NY True Crime: Turn of the Century Cases. Arthur Cheney Train

hounding him out of revenge. The courtly General was as distingué as ever as he addressed the hard-headed jury of tradesmen before him. As what canaille he must have regarded them! What a position for the "Count de Tinoco"!

      Then two officers entered the courtroom bearing the famous trunk of the General between them. The top tray proved to contain thousands of railroad tickets. The prosecutor requested the defendant to explain their possession.

      "Ah!" exclaimed Moreno, twirling his mustaches, "when I was General under my King Don Carlos, in the Seven Years' War of '75 and also in Catalonia in '80, I issued these tickets to wounded soldiers for their return home. At the boundaries the Spanish tickets were exchanged for French tickets." He looked as if he really meant it.

      Then the prosecutor called his attention to the fact that most of them bore the date of 1891 and were printed in French—not in Spanish. The prisoner seemed greatly surprised and muttered under his breath vaguely about "plots" and "conspiracies." Then he suddenly remembered that the tickets were a "collection," made by his little son.

      Beneath the tickets were found sheaves of blank orders of nobility and blank commissions in the army of Spain, bearing what appeared to be the royal seal. These the General asserted that he had the right to confer, by proxy, for his "King Don Carlos." Hundreds of other documents bearing various arms and crests lay interspersed among them. The prisoner drew himself up magnificently.

      "I was the General Secretary of War of my King," said he. "When I had to give orders to the generals under me, of whom I was the chief, I had the right to put thereon the royal imprint of Don Carlos. I was given all the papers incident to the granting of orders and grades in the army, and I had the seal of the King—the seal of the Royal King."

      But, unfortunately for the prisoner, the seals upon the papers turned out to be the legitimate arms of Spain and not those of Don Carlos, and as a finale he ingenuously identified the seal of the Mayor of Madrid as that of his "Royal King."

      Next came a selection of letters of nobility, sealed and signed in the name of Pope Leo the Thirteenth. These, he asserted, must have been placed there by his enemies. "I am a soldier and a general of honor, and I never did any such trafficking," he cried grandly, when charged with selling bogus patents of nobility.

      He explained some of his correspondence with the Lapierres and his famous bill for twelve thousand dollars by saying that when he found out that the inheritance Tessier did not exist he had conceived the idea of making a novel of the story—a "fantastic history"—to be published "in four languages simultaneously," and asserted solemnly that he had intended printing the whole sixteen feet of bill as part of the romance.

      Then, to the undisguised horror of the unfortunate General, at a summons from the prosecutor an elderly French woman arose in the audience and came to the bar. The General turned first pale, then purple. He hotly denied that he had married this lady in France twenty-three years ago.

      "Name of a name! He had known her! Yes—certainly! But she was no wife of his—she had been only his servant. The other lady—the Hibernian—was his only wife." But the chickens had begun to come home to roost. The pointed mustaches drooped with an unmistakable look of dejection, and as he marched back to his seat his shoulders no longer had the air of military distinction that one would expect in a general of a "Royal King." His head sank on his chest as his deserted wife took the stand against him—the wife whom, he had imagined, he would never see again.

      Any one could have seen that Elizabeth de Moreno was a good woman. Her father's name, she said, was Nichaud, and she had first met the prisoner twenty-three years ago in the village of Dalk, in the Department of the Tarne, where, in 1883, he had been convicted and sentenced for stealing bed linen from the Hôtel Kassam. She had remained faithful to him in spite of his disgrace, and had visited him daily in prison, bringing him milk and tobacco. On his liberation she had married him and they had gone to live in Bordeaux. For years they had lived in comfort, and she had borne him eight children. He had never been to any war and was neither a general nor, so far as she had known, a friend of Don Carlos. She had supposed that her husband held some position in connection with the inspection of railroads, but, in 1902, it had come out that he was in the business of selling counterfeit railroad tickets, and had employed a printer named Paul Casignol to print great numbers of third-class tickets for the purpose of selling them to ignorant soldiers and artisans. Moreno had fled to America. She had then discovered that he had also made a practice of checking worthless baggage, stealing it himself and then presenting claims therefor against the railroad companies. She had been left without a sou, and the rascal had taken everything she had away with him, including even the locket containing the hair of her children. By the time she had finished her story Moreno's courage had deserted him, the jury without hesitation returned a verdict of guilty, and the judge then and there sentenced the prisoner to a term at hard labor in State's prison.

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      "Mais oui," grunts Lapierre, as the crow, with a final caw of contempt, alights in a poplar farther down the road, "I don't blame the bird for laughing at me. But, after all, there is nothing to be ashamed of. Is one to be blamed that one is fooled? Hein! We are all made fools of once and again, and, as I said before, he would have deceived the devil himself. But perhaps things are better as they are. Money is the root of all evil. If I had an automobile I should probably be thrown out and have my neck broken. But if M'sieu' intends to take the next train for Bordeaux it is as well that he should be starting."