Never-Fail Blake | Page 9

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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