“Vandalism, they will call it,” he said after destroying probably five hundred dollars’ worth of glass, “but in reality it is a scientific experiment and a success.” The impact of the hammer sounded very much like the breaking of a piece of kindling wood under foot. At last we were ready, and Sanc, as usual, gave me final instructions.
“Oakland is a tough town to take a pinch in, kid. You can’t fix your case, and you’ll get the limit if convicted. I’ll take a gun along. You needn’t. There isn’t much you can do. When the bull is out of the block and pedestrians are a couple of doors away I will do the best I can. You stand near by and if anybody gets wise to me, you shout to him: ‘Look out, he’s got a gun. Let’s get a policeman!’”
At nine o’clock we passed the window. A crowd was admiring the ring. At ten the pedestrians had thinned out, and half an hour later Sanc’s chance came.
The store was in the middle of a block. The patrolman was at the corner going farther away. Everything was exactly right. A passing electric car swallowed the noise of the breaking glass. Sanc disengaged the hammer’s nose from the hole carefully with a rasping noise. The hammer went into his coat pocket, and the wire came from beneath his coat. The top of the pedestal where the ruby rested was higher than the hole in the window, and when Sanc lifted the ring on his wire it slid slowly down and out into his hand. He threw the wire into the street and walked away. I followed behind and overtook him at the corner. A few blocks farther away he tossed the hammer into a lot. We sat apart on the train to the ferry and on the boat across to the city.
In my room Sanc removed the ruby from its setting, which I immediately took out and threw into a near-by sewer opening. When I returned he was admiring the stone. “There’s a stone, kid, that, as Shakespeare says, ‘A Jew would kiss and an Infidel adore.’”
The Sanctimonious Kid’s face wore a serious look the next evening when we met to go to dinner. “Kid,” he said, “the more I think of this wonderful pigeon-blood ruby the less I think of it, if you understand what I mean. It is possible that we put too much faith in the integrity of the business firm that displayed it so carelessly. I was out to the park to-day and gave the thing a careful inspection in the sunlight, and there is a cold, clammy suspicion in my mind that we have been swindled—in short, I am afraid the thing is a rank phony.
“And the worst of it is there’s not one person in five thousand who knows a real ruby when he sees it. There are probably three men in San Francisco who would know, but they are all square business men and we can’t submit it to any of them. The next nearest man is the buyer for the big Mormon store, Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution, at Salt Lake City. I will take a run back there with it and get some one to have him give an opinion on it. If it’s genuine I can get a thousand dollars on it. I’ll be gone about two weeks, and this is what I want you to do while I am away.
“Put on your best clothes, keep clean and neat, and spend your evenings around the Diamond Palace in Montgomery Street. Go through the whole block on both sides of the street. Look into every hallway, basement, empty store, and saloon. Try to locate some place that we can go through and out into an alley or another street. The getaway’s the thing, and if you can find one in the block we’ll chance the Diamond Palace some evening, maybe Christmas Eve.”
He left next morning after giving me strict orders to keep away from the wine dumps and attend to business. I worked faithfully and soon found half a dozen places that would serve. My time was now my own, and once more I began exploring the byways of the city.
The hypos I spent the night with in the city prison had aroused my curiosity about Chinatown. I put in many nights prowling through the alleys watching these mysterious people gambling, smoking opium, and trafficking in their women slaves. There were rumors of strange, mysterious underground passages below the streets and under the buildings, but I never saw them and I have since come to doubt whether they ever existed.