Her mind was naturally powerful, and I had little hope of breaking down her will; she would evidently show fight to the last, and all that I could hope would be to learn enough secretly to insure her conviction without her confession. She was as shrewd as if all her life had been passed in evading the toils of the law; even in her sleep, or when pretending to sleep, she would talk with great freedom; but, as she never gave any intelligence of importance on such occasions, I put little faith in the soundness of her sleep. In her readiness to assist Ingham to hide his plunder, I saw the dangerous side of this woman's nature strongly revealed. If she were so willing to act as an accomplice in one crime, why not in another? As she had been so successful in her encounter with Trafton, might she not be glad to carry out the same scheme again? At least, there would be no harm in putting an opportunity before her, and her actions in one case might give some clue to those by which she had succeeded in the former affair.
"Yes, that will be a good plan," I soliloquized; "I will send a young fellow there with a large sum of money, and he will get drunk. Then, if she tries to rob him, I shall be certain that she did the same with young Trafton."
I therefore arranged that Ingham should pretend that he had made the acquaintance of a stranger from the East, who had a large sum of money; he was to tell Mrs. Sanford that he would bring the stranger to her rooms to spend the evening; the stranger would be rather drunk when he arrived there, and they would give him more liquor, until he should be quite drunk; if she should then try to rob him, he would get away as well as possible, and Ingham would go after him. In a little while, Ingham would return and show her a package of bonds, stolen from the stranger, and tell her that he had knocked the man down with a brick, before robbing him. The next morning a notice would appear in the papers to the effect that a stranger had been found in the burnt district, lying on the ground in an insensible condition, having been knocked down and robbed.
Ingham was instructed as to his part in the affair, and next day he told Mrs. Sanford that there was a young fellow down town whose acquaintance he had made, who had a large amount of money with him. Ingham said that the man's name was Adamson, and that he was a gambler in good luck. He wanted to bring Adamson to the house that evening, and she was very anxious that he should come.
I intrusted the stranger's part to my son, Robert A. Pinkerton, who assumed the name of Adamson for the occasion.
Accordingly, the two detectives met at my office, and Adamson was given five hundred dollars in fifty dollar bonds. They then went to Mrs. Sanford's house, and, on arriving there, Mr. Adamson was quite unsteady on his legs. Mrs. Sanford was nicely dressed to receive the stranger, and she made herself very agreeable to him, in spite of his apparent drunkenness. They played cards together for a time, and then Adamson proposed to play euchre with Ingham seven points for five dollars a game. While they were playing, Adamson became quite reckless, and he threw down his cards with such a look of drunken gravity as to be quite amusing. He lost almost every game, and, at length, he wanted to go out for a drink. Mrs. Sanford told him to go on with his game, and she would get what he wished.
"What do you want to drink?" she asked.
"Anything excep' warrer," he replied.
"What do you know about water?" asked Ingham; "I don't believe you can tell how it looks."
"Tha's a lie. I know how to tell warrer's well's you. I (hic) can allus tell warrer—it looks jus' like gin. Get us some gin."