Another man came to the jail to provide additional information. The man was Albert Wisehart, a farmer, who said that Dane, who was a neighbor, had stopped him south of Stevensville and ordered him to drive back to the town, a distance of about two miles. When Wisehart refused to go over an almost impassable dirt road east of town instead of using the concrete highway. Dane leaped from the car with a curse and disappeared in the darkness.
When Wisehart last saw him, Dane was only about three and a half or four miles from the bungalow where he lived.
“He’s not far from here, men!” exclaimed Sheriff Bryant. “Get out to that house — and don’t take any chances with him!”
III
A group of eight deputies, led by Deputy Kubath and Chief of Police Fred Alden jumped into two large automobiles and sped out the Lake Shore drive. The cars were parked in a lane a short distance from the house and the officers, divided into two groups, crept up to the place. There was no sign of a light.
Kubath knocked at the back door. After a wait that seemed like several minutes a woman’s voice called out, “Who’s there?”
“Sheriff’s men. Open the door!” answered Kubath.
The door was opened and a short, plump woman with bobbed hair peered out. She wore a bathrobe over a nightgown.
“We’re looking for Fred Dane — is he here?” demanded Officer Kubath.
“Why, no; I don’t know where he is,” answered the woman, stammering nervously at the sight of the officer’s drawn guns. “I came in from Chicago on the eight o’clock train and he was supposed to meet me at the station in St. Joseph, but he wasn’t there, so I took a taxicab and came home. What’s the matter, what—”
“Never mind,” interrupted Kubath, adding, “we’ll have a look around here, I guess.”
The officers stalked cautiously through the well-furnished little home, peering into darkened rooms and closets.
“Who are you?” asked Kubath of the startled woman.
“I’m Mrs. Fred Dane, and I don’t like this at all. Busting in on a woman at this time of night.”
The house appeared to be empty save for the woman, and the officers were about to give up their search and return to the county jail when Deputy Frank Priebe, rummaging around upstairs, called the others. A half dozen men with gun ready leaped up the stairs.
Priebe stood with arms akimbo before the open door of a clothes closet and there was a puzzled, frightened look on his face.
The officers looked into the small dark closet, which was lighted only by the ray from a flash light, and saw, neatly stacked on the floor and on shelves, all the weapons of a small arsenal — machine guns, rifles, steel vests, ammunition drums, pistols, tear gas bombs!
With murmured exclamations of awe the officers went down on their knees and pawed over the deadly instruments — instruments no peaceful gentleman-farmer would have cached away in his country home.
There were two machine guns, one completely assembled and ready for its deadly business and the other knocked down and packed in a black suitcase. There was a case containing six rifles, all high-powered. Ammunition was everywhere, in glass jars, in machine gun drums and scattered about on the floor.
There were four bullet-proof vests of thin, flexible steel, a sawed-off shotgun with pistol grip, two bags of forty-five caliber ammunition to refill the machine gun drums, and a half dozen tear gas bombs. The machine guns were of Thompson make with nine ammunition drums of one hundred shots each and three twenty-shot clips.
On the shelf was a neatly wrapped and tied bundle, and as Deputy Kubath tore the heavy brown paper from it several green embossed papers fell to the floor. Bonds! Three hundred and nineteen thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars in bonds!
Kubath ordered the woman brought upstairs and as she was led before the gaping closet door and confronted with the exhibit she shrank back with a cry of horror, clasping her hands over her eyes.
“Oh, where did those things come from?” she cried.
“Do you mean to say you didn’t know they were in the house?” asked Kubath.
“I never saw them before. I tell you I never saw them before.”
“I guess you had better come along with us,” the officer told her.
She went to dress, returning a few minutes later garbed in an expensive mink coat — a Christmas present from her husband a year before, she explained.
Back at the jail there was wild excitement. The four-party telephone line serving the Dane home had been tapped by City Manager James Crowe while the officers were at the little bungalow, and an intercepted message had landed Steve Kooney, one of the killer’s neighbors, in jail.
Kooney, who talked in broken English to the officers, had been heard telephoning to a farmer living about two miles away about Dane’s escape. Kooney lived in a modest little home less than two hundred rods from the Dane bungalow.
“What do you know about Dane, and where did you see him to-night?” demanded the sheriff.
“Well. Dane is my neighbor and I used to do a lot of odd jobs for him, especially when he was remodeling the bungalow last fall,” the man said in his broken English. “He always carried a big roll of bills and boasted to me that he made three thousand dollars a month from some gasoline stations he owned in Gary, Indiana. My wife never liked Dane, but I thought that was just because he was such a windy fellow. No, I don’t know much about his house because I was in it only a few times.”
Kooney said that about nine thirty or ten o’clock that evening he and his wife were sitting in the parlor of their home when his wife looked out and saw a man standing in the driveway. Kooney, thinking it might be the chicken thief who had been prowling around the neighborhood, went outside and the man hurried toward him. The man was panting and his hair and clothes were disheveled. Then he recognized the man as Dane, his neighbor.
“I’ve got to see a man in Coloma right away and you’re going to drive me there: my car’s broken down,” Dane told Kooney, in a voice that carried a command. Kooney, who was ignorant of the slaying of Skelly, saw a revolver in Dane’s hand and asked him what the trouble was.
“I’m in a hell of a jam, but it’s none of your business,” the big man said. “Hurry up and get your car out and drive me out over the Napier Bridge to Coloma.”
They got into Kooney’s car and drove to Coloma, about fourteen miles north of St. Joseph on the shore of Paw Paw Lake, without being stopped by any of the half dozen officers who must have been patrolling the road. Dane got out of the car on the outskirts of the little town, flung a five-dollar bill at Kooney, and ran into the darkness.
Kooney returned to his home, unaware of the fact that he had aided the escape of a murderer.
When Sheriff Bryant had completed the questioning of Kooney and had ordered him released, Deputy Kubath turned to Police Chief Alden, a stocky man weighing considerably more than two hundred pounds, and jokingly remarked:
“Fred, I nearly took a shot at you by mistake when we were at that house a short while ago.”
“What do you mean?” asked Alden.
“Well,” explained Kubath. “I came out of the front door of the house to see that our cars were well hidden and I saw a man crouching near a hedge on the other side of the road. At first I thought it might be Dane and I called out, ‘Fred.’ The man didn’t move, so I decided it was you hiding out there to watch the roadway.”
“But I wasn’t outdoors. I was down in the basement of the house looking around,” said the chief.
“It was Fred, all right, Fred Dane,” said the sheriff. “He was doubling back to Kooney’s house and you fellows let him slip through your fingers.”
With the trail of the slayer lost fourteen miles to the north of St. Joseph, the officers set about checking up on the true identity of this fiendish, daring killer who kept a complete arsenal in his modest little hideout. The three hundred and nineteen thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars in bonds of various denominations, undoubtedly stolen, were the best means of fixing the identity of the slayer, Prosecuting Attorney Wilbur M. Cunningham said, and Sheriff Bryant agreed. George Selfridge, assistant cashier of the Farmers & Merchants National Bank in Benton Harbor, was called in and told to check the origin of the securities as quickly as possible.