Ten Years Among the Mail Bags / Or, Notes from the Diary of a Special Agent of the Post-Office Department

by James Holbrook

The ingenuity and shrewdness of this device cannot be too much admired. The threat contained in the letter was so well calculated to throw the culprit off his guard, that if he had read it, he would no doubt have fallen an easy prey to such cunning machinations! It was of course expected by the deviser of this scheme that the package would be preserved by the person who stole it, in order to afford the necessary evidence of crime! The pieces of tissue paper could easily have been identified, and he would naturally preserve the accompanying document with as much care as Job was ready to show to the "book" which he wished his adversary to write!

Such interference as this, with an important investigation, is never warranted by any considerations whatever. The commander of an army who has laid all his plans for surprising an enemy, would feel under very slight obligations to any officious friend, who, in his impatience and ignorance of the course intended, should alarm the foe by some hasty and ill-advised attack.

Thus is it in the investigations to which we refer. Secrecy is all-important to the successful issue of the plans that may be devised; and volunteer services, especially from persons destitute of experience, are quite as likely to aid the criminal as to assist those who are endeavoring to detect him.

This digression has been made principally for the sake of protesting against such interference as that above mentioned, and of inducing others to abstain from similar unwarrantable experiments.

Notwithstanding the uneasiness of our amateur detective officer, and the remarkable skill displayed by him (as he supposed) in that capacity, considerable progress had already been made by means much safer than those which he adopted, if not more ingenious.

There were but few points to which suspicion could be reasonably directed, as there were but few places where the stolen packages would have centered. Each of these points was closely watched. A section of rail road, some thirty-five miles in length, over which most of the robbed mails must have passed, seemed, for a time, to satisfy the conditions of the problem to be solved, but this hypothesis was overturned by the fact that on one and the same night, packages were taken from mails which had passed each other on this road, in opposite trains, on separate tracks, and at a high rate of speed.

The mail messengers employed to convey the mails to and from the several railroad depots at central points, were carefully looked after, but all appeared right among them. And as for the post-offices, there were not more than two out of all affected by the numerous losses, through which half a dozen of the lost letters would have passed.

There was however, one man who had not thus far been included in the investigation, chiefly because in the discharge of his ordinary duties as baggage-master, at a central station or junction where mail carriers were provided by the rail road companies, he was not supposed to have even a temporary charge of any of the mails. But while watching one of the mail carriers on a certain evening, as he was conveying a number of mails from a city post-office to the cars, the Agent observed him placing them in charge of the aforesaid baggage-master, prior to the arrival of the train by which they were to be forwarded.

After they had thus been committed to his custody, he was seen to throw them carelessly into his baggage room, and enter the room, closing the door behind him. After a lapse of several minutes, he came out, piled the bags upon a barrow or baggage truck, and wheeled them to a point upon the platform, opposite which the approaching train was to stop. The unnecessary operation of placing the bags in the room, when the train was nearly or quite due, was a very suspicious circumstance, especially when taken in connection with the other movements of the baggage-master, and by means of the telegraph the post master of a neighboring city was requested to be present at the opening of that mail, to see whether certain letter packages arrived which were known to have been in the through mail pouch for his office that evening. The reply was, "opened mail myself, no letters for this delivery."

An hour and a half had now passed since the train had left, and if the mails had been rifled in the baggage room, sufficient time had been afforded the robber to have concealed or destroyed all the direct proof of his guilt upon this occasion. Hence no open action was then taken in view of the discoveries made. Besides, there was too much at stake to warrant the incurring of any risk on the strength of these facts.