“I will walk into the place about seven o’clock some evening, dressed in a black suit, white shirt, high collar, and black tie. You will go in directly behind me. You will carry a harmless-looking parcel that looks like a box of handkerchiefs neatly wrapped and tied. There will be no bottom in it. I will walk to the back of the store where there are two or three settees for patrons and visitors. You will stroll about near by. I will leave my derby hat and overcoat on a settee and try, mind you, try to get behind the main counter. I am depending upon the fact that the place will be full of visitors and customers and that there will be a number of strange clerks and that no one clerk will know all the others. “You will follow my movements closely. When I get behind the counter I will take out the best tray I can get and set it on the show case in front of you. You will put your bottomless package over the tray, pick it up, put it under your arm, and walk out. We have two weeks to get ready. We will go down there separately and look the place over for a week. When you go in, you rehearse the thing in your mind and don’t think of anything else for the next ten days.” We thought and talked of the Diamond Palace only for days and days. “Kid,” said Sanc, “I heard ‘Rebel George’ who invented the gold-brick swindle say: ‘The way to sell a brass brick is to bunko yourself first into the belief that your brick is solid gold—the rest is easy. The most successful bunko man is the one who bunkoes himself before he goes after a sucker.’ “I am going to hypnotize myself into the belief that I am a clerk in that store from the minute I take my hat off till I put it on. You are a visitor from the minute you go in till you get your hands on the stones; then, presto, you are what you are. If we can get one of the larger trays of stones we can get enough money on them to go to Salt Lake or Denver, and open a small gambling house where, while we can’t be entirely respectable, we can at least be secure. I am at a stage where I would like to quit. I don’t feel like going to work as a laborer at two dollars a day, or as a clerk for fifteen a week. I’m not speaking disparagingly of them, mind you—fact is, they have more real courage than we have, working for such wages. But this life of ours breeds expensive habits of loose, careless spending that are hard to overcome, and even if I could swallow my objections to being exploited I would still find it impossible to survive on the pay. “I didn’t jump into this life I’m leading as I jump into bed, and I can’t get out of it in one jump. I drifted in by slow degrees, and if I get out I’ll have to ease out of it by slow stages. A gambling joint would be the first step away. Then maybe something better after that. This can all be threshed out later; we must not let our minds stray from the Diamond Palace.”