ocess of opening and reading letters
without detection. He became an adept at picking a lock. One of his
earlier successes had depended on the cool dexterity with which he had
exchanged trunk checks in a Wabash baggage car at Black Rock, allowing
the "loft" thief under suspicion to carry off a dummy trunk, while he
came into possession of another's belongings and enough evidence to
secure his victim's conviction.

At another time, when "tailing" on a badger-game case, he equipped
himself as a theatrical "bill-sniper," followed his man about without
arousing suspicion, and made liberal use of his magnetized tack-hammer
in the final mix up when he made his haul. He did not shirk these mix
ups, for he was endowed with the bravery of the unimaginative. This
very mental heaviness, holding him down to materialities, kept his
contemplation of contingencies from becoming bewildering. He enjoyed
the limitations of the men against whom he was pitted. Yet at times he
had what he called a "coppered hunch." When, in later years, an
occasional criminal of imagination became his enemy, he was often at a
loss as to how to proceed. But imaginative criminals, he knew, were
rare, and dilemmas such as these proved infrequent. Whatever his
shift, or however unsavory his resource, he never regarded himself as
on the same basis as his opponents. He had Law on his side; he was the
instrument of that great power known as Justice.

As Blake's knowledge of New York and his work increased he was given
less and less of the "rough-neck" work to do. He proved himself, in
fact, a stolid and painstaking "investigator." As a divorce-suit
shadower he was equally resourceful and equally successful. When his
agency took over the bankers' protective work he was advanced to this
new department, where he found himself compelled to a new term of study
and a new circle of alliances. He went laboriously through records of
forgers and check raisers and counterfeiters. He took up the study of
all such gentry, sullenly yet methodically, like a backward scholar
mastering a newly imposed branch of knowledge, thumbing frowningly
through official reports, breathing heavily over portrait files and
police records, plodding determinedly through counterfeit-detector
manuals. For this book work, as he called it, he retained a
deep-seated disgust.

The outcome of his first case, later known as the "Todaro National Ten
Case," confirmed him in this attitude.