I gathered from it that his cash register “bane on the bum.” Something got wrong with its locking arrangement the night before, and Pete took his money to bed with him. “Ay take the old bankroll and throw her under the mattress and lay my two hundred pounds Swede beef on her,” he finished with a roar. Then, bouncing another gold piece on the bar, he ordered it to “yump” and the house to drink. If he suspected me he didn’t show it, and I went out not relishing his talk or his liquor. I thought of sticking him up, but he knew my voice and that wouldn’t do. I thought of chloroform, but my awful experience with the Chinamen warned me against it. I had no desire to get tangled up with Pete’s “two hundred pounds Swede beef” that wasn’t beef at all, but bone and muscle he put on in his youth as a laborer in the Northwest lumber camps. After much thought, I let him go and gave him up as a total loss.

I don’t know what the statistics show, but I should say that for every five hundred burglaries one burglar gets arrested. On the other hand, my experiences showed that if the burglar gets what he is after one time in five he is lucky.

After my bad luck with the big Swede I sat down and gave my system of stealing a good overhauling. As near as I could calculate ten thousand dollars had slipped out of my hands since I left Los Angeles. I wasn’t satisfied to put this down to tough luck entirely. I saw that carelessness had something to do with it. I should have planted the mine payroll in a safer place. A more careful and experienced “blacksmith” would have taken measures to prevent that big safe from falling on its face and burying the money beyond reach, and in the matter of Swede Pete I was careless and overconfident, in not checking on him the night I went after his money. Figuring that my luck was about due to change for the better, I resolved to pull myself together, tighten up my system, and look around me for something else.

If business houses took as much precaution in protecting themselves from thieves as thieves do in protecting themselves from the police, the business of burglary and robbery would reach the vanishing point in no time. Thieves are occasionally careless; businessmen are habitually so; both pay for their carelessness sooner or later.