HOW I ESCAPED ARREST
Night came and the two sleuths showed no signs of leaving. The only avenue of escape from the upper room where I had been hiding all day was by the window.
With Mr. Rowe's kind help I securely fastened to the window frame one end of a long rope, which was kept for use in case of fire. Down this I slid in the darkness to the roof of a one-story building adjoining the hotel. From there it was an easy drop to a little alley, which finally brought me out on Broadway.
After an agonizing wait of several minutes at the station I got safely on board a train and was soon speeding toward Detroit. Then I drew the first long breath I had taken since morning, when I had seen that tearful crowd of investors and creditors in front of the closed bank.
Carrie Morse was never caught or punished for the ladies' bank swindle, which the newspapers later said must have netted her at least $50,000. Years after I met her in Chicago where she was operating a matrimonial agency which was almost as crooked as the bank had been. She never mentioned our banking venture nor offered me my share of the profits, and, as I was prosperous then, I never asked her for it.
She was a swindler to her dying day and served many long prison terms. As she grew old it took all the money she could make to keep out of jail and she finally died in poverty. With all her cleverness she never seemed able to see what expensive folly it was to waste her really brilliant abilities in a life of crime.
This was my first experience with clever women swindlers. I was surprised to learn, to my sorrow, that the standards of good faith which are maintained among men of the underworld do not hold good among most women criminals. I fully determined to have no more dealings with criminals of my own sex.
But this wise resolve was broken quite by accident a few years later, while I was traveling in the south of Europe and became acquainted with Mrs. Helen Gardner, an English swindler and confidence operator. Mrs. Gardner was a woman of fine presence, a finely modulated voice, all the manners, graces, and charms of a well-bred English woman, and an amazingly inspiring and persuasive conversationalist.
In daring and ingenuity this remarkable woman surpassed any man I ever knew. Crimes which the cleverest men in the underworld would have declared impossible or too foolhardy to undertake she not only attempted, but carried through to success.
For years the boldest schemes followed one another in rapid succession from Mrs. Gardner's fertile brain. Swindling was as natural to her as breathing is to normal persons. She was the most successful confidence woman who ever operated in England or on the Continent, and no rich man was safe once she got her traps set for him.
I first met Mrs. Gardner in Nice, where I was enjoying a little vacation after a long, arduous bank robbing campaign in America. She was then traveling under the name of Lady Temple.
To make a long story short, we soon became great friends. We went everywhere together and she generously shared with me the luxuries with which she was so plentifully supplied. She finally even induced me to take rooms in the hotel adjoining her own suite.
I did not know at that time that she was Mrs. Gardner, the famous English confidence swindler.
She told me little of her personal affairs except that her husband, Sir Edward Temple, had been a prominent physician in London and that she was in Nice to recover from the shock incident to his sudden death. The deep mourning she habitually wore and the heavy black band on her visiting cards bore out this story, but, to tell the truth, I didn't bother my head much about its truth or falsity.
I did not at that time happen to know that it is the custom in England for a doctor's practice to be sold when he retires from business or dies.
There was no doubt that she had money and that she was giving me a liberal share of its benefits—why should I worry about where it came from or how long it would last?
I, in turn, kept her in equal ignorance of my own past life and of my means of support.
But there was one thing about which I couldn't help being very curious—the number of doctors who were calling at the hotel to see Lady Temple. Every day there was at least one and some days there were three or four—each came alone and the same one seldom appeared a second time.