The discovery of the forgeries were first made by one of the assistants of C. G. Warner, general auditor of the Missouri Pacific Railroad at St. Louis. The assistant auditor discovered the forgeries, he having noticed the numbers on the tickets were irregular.
At this time I was Chief Special Agent for the Missouri Pacific, and the case was placed in my hands for investigation, by General Auditor Warner.
After a lot of tedious work, the details of which would not interest the reader, I, with the help of some of my assistants, learned that Rice and Lands were railroad ticket scalpers and had offices in several cities in the middle west, from which they had supplied other scalpers with large quantities of these forged tickets. I also learned that Rice and Lands had established a private printing office in a small town in western Illinois, in which the counterfeit tickets were printed; the forms of which had been arranged by Rice, who had been a chief clerk for a number of years for a General Passenger and Ticket Agent of one of the large railroad systems of the West, and was, therefore, thoroughly conversant with the details of all of the ticket business.
Lands was a crooked lawyer, who had married into an eminently respectable family of the State of Indiana. Rice was a single man, but was engaged to a young lady, whose family was of considerable prominence. He was also of a good family and had always borne an excellent reputation, and was considered a bright, affable young business man.
After learning all of these facts and reporting them to the proper officials of the Missouri Pacific System, I was instructed to locate and arrest Rice and Lands, charging them with having made and issued the counterfeit railroad tickets. I had but little trouble in locating Lands, but, as I considered Rice the principal, knowing that he was the man who had gotten up the forms of the counterfeit tickets, I decided to quietly place Lands under surveillance, by one of my operatives, and then took up the search for Rice, as I desired to arrest him first, being very sure that I could apprehend Lands any time that I wanted to do so.
I traced Rice from Kansas City to Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, but lost trace of him there, and after consuming several days with no results, I decided to return to St. Louis, and to visit the town in Iowa where Rice's betrothed resided with her parents, which I did.
After spending several days near the home of this young lady, I was finally rewarded by learning the alias that Rice had assumed, and his whereabouts at that time, and I immediately, as the traveling men say, "doubled back" to the Pacific Coast, boarding a steamship at San Francisco for Victoria, B. C., and from there went overland to a camp in the Kassiar Mountains, British Columbia, which is about 357 miles from Victoria.
On arriving there I learned that Rice had left but a few days before my arrival, and that he had undoubtedly passed me on my way to Kassiar. He had left word with friends there that he was going back to Portland, Oregon. He had been prospecting in the mountains for gold and had been unsuccessful, and had exhausted his funds, so he had concluded to go back to Portland and seek employment there.
I, therefore, returned to Victoria and boarded a vessel for Seattle and from there I went to Portland, where I succeeded in locating Rice. He was working as a day laborer in a bed-spring factory. He was clad in a suit of greasy overalls, when I found him, needed a haircut and a shave, and did not in any way resemble the dapper and stylishly dressed Louis Rice, whose photograph I had in my possession.