The Lake Shore gang consisted of the following types: the desperate laboring man (?) who is willing to grapple with your throat on account of a dollar or two--I mean the hold-up man that you hear so much about in the Middle West; the discouraged criminal who knew that he was discouraged, but thought he might possibly, under spurious cover, get a "stake" on professionally criminal lines; the hard-up man who was led along by the other conspirators in the game; the boy of eighteen, who had made some miserable mistake in his home, had to get away from that home, and had fallen into the hands of scheming men; and the woman of the street who had her reasons for knowing anything about the Lake Shore gang. The Lake Shore gang, it can be said, grew out of the idea that when you can be imposed upon, you will stand for it. What they are doing now I do not know. It may be that they are amusing themselves as in days of old. All I want to say here is that this was the company I had good chances of falling in with when striking the general manager's terminals on the lakes. The Lake Shore Railroad and the Nickel Plate, as it was called, took up the full responsibility of all tramp nonsense after certain department heads had done their best to relieve both of these roads of pronounced deficiencies and crimes. As I have said, I found that, at Ashtabula, the tramps were burning up the Lake Shore Company's coal, the Nickel Plate Company's coal--put the two together and call them the Vanderbilt lines if you like--and that the Lake Shore gang were robbing people right and left on every freight train that went over the Vanderbilt lines. I found also that the Vanderbilt lines did not pay the slightest respect to the protection of their patrons, as regards pickpockets and other gentry of that character, on their passenger trains, otherwise than by employing a man who feverishly ran up and down their territory--let us say between Toledo and Cleveland--took his lunches where he could buy them for from ten to twenty-five cents, and tried to carry out the whole game for the Vanderbilt interests between the points mentioned. This man was supposed to be the police force of that district. The reason he took so many quick lunches is because he had too much to do. In some ways, I believe that he tried to serve the Vanderbilt interests. But no man can cover such a district, if he be all alone--as it is alleged that he was--and attend to all of the details that will come up in police life on the Vanderbilt lines or on any other line. This man I did not meet. I heard about him, from time to time, taking hungry lunches on the Lake Shore trains, passenger and freight.