A HUMAN TARGET.

Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 42, 22 June 1908, Page 7

A HUMAN TARGET.

Probably no celebrity of modern times underwent sq many escapes from assassination as did Mr. Robert Pinkerton, until the other day the head of the world-famous American detective agency. Yet he died peacefully in his bed in the end. Threatened men live long. He even survived the enmity of that notorious secret murder society, the dreaded Molly Maguires, although three separate emissaries of theirs fired on him at close range on three different occasions, and once a party of them blew up with dynamite, at dead of night, a house in which he was erroneously supposed to'be lqdging. Perhaps, however, his narrowest escape from death occurred in London some ten years ago. A notorious American croqk, known as "King” O’Brien, had followed him from New York with the avdwed intention of shooting him on sight. But a fellow "crook," named "Kid" Waddell, whom O'Brien had taken into his confidence, warned Pinkerton of his danger. O'Brien's fury on learning of this piece of treachery was uncontrollable. To escape it, Waddell fled to Paris. But O’Brien followed him, and shot him dead in the smoking-room of the Hofei d*u Nord.

For this the French authorities sent him to Devills Island for life. His friends in Chicago and New York, however, chartered a swift steam yacht, mid would almost certainly succeeded in carrying him off from under the guns of the obsolete wooden guard-ship "Dubourdieu, had not the Pinkertons got wind of the project and communicated with the Governor of French Guiana.

Indeed, so certain was the gang of success that thay caused a full account of tfie affair to be published in the "New York Journal," giving tho details as though they had actually happened. "King” O'Brien, when he heard how his carefully planned rescue had been foiled, committed suicide.