“See here, Billy,” I said warningly, “you mustn’t let your shrewdness in getting combination numbers give you a big head. Keep your skull level and leave the combinations to the tellers’ safes to me. I’ll devise some way to get at them.” Encouraged by the lad’s good fortune, I began immediately to take advantage of it. “Get me,” said I, “a wax impression of the little key to the second door of the vault; that will be your next job.” Later in the evening I met Billy at Peter Burns’s, where I gave him the right kind of wax to make the impression; and, too, I put my pupil through another course of my art. I showed him, with extreme care, how to get the impression of a key. Again was he apt in acquiring the knowledge that all successful crooks, in the bank-breaking line, must have. At the end of two days he brought me an impression of the desired key, and from it I made a duplicate. “It fitted at the first trial,” announced Billy the following evening. “My work was fine and yours must have been better.” “It was easy to make a right key from a fine wax impression,” I replied, in a complimentary way. The time had come when I must make my second visit to the bank, and that for the purpose of sizing up the tellers’ safes; so it was agreed that I should meet Billy at the Second Street door of the bank, as before. Unto this day I haven’t forgotten that visit. Even now I marvel at our escape from what seemed to be certain exposure. Withal, I wasn’t sorry for what happened, as it served to prove the sort of metal out of which my “right” watchman was made. The night watchmen leaving the bank at seven A.M. and the clerks’ hour being eight, it behooved us to keep tabs on the minutes in order that I be allowed time in which to quit the banking office unobserved. We had been working on the tellers’ safes for half an hour, so it seemed, when a sharp rap came on the Second Street door. My hair rose on end, and as for Billy, he, for an instant, shook like a leaf. I glanced at my watch--it was just eight o’clock. “Damn!” I whispered; “it must be one of the clerks. What’ll we do?” I saw a fairly promising job knocked in the head. For Billy it meant undoubted exposure, and that was as good as a failure--to me. I’d never get another watchman of his caliber, I knew. The main door leading into Chestnut Street was locked and Billy had no key--which I well knew. As for going out the Second Street door, the way I had entered, that seemed to me an improbability. I confess I was stupefied. Though it has taken several minutes to jot down these impressions, I assure my readers that hardly as many seconds were consumed in the actual happening. It may have been the fix we were in that brought to the surface the staying qualities possessed for the emergency by Billy. The ague which had tackled him for the instant was quickly shed, and, catching me by the shoulder, he shoved me out of the vault.