Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 44, No. 5, September 28, 1929

Old “Never-Let-Go” Tells What Makes a Detective — and Relates the Strange Case of the “Weazened Wonder” of Erie

Editor’s Note: —A year ago one of the greatest detectives the world has ever known died. He was John Wilson Murray, Chief Inspector of Criminal Investigation of the Department of Justice of the Province of Ontario. His career was one of the most amazing a man ever had, for more than thirty years in the grim business of the manhunt. Fortunately for readers of Detective Fiction Weekly, John Wilson Murray told the story of his life to his close friend and collaborator, Victor Speer, and we are able here to present the gripping chronicle.

Chapter I The Grave in the Swamp

In a tangled swamp on a farm near Galt, in the County of Waterloo, Province of Ontario, Canada, one August, searchers were hunting for the body of a farmer’s wife. She had disappeared, and blood by the wood pile, and near the house, told of a crime and the hiding of the body.

One of the party beating the swamp came upon a half dug grave. He kept silence as to his discovery, and, when night fell, he secreted himself in the thick brush near the grave and waited, in the faint hope that the murderer would return and finish his task.

It was bright moonlight overhead. In the thicket o£ the swamp all was gloom, save for a broken filtering of pale light where the underbrush and tall brier had been thinned out. It was a lonely, dismal place. An owl’s wailing and the swamp-frog’s croaking were the only sounds. The hours passed. Midnight came and went. Not even a lizard appeared by the grave. The watcher was about to creep closer and ease his limbs, when a rustle sounded in the brush, a noise like the wind swishing a bush. It ceased, then came again, then all was still. Suddenly, on the side of the grave farthest from the watcher, a figure crept swiftly out of the thicket and stood erect.

The moon shone full upon him. He was tall and broad shouldered, with a pose like that in the old-fashioned prints of heroic figures of the ancient wars. He wore knee boots, with a long, loose coat reaching to their tops, and buttoned to the chin. A slouch hat, pulled well down on the forehead, shaded his face. In his left hand he held a spade. He paused by the grave, thrust his spade into the earth, and left it upright like a headstone, then shoved back the hat, and knelt on all fours, with his face close to the ground, for all the world like a bloodhound sniffing for a scent. On hands and knees he crept around and around the grave. Finally, from a pocket of the long coat, he produced a tiny lamp, and turning its light full upon the ground, he resumed his circling of the grave, his face not five inches from the earth, his eyes searching every foot of ground.

For half an hour this creeping around the grave continued. Then the figure squatted by the mound of earth and sat motionless. Suddenly he arose, seized the spade, and swiftly tossed away the mound of earth dug from the grave. All was done so noiselessly, so deftly, that it seemed unreal, phantomlike, the antics of a ghost. As he neared the bottom of the pile of earth his care redoubled. At length he began to dig around the remnant of the pile as if making a second grave beside the first. He had left about four inches of the earth from the first grave lying undisturbed on the site of the second grave. It was thick, sticky soil, that held together firmly, being less watery than elsewhere in the swamp, yet full of heaviness and moisture.

He dug cautiously, sinking the spade about four inches in the soil, then driving it under, as would a man in cutting sod. When he thus had cut under the entire remnant of earth from the first grave, he cleared a space on the ground beside it, and as one would turn a pancake on the griddle, he flipped earth out and turned it onto the cleared space, so that the remnant of soil from the first grave was underneath. He then painstakingly lifted away the upper layer, and thus exposed to view the soil from the first grave, precisely as it had formed the surface or top of the earth before the digging of the grave began. He knelt over this earth as a mother over her child. He turned the light of the little lamp full upon it. Then he grunted, a subdued, deep, satisfied grunt. With the spade he carefully cut out a piece of the earth about a foot long and half as wide. He produced a measuring rule, and for half an hour worked over the piece of earth. Then he took the earth in his arms as tenderly as if it were a babe, picked up the spade and vanished in the thicket.

Like a flash it dawned on the watcher that this mysterious figure had been searching for footprints. He had found no clear footprints around the grave. The marks there had been trampled by those of the watcher. But on the surface of the earth, where the grave had been dug, the footprints of the digger were certain to appear. So the figure in the long coat had reclaimed this surface undisturbed, and, judging from the one sound he made, the grunt of joy, he had found what he sought.

The watcher trailed after him, ignorant of who he was or whence he came. The gray dawn was creeping into the sky as he entered his hotel at Galt. A sleepy porter was lolling on a table — footsteps sounded in the hall, and past the office door on his way upstairs went the figure of the long coat. The coat was in his arms, borne carefully, for it concealed the precious piece of earth.

“Who is that?” asked the watcher.

“That!” said the porter with a yawn. “That’s Old Never-let-go.”

“Who?” asked the watcher.

“Old Never-let-go,” answered the porter. “Murray, John Murray, Old Never-let-go, the greatest genuine detective that this here or any other bloomin’ country can produce. He’s snoopin’ around now a gettin’ ready to fix a hangin’ for whoever killed Mrs. Orr.”

The figure of the long coat was in his room before the porter finished. He had laid the piece of earth on a table and turned the light full on it. A footprint showed, distinct in every detail of the shoe’s outline. He remeasured it carefully, noting the measurements on a slip of paper. When he finished he compared this slip with another slip. Then he went to a closet and drew forth an old shoe, earth stained and worn. He gently lowered this shoe into the imprint on the piece of earth. It matched. The clew held true.

After locking the piece of earth in an iron box, he went straight to the jail, where a suspect was under guard. He entered the cell and slammed the door. An hour later he returned to his room at the hotel, glanced longingly at the bed, then at his watch, shook his head, and five minutes later was in a cold bath. When he appeared in the hotel office shortly after, the newspaper men and others, including the watcher in the swamp, crowded around him.

“Any news?” they asked eagerly.

“The murderer’s locked up,” was the reply.

“Who is he?”

“Jim Allison, the chore boy. He’ll confess before he’s hanged.”

Allison was tried and convicted, and he confessed before he was hanged. At the trial there was no inkling of the all-night labors in the swamp or of the fatal footprint. The case was complete, without a revelation of the methods of the man who ran down the necessary evidence. If it had been necessary, the piece of earth with the telltale tread, a plaster cast of it to make it still plainer, would have been in evidence at the trial. It was not needed, and hence it did not appear. In a somewhat similar case a few years before, proof of footprints was needed, and it did appear.

“You’re sure Allison did it?” asked the newspaper men at the Galt Hotel.

“Sure,” said Murray, and he went to breakfast.

It was the writer’s first experience with John Wilson Murray, before his death Chief Inspector of Criminal Investigation of the Department of Justice of the Province of Ontario, with head offices in the Parliament Buildings, Toronto. For almost thirty years he was inspector, and, in that time, murders by the dozen, burglaries by the score, crimes of all kinds, totaling thousands, were solved by him, and the perpetrators apprehended.

His career was a record of events outrivaling the detective tales of fiction; for fact, in its fullest scope, is stranger far than fiction. He followed men over two continents, he pursued them over land and sea, from country to country, from hemisphere to hemisphere, from new world to old world and back again. He traveled over thirty thousand miles in the chase of a single man. He shot and was shot. He was worsted in desperate struggles when help came in the nick of time, and he fought grim battles single handed when defeat would have meant death. His prisoners ranged from men of high estate to creatures of the lowest depths. The cases he solved ranged through every variety of crime known to the police records of the world.

He ran down counterfeiters of one million dollars and more; he unraveled the mysteries of murder where life was taken for eighty cents. He had the counterfeiting plates, valued at forty thousand dollars, as a trophy of the one chase, and he had a rusty iron pipe as a souvenir of the other.

Before his death he lived in Toronto, in a comfortable brick house in Brunswick Avenue. A stranger seeing him would have regarded him as a prosperous business man, of placid life and uneventful career. His home life was the antithesis of his official life. He lived alone, with a trusted housekeeper and discreet servants. His pleasure, apart from his work, was in outdoor life, with his dogs and gun, his fishing tackle, or, above all, a boat on the open sea. Beside his desk in the library of his house, were his favorite books on a separate shelf — the poems of Robert Burns, the works of Scott, the essays of Emerson, the Count of Monte Cristo, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Bible. He was an omnivorous reader, but these were his favorites. On the wall, side by side, were pictures of Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln. His den was filled with reminders of his life’s work. There were rusty bullets that came from the brains of murdered men; there were bludgeons, knives, revolvers, and sandbags, pieces of pipe, jimmies, kits of burglars, outfits of counterfeiters, symbols of the crucial clews that fastened on criminals the guilt of their crimes. Each had its history, and in the story of his life all have their place.

And in a gold frame on the top of his desk, in old English lettering on heavy paper, was the following:

Murray used to smile when a visitor read it.

Chapter II What Makes a Detective

“My experience in the United States Secret Service some thirty years ago,” Murray said, “settled my determination to make the detective business my life work. I realized that to make a success of it I would have to go to work to perfect myself in it, just as does a man fitting himself for any other business and advancing himself after he engages in it.

“The detective business is the higher branch of the police business. A man may be an excellent policeman, and yet be an utter failure as a detective; and I have seen many a clever detective who was out of his element in the simpler lines of police duty. There is no magic about the detective business. A detective walking along the street does not suddenly hear a mysterious voice whisper: ‘Banker John Jones has just been robbed of one million dollars.’ He does not turn the corner and come upon a perfect stranger, and then because the stranger has a twisted cigar in his mouth, suddenly pounce upon him and exclaim, ‘Aha, villain, that you are, give back to Banker Jones the one million dollars you stole ten minutes ago!’ The detective business is of no such foolish and impossible character. Detectives are not clairvoyants, or infallible prophets, or supernatural seers. They possess no uncanny powers and no mantle of mysterious wonder-working. I remember a few years ago I was subpoenaed before a grand jury in the city of New York to testify on a matter pertaining to a prisoner whose record I knew here in Canada. The foreman of that jury was a man prominent in New York’s business life. When I was called he looked at me and suddenly said:

“ ‘Inspector Murray, what crimes have been committed within the past hour in New York, and who committed them?’ ”

“ ‘I have not the slightest idea,’ I replied.

“ ‘Oho! So you cannot go out and put your hands on every man who has committed a crime? You are a detective, yet cannot do that?’ he said.

“ ‘I am not that kind of a detective,’ I replied. ‘When I get a guilty man it usually is by hard work or good luck, and often by both.’

“ ‘Thank the Lord we’ve found a detective who is not greater than God,’ he said.

“As a matter of fact, the detective business is a plain, ordinary business, just like a lawyer’s business, a doctor’s business, a railway manager’s business. It has its own peculiarities because it deals with crime, with the distorted, imperfect, diseased members of the social body, just as a surgeon’s business deals with the distorted, imperfect, diseased members of the physical body. But it is not an abnormal or phenomenal or incomprehensible business. There is nothing done in it, nothing accomplished by any detective that is not the result of conscientious work, the exercise of human intelligence, an efficient system of organization and intercommunication and good luck. A good detective must be quick to think, keen to analyze, persistent, resourceful, and courageous. But the best detective in the world is a human being, neither half devil nor half god, but just a man with the attributes or associaties that make him successful in his occupation.

“A wide acquaintance is one of the most valuable assets of a detective. The more crooks he knows the better. I have seen detectives visit a prison and walk through it, recognizing man after man — hundreds of them. I have seen detectives stand before photograph cases and name and describe criminal after criminal, even to the minute eccentricities of each one. A good memory is a great help; in fact, it is essential to the equipment of a clever detective.

“A wide acquaintance of the proper sort is invaluable. Personal friendship, among detectives and police departments of different cities and different countries, is one of the greatest aids to efficient detective work. Detectives and police departments can help one another, for by their cooperation they create a detective system that covers the world. If a criminal escapes in one city he is apt to be captured in another, and times without number the perpetrators of crime in one community are arrested by the police of another, and held until called for by the police of the place where they are wanted.

“From the outset of my career I have made it a point to increase steadily and systematically my acquaintance among detectives, among criminals, among bankers, lawyers, business men, professional men, people of all sorts and conditions. Hundreds of times I have had occasion to be glad I did this. By knowing a man in the right way personally, you will find he will do things for you in a pinch that he never would do for you otherwise, under any circumstances.

“Personal knowledge of crooks is valuable for many reasons. Often you may recognize the perpetrator of a crime from a witness’s description of a person seen in the vicinity. You may recognize a certain kind of burglary as the work of a certain gang. In an emergency you may gather information from crooks that will enable you to lay your hands on the very man you are after.

“Much has been written about crooks by students of the social problem and by scientists. At least all writers agree that they are a queer lot, a class by themselves, with a life of their own and a point of view that is peculiarly their own. They have the characteristic of gratitude in perhaps a greater degree than some other classes of humanity. Of course there are exceptions. But crooks as a whole have a code of honor, or rather a code of dishonor, that is always paradoxical, yet they adhere to it.

“If you do one of them a favor — that is, a turn that he, not you, regard as a favor to him — he will not forget it. More opportunities than are imagined present themselves where, in no way inconsistent with his duty, a detective may gain the favor instead of the disfavor of a crook. The best crooks make the least trouble personally to a detective. They are the hardest to catch, next to unknown crooks who are on the road for the first time, but once they are caught they realize that the part of wisdom is to acquiesce.

“Crime is a disease. It is hereditary, just as consumption is hereditary. It may skip a generation, or even two or three generations. But it is an inherent, inherited weakness. I am satisfied of this. I have seen instances where the identical kind of crime has appeared in generation after generation, great-grandfather down through grandfather, father, son and grandson. I have known men whose grandfathers were horse thieves or counterfeiters, and whose fathers were honest, to become horse thieves or counterfeiters and do nothing else dishonest. In the oldest records of crime we find inherited crime traced through three hundred years, and even longer. The conditions of the criminal may be bettered, just as the conditions of the consumptive may be bettered. The disease may be checked; in some instances it may be averted, but the crime germ, if I may use the word, is there, lurking in the life of the victim.

“Once dishonest, always dishonest. That is the general rule. I believe in it absolutely. Reformation is the exception. The degree of dishonesty may vary, but the fact of dishonesty does not alter. I made up my mind slowly on this point, and I reached my decision with reluctance. But I have seen it over and over again. It is observed more clearly about professional dishonesty than amateur dishonesty, if I may draw such a distinction. The crook who goes to prison once is apt to turn up again in the hands of the police.

“The business is full of vexations. There are times when you know to a certainty the doer of a deed, yet arrest must wait until the evidence is in hand. Sometimes the evidence never comes, and you see the years go by, with a guilty man enjoying the liberty denied to another, no more guilty, who had not the good fortune to lose some links in the chain of evidence that surrounded him. It is the law of chance.

“I believe in circumstantial evidence. I have found it surer than direct evidence in many, many cases. Where circumstantial evidence and direct evidence unite, of course, the result is most satisfactory. There are those who say that circumstances may combine in a false conclusion. This is far less apt to occur than the falsity of direct evidence given by a witness who lies point-blank, and who cannot be contradicted save by a judgment of his falsity through the manner of his lying. Few people are good liars. Many of them make their lies too probable; they outdo truth itself. To detect a liar is a great gift. It is a greater gift to detect the lie. I have known instances where, by good fortune, I detected the liar and then the lie, and learned the whole truth simply by listening to the lie, and thereby judging the truth. There is no hard and fast rule for this detection. The ability to do it rests with the man. It is largely a matter of instinct.

“The best detective, therefore, is a man who instinctively detects the truth, lost though it may be in a maze of lies. By instinct he is a detective. He is born to it; his business is his natural bent. It would be a platitude to say the best detectives are born, not made. They are both born and made for the business.

“The man, who, by temperament and make-up, is an ideal detective, must go through the hard years of steady work, must apply himself, and study and toil in making himself what he is born to be. Sandow was born to be a strong man, but, if he had not developed himself by hard work he would not have become the strongest man of his time.

“As a detective advances in his business he will find that the more he studies and works, the stronger his powers of intuition, of divination, of analysis, become. A very simple broad illustration will prove this. If a detective is chasing a criminal from country to country, and has learned, by study of the extradition treaties, that a certain country offers a better haven than another, he may save himself many a weary mile by going to the country where his common sense tells him his man is more likely to be.

“A mechanical knowledge of the use of tools, a knowledge of the effects of poisons, a knowledge of the ways of banking, of the habits of life of the various classes in various callings, a knowledge of crooks and, above all, a knowledge of human nature, in whatsoever way manifest, are invaluable elements of the equipment of a good detective.

“In a vague way I held these opinions away back in 1866, when, as a young fellow of twenty-six, I left the service in the navy after the war, and for about two years served as a special agent in the employ of the United States Government. I made acquaintances all over the country in those days, many of them being young fellows like myself, who were in the police business then, and later became heads of detective or police departments. I obtained my first experience then in the secrets of counterfeiting, in the arts of burglars, in the ways of the classes of thieves busy in those days in all parts of the United States, and more or less bothersome at times to the government. It was precisely the experience and training I needed at that time.

“Afterwards I was persuaded to go to Erie, Pennsylvania, where I had made friends during my early days on the lakes, including prominent railroad men, and joined the police force there. In the four or five years I remained there I had plenty to do, and it fitted me further for the work I had outlined for myself. I became a detective on the force in Erie. Tom Crowley, a man I loved and respected, was chief at that time.

“Sometimes, when the wind howls and the world is full of gusts and gales, and I am caught where the man next me has a pipe as old as Methuselah, and tobacco as strong as Samson, my mind turns back to Crowley, and there flit through my memory, like ghosts of long ago, episodes of the old days in Erie when I was a sleuth from Sleuthville, and mighty proud of it, too.”

Chapter III The Weazened Wonder

A plague of sneak-thieving broke out in Erie, Pa., shortly after Murray became a detective. It grew to be epidemic. Furniture vanished out of houses. Clothing seemed to fall upon the backs of invisible wearers and saunter into Spookland. Plows disappeared from farmers’ fields as if they had started on the shortest route to China. Horses trotted off into nowhere. Entire shelves in stores were swept bare in a single night, and from one of them twenty dozen pairs of shoes seemed to walk out of sight at midday.

“ ‘We had better order the people to anchor their houses,’ said Crowley to me,” said Murray, telling the story. “We watched all day and we watched all night for weeks, but the stealing went on just the same. Crowley said it must be giant rats, who had a den in the bowels of the earth and decided to furnish it from Erie. He said some one had told him that in India they had a plague, by which people wasted away and finally dried up. He concluded that the plague had spread from India to Erie, and had seized upon everything portable in and around the town. ‘They’re not stolen, they just waste away,’ said Crowley. ‘It’s a case of now you see them, now you don’t. To clinch this, one of the men began to lose his hair. Crowley pointed to it and exclaimed: ‘See, it’s just wasting away.’ I had a mustache that was not flourishing just then, and I shaved it off. When I appeared for duty the next day Crowley gasped:

“ ‘Great Scott, Murray! They didn’t steal your mustache, did they?’

“Finally a new democrat wagon disappeared. It belonged to James Tolwarthy, a grocer, who had left it in front of his store the day after he had paid two hundred and seventy-five dollars for it. The democrat had gone, as completely as if a modern Elijah had impressed it for chariot service to the skies. Tolwarthy was angry. He kept his wagons usually in a hotel shed near his store. When he went there to look for his new democrat he found an old crackey wagon standing in its stead. It stood there for weeks, and every day we went to look at it, as if its tongue could tell us who left it there.

“We searched every stable and every vacant building in the town. Not a trace of Tolwarthy’s democrat or of any other vanished property did we find. A little child can lead us, however, and I came across a boy who said he thought he had seen the man who left the wagon in Tolwarthy’s shed. He described him as best he could. It was not much of a description, but a poor description is as good as a good photograph any day. I would rather have a fair description than a dozen photographs when it comes to going after a man I never saw. I took the lad’s description and started out to visit every farmhouse on every road leading out of Erie. I nosed into all of them for a radius of several miles. I found no such man as the lad described, and no haymow’ hid any plunder, either, for I climbed into all.”

“At last I found a farmer who had seen a fellow’ drive by his house in a new democrat about the time Tolwarthy’s wagon vanished, and the description of the democrat tallied with that of Tolwarthy’s democrat, while the description of the man proved him the same fellow seen by the lad.

“Crowley, Officer Snyder and myself got a team and started to drive over the road the stranger went with Tolwarthy’s wagon. We stopped at every house along the way, but not a sign or trace of him could we find. For a dozen miles we made this farm to farm search. After fifteen miles or more we decided to put up the horses for a feed and rest. We turned off the main road, and in a secluded, out of the way place, in a clearing with about twenty-five acres of pine woods around it, we saw a house. No one was in sight. We hailed, and presently a buxom, blooming woman, about twenty-five years old, seemed to pop out of nowhere and ask us if we wanted anything. Crowley asked for the man of the place, as he wanted to feed his horses. The woman whistled, and out from a clump of bushes near the barn came a little, weazened old fellow, about fifty years old. He reminded me of a muskrat. The moment I laid eyes on him I recalled the description by the lad of the man who left the crackey wagon.

“We alighted and fed the horses. The old man eyed them keenly and looked at their teeth.

“ ‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.

“ ‘George Knapp,” he said.

“ ‘Lived here long?’

“ ‘Me and my wife been here about a year,’ he answered.

“ ‘Your wife?’ I said.

“ ‘Yep, ain’t she a bloomer?’ and the old man chuckled hideously as he leered at the young woman who was standing in the doorway of the house.

“He was as keen as a scythe. I innocently asked him if he had seen any stranger driving past his house in a new democrat wagon.

“ ‘Nope! No one ever drives past here,’ said he, ‘there ain’t no past; the road stops here.’

“He parried us at every point. We searched his place, barn, house, and outbuildings and found nothing. Yet I was morally certain we had our man. As I sat in the shade by the barn I gazed idly at the stretch of cleared land running down to the creek. I noticed a place or two where the sod had been turned recently. It is the little things that point the way to big results. A sign-board a foot long often tells you the road for the next forty miles.

“ ‘Knapp,’ I said, ‘I am going fishing in that stream.’

“ ‘All right,’ said Knapp.

“ ‘Lend me a spade,’ I said.

“ ‘What for?’ said Knapp, with a sudden sharpening of his glance.

“ ‘I want to dig some bait,’ said I.

“Knapp hesitated, then brought a spade, and followed me as I set out for the stream. I halted at one of the spots where the sod had been turned.

“ ‘No good digging here,’ said Knapp. ‘Come on farther down.’

“‘Why?’ said I.

“ ‘This has been dug,’ said Knapp. ‘It’s worm-scarce right here.’

“ ‘Never mind,’ said I. ‘I only want a few, and it’s easier digging.’

“The perspiration started on Knapp’s weazened, wrinkled face. I never dally in my garden with my spade, but I see a vision of Knapp dripping like an April shower.

“I drove in the spade. It struck something hard. I turned back the soil and there lay one of the wheels of Tolwarthy’s democrat buried beneath a foot of earth. I looked at Knapp and he was grinning in a sickly sort of way. I called Crowley and Snyder and arrested Knapp. Then we led him down to the stream and sat down and informed the old man, on the edge of the water, that the wise thing for him to do was to confess the whole series of thefts. He looked at us and then at the water and then back at us. I think he understood. At any rate he stood up.

“ ‘Come on,’ he said, and led the way to the house.

“The buxom woman met us at the door.

“ ‘Get the shingle,’ said Knapp.

“Without a word she went indoors and returned with a broad shingle. It was covered with red dots, which Knapp explained were made with chicken blood. One big blotch was to show where the barn stood. The smaller dots spreading out beyond it showed where Knapp had buried the plunder.

“We began to dig. The first thing we struck was a coffin.

“ ‘You murderer!’ said Snyder. ‘Now we know why you used blood to dot the shingle.’

“We lifted the coffin carefully out of the grave. It was very heavy. We pried off the lid, expecting to see the mutilated body of one of Knapp’s victims. Instead of a pallid face and glazed eyes we found dozens of boxes of shoes. Knapp chuckled.

“ ‘Coffins ain’t only for corpuses,’ he said.

“We unearthed samples of everything from a needle to an anchor, a shroud, a toilet set, a baby carriage, forty silk dresses, gold watches, seven ploughs, a harrow, surgical instruments, a churn, a log chain, a grandfather’s clock, a set of grocer’s scales, hats, overcoats, pipes, a barber’s pole, even a policeman’s shotgun, that cost one of the Erie policemen eighty dollars, and that Knapp had stolen from his house. One of us would dig for awhile, then Knapp would dig, and if any one dug more than his share it was Knapp. We uncovered ten wagonloads of stuff, including Tolwarthy’s democrat, which Knapp had buried piece by piece.

“We took Knapp and his wife to Erie, and locked them up. We hired a large vacant store in the Noble block in Erie, hauled in the plunder from Knapp’s, and put it on exhibition for identification.

“In burying his plunder he had boxed it up, preparatory to sending it away in the fall. He said frankly that he had been stealing for years. He explained that the way he did it was to drive into town in a wagon pretending he was selling farm produce or garden vegetables, and seize opportunities in that way to familiarize himself with houses, and then sneak in later, and steal whatever he could carry away.

“Knapp was very angry over having been compelled to help dig up his loot. He vowed he would get even. Some time after he had been locked up in Erie, he called us in and informed us, in profound confidence, that he had buried twenty-five hundred dollars in gold out on his place, and if we would take him out there he would show us where it was. The story was plausible, and three of the fellows got a team, and drove out seventeen miles with Knapp.

“They took three spades and a pick with them. Knapp began a lot of maneuvering, pacing off distances from house to barn, and from barn to tree, and from tree to stump. They followed him, and he tramped about for an hour, leading them through briers and swamps, and finally back toward the barn again.

“ ‘There is the place,’ he announced.

“They began to dig as if their hope of eternal salvation depended upon it. Knapp encouraged them to greater exertion, and told them he had buried the gold seven feet deep to have it secure. They toiled for hours, digging to a depth of eight feet, but finding nothing. One of them, who knew unbroken earth when he dug it, accused Knapp of tricking.

“ ‘This is the place,’ insisted the old man. ‘There is twenty-five hundred dollars in gold in two canvas bags.’

“They fell to again. It was a broiling hot day. They toiled until toward sundown, when the old man began to chuckle.

“ ‘That’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’m even.’

“ ‘Even for what?’ they asked.

“ ‘For the two days I had to dig,’ said Knapp.

“ ‘And there’s no gold here?’ they demanded wrath fully.

“ ‘There’s gold all right, but I cannot remember where it is,’ said Knapp.

“They drove him back to Erie, and locked him up again. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to sixteen years in the Alleghany Penitentiary. His wife was released. Knapp played insane, and beat the penitentiary. He was transferred to the lunatic division, and, soon after, he sawed the bars, escaped, and never was caught.”