OCR Text |
Show 'ths New Tork detective, when he man-g:d man-g:d to get his face straight , and the stitches out of his sld. proceeded to do. ;"I wouldn't care to be held up as criticising- or knocking the sleuthing staff of -another town," ha. said, 'but they sure must have a swell mob of spud-peelers for ' fly oop out St Loo way If. this on Is a fair specimen of -the cork-shod.-suspen-er-badge. flashers of the St. Louis suit. . "Here's the story, the way they -print it' in this paper: The St. Louis detective waa convoying frm San Francisco to St. Louis on the varnished cars, a class A second-story man who'd been corralled out in the slope town. Tile - 8U- Louis, eleuth became jeal - forty-wlnsky, so he did, as the train slid through Utah. So ho pulled his griddle forward to shade bis lamps, and sprawled .back in his seat alongside the veranda man for a' few leagues -ot slumber. It looked all right to the St. Loo fly-bull didn't the lag he was convoying; nave the bracelets, on? But the piazsa man was a gay character. ' He waited untU the gumshoeist with the St. Loo badge had saxophoned along to the fortissimo stage and got to dreaming of sure-enough money, and then he frisked the St. Louis detective for his key ring and its ornaments. "The handcuff key was attached to the key ring, which made it right handy for the lag. lie unlocked himself, and, with a neat sense -of humor, snapped the wristlets onto, the sleuth, who still slumbered slum-bered on, beiiig some tired, as the paper states severartimes. Not only that, but the balcony-climber cunningly chained the hlst-eureka Cap. Collier from St. Loo to a sfeam pipe and still the Crafty Sranston from the. St. Loo office dosed on. Then the piazza boy, observing how good It' looked, separated the Rip Van Winkle terror to evil-doers from his split-second split-second souper, his three-karat mazarine-hued mazarine-hued headlight, and his leather, containing contain-ing some four hundred and odd ace-high coonskins. "All of this came off in the smoking compartment of the chair car, of which the St. Loo sleuth and his captive were the only occupants. At Ogden the lag raised the '23 for me' sign, dropped off the train, and vanished in the brush. "Also at Ogilen. the chained sleuth, strangely enough, awoke. The conductor couldn't see the St. Loo detective's story. The conductor was certain that the hobbled hob-bled detective was really the prisoner, and so he turned him over to the Ogden constabulary. The St. Loo detertive finished fin-ished his sleep In the Ogden t-alahoose as a prisoner until the Ogden authorities got a wired description of him from the St. Louis police authorities, when he was turned loose The lag is still in the chaparral chap-arral hitting Just occasional places, maybe. may-be. "I'd sure hate to have to report hack to headquarters after having been treated in that scandalous manner by a prisoner." prison-er." went on the New Tork detective. "I'd be afraid the old man might feel like gazing at me reproachfully. "There Isn't anything more dead sure in these foxy days than that a man in charge of a prisoner, no matter how long the hike may be. has gokr to have a certificate of membership In the sleep-flagging sleep-flagging and bed-hating association. "The old days when, at the beginning of a run heme with a prisoner, you could ask him. 'BUI, are you going to be good or not?' and take his word for It if he nodded affirmatively, have passed. "Out in Colorado Springs a few years ngo I nailed one of the most scientific srratchers that ever kited big-money checks around the Atlantic seaboard. He consented to return to New York with me without extradition documents. I " I'm tired of this durking around." he i said to me, 'and I'm going to plead gull- ty, give the beak on the bench the antelope ante-lope gaza. and try to swing him for, say. a three-sptPker, or something about as light as that. And after I do the bit I'm sure golnf to quit scratching.' Pretty lilting lilt-ing line of Epworth league conversation, that, hey? Of course, I pretended to gulp it why not? " 'What's more." my scratrher went on. confidentially, "you'll he doing the real winsome thing If you don't hobble me on the run in to New York. The chill of the i wristlets gives me the rheiimatism in the forearms. It'll be all right. I'm going to be good. I'll stand watch-and-watch with you. You needn't worry." " 'Oh, what larks!' I said to that one, and I snapped the cuffs on him real quick. I kfiew that he was going to stand by for any old kind of a chance to lose me, for the south breeze of the brand he exuded wasn't the first of that kind I'd listened to. He Bulked on me then, of course, but that didn't prevent me from fastening one of the cuffs to my own wrist after we boarded the east- . bound train at Colorado Springs. It was ; a day coach, and I took the window side : and gave him the aisle seat the window had to be left partly open for airN for It was hot weather, and I wasn't taking any j chance of his making a dive out of It at a slow-up, even if I had made him my Siamese twin. "When we were a few hours out of Council Bluffs and in the middle of Iowa i a woman wtfioee face I knew boarded the ! train at one of the small stations. She i was a New York penny-weight worker j and a spark-palmer of 'the first-class fur j whom the circulars had been out for ; over a vear. She had been a crook from i her girlhood, and she knew the whole push, male and female, in every branch j of crookdom. "I was pretending to doze when she en- I tered the car. but from the quick ex- change of glances between her and my man as soon as she located him I saw through the slit of my eyes that she was there on business. She'd had a wire from the crook or one of his pals. "She plumped herself Into the vacant seat right In front of us we were in the last seat In the car and then, curious to see what she thought she was going to do, I starUd in to snoring real hard. The train was hardly more than a mile out of the little station where she got on before, without turning In her seat, she passed my scratcher. over tho top of her seat, a bunch of handcuff keys, which he nailed with his loose hand. "First, looking me over carefully, and probably figuring that I was as good as j temporarilv dead, he began to try the , keys that she had slipped him on Ms own cuff, of course. Well. I let him pi : it loose. I wanted the chance to use both . of my hands. He was Just stepping over . me. when I put him to the bad with tV" best I had in stock, square on the point j of the Jaw. He fell back Inso the seat. limp, and then I grabbed the woman and snapped the flaming bracelet, one cuff of which I waa still wearing myself, on hr r j wrist. She tried to puncture me with n knife that she had in her loose hand, hi t , I twisted the knife away from her. louf- j ened the cuff from my wrist, and then cuffed the two of them together. The result re-sult of the Woman's slamming In was that I brought two of them Instead of one to New York, and copped out. some-, thing easv. the tlJ0 reward which the Jeweler's Protective association had been offering for a couple of years for the woman's wo-man's apprehension. The woman had the nerve to set up the long wail about my kidnaping her, as she called it. out of the State of Iowa, but she got and had to do her little five-spacer ail the same. Washington Wash-ington Star. Traveling WithCrimiBals on j; the Railroads Risky Business. ,s' " In the buffet car of the southbound Congressional Limited, a tew afternoons ago I'eame upon a well-known New York headquarter detective H m ' hi. way tovPhiladelphia to pick .up a New York absconder whd had been in by the far from slumbersome Pnlladel- phia sleuths. At the moment I happened Into him the New York detective was rocking with laughter In his buffet car over a news story he had been reading In one of the New York evening papers. It was suggested to him that the best way to get It all out of his system would be to tell somebody else all sfxut It. Which 1 |