But it's the long-drawn-out cases which he has to ponder over and consider from a score of angles that, in the vernacular of vaudeville, capture his Angora. Give him an assignment where he can trail his man for a day or two, get the lay of the land, and then drop on the bunch like a ton o' brick and everything's fine. Give him one of the other kind and--well, he's just about as happy as Guy Randall was when they turned him loose with instructions to get something on Carl Cheney. Remember during the early days of the war when the papers were full of stories from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Milwaukee and points west about gatherings of pro-German sympathizers who were determined to aid the Fatherland? Theoretically, we were neutral at that time and these people had all the scope they wanted. They did not confine themselves to talk, however, but laid several plans which were destined to annoy the government and to keep several hundred operatives busy defeating them--for they were aimed directly at our policy of neutrality. As a campaign fund to assure the success of these operations, the German sympathizers raised not less than sixteen million dollars--a sum which naturally excited the cupidity not only of certain individuals within their own ranks, but also of persons on the outside--men who were accustomed to live by their wits and who saw in this gigantic collection the opportunity of a lifetime. When you consider that you can hire a New York gangster to commit murder for a couple of hundred dollars--and the "union scale" has been known to be even lower--it's no wonder that the mere mention of sixteen million dollars caused many a crook of international reputation to figure how he could divert at least a part of this to his own bank account. That's the way, as it afterward turned out, that Carl Cheney looked at it. Cheney had rubbed elbows with the police on several occasions prior to nineteen fourteen. It was suspected that he had been mixed up in a number of exceptionally clever smuggling schemes and that he had had a finger in one or two operations which came perilously close to blackmail. But no one had ever been able to get anything on him. He was the original Finnigin--"In agin, gone agin." By the time the plan came to a successful conclusion all that remained of "Count Carl's" connection with it was a vague and distinctly nebulous shadow--and you simply can't arrest shadows, no matter how hard you try. The New York police were the first to tip Washington off to the fact that Cheney, who had dropped his aristocratic alias for the time being, was back in this country and had been seen in the company of a number of prominent members of a certain German-American club which wasn't in any too good repute with the Department of Justice by reason of the efforts of some of its members to destroy the neutral stand of the nation.