UNCLE SAM
DETECTIVE

BY

WILLIAM ATHERTON DU PUY

AUTHOR OF
"UNCLE SAM'S MODERN MIRACLES,"
"UNCLE SAM, WONDERWORKER"

WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS BY
S. EDWIN MEGARGEE, Jr.

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1916, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

May I ask you to close your eyes for a moment and conjure up the picture that is filed away in your mind under the heading, "detective"?

There! You have him. He is a large man of middle age. His tendency is toward stoutness. The first detail of him that stands out in your conception is his shoes. In stories you have read, plays you have seen, the detective has had square-toed shoes. You noticed his shoes that time when the house was robbed and a plain clothes man came out and snooped about.

These shoes are a survival of the days when the detective walked his beat; for the sleuth, of course, is a graduate policeman. He must have been a large man to have been a policeman, and he must have attained some age to have passed through the grades. Such men as he always put on flesh with age. Your man perspires freely, breathes heavily, moves with deliberation. The police detective can be recognized a block away.

Or, perhaps, you have the best accredited fiction idea of the unraveler of mysteries. This creation is a tall, cadaverous individual, who sits on the small of his back in a morris-chair and smokes a pipe. From a leaf torn from last year's almanac, in an East Side garret, he draws the conclusion that the perpetrator of a Black Hand outrage in Xenia, Ohio, is a pock-marked Hungarian now floating down the Mississippi on a scow; he radiographs with the aid of a weird instrument at his elbow and apprehends the fugitive.

Of these two conceptions of detectives it may be said that the first is quite correct: that the graduate policeman is abroad in the land, lumbering along on the trail of its criminals and occasionally catching one of them. His assignment to this task is, obviously, a bit like thrusting the work of a fox upon a ponderous elephant. The police departments, however, are practically the only training schools for detectives and it is but natural that they should be drawn upon.

Of the second conception of the detective—the man of science and deductions—it may be said merely that he does not exist in all the world, nor could exist. There is