Free The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower Page A

“road” and rolling stock as the line pushed south to Mobile and the Gulf of Mexico. Several other railroad companies followed suit, employing a growing cadre of Pinkerton men for any “special and sudden exigencies” that might arise. For these services, Pinkerton received annual retainers amounting to ten thousand dollars a year, as well as “several funds hereinafter specified” to help the agency expand. As he told Hunt, “I am overwhelmed with business.” The grueling pace sometimes left him so exhausted, he admitted, that he could scarcely stand: “I never removed my clothes this evening but fell across my bed.”
    That same year, Pinkerton made a decision that would change forever what it meant to be a Pinkerton man. One afternoon, as he sat “pondering deeply over some matters,” Pinkerton looked up and saw a young woman standing in the door of his office. The visitor introduced herself as Mrs. Kate Warne and explained that she was a widow seeking employment. Pinkerton estimated her age at twenty-two or twenty-three. “She was above the medium height,” he observed, “slender, graceful in her movements, and perfectly self-possessed in her manner.” Kate Warne was perhaps the most remarkable person ever to pass through the doors of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Her pale, broad face was frank and unassuming, Pinkerton noted, but her dark blue eyes were captivating—sharp, decisive and “filled with fire.” She was not a conventional beauty—her features, Pinkerton admitted, were “not what would be called handsome”—but she radiated a quiet strength and compassion. Kate Warne appeared to be the sort of person to whom one would turn in times of distress.
    “I invited her to take a seat,” Pinkerton recalled. He assumed, understandably, that she had come in hopes of a secretarial position. “I’m afraid there are no openings at present,” he said, glancing down at his papers.
    Mrs. Warne folded her gloved hands. “I’m afraid you have misunderstood me,” she said.
    Pinkerton looked up. “Have I?” he asked.
    The young widow gave him a level gaze across the cluttered expanse of his desk. Her blue eyes, he saw, were now burning with resolve. “I have come to inquire,” she said, “as to whether you would not employ me as a detective.”
    These words, Pinkerton admitted, left him dumbfounded and thoroughly unsettled. Up to that moment, the possibility of hiring a female operative had simply never occurred to him. The very suggestion was shocking, and entirely outside the compass of his experience. Pinkerton agents, by definition, were rugged men of action, good with their fists and cool in the face of danger. The work was physically demanding, as well; one operative had recently trailed a horse-drawn carriage on foot rather than lose sight of a suspect, covering more than twelve miles at a dead run. This was not Pinkerton’s idea of women’s work.
    To his credit, Pinkerton decided to give Mrs. Warne a fair hearing. “It is not the custom to employ women as detectives,” he told her. “How, exactly, do you propose to be of service?” The young widow leaned forward and spoke with sudden urgency. “A female detective may go and worm out secrets in ways that are impossible for male detectives. A criminal may hide all traces of his guilt from his fellow men, but he will not hide it from his wife or mistress. The testimony of these women, then, becomes the sole means of resolving the crimes, and this testimony can be obtained in only one way—a female detective makes her acquaintance, wins her confidence, and draws out the story of the wrongdoing.”
    Pinkerton nodded his head as Mrs. Warne spoke, and continued nodding after she had finished. In spite of his instinctive reservations, he could not fail to see the merits of her reasoning. “She had evidently given the matter much study,” he admitted. Still, as Pinkerton knew all too well, his operatives routinely placed