A few years later I first encountered Crowe in New York, when he came to see me with a petty favor to ask and an article of his reminiscences to sell. He had meantime become a kind of peregrine reformer, lecturer, pamphlet seller and semi-mendicant, now blessed with a little evanescent prosperity, again sleeping in Bowery flops and eking out a miserable living by any device short of lawbreaking. And he has called upon me or crossed my wanderings repeatedly in the intervening years, always voluble, plausible and a trifle pathetic. Now he is off to call upon the President, to memorialize a governor or to address a provincial legislature. He is bent on abolishing prisons, has a florid set-speech, which he delivers in a big sententious voice, and perhaps he impresses his rural hearers, though the tongue in the cheek and the twinkle in the eye never escape those who know him of old. This grand rascal is no longer young--rising sixty, I should say--and life has treated him shabbily in the last twenty years. Yet neither poverty nor age has quite taken from him a certain leonine robustness, a kind of ruined strength and power that shines a little sadly through his charlatanry. Only once or twice, when he has lost himself in the excited recounting of his adventures, of his hardy old crimes, of the Cudahy kidnapping, have I ever caught in him the quality that must once have been his--the force, the fire that made his name shudder around the world. Convention has beaten him as it beats them all, these brave and baneful men. It has made a sidling apologist of a great rogue in Crowe’s case--and what a sad declension! IX THE WHITLA KIDNAPPING Abduction is always a puzzling crime. The risks are so great, the punishment, of late years, so severe, and the chances of profit so slight that logic seems to demand some special and extraordinary motive on the part of the criminal. It is true that kidnapping is one of the easiest crimes to commit. It is also a fact that it seems to offer a quick and promising way of extorting large sums of money without physical risk. But every offender must know that the chances of success are of the most meager.