We arrived in San Francisco safely and without incident. The first thing
was to get rooms. My experience in the matter of Smiler inclined me
toward a room by myself. Sanc, always cautious, decided it would be
safest to have separate rooms. I found a nice, quiet German hotel in the
Mission where I located, and Sanc found himself a place downtown. After
getting settled, Sanc took our paper money to a bank and got gold for
it.
At that time storekeepers hesitated about taking paper. Many of them did
not know good from bad paper, there was so little of it in circulation,
and they had been loaded up with Confederate bills till they were
suspicious of any paper and sometimes called in a copper to inspect it
and the person who proffered it. We didn’t want any of this thing, and
got gold at once.
“Now for another safety box,” said Sanc. “I would prefer the bank,
straight, but there’s too many formalities about putting it in and
getting it out, and besides that you can do a lot of locating if you
have a safety box. You can go in two or more times a day and you will
always see people going and coming to their boxes with money or jewelry.
Many women have all their jewelry in safety boxes and only take it out
when they want to display it at a theater or party. They lift it on the
afternoon of the evening they want to wear it, and put it back the next
morning, but they have to keep it at home that night. Simplest thing in
the world to tail them home from the bank.
“The safety box is also used,” he continued to illuminate me, “by
race-horse men, gamblers, and the moneyed macquereau, and I don’t mind
telling you that I’d rather ‘prowl’ one of them than any business man.
It’s a joy to hear one of them squawk, and most of them would put the
old index finger on you or me in a minute, just by the way of alibi.
“There is one bad objection to a safety box for a thief. The coppers are
beginning to get wise that they are the greatest receptacles of loot in
the world. They are loaded with stolen money, jewelry, bonds; and the
larger boxes are often used to store smuggled opium and other contraband
drugs. The coppers hang around them, doing a little locating themselves,
and if I were known in the town I wouldn’t think of having anything
crooked in one of them. I will pay for the box, and tell them I play
poker and may want to get money before or after banking hours, and that
you are to have access to it at any time.”
He got two keys and gave me one. “You can carry the key with you if you
want, kid. There’s nothing crooked in the box yet, but if there is later
on, and I hope there will be, you must plant it till you need it. And
here goes the receipt,” he said, tearing it to bits and giving them to
the wind.
“To-morrow, Kid, while we have plenty of coin, I want you to get a
couple of guns. Thirty-eights,” and he named a certain standard make.
“No other kind, remember. You heard what Soldier Johnnie said, and he
knew what he was doing. I suppose you’ll go to the first hardware store
for them, eh?” he said rather severely.
Those were the good, or bad, old days when any wild-eyed maniac could
rush into a hardware store or pawnshop with money enough and buy a gun,
guaranteed to kill a man a block away. They would take the number of it,
to be sure, in order to get witness fees if the gun worked properly.
To-day it’s a little more difficult to buy a gun in California. The
better stores will not sell them unless the purchaser has a permit. The
other stores, and they are quite numerous, take your money to-day for
the gun, and to-morrow you go to the store and get it.
“Oh, I don’t know, I might look around a bit,” I said. “How about
getting them in a hockshop?”
“That would be just the place, kid, if you were going to shoot a burglar
or stick-up man, but in this instance there’s a difference. I’ve been
carrying a gun around for ten years. Every time I fired it I was in the
wrong, legally speaking, see? I’ve been lucky enough so far not to have
killed anybody, and hope I never do, but you have to be careful just the
same. The hardware store has the number of every gun. The hockshop man
not only notes the number, but in most cases puts a mark on it for
future reference. Your hockshop man, kid, is the hangman’s handmaiden.
“You will get those guns in Chinatown at different places, one to-morrow
morning and one in the evening. You have plenty of time, and the best
way to spend it is in taking precautions against trouble. The Chinks are
safe to do any kind of business with, buying or selling. They don’t
talk. I’ll show you the kind of place to go this evening. The guns you
will buy are probably stolen from some pig-iron dump (hardware store)
outside of the state, and come into the Chinks’ hands by such devious
routes that the numbers are long since lost track of.”
The guns and cartridges were duly bought and put away in the safety box
with most of our money. The keys we planted about the places where we
lived. Our clothes were few and in bad shape. Sanc proposed going to a
tailor.
“Yes,” I said. “Here’s where one of my ambitions comes to a head. I’m
going to have a nice gray suit, gray hat, and a fine leather trunk,” my
mind going back to the gray man and his traveled trunk that I worshiped
on the depot platform in my little town. It seemed an age since then.
“If you dress yourself that way, Kid, we part. Where did you gather
that insane notion? A gray suit, gray hat, leather trunk! I suppose
you’d have stickers on the trunk so the coppers wouldn’t have to ask you
where you were from.”
I was silent, ashamed to tell him where I got the notion.
“It’s just as I said about the guns; you might wear that rig if you were
out hunting burglars, but you wouldn’t get many. Even the ‘dicks’ have
too much sense to dress that way. Do you want everybody to look at you?
Do you want everybody that looks at you to remember you? You do not. You
want as few people to look at you as possible, and you want those few to
forget you as soon as possible,” he continued, with emphasis.
“What you want is clothes that will not detain the eye for a second.
Expensive as you like, and well fitting, but not loud or striking.
You want clothes that a man or woman could not describe as blue,
brown, or black five minutes after looking at you. You want neutral
clothes. Be as positive yourself as you like, but no positive clothes.
You’ve got to watch yourself, kid. You know that old maxim, ‘eternal
vigilance.’ You’ll have enough trouble come to you naturally and
unavoidably—accidents that you cannot foresee—without advertising for
it with a loud suit of rags. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred are
picked up through some peculiarity of dress and identified by the same.
You don’t want any funny hats, either, or loud ties.
“You know when you are doing things to people you depend largely on the
element of surprise. They do not look at you carefully and memorize your
features. They get a fleeting, frightened glance, and you are off. But a
red tie, Kid, a glance is enough, and no matter how surprised your party
may be he remembers your gray suit, gray hat, or red tie.”
The Sanctimonious Kid was a sober, careful character. He did not gamble
and keep us broke as poor Smiler had. We went along easily and got some
good out of our money. I spent days along the water front and in the
park and at the beach, and evenings at shows or in the dance halls,
watching the sailors, whalers, miners, lumbermen, spending their
winter-money in a night.
The night life fascinated me. Grant Avenue, now filled with the best
shops, was a part of the Tenderloin, and all the narrow streets or
alleys off it were crowded with cribs and small saloons with a dance
floor in the back room. Many of them had only the short, swinging doors,
and never closed from one year’s end to another. The Tenderloin was
saturated with opium. The fumes of it, streaming out of the Baltimore
House at the corner of Bush and Grant, struck the nostrils blocks away.
Every room in it was tenanted by hop smokers. The police did not molest
them. The landlord asked only that they pay their rent promptly. If it
was not paid on the hour, he took the door of the room off its hinges
and put it behind the counter, leaving the occupant’s “things” at the
mercy of his fellow lodgers.
Dupont Street, now Grant Avenue, began at Bush and carried the
Tenderloin over into Chinatown, where old St. Mary’s Church rose from
the heart of it, brooding over it all. It was a colorful
Tenderloin—loud, drunken, odorous, and stupid from hop. Its bad wine,
ill women, and worse song have gone to join the Indian, the buffalo, the
roulette wheel, and the faro box. Deeply and securely dug in, it yielded
slowly, inch by inch, and with scant grace, to the sledgehammer blows of
the militant Father Caraher.
I made a few acquaintances around the dance halls and found my way into
the hop joints. Curiosity was my only excuse for my first “smoke.” It
made me very sick, and although I became a “smoker” after, it was years
before I touched the pipe again.
Sanc spent his time in his own way, and there were times when I wouldn’t
see him for a week. One night when he appeared at our eating place, he
handed me a sheet of paper.
“Here’s some work for you, kid. There are the names and addresses of
about fifty people here and in Oakland who carry burglary insurance. It
cost me one hundred dollars. The lawyer who got it for me probably gave
the clerk who got it for him ten dollars. It’s cheap though, at that,
for it will save me a lot of footwork, guesswork, and uncertainty. A
glance at that list tells you where they live, it tells you they have
valuables because they are insured, and it tells me that they are
careless because they are insured. It also tells me that in case of a
show-down they will give up their valuables without a murmur because
they are insured. It further tells me that some of them are going to
collect insurance shortly, providing you get out and do your part of
it, and that’s this.
“I want you to look over some of those shacks. To-morrow you copy off
about three names and plant that list somewhere around your hotel; then
go out and look over the places. Later I’ll look at any you think are
possible of approach. I want to know about dogs, kids, servants, sick
people—everything. The house, the porch, the basement, the yard, the
alley.
“You’ve read a lot of books about criminals, but forget it all. Don’t
scrape acquaintance with the nurse girl to ask questions. Don’t ask a
question in the neighborhood. Just walk by and look, or get a book or
paper and read where you get a good view of the house and its occupants.
Look at the porches especially. This is about the time of the year for a
good ‘supper sneak’; it’s dark when they are at dinner now.
“Take your time, and when you see one that looks tough, forget it. There
ought to be a few soft ones on that list. One good one would do.”
There was nothing of the Bill Sikes about Sanc. He ordered me to do
things as a plumber would an apprentice. I took orders and obeyed them
as any apprentice should, cheerfully. I worked faithfully day after day,
reporting several places to Sanc, who took a look at them and said,
“Keep on going, Kid.”
At last I found a house that seemed to interest him. He looked at it and
told me to quit my search and turn my attention to the place for a few
evenings. It was built to be burglarized. Big yard, trees, shrubs.
House of about ten rooms, two stories, porch in front and around one
side. It was on a corner lot and from the side street the family could
be seen, assembled at dinner.
We looked at it together for several evenings, and Sanc decided it would
do. “Ordinarily,” said he, “I would get this alone, but to-morrow night
you will come along. That old porch may not bear my weight. If it
won’t, you will have to go up.”
The next evening we were in the yard when they gathered round the dinner
table. The upstairs was lighted as usual. Sanc left me in the shrubbery,
and stepped to the side porch and upon the railing. When he grasped the
upper part to lift himself, the whole structure groaned and creaked and
rocked. He tried another place and it was worse. He beckoned me. “Up
you go, Kid. It won’t hold me. The front rooms first, remember. Take
your time; we have half an hour. I’ll protect you.”
I went up with ease and he back to the sheltering shrubs. The nearest
window was unfastened. I doubt if one of them was locked. I was nervous.
My heart was pounding with the suspense till I could hear it. Sanc had
instructed me well. I was fortunate enough to get the long end of what
was there. It was on top of a dressing table. No money. The other rooms
were bare of valuables.
I was hanging from the top of the porch, feeling for a foothold on the
railing, when a pair of arms encircled me, and, thinking it was Sanc
helping me down, I said softly, preparing to let go my handholds, “Have
you got me?”
The arms tightened around my waist like iron bands, pinning me to the
porch post, helpless.
“Yes, damn you, I’ve got you good!” said a strange voice. “Oh, Clarence,
come out here. I’ve got a burglar, red-handed.”
Captured red-handed, as I was, my mind turned to Sanc. I could not
believe he had deserted me. Another man joined my captor in response to
his call and they began tugging and hauling me, trying to break my hold
on the porch roof. I could see myself being beaten, mauled, despoiled of
my loot, and thrown into the patrol wagon by the two outraged and angry
citizens.
Just when I was ready to let go all holds and fall into their arms, I
felt the iron clasp of the one that had me around the body slacken
slowly. One of them exclaimed: “Look out!” Then I heard Sanc’s voice.
It was not clear and soft as usual. There seemed to be a slight
impediment or obstruction in his speech, which was positive enough but
so different that I doubted for a minute if it was he. His precise and
careful English was gone, too.
“Hey, youse, let go uh that guy or I’ll tear your heads off. Want to git
yourselves plugged over a bunch of junk dat’s insured? Git inside an’
stay there or I’ll smoke the both of youse off.”
My confidence came back, and I found a foothold on the porch rail. My
captors were backing slowly, silently toward the door they came out of.
Sanc, a fearsome object, his coat collar up, hat down over his ears and
eyes, stood in the shadow of a large bush six feet away, waving some
shiny thing at them. “Don’t try any funny business,” he said to them as
I jumped to the ground. “You might get us to-morrow but not to-night.
Phone your head off if you want, but don’t poke it out of the house
while we’re in the block.”
“Did you connect, Kid?” he asked when we were on the street.
“Yes, a coat pocket full,” I said, brushing the cobwebs and dust off my
clothes; “but why did you tell them to phone?”
“I’ll explain all that to you later. You’ve got to outthink them. You
have to have something besides guts at this racket. I sent them to the
phone so they wouldn’t follow us out. I couldn’t have stood them off on
the street with this bottle. I had to keep waving it about wildly for
fear they would see it wasn’t a gun. I found it right at my hand on the
porch, and it served the purpose,” he said, throwing it into a yard. “I
seldom carry a gun at this evening work because I can flatten the
average man with a punch. However, I think I shall put a small ‘rod’ in
my coat pocket hereafter.”
We walked away briskly without attracting attention; it was early
evening and there were people in every block. At a corner I started to
turn toward downtown. He stopped me. “No, no; we must assume that they
phoned because they did not follow us. That way you might meet the
coppers on their way out.”
A short walk brought us to a car line. “Take this car, Kid, and go
straight to your room. I’ll be on the next one; and don’t lock your door
when you go in. It looks and sounds suspicious at seven o’clock in the
evening in a decent, quiet hotel.”
He came in ten minutes after me, without knocking, and locked the door
softly. “Now, kid,” he said in his best manner, “we will proceed to
estimate the intrinsic value of our takings in dollars and cents. That
amount, divided by four, will give us an idea of what we have earned
this evening.”
“Why divide it by four, Sanc?”
“Because it’s crooked and no fence will give you more. It’s a great
game, Kid. The fence divides it by four, taking seventy-five per cent of
the value to pay him for the chances he takes. The loser, reporting to
the insurance company, multiplies it by four to pay himself for the
extrinsic value of his junk, and the annoyance caused by his burglar.”
He turned to the stuff I threw on the bed. “Better brush your clothes
off carefully, Kid. There are still some smudges on your coat.” He
looked at me critically. “And a button gone.” He pointed to where there
should have been a button. “Take that suit off. Put on your old one.
That button is around that porch and it’s enough to bury us both in
Quentin. Tear the tailor’s tags out of those clothes, wrap them up, go
out, and throw them in a lot somewhere, not too close to this place.
To-morrow you can order a new suit. That one is poison. While you’re
out, I’ll take these stones out of their ‘harness.’”
It broke my heart to throw away a new suit of clothes, but I was a good
apprentice and obeyed. When I returned he had finished “unharnessing”
the stones. There was a fistful of broken gold settings, and some small
articles of little value. “Wrap that junk up, kid, take it out and throw
it in a lot and not the same lot you left the clothes in, either,” said
the master.
I tore a sheet from a newspaper, and, wrapping the junk up, started out
again. He stopped me. “Wouldn’t it be just as well to take the balance
of that paper and throw it away, Kid? Why leave it in the room? It fits
the piece you have in your pocket. And be sure to throw that junk away.
Don’t plant it somewhere against a rainy day. Throw it away,” he
finished emphatically.
Again I obeyed. When I got back he had planted the stones, a very small
parcel now, in the hotel wash room. On our way out he said, “One more
thing now, and I will feel safe. We will get a new hat each.”
We left the old ones in the store, “to be called for.”
“Now, Kid, something to eat, and I will sum up for you the doings of
this evening.” Seated in a quiet restaurant with decent dinners before
us, Sanc began.
“You probably thought when you were seized coming down the porch that I
had abandoned you.”
I protested, “No, no.”
“Well, that’s what I would have thought if I had been in your place. You
see, I saw the party coming toward the door just as you were dropping
off the porch roof. I was afraid if I started anything then you would go
back up and get trapped inside the house. So I let things go along
naturally till I thought they had gone far enough.”
“You did the right thing,” I said gratefully, “but why did you tell them
they might get us to-morrow?”
“Ha, that’s the psychology of the situation, Kid. I mentioned also that
he was insured. That reminds him that he is not losing anything, and it
also saves his face with the family. He went inside and said to them and
the other chap, after they had looked about the house and phoned the
police, ‘Oh, well, we’re insured. Of course if we hadn’t been I would
have given that other burglar a battle, tough as he was.’ Then the other
chap cuts in and says, ‘You did the sensible thing, Tom. The police will
pick them up to-morrow at some pawnshop.’
“You see, kid,” Sanc continued, “those people are excited and
frightened. You have to think for them and for yourself, too. When I
told them they might get us to-morrow I gave them another out; they say
to themselves, ‘Why, of course the police will get them. How foolish of
us to endanger ourselves and family over a few things that are insured
and will be recovered in the pawnshops when the burglars are arrested.’
“Then I send them to the phone, and we depart.”
I listened, spellbound. “You did something to your voice. I hardly
recognized it.”
“Simplest thing in the world. Put a fifty-cent piece or any little
object in your mouth and see what a difference it makes in your voice. I
venture to say that the loss of one tooth would cause a change that
might be detected with certain instruments for analyzing sound. It’s
just as well to take such precautions. Some people have uncanny
memories for voices. And now we come to the last phase of the evening’s
work. It hurt you to throw away your new suit. Don’t worry, it’s not
wasted. Somebody will find it and wear it, and maybe get arrested. But
this is no time for speculating about that. Suppose that button were
found on that porch or maybe in one of the rooms. You might have lost
it going in the window upstairs. It don’t belong in the house. The
presumption is that you lost it in the struggle or climbing up the
porch.
“Old Captain Lees (you’ve heard of him) would give that button to one of
his smart young ‘dicks’ and stand him on the Richelieu corner, Geary and
Market.
“He would stand there from four in the afternoon till midnight waiting
for you to come along, which you do every evening. Just think what might
happen to us then. He wouldn’t pinch you there. He would tail you to
your room, then to my room, then to the safety box, and when they got
ready in we would go. Think that over.
“If the case were big enough, Lees would go through every tailor shop in
town fishing for a line on you, and he might stumble on it.
“The gold mountings you threw away could have been melted at the expense
of a fifteen-cent crucible and a dime’s worth of borax, and would have
brought us maybe ten dollars as old gold at any jeweler’s. But think of
the chances you take in selling it, jeopardizing the stones we have and
our liberty for ten dollars—bad business.
“And that newspaper I made you throw out. Here’s the reason. We might
be in jail to-morrow on suspicion. We figure to get picked up any time
because, well, because we’re what we are. Everything in your room, if
they find your room, is taken down and held and examined. Suppose that
happened to-morrow and while you’re locked up the parcel of junk is
found in the lot wrapped in the missing part of the paper found in your
room. No lawyer in California could beat that case. That proves
possession and that’s all they need to convict you of burglary. And
here’s something else about house burglary. You seldom get money.
Everything has to be sold. And that’s where your danger and troubles
begin in earnest. Not one house burglar in a hundred is caught in the
act. It’s always when he is trying to sell his plunder.
“I could steal, take, and carry away,” he continued, smiling, “fifty
thousand dollars’ worth of plunder—rugs, furs, paintings, statuary, and
such junk in thirty days, if I wanted to make a pack horse of myself.
But just imagine trying to dispose of it. There’s where you ‘sup with
sorrow’ as the poet says, Kid. Take nothing you can’t put in your coat
pocket. You’ve got to watch yourself like a fat man on a diet. The
smallest trifle will upset you, and you’ll have leisure to repent your
carelessness. When you get your new suit from the tailor’s, take all the
tags out of it, and when you buy a hat don’t let the hatter stamp your
name on the sweatband. You don’t know what house you might lose it in.
“I know thieves so conceited and foolish that they have their names in
their hats and monogrammed pocket handkerchiefs, and neat little
notebooks with all their friends’ addresses and phone numbers carefully
noted. That’s the type of thief that calls the police ‘a bunch of
chumps,’ and goes to jail crying, ‘Somebody snitched.’
“The police are not chumps, kid; they are just lazy, that’s all. If they
worked as thoroughly at their business as I do at mine, I don’t know
what would happen. They are human, and take the easy way. Somebody
whispers to a dick. He whispers to me, and we go down to the jail, where
he locks me up ‘on suspicion.’ The next morning he and his partner come
to my cell, knock me down, walk up and down on my wishbone for a few
minutes, and ask me if I am ready to snitch on myself and all my
friends. If I decline to help them, they let me out. That’s the lazy
coppers’ notion of doing police duty.”
Our dinner finished, he said: “And now, after all this talk, what do you
think we should do with the stones we have?”
“Why not spend a hundred dollars for fare to Pocatello and back?” I
asked. “Mary’s safe.”
“You are learning, Kid. That’s precisely what I intended doing. Mary is
safe, and moreover she’ll give me more than I could get around here. The
expense of going to her is money spent insuring ourselves against
trouble. If I try to drop the stones here, I have to take what the first
man offers me or I make a dangerous enemy right there. If I refuse to be
robbed and turn down half a dozen offers, I make that many bad friends,
and they whisper me into jail. I could give them to some crooked saloon
man, who would sell them in an hour and pay me at the rate of five or
ten dollars a day, in the hope that before I got all the money I would
get pinched for something else, and put away where I couldn’t collect
the balance. If I get insistent and demand it all at once, he throws a
scare into me thus: ‘Say, now, what’re you trying to do, crowd somebody?
If I wanted to be wrong I could turn you in to the coppers and get a
favor of them some time. But I’m right. Nevertheless, don’t try to
crowd me, see?’
“So I am for Salt Chunk Mary’s in the morning. She’s righter than a
golden guinea and is entitled to make the profit on the junk. I’ll be
back in ten days.
“While I’m away take it easy and don’t go around the residence district
at all. You can make the safety box about ten o’clock in the morning and
four in the afternoon every day. You might locate something from there.
Here’s something else you can do.
“Every afternoon go into some good hotel and pay for a room for the
night. Register from out of town. When you get the key, go out to your
own room and make a duplicate of it. Mark your duplicate so you can
identify it, and plant it somewhere. Most of the best places are using
these spring locks now and you can’t do anything without a key when
there’s a sleeper in the room. In a week you’ll have keys to half a
dozen good transient rooms in the best hotels, and I might get some real
money out of them.
“Go back to the hotel in the evening, tell the clerk you are called out
of town and ask for your money back. He will usually give it to you.”
I bade Sanc good night and good-by, resolving to have something good
located for him on his return from Salt Chunk Mary’s.