The way to the bank vaults with their treasures had been laid open, but there remained many matters of detail to be carried out before we could enter them. There promised to be a delay of several months, but we were impatient over the prospect of delay of even six months in securing the fortunes we wanted, and which we had come to consider essential to our happiness. Our plan to ease the bank of a million or two of her forty million sterling was, roughly stated, to borrow from day to day large sums upon forged securities, the bad feature of the plan, from our point of view, being the fact that the bank, as a matter of course, would retain these documents, which could be produced at any future time to found a criminal charge against us, provided justice ever had the opportunity to weigh us in her balances. Protected as we were by the police in New York, we felt that the chance of our identity ever becoming known was remote. Still, there was an element of chance we wanted to eliminate entirely. In our recent raid on the bankers of France and Germany we never exhausted our letter of credit, but had the amount of cash we drew indorsed upon it, and brought the actual forged document away and instantly destroyed it. Had we been arrested in Europe, no doubt, under the laws prevailing there, they would have made us suffer upon the verbal statement of the banker; but in America to convict one of forgery the document itself must be produced in court. I paid several visits to the bank, depositing and drawing out various sums of money. I had talks with the sub-manager, and, on various pretexts to get information, I interviewed bankers and money men in the city. Finally, after many conferences, we came to the conclusion that the boasted impregnability of the bank was imaginary, and that the vanity and self-sufficiency of the officials would some day prove a snare to the institution they ruled over. The next conclusion we arrived at was that, easy as it might be to defraud the bank, yet there was an infinity of detail which would require six months of preparations to carry out. Then, again, the word forgery began to look black in our vocabulary. We knew John Bull was an obstinate fellow when he once got his back up, and we began to think it wise to keep beyond his dull weather eye.