When, on the death of his father, Charlie Wait came into control of the hotel, he got the aldermanic bee in his bonnet. In furtherance of his ambition, he made a political deal which embraced the letting of our stable to a certain politician. Consequently we were obliged to vacate and also to sell our stock at a great sacrifice. At this time Meriam was dead and I was finishing a twelve-year term of imprisonment in Vermont, where I had been since 1876, for the robbery of the Barre Bank. Consequently my wife was conducting the business with the aid of a manager, and she could not cope with Wait’s political aides. When I had been sent to prison, I had been robbed of nearly every dollar I had by the New York police and was stone broke. Therefore this livery business was my wife’s sole dependence for her livelihood; and when deprived of it she was left in a bad way. On my release, in 1888, we were practically without a dollar--thanks to Charlie Wait. But he was no better off, having lost his whole fortune, including a one-third interest in the Windsor Hotel in Fifth Avenue. Meanwhile, during our separation, Shinburn had not fared much better than I. He pulled off one good trick, got arrested for it, and escaped. This trick was the robbery of the Lehigh and Susquehanna Navigation Company at Whitehaven, Pennsylvania. A few days after our arrival in New York from the Steuben County jail, Shinburn went to Scranton. Here two sporting men of that city put him on to the safe in question, which on one night in each month contained a large sum of money with which to pay the employees of the company. Shinburn obtained wax impressions of the keys to the safe and had duplicates made. On the night when the pay money was supposed to be in the office Shinburn entered the building and unlocked the safe. For some reason the expected amount of money was not there, the safe containing at the time only six thousand dollars. Shinburn decided not to take it, but to wait until the full amount was on hand. Therefore, replacing the six thousand dollars, he relocked the safe and left. The next month, on the day that the large sum of money was again supposed to be on hand, he returned, opened the safe, and found thirty thousand dollars. This he took, thus getting twenty-four thousand dollars as a reward for his patience. He and one of the sporting men had driven over from Scranton in a rig that had been hired from a livery in that city. After looting the safe, they returned to Scranton by the same means, and would doubtless have escaped detection but for one of those mysterious happenings which seem to lie in the wake of the evil-doer to bring about his downfall.