Deputy he
no longer resented being known as a "rough neck" or a "flat foot." As
an official, he believed in roughness; it was his right; and one touch
of right made away with all wrong, very much as one grain of pepsin
properly disposed might digest a carload of beef. A crook was a crook.
His natural end was the cell or the chair, and the sooner he got there
the better for all concerned. So Blake believed in "hammering" his
victims. He was an advocate of "confrontation." He had faith in the
old-fashioned "third-degree" dodges. At these, in his ponderous way,
he became an adept, looking on the nervous system of his subject as a
nut, to be calmly and relentlessly gnawed at until the meat of truth
lay exposed, or to be cracked by the impact of some sudden great shock.
Nor was the Second Deputy above resorting to the use of "plants."
Sometimes he had to call in a "fixer" to manufacture evidence, that the
far-off ends of justice might not be defeated. He made frequent use of
women of a certain type, women whom he could intimidate as an officer
or buy over as a good fellow. He had his _aides_ in all walks of life,
in clubs and offices, in pawnshops and saloons, in hotels and steamers
and barber shops, in pool rooms and anarchists' cellars. He also had
his visiting list, his "fences" and "stool-pigeons" and "shoo-flies."

He preferred the "outdoor" work, both because he was more at home in it
and because it was more spectacular. He relished the bigger cases. He
liked to step in where an underling had failed, get his teeth into the
situation, shake the mystery out of it, and then obliterate the
underling with a half hour of blasphemous abuse. He had scant patience
with what he called the "high-collar cops." He consistently opposed
the new-fangled methods, such as the _Portrait Parle_, and pin-maps for
recording crime, and the graphic-system boards for marking the
movements of criminals. All anthropometric nonsense such as
Bertillon's he openly sneered at, just as he scoffed at card indexes
and finger prints and other academic innovations which were
debilitating the force. He had gathered his own data, at great pains,
he nursed his own personal knowledge as to habitual offenders and their
aliases, their methods, their convictions and records, their associates
and hang outs. He carried his own gallery under his own hat, and he
was proud of it. His memory was good, and he claimed always to know
his man. His intu