Uncle Sam, Detective

by William Atherton DuPuy

"And I know just how much I have on deposit," insisted Miss Dolan, the school-teacher.

"And I am quite sure of mine," asserted a buxom widow who had collected life insurance.

"As a test of my contention," said Gard, "I am willing to pledge a box of candy to each of the ladies and cigars to the gentlemen who will set down the exact amounts of their inactive accounts in the First National bank and then prove their figures correct by application to the cashier."

This proposal appealed to those who had been drawn into the incipient controversy. Next day they asked for the figures, and each had won his reward. Gard seemed chagrined that his theory should have thus gone to the winds, but he cheerfully stood treat.

For he had established a fact very important to him. The inactive accounts of the First National bank of New Beaufort were intact.

This was one of the first steps in an investigation of a financial institution which, while seemingly in the best of condition, was suspected of having been looted for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Special agents of the Department of Justice knew that an official of the bank had been trading heavily in Wall Street and that he had lost. Gard, a member of this new detective force of the Federal Government, had been sent to investigate. Representing himself as a bookkeeper he had secured a position with the leading grocer and had come to board with Mrs. Hudson.

He stayed three months. At the end of that time he reported the shortage, fixed the blame upon the man responsible for it, showed the methods used, cited the accounts from which the money had been stolen, told what accounts were still intact. Yet he had never been inside the bank, had seen none of its books, had consulted with nobody familiar with them, had received no confessions. The manner in which he accomplished these seemingly impossible ends illustrates most excellently the methods used by this new detective agency of the Government.

It was a strange conspiracy of circumstances that brought to New Beaufort detectives from three different services on the night, two months later, that Conrad Compton, the enterprising citizen and banker, was giving his big party.

There was McCord, a plain-clothes man from New York. McCord would not have been in New Beaufort but for the ramifications of the New York police department in keeping track of these middle class criminals who live through the trade of burglary—a calling that is sometimes refined to art. And the police department would not have come into possession of a certain tip if "Speck" Thompson had not done his bit up the river and returned to his old haunts so broken that he chose to become a stool pigeon because he was no longer up to second story work.

Speck had found that "Dutch" Shroder had arranged to crack a safe and that the scene of the cracking was New Beaufort. He had tipped the matter off to the police, and hence McCord's presence in a community that was far from metropolitan. He represented the first of the detective services.