Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

“Don’t you tell ’em a word, Ambrose! I forbid you! They won’t dare do that to me. And if they do, I’d rather have my feet burned off than to give in to the filthy cowards. Ambrose, keep your mouth shut.”

The small, masked man drew the poker out of the fire. It glowed as red as the coals. He stepped on into the bedroom.

“Wait!” cried old Green. “I’ll—”

“They ain’t touched me yet, Ambrose, they won’t dare!”

But in his avariciousness to possess himself of the aged farmer’s money the leader fiendishly laid the red-hot iron against the bare flesh of the prostrate woman’s feet.

Yet such was her fortitude she did not cry out. She knew that the sounds of her suffering would be the one thing that would make her husband yield, and two of the robbers were afterward to confess that four times the red-hot poker was applied to the woman’s flesh before, tortured beyond all endurance, she screamed.

At the sound of that single outcry of agony old Ambrose Green yelled to the robbers that he was ready to yield the secret of the hiding place of his money.

To the chagrin of the gang, who had toiled so hard in ransacking the place and gone to such horrible lengths to extort the knowledge, the old man said with a curling lip of scorn:

Virtually Murder

“It’s in my pocketbook in my coat pocket — that coat there you dumped on the floor when you was searching around back of the closet.”

The leader pounced upon the coat, brushing the others back, and found there a wallet containing one thousand dollars in cash and four bonds of five hundred dollars each. These were negotiable bonds which could be realized on as easily as the cash itself.

“Well, now that you got the money untie my wife and me — you’ll do that much in decency, won’t you, so I can ’tend to her, put some salve on her burned feet?”

The defeated, agonized old woman said in added plea:

“Do that, you men, won’t you? I’m suffering awful.”

The merciless crew paid no slightest attention to the appeal, had no pity.

They hurried out of the house and the old couple heard sounds of triumphant laughter as the gang made their get-away down to the dark and deserted highway.

It was virtually murder, for it might easily have been days before any neighbor came to the Green farm.

As it happened, however, Len Purdy, the farmer, whose name the robbers had used in gaining entrance to the domicile, had need of a farm implement he didn’t possess and arrived at the Green home early the next morning for the purpose of borrowing the implement.

Both Green and his wife were unconscious, but the sturdy old man soon revived. The coma into which the wife had fallen had been a mercy to the aged woman with the seared feet, and a doctor was at her bedside and oil and bandages applied to her wounds before she revived.

But the shock of her experience, coupled with the physical agony she endured, added to the symptoms of blood poisoning resulting, kept her for weeks on what appeared to be inescapably her death bed.

The press of the country rang with denunciations of the fiendish cruelty of her torturers coupled with demands on the authorities to make extraordinary efforts to discover the whereabouts of the inhuman gang of robbers.

Especially came the cry from every side for the capture of the barbarously merciless leader who had conceived and enacted the atrocity of putting red-hot iron to the feet of the bound and helpless old woman as a means of loosening the lips of Ambrose Green regarding the whereabouts of his money. It was a cry from the press expressing the feeling of the population of the entire country.

No Clew in Sight

But little Coraopolis itself had no police force — a single constable befuddled at the facing of the task. In the circumstances the Governor of the State appealed to the Pittsburgh police for aid, and Roger O’Mara, then chief of the force of that city, announced that he would take personal charge of the pursuit.

A week, two weeks passed, however, and no arrest had been made. Not a clew discovered. The five men had worn masks which completely concealed their countenances and Green and his wife could only offer descriptions of the sizes and apparent ages of the men.

Both were certain — very — that they would recognize the voice of the little, lithe leader of the gang. It was curiously mild and soft, they said, for the voice of such a fiend.

The train crews of every passenger and freight which had passed through the territory that night were energetically sought, seen and interviewed, but none had recollection of seeing such a group of men on the night of the crime.

O’Mara hardly expected any result from this step. He was certain the gang was in Pittsburgh, that they had walked the five miles into the city from the Green farm under cover of the night.

Deep disappointment had public expression in the newspapers, when two weeks had gone by and the monstrously cruel robbers were not apprehended or, even, apparently, a clew turned up to guide the police toward their capture.