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May I ask you to close your eyes for a moment and conjure up the picture that is filed away in your mind under the heading, "detective"?

There! You have him. He is a large man of middle age. His tendency is toward stoutness. The first detail of him that stands out in your conception is his shoes. In stories you have read, plays you have seen, the detective has had square-toed shoes. You noticed his shoes that time when the house was robbed and a plain clothes man came out and snooped about.

These shoes are a survival of the days when the detective walked his beat; for the sleuth, of course, is a graduate policeman. He must have been a large man to have been a policeman, and he must have attained some age to have passed through the grades. Such men as he always put on flesh with age. Your man perspires freely, breathes heavily, moves with deliberation. The police detective can be recognized a block away.

Or, perhaps, you have the best accredited fiction idea of the unraveler of mysteries. This creation is a tall, cadaverous individual, who sits on the small of his back in a morris-chair and smokes a pipe. From a leaf torn from last year's almanac, in an East Side garret, he draws the conclusion that the perpetrator of a Black Hand outrage in Xenia, Ohio, is a pock-marked Hungarian now floating down the Mississippi on a scow; he radiographs with the aid of a weird instrument at his elbow and apprehends the fugitive.

Of these two conceptions of detectives it may be said that the first is quite correct: that the graduate policeman is abroad in the land, lumbering along on the trail of its criminals and occasionally catching one of them. His assignment to this task is, obviously, a bit like thrusting the work of a fox upon a ponderous elephant. The police departments, however, are practically the only training schools for detectives and it is but natural that they should be drawn upon.

Of the second conception of the detective—the man of science and deductions—it may be said merely that he does not exist in all the world, nor could exist. There is one case in a hundred which would require the man of science in its solution and upon which he might work much as he does in fiction. In the ninety-nine there would be no place for such talents as his.

For each criminal case is a problem separate unto itself, and there may not be brought to it more than a trained, logical, imaginative mind, which may unfold it and see all the possibilities. There is but the occasional call upon science, and the good detective knows when to consult the specialist.

It was little more than half a dozen years ago that the Federal Department of Justice set about the upbuilding of the greatest detective bureau that the Government, or America for that matter, has ever known. As the Bureau of Investigation it was to have charge of all the secret work of the Government for which provision was not made elsewhere. It was to wrestle with violations of neutrality, with those of the national banking laws, with anti-trust cases, bucket shop cases, white slave cases; it was to prosecute those who impersonate an officer of the Government, to pursue those who flee the country and seek to evade the long arm of the Federal law. Its duties were vastly wider than those of any other of the Government detective agencies.

Department of Justice cases are stupendously big in many instances. They may affect the relations that exist between nations, they may mean the wrecking of hundred-million-dollar corporations, the stopping of practises that are blights upon the morality and good name of the nation. They are endless in variety and stupendous in their results.

The Department of Justice asked itself what manner of man should be called upon to perform this important work. It looked the tasks in the face and sought to determine the individual who would be best fitted to their performance. When it had come to a conclusion it built a staff of a hundred or two hundred (the number should not be stated) made up of men of the material specified.

That staff ever since has been wrestling with the great problems that confront a powerful nation with multitudinous interests. Its accomplishments have satisfied the Department that its judgment was right when it established a peculiar standard for the men whom it selected to perform these delicate and difficult tasks.

I have purposely cultivated these men in many cities, have seen them at work, have been given special privileges in my efforts to get a true conception of them and their methods. Scores of the stars that have been developed in the service have told me their best stories, their most striking experiences.

In the end, I have attempted to evolve a character who is typical of this new school of detectives. I have wanted him to work in my stories as he would have done in actual life. I have wanted him to be true in every detail to those young men who to-day are actually performing those tasks for Uncle Sam.

So has Billy Gard come into being. The cases upon which he goes forth have actually been ground through the mill of which he is a part. Each is founded on facts related to me by these special agents of the Department of Justice. Billy Gard is not an individual but a type—a new detective who is effectually performing as important work as ever came to the lot of men of his kind.

If the reader wants to know that his story pictures correctly the situation which it undertakes, I wish to assure him that I have taken infinite care that Billy Gard should work out his problems by the methods that are actually employed and that the Government machine operates in just this way.

William Atherton Du Puy.

Washington, D. C.,

March, 1916.

UNCLE SAM: DETECTIVE

UNCLE SAM: DETECTIVE