Detective Pierson exhibited his shield. Shinburn laughed derisively. “Where’s your warrant? That’s what I want to see.”
Pierson fished a warrant out of his pocket and held it to Shinburn’s nose. He thrust it away contemptuously.
“The devil!” he cried; “that’s nothing but a Maryland warrant, and it doesn’t go in the state of New Jersey. Come, the game is up; take off these irons, quick!”
“It’s a fact, gentlemen,” said Pierson, turning to the bankers and attorneys, “that we haven’t anything more than the Maryland warrant. These men refuse to go with us without requisition papers from the state of New Jersey. In fact, the prisoners as such in New York are here no longer prisoners.”
“Call an officer of the Jersey City force,” put in one of the bank’s attorneys.
“Good day, gentlemen,” said Shinburn, walking swiftly from the car, followed by the sales agent; “you’ve made a mistake this time.”
No one offered to follow them and of course no one wanted to. Outside I was waiting with the carriage. In hopped the pair, and at a gallop we were driven on the ferry-boat. It was the one that brought us over. Upon it we landed again on the New York shore. In the meantime I unlocked the irons from the wrists of my companions with a key I had provided. Within an hour from the time the lads got out of John Young’s hands, they were back in New York streets, free to go where they pleased. To them the New Windsor Bank robbery was to pass into the realm of “has been.” But the outcome of the projected trip of Shinburn and the sales agent, with the superficial booking for their confinement in a Maryland prison, was to create a laugh. They were free, and the bankers had gone home with the one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars’ worth of securities that Captain Young had turned over to them in return for his reward, besides the Union Pacific bonds. With the possibility of getting nothing out of the two hundred and eighty-one thousand dollar loot, and returning to Westminster with two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, the bankers could well count themselves lucky. We had to be satisfied with sixty-three thousand dollars, less the “rake-off” that must be paid to our Police Headquarters friends.
It was a week after the matter had been settled that we decided to “square” with Mulberry Street, and I advised that Mark had better make arrangements to meet either Detective McCord or Detective Radford. Mark hadn’t done this sort of work, leaving it for me to do.
“Try your hand, Mark,” I said, and he did. It was, however, the first and last time while we worked together. Mark made an appointment to meet Radford at Chris Connor’s place in Fourteenth Street, near Broadway, at eight o’clock in the evening, and went there in a cab. He turned over to Radford sixty-three hundred dollars, the ten per cent we agreed to give the police. It was in bills, wrapped in brown paper. Radford put it in his pocket. There was wine bought to celebrate the settlement, with the result that, nine o’clock coming, Radford had added not a little to a comfortable “jag” he had acquired before the meeting. Mark found the detective troublesome and once or twice the latter was on the point of a quarrel. And, too, he accused Mark of putting up a job to get him off the force. Of course this was a fancy of his drink-crazed brain, and, more to protect him than anything else, Mark suggested that they drive to the Metropolitan Hotel to see Jack McCord. This seemed to suit Radford. They got in the cab and were soon whirling down Broadway. At Ninth Street, Radford turned to Mark and, saying something incoherent, tore the package of money from his pocket and threw it out of the window. The cab was stopped and Mark ran back more than a block in search of the money. He heard Radford shout back in a thick way, “You can’t put up a job on me.” Fortunately Mark’s activity resulted in recovering the money, though a moment later he would have been too late. A telegraph messenger boy running across Broadway had struck the package with his foot and was about to run off with the prize when Mark snatched it. Hurrying back, no one was there but cabby, Radford having disappeared through Ninth Street. Mark drove to his rooms in West Twenty-sixth Street, where he dismissed the cab. The next day Jack McCord sent for me and with great concern said, “Do you think Mark would put up a job on me and Radford?”
“What!” I cried, “do you think we’re crazy? Why?”