When my husband first suggested his escape from Sing Sing he promised me that if he ever succeeded in getting out he would give up crime and turn to some honest and honorable work. That promise was made while his remorse was sharpened by his sudden change from high living to poor prison fare, and I was now to see how weak his good intentions really were.
After a few weeks in New York, where we received the warm congratulations of many friends on our escape from Sing Sing, we went to Canada to visit our children who were in school there. It was not long before our funds began to get low. I thought this a favorable time to remind my husband of his promises and to urge him to get some honest employment. But he would not listen to me.
"That would be all very well if I had any money," he said; "but I can't settle down until I have enough capital to give me a decent start. Wait until I do one more good bank job and then I will think about living differently."
AN EASY BANK ROBBERY
I agreed to this reluctantly, for I felt a premonition that when this "one more job" was finished we should both find ourselves back in Sing Sing again. And, as it turned out, I was right.
It was not altogether lack of money or the desire to live a decent life which made me plead with Ned to reform. The fact that there was a reward on both our heads and that at any minute some ambitious detective was liable to recognize us was beginning to tell on my nerves. Ned used to try to laugh my fears away by saying that I saw policemen in my sleep. Probably I did—at any rate, I know that for months, asleep or awake, I would jump at the slightest sound, thinking it was an officer come to take us back to Sing Sing. We could not live natural lives but had to be constantly dodging about, and occasionally running to cover for long intervals.
The "one more job" my husband had in mind was the robbery of a Montreal bank. He looked the ground over, found it to his liking, and then sent for a friend of ours, Dave Cummings, an experienced bank robber, to come on from New York and help us.
It was really a very simple undertaking for three such expert criminals as we were. My part of it was merely to stand in the shadow of an alley and watch for the possible return of one of the bank's two watchmen. There was small chance of his putting in an appearance, for my husband had previously cultivated his acquaintance, and on this particular evening had been plying him with mugs of ale until he had left him fast asleep in a nearby saloon.
Inside the bank there was a second watchman. He was an old man, but when he discovered Ned and Dave crawling through the rear window, which they had opened with their jimmies, he put up such a stiff fight that they had all they could do to stun him with a blow on the head, stuff a handkerchief down his throat, and tie his hands and feet with a piece of rope. As it was, they made so much noise that I nearly had nervous prostration in the alley where I was crouching half a block away.
"I think I'd better keep an eye on this old chap while you get the coin, Dave," my husband said, ruefully rubbing a bruised cheek he had received in the tussle with the faithful guardian of the bank.