The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion by Loren D. Estleman

rest.
    He’d been more bored in Chicago than he’d let on, even to himself. For years, those brief few moments of satisfaction he’d experienced upon the successful closing of an investigation had more than compensated for the hours, days, and weeks spent at his desk, clipping items out of newspapers, reading reports and telegrams, drafting responses, and maintaining stoic patience in the presence of minds slower by far than his own—turtle-brains, to be blunt; William Pinkerton, Allan’s second son, was particularly chronic in this regard—but of late, as he’d come to realize that half his span was behind him, the prospect of merely repeating himself throughout the second half depressed him deeply. For the first time, he understood the motives of the men he’d brought to justice who had thrown over decades of good behavior for the lure of a dollar unstained by the sweat of honest labor. It amused him to consider that he, who turned down such harmless temptations as a free meal for his part in exposing a thieving restaurant employee, might have turned highwayman but for this opportunity.
    There’d been no danger of that; he didn’t even stray so far as to enter a personal expenditure of a nickel into the account-book he kept for the agency. But he entertained himself with the conviction that he’d have made a criminal of the first rank. In order to apprehend one, it was important to understand his mental processes, and in effect to think more like a thief than a thief-taker. In this he had a decade of experience. Certainly, that approach had proven most useful during his interviews thus far in his journey.
    Being of an honest temperament, Rittenhouse would most likely have become a senior file clerk in some business concern but forthe chance encounter that had brought him to the attention of the nation’s foremost detective. He never read a newspaper without a pen and a pair of shears close to hand, to underscore and remove items of interest for closer study, and the pigeonholes in his desk in Chicago were packed with lists he’d compiled of mundane details connected with larcenous events, compiled from reporter’s accounts and replies to telegrams he’d sent requesting further information: calibers of firearms, the bandits’ dress and idiosyncracies of speech and behavior, the nature of the containers in which spoils were carried away; there was no end to his patience with regard to such minutia, and he had a mesmerist’s skill for gleaning data from witnesses who insisted at first that they’d been too preoccupied by personal danger to notice whether the robbers were right- or left-handed or what they wore on their feet. Nothing was without interest, and no observation too unimportant to record.
    He applied this same thoroughness to his daily reading of out-of-town newspapers. While other agents satisfied themselves with a cursory examination of the criminal columns, Rittenhouse made it a point to scan the inside pages containing local advertisements, notices, and items of human interest. When the announcement of a visit by a group of itinerant actors calling itself the Prairie Rose Repertory Company appeared in issues of both the
Kansas City Times
and the
Omaha Herald
reporting the robbery by a lone bandit of first the Farmers Trust Bank and then a livestock auction, he was alerted; when he learned that the Prairie Rose players had been present also at the time the Wells, Fargo office was struck (again by a man acting alone), he was committed. A close study of papers from Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Tannery, Nebraska, settled the question as far as Rittenhouse was concerned.
    He was encouraged rather than put off by the variant descriptions of the robber involved in each outrage. Here he was tall and well-built, there thin and stoop-shouldered; elsewhere, he left the impression of an adolescent boy. He knew a little something about repertory players and