“I’m scheming to make a strike through Western New York and Ontario, Canada,” Shinburn said to me a few weeks later, “but I’m short of the ‘ready’ just now, having been in retirement for some time, as you know; so, if you’ll back the game, I can’t see how we can lose.”
“I’m with you, Mark, provided there is a chance of making good. You’ve been in the business long enough to know best what to do, so here’s along with you.”
John Ryan and Laurie Palmer were counted in the venture, and the prospect of a rich haul seemed exceedingly bright. The banks that were secured entirely by key locks Shinburn was to tackle, and those being guarded in part, or wholly, by combination locks were to be attacked by Ryan, who had a fine kit of tools for that sort of work. We went to Buffalo, where Shinburn and Palmer called on a gambler friend. Ryan put up with a man acquaintance, while I went to a hotel. Making the Bison City our headquarters, we struck out in different directions in search of “lootable” banks, our main object being to find those using key locks. It was like convicting an egotist of his own conceit to find this class of bank, so we gave it up. About this time a friend of Shinburn’s, whom he introduced as Mr. Ellis, a counterfeiter, suggested that a bank at Brockport, seventeen miles west of Rochester, would be a comparatively easy piece of loot, owing to the habits of the police guard of the village, which consisted of a lone night watchman. Ellis said this watchman invariably went off duty at eleven o’clock at night. As to the vault of the bank, he declared it could be robbed, despite the combination lock used on it and its heavy steel work in general, by tunnelling from the top. Shinburn and Ryan decided to attempt the job, agreeing to pay Ellis ten per cent of the treasure obtained.
A postponement was necessary the first night we went at the job, because there happened to be a dance in the village, which in some manner or other induced the night watchman to remain on duty longer,—in fact, until three o’clock in the morning. Several evenings later we journeyed there again, and it was a night to be remembered, because of the great snow-storm and high winds that came with it. It was a hummer—of the blizzard class. In many respects, though, it was just our sort of weather, the kind that keeps people indoors. Scarcely a dog was in the streets after eleven o’clock.
A few minutes after midnight, leaving Palmer on the outside as a guard, Shinburn, Ryan, and I broke in the bank through the front door and were soon examining the vault. We had decided to try wedges on the vault door, so Ryan went to work. He had finely drawn untempered steel ones, which were driven in the seam between the front edge of the door and the jamb. For two hours we labored with these wedges, but the best we could possibly do was to force an opening about half an inch wide, which was insufficient to admit of throwing back the lock bolt. When a space wide enough to do this was about made, the wedges would rebound. Unable to release the bolt, we abandoned the job, being hopeless of accomplishing it in that manner, and leaving behind us plenty of evidence of our failure. The vault front was sadly defaced, but defiantly impregnable, so far as we were concerned that night, with the means at hand.
We went out in the storm, very much disappointed. Locating a hand-car, we started by rail for Rochester, but the snow being too heavy on the track, we ditched the car, and walking to the first village, hired a team and drove there. The remainder of the journey to Buffalo was accomplished by train.
My experience at Brockport and similar knowledge I had previously obtained through the work of a Jack Hartley and his mob of would-be safe-breakers at Carbondale, Pennsylvania, convinced me that success in our line could only be attained by forcing open vaults by means vastly different than any of those employed by either Ryan or Hartley or burglars of their class.
“Putting up cash to break banks with tools Ryan has,” I said to Shinburn, “is simply dumping it in the sea. As for me, I’m out of it.”
This broke the combination, so far as Ryan and Palmer were concerned, the former remaining in Buffalo and the latter returning to New York.
Shinburn and I determined to make for the metropolis also, but he recalled a tip from a friend at home, that there was a bank at Corning, New York, which might be relieved of its cash. Shinburn’s friend was of the opinion that the vault was secured by a key lock. So we concluded to stop off there and investigate, but, doing so, Mark discovered that the work entailed was not worth the risk. At two o’clock in the morning we were in the Erie Railroad depot waiting for a New York train, when a most unexpected thing happened. A mob of men and boys, led by a pair of constables, ran in the depot, one of them a big-looking fellow, yelling at the top of his voice, “Here they are!” The other constable rushed at Shinburn, crying, “We want you men; surrender!”