e of
old Mr. Rice to the spurious will of 1900 and to the checks for $25,000,
$65,000 and $135,000 upon Swenson's bank and the Fifth Avenue Trust Co.,
the forgeries were easily detected from the fact that as Patrick had
_traced_ them they were _all almost exactly alike and practically could
be superimposed one upon another, line for line, dot for dot_.[1]

[Footnote 1: See _Infra_, p. 304.]

[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Practice signatures of the name of Alice
Kauser.]

Mabel Parker's early history is shrouded in a certain amount of
obscurity, but there is reason to believe that she was the offspring of
respectable laboring people who turned her over, while she was still an
infant, to a Mr. and Mrs. Prentice, instructors in physical culture in
the public schools, first of St. Louis and later of St. Paul, Minnesota.
As a child, and afterwards as a young girl, she exhibited great
precocity and a considerable amount of real ability in drawing and in
English composition, but her very cleverness and versatility were the
means of her becoming much more sophisticated than most young women of
her age, with the result that while still in her teens she gave her
adopted parents ground for considerable uneasiness. Accordingly they
decided to place her for the next few years in a convent near New York.
By this time she had attained a high degree of proficiency in writing
short stories and miscellaneous articles, which she illustrated herself,
for the papers and inferior magazines. Convent life proved very dull for
this young lady, and accordingly one dark evening, she made her exit
from the cloister by means of a conveniently located window.

Waiting for her in the grounds below was James Parker, twenty-seven
years old, already of a large criminal experience, although never yet
convicted of crime. The two made their way to New York, were married,
and the girl entered upon her career. Her husband, whose real name was
James D. Singley, was a professional Tenderloin crook, ready to turn his
hand to any sort of cheap crime to satisfy his appetites and support
life; the money easily secured was easily spent, and Singley, at the
time of his marriage, was addicted to most of the vices common to the
habitues of the under world. His worst enemy was the morphine habit and
from her husband Mrs. Singley speedily learned the use of the drug. At
this time Mabel Prentice-Parker-Singley was about five feet two inches
in height, weighing not more tha