“While I’m away take it easy and don’t go around the residence district at all. You can make the safety box about ten o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon every day. You might locate something from there. Here’s something else you can do.

“Every afternoon go into some good hotel and pay for a room for the night. Register from out of town. When you get the key, go out to your own room and make a duplicate of it. Mark your duplicate so you can identify it, and plant it somewhere. Most of the best places are using these spring locks now and you can’t do anything without a key when there’s a sleeper in the room. In a week you’ll have keys to half a dozen good transient rooms in the best hotels, and I might get some real money out of them.

“Go back to the hotel in the evening, tell the clerk you are called out of town and ask for your money back. He will usually give it to you.”

I bade Sanc good night and goodbye, resolving to have something good located for him on his return from Salt Chunk Mary’s.

During Sanc’s absence I worked industriously, bettering his instructions by renting two rooms a day and making the duplicate keys. In most instances the clerks returned my money when I told them I was called away and could not occupy the rooms. My days were well filled with work, renting two rooms, making two keys, trying to get my room money refunded and visiting the safety box twice a day, sometimes following a depositor out and around the streets to see what he did with his money.

My evenings were my own and I spent them on the Barbary Coast or the waterfront. With an old suit on and a dollar or two in silver I loved to go to the sailors’ boarding houses where seafaring men, brawny, brown, and tattooed, speaking all languages, ate, drank, fought, sang their strange sea songs, and told tales of hardship and adventure on all the seas. Here I learned to beware the crafty shanghaier with his knockout drops, lying in wait for strong young fellows from the country. The cowardly and unscrupulous thieves who later used chloral so indiscriminately and murderously learned its stupefying effects from the busy shanghaier on San Francisco’s waterfront.