The Chase Read Free Page B

ever seen him come and go on horseback or driving a buggy.
    Immensely pleased with himself, he sipped the wine from a crystal glass and studied the leather suitcase. Was this his fifteenth, or was it his sixteenth, successful robbery? he mused. The thirty-eight men and women and two children he had killed never entered his mind. He estimated the take of the mining payroll at $325,000 to $330,000. Most robbers wouldn’t have come close to guessing the amount inside the case.
    But it was easy for him, since he was a banker himself.
    The sheriff, his deputies, and the posse would never find the murdering robber. It was as if he had disappeared into thin air. No one ever thought to connect him with the dapper man riding through town on a motorcycle.
    The hideous crime would become one of Bisbee’s most enduring mysteries.

2
    SEPTEMBER 15, 1906 THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER BELOW HANNIBAL, MISSOURI
    S OON AFTER THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS BORN , steamboating on the Mississippi began to fade. Few passenger steamboats still reigned in style. The Saint Peter was one of the last grand passenger boats to have survived the onslaught of the railroads. Two hundred fifty feet long and seventy-five feet wide, she was a splendid example of palatial elegance, with side-curving stairways, plush passenger cabins, and a magnificent main dining room with the finest food to be found anywhere. Ostentatious salons were provided for the ladies while the men smoked their cigars and played cards in handsome rooms adorned with mirrors and paintings.
    Card games on steamboats plying the river were notorious for their cardsharp gamblers. Many passengers left steamboats poorer than when they boarded. At one table in the gambling room of the Saint Peter, in a quiet corner away from the main action, two men were enjoying a game of five-card stud.
    At first glance, the scene looked like any other in the room, but a closer look revealed that no chips sat on the green felt table.
    Joseph Van Dorn calmly studied his hand before laying down two cards. “A good thing we’re not in this for the money,” he said, smiling, “or I would owe you eight thousand dollars.”
    Colonel Henry Danzler, director of the United States government’s Criminal Investigation Department, smiled in return. “If you cheated like I do, we’d be even.”
    Van Dorn was a congenial man in his early forties. His cheeks and chin were buried under a magnificent red burnsides beard that matched what remained of the hair that circled his bald dome. His face was dominated by a Roman nose, and his brown eyes looked sad and melancholy, but his looks and manner were deceiving.
    Irish-born, he bore a name known and respected throughout the country for tenacity in tracking down murderers, robbers, and other desperados. The criminal underworld of the time knew he would chase them to the ends of the earth. Founder and chief of the renowned Van Dorn Detective Agency, he and his agents had prevented political assassinations, hunted down many of the West’s most feared outlaws, and helped organize the country’s first secret service agency.
    â€œYou’d still deal yourself more aces than me,” he said affably.
    Danzler was an enormous man, tall and mammoth in girth, weighing slightly over three hundred pounds, yet he could move as effortlessly as a tiger. His salt-and-pepper hair was immaculately trimmed and brushed, shining under the light that streamed in through the boat’s big windows. His blue-green eyes had a soft glow to them, yet they seemed to analyze and record everything going on about him.
    A veteran and hero of the Spanish American War, he had charged up San Juan Hill with Captain John Pershing and his black “Buffalo Soldiers” of the Tenth Cavalry and had served with distinction in the Philippines against the Moros. When the government’s Criminal Investigation Department was authorized by Congress, President Roosevelt asked