Walker of the Secret Service/Chapter 6

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 highway man 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 re ported 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 any thing 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:

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 s?”

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.