"When I was a boy in Chicago there were two brothers, neighbors, about the age of myself and my younger brother, and we were friends. When the civil war broke out I went into the army secret service at the age of fifteen, and the older of these two boys, John, enlisted in an Illinois regiment. Jerry, the younger, was not old enough, but a little later, when the government began offering a bounty for soldiers, he became a bounty jumper. He would enlist, get the bounty money, then desert and enlist over again under another name. He was with a band of young fellows who were engaged in that way of getting easy money, and who found it so easy that they turned to other kinds of crime. "When the war was over John came back to Chicago and settled down as a rather plodding sort of a mechanic. He tried to get Jerry to straighten out, but the younger brother was too far along the road to prison. "In those days the Northwestern Railroad used wood for fuel, and the wood agent of the road was Amos Snell--the same Snell who was later murdered by 'Willie Tascott.' He lived in a suburb of Chicago, and one night Jerry and his crowd went out there and 'stuck' up the whole family--robbed them of everything they had. John was along with them, lying in the bottom of the hack. The police got a clew through the hack-driver and rounded up the whole band. All of them, including John, were sentenced to five years each except Jerry. When he came into the hands of the police a citizen who had been held up on the street some time before identified him as the hold-up man, and on the strength of that the Judge gave him fifteen years. It was an unjust sentence, for Jerry had not committed the hold-up--that was found out later. "Well, John's old Colonel and some other army men and my father got together and got a pardon for John, who had merely gone along with the crowd and had taken no part in the robbery. He went back to work at his trade of brass finisher, but Jerry stayed in Joliet, rebelling against those long unjust years of his sentence. Jerry was put to work in the engine room of the prison and soon displayed great aptitude for machinery. He served out his term with time off for good behavior and finally got out. I met him in Chicago. He was despondent. He felt that he had no chance to be anything but a crook, but he knew the terrible chances a once convicted man runs if he returns to crime. I told him the best thing for him to do was to go to New York, and I sent him on to my brother Robert, who had also known him as a boy. Reform of Jerry.