Scamp Caught

The Chicago Tribune gloated with a loud goodwill last week that it had caught the scamp who five months ago had used a Tribune want ad with dastardly intent and criminal result.

One Robert Malachi Crowe, lecherous Negro, was the villain. His Tribune want ad called for the services of a nurse. A Ruth Sampson answered the ad, and her he assaulted. Then he disappeared. The attack made an excellent Tribune story; the Negro's arrest would make another. But best for the paper's business office, if he were caught, would be the well-spread cry: The Tribune guarantees the integrity of even its want ads. . . . Truth among the agate lines.

So Reporter Moses Lamson was set upon Negro Crowe's scent. He used skullduggery and pipelines of sly information--police, stool pigeons, private detectives, Pullman porters, servants. . . . Shrewdly he asked the best catch-scamps --doctors--to watch for the villain. The quarry has cancer of the stomach (TIME, Feb. 20, MEDICINE).

And last week, at Kansas City, Mo., Reporter Moses Lamson caught his Robert Malachi Crowe. No doctors had helped, nor any policemen; only a furious Negro friend whose wife Robert Malachi Crowe was blackguardedly courting. Detectives hustled the prisoner to Chicago, where a judge quickly sentenced him to prison. The reporter received a $1,000 bonus and the Tribune the want ad publicity, as the moral approbation, upon which it had calculated.