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 with my two daughters. Sarah Anne, Mary Adeline—"

The Commodore and Mr. John Huzzard advanced ceremoniously toward the two girls, and Mr. Kent, being a cousin, closed the procession between Mr. Raycie and Lewis.

Oh, that supper-table! The vision of it used sometimes to rise before Lewis Raycie's eyes in outlandish foreign places; for though not a large or fastidious eater when he was at home, he was afterward, in lands of chestnut-flour and garlic and queer bearded sea-things, to suffer many pangs of hunger at the thought of that opulent board. In the centre stood the Raycie of pierced silver, holding aloft a bunch of June roses surrounded by dangling baskets of sugared almonds and striped peppermints; and grouped about this decorative "motif" were Lowestoft [ 21 ]

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title: Page:Old New York 1 False Dawn.djvu/29


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 But a man beyond the range of staff was crouching by the peat-stack, with a long gun set to his shoulder, and he got poor father against the sky, and I cannot tell the rest of it. Only they knew that Smiler came home, with blood upon his withers, and father was found in the morning dead on the moor, with his ivy-twisted cudgel lying broken under him. Now, whether this were an honest fight, God judge betwixt the Doones and me.

It was with more of woe than wonder, being such days of violence, that mother knew herself a widow, and her children fatherless. Of children there were only three, none of us fit to be useful yet, only to comfort mother, by making her to work for us. I, John Ridd, was the eldest, and felt it a heavy thing on me; next came sister Annie, with about two years between us; and then the little Eliza.

Now, before I got home and found my sad loss—and no boy ever loved his father better than I loved mine—mother had done a most wondrous thing, which made all the neighbours say that she must be mad, at least. Upon the Monday morning, while her husband still lay unburied, she cast a white hood over her hair, and gathered a black cloak round her, and, taking counsel of no one, set off on foot for the Doone-gate.

In the early afternoon she came to the hollow and barren entrance, where in truth there was no gate, only darkness to go through. If I get on with this story, I shall have to tell of it by and by, as I saw it afterwards; and will not dwell there now. Enough


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The Glove of Guilt

OR the three thousand six hundred and fortieth time Night Watchman Murphy patrolled the corner in front of the First National Bank of Dayville. On the other three thousand six hundred and thirty-nine times nothing had happened. This time Night Watchman Murphy heard a shot.

More than ten years Murphy had walked this little space of sidewalk at the corner, his cap tilted to one side, his stick swung jauntily. In those ten years there had been little to disturb the tranquility of Dayville's main business corner. Once there had been shooting a block or so away, but Murphy had not been lured from his corner.

Murphy, who was paid by the bank, walked first on the fifty-foot frontage on Franklin Avenue, and then around to the eighty feet on Main Street. At times he stood on the well-lighted corner where his vigilant eye could command both sides of the bank. Here at the corner was the main entrance of the building. All the side windows and the entrance on Franklin Avenue were heavily barred.

Thieves wishing to enter that bank would have to put the watchman out of the way first, and Murphy was not to be caught off guard. After nine o'clock at night all the streets of Dayville were quiet. There was no diversion to tempt the watchman even so far as across the street.

On this night the usual quiet prevailed up to ten o'clock. Once or twice Murphy had peered through the barred glass of the windows. As usual the night lights inside the building were burning brightly, and there was no one in sight.

A few minutes after the hour of ten had struck a cold wind swept up with the inrushing fog from the bay. Murphy walked into the broad front doorway, buttoning his heavy coat about him. Ten years on the job had taught him the chill that could be in one of those fogs.

And then he heard the shot, and the surprise of it seemed to stun him, but only for a moment. He ran down the steps of the entrance to look down Main Street, then down Franklin Avenue. He had not believed for a moment that the sound had come from inside the bank.

But there was nobody in sight in either street, no indication of trouble. In an instant Murphy was at the nearest window and was surveying the interior of the bank. The lights were undisturbed, and he saw nobody. Yet Murphy knew that he had not been deceived about the shot. His ears were good, and he recognized the report of a gun when he heard it.

As he blew his whistle he touched the concealed button beneath the stone window ledge that started all the burglar alarms ringing. Almost immediately the lone policeman who had been patrolling the central part of the town was on the scene. Five other officers came dashing down Main Street in the police department's one automobile to answer the alarm. The bank was surrounded, and if the shot had been fired inside the building, the man who had fired it was trapped there.

“Sure that you heard a shot?” one of the policeman asked Murphy.

“I am that! I haven't lost my hearin',” Murphy snapped in reply.

“Anybody been hanging around the bank to-night?'

“Not with me on the job at the corner,” Murphy said.

“You've boasted a million times, Murphy, that nobody could get into the bank at night without you seeing them.”

“A man is a fool to boast,” Murphy said. “Suppose we go inside and look things over.”

“Can you get inside?”

“I can,” said Murphy. “I have keys to the big front doors to be used in case of emergency such as is this.”

Two officers were assigned to remain outside and guard all possible avenues of escape while the other three with the night watchman entered the building. Whoever had fired the shot must be hiding beneath one of the long marble counters on which were placed the windows of the cashier and the tellers.

Murphy cautiously unlocked the heavy front doors. Police Captain Hoyt, with whom Murphy had been talking, gently thrust the watchman aside and led the way. Murphy and the two policemen, their weapons held ready for instant use, followed at the captain's heels.

Through the lobby they went and around to the little gateway that led to the interior. There was no one in sight. Carefully they searched every possible hiding place. There were few corners into which a man might creep. It took the officers less than five minutes to make sure that there was nobody there. They went back to the entrance again.

No one had left the building; the two policemen outside were sure of that. Murphy still declared that he had heard a shot.

“Sounds fishy,” Captain Hoyt declared. “If there's anybody in the bank building he must be in one of the vaults. He couldn't hide anywhere else. Who is the nearest official who can open the vaults?”

“Mr. Emery, the cashier,” Murphy said. “He lives on Maple Street about six blocks out. He can open the vaults where they keep books and papers and such, and the one where some of the money is kept to be used first thing in the mornin'. But even Mr. Emery can't open the big vault where the real stuff is piled in rows. There's a time lock on that one.”

“We'll get Emery,” the captain said.

The police car sped away for the cashier, and the officers guarded the entrance of the building where the front door still remained unlocked. A small crowd had gathered, but the officers forced them away from the corner. Twenty minutes later the cashier was on the scene.

Emery smiled. when the situation was explained to him in detail by Captain Hoyt.

“Murphy, you have been hearing things,” he said. “How could anybody be inside the bank? How would they get in without you seeing them? And you have already searched the building, and found no one. If you heard a shot it must have been in some other building around the corner. Since I am here it wouldn't do any harm to investigate the vaults.”

Cashier Emery opened the first vault, and they found it empty except for piles of dusty ledgers and records. Another was opened, but nobody was found inside. The cashier went to the one remaining vault that could be opened at that hour.

“How could a man crawl in here, lock himself in from the outside, and then fire a shot that could be heard away out in the street?” Emery wanted to know, smiling at Murphy again.

“I heard that shot, sir,” Murphy declared. “And I'm bettin' that it was inside the bank.”

The cashier smiled again as he began working the combination. Captain Hoyt, Murphy, and another officer stood behind him, their weapons held ready. It did appear ridiculous to them now. If there was somebody in that vault who had locked him in? All the employees of the bank had checked out the evening before as usual.

Emery opened the door. An incandescent light inside the vault flashed into life. Those at the door saw a man stretched on the floor of the vault.

The officers sprang aside instinctively and thrust their guns toward the vault. The form on the floor did not stir. Cautiously, wondering what it might mean, fearing a trick of some sort, Captain Hoyt bent and touched the man on the shoulder. There was no response.

“Dead!” Hoyt said. “Shot through the head. Look at the red pool on the floor—that tells the story.”

“And take a look at this!” Night Watchman Murphy added.

Near the body was a small black bag containing a kit of burglar tools. The dead man wore rubber gloves. In his hip pocket was an undischarged revolver, the only weapon the man had.

“Couldn't have been suicide,” Hoyt declared. “He's a robber, and I'll bet we find he has a record. But how did he come inside this vault? Did some other man kill him and then lock him in here? But what became of the other man. He never left the bank—Murphy would have seen him. And he isn't inside now.”

The cashier had been making a further investigation.

“Fifty thousand dollars for the pay roll of the Dayville Ink Company is gone,” he said. “I placed it in the vault myself the last thing yesterday afternoon. The company always gets its pay roll money as soon as the bank opens.”

Detective Billy Shannon, of the San Francisco Police Department, was on the ground in Dayville at eight o'clock in the morning. There was a special reason why Detective Shannon had been sent down by the chief of the bureau in the city. The baffling case in Dayville gave promise of solving some of the recent cases about San Francisco, provided this latest crime could be explained.

Shannon himself had suggested that he be sent to Dayville. For some time he had been conducting a campaign against a band of clever criminals known as the Grayson gang, and he believed that the gang might have had a hand in this.

Dayville's chief of police was only too glad to turn everything over to competent Billy Shannon. And Shannon had not been in Dayville for more than half an hour before he arrived at the conclusion that this bank robbery and murder eclipsed anything that yet had occurred about the bay.

Shannon decided that if the Grayson gang was responsible for the Dayville crime they had outdone themselves. The Graysons were three brothers who had been operating almost in open defiance of the police. They were noted for courage and skill. But even the Graysons did not make a practice of taking fifty thousand dollars out of a vault without opening it, to say nothing of killing a man, locking his body in the vault, and then escaping from the building without going out of it.

Going over the ground carefully with Captain Hoyt and Night Watchman Murphy, Shannon was unable to adduce any facts which did not add to the puzzling features of the case. Murphy declared that nobody had entered the bank. He explained how he had heard the shot, had given the alarm, and how he had watched both sides of the building carefully until the police reached the scene.

The arrival of the police, the search of the interior, the calling of the cashier, the opening of the vault and the finding of the body and the kit of burglar tools—all were recounted with extreme detail. Detective Shannon asked many questions, but could make no headway in establishing what he had hoped to establish—that somebody had escaped from the building after the shot had been fired. Murphy had watched the two sides of the building, and the other two sides were fire walls innocent of door or window.

If nobody had left the building there were but three possible answers to the puzzle. The dead man might have committed suicide or shot himself accidentally, the murderer might have left by way of the ceiling to the roof, or he might still be in the bank building.

These conjectures Shannon proceeded to eliminate in order. If the man had shot himself, he would have been unable to close the vault afterward, and the sharpness of the report that Murphy had heard meant that the door of the vault had been open when the shot was fired. Furthermore the revolver of the dead man did not show that it had been discharged.

The detective examined the ceiling and found it was solid, glazed plaster. Again the interior of the bank was searched, and even the walls back of the radiators were examined. No man could be hiding in the building.

There was but one tangible clew upon which Detective Shannon could work—the slain man. Prints were taken of the dead man's fingers, but they were not duplicated by anything on record in the San Francisco bureau, as Shannon soon learned by telegraphing the formula. Shannon's next step was to wire to Leavenworth, the national finger-print clearing house. If there were no duplicates in Leavenworth the slain man was not a criminal of record anywhere in the country.

The vault itself yielded no prints of value, although all possible traces were developed and photographed. These turned out to be marks left by regular employees of the bank, and by some of the officers at the time the vault was opened the night before. Obviously the robbers had taken precautions with gloves to leave no prints.

It was not until the finger-print work had been concluded that Shannon gave the word to the bank officials to have the vault cleaned up and the red stains removed. Sydney Butler, president of the bank, arrived as this work was in progress. In the confusion he had not been informed of the robbery and murder. The head of the institution betrayed much astonishment at the news of what had happened.

One of the few positive facts of the case was the escape of the robber and murderer. Of this fact there could be no doubt, for the fifty thousand dollars was gone, and the man found in the vault was dead. Billy Shannon began to feel that he had run up against a wall of solid stone.

The detective walked to the lobby and strolled back and forth, his keen eyes alert for anything, anywhere, that might be slightly unusual. Then he returned to the vault where the red pool had been cleaned away. He examined the ceiling, the walls, and the floor. Finally his eyes rested on a spot in one corner of the vault. He hurried to President Butler, whose office was at the other end of the building.

“I would like the name of the contractors who built this bank,” Shannon requested.

“Snell & Frane,” the banker informed him. “We have been using this new building only a little more than a year, you know.”

“Thank you, sir,” Shannon said.

He hurried to a telephone and talked with the office of the contracting firm. In half an hour a little man in working togs entered and asked for Shannon.

“I guess that I'm the man you want, sir,” he said. “I'm the man who bossed the tile job in this building.”

“You're the man,” Shannon said, leading him into the vault. “Now tell me something. Why did you make that center group of tile figures open at the left, when all the other groups in the floor open to the right?”

“My men never laid those tile that way!” the foreman declared. “Think that I'd stand for a job like that? That's been tampered with, some way.”

“Tear it up!” Detective Shannon ordered. There was a new ring in his voice and a new light in his eyes.

The foreman obtained a chisel, inserted it between two of the tile patterns, and lifted one of the plates off its concrete base. He put the end of the chisel under the next square, and the chisel struck wood instead of cement.

“Off with it, man!” Shannon ordered.

The man bent to his work. A trap door, topped with patterns of tile, was lifted out of the floor of the vault!

“That was a mighty good piece of work laying the pattern on a wooden base,” the mason declared. “The thing they didn't figure on was that there are two tile patterns that look exactly alike and are really exactly different. I'll say you have a good eye, Detective Shannon.”

But Shannon did not care to waste time discussing the process of tile laying. He stepped into the opening, convinced that the trap-door job was a marvel in many ways, the tile fitting so snugly that scarcely anybody would have noticed it.

Shannon found that for a distance of five feet the hole beneath the trapdoor went straight down and was about three feet in diameter. Then it branched off into a narrow passageway large enough for a man to crawl through.

In this dark, underground tunnel, Detective Shannon worked his way cautiously, deciding against a light, and taking the chance of encountering one or more criminals in hiding. For thirty feet he wormed his way through the damp earth. Another few feet and the passageway ended suddenly against a boarded wall.

His ear close to what resembled a wooden door. Detective Billy Shannon waited for a sound. For fully ten minutes he listened, but not the faintest sound did he hear. Feeling along the edge of the boards Shannon's fingers rested on a small hinge. He hunted for a latch on the other side, but there was none. Then he pushed carefully against the partition. It did not yield. Once more he shoved at it, and when he let go the door sprang back toward him on a rebound. The door was unlocked and opened on the tunnel side.

Against the wooden partition stood a large piano box. A faint ray of light trickled in at the edge. Pushing against this obstacle Detective Shannon found that it yielded. He squeezed himself silently out along the side of the box and found himself in a small warehouse.

It was rather dark there, but not so dark as it had been in the tunnel. A door opening into a store room of some kind in front was securely locked and evidently bolted. Forcing up a boarded window in the rear of the room Shannon fixed the location of the door from the areaway adjoining the bank building. Then he started back.

Replacing the piano box Shannon closed the wooden door and left it exactly as he had found it. Next he crawled back through the damp tunnel and out into the bank vault, where President Butler, Cashier Emery, and the tileman were waiting. Giving orders that the vault should be closed until further notice, Shannon took Captain Hoyt and two of his men to the building adjoining the bank, to which the tunnel had led.

This building, which faced on Frankline [sic] Avenue, was a long, three-story brick structure, with several stores on the ground floor. But the particular storeroom that Shannon wanted to see was a small, narrow room on the first floor, immediately adjacent to the bank. It was occupied by a coffee-and-tea establishment, but, although it was still early in the afternoon, there was no sign of life about the place.

Trying the door Detective Shannon found that it was locked. The tea-and-coffee house evidently was not open for business. The four officers forced the door and entered, prepared for an attack.

“Gone!” Shannon said a few minutes later. “This store was only a blind. And since they got away with fifty thousand dollars and killed one of their pals we may have a long chase.”

The detective, leaving two men on guard, hurried to the office of the agents for the building, where he got descriptions of the two men who had rented the storeroom. These descriptions tallied perfectly with two of the three men for whom the San Francisco police had been looking for months. They were the Grayson brothers.

From tenants of other storerooms in the building Shannon learned that the tea-and-coffee house had been opened about three weeks before. Nothing unusual had been noticed about the place until it had been closed so mysteriously two days before. It had not been opened since.

Further questions brought forth the fact that more bags of coffee were hauled away from the store than had been seen going into it. Detective Shannon knew then how the earth from the tunnel had been removed.

“It has all the marks of a fancy Grayson job,” he told Captain Hoyt, as he walked with the latter down the street toward the telegraph office.

He wanted his reply from Leavenworth, and he found it waiting for him. The finger prints of the slain man found in the vault were on record. They were those of a certain Simon Lurch, a notorious criminal of Boston who had served two terms for burglary, and who had finally escaped from prison. The Leavenworth authorities gave the further information that Lurch had escaped with another man, a youth named John Hayes, a first-time offender. A description of Hayes had been sent.

Shannon read this description carefully.

“John Hayes,” he reflected. “I think I know him as Jimmy Herman.”

He telephoned San Franscico [sic] to ask that the dragnet be thrown out for his man. But the dragnet was unnecessary. To Shannon came one of those accidents that happen at times, and often are puzzling. At the depot, ready to return to San Franscico and take up the chase of the Grayson gang, the officer met John Hayes face to face.

“I want you,” Shannon said. “The bank job, you know.”

“What bank job?” Hayes asked.

“And for murder,” Shannon added, watching his man carefully.

He expected some move from Hayes as he spoke, but none came. The youth looked at him sullenly, and then hung his head.

“Old stuff!” he said. “I might as well admit you've got me, but not for murder. I've been double-crossed, that's all. I'm sore. Take me along. I'm ready to squeal. But you'll never hang a murder on me.”

“We'll go up to police headquarters, where you can talk as long as you please,” Shannon said. “And the straighter you talk the better it will be for you.”

“I'll begin now,” said his prisoner as they walked up the street. “I've been double-crossed by men who said they were my pals. I've been in some tight places with Simon Lurch, but I never doped him that he'd turn out a welcher.”

“So Lurch was a welcher, was he?”

“He was,” the prisoner said. “I got wise to this little job of the Grayson gang by accident. Lurch and I had a room on Mission Street in San Francisco. Two weeks ago we got wise to the fact that the Graysons were bunked in the same hole in the next room.”

“That's interesting,” said Shannon. “Go on with your tale.”

“I've known Sam Grayson for about three years, knew him in Buffalo—but he never would work with me—said I was too much of a kid. He and his brothers always worked together and didn't care to take in outsiders. And as soon as these fancy bank jobs began to be pulled around the bay, I guessed the Graysons were handling them. I could have turned them up at any time—but I ain't that kind.

“Lurch and me knew the Graysons wouldn't let us in on anything, and we decided to get the lay of the land, get a line on some of their fancy stuff. Night after night Lurch and me took turns laying flat on our faces by the door between the two rooms. And finally one night one of the Graysons dropped something about their coffee store down here in Dayville. The next day Lurch and me came down here.

“We found the coffee house, all right, and we saw Sam Grayson dealing out a little coffee for a few customers that happened in. And then we found out about the tunnel job. Those sacks of alleged coffee didn't fool me any at all.

“Back in San Francisco that night and the next Lurch and me took turns again listening at the door. We got only a word or two; the Graysons were not loud talkers, but it was enough to tell us that the tunned was ready. We decided to beat the Graysons to it and grab off the coin in the bank for ourselves. So we came back to Dayville.

“We managed to get into that coffee store right after dark. We figured that we could get through with the job and be gone before the Graysons came, because it was sure they would wait until after midnight. We found the tunnel, and Lurch took the lead. I stood on guard at the store end.

“After exploring things Lurch came back and said that it was the prettiest job he ever had seen. The tunnel went right into the cash vault through a trapdoor all laid in tile. The way things had been done showed that the Graysons intended to make more than one visit to the bank. I told Lurch to hustle back and grab everything in the money line that he could carry, and I would stand guard at the other end of the tunnel.

“He went back, and he wasn't gone more than five minutes when I heard a shot, muffled like, at the vault end. I knew Lurch must have run into some guy in the bank and plugged him. I hurried through the tunnel to the other end to help out if he needed me.

“Just as I got by the trapdoor Lurch dropped down from the vault in the dark with a bundle that I supposed was coin. 'Beat it quick,' I told him, 'and I'll shove back the trapdoor to keep anybody from following. You wait for me in the coffee store.'

“I shoved the door up into place, put the posts under it, and crawled back through the tunnel to the coffee house. I was just in time to see Lurch leave the place, and when I whistled to him he kept right on going. As he rounded the corner he broke into a run and gave me the slip in a dark alley. That's how I was double-crossed if you want to know it.”

Detective Shannon chewed at his cigar.

“Pretty good story,” he remarked.

“It's the truth, all right.”

Shannon sensed that it was. His man was telling the truth as far as he knew it. But he was far off on one point—it had not been Simon Lurch who had dropped down from the vault and had hurried away with the money.

“Before I take you the rest of the way to headquarters I want to show you something,” Shannon said. He had stopped before an undertaking establishment. “I want you to look at the man who was shot last night.”

He forced his prisoner to go inside, and they followed an attendant into the morgue. The prisoner gave a cry of surprise while Shannon watched him closely.

“Lurch!” he said. “They got Simon Lurch! And I been thinking he double-crossed me! Who was the guy that croaked him? Who shot my pal?”

“That is what I am eager to learn,” Shannon said. “Instead of Lurch and you beating the Graysons to it, it seems that they beat you to it.”

A live clew at last, Shannon thought. The Graysons had robbed the bank, and catching Simon Lurch there had murdered him for his attempt at underworld treachery.

Shannon put his man in jail, and then called San Francisco over the telephone to say that he had caught his man in Dayville. And then got a shock, and saw his clew disappear into thin air.

“You can count the Graysons out of it,” the San Francisco office told him. “Evidently they didn't intend to pull off that Dayville job until later. All three of the Grayson brothers were caught last night trying to crack a safe in a little town two hundred miles north. A town constable nabbed them. What do you think of that? No, there is no mistake, Shannon. The men have been brought here for safe keeping, and I've talked to them.”

Detective Shannon spent a sleepless night in his room. Behind the drawn curtains he sat propped up in a chair, heedless of the fact that the steam in the radiators long before had been turned off, and consuming a fresh cigar every half hour; at other times he paced the floor, trying to solve the perplexing riddle with which he found himself confronted.

Long before midnight Shannon had confessed to himself that he was about where he had started. The Graysons now were eliminated, though they had constructed the tunnel and had intended to rob the bank. Being jailed by a country officer two hundred miles away at the time the Dayville crime was committed was alibi enough even for the notorious Graysons.

And all other clews except one were eliminated likewise, including the finger prints of the dead man, which had served only to lead to John Hayes. And Hayes merely laid bare as deep a puzzle about the murder as the original find in the vault. The one clew that remained might develop in the morning with an expected telegram, but Detective Shannon was not leaning on it.

And now he was staying awake to figure out some other method of approach to the problem. But he failed even in this. No valuable deductions were possible with the conflicting material at hand. He decided to get new material by hunting over the whole ground again. There was a chance that something had been missed. He would summon together those who had participated in the events immediately following the crime.

When he met Captain Hoyt, Night Watchman Murphy, and the other police officers early the following morning, he went over the whole thing again with them. Lachman's recital was exactly as he had given on the day previous. President Butler seemed to be greatly agitated over the loss of the fifty thousand dollars, Shannon learned nothing new.

The detective spent several hours in going over the reports of financial conditions in Dayville, and heard rumors of an expected run on the banking institution. President Butler could give him nothing new upon which he might work.

“Of course, I am no detective,” the president said, “but it seems to me that you have all the clew you need. You found a tunnel to the vault, found one dead burglar, caught his confederate, and have the latter in jail. It looks to me like a plain case of one crook slaying another, possibly in a quarrel over a division of the spoils.”

“Possibly,” Shannon replied, “you do not know crooks as well as I. I have had a talk with the man in jail. Long experience enables me to read the mind of a crook pretty well and to weigh what he says for truth or fiction. John Hayes did not kill his pal in the vault—of that I am sure.”

The banker laughed. “It is a funny world,” he remarked, “when the word of a bank robber outweighs the obvious trend of the evidence in the case.”

“We'll not waste our time with that sort of evidence any longer, Mr. Butler,” Detective Shannon said good-naturedly. “I am looking for the murderer in a different direction.”

“Then you have another clew?” the banker asked, evidently much interested.

“Scarcely a clew,” the detective replied. “Perhaps it might be called a part of a clew. It might develop into a real one if other parts of it were forthcoming. Has anything at all happened since I saw you last night that might throw light on the case?”

“Not a thing.”

“Then I'll be moving along—you are a busy man. By the way, if you are going to be here about four o'clock I'll drop in on you and we'll consider this part of a clew of which I spoke.”

“Very well, Mr. Shannon. I'll be here at four o'clock to-day.”

The detective left the office. A moment later President Butler's secretary opened the door suddenly, and the banker started.

“Oh, it is you, Miss Crawford,” he said. “The loss of that money has made me nervous. I don't seem to be able to get down to business.”

The secretary smiled and put some letters before him. The banker reached for them, and the girl turned toward the door.

“Miss Crawford,” Butler called after her, “have you taken my letter opener?”

“No, Mr. Butler.”

“That's strange. I cannot find it anywhere,” he said.

He hunted with the secretary, but without success. The girl went to her own office, and President Butler attended to his mail. He was a busy man until Detective Shannon appeared at four o'clock.

“Mr. Butler, I've been trying to patch up that half clew I said that I had,” Shannon reported. “And I am here now to say that I have discovered the identity of the robber and murderer.”

“You have?” Butler cried.

“Yes,” Shannon replied, taking the chair at the end of the desk. “Want to hear about it?”

“Naturally,” the president said.

“Very well. I have been waiting for a telegram on the chance that I might have what we call a live clew. I received the message soon after leaving you. To start at the beginning, John Hayes, the man I have in jail, told a circumstantial story about planning the robbery with a confederate, Simon Lurch, the man found dead in the vault. He told a true story of what happened as far as he knew. But he failed to throw light on the identity of the real murderer, because the man who committed the crime and got away with the money was as much a mystery to him as to me. John Hayes, you see, let him slip through the tunnel under the impression that he was Simon Lurch.

“Now what I have told nobody in town is this—that I found a glove in that tunnel the first time I went through it.”

“A glove!” Butler exclaimed.

“Yes, sir. This glove I packed carefully in cotton and had sent to the identification bureau in San Francisco on the chance that something might come of it. On my suggestion the fingers of the glove were turned inside out. The material being leather, I assumed that there was a slight chance of there being enough of a finger print on the inside of one of the fingers to give me a clew.”

The banker laughed dryly. “That sounds like some wild dream of a fiction detective.”

“I'll admit that it does,” said Shannon. “But it has turned out better than I expected. On the left ring finger of the leather glove the identification bureau found a trace of oily secretion from the pores of the murderer's finger, and by developing it with powder they discovered a pattern with a clearly defined core and delta. It was the only one of all the fingers that showed anything at all. But it was enough.”

“You interest me,” the banker said.

“I wired the formula to Leavenworth after finding no record of a duplicate in the San Francisco bureau,” Shannon continued. “On the reply received from Leavenworth depended my chance of identifying the man who wore the glove—the robber and murderer. That is the telegram for which I have been waiting. And it brought news that the man's print was on record, and gave me his name.”

“Who is he?” the banker demanded.

“His name is Ben Lorigan, formerly of Hell's Half Acre, Fort Worth, Texas.”

“Lorigan,” the banker repeated. “Lorigan?”

“Lorigan,” said Detective Shannon.

“But, supposing that this strange story is true, what good is it unless you find this Lorigan and arrest him for the crime?”

“That is one part of the clew that I patched up since I left you,” Shannon said. “As you say, the thing now is to capture Lorigan.”

The banker's secretary tapped on the door, entered, and announced that Captain Hoyt was waiting.

“Just in time, captain,” Detective Shannon said. “I am about to tell the story of what happened in the bank the night of the robbery. In the first place a sharp, distinct report of a gun was heard by the night watchman. That means only one thing—the shot must have been fired either in the big room, or the open vault. In either event the vault was open, because the shot could not have been fired through the vault door. And it couldn't have been fired in the closed vault and the report been so distinct. Since it is not customary for banks, even in small towns, to allow their vaults to stand open after business hours it is evident that the vault was opened during the evening, undoubtedly just before the robbery.”

“Of course!” President Butler exclaimed. “The two crooks opened it.”

“But there were more than two crooks,” Shannon declared. “And the vault, as we all know, was opened without the use of explosives or tools of any kind.”

President Butler began to show some excitement. “You mean”

“I mean,” Detective Shannon continued, “that the vault was not opened from the inside by either Simon Lurch or John Hayes. The door was opened from the outside, and by somebody in the bank.”

“But,” the banker expostulated, “the police found no one in the bank—and no one left the building.”

“Which made the case look extremely difficult at first,' Shannon said. “It is true that there were burglar tools in the vault, but there was not a scratch on the metal anywhere. No tools were used either on the inside or outside.”

“Then”

“Since the door of the vault was not opened forcibly, and since it was opened from the outside, it could have been opened only by some one who knew the combination.”

“That is rather a reckless deduction,” President Butler said.

“Not at all. I understand that only two men knew the combination.”

“Mr. Emery knew it,” the banker said.

“And you knew it!”

“Yes, of course.”

“Now we are getting nearer to the point,” Shannon went on. “While the burglar tools were not used to open the vault, they were brought into the bank for that purpose. The man who opened the vault came here with the intention of robbing the bank to get money to cover dishonest stock gambling and peculations. But he did not want it to appear that way, of course. He wanted it to look like a genuine robbery.”

“Isn't that rather proposterous [sic]?” Butler asked.

“And,” Shannon resumed, “this man came into the bank wearing gloves. He was an amateur, or he would have known that he should wear rubber gloves instead of leather. The leather was his undoing.

“It was his plan, I feel sure, to go inside the vault after he had opened it with the combination, and then to close the door a part of the way to hide himself and the sound from the street. Then he was going to use the tools to make it appear like a genuine job of yeggmen. He intended taking the fifty thousand dollars and slipping out the Franklin Avenue door while the watchman was on the Main Street side of the building.”

President Butler raised a hand in protest. “Mr. Shannin [sic]. this sounds like a bit of comedy deduction,” he said. “One would think that you had been in the lobby of the bank watching the affair.”

“I hardly deserve the compliment,” the detective replied coldly. “Getting back to what happened—the man opened the door of the vault as he had planned. Then he saw something that he had not anticipated—Simon Lurch had come up through the trapdoor in the tiling. The robber in the vault was as much surprised as the man on the outside. He thought that he had been caught by an officer. He reached for his gun. But the other man beat him to it—and shot him.

“And when the shot rang out it gave an alarm that the man who had opened the vault had not figured on. With the dead man at his feet and the trapdoor open he had a chance for escape. He grasped the only chance remaining for a get-away. He took the bundle of money, dropped into the hole, and went into the tunnel.

“When he went down the hole he ran into another surprise—a man waiting in the passageway. But when this man, thinking that he was Lurch, told him to keep on going, it was easy.”

“Sounds like fiction,” the banker observed.

“But it is not. Would you like to know the name of the murderer?”

“I suppose you mean Emery, my cashier?”

“No, sir,” said Detective Shannon. “The murderer and robber was Sydney Butler, alias Ben Lorigan, formerly of Hell's Half Acre, Forth Worth, Texas!”

The bank president, trembling in mingled fear and rage, sprang to his feet.

“What's the proof of all this?” he demanded.

“Do you deny it?”

“Of course I deny it. You are trying to frighten and blackmail me by making wild guesses about the entire affair.”

“In my investigations I have learned a few things about your trouble with the bank examiner, and your fliers in stocks,” Shannon said quietly. “I did not assume too much, but I did keep my eyes open. And when I talked with you a few hours ago I noticed something about one of the little buttons on the right sleeve of your coat.”

Butler jerked the sleeve quickly before him and looked down at the buttons.

“Just a little yellow clay packed into the holes of the button,” Shannon went on. “The remainder of your suit shows no trace of your escape by crawling through the tunnel.”

“So that is what you call a clew, is it?” the banker asked, trying to laugh.

“Just one of the scraps of a clew that I patched together,” Shannon replied. “Also, I borrowed your metal letter opener, and it did not take long to find that the finger-print pattern found in the glove was yours.”

The banker sprang to his feet.

“You've got me!” he said. “It is true enough. But at least give me credit for one thing, Detective Shannon—I know when I am licked.”

title: The Glove of Guilt


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 that no gun was fired at her, only her eyes were covered over, and somebody led her by the hand, without any wish to hurt her.

A very rough and headstrong road was all that she remembered, for she could not think as she wished to do, with the cold iron pushed against her. At the end of this road they delivered her eyes, and she could scarce believe them.

For she stood at the head of a deep green valley, carved from out the mountains in a perfect oval, with a fence of sheer rock standing round it, eighty feet or a hundred high; from whose brink black wooded hills swept up to the sky-line. By her side a little river glided out from underground with a soft dark babble, unawares of daylight; then growing brighter, lapsed away, and fell into the valley. Then, as it ran down the meadow, alders stood on either marge, and grass was blading out upon it, and yellow tufts of rushes gathered, looking at the hurry. But further down, on either bank, were covered houses, built of stone, square and roughly cornered, set as if the brook were meant to be the street between them. Only one room high they were, and not placed opposite each other, but in and out as skittles are; only that the first of all, which proved to be the captain's, was a sort of double house, or rather two houses joined together by a plank-bridge over the river.

Fourteen cots my mother counted, all very much of a pattern, and nothing to choose between them, unless it were the Captain's. Deep in the quiet valley there,


text: Talk:The Glove of Guilt

title: Talk:The Glove of Guilt


text: Talk:Top-Notch Magazine/Volume 14/Number 5/Untempered Steel


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 away from noise, and violence, and brawl, save that of the rivulet, any man would have deemed them homes of simple mind and innocence. Yet not a single house stood there but was the home of murder.

Two men led my mother down a steep and gliddery stair-way, like the ladder of a hay-mow; and thence from the break of the falling water as far as the house of the captain. And there at the door they left her trembling, strung as she was, to speak her mind.

Now, after all, what right had she, a common farmer's widow, to take it amiss that men of birth thought fit to kill her husband? And the Doones were of very high birth, as all we clods of Exmoor knew; and we had enough of good teaching now—let any man say the contrary—to feel that all we had belonged of right to those above us. Therefore my mother was half-ashamed that she could not help complaining.

But after a little while, as she said, remembrance of her husband came, and the way he used to stand by her side and put his strong arm round her, and how he liked his bacon fried, and praised her kindly for it,—and so the tears were in her eyes, and nothing should gainsay them.

A tall old man, Sir Ensor Doone, came out with a bill-hook in his hand, and hedger's gloves going up his arms, as if he were no better than a labourer at ditch-work. Only in his mouth and eyes, his gait, and most of all his voice, even a child could know and feel that here was no ditch-labourer. Good cause he


text:
Author:Robert Rutherford McCormick

Non-fiction

 * Message of President Robert R. McCormick (1907)
 * With the Russian Army (1915)
 * The Army of 1918 (1920)

title: Author:Robert Rutherford McCormick


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 be ome Error: But at leat M. Caini eems certain, that there is a very coniderable Diminution in the Degrees of the Parallel of Paris, which confirms his Opinion of the Earth’s being longet at the Poles. This we are likely to have better Certitude of hereafter, eeing we are inform’d that this Meaurement of the Parallel of Paris, is carrying on in France by M. Caini’s Sons, M. Maraldi’s Nephew, and everal other young Mathematicians, intructed by M. Caini in this ort of Work.

I have already aid, that all thee Operations perform’d in France, for the Figure and Magnitude of the Earth, could not erve to determine the Earth’s Figure out of France, without the Aitance of certain Hypothees; unles the ame thing were undertaken and carried on in the other Regions of the Earth, more Northern and Southern than France. ’Tis upon this Conideration, that the Royal Academy of Sciences took up the Reolution of ending ome Atronomers to make the like Obervations as near the Equator and the Poles as poible, which are the Places where the difference of the Degrees on the Meridian ought to be the greatet, according to the different Hypothees.

In the Month of April 1735, et out from France three Mathematicians and Atronomers of the Academy, viz. Meieurs Godin, Bougher, and De la Condamine, for the Province of Quito, which is the mot Northern part of Peru in America; in order to oberve, just under the Equinoctial Line, the Magnitude of ome Degrees of the Meridian and Equator.

As to the other Mathematicians and Atronomers of the ame Academy, viz. Meieurs de Maupertuis, Camus,


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Page:Hans Brinker, Or, The Silver Skates- A Story of Life in Holland (IA hansbrinkerorsi00dodggoog).pdf/48

 At the very threshold he turned to say—"Your spinning-wheel wants a new treadle, mother."

"You can make it, Hans."

"So I can. That will take no money. But you need feathers, and wool and meal, and"

"There, there! That will do. Your silver cannot buy everything. Ah! Hans, if our stolen money would but come back on this bright Saint Nicholas' Eve, how glad we would be! Only last night I prayed to the good Saint"

"Mother!" interrupted Hans in dismay.

"Why not, Hans! Shame on you to reproach me for that! I'm as true a protestant, in sooth, as any fine lady that walks into church, but it's no wrong to turn sometimes to the good Saint Nicholas. Tut! It's a likely story if one can't do that, without one's children flaring up at it—and he the boys' and girls' own saint—Hoot! mayhap the colt is a steadier horse than the mare?"

Hans knew his mother too well to offer a word in opposition, when her voice quickened and sharpened as it did now (it was often sharp and quick when she spoke of the missing money) so he said, gently:

"And what did you ask of good Saint Nicholas, mother?"

"Why to never give the thieves a wink of sleep till they brought it back, to be sure, if he's power to do such thinga, or else to brighten our wits that we might find it ourselves. Not a sight have I had of it since the day before the dear father was hurt—as you well know, Hans."

"That I do, mother," he answered sadly, though


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 The Puritan

T has been said in the first section that Bernard Shaw draws from his own nation two unquestionable qualities, a kind of intellectual chastity, and the fighting spirit. He is so much of an idealist about his ideals that he can be a ruthless realist in his methods. His soul has (in short) the virginity and the violence of Ireland. But Bernard Shaw is not merely an Irishman; he is not even a typical one. He is a certain separated and peculiar kind of Irishman, which is not easy to describe. Some Nationalist Irishmen have referred to him contemptuously as a "West Briton." But this is really unfair; for whatever Mr. Shaw's mental faults may be, the easy adoption of an unmeaning phrase like "Briton" is certainly not one of them. It would be much nearer the truth to put the thing in the bold and bald terms of the old Irish song, and to call him "The Irishman." But it is only fair to say that the description is far less of a monstrosity than the Englishman would be; because the Irish are so much stronger in  Compared with the constant self


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 The Puritan flattery of the English, nearly every Irishman is an Irishman. But here again popular phraseology hits the right word. This fairly educated and fairly wealthy Protestant wedge which is driven into the country at Dublin and elsewhere is a thing not easy superficially to summarise in any term. It cannot be described merely as a minority; for a minority means the part of a nation which is conquered. But this thing means something that conquers, and is not entirely part of a nation. Nor can one even fall back on the phrase of aristocracy. For an aristocracy implies at least some chorus of snobbish enthusiasm; it implies that some at least are willingly led by the leaders, if only towards vulgarity and vice. There is only one word for the minority in Ireland, and that is the word that public phraseology has found; I mean the word "Garrison." The Irish are essentially right when they talk as if all Protestant Unionists lived inside "The Castle." They have all the virtues and limitations of a literal garrison in a fort. That is, they are valiant, consistent, reliable in an obvious public sense; but their curse is that they can only tread the flagstones of the courtyard or the cold rock of the ramparts; they


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 important policy papers in a more systematic way. Therefore, we look forward to working with you on seeing this resolution move forward and we thank you for your leadership on this important issue. Thank you very much.

Chairman. Thanks, Mr. Schwartz.

I appreciate your mention of the CRS. It is quite a remarkable office, much larger than what most people would guess. And it has within it real scholars on an extraordinary array of subject matter, policy matters, and they do very high quality work. It ought to be public. It benefits us, but it ought to be public for all of the many people out there who would benefit from seeing the product of this very high level research. Thanks for your support for that.

Mr. Wales, thanks for being here. We welcome your testimony now.

Mr. . Thank you. My name is Jimmy Wales and I am the founder of Wikipedia, as well as founder of the non-profit charity The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia project and several other related projects.

I am grateful to be here today to testify about the potential for the Wikipedia model of collaboration and information sharing which may be helpful to government operations and homeland security.

To introduce this potential, I would like to first talk about our experience with Wikipedia. The original vision statement for Wikipedia was for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That is what we are doing.

Wikipedia currently consists of more than nine million encyclopedia articles in more than 150 languages. While the English project is the largest, with over 2 million articles, this represents less than one-fourth of the total work.

Wikipedia is currently increasingly important around the world with more than half a million articles each in German and French, and more than 250,000 articles in several additional European languages, as well as more than 400,000 articles in the Japanese language.

Despite being blocked in the People's Republic of China for the past 2 years, the Chinese language Wikipedia, which is primarily written by Chinese speakers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and around the world, is a healthy community project with more than 150,000 articles and a strong growth rate.

At a time when the United States has been increasingly criticized around the world, I believe that Wikipedia is an incredible carrier of traditional American values of generosity, hard work, and freedom of speech.

Now I would like to talk a little bit about how open, collaborative media like wikis enable more efficient gathering and dissemination of useful information. Although it may be counterintuitive that opening up a wiki project leads to a more useful compendium of information, that is what our experience has been with Wikipedia.


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 George Bernard Shaw have never so much as set their foot upon their native soil.

We have considered Bernard Shaw as an Irishman. The next step is to consider him as an exile from Ireland living in Ireland; that, some people would say, is a paradox after his own heart. But, indeed, such a complication is not really difficult to expound. The great religion and the great national tradition which have persisted for so many centuries in Ireland have encouraged these clean and cutting elements; but they have encouraged many other things which serve to balance them. The Irish peasant has these qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ireland, a strange purity and a strange pugnacity. But the Irish peasant also has qualities which are common to all peasants, and his nation has qualities that are common to all healthy nations. I mean chiefly the things that most of us absorb in childhood; especially the sense of the supernatural and the sense of the natural; the love of the sky with its infinity of vision, and the love of the soil with its strict hedges and solid shapes of ownership. But here comes the paradox of Shaw; the greatest of all his paradoxes and the one of which he is unconscious. These one or two


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 The Puritan plain truths which quite stupid people learn at the beginning are exactly the one or two truths which Bernard Shaw may not learn even at the end. He is a daring pilgrim who has set out from the grave to find the cradle. He started from points of view which no one else was clever enough to discover, and he is at last discovering points of view which no one else was ever stupid enough to ignore. This absence of the truisms of boyhood; this sense that he is not rooted in the ancient sagacities of infancy, has, I think, a great deal to do with his position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has no real country can have no real home. The average autochthonous Irishman is close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. In short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the man of the garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people. Mr. Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college cus-


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 And I believe that experience can the same for government agencies and operations, as well.

The method of production for Wikipedia is highly innovative. And in keeping with the old adage, necessity is the mother of invention, the story of how Wikipedia came to be is, I hope, both instructive and entertaining.

Wikipedia was born of the famous dot-com crash. In the early days of the project, we worked together as a community with only a shoestring budget. If the financial climate had been better, then I would have likely turned to hiring employees to fill some critical functions. But because investment money and advertising revenue had completely dried up, we were pushed to find new solutions, solutions of community institutions to manage processes that would have been traditionally handled in a top-down manner.

As a result, we pushed the limits of the new Internet medium to create a new kind of community and a new kind of encyclopedia, one controlled by volunteer administrators and editors working together in a grand global conversation to create something new.

According to firms that measure Internet usage, Wikipedia is now the eighth most popular website in the world. And yet despite competing in some sense with companies with billions of dollars to invest, Wikipedia survives on an incredibly modest budget. Last year we spent around $1 million and although this year we are spending a bit more, our budget is still minuscule compared to that of most other tech enterprises, even if you limit the comparison to other top websites.

The First Amendment plays an important role in this project, as do traditional American ideas of individual responsibility. Under U.S. law, everyone writing in Wikipedia takes responsibility for his or her own actions, just as it is true of everyone speaking in any public forum. The maintainer of this forum, the Wikimedia Foundation has set down some fundamental codes of conduct including, but not limited to what constitutional scholars call time, place, and manner restrictions. And I have personally imposed policies which strive toward respect for others, quality writing and the citing of sources.

It is counterintuitive to some that an open discussion with virtually no top-down command and control structures can generate a high quality encyclopedia. Nevertheless, it does.

To illustrate our success improving the quality of Wikipedia, we are currently celebrating a study published in the German weekly news magazine, Stern. According to this study, which just came out last week, Wikipedia scored higher in all but one categories than the standard German encyclopedia Brockhaus. The one standard we fell a little bit short on was readability. I promise, we are working on that one every day.

Now given that Wikipedia is a public enterprise open to the entire public for collaboration and contribution, you may be wondering how wikis or the Wikimedia model may be useful to government. First of all, I want to note generally that there are other ways in which a wiki can be set up usefully, including set ups that do not involve opening the wiki to the general public. You can control access, and a wiki might be useful to an agency that wants to facilitate information sharing up and down the hierarchy for in-


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 creased vertical sharing. And controlled access wikis can be set up to share inter-agency information, so increased horizontal sharing, as well.

The main point here is there is no requirement of necessity for the tool of a wiki to be open to the general public in order for it to be useful. The word wiki comes from a Hawaiian word wiki wiki, meaning quick. The concept of a wiki was originally created by a famous programmer named Ward Cunningham, who lives in Portland, Oregon. The basic idea of a wiki is quick collaboration. When people need to work together to produce some document, the only option in the old days would be to email around a text file or word processing document. The wiki represents a crucial innovation allowing for much greater speed. The most basic idea of a wiki is a website that can be easily edited by the readers, but modern wikis contain simple yet powerful features that allow for the users to control and improve the quality of the work.

Wikipedia represents the power of a wiki open to the general public, but I believe the same wiki technologies that powers Wikipedia is also being widely adopted inside many enterprises. And I will note here in passing a couple of examples of this innovative use, one in private enterprise and one in the U.S. Government.

First, consider Best Buy. Recently great companies such as Best Buy have been using wiki technology across the enterprise to foster faster information sharing and collaboration inside the enterprise. To give a hypothetical example of how this works, imagine the car stereo installer in a Best Buy store in Florida who discovers a faster or easier way to install a particular brand of stereo. This information can now be shared directly peer-to-peer to other stereo installers within the company across the entire store network. In the past, this kind of local information discovery was lost or isolated.

One Harvard professor’s research suggests that one key to successful use of new technologies is adoption. The tools must be easy to use and valuable in the day-to-day life of those using them.

Now I will take a quick look at Intellipedia. I am not an expert on intelligence gathering, so I will simply quote a useful resource, Wikipedia, regarding Intellipedia. The Intellipedia consists of three wikis. They are used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community and other national security related organizations including combat and commands and Federal departments. These wikis are not open to the general public.

The Intellipedia uses Mediawiki, which is the same software used by Wikipedia, and the officials who have set up the project say that it will change the culture of U.S. intelligence community which have been widely blamed for failing to connect the dots before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Tom Fingar has gone on record describing one of Intellipedia’s intelligence successes. Mr. Fingar told DefenseNews.com that a worldwide group of intelligence collectors and analysts used Intellipedia to describe how Iraqi insurgents are using chlorine in IEDs, improvised explosive devices. They developed it in a couple days interacting in Intellipedia, Mr. Fingar said: No bureaucracy, no ‘‘mother may I,’’ no convening meetings. They did it and it came out pretty good. That is going to grow.


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 As you can see, just as the dot-com crash forced private industry to think about more efficient and effective ways to use digital technology, the attacks on the United States forced our intelligence community to explore innovate ways to share intelligence among agencies.

This brings us back to what might be called the lesson of Wikipedia, that an open flat forum allowing many stakeholders to participate can facilitate information sharing in an extremely costefficient manner and it can take advantage of a wider range of knowledgeable people than traditional information sharing processes do.

Good democratic governments strive to be responsive to citizen’s needs. In order to do so, it is important that governments use technology wisely to communicate with the public and also to allow the public to communicate with the government.

It is my belief that the government of the United States should be using wiki technology for both internal and public facing projects. As with any large enterprise, internal communications problems are the cause of many inefficiencies and failures. Just as top corporations are finding wiki usage exploding because the tool brings about new efficiencies, government agencies should be exploring these tools, as well.

The U.S. Government has always been premised on responsiveness to citizens, and I think we all believe good government comes from broad, open public dialogue. I therefore also recommend that U.S. agencies consider the use of wikis for public facing projects to gather information from citizens and to seek new ways of effectively collaborating with the public to generate solutions to the problem that citizens face.

Thank you for inviting me to testify about the potential for the Wikipedia model to improve our government’s ability to share and gather information for increased security, for increased governmental responsiveness in our open society, and for the preservation of democratic values. Thank you.

Chairman. Thanks, Mr. Wales. That was great, and necessity mothered a great invention.

I love the story of the founding of Wikipedia. And if I may say so, and I appreciate your saying that in some ways, it is classically American. And this is a part of American history, part of the American experience that goes right back to the beginning. It always struck me as instructive, that among the founding generation of Americans were some remarkable inventors, beginning with Franklin and Jefferson. And obviously this continued, in many ways, throughout our history with the extension of the American frontier and all of the advances that have occurred since.

But you have really done that, along with your colleagues, in this age. And so I thank you for it.

And I thank you for the suggestions that you have made about how this collaborative technology can help us, in government, do our job better. I want to come back to that in a few minutes. But let me start with this question that we were focused on in the reauthorization, which is the problem of access through search engines.

Mr. Needham, you testified that in whole or part, there are 2,000 Federal Government websites that are not included in search en-


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1895.]

and leaf are for the most part worked out, but whose bodies are weak from lack of a supporting woody framework. The third division includes the first of “vertebrated” plants, the “Pteridophytes,” where belong not merely the ferns, but the scouring rushes, the club-mosses, and certain groups that do not come within the common experience, but are of vast interest to the botanist. Pteridophytes have a woody framework and may attain tree-like proportions, but their spores are early separated from the parent, in a sort of oviparous fashion. The fourth and fifth divisions have been commonly kept together, as representing the great group of seed-producing plants, called “Phanerogams,” and commonly “flowering plants.” Flowers are not peculiar to them, however, as Pteridophytes also produce true flowers; but the habit of retaining the spore on the parent during its germination, resulting in the structure known as the seed, a kind of viviparous habit, is peculiar to the group. Dr. Warming finds in the old group Phanerogams sufficient diversity to raise its two usual subdivisions to the rank of main divisions, and hence “Gymnosperms,” including Conifers and Cycads, become the fourth grand division, and “Angiosperms,” the true flowering plants, the fifth and highest. It has long been known that the Gymnosperms are more closely related to the Pteridophytes than to the Angiosperms, and the present arrangement but emphasizes this fact. It is very curious that in certain manuals still current the Gymnosperms are placed in the very midst of the Angiosperms. To one familiar with the ordinary school manuals the arrangement of the families of Angiosperms. To one familiar with the ordinary school manuals the arrangement of the families of Angiosperms would seem very strange, but it is just at this point that recent research appears, and, as a consequence, the old artificial grouping disappears. It is very evident that the old systematic botany, with its sets of pigeon-holes and its search for plant names, has been set aside, and that the new systematic botany deals with genetic relationships.

One of the notable books of the year is Dr. Vines’s “Text-Book of Botany.” Ever since his admirable work on Plant Physiology, Dr. Vines has been recognized that he had a general text-book in preparation created such a demand for it that the first part of the volume was issued separately in 1894, and was followed by the remaining part in 1895. The whole presents the most complete and compact view of modern botany yet published. The notable feature of the book is that it presents a consistent terminology throughout, and that homologies are not disguised by a variable set of terms. As one approaches the higher plants from a study of the lower, he has been confronted by a morphology bred of antiquated ideas that has been confusing and misleading. It may come as a shock that “stamens” and “pistils” are not “male” and “female” organs, and that our whole conception of a “flower” was radically wrong, but it is just as well to have the truth presented. It would be impossible to present the details of such a book, and it can only be said that it binds the whole plant kingdom together in one consistent scheme. It is interesting to note Dr. Vines’s great divisions of the subject of Botany. The book is divided into four parts, entitled (1) Morphology (2) The Intimate Structure of the Plants, (3) The Classification of Plants, (4) Physiology. There can be no question that morphology and physiology are two very distinct and fundamental divisions of the subject, and that classification (better taxonomy) is a sort of cap-sheaf for all departments; but anatomy and histology should be considered more as a means to an end than a great division by itself. It enters essentially into all work, but can hardly be said to have any worthy autonomy. The compound microscope is also essential in most work, but it is hardly worth while to have a division of “microscopy.” The recognition of anatomy as an end, however, is not so surprising as the failure to recognize the great department of œcology. In one sense it may be included under physiology, but hardly more so than morphology could be included under taxonomy. This book will do more than bring to the beginning student the science of botany based upon the most recent morphology; it will also go far towards bringing about that uniform terminology which was a crying need of botany.

A most fascinating book, not only for the botanist but for the general reader also, is Mr. Oliver’s translation of Kerner’s “Natural History of Plants.” There are to be five parts, two of which are before us. The work is copiously and beautifully illustrated, and deals in popular style, but with scientific accuracy, with some of the most interesting problems in the life of plants. It is a pity that the translator does not give even a brief preface explanatory of the status of the work and its purpose. Several colored illustrations supplement the numerous original woodcuts. Professor Kerner has done what more botanists should do: he had brought the most recent researches within reach of the intelligent reader, and in a style so charming that even the professional teacher may learn a lesson in the art of presentation. In the two volumes before us the general subjects presented are: “the living principle of plants,” a discussion of the fascinating problem of protoplasm and its activities; “absorption of nutriment,” taking up the various sources of supply, which leads into such questions as parasitism, symbiosis, etc.; “conduction of food,” where those who think they know something about the “ascent of sap” may find something to learn; “formation of organic food,” the story of the conversion of the mineral into the organic; “metabolism and transport of materials,” under which is described the inner activities of the plant; “growth and construction of plants”; and “plant-forms as completed structures.” The two parts contain nearly 800 pages, but the subjects of reproduction and distribution, to be considered in the remaining parts, are capable of still greater interest in presentation. It

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 George Bernard Shaw toms, to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does not keep anniversaries; musical as he is I doubt if he would consent to sing. All this has something in it of a tree with its roots in the air. The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; and the only way to enjoy the sun of April is to be an April Fool. When people asked Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Tercentenary, he wrote back with characteristic contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday, and I cannot see why I should keep Shakespeare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had always kept his own birthday he would be better able to understand Shakespeare's birthday—and Shakespeare's poetry.

In conjecturally referring this negative side of the man, his lack of the smaller charities of our common childhood, to his birth in the dominant Irish sect, I do not write without historic memory or reference to other cases. That minority of Protestant exiles which mainly represented Ireland to England during the eighteenth century did contain some specimens of the Irish lounger and even of the Irish blackguard; Sheridan and even


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 gine results. And I wanted to ask you why, and to expand a bit on what you said. I know you had a reference to EPA and NIH. But is it accidental? Is it that they are not going the extra mile to make this happen? Or is there some policy? Or is it plain laziness that is bringing us to a point where we should not be?

Mr. . Right, happy to speak to that.

So I think the principle factor that we can look to is that governments produce lots of information and have a mandate to disseminate that information. And to do that, agencies rely on large databases to hold public records and present government programs to citizens. So that is one factor, lots of information, hard to disseminate it efficiently.

But these databases, the EPA example I gave and many others that I could point to at the Federal, State, and local level. They typically present to the user a search form by which that user then types in key words to find the report they are seeking, or the record or what have you. These search forms cannot be navigated by search engine crawlers. We cannot reach behind to see what is there and add those records to our index.

And because, as we have experienced in our communication with agencies, they tend not to think as much about how citizens are going about finding information but rather about how their website is presented to citizens, they have not taken, by and large, this step of providing us a means of finding those records behind that search form. And that is what the Sitemap Protocol technology enables. It provides the agency a simple mechanism for pointing out to a search engine crawler, these are all of the records in this database, come here and crawl them.

Chairman. I appreciate the answer. So you have now created a tool that should make it much easier for Federal Government websites to be included in search engine results.

Let me go back to you, Ms. Evans, and ask you if you want to add at all to Mr. Needham’s answer about why some agencies have not made their web pages available to commercial search engines?

Ms. . Well, I think Mr. Needham hit on the first issue about it is a lot of information and therefore we try to figure out the best way to efficiently deliver it, which is through databases and organization that way.

The other part, which Mr. Needham has also highlighted, is the partnership that we need to work out with commercial search capabilities, because many times when we start delivering these next level of services, what we have also done is streamlined the support services associated with those.

So in talking with Google and other search companies, we try to present the information in a context. We may not be doing it in the most efficient way to provide a context around it. For example, on GovBenefits.gov, when we initially talked, we have a whole support mechanism behind that. So we try to filter so that we do not create frustration in the citizen as well and present a whole series of results to them. And what they do is they see what they are basically eligible for.

Now what we need to do is work in partnership, which is what your reauthorization allows us to do, is that there is a balance between us trying to streamline our backline and making sure that


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 the citizen really knows what they are eligible for and also making the information commercially available to the search engines, because it is all out there. We just want to make sure that we are providing it in a context so that we do not create more frustration.

Chairman. So leaving aside matters that we might not want to have easy access to, because of privacy concerns or classification, is there any other policy reason that would justify limiting access to otherwise publicly available information on Federal websites through search engines?

Ms. . No, sir. The way that we have put together the policies, but we would need to go back and relook at that to see of any agencies may be interpreting it that way. But the way that the policy is based on the current E–Government Act, it is for greater dissemination of public available information. And then also, the Administration has passed an Executive Order, again supporting the Freedom of Information Act, saying look even further at your information and make this available before it is asked for.

So that information is out there. But we do have to do it in a way that it is easily accessible through the means that citizens research and look for the information.

Chairman. I appreciate that answer because that is certainly our intention, that except for privacy and classification reasons, everything else should be maximally and as easily as possible available to the public including through search engines.

Mr. Schwartz, do you want to add anything to this discussion?

Mr. . I think Ms. Evans made a good point about the context issue. I think it is an important one. But I also think that the American people are smart and they know how to use search engines. While it may be frustrating a few people, we do not want to block information from the vast majority of people who would be able to figure out the context and use that information. For the minority of people that cannot figure it out, that might be frustrating, but at least they have an opportunity for access.

So I think that there is sort of a balance there of how do you give the right context but make the information as maximally available as possible and maximally searchable as possible.

Mr. . If I may add a comment on this, as well.

Chairman. Please.

Mr. . We worked with the State of Arizona earlier this year to open up eight of their major databases, which were not initially designed to be crawled by search engines. And the pages that they present to users, indeed may not be utterly clear to the user on first blush, but they did so. They opened these databases. And as we indicated in a report we published or a case study we published yesterday on this website I referenced, Google.com/publicsector, the administrators of these agencies, whose databases were opened, are very pleased with the results of citizens for the first time learning about, for example, license record of contractors and of real estate developers, and so forth. So we know it can work because we have seen it work.

Chairman. Good. That is a good example. Mr. Wales, do you want to get into this?

Mr. . Yes. Actually, in many cases we have heard about the difficulty when the web crawler comes to a form and they have


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 to, instead of clicking on something that says Alabama, someone would have to type in Alabama and the search crawler is not able to figure out what to type there.

But we actually find even in the Wikipedia context, which is written by human beings, that there are some websites that even when you type in the right thing and you submit and you get the information you want, you cannot link directly to that. And so someone who is writing something, trying to explain something, and they want to link to a particular statute or a particular regulation or a particular piece of information that has been published by the government, if they are not able to cut and paste that URL and put it into Wikipedia, then even with a human involved it is very frustrating. The only thing you can do is give someone instructions. Go to this page, type in this, select the third link. It can be very frustrating.

Chairman. That is a good point. Ms. Evans, do you want to respond?

Ms. . Well, all I can say is that we are very open to making this more collaborative. We have examples, and I would like to actually share one, that we are embracing this technology and we are using it more ourselves. The EPA was raised as an example here of not making information available. But they recently held what they called the Puget Sound Partnership where they went and for 36 hours they worked directly out there trying to figure out how to do the information, using the technology. What parts of their information were not easily accessible? Could they set up these pages? Could they do all that?

We are taking those lessons learned there. Molly O’Neill from EPA, the CIO from EPA is sharing that now with the other CIOs. So that we can take these types of things and the frustration of the information that we are putting out there and then try to fix it so that we can make sure that it is readily available.

Chairman. OK. That is an encouraging example.

As you know, Section 204 of the E–Government Act required the development of an official Internet portal that would be organized by function or topic instead of the boundaries of agency jurisdiction. That is USA.gov which now receives, I gather, almost 1.9 million visits per week.

I wanted to ask you if you have done any work that would enable you to tell us how you think a user’s experience is enhanced by using USA.gov instead of attempting to find their information through search engines?

Ms. . Well, the way that USA.gov is set up—GSA really manages this very well, at least we think they manage it very well. They do hold user focus groups constantly throughout the year to really measure the customer experience, the citizen experience and how to reorganize it.

This is a good example of us and our interpretation of putting the context around the Federal Government information and then trying to give the citizen an enriched experience when they come and that it is the authoritative source for the Federal Government launching off of there, that you are going to authoritative sites.

They did a lot of market research, it used to be called FirstGov.gov. They did research just in the name itself and


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 changed it based on their market research and changed it to USA.gov. And just the simple name change of that increased the usage by 67 percent.

So they are constantly looking at customer satisfaction. All of the E–Government initiatives are measuring customer satisfaction usage. And then as well as how we can go back and really deploy it and improve it and we make all of those metrics publicly available.

So we set targets. Several of the initiatives may not necessarily be meeting their targets. But we do set the targets and the metrics and we do publish our actual performance against those metrics. Chairman LIEBERMAN. Do you think enough people know? The numbers are pretty good obviously, but do enough people know and take advantage of the service that USA.gov provides?

Ms. . I think that if I had—I do it myself. So I will be honest—I go to Google and then I go to USA.gov when I am looking for specific things. But I launch into Google or Yahoo! or Ask.com, just like anyone else does. Because I want to see how my services come up.

But I will tell you that the other benefit to having the government initiatives such as the Federal Internet portal and USA.gov was those services were available when crisis and things happen within the Federal Government that we have to mount an immediate response because the infrastructure is already there. USA.gov, because of its integration of the services, was able to provide support services to the State Department like answering passport questions. They can build out that and complement what the State Department is doing.

As a matter of fact, they actually answer all of their calls now. We get a common set of answers because USA.gov is tied into every agency, so they handle all of the misdirected e-mail. So if anybody does write directly to a department or an agency, it is automatically routed to their set of agents so that they can answer the questions on a consistent basis.

So there is a lot of integration of back end office types of services that we have done through these government-wide initiatives that when something happens like the VA situation where we lost that data, USA.gov and those services built up within 48 hours. They had the capability and they put all of that information out on their website. They had RSS feeds set up, which are automatic sign ups so that people can get the update of the information as we changed it. And we also had 1–800 service so that we could answer 240,000 calls a day for the veterans.

So we tried to put all of that together as an integrated channel so that we are providing the solutions to the citizens. So it is a more complicated question than does everyone know USA.gov?

Chairman. I will tell you that in preparing for the hearing we went to Google and typed in Federal Government, and USA.gov came up first in a number of listings.

Let me go to another provision of the E–Government Act and see if I can start a discussion with the four of you, but I will start with you, Ms. Evans. In one provision of that Act, we require the development of a system for finding, viewing, and commenting on Federal regulations. This was really a step forward, obviously. The


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 goal was not just transparency, but real accessibility to give individual citizens the opportunity that they would find very difficult under the previous technology to both see proposed regulations, gain access to them easily, but actually then to comment on them.

From what I can see, while there has been progress, I have been disappointed that the development of Regulations.gov has not opened up the rulemaking process to a greater degree. CRS, which we referred to earlier, recently reported, ‘‘It still appears that relatively few comments have been coming to the agencies via Regulations.gov compared to other methods of comment.’’

Further, in relation to what we have been discussing today, the data in Regulations.gov cannot be found by outside search engines.

So give us your status report on how Regulations.gov is doing and tell us whether you agree that more needs to be done to facilitate public access to tracking and ability to comment on regulations.

Ms. . Sir, the short answer is yes, sir, more needs to be done on Regulations.gov.

The other part of it is about searching and doing the docket systems that are back within the agencies and making that information available. Again, this would be one where we would have to partner with commercial search providers about the best way to make that information available because we know that is a limitation right now within it.

Agencies do have to post all of the regulations, proposed rules at Regulations.gov, but what we wanted to do was make sure that the public had the availability to comment through multiple channels. So the comments can go directly to an agency, not necessarily all comments have to come through Regulations.gov. And that was flexibility that the agencies still wanted to maintain.

Some of the things that are being looked at with Regulations.gov because this is really not a technology issue. This is really looking at how do we want the business of rulemaking to evolve? Some of the basic things that I have asked as the technology is going forward is do more comments make a better rule? Those are things that I think the way the technology is working and that you see through the development of functions like Wikipedia that there are arguments on both sides of that. And that is what needs to be looked at. We are in partnership, we jointly manage that with the OIRA Administrator, Susan Dudley. And these are things that she is embracing because she does want more transparency, she does want more openness in the regulation process. And so we are working with that.

There is an ongoing study right now with the American Bar Association that we have been meeting with them of improvements and requirements, some things that we can do to Regulations.gov that would just make it easier to use so that more people would want to put comments in there, as well.

Chairman. Mr. Wales, would you say, based on the Wikepedia experience, that as a matter of policy or that we could conclude that more comments would make better rules?

Mr. . I think so, yes. But I think one of the interesting things about Wikipedia, what is innovative about the wiki tech-


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 nology is rather than just commenting, people are collaborating and finding ways to compromise.

Chairman. Yes, good point.

Mr. . And so, there are some very practical problems, of course, that are faced with open commenting, spammers, crazy people, and all kinds of bad behaviors. And you have to think how do you balance the desire for allowing the general public to comment and not to censor their remarks because maybe somebody does not agree with them versus well it is not censorship to say, links to Viagra advertisements is not really a comment on most regulations, anyway.

And so, I think that these things do take very careful study. People can be very simplistic and say well they, should allow the public to comment on regulations. Well, sure. But how are we going to help the public to come in as a part of a responsible community and do that in a way that everyone finds useful.

Chairman. Good, thoughtful answer. Mr. Needham, any thoughts about this question about how we can improve basically Regulations.gov?

Mr. . Well, you are correct, that this is an example of an E–Government program website, among the many that I have referred to, that are not visible to search engine users. And this, I think, is more of a comment on the USA.gov discussion earlier, that let us say that someone is a farmer that grows tomatoes in Florida is not too plugged into the regulatory process that governs that industry and searches on Google for ‘‘tomatoes transport.’’ If this resource were crawled and indexed and integrated in search engines, including USA.gov, this grower might be more engaged in that regulatory process, learn that there is, in fact, a rule that is under comment.

And the point being made here is that not every citizen realizes when they are looking into their health, their business, education, or housing, that government provides a service that is relevant. And that is why it is critical that all of the information of the Federal Government that is public be in all search engines possible and not simply through USA.gov, where a user is consciously looking for information from its government.

Chairman. Well said. Mr. Schwartz.

Mr. . I want to take on two different points there, the first one that Mr. Needham just raised. In terms of when we first did our report looking at what kinds of searches were not coming up, it was during the polar bear comment period that the Interior Department was having, that had more comments than any other commentary.

Chairman. Whether the polar bear was going to be listed as an endangered species?

Mr. . Exactly. And we did some searches on that and you could not find that on any search engine at all. It was one of the first things that really got us interested in this issue. This was one of the best known comment periods in the history of the Federal Government. I mean, the most activity in terms of comments and you could not find it on a search engine, except for going through secondary parties. And part of that was because it was not on Regulations.gov.


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80 pre-Hellenic peoples which knew of mothers and children, but not much of husbands. Both forms of home must have acted as powerful moral influences in man's life before the time of the migrations by sea, and both equally were destroyed at that time, and their divers tiesdiversities [sic] and tendernesses battered out of existence. ‘As for this trouble about Briseis,’ says Agamemnon to the envoys, ‘tell Achilles that I will give him seven Lesbian women down, and I promise him that, when we take Troy, he can pick out twenty Trojan women—any twenty excluding Helen.’ And Briseis herself has not a proper name. The word Briseis is only an adjective derived from the town of Brisa or Brêsa in Lesbos. She is ‘the girl from Brêsa’.

So much for the respect for woman which forms a part of the tradition of both forms of home. And what of the father? It is interesting, though not strange, how keenly this question of the treatment of fathers is felt. It was the same in the early Aryan household, and throughout historical Greece. It is the same, I should imagine, in all societies except those in which people, like the rich at the present day, live on incomes derived from accumulated stores of wealth and are consequently far removed from the groundwork of human needs. In all poor or precarious societies there is an assumption that the children owe the parents a definite debt for their food and rearing. The parents fed and protected the child when he was helpless. Now that the old man cannot fight, the son must fight for him: when he cannot work, the son must support him. Yet when men are flying or fighting for their lives, when every weak hand or slow foot brings danger to the whole party, there must have been many old men left by their sons to save themselves as best they might. The conscience of the Greek Saga was stirred on the point. Not without purpose does it tell us how Aeneas in the very flames of Troy, when every delay might mean death, would not move without ‘father Anchises’, and, when Anchises‘ strength failed, faced all the dangers of flight amid armed enemies with the old man upon his back. That is what the saga calls ‘piety’! It is the other side of Hesiod’s complaint, how the men of those days, the generations that came just after the Trojan War, cursed and deserted their old parents.

For there is a passage in Hesiod which reads almost as if it


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 Eventually GPO sitemapped their site and then you could at least find it through GPO. But that is just one example. You know there are people that are searching for this in a way that, where they hear on the news that there is a comment period on whether the polar bear should be endangered species and they want to comment. They go to search on Google, they do not get the result that they expect.

Regulations.gov shows that concern very acutely.

I want to follow a little bit on Mr. Wales comments and Ms. Evans comments about Regulations.gov. We were hoping by this point that we could be at the point where we were trying out new technologies for regulations and public comment periods.

Chairman. What were you thinking of?

Mr. . I mean, using the wiki model. A lot of people would think of it as, oh you just put up a rule and then people go and attack it and you get both sides. But the really interesting thing about what happens on Wikipedia is the commentary pages and the notes pages, which are much more similar to a traditional rulemaking than you would think.

If you go through and look through how they go about making determinations and people giving justifications based on facts and what the rules are for how that is done, I think we could learn a lot from just trying out new technologies. Not saying that it should supplant the old ways of rulemaking. But perhaps we can, in certain kinds of rulemakings, we can come up with a more collaborative discussion rather than the traditional conflict policy that kind of governs public comment periods today.

Chairman. That is very interesting.

You know there is another institution around Washington that needs more collaboration to be effective, Congress. Maybe we should all form a Congressipedia.

Another thing we do not do here, if I may continue this particular flight, gaining now with the welcoming our colleague from Hawaii. You told us the word wiki is Hawaiian for quickly, that one thing that we do not do enough around here is to legislate wikily. So anyway, I welcome Senator Akaka.

I am going to ask one more series of questions and then I am going to yield to you, Senator Akaka. Thanks for being here.

I want to go directly to you, Mr. Wales, and thank you again for being here, to take up one of the—I guess it is a criticism, a skepticism about Wikipedia, which is that inaccurate content can result when larger numbers of participants outweigh the contribution of a few experts.

In your testimony, you said that controls or kind of management devices can be put in to provide—I like the term—fine grain control to access and edit information. And I wanted to ask you to elaborate on that, particularly, but generally with regard to Wikipedia but also as it may effect collaborative technologies to be used by the Federal Government.

Mr. . Absolutely. So within Wikipedia, the software, the Mediawiki software that we use puts several tools into the hands of the community so that they can manage the quality of the content. Within the community, there are administrators who are elected from the community and they are generally chosen after