Walker of the Secret Service/Chapter 3

I think the third holdup undertaken by these men was the most remarkable that ever occurred in all the history of train robberies.

I do not mean that the result of it was so remarkable or that it was attended by peculiar adventures. But the cool nerve exhibited by Mooney—his deliberate assumption of enormous risk, and his plan to draw the attention of the authorities from his confederate—marks the affair as without equal. The plan, too, to get away with what was taken in the robbery was wholly original. In all record of criminal methods I have never known this plan to be adopted by anybody else.

I think it was worked out by Mooney to meet a situation which he knew now existed.

The two train robberies which we had undertaken had aroused the country. The authorities could be expected to make every effort to run down and capture the highwayman who should undertake a repetition of these affairs. Mooney knew this and he worked out a plan to meet it.

The circus was loaded and moving when I first learned of this new adventure.

I was sitting in the box car with the horses. We had pulled up on a siding near some little town. The door was open and Mooney and White came in. White was very carefully dressed. He wore a new overcoat and derby hat and he carried a leather suit case. He looked precisely like one of the thousand traveling men who go about over the country. When the two men got into the car, I did not know who was with White, Mooney was so changed.

I looked at him with astonishment. I could not believe that the person before me was the man with whom I had been so closely associated. He had a heavy drooping mustache, long black hair and deep-lined face. His eyes seemed lengthened and narrowed, and he appeared taller and more erect.

Now, the man naturally in life was stooped, and with a weary, nervous appearance, as though every motion were an effort. This attitude, as I have come to know, was the languor of a drug and his common appearance was the result of the use of it.

But to-day, by some powerful effort, or perhaps by virtue of an excessive injection of the drug itself, his whole manner had changed. Of course the appearance of the man was merely the result of the make-up, amazingly skillful, which he had undertaken for the thing he had in hand.

He explained to me that they had finally located the treasure train and that they were going to hold it up to-night. He said that we would probably be noticed and that it was necessary to change our appearance so descriptions of us, which would be published abroad over the country, would be wholly misleading.

I had been sleeping on some blankets in the horse car. There was only a box for a chair. He directed me to sit down on the box; fastened a horse blanket under my coat, between the shoulders, to make a hump; and then he began to transform me into somebody else. The man worked very carefully on my face and hair for perhaps an hour, in the horse car. It was nearly dark. The train had gone on and the door was closed. Mooney worked by the light of a lantern which I carried in the horse car. Finally, when he had finished, he held up a little hand mirror so that I might see the result of his work.

I was astonished at the face I saw.

In that hour, under Mooney’s skillful manipulation, I had become middle aged. My hair was streaked with gray; my face was lined. The thing was like a piece of sorcery. There was a delicate network of wrinkles about the eyes; there was even the sagging of age beginning to appear in the outline of jaw and throat.

The man’s skill was uncanny.

He had transformed himself into a straight, vigorous motion-picture desperado of middle life, turning the evidences of age backward in his own case, while he carried them forward in mine. No one could have known us for the same men; the transformation was too complete. We were, in fact, not the same men; there could be no possibility of those who would recognize us now ever being able to identify us when these disguises were removed.

Mooney had with him a second of these leather suit cases, precisely in every detail like the large one which White carried. He told me nothing except that I was to go with him.

It was late of a Sunday evening. The circus train was making a long run. About dark, as the train was going slowly, White got out. I afterward learned that it was his plan to take a street car from this point to a station where we were to board a through express.

About nine o’clock the train pulled into a town.

When it began to slow up, Mooney and I got out and closed the door. We followed a road into town. Turning into the main street, we walked leisurely over to the railroad station. Mooney, walking with a brisk, active step, carried the leather suit case, and I trudged beside him.

The town was evidently not very large and the through express made only a short stop.

There was a line of people waiting to get on the train, standing outside the station on the wooden platform. We went down through this crowd to one end of it, for it was Mooney’s intention to take the day coach nearest to the express car. Here I saw White waiting with his suit case, as though he were an ordinary traveler.

When the train pulled in we got on with the other passengers.

We sat down about midway of the coach, but I noticed that White, who was among the first to get on the train, went forward to the very end of the coach and sat down on the last seat. At the next station Mooney and I got off; we walked to the head end of the train and when it started we climbed up the steps of this forward coach next to the express car, as though we were going into the car from the forward end of it. But we did not go in. We stopped on the steps while the train pulled out.

I suppose we remained there for perhaps twenty minutes, until the lights of the town disappeared and the train trailed out into the great open country.

Then Mooney proceeded to put his plan for the holdup into operation.

He went over to the door of the express car and knocked on it. One of the biggest men I have ever seen opened the door. Mooney’s weapon seemed to appear suddenly almost in the man’s face. He stepped back with a little cry, and we were instantly in the express car with the door closed and locked behind us. There were two other men in this car, and on top of the safe were a rifle and a short automatic shotgun. The men for whom these weapons were provided made no effort to avail themselves of them. They stood in the middle of the car with their hands up as far as they could reach, their eyes wide, their mouths gaping.

I think our appearance struck them with more terror than if we had been masked highwaymen. Mooney was so evidently the stage type of Western desperado; and I must have been, myself, a sinister figure—a strange figure, with the big leather suit case in one hand and an automatic pistol in the other. Mooney ordered the two men at the end of the car to lie down on their faces; this they did with ludicrous haste; one of them nearly fell in his effort to obey the order quickly. They went even further than Mooney directed; they lay flat with their arms around their faces as though to convince the outlaw that they would make no efforts to see what was going on.

Mooney ordered the big man to open the safe.

The man was evidently in terror, but he was a sensible person. He pointed out that he could not open it; that it had a time lock on it. He went ahead of Mooney to the safe, squatted down in the car and put his big finger on the lock.

“You can see,” he said, “I can’t open it.”

The man’s face was distended with anxiety.

What he said was the truth, but he was not certain that the highwayman, standing a few feet behind him covering him with a weapon, would believe what he said. He knew the stories of such holdups: how express messengers had been ordered to open safes and when they refused, or where unable to do so, they had been promptly shot.

I think the man expected to be shot, as he squatted there beside the safe, his big body loose, his face covered with sweat. Mooney saw instantly that the man was telling the truth. I do not know that he was, in fact, paying any attention to what the man said. He knew at a glance that the safe was fitted with a time lock.

He advanced toward the man, and the express messenger’s face seemed to puff out as though it were becoming suddenly swollen; I think he was now convinced that the highwayman was about to kill him. But instead, Mooney ordered him to lie down. He turned over on the floor precisely like one who collapses from fatigue.

Mooney took the leather suit case from my hand.

“Shoot any man that moves,” he said hoarsely.

Then he went to work at the safe. The big messenger was so close to the safe door that Mooney had literally to push his body out of the way with his foot. Mooney got some tools out of the dress-suit case, drilled the combination, and put in a charge of nitroglycerine.

He did it quickly, with incredible skill.

Then he ordered the express messenger to move up to the end of the car.

“Go ahead,” he said, “or you will be shot full of scrap iron.”

The big man got up on his hands and knees and without turning his head crawled to the end of the car and lay down.

Mooney took the horse blanket from under my coat, and whatever else he could find in the car, and heaped them against the door pf the safe. Then he fired the nitroglycerine. He had gauged the explosion to do exactly what he wished it to do. There was a dull sound and a jar, but far less noise than I expected. The blanket and coats that Mooney had heaped up against the safe were hardly thrown down, but the combination was broken open and the man was able to manipulate the tumblers.

In a very few minutes he succeeded in opening the safe.

There was another small steel door fastened with a lock. Mooney did not even take time to get the key for this door from the express messenger. He took a bunch of keys out of his own pocket, selected a flat one, and turned the lock. He did it instantly, as though a lock of this sort could be opened by a twist of the fingers.

There were a number of big brown envelopes sealed with red wax. These Mooney packed in the dress-suit case; then he got up and we went back to the door of the car through which we had entered. Mooney opened the door and motioned me to step through it out on the platform; then he spoke as though I still remained in the car.

“Keep these men covered,” he said, in the same harsh voice, “and if one of them moves shoot him. I am going through the passenger coaches.”

He stepped through the door and slammed it behind him. We were both now on the outside of the express car. But in the imagination of the men lying on the floor within it, one of the desperate highwaymen remained, covering them with his weapon.

Mooney went ahead of me to the passenger car. He had the leather dress-suit case in one hand and his automatic pistol in the other. I followed behind him. He opened the door, and, entering the car, he stood a moment looking at the amazed passengers. There was hardly a sound, but astonishment brought everybody in the car even those half asleep, up straining in their seats.

The highwayman of the storybooks was before them.

Mooney remained thus motionless for a moment until everybody in the car could get the picture in his mind, then he spoke quick and sharp.

“Turn,” he said, “—everybody—and face the other way.”

The passengers turned instantly; no man hesitated. The direction was obeyed as though it were an order of a drill sergeant. White, who sat at the end of the car, turned with the others.

Mooney stood in the aisle just beside this last seat in which White had been sitting. He now put down his suit case and reached up, pulled the emergency cord, and stopped the train. Then he picked up the suit case and stepped back through the door to where I stood on the platform.

Here a puzzling thing happened.

Mooney did not pick up the same suit case he put down; but he slid the case into the seat where White was sitting and took up the case White had beside him. They were precisely alike, and no one but myself saw the exchange made. The passengers were facing the other way.

When the train slowed up we jumped down. Mooney gave me the suit case to carry. There was nothing in it, as I afterward discovered, but a couple of bricks.

It was pitch dark. We both started straight off from the train. I was ahead of Mooney.

I suppose I was about a hundred feet from the track when I went down suddenly into a ditch; the dirt was soft and I was not hurt. I must have fallen at least six feet. The train was still standing; the people in the coaches had gotten out. We could hear them talking and we could, of course, see the lights of the train. Mooney must have seen me fall, for he slipped down into the ditch and spoke to me softly. There might be a guard of some sort on the train and it was advisable for us to keep in the ditch instead of climbing out on the farther side.

We moved along the ditch as quickly as we could, for, I suppose, a distance of some three hundred feet. Here we found a railroad tie which some one had put across for a foot bridge. Mooney reached up and caught the tie with his hands and climbed out; I followed his example, passing up the suit case for him to hold until I got out. We stood still for a moment, listening; presently we heard the train pull out.

Mooney then led the way back to the railroad track. He seemed to wish to get his bearings of the country. He seemed to know where he was, although as I have said the night was dark, and we started down the track in the direction from which the train had come. We followed the track for about a mile until we came to a deep rock cut. This cut seemed to be the indicatory point for which Mooney was looking, and he at once began to run.

I followed him.

The cut seemed endless, and in spite of our speed I could see the outlines rise higher and higher against the sky until the walls seemed perpendicular, as though the track was cut down through solid rock. The cut must have been over a mile long, for I was nearly worn out when we reached the end of it.

Then we turned off sharply to the right. The country seemed open and I followed Mooney, who walked swiftly across fields, until finally we got into a road. I had no idea where we were going, or the direction, except that it seemed to be at right angles to the railway and through a country that Mooney knew. Taking the rock cut for a point of departure, he was endeavoring to find this road which we finally came into.

When we reached the road Mooney took the suit case, opened it, threw away the bricks, carried it on for perhaps a mile, and tossed it into a fence corner. I now understood what the man was doing. He was making a deliberate trail for any one who should follow; this would enable White to escape easily with the suit case which contained what had been taken out of the express safe.

The posse which would presently come to the scene of the robbery with the inevitable blood hound would have no difficulty in following our trail. Any number of persons on the train could identify us and would remember that we carried the dress-suit case. The expressman would identify it as being the one he had seen in Mooney’s hand and into which we had packed the contents of the safe.

We continued to travel the road, running, as I afterward discovered, due east, and about day light we came to another railroad line. When we reached this track Mooney stopped.

He explained then what he had been about.

It was his intention that there should be a plain trail which the posse could follow across the country. The trail should end here, so it would be evident that the robbers had boarded some train passing on this track, perhaps a freight. The energies of the authorities would then be directed toward the search of this railroad. They would endeavor to find what trains passed in the night, and their destination, and the whole search would be turned in this direction.

He now turpentined our shoes very carefully, and our clothing.

It was beginning to be daylight, and I could see something of the lie of the country. We had come through a valley, but off to our right there was the loom of a mountain. We went down the track for perhaps half a mile; then we turned up into a wood and began the ascent of the mountain.

The sun was up and we finally stopped in a wooded thicket on a sort of knoll that overlooked the country. The valley we had crossed stretched away to the west. The mountain seemed also to lie in that direction. The railroad track extended at the foot of the mountain below us, and from the point where we were hidden in the thicket, on the little shoulder or knoll, I could see clearly the way over which we had come and the point where we had emerged on the track.

Mooney had some food: dried meat and hard biscuit. We ate our breakfast, and he went to sleep, curling up in the leaves of the thicket as though nothing extraordinary had happened, and he was peacefully in a bed.

I could not go to sleep.

The incidents of the adventure in which I had become involved ran vaguely through my mind.

I am now certain that the explanation these men gave of their failure to find anything of value in the two preceding holdups was false; but it was clear that they were disappointed. They were on the lookout for some large shipment of money which they expected to obtain. I do not know whether they had any definite in formation about such a probable shipment or whether they were merely trying chances for it.

The story of the Mexican government money was, of course, merely a pretense.

Looking at the thing now, it seems to me that I was not very much impressed with that feature of the affair. It was a series of adventures directed against my enemy, the railroad, some what as the fairy adventures of the storybooks were directed against a dragon.

Mooney had given me a hundred dollars, not as part of the loot—for they continued to insist that they had not found what they were looking for—but as an honorarium out of his own pocket.

This was a large sum of money to me.

I do not remember precisely to what use I put the money except in one shining instance. I bought a bracelet for the girl who rode the white horse in the circus. It was a gold chain fastened with a lock.

And it very nearly caused a tragedy.

The little dark-haired woman Maggie, who was with the girl always, like her shadow, noticed it immediately. I had given it to the girl when she went into the afternoon performances. When she came out Maggie seized her wrist, indicating the bracelet with some query. The girl pointed toward me where, at some distance, I stood by White near the horse tent. The little woman thought she meant White, and she rushed at him like a mad dog. From somewhere about her, as though out of the air, a knife flashed in her hand.

The thing happened in a moment.

White caught her by the shoulder and threw his body backward, but she swung under his arm and struck at him. Fortunately her reach was not quite long enough and the knife only slashed his coat. I caught the woman’s arm. But it was all the two of us could manage to hold her. She cursed and struggled like a harpy.

Mooney came sauntering up.

“It wasn’t White, Maggie,” he drawled; “it was the boy.”

The woman instantly ceased to struggle. We released her and she stood for a moment looking at me, as though in some deep reflection. Then she spoke.

“Why did you give it to her?”

I was embarrassed to reply. Finally I stammered it out.

“I don’t know. … I like her.”

She remained looking at me, her eyes narrowed, her hand extended across the lower part of her face. But she did not go any farther with her inquiry. Mooney continued in his relaxed drawl.

“What’s the notion, Maggie?” he said. “The girl’s not your child.”

She swung slowly toward him.

“Not your cursed notion!” she said, indicating me with a gesture. And then she walked away.

I thought the thing out and in my youthful fancy the girl became the fairy princess for which she each day made up. This woman was not her mother. She was some royal foundling, changed by the fairies or stolen at her birth. I treasured every word with her, every touch of her hand, every look she gave me.

I thought about it as I sat there hidden by the undergrowth.

Then, suddenly, something caught my eye.

Far out in the valley in the direction from which we had come I noticed a sort of blur; presently it became a group of dots moving about, as one has observed minute organisms under a microscope. The tiny things advanced until I presently saw that it was a crowd of men; then in the distance I heard the baying of the dogs.

They seemed to come slowly.

The sound of the dogs increased and in a little while I could make out individuals of the posse. A tall man moved in front holding two dogs on the leash. They came along our trail right down to the railroad. There the dogs stopped and I realized the efficacy of Mooney’s precaution against the bloodhound. When the dogs reached the place where we had turpentined our shoes, they stopped instantly and began to howl.

The man led them about in circles, across the track and beyond it, in every direction, but the dogs would not take up our trail. The turpentine was a complete safeguard against them; they would not follow it. The big man handled the dogs with skill; he moved out in an ever widening circle; he covered the ground for a hundred yards in every direction, from the point where our trail stopped, but it was no use.

The dogs would not take up a trail fouled with turpentine.

The posse then gathered in a sort of council, and I sat watching them through the thicket. They evidently came to the one obvious solution of the matter—that the train robbers whom they had followed to the track had, here, boarded some passing train; and they set out southward along the track to what I imagine was the closest railway station.

This was precisely the thing Mooney intended them to do.

He was so certain that they would do it that he slept peacefully while this posse was within a quarter of a mile of us, and the dogs baying along the edge of the mountain in which we were at that moment concealed. I felt a vast relief when the posse departed, and I lay back on the dry leaves with my hands linked under my head.

I must have fallen asleep, for when I awoke it was midday. Mooney had found a little stream and had removed all the evidences of his disguise. The wig he had buried under a stone and the make-up he had removed from his face.

He took me through the bushes to the little rivulet, a mere thread of water from some spring, and very carefully restored me to my normal appearance. He removed the make-up with some sort of grease and I washed my hair in the water which he had dammed up into a tiny pool.

We now bore no relation, in our outward appearance, to the men who had held up the train.

It was afternoon and we set out west through the edge of the mountain. The going was rough and dangerous. We found deep gullies and ravines that ran almost from the top of the mountain into the very valleys. Some of these walls were almost perpendicular. They looked to stand sheer for a hundred feet.

We had to follow these gullies for a great distance up the mountain before we could cross them. Then, we came to ledges of rock which it was impossible for us to scale; these we had to follow down the mountain.

I suggested to Mooney that it would be easier to take a road, but he replied that the news of the holdup would be generally over the country and that it would be dangerous for strangers to be found on any of the roads. He said the plan was to follow the mountain until we came to the river about twenty miles farther west, and then to go down the river to a town from which we could take a train.

As night came on we descended to the border of the mountain and followed it west. About daylight we reached the river. We traveled two or three miles over muddy ground and through weeds and grasses to our waists, following down the river, looking for some chance boat. Finally by a fallen tree we found a skiff. This boat had been anchored in low water and the river afterward had risen and covered it. It was now half full of mud.

We had to clean it out; there were no oars but Mooney got a piece of board from a fence and we shoved off the boat and started down the river. It was a heavenly sensation after the immense labor of that night’s travel through the mountain. Mooney was trying to locate the town at which he intended to stop and take a passenger train. He thought the town was nearer to the river than it actually was, but, as the river was low and the banks high, we failed to locate it until we had passed it for a mile.

And here we came very nearly into a tragedy.

It seemed that this river was the highway of bootleggers who were accustomed to bring liquor down into the state from a neighboring city. We did not know this. But we discovered, later, that every boat going down the river was searched. We were moving slowly between the high banks when we heard a motor boat and saw that we were being followed.

Mooney realized at once that it was of no use to endeavor to escape.

He told me to put my hand down into the water and drop the automatic pistol; he did the same, and before the boat was on us we were rid of any incriminating evidence. We did not know why we were being followed or why there was a motor boat on the river. It was barely possible that it was a party of the posse on the lookout for the men who had held up the train.

There was only one course open to us—to face them as though we were without concern.

Mooney stopped the skiff when the motor boat appeared and waited for it to come up. Some one—I think it was a constable—called to us when they approached.

“Hello, boys!” he said. “What have you got this morning?”

Mooney replied that he did not understand, and, without a further word, they pulled up where they could see into our boat. We did not know what they were about to do.

“We thought you might have a cargo of wet goods,” the constable said.

Mooney did not reply and the man added:

“You boys live down the river, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Mooney.

And with that the conversation ended and the motor boat went on.

We drifted down the river until we were out of sight of the motor boat. Then we returned along the road to the town which we had passed. Here we got our dinner at a restaurant, and calmly, like any other passengers, walked over to the station and a train.