Van Orden was completely floored by the turn of circumstances. Though I knew his promises would be worthless, I could do nothing more than accept them. Colonel Whiteley left the bank presently, and I soon followed. I had had revenge, but it was dearly bought.
Colonel Whiteley and I had met for the first time, though I had been in the line of getting something for nothing about four years. He went away believing me to be an honest man. As for him, I don’t know that he didn’t turn the nine hundred and fifty ten-dollar notes over to the Treasury Department. But I was to meet him again before many years, and under most unusual conditions. Of this meeting I shall be able to tell in another volume of my series of Bliss books.
As to my foreman, Meriam, when he came up for a preliminary trial, ex-Judge Stuart, whom I retained for him, so confused the young woman who came on from the Treasury Department to identify the bills that her testimony was valueless. As the case depended upon her identification, it fell through, and Meriam was discharged from custody.
All together it was a costly meeting that I had had with Jim Burns in Fifth Avenue. I had started out to make a profit of one thousand dollars, and it had cost me more than ten thousand, besides bringing grief to my beloved wife; for until that time she’d been kept in entire ignorance of the fact that I was a professional burglar.
The New England congressman got more out of the job than I. Lucky congressman!
CHAPTER XXII
WILLIAM HATCH, ESQUIRE, DAY WATCHMAN
After the ingenuity of a master cracksman has been taxed to its utmost in an effort to get the combination numbers of a presumably impenetrable vault, and success seems assured, is it not most provoking, and disheartening too, when the unexpected pops up and thunders down failure upon his head? It was thus in my attempt to possess the millions kept in the vault of the Corn Exchange National Bank of Philadelphia in the winter of 1872 and the spring of the following year.
In December of 1872 Detective McCord, my friend of the New York Detective Bureau, asked me to call on Frank Gleason, the shrewd partner of Andrew Roberts, the notorious bond forger and “fence” keeper. Gleason, so Jack McCord told me, had a large job in the Quaker City, in which I could use a “right” day watchman. I saw Gleason and was given a letter of introduction to Peter Burns, a Philadelphia crook of no small reputation in his neighborhood. I was informed that he possessed a snug fortune at one time, though I will not vouch for it. I do know, however, that he was a protégé of Detective Josh Taggart, of the Quaker City Police Department, one of the slickest Hawkshaws of the period.
As to my introduction to Peter Burns, it led to an acquaintance with the day watchman of the Corn Exchange Bank. His name was William Hatch, though I never called him other than Billy. He was a friend of Burns’s, so you will observe that it was first through McCord, a detective, next Gleason, a forger, then Burns, a crook, who was a friend of Taggart, another detective, that I finally reached the man who was to play a first-class crook part in my attempt to rob the bank. Perhaps it was Detective Taggart who tipped off Jack McCord. Who knows? I won’t say.