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Show fO YOU WANT $1,000? If so, just catch a. railway mail robber. Uncle Sam will pay you that much for him this being 'a i standing offer which the ' poBtofflce dep a r t m e n t makes for the capture of anybody who ventures to pillage a train that is carrying the mails. Train robbing is the most distinctively distinc-tively American of all professions; It Is likewise the most perilous, bar none. One of the most recent examples exam-ples was the holding up of the Overland Over-land limited, bound from San Francisco Francis-co to Chicago and points east. It was halted at midnight by a red lantern placed In the middle of the track three miles west of Omaha, and the mail car was plundered, seven pouches of registered letters and packages being thrown out and rifled. The "flying squadron" of postolfice detectives, with headquarters at Omaha, Oma-ha, got after the robbers so quick that the latter were actually unable to make their escape from the city. Assisted As-sisted by the corps of professional bandit hunters, under Chief W. P. Canada, they captured every one o the holdup men, to the number of Ave, within a week illustrating the fact that the days of train robbing as a safe and easy method of acquiring wealth are past The government will spend unlimited money to catch such outlaws, and the railroads offer additional addi-tional rewards for their seizure, alive or dead. Pursuit of them nearly always al-ways winds up with a desperate fight, and the shooting is to kill. Chief Canada has under him eight men, all of them dead shots with rifle Dr pistol. They travel in a special car of extra length, half of which is occupied by stalls for nine horses. Arrangements are such that they can be on their way to the scene of a train robbery within thirty minutes after news of it has been received. Arriving there with fresh horses, they can telegraph for relay mounts as they are needed two of the men be-! be-! Ing expert operators, who can easily climb a pole with a portable instru-j instru-j ment They know how to follow a I trail that no ordinary person could j distinguish, and final escape for the bandits is almost out of the question. Train robbers have grown much bolder within recent years. Formerly they plied their highly stimulating vocation in remote and isolated parts of the country; nowadays they do not hesitate to operate in densely populated populat-ed districts and near the largest cities, not long ago a train was held up near Benicia, Cal., and the mail rifled. A gang of nine men conducted the affair, and all of them were captured and sent to prison, five of them for life, md the others for terms of fifteen years to forty-five years. Thus, the adoption of measures sternly repressive, the postolfice department de-partment is enabled to prevent the robbing of mail trains from becoming more popular as a form of industry though on an average, half a dozen Instances of such" outlawry occur every year. But there is another kind of criminal enterprise which has Bhown a tendency to increase alarmingly, alarm-ingly, and with which the authorities And it difficult to deal. This is tne pillaging of postoffices by professional thieves the extent of the business being indicated by the fact' that during dur-ing last year nearly 2,000 poBtoffices were "burgled." ' This seems to be, under present conditions, con-ditions, a fairly profitable species of crime. Postoffices are easily entered at night, and there is usually a safe on the premises which, containing as It does the stock of stamps and a Bum of money representing postal funds, may be expected to yield anywhere any-where from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. Not long ago the postoffice at South Bend, Ind., was burglarized, and $18,653 in stamps and cash was taken. During the same twelvemonth the postoffice at Daytona, Fla., yielded loot to the extent of $5,436; and $5,240 was stolen from the postoffice at Santa Cruz, Cal. The robbing of postoffices is today a well-organized industry, conducted by tramp-thieves of desperate character charac-ter who call themselves "yeggmen." ; These yeggmen have practically superseded super-seded the old-time safe blowers. Formerly For-merly the blowing of safes was done by a few skillful, expert mechanics, who carried high-class tools and knew just where to drill into the lock in order to break it, or where to insert FMIN ROBBEKE POST PERILOUS an explosive. But the yeggmen practice prac-tice much simpler methods. Provided with no apparatus except a bottle of nitroglycerine, a coil of fuse and caps, they enter the postoffice through a door or window, with the help of tools stolen' perhaps from a nearby blacksmith's black-smith's shop. Meanwhile, two or three men are stationed outside as pickets, to give an alarm in case anybody approaches, or to shoot if there is occasion. Common Com-mon bar soap is used to fill the joints of the safe door and enough nitroglycerine nitro-glycerine is allowed to percolate in behind this "tamping" to furnish the requisite explosion. Then the fuse is lighted, and, at a safe distance, results are awaited. When the safe has been torn open, its contents are hastily thrown into a sack. All registered and ordinary mail that happens to be on the premises is rifled and the thieves make off. Should they be interrupted, in-terrupted, they are always ready to kill, and . usually they escape. Now and then they have pitched battles with citizens, and the latter, being unprepared, are apt to get the worst of it. Such ajob is easy, nearly always successful, and attended by comparatively compara-tively little risk. Even if a postoffice robber is captured and convicted, the maximum penalty under the law is only five years in prison. A reward of $100 to $200 is offered in cases of the kind by the government, and during dur-ing the last year 329 thieves of this class were arrested; but the business offers special attractions to criminals of the sort here described, and so goes merrily on. Recently there has been a new and rather startling development of this kind of industry. The postoffice robbers rob-bers have taken to practicing their profession in automobiles. Up-state In New York they are going from town to town in motor cars (stolen, of course), and pillaging postoffice after postoffice, in some instances several of them in a night. In this . way a gang of yeggmen can easily rifle the postal safes in half a dozen or more towns between midnight and daybreak, day-break, speeding away thereupon to a distance of 100 miles or more from the scene of operations and scattering. scatter-ing. The car is left behind; it is easy to steal another one when they want it. i- The stamps stolen by the robbers are easily disposed of through a "fence" in some city, who converts them into money by selling them at a discount. It is astonishing (say the detectives of the postal service) how few questions are aked, and how little lit-tle it takes to satisfy business people of the highest standing that it is proper prop-er to buy stamps which are at least under suspicion of having been stolen. All stamps look alike, and are current everywhere at face value. They can ' not be identified as stolen goods in the hands of either thief or receiver. One of the most remarkable robberies rob-beries occurred not long ago at Richmond, Rich-mond, Va., where the postoffice was-entered was-entered some time between Saturday evening and the following Monday morning, the vault blown open, and $S6,295 in stamps and money stolen. Two suspicious strangers left the city with several trunk's soon after the burglary, and by cleyer work the government gov-ernment detectives traced these trunks through several cities to New York. There they arrested Eddie Fay and Richard Harris, notorious yegg- men, when they called at the railroad station for the trunks, which contained con-tained burglars' tools and a large part of the missing stamps. Both were sent to prison. There was a few years ago, in Oklahoma Ok-lahoma and Indian territory, a little company of desperadoes known as the Bill Cook gang, which operated with great' frankness. They would walk into postoffices in the daytime, take what money there was on hand, and walk out again. As a mode of making a living, nothing could be more simple. sim-ple. But they did this sort of thing so frequently as to exasperate the postal pos-tal authorities, and, as a result, special spe-cial prices were put on their heads. Every one of them was finally killed or captured, and Bill got forty-rive years in what is colloquially known as the "stone jug." Street letter boxes are robbed from time to time, but this species of depredation depre-dation is no longer practiced with the success of former days. The boxes now in use are so ingeniously contrived con-trived that it is hardly possible to fish letters out of them, ' either with a crooked piece of wire, or by means of a string with a sticky disc of leather on the end both of these being methods meth-ods anciently employed. There remains, re-mains, however, the expedient of opening open-ing the box with a false key. All of the letter boxes in any given city have locks exactly alike, and may be opened with one key. This, as one easily sees, is necessary, inasmuch as a single postman may have to visit and make collections from 100 or more widely-scattered receptacles. It follows then, that a thief, if he possesses pos-sesses a copy of the key, has all the boxes at his mercy; and this is not hard to obtain, by filing off and removing re-moving one of the padlocks. Among criminals there are many clever locksmiths. lock-smiths. Fifteen years ago there was much robbing of letter boxes by thieves who worked in gangs, covering up their tracks with remarkable cleverness. Their operations were so extensive that the postoffice department made trials of many kinds of locks, some of which cost as much as $5 each. Those now in -use cost only 40 cents apiece, wholesale; for the authorities have made up their minds that a burglar-proof burglar-proof mail box is an impossibility. |