"I take off my hat to the New York police," said she.

At this time, apparently, no thought of denying her guilt had entered
her mind, and at the station house she talked freely to the sergeant,
the matron and the various newspaper men who were present, even drawing
pictures of herself upon loose sheets of paper and signing her name,
apparently rather enjoying the notoriety which her arrest had
occasioned. A thorough search of her apartment was now made with the
result that several sheets of paper were found there bearing what were
evidently practice signatures of the name of Alice Kauser. (Fig. 5.)
Evidence was also obtained showing that, on the day following her
husband's arrest, she had destroyed large quantities of blank check
books and blank checks.

Upon the trial of Mrs. Parker the hand-writing experts testified that
the Bierstadt and Kauser signatures were so perfect that it would be
difficult to state that they were not originals. The Parker woman was
what is sometimes known as a "free hand" forger; she never traced
anything, and as her forgeries were written by a muscular imitation of
the pen movement of the writer of the genuine signature they were almost
impossible of detection. When Albert T. Patrick forged the signature of
old Mr. Rice to the spurious will of 1900 and to the checks for $25,000,
$65,000 and $135,000 upon Swenson's bank and the Fifth Avenue Trust Co.,
the forgeries were easily detected from the fact that as Patrick had
_traced_ them they were _all almost exactly alike and practically could
be superimposed one upon another, line for line, dot for dot_.[1]

[Footnote 1: See _Infra_, p. 304.]

[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Practice signatures of the name of Alice