s
time--and the man usually came. His appetite for the spectacular
increased. He preferred to head his own gambling raids, ax in hand.
But more even than his authority he liked to parade his knowledge. He
liked to be able to say: "This is Sheeny Chi's coup!" or, "That's a job
that only Soup-Can Charlie could do!" When a police surgeon hit on the
idea of etherizing an obdurate "dummy chucker," to determine if the
prisoner could talk or not, Blake appropriated the suggestion as his
own. And when the "press boys" trooped in for their daily gist of
news, he asked them, as usual, not to couple his name with the
incident; and they, as usual, made him the hero of the occasion.

For Never-Fail Blake had made it a point to be good to the press boys.
He acquired an ability to "jolly" them without too obvious loss of
dignity. He took them into his confidences, apparently, and made his
disclosures personal matters, individual favors. He kept careful note
of their names, their characteristics, their interests. He cultivated
them, keeping as careful track of them from city to city as he did of
the "big" criminals themselves. They got into the habit of going to
him for their special stories. He always exacted secrecy, pretended
reluctance, yet parceled out to one reporter and another those dicta to
which his name could be most appropriately attached. He even
surrendered a clue or two as to how his own activities and triumphs
might be worked into a given story. When he perceived that those
worldly wise young men of the press saw through the dodge, he became
more adept, more adroit, more delicate in method. But the end was the
same.

It was about this time that he invested in his first scrap-book. Into
this secret granary went every seed of his printed personal history.
Then came the higher records of the magazines, the illustrated articles
written about "Blake, the Hamard of America," as one of them expressed
it, and "Never-Fail Blake," as another put it. He was very proud of
those magazine articles, he even made ponderous and painstaking efforts
for their repetition, at considerable loss of dignity. Yet he adopted
the pose of disclaiming responsibility, of disliking such things, of
being ready to oppose them if some effective method could only be
thought out. He even hinted to those about him at Headquarters that
this seeming garrulity was serving a good end, claiming it to be
harmless pother to "cover" more immedia