The next day he bought at a secondhand 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.