him. The rest were all sorts of men. Mr. Clarke won over each man to himself, and interested them all. Then he called for the county prosecutor. The prosecutor was a politician; he knew the Ames crowd; they were too powerful to attack.
“You are excused,” said the foreman.
There was a scene; the prosecutor knew his rights.
“Do you think, Mr. Clarke,” he cried, “that you can run the grand jury and my office, too?”
“Yes,” said Clarke, “I will run your office if I want to; and I want to. You’re excused.”
Mr. Clarke does not talk much about his doings that summer; he isn’t the talking sort. But he does say that all he did was to apply simple business methods to his problem. In action, however, these turned out to be the most approved police methods. He hired a lot of local detectives who, he knew, would talk about what they were doing, and thus would be watched by the police. Having thus thrown a false scent, he hired some other detectives whom nobody knew about. This was expensive; so were many of the other things he did; but he was bound to win, so he paid the price, drawing freely on his own and his colleagues’ pockets. (The total cost to the county for a long summer’s
