thought everybody was a thief until his innocence was proven, and Burns answered with surprise, "Well, they are—here in Washington." Burns knows his Washington. His suspicion is built up by insight, but it is founded upon facts. Knowing that So-and-So is stealing, he knows that the other So-and-Sos near the thief must know about it, and he asks, "Why don't they holler, eh? What are they getting out of it?"
To the Secretary, hard-headed and unimaginative, Chief Wilkie's star came as a shock. Burns did not know the graft map of the Interior Department, so he suspected everybody in it. His first request, made before he himself arrived, was that nobody but the Secretary and Chief Wilkie should be informed of his engagement. No doubt he would have kept out the Secretary himself, at first, if he could, but the Secretary had to know, of course, and he took into his confidence four or five other men besides himself and Wilkie. And the sequel proved that Burns was right; too many knew. When the detective had indicated the depth, breadth and height of his suspicions at their first council, the Secretary drew Chief Wilkie aside.
"Now, Mr. Wilkie," he said, "do you think your man will be able to handle such a difficult, delicate job as this? "
"He has never failed yet," said the Chief, and the Secretary was resigned. He gave Burns the case, and he hoped for the best. As time went on he came to put great faith in the detective, but it was sometimes hard to do so, and their intercourse was a series of shocks.
Burns' next move was the next shock. He asked to be put to work in the Land Office. He said he must have an understanding of the laws, methods and general organization of the General Land business, and that was true; but also he needed to "form his theory."
"I wanted to find out," he told me, "first, how the laws intended that the public lands should be distributed, honestly; second, the methods by which they were actually disposed of, honestly; third, how the crooks got hold of them, crookedly. And, finally, I knew that if the outside crooks in the business got land crookedly, certain crooks in office had to know about it, and I wanted to know before I went after them just who they were, both in the Department at Washington and out West in the field."
Burns at Work in Washington
Reading law in the Land Office, Burns saw that the policy of the United States government and the intent of its open land legislation was to distribute the public domain gradually in small parcels to bona fide settlers, miners and others, who would cultivate it for their own and the common good. The evils that had grown up with time, he found, were all the results of the efforts of "enterprising" business men to get large tracts of land for the purposes of reckless, selfish exploitation. Thus the land frauds were not only violations of the land laws; they were a general violation of the policy of the government; and they were bringing about a condition in which, as in the old countries, a comparatively small number of large land-owners would own the land in the United States. Burns saw that this process of appropriation was carried on by several methods, and he studied them all, but he worked out most carefully the schoolland, lieu-scrip frauds, since they were the specialty of Hyde and Benson, his first case.
Having grasped the general principle underlying the land policy. Burns perceived at a glance that Hyde and Benson were merely brokers through whom big operators got hold of lands meant for small settlers. Who the big operators were was well known in the Land Office, and the mere fact that they were getting lands wholesale was of itself an evidence of fraud and corruption. Moreover, the clew to the crime was written plain in the Land Office records. The lieu-land act read as if it was drawn to compensate settlers, the states and others for land taken back by the government, and the applications on file were indeed from many "settlers" who signed many names. But throughout hundreds and hundreds of these papers there recurred constantly one name: F. A. Hyde. Schneider's letters said that the settlers were dummies, and that with their applications for school lands went also a deed of relinquishment to Hyde, but even if Schneider had not written this letter, the constant recurrence in so many papers of "F. A. Hyde," the name of one man should have aroused suspicion in an honest official's mind; and since everybody knew that Hyde was one of the brokers
