"'What's the use of making trouble, Mr. Pinkerton?' he pleaded. His inadvertent use of my name, which had not been mentioned there, gave him away.
"'I don't know what kind of a case the police here have on you,' I told him, 'but we are retained by the Jewelers' Protective Association, and if you get after any jewelry drummers I'll make it hot for you.' And as a precaution I got his photograph from the New York police. They didn't have much of a case on him and he got off.
"Not long after a jewelry drummer was robbed in a Chicago hotel of about three thousand dollars' worth of diamonds which he had carelessly left in his grip instead of putting them in the safe. The same day a friend of mine who was stopping in another hotel lost his new overcoat and told me about it. I thought of the old man in the first job, and found a chambermaid and bellboy who had seen him on the floor, but didn't connect him with the second because he had never stolen anything but very valuable articles, so far as I knew. My friend had to leave for New York that night, and some time in the evening I got a telegram from him which had been filed in Fort Wayne.
"'Positive man who got my coat is in same sleeper, ticketed to New York,' it read. I wired my friend at a point further along the line to get off at Pittsburg and hold a white handkerchief in his hand so he could be identified and be prepared to point out the thief. Then I got in touch with Pittsburg by wire, and sure enough back came a wire after a while to the effect that they had got the man, whom my friend identified, and found on him besides the overcoat about $3,000 worth of diamonds. I asked for a description and the one they wired fitted that of the man I had seen in New York. I referred Pittsburg to the man's photograph, which had been published that week in a police periodical, and they were sure they had the same man. And so it proved. He was brought back to Chicago and convicted of the jewelry theft. He served a short sentence, and when he got out he came to me.
"Mind you, this was an old man, who had been a thief all his life—I had known him as a thief more than thirty years before. It is criminals of that kind that are commonly regarded as the most difficult to reform, but even hardened and lifelong offenders like this man will go straight if they get the right kind of encouragement. I found this old man apparently anxious to be honest, but he had never had a chance after his first slip as a young man. I determined to do what I could for him and I got him a job in New York. He is more than seventy years old now, but he is still holding that job, and he hasn't made a false step since he got out of prison the last time.
"Do criminals ever reform? I think I have told you enough to prove that they do—and I could tell you of hundreds of other instances if you needed any further proof."
A LETTER FROM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE "STAR OF HOPE" PAPER PUBLISHED IN SING SING PRISON.
Ossining, N. Y., April 9, 1906.
Dear Brother Herr: