“Much has been written about crooks by students of the social problem and by scientists. At least all writers agree that they are a queer lot, a class by themselves, with a life of their own and a point of view that is peculiarly their own. They have the characteristic of gratitude in perhaps a greater degree than some other classes of humanity. Of course there are exceptions. But crooks as a whole have a code of honor, or rather a code of dishonor, that is always paradoxical, yet they adhere to it.
“If you do one of them a favor — that is, a turn that he, not you, regard as a favor to him — he will not forget it. More opportunities than are imagined present themselves where, in no way inconsistent with his duty, a detective may gain the favor instead of the disfavor of a crook. The best crooks make the least trouble personally to a detective. They are the hardest to catch, next to unknown crooks who are on the road for the first time, but once they are caught they realize that the part of wisdom is to acquiesce.
“Crime is a disease. It is hereditary, just as consumption is hereditary. It may skip a generation, or even two or three generations. But it is an inherent, inherited weakness. I am satisfied of this. I have seen instances where the identical kind of crime has appeared in generation after generation, great-grandfather down through grandfather, father, son and grandson. I have known men whose grandfathers were horse thieves or counterfeiters, and whose fathers were honest, to become horse thieves or counterfeiters and do nothing else dishonest. In the oldest records of crime we find inherited crime traced through three hundred years, and even longer. The conditions of the criminal may be bettered, just as the conditions of the consumptive may be bettered. The disease may be checked; in some instances it may be averted, but the crime germ, if I may use the word, is there, lurking in the life of the victim.
“Once dishonest, always dishonest. That is the general rule. I believe in it absolutely. Reformation is the exception. The degree of dishonesty may vary, but the fact of dishonesty does not alter. I made up my mind slowly on this point, and I reached my decision with reluctance. But I have seen it over and over again. It is observed more clearly about professional dishonesty than amateur dishonesty, if I may draw such a distinction. The crook who goes to prison once is apt to turn up again in the hands of the police.
“The business is full of vexations. There are times when you know to a certainty the doer of a deed, yet arrest must wait until the evidence is in hand. Sometimes the evidence never comes, and you see the years go by, with a guilty man enjoying the liberty denied to another, no more guilty, who had not the good fortune to lose some links in the chain of evidence that surrounded him. It is the law of chance.
“I believe in circumstantial evidence. I have found it surer than direct evidence in many, many cases. Where circumstantial evidence and direct evidence unite, of course, the result is most satisfactory. There are those who say that circumstances may combine in a false conclusion. This is far less apt to occur than the falsity of direct evidence given by a witness who lies point-blank, and who cannot be contradicted save by a judgment of his falsity through the manner of his lying. Few people are good liars. Many of them make their lies too probable; they outdo truth itself. To detect a liar is a great gift. It is a greater gift to detect the lie. I have known instances where, by good fortune, I detected the liar and then the lie, and learned the whole truth simply by listening to the lie, and thereby judging the truth. There is no hard and fast rule for this detection. The ability to do it rests with the man. It is largely a matter of instinct.
“The best detective, therefore, is a man who instinctively detects the truth, lost though it may be in a maze of lies. By instinct he is a detective. He is born to it; his business is his natural bent. It would be a platitude to say the best detectives are born, not made. They are both born and made for the business.
“The man, who, by temperament and make-up, is an ideal detective, must go through the hard years of steady work, must apply himself, and study and toil in making himself what he is born to be. Sandow was born to be a strong man, but, if he had not developed himself by hard work he would not have become the strongest man of his time.
“As a detective advances in his business he will find that the more he studies and works, the stronger his powers of intuition, of divination, of analysis, become. A very simple broad illustration will prove this. If a detective is chasing a criminal from country to country, and has learned, by study of the extradition treaties, that a certain country offers a better haven than another, he may save himself many a weary mile by going to the country where his common sense tells him his man is more likely to be.
“A mechanical knowledge of the use of tools, a knowledge of the effects of poisons, a knowledge of the ways of banking, of the habits of life of the various classes in various callings, a knowledge of crooks and, above all, a knowledge of human nature, in whatsoever way manifest, are invaluable elements of the equipment of a good detective.
“In a vague way I held these opinions away back in 1866, when, as a young fellow of twenty-six, I left the service in the navy after the war, and for about two years served as a special agent in the employ of the United States Government. I made acquaintances all over the country in those days, many of them being young fellows like myself, who were in the police business then, and later became heads of detective or police departments. I obtained my first experience then in the secrets of counterfeiting, in the arts of burglars, in the ways of the classes of thieves busy in those days in all parts of the United States, and more or less bothersome at times to the government. It was precisely the experience and training I needed at that time.
“Afterwards I was persuaded to go to Erie, Pennsylvania, where I had made friends during my early days on the lakes, including prominent railroad men, and joined the police force there. In the four or five years I remained there I had plenty to do, and it fitted me further for the work I had outlined for myself. I became a detective on the force in Erie. Tom Crowley, a man I loved and respected, was chief at that time.
“Sometimes, when the wind howls and the world is full of gusts and gales, and I am caught where the man next me has a pipe as old as Methuselah, and tobacco as strong as Samson, my mind turns back to Crowley, and there flit through my memory, like ghosts of long ago, episodes of the old days in Erie when I was a sleuth from Sleuthville, and mighty proud of it, too.”
Chapter III
The Weazened Wonder
A plague of sneak-thieving broke out in Erie, Pa., shortly after Murray became a detective. It grew to be epidemic. Furniture vanished out of houses. Clothing seemed to fall upon the backs of invisible wearers and saunter into Spookland. Plows disappeared from farmers’ fields as if they had started on the shortest route to China. Horses trotted off into nowhere. Entire shelves in stores were swept bare in a single night, and from one of them twenty dozen pairs of shoes seemed to walk out of sight at midday.
“ ‘We had better order the people to anchor their houses,’ said Crowley to me,” said Murray, telling the story. “We watched all day and we watched all night for weeks, but the stealing went on just the same. Crowley said it must be giant rats, who had a den in the bowels of the earth and decided to furnish it from Erie. He said some one had told him that in India they had a plague, by which people wasted away and finally dried up. He concluded that the plague had spread from India to Erie, and had seized upon everything portable in and around the town. ‘They’re not stolen, they just waste away,’ said Crowley. ‘It’s a case of now you see them, now you don’t. To clinch this, one of the men began to lose his hair. Crowley pointed to it and exclaimed: ‘See, it’s just wasting away.’ I had a mustache that was not flourishing just then, and I shaved it off. When I appeared for duty the next day Crowley gasped: