Little things like the discomfort of hospital treatment and searching examinations by railroad surgeons do not seem to discourage these criminals. They take these as necessary hardships that go with their profession. Inga Hanson, the woman who impersonated deafness, dumbness, blindness and paralysis to win a heavy verdict from the Chicago City Railway Company, and who was afterwards convicted of perjury, was wheeled daily into the court-room in a chair apparently nothing more than a living, inert, shapeless mass of humanity, exquisitely trained to enact her role of deception.
Sometimes the claim-agents, working in conjunction with the railroad’s secret service, have used the camera to great advantage. A farmer who lives in New Jersey drove into a seaboard city with a load of produce. At a grade crossing, a switch-engine overturned his craft, about as gently as such an accident could be accomplished. The farmer was lucky in that he was bruised, rather than seriously hurt. Then he saw a lawyer and learned that he was incapacitated for life by severe internal injuries. He entered suit for $25,000 against the railroad.
There was a case for the secret-service bureau of the railroad, and it took little time to find the right detectives, husky enough to get out into the fields and work for four long weeks as farmhands. When the Jersey farmer began haying that August, he found less trouble than he had ever before experienced in hiring low-priced help. He was able to get two big lads, who were hard workers.
It was a big hay year and the farmer was not averse to turning in to do his part of the work. He liked to be with the boys he had hired and one of them had a camera that he could take “great” pictures with. He showed him some of the pictures that he took those August days on the Jersey farm. The farmer liked them immensely.
He liked them rather less when his attorney came down from the city one day, with prints of the same pictures that had been sent him by the law department of the railroad. The farmer was given a chance to withdraw from the limelight or else stand a criminal trial for perjury, with the penitentiary’s gray walls looming up behind. He took the chance. Few of the dishonest claimants will proceed after such evidence has been put before them. As for the railroad, it usually works better through getting signed confessions of guilt than by going through the somewhat intense workings of a criminal trial.
The secret service stands just back of the claim-agents. It has greater or less recognition in the case of different railroads but its work is generally much the same. It is police. Sometimes it is organized like the police department of a small city, with captains and inspectors at various division headquarters, and at other times its very existence is denied by the railroad heads. But its work is much the same. Its men, generally chosen for fitness from city police or detective staffs, sometimes root out tramps or small thieves along the line and in the freight-yards, sometimes in gay uniform patrol the platforms of crowded passenger terminals, sometimes work with greatest secrecy in “plain clothes”—which in this case may be jeans or overalls—to detect theft or treason among employees, and sometimes they receive their greatest laurels in connection with the “fake” suits that are brought against the railroad.
The secret-service works night and day. Its members, with the claim-agents, are at the scene of a serious accident as quickly as the wrecking-train itself. Together with the railroad’s own corps of surgeons, retained in every important town, and chosen for absolute honesty and integrity, they form an important adjunct of the personal injury claim service.
The financial officer of the railroad is, of course, the treasurer. It is he who receives its earnings—running possibly into a hundred millions dollars in the course of a twelvemonth—and disburses them for supplies and for wages, for taxes and for bond coupons, and, it is to be hoped, for dividends. He works through appointed banks; and the bank president who can go out and capture one or two good railroad accounts for his institution has earned his salary for several years to come. The selection of the banks is one of the dramatic phases of the inside politics of railroading; it is a cause of constant wire-pullings and heartburnings.
“Do you see that whited sepulchre down there?” a big railroad head laughs to you as he points to a white marble skyscraper closing the vista of a city canyon. “This road built that temple of business. Our account is its backbone. Sometimes we deposit a million dollars a day and it is no uncommon thing for our balance there, approaching coupon or dividend times to reach sixteen or seventeen million dollars.”