I was wrong. I knew I was wrong, and yet I persisted. If that is possible of any explanation it is this: From the day I left my father my lines had been cast, or I cast them myself, among crooked people. I had not spent one hour in the company of an honest person. I had lived in an atmosphere of larceny, theft, crime. I thought in terms of theft. Houses were built to be burglarized, citizens were to be robbed, police to be avoided and hated, stool pigeons to be chastised, and thieves to be cultivated and protected. That was my code; the code of my companions. That was the atmosphere I breathed. “If you live with wolves, you will learn to howl.” In my rambles about Vancouver, I met an acquaintance from Salt Lake. He and his wife were exiled from the Mormon city and could not return in safety till they got a “bunch of trouble fixed up.” He fell on my neck, saying: “Just the party I’m looking for. I’ve got something soft for you; you can’t go wrong.” He invited me to his quarters, a cottage they had rented. They were both “smokers,” and over the hop he explained the “soft” thing. His wife, in buying a can of hop, had tendered the Chinese storekeeper a large bill. When he went into a rear room for the change, she saw that he had his money in a box concealed beneath the floor. He made a purchase later and verified her story. “That’s all there is to it,” he said. “All you’ve got to do is go get it.” I investigated and found that his story wasn’t altogether the rosy dream of a hop fiend. The storekeeper, an elderly Chinaman, did keep his money in a box under the floor, but he slept on top of it at night and in a room adjoining about a dozen Chinese laundry hands slept in bunks. It didn’t look a bit soft to me. I convinced myself that the money was there, and that I could get into the place, but that was all I could be reasonably sure of. My friend’s wife was a resourceful woman. “Chloroform him, that’s easy. I’ll get you the chloroform,” she cried. I hesitated about that. I was practical, I knew nothing about chloroforming people. Sanc had never once mentioned chloroform and what he knew about burglary was plenty. In searching my mind for something to guide me I recalled having met a talkative chap in Chicago at California Jack’s hop joint, who told me in great detail about his “ether outfit,” how he injected the fluid through keyholes, putting his victims out before going into their rooms, how he chloroformed women sleepers by holding a saturated handkerchief to their noses, and how he stripped their fingers of rings while they were stupefied. I remembered his talk didn’t ring just right and that he borrowed two dollars from me at the finish and never paid them. I had long since dismissed him from my mind as a magazine burglar, a reader and rehasher of crime stories, embellished and embroidered by daily devotion to the bamboo pipe.