CHAPTER XI
Wearrived 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 carrythe 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 everygun. 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 poorSmiler 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 hallsand 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 inthe 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 wholestructure 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 thathad 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 itserved 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 stillsome 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 andfamily 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 gothrough 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. Theexpense 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 adozen 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.