United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
energies in watching, unobserved, a greedy rabbit rob a carrot field.
The game now was his fellow-man and his enemy; not only his enemy, but
the enemy of his country.
In his first effort Jimmie was not entirely successful. The man looked
the part perfectly; he wore an auburn beard, disguising spectacles, and
he carried a suspicious knapsack. But he turned out to be a professor
from the Museum of Natural History, who wanted to dig for Indian
arrow-heads. And when Jimmie threatened to arrest him, the indignant
gentleman arrested Jimmie. Jimmie escaped only by leading the professor
to a secret cave of his own, though on some one else's property, where
one not only could dig for arrow-heads, but find them. The professor
was delighted, but for Jimmie it was a great disappointment. The week
following Jimmie was again disappointed.
On the bank of the Kensico Reservoir, he came upon a man who was acting
in a mysterious and suspicious manner. He was making notes in a book,
and his runabout which he had concealed in a wood road was stuffed with
blue-prints. It did not take Jimmie long to guess his purpose. He was
planning to blow up the Kensico dam, and cut off the water supply of
New York City. Seven millions of people without water! With out firing
a shot, New York must surrender! At the thought Jimmie shuddered, and
at the risk of his life by clinging to the tail of a motor truck, he
followed the runabout into White Plains. But there it developed the
mysterious stranger, so far from wishing to destroy the Kensico dam,
was the State Engineer who had built it, and, also, a large part of the
Panama Canal. Nor in his third effort was Jimmie more successful. From
the heights of Pound Ridge he discovered on a hilltop below him a man
working alone upon a basin of concrete. The man was a German-American,
and already on Jimmie's list of “suspects.” That for the use of the
German artillery he was preparing a concrete bed for a siege gun was
only too evident. But closer investigation proved that the concrete was
only two inches thick. And the hyphenated one explained that the basin
was built over a spring, in the waters of which he planned to erect
a fountain and raise gold fish. It was a bitter blow. Jimmie became
discouraged. Meeting Judge Van Vorst one day in the road he told him
his troubles. The young judge proved unsympathetic. “My advice to you,
Jimmie,” he said, “is to go slow. Accusing everybody of espionage is a
very serious matter. If you call a man a spy, it's sometimes hard for
him to disprove it; and the name sticks. So, go slow--very slow. Before
you arrest any more people, come to me first for a warrant.”
So, the next time Jimmie proceeded with caution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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