Show THIEVES MAP S S j i i How Chief luipector Sharps Tracws tfp the luau Kobber I Oneoi the most important duties of the Chief Inspector is to detect railway postal clerks who steal letters containing money To accomplish this Colonel Sharpe follows a simple but ingenious system which he explained the other day to the writer To catch tho thieves he said I had constructed a large railroad map of the United States which hangs in my office in Now supposing a man mails a letter Boston for Kansas City containing 50 avery a-very bad practice but people will do it The letters never reaches its destination and pretty soonwe get a complaining letter let-ter stating the circumstances Now if the supposed case were an isolated one we probably could do nothing noth-ing The letter in going from Boston to Kansas City would pass through thirty or forty hands and it would be useless to fix the blame But the Boston mans case is not isolated Every day we get from one to fifty complaints from allover over the country and this fact as you will see enables us to locate the mischief mis-chief chiefFirst we ascertain exactly when and where the missing letter was mailed and its address Then we are ready for the map I spoke of I take the Boston mans letter and a bunch of similar complaints and then I begin to stick pins into my map I know just the route which 1 letter let-ter would take to go from Boston to Kansas Kan-sas City and stick pins along to sketch out this course Then I take the next thi complaint Perhaps this is from a man who lost money transmitting it from Mobile to Chicago Very well I trace out the line such a letter would take The third perhaps was gent from New York to San Francisco the fourth from New Orleans to Buffalo the fifth from Saginaw City to Philadelphia and so on Now before very long the map begins to look quite interesting The pins are strewn all over the country but we notice one track say for instance between Chicago and Cleveland where all the lines unite Thats where the thief is Knowing now where the stealing is going on we advise our most trusted man in that division we have to trust somebody some-body you know that there is trouble in his section and we advise him to keep a sharp lookout We inquire into the habits hab-its and associations of the clerks and we are perhaps able to spotthe man at once At other times it is more difficult But we always fetch him Detection is certain cer-tain |