Indeed, a detective who cannot break one of his rules and change his mind to suit the occasion, can never hope to be a success.
Little things, sudden ideas which seize hold of your mind, often lead you to results which the best formed plans could never do. Such has ever been my experience, and such also is the experience of my old pupil, Dave Doyle, who began to study under me at about the same time as Sam Kean.
Dave was a smart fellow, and a born detective, although a young man of no education at all, and for this reason unfitted for certain kinds of detective work.
Let me introduce one case in particular where Dave succeeded by following a sudden idea which seized hold of me. Later on Dave began to get ideas of his own.
When Mr. Philander Camm defaulted and ran away with $100,000 of the funds of the Bakers’ Bank there was the biggest kind of a row.
A big reward was offered to any detective who would get him, and there seemed to be a chance that some one might earn it, for it was believed that the thief hadn’t left New York.
I had just gone to work for Old King Brady then, and when I read the account in the papers I says to myself:
I went up to the office that morning and spoke to Mr. Brady about it.
“Well,” he says, “and if you did get him the reward wouldn’t be yours by rights, but mine. Ain’t you working for me?”
Now I hadn’t looked at the thing that way, but I saw right off he was right.
“I’d like to get it for you then,” I says.
“That’s another part of speech,” says he, “and maybe you can. I ain’t got time to work up the case myself. Go ahead and see what you can do. If anything comes out of it I won’t be mean.”
“Of course I do,” says he. “You’ve got to take up a big case some time, and this will be a good one to begin with. You’ll have every detective of any account against you, though. There ain’t one chance in forty that you’ll succeed.”
But Old King Brady always did put things straight and call a spade a spade.
“Don’t ask me,” he says. “Make up some plan for yourself.”
“I s’pose he’ll try and get away by some of the railroads?” I says. “I might go and watch for him at the depot.”
“Can you watch all the depots at once, Doyle?” he says, laughing. “Then there’s the steamboats, too, and you know he might take a notion to walk.”