My first act was to put the stones in a safety box, tear up the receipt, and plant the key in a safe, convenient place. Then began the toughest part of the business, getting the stones off my hands and into cash. Day after day I sorted out the larger ones and in my room “unharnessed” them from their settings. Other articles, clusters and sunbursts, were left intact in their settings—to remove them would depreciate the value. I had many of the best stones reset and sold them for fair prices openly to bookmakers, prize fighters, jockeys, gamblers, and women about town. My money went into the bank, and for the first time in my life I carried a check book.
I was careful, kept clean and sober and away from the hop joints and thieves’ hangouts. For once in my life I managed to get a fair price from pawnshops for some of my junk. Taking one of the reset rings that was perfectly safe and impossible of identification, I would step into the pawnbroker’s at lunch time and always when there were other patrons in his place. The average thief is duck soup for the hockshop man. He will walk by the hockshop and look in. The hockshop man sees him and knows he has something “hot,” or crooked. If there is anybody in the place but the employees, the thief waits till they go out before going in. This convinces the pawnbroker he has a thief to deal with and he offers him half what he would offer an honest man with a legitimate article.
Instead of sneaking into a hockshop, taking a ring out of my pocket, and saying, “How much can I get on this?” I walked in confidently, held out my finger with the ring on, and said: “I want to pledge this ring for one hundred dollars till pay day. My name is so-and-so. I work for such and such a firm. I lost some of my employer’s money at the race track and must have it to-night.”
I always asked for a sum far in excess of what I expected, but that served to convince the pawnbroker I knew nothing about pawning things, that I was honest, that the ring was mine and that I would probably redeem it. After inspecting it, he would offer me much more than if he thought it was crooked. If it was redeemed he would get his big interest, and if not he would still be safely below the wholesale price, which is the dead line for him.
In one way and another I unloaded most of my stones to advantage. I could go about with them one at a time in safety; they were impossible of identification when out of their original settings. While I was trying to find some safe way of selling the pieces I had left in their settings, I met by chance a young chap I had known on the road. He had settled down, got married, and was making a semi-legitimate and uncertain living gambling. He was square enough, and I arranged with him to sell them for me. He was in San Francisco when the burglary was committed and was in no danger of being charged with it if he did get arrested.
He got rid of them quickly to his friends in the Tenderloin and to small pawnshops, getting a price that satisfied me and left him a good profit. I cleaned everything up and quit with eight thousand dollars in the bank and several very nice stones that I wanted to keep. Of late I had thought of buying a saloon some time and leaving the burglary business. Now, as I looked over the small dives and joints with their hangers-around, their discordant pianos and beery-voiced singers, and drunken, bedraggled women, I found they had no attraction. Now that I could have one of those places I didn’t want it.
The notion of going into any decent business never occurred to me. Without any definite notion of what to do, I settled down to have a few months of ease and relaxation. The race tracks and gambling houses were running wide open, but I kept away from them and didn’t get hurt. The wine dumps, the “Coast,” Chinatown, and the dingy dives that fascinated me when I first saw them, no longer held anything of interest.
I’m not finding fault with these brave days of jungle music, synthetic liquor, and dimple-kneed maids, and anybody that thinks the world is going to the bowwows because of them ought to think back to San Francisco or any other big city of twenty years ago—when train conductors steered suckers against the bunko men; when coppers located “work” for burglars and stalled for them while they worked; when pickpockets paid the police so much a day for “exclusive privileges” and had to put a substitute “mob” in their district if they wanted to go out of town to a country fair for a week. Those were the days when there were saloons by the thousand; when the saloonkeeper ordered the police to pinch the Salvation Army for disturbing his peace by singing hymns in the street; when there were race tracks, gambling unrestricted, crooked prize fights; when there were cribs by the mile and hop joints by the score. These things may exist now, but if they do, I don’t know where. I knew where they were then, and with plenty of money and leisure I did them all.
CHAPTER XXII
The young fellow that helped me dispose of the stones was the wayward son of a fine family and it would not be right to them to use his name. I will call him “Spokane,” the monoger he was known by among his associates. He had been in San Francisco for years and was familiar with an underworld that I had seen very little of. Most of my life had been spent on the road or roughing it in out-of-the-way places, broken by a few months now and then in city slums. He introduced me into the elegant hop joints where we smoked daily, into the hangouts of polished bunko men and clever pickpockets, into the gilded cafés and other exclusive and refined places of entertainment.