This grizzled old yegg was a byproduct of our Civil War. Apprentice to a village blacksmith, he was drafted into the army, where he learned the disruptive force of powder, and many other things useful to him in his profession of safe breaking. His rough war service, his knowledge of mechanics and explosives combined to equip him for what he became⁠—one of the pioneers of safe breaking. From black powder he turned to dynamite and afterward was one of the first to “thrash out the soup”⁠—a process used by the bums and yeggs for extracting the explosive oil, nitroglycerine, from sticks of “dan” or dynamite. He boasted that he had never done a day’s work outside of prison since he was mustered out of the army, except one year in a safe factory in the East where he went deliberately and worked for starvation wages to learn something of the construction of a very much used make of safe and its lock. Fortified with this knowledge, he followed that particular make of safe to many parts of the world, and, as he said, “knocked ’em open like ripe watermelons.”

George inherited a very ordinary set of features to start with. His war scars and rough bouts on the road and in prison hadn’t served to add anything to them in the way of refinement. His head rose to a point from all four sides. The “Sanctimonious Kid,” one of my cellmates, once said of George: “If you were to put a dime on the top of George’s head and start it sliding down the back it would fall inside his shirt collar; if you started it down his forehead it would wind up in his mouth, his lower jaw sticks out so far.” His eyes were small and cunning. They looked as if they had been taken out, fried in oil, and put back. Dead, pale blue and expressionless, they gave no hint of the cunning, always-busy brain behind them. His nose wasn’t worth looking at, just a small knob of soft red flesh, long since collapsed and hanging like a pendant from between his eyes. He was of medium height, broad, heavy and rugged. With all his ill-favored appearance and his rolling, limping walk that seemed to start at his shoulders and work its way down into his legs, he had a heart of gold and oak, and knowing him one readily forgave him ungovernable temper and violent outbursts of rage. He was square. His life was stormy and his death sudden and violent as Smiler’s. But that has another place in this story.