we are on the honest game, which pays better." What that was will
appear. Turtle had a large private inquiry office, with two of the city
detectives for side partners, who turned over to him all business in
which there was a prospect of mutual profit. All imaginable schemes of
villainy were concocted and executed there, and with perfect impunity,
too. For Turtle had the ear of all the magistrates, and was in with all
the gangs that made the City Hall of Chicago the worst and vilest den of
robbers that encumbers this earth.

What cause the pessimist has for his boding views when in cities like
New York, Quaker Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco, the City
Halls, those centres of municipal life, hold and are ruled by the worst
and most dangerous gangs of criminals sheltered by any roof in any city!

Alas! that the centre which should be the purest stream within the city
should be a foul cesspool, sending out poisonous vapors to pollute the
life of the citizens!

Universal suffrage in our great centres is a corrupt tree and its fruits
must needs be poisonous.

Turtle gave his friend Foster a welcome at his office and at once
enrolled him on his staff, but virtually made him a member of the firm.
So, between the two Police Headquarters thieves and the two English
ones, they had a combination indeed.

Many stories Foster told me during the years of our intercourse that
were novel and strange, and gave me a view of the social world seldom
seen. Here is a specimen:

One day a countryman appeared at Police Headquarters in Chicago and
announced that he had been robbed of $20,000, and showed how his coat
pocket had been cut open and the money taken. This, he explained, had
been done in a crowd. It was a strange place for a man to carry so
large a sum, and, still stranger, the pocket was cut on the inside. Of
course, a pickpocket in the rare event of cutting the pocket of an
intended victim must of necessity cut the pocket from the outside. The
countryman had fallen at Headquarters to the tender mercies of the two
partners of Turtle. One glance at the pocket showed them there was a
colored gentleman in the woodpile, and as there was $20,000 in the deal
somewhere, they determined to have some share of it. They, of course,
pretended to believe the story of the countryman, but for fear some of
the other Headquarters men might hear and want a share, they hurried him
away from the office over to the Sherman House; then one we