A second reason was that if he had removed Hodgins on account of those snapshots, the mayor, in order to be consistent, would have had to dismiss from the department the delinquent policemen whose pictures had appeared in the Bulletin. Some of these men had a strong political pull, and Mayor Henkle was disinclined to take such action against them.
Besides, the Chronicle, at the mayor’s suggestion, had published a long editorial denouncing those police snapshots as atrocious fakes, and denying that the members of the force were really guilty of the misconduct of which the Bulletin’s pictures had seemed to convict them. Consequently, the mayor could not have punished his chief of police without going back on the administration organ.
So Chief Hodgins still held on to his job. But he was not happy. The fact that Hawley had come back to Oldham, and was once more at work with his camera, was one of the things which prevented him from being so.
Goaded by the jeers and snarls of the mayor and by his own frantic desire for vengeance, he sought desperately to capture the Camera Chap; but, try as he would, he could not succeed in laying hands on that elusive man.
Hawley had become a veritable will-o’-the-wisp. Although every member of the force was as anxious as the chief to catch him, and kept a sharp lookout for him day and night, he seemed as immune from capture as a mosquito buzzing around the head of an armless man.
Hodgins stationed detectives outside the Bulletin office, in the hope of being able to apprehend him when he came to deliver the pictures; but, greatly to his chagrin, these sleuths reported that the Camera Chap did not come to the Bulletin office. Evidently anticipating this ambush, he had made secret arrangements with Carroll to get the films to the Bulletin without bringing them in person; but what this method was the police were unable to find out.
Hodgins also sent detectives, armed with a warrant, up to the mountain retreat of Hawley’s host; but the latter informed the policemen that he had not seen the Camera Chap for several days. Evidently Hawley, anticipating this move, too, had seen fit to change his boarding house; and the police were unable to find his present residence.
Through the medium of the Chronicle, the chief of police appealed to all good citizens to aid in the capture[Pg 32] of the “notorious camera bandit.” Had this appeal met with a general response, the chances are that Hawley would soon have been caught; but, fortunately for him, the sympathies of the citizens of Oldham were largely on his side. The new anticamera law was not proving at all popular. People thought it a shame that the Bulletin should be discriminated against, and the public in general was rather pleased than otherwise by Hawley’s success in dodging the police.
But at last Hawley’s phenomenal luck deserted him. Chief Hodgins, strolling along Main Street one afternoon, saw a sight which astonished him so much that for a moment he was inclined to believe himself a victim of hallucinations.
There, only a few yards ahead of him, stood a man with a camera in his hand, photographing an ornamental fountain in which several urchins were paddling and splashing—a thing forbidden by law, but ignored by the indolent police.