Walker of the Secret Service

by Melville Davisson Post

I think the third holdup undertaken by these men was the most remarkable that ever occurred in all the history of train robberies.

I do not mean that the result of it was so remarkable or that it was attended by peculiar adventures. But the cool nerve exhibited by Mooney—his deliberate assumption of enormous risk, and his plan to draw the attention of the authorities from his confederate—marks the affair as without equal. The plan, too, to get away with what was taken in the robbery was wholly original. In all record of criminal methods I have never known this plan to be adopted by anybody else.

I think it was worked out by Mooney to meet a situation which he knew now existed.

The two train robberies which we had undertaken had aroused the country. The authorities could be expected to make every effort to run down and capture the highwayman who should undertake a repetition of these affairs. Mooney knew this and he worked out a plan to meet it.

The circus was loaded and moving when I first learned of this new adventure.

I was sitting in the box car with the horses. We had pulled up on a siding near some little town. The door was open and Mooney and White came in. White was very carefully dressed. He wore a new overcoat and derby hat and he carried a leather suit case. He looked precisely like one of the thousand traveling men who go about over the country. When the two men got into the car, I did not know who was with White, Mooney was so changed.

I looked at him with astonishment. I could not believe that the person before me was the man with whom I had been so closely associated. He had a heavy drooping mustache, long black hair and deep-lined face. His eyes seemed lengthened and narrowed, and he appeared taller and more erect.

Now, the man naturally in life was stooped, and with a weary, nervous appearance, as though every motion were an effort. This attitude, as I have come to know, was the languor of a drug and his common appearance was the result of the use of it.

But to-day, by some powerful effort, or perhaps by virtue of an excessive injection of the drug itself, his whole manner had changed. Of course the appearance of the man was merely the result of the make-up, amazingly skillful, which he had undertaken for the thing he had in hand.

He explained to me that they had finally located the treasure train and that they were going to hold it up to-night. He said that we would probably be noticed and that it was necessary to change our appearance so descriptions of us, which would be published abroad over the country, would be wholly misleading.