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The Confidence King
by
“Come, come, Kennedy,” interrupted Burke. “Surely you are getting in wrong here. This can’t be the man.”
Craig shook his head decidedly. “You can make the arrest or not, Burke, as you choose. If not, I am through. If so – I’ll take all the responsibility.”
Reluctantly Burke yielded. The man protested; the woman cried; a crowd collected.
The train-gate shut with a bang. As it did so the man’s demeanour changed instantly. ” There,” he shouted angrily, “‘you have made us miss our train. I’ll have you in jail for this. Come on now to the nearest magistrate’s court. I’ll have my rights as an American citizen. You have carried your little joke too far. Knight is my name – John Knight, of Omaha, pork-packer. Come on now. I’ll see that somebody suffers for this if I have to stay in New York a year. It’s an outrage – an outrage.”
Burke was now apparently alarmed – more at the possibility of the humorous publicity that would follow such a mistake by the secret service than at anything else. However, Kennedy did not weaken, and on general principles I stuck to Kennedy.
“Now,” said the man surlily while he placed “Mrs. Knight” in as easy a chair as he could find in the judge’s chambers, “what is the occasion of all this row? Tell the judge what a bad man from Bloody Gulch I am.”
O’Connor had arrived, having broken all speed laws and perhaps some records on the way up from headquarters. Kennedy laid the Scotland Yard finger-prints on the table. Beside them he placed those taken by O’Connor and Burke in New York.
“Here,” he began, “we have the finger-prints of a man who was one of the most noted counterfeiters in Great Britain. Beside them are those of a man who succeeded in passing counterfeits of several kinds recently in New York. Some weeks later this third set of prints was taken from a man who was believed to be the same person.”
The magistrate was examining the three sets of prints. As he came to the third, he raised his head as if about to make a remark, when Kennedy quickly interrupted.
“One moment, sir. You were about to say that finger-prints never change, never show such variations as these. That is true. There are fingerprints of people taken fifty years ago that are exactly the same as their finger-prints of to-day. They don’t change – they are permanent. The fingerprints of mummies can be deciphered even after thousands of years. But,” he added slowly, “you can change fingers.”
The idea was so startling that I could scarcely realise what he meant at first. I had read of the wonderful work of the surgeons of the Rockefeller Institute in transplanting tissues and even whole organs, in grafting skin and in keeping muscles artificially alive for days under proper conditions. Could it be that a man had deliberately amputated his fingers and grafted on new ones? Was the stake sufficient for such a game? Surely there must be some scars left after such grafting. I picked up the various sets of prints. It was true that the third set was not very clear, but there certainly were no scars there.
“Though there is no natural changeability of finger-prints,” pursued Kennedy, “such changes can be induced, as Dr. Paul Prager of Vienna has shown, by acids and other reagents, by grafting and by injuries. Now, is there any method by which lost finger-tips can be restored? I know of one case where the end of a finger was taken off and only one-sixteenth inch of the nail was left. The doctor incised the edges of the granulating surface and then led the granulations on by what is known in the medical profession as the ‘sponge graft.’ He grew a new finger-tip.