CHAPTER XIII
Having plenty of time and spending money I visited San Jose, towns down the peninsula, and across the bay—always with an eye to business. Jewelry-store windows are fascinating to the thief. He must stop and look over the sparkling plunder. Even in these days of my regeneration I stop occasionally from habit at a jewelry-store window. Usually there are others looking, too!
I paused before a jewelry-store window in Oakland one evening, just at closing time. The clerks were clearing it out for the night. In the center of the display stood a slim, polished wood pedestal, on top of which, in a velvet cup, reposed an enormous ruby, the size of my thumb nail, set in a ring. A placard announced that this pigeon-blood ruby, valued at three thousand dollars, was to be awarded by some organization, the name of which I don’t recall, to the winner of a contest they were holding.
The window was cleaned up, the display put away for the night, but the ruby was left on its pedestal when the store was closed. I got the next boat across and found Sanc. We went back to Oakland and got to the store about eleven o’clock.
“I don’t know anything about rubies, kid, but if it’s left there all night it’s phony.”
Just then two men came along, entered the store, and, locking the door behind them, went to the window and got the stone. They disappeared toward the back of the store.
“It must be genuine, kid. They are putting it away in the ‘box.’”
As we walked away, Sanc said: “The window has a burglar alarm. You can see the tape around the edges. If I could devise some way to put an inch hole through the glass without cracking it clear across to the tape, the alarm would not sound and I could take the stone out with a stiff wire. To-morrow night I’ll try something I have long thought of.”
The next day he bought at a second-hand store a small machinist’s hammer, weighing about a pound. One face of it was thick, heavy, and flat, the other was rounded to a nose about the size of a boy’s marble. He bought a whipstock of tough, springy wood and made a handle about eighteen inches long, which he fitted into the hammer.
For several nights we went around to new buildings and into deserted streets where there were plate-glass windows of a weight corresponding with the one in Oakland. Sanc used his hammer like a whip, snapping the noselike face of it against windows till he became so expert he could make a hole as clean as if it had been done by a bullet, and without cracking the glass for more than six inches from it.