XV
THE MAN WITH THREE WIVES
One of the first things to strike the eye of the visitor who enters the library-den of William J. Quinn—known to his friends and former associates in the United States Secret Service as "Bill"—is a frame which stands upon the mantel and contains the photographs of three exceptionally pretty women.
Anyone who doesn't know that this room is consecrated to relics of the exploits of the various governmental detective services might be pardoned for supposing that the three pictures in the single frame are photographs of relatives. Only closer inspection will reveal the fact that beneath them appears a transcript from several pages of a certain book of records—the original of which is kept at the New York City Hall.
These pages state that....
But suppose we let Quinn tell the story, just as he told it one cold November night while the wind was whistling outside and the cheery warmth of the fire made things extremely snug within.
Secret Service men [said Quinn] divide all of their cases into two classes—those which call for quick action and plenty of it and those which demand a great deal of thought and only an hour or so of actual physical work. Your typical operative—Allison, who was responsible for solving the poison-pen puzzle, for example, or Hal Preston, who penetrated the mystery surrounding the murder of Montgomery Marshall—is essentially a man of action. He likes to tackle a job and get it over with. It doesn't make any difference if he has to round up a half dozen counterfeiters at the point of a single revolver—as Tommy Callahan once did—or break up a gang of train robbers who have sworn never to be taken alive. As long as he has plenty of thrills and excitement, as long as he is able to get some joy out of life, he doesn't give a hang for the risk. That's his business and he loves it.
But it's the long-drawn-out cases which he has to ponder over and consider from a score of angles that, in the vernacular of vaudeville, capture his Angora. Give him an assignment where he can trail his man for a day or two, get the lay of the land, and then drop on the bunch like a ton o' brick and everything's fine. Give him one of the other kind and—well, he's just about as happy as Guy Randall was when they turned him loose with instructions to get something on Carl Cheney.
Remember during the early days of the war when the papers were full of stories from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Milwaukee and points west about gatherings of pro-German sympathizers who were determined to aid the Fatherland? Theoretically, we were neutral at that time and these people had all the scope they wanted. They did not confine themselves to talk, however, but laid several plans which were destined to annoy the government and to keep several hundred operatives busy defeating them—for they were aimed directly at our policy of neutrality.