this position so flagrantly as to "go over to the enemy," or to join such criminals, in furtherance of their iniquities, may truthfully be set down as the vilest of the vile—par excellence.

Felker was not unpretentious in his claims to being a good Detective, at Chicago, some seven years since. He was a smooth, polished conversationist, and a genial man; but he became subsequently, directly or indirectly, involved in such a maze of crime, as to have drawn down upon him the heavy hand of the law, with emphatic import.

It is charged that he loved his own pecuniary interests more ardently than he ever did the interests of the Government. He stood ready to remove or to destroy the evidences of a prisoner's guilt, if the criminal or his friends possessed the means to pay roundly for this service. He was more than suspected of having been a personal friend and secret associate of the Reno gang, who, it will be remembered so long flourished amidst their evil deeds in the State of Illinois.

The case of the Reno boys must be familiar to every one. They were charged with having robbed the Adams Express Company, in 1866 or '67, of a heavy sum. When they were discovered and escaped into Canada, and the extradition