“We can’t leave it any way but unlocked,” I said; “and, as a matter of fact, knowing the habits of cashiers as I do, I’ll wager that nothing will be thought of the door being found unlocked. The cashier will think he has been careless, and you can be certain that he won’t squeal on himself. In the meantime, we’ll make the keys fit. Don’t forget the safe key you threw on the floor.” Shinburn continued to sit on the floor like a child in a pout. “Come, Mark, come!” I spoke harshly and almost aloud, impatient over his tardiness and seeming indifference to our danger. “We’re taking a long chance remaining here like this.” “Blast the luck!” he growled again, “to think we’ve got to miss this fine opportunity of getting away with that swag.” Never in all my experience with Shinburn, this master crook, had I seen him so confoundedly obstinate and so much disturbed. He was an icicle, as a rule--nothing stirred him. Tonight he was disgusted clean through. “There, that safe is locked,” he said at length, as, springing from the floor, he threw the money safe door to, and turned the key home. Two or three small fortunes were shut from our view. “And that one,” he added, “will be open the next time we come, if we do, or I’ve lost all my cunning.” “Hold your tongue, Mark,” I said, “and come with me.” How often I had been obliged to urge discretion upon him, for he was ever running risks. As we came out of the vault I closed the great steel door, and once more tried to throw home the bolt. It was useless to try. Shinburn seemed to look at me sarcastically, as though he would tell me there was no hope of locking the door if he couldn’t do it. Leaving everything as we found it, we left the bank by the rear door. Scarcely had we done so when the night clerk let himself in by the front door. It was the first work done on the inside of a St. Catharines bank in Ontario, Canada, the vault of which, we had been informed, held a treasure worth the miles we had come to possess it. The prize seemed to be within our reach, when the failure of the duplicate keys to work brought irritating delay. The cash in one of the safes might have been carried off that night, but it would have been flatly unwise, from our viewpoint, to leave behind thousands which might easily be gotten. To rob one safe would mean discovery of the fact the next morning, and there would end all possibility of getting the contents of the other safe. Both, with properly made keys, could be looted with one visit to the vault. One of those apparently insignificant oversights on the part of bank officials was the foundation upon which I constructed the plan to rob this bank, and I would direct the attention of the banking world to the incident with all the force I possess. While the method of bank protection of the present period is vastly different from then, it may be that there will be a lesson, after all, found in this history.