play fair.  “We are very careful never to break a promise we have made to a man,” says an agency which deals with many deserters.  The same agency, as illustration of its own methods in seeking deserting men, instances the case of a man who was being shielded by his sister, but was discovered by an officer who scraped acquaintance with her little boy and asked innocently, “Where’s your uncle Jack now?” In another case the officer learned of a man’s whereabouts through his relatives by representing himself as a lawyer’s clerk calling about a legacy which had been left the man.  In still another case, reported by a different agency, a man who had deserted his family was known to be receiving mail through the general delivery of another city.  It was ascertained that he was writing to a woman in his home town.  A letter was sent to him in care of General Delivery asking him to meet the writer (who was represented to be the young woman with whom he was corresponding).  The wife was sent to that city and she and the local probation officer met the man and served the warrant.

There is, of course, something to be said in favor of the use of such methods.  The protection of the weak and helpless may justify, in certain circumstances, any subterfuge.  But the detective who arrests the criminal in ways like these is seeking his punishment and nothing else.  There is no thought in that case of establishing personal relations and effecting the long, slow process of reformation.  When social workers use such methods it should be in the full realization that they are foregoing any future advantage of straight dealing with the man.  To capture a man by a trick is to declare war on him; and, in his mind, the social worker and the policeman then stand in the same place, “I’d have him there to meet you,” said a deserter’s chum to a woman visitor, “if I wasn’t sure, in spite of your straight talk, you’d have a bull waiting behind a tree."[20]

If it is a first desertion, or if there is room for doubt whether an accident may have befallen the man, police and hospital records should be looked up.

A woman with four children applied to a charity organization society, saying her husband had disappeared.  There was a rumor that someone had seen him fall off the dock while intoxicated, but no attempt had been made to confirm this and the family was treated as a deserted family for some months, until the man’s body was found in the river and identified.

If there have been previous desertions, it is extremely important to secure their history.  The reasons that moved the man once are likely to do so again, and he is apt to return to his former haunts and be seen by former friends and acquaintances.