But our trip was not without its disappointment in another direction, for Shinburn and I had a disagreement. He still insisted that it was unnecessary to have paid Sheriff Smith the thousand-dollar bribe, averring, testily, that it was money thrown away, and exhibited a disinclination to shoulder his share of it. The end of it was a decision to part company. I believed then, and I do to this day, that we would have been turned over to Detective Watts had I trusted to Lawyer Rumsey. I feel morally certain, too, that he overestimated his power with the cunning sheriff. In the meantime Mark and I made precious little money. I was convinced that the crude methods used by the burglar craft, to master bank vaults, were too antiquated to compete with the great improvement which had been made in the construction of vaults and combination locks. In my brief experience I had become thoroughly disgusted with the lack of success in robbing banks, for fully ninety-nine per cent of failures had been recorded in my mental bookkeeping. This I had good reason to know, for hadn’t I supplied much of the funds which were behind these ventures? I determined that no longer would I have anything to do with the sort of bank robbery that necessitated lugging about three hundred pounds of burglars’ tools. I believed there was some other and more effective method of getting at the millions in vaults whose locks must be mastered. No doubt, if the newspapers of that period had woven the romance about the burglar that we read of to-day when one of the profession exhibits exceptional genius, I would have been dubbed the “Ethical Burglar,” for I began a diligent, systematic study into the theoretical and practical aspects of the subject of bank looting. To do this, I purchased combination locks from all the leading manufacturers and plunged into the intricacies of their mechanism, and at the end of many months of almost constant investigation I felt satisfied that I had not thus applied myself in vain. I could pick every lock, work out every known train of numbers, and had mastered the finest system in the use of high explosives; and, what was of far greater importance than all, I had evolved a tiny instrument scarcely more formidable than a finely tempered piece of very small steel wire. But the possibilities of this invention were greater than I knew, for it worked wonders before the end of its usefulness came. It did away with cumbersome burglars’ tools and made the necessity for the use of explosives of rare occurrence. In fact, it made safe robbing an easier proposition than it ever had been and ever will be again.