Latisan lashed his horses away toward the north.
Craig took the forenoon train down over the narrow-gauge, headed for New York. He was seeking that aid of which he had boasted—city brains. In handling certain affairs of his in the past he had found the Vose-Mern Detective Agency both crafty and active—and the roundabout method of craft, he decided, was the proper way to get at Latisan, without involving the Comas folks in any scandal.
CHAPTER NINE
NOT cattishly, but with patronizing pity, Miss Leigh, bookkeeper, remarked to Miss Javotte, filing clerk, that if Miss Kennard did not change that green toque with the white quill to something else pretty soon, she could be identified by her hat better than by her fingerprints.
Miss Leigh had been showing one of her new spring hats to Miss Javotte; she was able to express a sotto voce opinion about Miss Kennard’s toque because Miss Kennard, stenographer, was rattling her typewriter full tilt. Miss Javotte agreed, spreading her fingers fan shape and inspecting certain rings with calm satisfaction. “And not even a rock—only that same old-fashioned cameo thing—speaking of fingers.”
“I was speaking of fingerprints,” said Miss Leigh, tartly, frowning at the display of rings, perfectly well aware that they were not bought on the installment plan out of a filing clerk’s wages.
It was quite natural for Miss Leigh to speak of fingerprints. She was an employe in the Vose-Mern offices. “Vose-Mern Bureau of Investigation” was the designation on the street corridor directory board of a building in the purlieus of New York City Hall. On the same board other parties frankly advertised themselves as detectives. The Vose-Mern agency called its men and women by the name of operatives. The scope of its activities was unlimited. It broke strikes, put secret agents into manufacturing concerns to stimulate efficiency, or calculatingly and in cold blood put other agents in to wreck a concern in the interests of a rival. It was a matter of fees. Mern could defend the ethics of such procedure with interesting arguments; he had been an inspector of police and held ironic views of human nature; he had invented an anticipatory system, so he called it, by which he “hothoused” criminal proclivities in a person in order to show the person’s latent possibilities up to an employer before damage had been wrought to the employer’s business or funds. That is to say—and this for the proper understanding of Mr. Mern’s code in his operations as he moved in the special matters of which this tale treats—his agency deliberately set women of the type well hit off by the name “vamps” “sicked” those women onto bank clerks and others who could get a hand into a till, and if the women were able to cajole the victim to the point of stealing or of grabbing in order to make a get-away to foreign parts with the temptress, the trick was considered legitimate work of the “anticipatory” sort. The operative would order the treasure cached, would appoint the day and hour for the get-away—and a plain-clothes man would be waiting at the cache! The Vose-Mern system thus nabbed the culprit, who had revealed his lack of moral fiber by reason of the hothouse forcing of the situation; Mern insisted that if the germ were there it should be forced. By his plan the loot was pulled back and returned to the owner.
Mern had broken the big paper-mill strike for the Comas Consolidated; he calmly assured his clients that he could furnish a thousand men as well as one. When he did a thing it was expensive—for he had bands of picked men always on call, and the men must be paid during their loafing intervals, waiting for other strikes.
Craig had been close to Mern during the strike. Mern stated that the ethics of the law allowed a lawyer to defend and extricate, if he could, a criminal whom he knew was hideously guilty; the lawyer’s smartness was applauded if he won by law against justice. Mern excused on the same lines his willingness to accept any sort of a commission. It was a heartless attitude—Mern admitted that it was and said that he didn’t pose as a demon. He seemed to get a lot of comfort out of declaring that if the fellow he was chasing had the grit and smartness to turn around and do Mern up, Mern would heartily give the fellow three cheers. Thus did Mern put his remarkable business on the plane of a man-to-man fight by his argument, not admitting that there was any baseness in his plots and his persecution.