The Sleuth of St. James Street | Page 8

in the
adventure of these cases?"
"What precisely do you mean, Sir Henry?" he replied.
The practical nature of the man tempted me to extravagance.
"Well," I said, "for example, were you never kissed in a lonely street by
a mysterious woman and the flash of your dark lantern reveal a face of,
startling beauty?"
"No," he said, as though he were answering a sensible question, "that
never happened to me."
"Then," I continued, "perhaps you have found a prince of the church,
pale as alabaster, sitting in his red robe, who put together the indicatory
evidence of the crime that baffled you with such uncanny acumen that
you stood aghast at his perspicacity?"
"No," he said; and then his face lighted. "But I'll tell you what I did find.
I found a drunken hobo at Atlantic City who was the best detective I
ewer, saw."
I sat down and tapped the manuscript with my fingers.
"It's not here," I said. "Why did you leave it out?"
He took a big gold watch out of his pocket and turned it about in his
hand. The case was covered with an inscription.
"Well, Sir Henry," he said, "the boys in the department think a good
deal of me. I shouldn't like them to know how a dirty tramp faked me at
Atlantic City. I don't mind telling you, but I couldn't print it in a
memoir."
He went directly ahead with the story and I was careful not to interrupt
him:
"I was sitting in a rolling chair out there on the Boardwalk before the

Traymore. I was nearly all in, and I had taken a run to Atlantic for a
day or two of the sea air. The fact is the whole department was down
and out. You may remember what we were up against; it finally got
into the newspapers.
"The government plates of the Third Liberty Bond issue had
disappeared. We knew how they had gotten out, and we thought we
knew the man at the head of the thing. It was a Mulehaus job, as we
figured it.
"It was too big a thing for a little crook. With the government plates
they could print Liberty Bonds just as the Treasury would. And they
could sow the world with them."
He paused and moved his gold-rimmed spectacles a little closer in on
his nose.
"You see these war bonds are scattered all over the country. They are
held by everybody. It's not what it used to be, a banker's business that
we could round up. Nobody could round up the holders of these bonds.
"A big crook like Mulehaus could slip a hundred million of them into
the country and never raise a ripple."
He paused and drew his fingers across his bony protruding chin.
"I'll say this for Mulehaus: He's the hardest man to identify in the whole
kingdom of crooks. Scotland Yard, the Service de la Surete, everybody,
says that. I don't mean dime-novel disguises - false whiskers and a limp.
I mean the ability to be the character he pretends - the thing that used to
make Joe Jefferson, Rip Van Winkle - and not an actor made up to look
like him. That's the reason nobody could keep track of Mulehaus,
especially in South American cities. He was a French banker in the
Egypt business and a Swiss banker in the Argentine."
He turned back from the digression:
"And it was a clean job. They had got away with the plates. We didn't

have a clew. We thought, naturally, that they'd make for Mexico or
some South American country to start their printing press. And we had
the ports and border netted up. Nothing could have gone out across the
border or, through any port. All the customs officers were, working
with us, and every agent of the Department of Justice."
He looked at me steadily across the table.
"You see the Government had to get those plates back before the crook
started to print, or else take up every bond of that issue over the whole
country. It was a hell of a thing!
"Of course we had gone right after the record of all the big crooks to
see whose line this sort of job was. And the thing narrowed down to
Mulehaus or old Vronsky. We soon found out it wasn't Vronsky. He
was in Joliet. It was Mulehaus. But we couldn't find him.
"We didn't even know that Mulehaus was in America. He's a big crook
with a genius for selecting men. He might be directing the job from Rio
or a Mexican port. But we were sure it was a Mulehaus' job. He sold
the French securities in Egypt in '90; and he's the man who put the
bogus Argentine