A few minutes after midnight, leaving Palmer on the outside as a guard, Shinburn, Ryan, and I broke in the bank through the front door and were soon examining the vault. We had decided to try wedges on the vault door, so Ryan went to work. He had finely drawn untempered steel ones, which were driven in the seam between the front edge of the door and the jamb. For two hours we labored with these wedges, but the best we could possibly do was to force an opening about half an inch wide, which was insufficient to admit of throwing back the lock bolt. When a space wide enough to do this was about made, the wedges would rebound. Unable to release the bolt, we abandoned the job, being hopeless of accomplishing it in that manner, and leaving behind us plenty of evidence of our failure. The vault front was sadly defaced, but defiantly impregnable, so far as we were concerned that night, with the means at hand. We went out in the storm, very much disappointed. Locating a hand-car, we started by rail for Rochester, but the snow being too heavy on the track, we ditched the car, and walking to the first village, hired a team and drove there. The remainder of the journey to Buffalo was accomplished by train. My experience at Brockport and similar knowledge I had previously obtained through the work of a Jack Hartley and his mob of would-be safe-breakers at Carbondale, Pennsylvania, convinced me that success in our line could only be attained by forcing open vaults by means vastly different than any of those employed by either Ryan or Hartley or burglars of their class. “Putting up cash to break banks with tools Ryan has,” I said to Shinburn, “is simply dumping it in the sea. As for me, I’m out of it.” This broke the combination, so far as Ryan and Palmer were concerned, the former remaining in Buffalo and the latter returning to New York. Shinburn and I determined to make for the metropolis also, but he recalled a tip from a friend at home, that there was a bank at Corning, New York, which might be relieved of its cash. Shinburn’s friend was of the opinion that the vault was secured by a key lock. So we concluded to stop off there and investigate, but, doing so, Mark discovered that the work entailed was not worth the risk. At two o’clock in the morning we were in the Erie Railroad depot waiting for a New York train, when a most unexpected thing happened. A mob of men and boys, led by a pair of constables, ran in the depot, one of them a big-looking fellow, yelling at the top of his voice, “Here they are!” The other constable rushed at Shinburn, crying, “We want you men; surrender!”