Science seems to admit so much—or, at least, hesitates to deny it, in face of the evidence. And I have sometimes thought that, as Allan fell through the swirling smoke down that flight of stairs in the old stone house, his last conscious thought of Mamie, that thought somehow flashed to her across the miles that lay between them—a C. Q. D. signal of distress, as it were, from him to her, on the wonderful wireless of the mind.
At least, I have no other explanation—I only know it really happened just as I have told it here.
A great crowd was waiting when that special pulled in to Wadsworth—a crowd which cheered and cheered as Allan and Jack Welsh and Mamie were borne to the carriages which were in waiting; a crowd from which three women threw themselves upon the conductor and brakemen, weak but smiling; a crowd which cursed the idiot and would have torn him from his cot and committed I know not what violence but for the platoon of police, assisted by Stanley’s specials, with Stanley himself, saturnine yet smiling, at the head of them.
For Stanley had returned and with him three prisoners and a wagon load of the richest silks ever shipped over an American railroad.
For the whole thing had been a case of robbery, after all, just as Stanley had suspected.
It had been carefully planned. The conspirators—old hands at the game—had learned that a shipment of silks of unusual richness had been made by a New York house to its jobbers in Saint Louis—had even received from some traitorous clerk the number of the car in which they were carried—had flagged the train, took conductor and brakemen prisoners, as they hurried forward to find out what the red light meant; had afterwards secured the engineer and fireman at the point of a revolver, extinguished the headlight, and looted the car at their leisure.
Then, after carefully sealing it up again so that the robbery would not be discovered until the car arrived at its destination, they had convoyed the prisoners to the old stone house, and committed them to the care of the half-witted monster they had brought with them from the city slums, with instructions that they be released in forty-eight hours, in which time they fancied they would be able to get well beyond reach of pursuit.
But they had not fully appreciated their confederate’s crazed condition; they had not foreseen in what a horrible way he would carry out their instructions—give them credit for that. Nor had they foreseen that, within a very few hours, one of the keenest detectives in the middle west would be after them. They had thought such search as would be made would be for the missing men, and had hoped that, in the disorganized condition of the road, no very effective search could be made at all.
How Stanley followed them, like the bloodhound that he was, and finally ran them down need not be related in detail here. Stanley himself has told the story in the book of memoirs which he published after he had retired from active service. Once he had got his clue to them, the rest was a question of only a few hours; for a wagon heavily laden cannot proceed at any great rate of speed, nor can it pass along the roads unseen. He had sworn in two deputies at a farm house, and with their assistance, had no difficulty in surprising the robbers, as they jogged along a country road, thinking themselves quite secure. It was merely the matter of a levelled revolver and a stern command, and the application of certain lengths of rope to wrists and ankles. Then, turning the wagon about, he had driven in triumph back to Wadsworth, reaching there just at dawn.