Of course in all this I allude to city work. Out in the country it is altogether different. There the shadow must worm himself into the confidence of his subject and travel with him. He will surely lose him if he don’t.
And this is often done, and most successfully.
I once sent a young man all over South America with a defaulting bank cashier. It was necessary to inveigle the fellow upon United States soil before he could be arrested.
To do this was difficult. My man first struck him in the city of Mexico and made his acquaintance at a hotel, taking pains to get an introduction to him which put him on a proper footing at the start.
For over a year he stuck to him and they grew to be like brothers.
They visited Brazil, Chili, Buenos Ayres and Peru; eating together, sleeping together, and all that sort of thing.
Long before the year was over the defaulter confessed the whole story to my man. He had taken $100,000 and had it all with him in gold and bills of exchange except what had been spent in his wanderings.
One day while at Callao, Peru, my man induced him to visit an American man-of-war then lying in the harbor.
This was the opportunity for which he had been so long seeking, and he immediately revealed himself and placed the defaulter under arrest, for to all intents and purposes they were then on American soil.
“My God! Jim, you can’t mean it!” the poor wretch exclaimed. “And I loved you so!”