We missed that tidy little bit of plunder just because a young woman was addicted to the habit of walking in her sleep.
And now another instance—the very remarkable chain of surprises which resulted in the murder of a bank cashier, the blackening of a dead man's reputation, and, finally, the imprisonment of two desperate burglars for life.
For many years the robbery of the bank in Dexter, Maine, puzzled everybody. This was a job of national importance, because Mr. Barron, the cashier of the bank, was accidentally murdered, and the detectives, after failing to get any clue to the burglars, buncoed the bank officials by inventing the theory that the unfortunate cashier had murdered himself!
They managed to fix up the books of the bank in such a way as to show some trivial pretended defalcation, which amounted, as I remember it, to about $1,100. On the strength of this barefaced frame-up the memory of the poor cashier was defamed and the bank actually brought suit against the widow for some small sum.
The real facts I will now tell you. Jimmy Hope, the famous bank burglar, first got his eye on the Dexter bank as a promising prospect, and made all his plans to enter the bank when, to his disgust, he was grabbed for another matter and given a prison term. In Jimmy Hope's gang was an ambitious burglar named David L. Stain, and Stain decided that there was no reason why the Dexter bank should escape simply because Hope was serving a sentence.
So Stain looked over the ground and decided to rob the bank with a little band of his own, consisting of Oliver Cromwell and a man named Harvey, and somebody else whose name I do not now recall. They selected Washington's Birthday because it was a holiday, and there was every reason to believe that nobody would be in the bank.
Late in the afternoon Stain and his associates forced their way into the building and sprung the lock of the back door of the bank. The burglars stood for a moment to put on their masks and rubber shoes, and then Stain moved forward toward the inner room of the bank, where the bank vaults were.
Just at the moment that Stain put his hand on the doorknob Cashier Barron on the other side of the door put his own hand on the inside knob as he unsuspectingly started to leave the inside room, where he had been going over some of the books that were in the vaults.
AS THE DOOR OPENED STAIN AND BARRON CAME FACE TO FACE