The Mark Inside

by Amy Reading

  Norfleet’s stomach turned, his entire body broke out in a sweat, and he felt a tingle run up and down his spine. And yet, despite his revulsion, his first absurd impulse was to wish his enemies a merry Christmas. After all, for most of the time that he’d known Ward and Gerber, they’d been his esteemed colleagues, crisp, well-dressed executives who had treated him with deference and respect. He marveled at how utterly their affects had changed and how little they resembled their former selves. Ward turned toward him sullenly and sneered like a common thief, “So you found us did you, you damned old fox?” Gerber, the one Norfleet had picked as the killer in the gang, was craven. “Norfleet, for God’s sake, don’t identify us!” he shouted. “Have mercy on us! Have pity for us! For God’s sake, don’t, don’t identify us!” Keeping his face impassive, Norfleet turned and followed Sheriff Shay back to his office without a word.

  As soon as they were out of earshot, Norfleet grilled the sheriff for the details of their arrest. Shay told him an extraordinary, an astonishing, a nearly unbelievable story. A Texan by the name of Cathey—did Norfleet know him?—was in San Bernardino for business and had fallen in with a group of phony stockbrokers. He was just about to close a deal with them, when he read in the newspaper of Norfleet’s swindle. Cathey knew at once that he was in the hands of the same men, minus Reno Hamlin as the mule buyer, and he dashed from the hotel room he was sharing with the swindlers and accosted the first police officer he saw on the street. Alas, Furey’s crew spotted him talking to the officer and fled the hotel. Furey and Spencer disappeared via the fire escape, but Sheriff Shay managed to intercept Ward and Gerber a few minutes later at the train station. He took the chance of detaining them long enough to wire Sheriff Sterling Clark in Fort Worth, and he received an instant reply to hold them under the warrant that Norfleet had filed after his swindling. In Ward’s suitcase, they found precisely the same credentials and documents used on Norfleet. Only Furey, now going by the name of Peck, had bothered to change his alias.

  The rapid capture of two of his men did not dampen Norfleet’s fervor for the other three. While the Fort Worth authorities readied the paperwork to extradite Ward and Gerber to Texas, Norfleet continued scouring southern California for leads on Furey, Spencer, and Hamlin. He searched the telephone and telegraph records at all the San Bernardino hotels but found no trace of Mr. Peck. He visited police stations in the surrounding cities and towns, and in Los Angeles he had a minor score. While looking through the rogues’ gallery of photographs, he identified a picture of Furey and learned his real name for the first time. And while he was in the big city, he thought he’d try his hand at disguise. He left his suitcase at the sheriff’s office and sought out a suitably adventurous beautician to wrestle with his mustache. A few hours later, a clean-shaven businessman wearing a neat gray suit walked into the sheriff’s office and asked for his suitcase. “Say! how do you get that way? Those things belong to a West Texas cow-man. What’cha tryin’ to pull off?” Norfleet beamed in happiness.

  Norfleet’s escapades in California were soon brought to a close by a summons from the Fort Worth district attorney to appear at a grand jury hearing for Ward and Gerber’s requisition. While the two men fumed in their California jail cells, Norfleet caught the next train east to Texas. He sat in the Pullman and thought about his case, his mind restlessly circulating around the same meager facts. And then an elderly man sitting across from him folded up his newspaper, leaned over, and introduced himself as Perry Garst. “I have just been reading about the capture of these fellows, Ward and Gerber. It looks like they’re in for it now, doesn’t it?” In high spirits, Norfleet cried that they would be if he had anything to do with it, and out came the entire story. Garst was riveted. By the time Norfleet finished his tale, Garst had decided to stop at Fort Worth with him to see how the trial turned out, and in the meantime he leaned in the corner of the car for a short nap.

  As Norfleet watched the older man’s head tip back into the seat and the light from the window play on his features, his mind suddenly froze. He knew that face. He was sure he had never met Mr. Garst before, but the characteristics of his face were undeniably familiar. And then he had it: Perry Garst was exactly what E. J. Ward would look like in thirty years. His newest friend was, he was instantly confident, the father of one of his mortal enemies, sent to tail him and reel out information from him. Norfleet cursed his own “egotism of the ignorant” for never even considering that the swindlers just might be as devious and obstinate as he.

  Garst woke, reached for his suitcase, and drew out an elaborate luncheon of many tempting morsels. He offered them in turn to Norfleet, but, as if compensating for his previous susceptibility, Norfleet turned down everything—the sandwiches with their curly lettuce, the stuffed olives, the cream-filled cakes, the fruits. His paranoia was strengthened when Garst refused to eat his own food, claiming an upset stomach, and choosing for himself only two hard-boiled eggs. It would be difficult, Norfleet thought savagely, to poison two unbroken shells, and this small act told him all he needed to know about Mr. Perry Garst. He resolved to double his caution.

  And then, in practically the very next instant, Norfleet broke his own resolution. His natural garrulity simply could not be held back, and he soon found himself in delightful conversation with a woman from Georgia. When he learned that she had been a detective prior to her marriage, he unstintingly granted her his confidence, telling her his tale of woe and giving her precise descriptions of the three men still at large. She promised to keep her eye out for them as she continued across the country, and to wire him with any leads. Norfleet stepped off the train at Fort Worth well satisfied with the progress he had made.

  Garst stepped off the train with him but was prohibited from following Norfleet into the grand jury hearing. Norfleet testified against Ward and Gerber, and as he left the courthouse, Garst seized his arm and asked feverishly, “What did they do? What did they do? Did they bill those men?” Norfleet affected nonchalance. He had done his part, he said, and the rest was up to the jury. He began to walk away. Garst’s voice grabbed at him again, saying that the hotels were booked up for a convention, so would Norfleet like to join him at the room he’d secured at a nearby boardinghouse? Once again, Norfleet declined, and eventually Garst gave up and took his leave. Norfleet shed his indifference, swiveled around, and did his best imitation of a private eye, trailing Garst into a poor district and up to the door of a disheveled house. When Garst was safely inside, Norfleet dashed back to the courthouse. He buttonholed Frank Evans, a newspaper reporter, and cajoled him into returning to the boardinghouse, hoping to confront Garst with their knowledge of his true identity and publish it as a scoop on the next day’s front page. On the way back to the boardinghouse, however, Norfleet got lost, and by the time they found it, Garst was gone, and all traces of his stay had been erased. Norfleet took that as the strongest possible evidence that his supposition of Garst’s relation to Ward was correct.

  Norfleet’s testimony that afternoon secured Ward and Gerber’s extradition from San Bernardino to Fort Worth. Sheriff Sterling Clark personally escorted his charges back to Texas by train, and they spent the rest of the winter in the Tarrant County Jail. Norfleet simply couldn’t resist visiting the two men in their cells and finding out the sequel to his swindling. Gerber matter-of-factly related how the men had congregated in the grillroom of the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio to divvy up Norfleet’s cash. So the J. Harrison in the hotel register really was Furey! Cutting up the score, naturally enough, led to a poker game. Which, just as naturally, led to one of the men losing all his money—in this case, Reno Hamlin, fresh from his short stint in jail, who left in disgruntlement. Minutes later he came back, unnecessarily masked with a handkerchief, a six-shooter in each hand. He took the money and vanished. Ward and Gerber were locked up for a crime from which they never even had a chance to profit.

  While Ward and Gerber made themselves at home in the county jail, Norfleet had another conversation that
deflated his swelling sense of triumph just a little bit. He was at the jail when the pair of swindlers was visited by G. C. Cornwall, a U.S. Secret Service agent who helped identify them as accomplices in the swindling of a Washington, D.C., man, a furniture dealer named Peter Nee. Cornwall told Norfleet that Ward and Gerber were part of the infamous Furey gang that used to operate out of New York. “The photos of all the leaders are right here in this town,” Cornwall informed him. “I sent them to the city detective a long time ago and asked him to be on the watch for them and to notify me if they appeared.” Norfleet was knocked flat by this news. How much easier would his search have been had he possessed photographs to show to sheriffs, hotel managers, and retired lady detectives? “You stay here and I’ll go hunt them up and bring you enough pictures of that gang to make a big family album,” Cornwall offered. But when he returned from the sheriff’s office, he shook his head in frustration and told Norfleet that the office was claiming never to have received the photographs. Norfleet got his first inkling of the swindling and sleight of hand performed on the other side of the sheriff’s counter. So when Cornwall launched into a lengthy speech intending to dissuade him from spending any more time or money hunting down Furey, Spencer, and Hamlin—pointing out that the Secret Service alone had fifteen hundred trained men sniffing out crooks like them—Norfleet was unmoved. The photographs may have been a false lead, but they gave him something invaluable: renewed conviction that only he was responsible for bringing about justice.

  His disappointment was soon offset by a miraculous lead. The two swindlers he’d landed in jail would give him no information on the other three, so he found himself once again with a wide-open country to scour. And then he received a letter, forwarded to him at his hotel in Fort Worth, from the retired lady dick. A man had boarded her train in Houston who matched Norfleet’s description of Furey down to the smallest pore. The woman moved close to him and eavesdropped on his conversation with a colleague. He started by telling the man that business in Dallas and Fort Worth “was as easy as running a picture show.” Clearly, that could only mean one thing. She leaned in closer. He said he was on his way to Miami to play “the game.” And then came the kicker, as he remarked in a casual aside, “I think I’ll stop off a few days in Jacksonville; so many of the boys are down there, and I like to keep up with the ‘gang’ and find out who the ‘new suckers’ are.” Indubitably, it was Furey. The wide-open country had telescoped down to a single city. Furey was squarely in Norfleet’s sights, and just as soon as he’d acquired a small arsenal of guns, a suitcase full of disguises, deputy sheriff credentials, and arrest warrants for his remaining quarries, the cowpuncher hopped on the next eastbound train.

  Let’s take stock. First, Norfleet jabbed his finger at random on a map of California and just happened to find two of his swindlers. They just happened to have swept a fellow Texan and longtime friend into the con, a man who just happened to have read Norfleet’s newspaper account in time to get wise and kick before he was cleaned out. Then Norfleet just happened to recognize a stranger on a train as the father of one of his swindlers in time to avoid further endangering himself. Finally, Norfleet described the ringleader to another stranger on a train, and she just happened to recognize that man halfway across the country and obtain precisely the information that Norfleet needed to track him down. All this in just twenty pages of his autobiography. Either the world was several orders of magnitude smaller in the 1920s, or something other than strict verisimilitude guides Norfleet’s account of these events.

  The first question his story raises is: Could he be conning us? His autobiography piles on the improbabilities without ever once acknowledging that they are improbabilities. He plays it so straight that it comes to seem like winking. For instance, the lady detective whom he meets on the train on his way to Ward and Gerber’s hearing is named Mrs. Ward. “As far I know,” he says neutrally, “this Mrs. Ward was in no way related to either E. J. Ward or his probable kin, Perry Garst. It was merely a coincidence.” Later, in hot pursuit of Joseph Furey, he approaches a police officer on a street corner in St. Augustine, Florida, who turns out to be named … Ward. Norfleet merely writes, “Would I never get rid of the Ward family!”

  On the one hand, perhaps Norfleet should be commended for sticking to the truth of his narrative, even when he risks our incredulity with particulars that no novelist could get away with. On the other hand, perhaps these inscrutable details and asides should signal something to his readers. The narrative sounds quite different from Norfleet’s early life history. Instead of self-righteousness and moral rectitude, Norfleet projects a hokey humor and an extreme tolerance for moral ambiguity. When he finds himself almost broke in southern California, he takes a jaunt down to the racetracks at Tijuana. He finds a Texas horse on the program and bets his last $90. “It would be a poor Texas horse who couldn’t win a little money for a Texas cowman, I thought.” According to the autobiography, “my little baby” won and paid out at six to one—this from the same man who banned gambling from his ranch and preached to young men on living up to their mother’s expectations. Norfleet justifies his vigilante quest as an attempt to restore his cowboy values that had been so summarily violated by the urban tricksters. But when he leaves his ranch and embarks on that quest, his values begin to drift away from their origins, and he starts to resemble his enemies more than he realizes. Take a man with a propensity for spinning yarns by the campfire, and then immerse him in the deceptive arts of the swindler: suddenly he almost seems to be impersonating himself and daring us to believe him.

  This prompts a second and far more beguiling question: If he is conning us, do we mind? Arguably, the most defining—and perplexing—characteristic of an American sense of fun is a perennial willingness to make oneself into the mark of a showman, artist, or director. Audiences and spectators have relished the very particular pleasure of accepting an invitation into a story they know might be false, only to be immersed in it completely and then duped at the end by what they thought was true. It is a sensation that is composed of equal parts admiration for the cleverness of the ploy and gratification at a neat resolution, and it has a long pedigree in American culture. It is called humbug, and it all started with P. T. Barnum.

  Long before he founded a traveling circus and made Jumbo famous in the Greatest Show on Earth, P. T. Barnum was a hoaxer. He came from western Connecticut, the land of wooden nickels, practical jokes, and Yankee dealings. His “organ of acquisitiveness,” as he called it, was activated at an early age; his father died in 1825 when Barnum was fifteen, leaving him to support his mother and siblings by working as a store clerk in a nearby village. Barnum portrayed early market capitalism in the country as ruthless and exploitative. “Sharp trades, especially dishonest tricks and unprincipled deceptions,” are not confined to the city, he warned. Women would bring rags of linen or cotton to his store to trade for dry goods, and he would later open the bundles to discover stones, gravel, or ashes. Men would bring oats or corn to trade for nails or rum, and later Barnum would weigh the loads and find them four or five bushels short. In such transactions, each party knew he or she was scheming to defraud the other, and the only question was who had enough savvy and insider knowledge to come out on top. Barnum’s brilliance as a showman came from his insight that this same adversarial relationship might be transposed into the field of entertainment. Contrary to popular myth, Barnum never said that there is a sucker born every minute. He was not that baldly cynical about humankind. He did say, “The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.” And so he set out to deceive them in a thousand different ways with their full cooperation and a quarter from each of their pocketbooks.

  In the summer of 1842, if you were a regular reader of The New York Herald, your curiosity might have been piqued by periodic mentions of Dr. J. Griffin, a British naturalist traveling through the southern states with an exhibit on loan from the Lyceum of Natural History in London, the preserved
body of a mermaid captured in the South Seas near the Fiji Islands. Dr. Griffin first appeared in a dispatch from a correspondent in Montgomery, then one in Charleston mentioned him, and soon reports of him were issuing from Washington and Philadelphia. One Sunday morning in July, all three major New York papers reported that Dr. Griffin would soon come to the city with his tantalizing catch. For the next few weeks, everywhere you went in the city you would have encountered boys selling pamphlets titled A Short History of Mermaids, Containing Many Interesting Particulars Concerning Them. Handing over a penny and opening it up, you would have read that an “eminent Professor of Natural History in the City of New-York” testified to having examined Dr. Griffin’s mermaid, and though he found her “far from being the beautiful and captivating creature represented by many pictures,” she was most definitely real. “That the animal has lived, moved, and had its being, as it is, ADMITS NOT THE SHADOW OF A DOUBT, as all must acknowledge who see it.”

  When the Fejee Mermaid, as she began to be called, finally arrived in the city and sat in state at Concert Hall, the Herald dismissed her in two lines: “Humbug—the Mermaid—and no mistake. We can swallow a reasonable dose, but we can’t swallow this.” Yet in the very same issue of the newspaper, you would have read the following confusing information: “A committee of scientific gentlemen yesterday examined the mermaid brought to this country by Mr. Griffin, and now exhibiting at Concert Hall, No. 404 Broadway, and reported that notwithstanding they had hitherto regarded the existence of this animal as fabulous, and as an anatomical impossibility, they were now convinced to the contrary, and could plainly discover that the formation and anatomical construction of this creature would allow its being under water a great length of time, but that it evidently remained, for the most part, with its head out of water.” So was the mermaid real or not?