<h2 id="c2">II</h2>
<p>It was as a Milwaukee newsboy, at the age
of twelve, that “Jimmie” Blake first found
himself in any way associated with that arm
of constituted authority known as the police
force. A plain-clothes man, on that occasion,
had given him a two-dollar bill to carry about
an armful of evening papers and at the same
time “tail” an itinerant pickpocket. The
fortifying knowledge, two years later, that
the Law was behind him when he was pushed
happy and tingling through a transom to release
the door-lock for a house-detective, was
perhaps a foreshadowing of that pride which
later welled up in his bosom at the phrase that
he would always “have United Decency behind
him,” as the social purifiers fell into the
habit of putting it.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_30">[30]</div>
<p>At nineteen, as a “checker” at the Upper
Kalumet Collieries, Blake had learned to remember
faces. Slavic or Magyar, Swedish or
Calabrian, from that daily line of over two
hundred he could always pick his face and correctly
call the name. His post meant a life
of indolence and petty authority. His earlier
work as a steamfitter had been more profitable.
Yet at that work he had been a menial; it involved
no transom-born thrills, no street-corner
tailer’s suspense. As a checker he was at least
the master of other men.</p>
<p>His public career had actually begun as a
strike breaker. The monotony of night-watchman
service, followed by a year as a
drummer for an Eastern firearm firm, and another
year as an inspector for a Pennsylvania
powder factory, had infected him with the
<i>wanderlust</i> of his kind. It was in Chicago,
on a raw day of late November, with a lake
wind whipping the street dust into his eyes,
that he had seen the huge canvas sign of a
hiring agency’s office, slapping in the storm.
This sign had said:</p>
<p class="center">“MEN WANTED.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_31">[31]</div>
<p>Being twenty-six and adventurous and out of
a job, he had drifted in with the rest of earth’s
undesirables and asked for work.</p>
<p>After twenty minutes of private coaching
in the mysteries of railway signals, he had been
“passed” by the desk examiner and sent out
as one of the “scab” train crew to move perishable
freight, for the Wisconsin Central was
then in the throes of its first great strike. And
he had gone out as a green brakeman, but he
had come back as a hero, with a <i>Tribune</i> reporter
posing him against a furniture car for
a two-column photo. For the strikers had
stoned his train, half killed the “scab” fireman,
stalled him in the yards and cut off two thirds
of his cars and shot out the cab-windows for
full measure. But in the cab with an Irish
engine-driver named O’Hagan, Blake had
backed down through the yards again, picked
up his train, crept up over the tender and along
the car tops, recoupled his cars, fought his way
back to the engine, and there, with the ecstatic
O’Hagan at his side, had hurled back the last
of the strikers trying to storm his engine steps.
He even fell to “firing” as the yodeling
O’Hagan got his train moving again, and then,
perched on the tender coal, took pot-shots with
his brand-new revolver at a last pair of strikers
who were attempting to manipulate the hand-brakes.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_32">[32]</div>
<p>That had been the first train to get out of the
yards in seven days. Through a godlike disregard
of signals, it is true, they had run into
an open switch, some twenty-eight miles up
the line, but they had moved their freight and
won their point.</p>
<p>Blake, two weeks later, had made himself
further valuable to that hiring agency, not
above subornation of perjury, by testifying in
a court of law to the sobriety of a passenger
crew who had been carried drunk from their
scab-manned train. So naïvely dogged was he
in his stand, so quick was he in his retorts, that
the agency, when the strike ended by a compromise
ten days later, took him on as one of
their own operatives.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_33">[33]</div>
<p>Thus James Blake became a private detective.
He was at first disappointed in the
work. It seemed, at first, little better than his
old job as watchman and checker. But the
agency, after giving him a three-week try out
at picket work, submitted him to the further
test of a “shadowing” case. That first assignment
of “tailing” kept him thirty-six hours
without sleep, but he stuck to his trail, stuck to
it with the blind pertinacity of a bloodhound,
and at the end transcended mere animalism by
buying a tip from a friendly bartender.
Then, when the moment was ripe, he walked
into the designated hop-joint and picked his
man out of an underground bunk as impassively
as a grocer takes an egg crate from a
cellar shelf.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_34">[34]</div>
<p>After his initial baptism of fire in the Wisconsin
Central railway yards, however, Blake
yearned for something more exciting, for
something more sensational. His hopes rose,
when, a month later, he was put on “track”
work. He was at heart fond of both a good
horse and a good heat. He liked the open air
and the stir and movement and color of the
grand-stand crowds. He liked the “ponies”
with the sunlight on their satin flanks, the
music of the band, the gaily appareled women.
He liked, too, the off-hand deference of the
men about him, from turnstile to betting shed,
once his calling was known. They were all
ready to curry favor with him, touts and rail-birds,
clockers and owners, jockeys and gamblers
and bookmakers, placating him with an
occasional “sure-thing” tip from the stables,
plying him with cigars and advice as to how
he should place his money. There was a tacit
understanding, of course, that in return for
these courtesies his vision was not to be too
keen nor his manner too aggressive. When
he was approached by an expert “dip” with
the offer of a fat reward for immunity in
working the track crowds, Blake carefully
weighed the matter, pro and con, equivocated,
and decided he would gain most by a “fall.”
So he planted a barber’s assistant with whom
he was friendly, descended on the pickpocket
in the very act of going through that bay-rum
scented youth’s pocket, and secured a conviction
that brought a letter of thanks from the
club stewards and a word or two of approval
from his head office.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_35">[35]</div>
<p>That head office, seeing that they had a man
to be reckoned with, transferred Blake to their
Eastern division, with headquarters at New
York, where new men and new faces were at
the moment badly needed.</p>
<p>They worked him hard, in that new division,
but he never objected. He was sober; he was
dependable; and he was dogged with the doggedness
of the unimaginative. He wanted to
get on, to make good, to be more than a mere
“operative.” And if his initial assignments
gave him little but “rough-neck” work to do,
he did it without audible complaint. He did
bodyguard service, he handled strike breakers,
he rounded up freight-car thieves, he was given
occasionally “spot” and “tailing” work to do.
Once, after a week of upholstered hotel lounging
on a divorce case he was sent out on night
detail to fight river pirates stealing from the
coal-road barges.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_36">[36]</div>
<p>In the meantime, being eager and unsatisfied,
he studied his city. Laboriously and patiently
he made himself acquainted with the
ways of the underworld. He saw that all his
future depended upon acquaintanceship with
criminals, not only with their faces, but with
their ways and their women and their weaknesses.
So he started a gallery, a gallery of
his own, a large and crowded gallery between
walls no wider than the bones of his own skull.
To this jealously guarded and ponderously
sorted gallery he day by day added some new
face, some new scene, some new name. Crook
by crook he stored them away there, for future
reference. He got to know the “habituals”
and the “timers,” the “gangs” and their “hang
outs” and “fences.” He acquired an array of
confidence men and hotel beats and queer
shovers and bank sneaks and wire tappers and
drum snuffers. He made a mental record of
dips and yeggs and till-tappers and keister-crackers,
of panhandlers and dummy chuckers,
of sun gazers and schlaum workers. He
slowly became acquainted with their routes
and their rendezvous, their tricks and ways and
records. But, what was more important, he
also grew into an acquaintanceship with ward
politics, with the nameless Power above him
and its enigmatic traditions. He got to know
the Tammany heelers, the men with “pull,” the
lads who were to be “pounded” and the lads
who were to be let alone, the men in touch with
the “Senator,” and the gangs with the fall
money always at hand.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_37">[37]</div>
<p>Blake, in those days, was a good “mixer.”
He was not an “office” man, and was never
dubbed high-brow. He was not above his
work; no one accused him of being too refined
for his calling. Through a mind such as his
the Law could best view the criminal, just as
a solar eclipse is best viewed through smoked
glass.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_38">[38]</div>
<p>He could hobnob with bartenders and red-lighters,
pass unnoticed through a slum, join
casually in a stuss game, or loaf unmarked
about a street corner. He was fond of pool
and billiards, and many were the unconsidered
trifles he picked up with a cue in his hand.
His face, even in those early days, was heavy
and inoffensive. Commonplace seemed to be
the word that fitted him. He could always
mix with and become one of the crowd. He
would have laughed at any such foolish phrase
as “protective coloration.” Yet seldom, he
knew, men turned back to look at him a second
time. Small-eyed, beefy and well-fed, he
could have passed, under his slightly tilted
black boulder, as a truck driver with a day off.</p>
<p>What others might have denominated as
“dirty work” he accepted with heavy impassivity,
consoling himself with the contention
that its final end was cleanness. And one of
his most valuable assets, outside his stolid
heartlessness, was his speaking acquaintanceship
with the women of the underworld. He
remained aloof from them even while he mixed
with them. He never grew into a “moll-buzzer.”
But in his rough way he cultivated
them. He even helped some of them out of
their troubles—in consideration for “tips”
which were to be delivered when the emergency
arose. They accepted his gruffness as simple-mindedness,
as blunt honesty. One or two,
with their morbid imaginations touched by his
seeming generosities, made wistful amatory
advances which he promptly repelled. He
could afford to have none of them with anything
“on” him. He saw the need of keeping
cool headed and clean handed, with an eye always
to the main issue.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_39">[39]</div>
<p>And Blake really regarded himself as clean
handed. Yet deep in his nature was that obliquity,
that adeptness at trickery, that facility
in deceit, which made him the success he was.
He could always meet a crook on his own
ground. He had no extraneous sensibilities to
eliminate. He mastered a secret process of
opening and reading letters without detection.
He became an adept at picking a lock. One
of his earlier successes had depended on the
cool dexterity with which he had exchanged
trunk checks in a Wabash baggage car at
Black Rock, allowing the “loft” thief under
suspicion to carry off a dummy trunk, while
he came into possession of another’s belongings
and enough evidence to secure his victim’s
conviction.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_40">[40]</div>
<p>At another time, when “tailing” on a
badger-game case, he equipped himself as a
theatrical “bill-sniper,” followed his man about
without arousing suspicion, and made liberal
use of his magnetized tack-hammer in the final
mix up when he made his haul. He did not
shirk these mix ups, for he was endowed with
the bravery of the unimaginative. This very
mental heaviness, holding him down to materialities,
kept his contemplation of contingencies
from becoming bewildering. He enjoyed
the limitations of the men against whom
he was pitted. Yet at times he had what he
called a “coppered hunch.” When, in later
years, an occasional criminal of imagination
became his enemy, he was often at a loss as
to how to proceed. But imaginative criminals,
he knew, were rare, and dilemmas such as these
proved infrequent. Whatever his shift, or
however unsavory his resource, he never regarded
himself as on the same basis as his opponents.
He had Law on his side; he was the
instrument of that great power known as
Justice.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_41">[41]</div>
<p>As Blake’s knowledge of New York and
his work increased he was given less and less
of the “rough-neck” work to do. He proved
himself, in fact, a stolid and painstaking “investigator.”
As a divorce-suit shadower he
was equally resourceful and equally successful.
When his agency took over the bankers’
protective work he was advanced to this new
department, where he found himself compelled
to a new term of study and a new circle of alliances.
He went laboriously through records
of forgers and check raisers and counterfeiters.
He took up the study of all such gentry, sullenly
yet methodically, like a backward scholar
mastering a newly imposed branch of knowledge,
thumbing frowningly through official
reports, breathing heavily over portrait files
and police records, plodding determinedly
through counterfeit-detector manuals. For
this book work, as he called it, he retained a
deep-seated disgust.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_42">[42]</div>
<p>The outcome of his first case, later known
as the “Todaro National Ten Case,” confirmed
him in this attitude. Going doggedly over the
counterfeit ten-dollar national bank note that
had been given him after two older operatives
had failed in the case, he discovered the word
“Dollars” in small lettering spelt “Ddllers.”
Concluding that only a foreigner would make
a mistake of that nature, and knowing the
activity of certain bands of Italians in such
counterfeiting efforts, he began his slow and
scrupulous search through the purlieus of the
East Side. About that search was neither
movement nor romance. It was humdrum,
dogged, disheartening labor, with the gradual
elimination of possibilities and the gradual
narrowing down of his field. But across that
ever-narrowing trail the accidental little clue
finally fell, and on the night of the final raid
the desired plates were captured and the notorious
and long-sought Todaro rounded up.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_43">[43]</div>
<p>So successful was Blake during the following
two years that the Washington authorities,
coming in touch with him through the operations
of the Secret Service, were moved to
make him an offer. This offer he stolidly considered
and at last stolidly accepted. He became
an official with the weight of the Federal
authority behind him. He became an investigator
with the secrets of the Bureau of Printing
and Engraving at his beck. He found
himself a cog in a machinery that seemed limitless
in its ramifications. He was the agent
of a vast and centralized authority, an authority
against which there could be no opposition.
But he had to school himself to the knowledge
that he was a cog, and nothing more. And
two things were expected of him, efficiency
and silence.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_44">[44]</div>
<p>He found a secret pleasure, at first, in the
thought of working from under cover, in the
sense of operating always in the dark, unknown
and unseen. It gave a touch of something
Olympian and godlike to his movements.
But as time went by the small cloud of discontent
on his horizon grew darker, and
widened as it blackened. He was avid of
something more than power. He thirsted not
only for its operation, but also for its display.
He rebelled against the idea of a continually
submerged personality. He nursed a keen
hunger to leave some record of what he did or
had done. He objected to it all as a conspiracy
of obliteration, objected to it as an
actor would object to playing to an empty
theater. There was no one to appreciate and
applaud. And an audience was necessary.
He enjoyed the unctuous salute of the patrolman
on his beat, the deferential door-holding
of “office boys,” the quick attentiveness of
minor operatives. But this was not enough.
He felt the normal demand to assert himself,
to be known at his true worth by both his fellow
workers and the world in general.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_45">[45]</div>
<p>It was not until the occasion when he had
run down a gang of Williamsburg counterfeiters,
however, that his name was conspicuously
in print. So interesting were the details
of this gang’s operations, so typical were
their methods, that Wilkie or some official under
Wilkie had handed over to a monthly
known as <i>The Counterfeit Detector</i> a full account
of the case. A New York paper has
printed a somewhat distorted and romanticized
copy of this, having sent a woman reporter to
interview Blake—while a staff artist made a
pencil drawing of the Secret Service man during
the very moments the latter was smilingly
denying them either a statement or a photograph.
Blake knew that publicity would impair
his effectiveness. Some inner small voice
forewarned him that all outside recognition of
his calling would take away from his value as
an agent of the Secret Service. But his
hunger for his rights as a man was stronger
than his discretion as an official. He said
nothing openly; but he allowed inferences to
be drawn and the artist’s pencil to put the finishing
touches to the sketch.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_46">[46]</div>
<p>It was here, too, that his slyness, his natural
circuitiveness, operated to save him. When
the inevitable protest came he was able to prove
that he had said nothing and had indignantly
refused a photograph. He completely cleared
himself. But the hint of an interesting personality
had been betrayed to the public, the
name of a new sleuth had gone on record, and
the infection of curiosity spread like a mulberry
rash from newspaper office to newspaper
office. A representative of the press, every
now and then, would drop in on Blake, or
chance to occupy the same smoking compartment
with him on a run between Washington
and New York, to ply his suavest and subtlest
arts for the extraction of some final fact with
which to cap an unfinished “story.” Blake,
in turn, became equally subtle and suave. His
lips were sealed, but even silence, he found,
could be made illuminative. Even reticence,
on occasion, could be made to serve his personal
ends. He acquired the trick of surrendering
data without any shadow of actual statement.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_47">[47]</div>
<p>These chickens, however, all came home to
roost. Official recognition was taken of
Blake’s tendencies, and he was assigned to
those cases where a “leak” would prove least
embarrassing to the Department. He saw
this and resented it. But in the meantime he
had been keeping his eyes open and storing
up in his cabinet of silence every unsavory
rumor and fact that might prove of use in the
future. He found himself, in due time, the
master of an arsenal of political secrets. And
when it came to a display of power he could
merit the attention if not the respect of a
startlingly wide circle of city officials. When
a New York municipal election brought a
party turn over, he chose the moment as the
psychological one for a display of his power,
cruising up and down the coasts of officialdom
with his grim facts in tow, for all the world
like a flagship followed by its fleet.</p>
<p>It was deemed expedient for the New York
authorities to “take care” of him. A berth
was made for him in the Central Office, and
after a year of laborious manipulation he
found himself Third Deputy Commissioner
and a power in the land.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_48">[48]</div>
<p>If he became a figure of note, and fattened
on power, he found it no longer possible to
keep as free as he wished from entangling alliances.
He had by this time learned to give
and take, to choose the lesser of two evils, to
pay the ordained price for his triumphs. Occasionally
the forces of evil had to be bribed
with a promise of protection. For the surrender
of dangerous plates, for example, a
counterfeiter might receive immunity, or for
the turning of State’s evidence a guilty man
might have to go scott free. At other times,
to squeeze confession out of a crook, a cruelty
as refined as that of the Inquisition had to be
adopted. In one stubborn case the end had
been achieved by depriving the victim of sleep,
this Chinese torture being kept up until the
needed nervous collapse. At another time the
midnight cell of a suspected murderer had
been “set” like a stage, with all the accessories
of his crime, including even the cadaver, and
when suddenly awakened the frenzied man
had shrieked out his confession. But, as a
rule, it was by imposing on his prisoner’s better
instincts, such as gang-loyalty or pity for
a supposedly threatened “rag,” that the point
was won. In resources of this nature Blake
became quite conscienceless, salving his soul
with the altogether jesuitic claim that illegal
means were always justified by the legal end.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_49">[49]</div>
<p>By the time he had fought his way up to the
office of Second Deputy he no longer resented
being known as a “rough neck” or a “flat
foot.” As an official, he believed in roughness;
it was his right; and one touch of right
made away with all wrong, very much as
one grain of pepsin properly disposed might
digest a carload of beef. A crook was a crook.
His natural end was the cell or the chair, and
the sooner he got there the better for all concerned.
So Blake believed in “hammering”
his victims. He was an advocate of “confrontation.”
He had faith in the old-fashioned
“third-degree” dodges. At these, in his
ponderous way, he became an adept, looking
on the nervous system of his subject as a nut,
to be calmly and relentlessly gnawed at until
the meat of truth lay exposed, or to be cracked
by the impact of some sudden great shock.
Nor was the Second Deputy above resorting to
the use of “plants.” Sometimes he had to call
in a “fixer” to manufacture evidence, that the
far-off ends of justice might not be defeated.
He made frequent use of women of a certain
type, women whom he could intimidate as an
officer or buy over as a good fellow. He had
his <i>aides</i> in all walks of life, in clubs and offices,
in pawnshops and saloons, in hotels and
steamers and barber shops, in pool rooms and
anarchists’ cellars. He also had his visiting
list, his “fences” and “stool-pigeons” and
“shoo-flies.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_50">[50]</div>
<p>He preferred the “outdoor” work, both
because he was more at home in it and because
it was more spectacular. He relished the bigger
cases. He liked to step in where an underling
had failed, get his teeth into the situation,
shake the mystery out of it, and then
obliterate the underling with a half hour of
blasphemous abuse. He had scant patience
with what he called the “high-collar cops.” He
consistently opposed the new-fangled methods,
such as the <i>Portrait Parle</i>, and pin-maps for
recording crime, and the graphic-system boards
for marking the movements of criminals.
All anthropometric nonsense such as Bertillon’s
he openly sneered at, just as he scoffed
at card indexes and finger prints and other
academic innovations which were debilitating
the force. He had gathered his own data, at
great pains, he nursed his own personal knowledge
as to habitual offenders and their aliases,
their methods, their convictions and records,
their associates and hang outs. He carried
his own gallery under his own hat, and he was
proud of it. His memory was good, and he
claimed always to know his man. His intuitions
were strong, and if he disliked a captive,
that captive was in some way guilty—and he
saw to it that his man did not escape. He was
relentless, once his professional pride was involved.
Being without imagination, he was
without pity. It was, at best, a case of dog
eat dog, and the Law, the Law for which he
had such reverence, happened to keep him the
upper dog.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_52">[52]</div>
<p>Yet he was a comparatively stupid man, an
amazingly self-satisfied toiler who had chanced
to specialize on crime. And even as he became
more and more assured of his personal
ability, more and more entrenched in his tradition
of greatness, he was becoming less and
less elastic, less receptive, less adaptive.
Much as he tried to blink the fact, he was compelled
to depend more and more on the office
behind him. His personal gallery, the gallery
under his hat, showed a tendency to become
both obsolete and inadequate. That endless
catacomb of lost souls grew too intricate for
one human mind to compass. New faces, new
names, new tricks tended to bewilder him. He
had to depend more and more on the clerical
staff and the finger-print bureau records. His
position became that of a villager with a department
store on his hands, of a country shopkeeper
trying to operate an urban emporium.
He was averse to deputizing his official labors.
He was ignorant of system and science. He
took on the pathos of a man who is out of his
time, touched with the added poignancy of a
passionate incredulity as to his predicament.
He felt, at times, that there was something
wrong, that the rest of the Department did
not look on life and work as he did. But he
could not decide just where the trouble lay.
And in his uncertainty he made it a point to
entrench himself by means of “politics.” It
became an open secret that he had a pull, that
his position was impregnable. This in turn
tended to coarsen his methods. It lifted him
beyond the domain of competitive effort. It
touched his carelessness with arrogance. It
also tinged his arrogance with occasional cruelty.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_53">[53]</div>
<p>He redoubled his efforts to sustain the myth
which had grown up about him, the myth of
his vast cleverness and personal courage. He
showed a tendency for the more turbulent centers.
He went among murderers without a
gun. He dropped into dives, protected by
nothing more than the tradition of his office.
He pushed his way in through thugs, picked
out his man, and told him to come to Headquarters
in an hour’s time—and the man usually
came. His appetite for the spectacular
increased. He preferred to head his own
gambling raids, ax in hand. But more even
than his authority he liked to parade his knowledge.
He liked to be able to say: “This is
Sheeny Chi’s coup!” or, “That’s a job that
only Soup-Can Charlie could do!” When a
police surgeon hit on the idea of etherizing an
obdurate “dummy chucker,” to determine if
the prisoner could talk or not, Blake appropriated
the suggestion as his own. And when
the “press boys” trooped in for their daily gist
of news, he asked them, as usual, not to couple
his name with the incident; and they, as usual,
made him the hero of the occasion.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_54">[54]</div>
<p>For Never-Fail Blake had made it a point
to be good to the press boys. He acquired an
ability to “jolly” them without too obvious loss
of dignity. He took them into his confidences,
apparently, and made his disclosures personal
matters, individual favors. He kept careful
note of their names, their characteristics, their
interests. He cultivated them, keeping as
careful track of them from city to city as he
did of the “big” criminals themselves. They
got into the habit of going to him for their
special stories. He always exacted secrecy,
pretended reluctance, yet parceled out to one
reporter and another those dicta to which his
name could be most appropriately attached.
He even surrendered a clue or two as to how
his own activities and triumphs might be
worked into a given story. When he perceived
that those worldly wise young men of
the press saw through the dodge, he became
more adept, more adroit, more delicate in
method. But the end was the same.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_55">[55]</div>
<p>It was about this time that he invested in his
first scrap-book. Into this secret granary went
every seed of his printed personal history.
Then came the higher records of the magazines,
the illustrated articles written about “Blake,
the Hamard of America,” as one of them expressed
it, and “Never-Fail Blake,” as another
put it. He was very proud of those
magazine articles, he even made ponderous and
painstaking efforts for their repetition, at considerable
loss of dignity. Yet he adopted the
pose of disclaiming responsibility, of disliking
such things, of being ready to oppose them
if some effective method could only be thought
out. He even hinted to those about him at
Headquarters that this seeming garrulity was
serving a good end, claiming it to be harmless
pother to “cover” more immediate trails on
which he pretended to be engaged.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_56">[56]</div>
<p>But the scrap-books grew in number and
size. It became a task to keep up with his
clippings. He developed into a personage, as
much a personage as a grand-opera prima
donna on tour. His successes were talked over
in clubs. His name came to be known to the
men in the street. His “camera eye” was now
and then mentioned by the scientists. His unblemished
record was referred to in an occasional
editorial. When an ex-police reporter
came to him, asking him to father a macaronic
volume bearing the title “Criminals of America,”
Blake not only added his name to the title
page, but advanced three hundred dollars to
assist towards its launching.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_57">[57]</div>
<p>The result of all this was a subtle yet unmistakable
shifting of values, an achievement of
public glory at the loss of official confidence.
He excused his waning popularity among his
co-workers on the ground of envy. It was, he
held, merely the inevitable penalty for supreme
success in any field. But a hint would
come, now and then, that troubled him. “You
think you’re a big gun, Blake,” one of his underworld
victims once had the temerity to cry
out at him. “You think you’re the king of
the Hawkshaws! But if you were on <i>my</i> side
of the fence, you’d last about as long as a snowball
on a crownsheet!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_58">[58]</div>
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