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“But I had as good a bringing up, criminally speaking, as you ever heard of. There was the old man, a wizard in his line; and my older brother Frank — he’s doing a one-to-fourteen-year stretch in Deer Lodge now — who wasn’t a dub by any means with a can opener — safe-ripping, you know. Between them and the mobs they ran with, I got a pretty good education along certain lines.

“Everything went along fine, with me keeping house for the old man and Frank, and them giving me everything I wanted, until the old man got wiped out by a night watchman in Philly one night. Then, a couple weeks later, Frank got picked up in some burg out in Montana — Great Falls. That put me up against it. We hadn’t saved much money — easy come, easy go — and what we had I sent out to Frank’s mouthpiece — a lawyer — to try to spring him. But it was no go—they had him cold, and they sent him over.

“After that I had to shift for myself. It was a case of either cashing in on what the old man and Frank had taught me or going on the streets. Of course, I wouldn’t have had to go on the streets actually — there were plenty of guys who were willing to take me in — it’s just that it’s a rotten way of making a living. I don’t want to be owned!

“Maybe you think I could have got a job somewhere in a store or factory or something. But in the first place, a girl with no experience has a hard time knocking down enough jack to live on; and then again, half the dicks in town know me as the old man’s daughter, and they wouldn’t keep it a secret if they found me working any place — they’d think I was getting a job lined up for some mob.

“So, after thinking it all over, I decided to try the old man’s racket. It went easy from the first. I knew all the tricks and it wasn’t hard to put them into practice. Being a girl helped, too. A couple times, when I was caught cold, people took my word for it that I had got into the wrong place by mistake.

“But being a girl had its drawbacks, too. As the only she-burglar in action, my work was sort of conspicuous, and it wasn’t long before the bulls had a line on me. I was picked up a couple times, but I had a good lawyer, and they couldn’t make anything stick, so they turned me loose; but they didn’t forget me.

“Then I got some bad breaks, and pulled some jobs that they knew they could tie on me; and they started looking for me proper. To make things worse, I had hurt the feelings of quite a few guys who had tried to get mushy with me at one time or another, and they had been knocking me — saying I was up-stage and so on — to everybody, and that hadn’t helped me any with the people who might have helped me when I was up against it.

“So besides hiding from the dicks I had to dodge half the guns in the burg for fear they’d put the finger on me — turn me up to the bulls. This honour among thieves stuff doesn’t go very big in New York!

“Finally it got so bad that I couldn’t even get to my room, where my clothes and what money I had were. I was cooped up in a hang-out I had across town, peeping out at dicks who were watching the joint, and knowing that if I showed myself I was a goner.