As we walked away, Sanc said: “The window has a burglar alarm. You can see the tape around the edges. If I could devise some way to put an inch hole through the glass without cracking it clear across to the tape, the alarm would not sound and I could take the stone out with a stiff wire. To-morrow night I’ll try something I have long thought of.” The next day he bought at a second-hand store a small machinist’s hammer, weighing about a pound. One face of it was thick, heavy, and flat, the other was rounded to a nose about the size of a boy’s marble. He bought a whipstock of tough, springy wood and made a handle about eighteen inches long, which he fitted into the hammer. For several nights we went around to new buildings and into deserted streets where there were plate-glass windows of a weight corresponding with the one in Oakland. Sanc used his hammer like a whip, snapping the noselike face of it against windows till he became so expert he could make a hole as clean as if it had been done by a bullet, and without cracking the glass for more than six inches from it. “Vandalism, they will call it,” he said after destroying probably five hundred dollars’ worth of glass, “but in reality it is a scientific experiment and a success.” The impact of the hammer sounded very much like the breaking of a piece of kindling wood under foot. At last we were ready, and Sanc, as usual, gave me final instructions. “Oakland is a tough town to take a pinch in, kid. You can’t fix your case, and you’ll get the limit if convicted. I’ll take a gun along. You needn’t. There isn’t much you can do. When the bull is out of the block and pedestrians are a couple of doors away I will do the best I can. You stand near by and if anybody gets wise to me, you shout to him: ‘Look out, he’s got a gun. Let’s get a policeman!’” At nine o’clock we passed the window. A crowd was admiring the ring. At ten the pedestrians had thinned out, and half an hour later Sanc’s chance came. The store was in the middle of a block. The patrolman was at the corner going farther away. Everything was exactly right. A passing electric car swallowed the noise of the breaking glass. Sanc disengaged the hammer’s nose from the hole carefully with a rasping noise. The hammer went into his coat pocket, and the wire came from beneath his coat. The top of the pedestal where the ruby rested was higher than the hole in the window, and when Sanc lifted the ring on his wire it slid slowly down and out into his hand. He threw the wire into the street and walked away. I followed behind and overtook him at the corner. A few blocks farther away he tossed the hammer into a lot. We sat apart on the train to the ferry and on the boat across to the city. In my room Sanc removed the ruby from its setting, which I immediately took out and threw into a near-by sewer opening. When I returned he was admiring the stone. “There’s a stone, kid, that, as Shakespeare says, ‘A Jew would kiss and an Infidel adore.’”