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One of the women — and a good-looker she was — wrapped in a striped blanket, saw me pick up one of the stockings that was pretty chunky and heavy about the toe, and she snapped out:

“That’s mine, sir. You’re not in the business of robbing women, are you?”

Now, as this was our first hold-up, we hadn’t agreed upon any code of ethics, so I hardly knew what to answer. But, anyway, I replied: “Well, not as a specialty. If this contains your personal property you can have it back.”

“It just does,” she declared eagerly, and reached out her hand for it.

“You’ll excuse my taking a look at the contents,” I said, holding the stocking up by the toe. Out dumped a big gent’s gold watch, worth two hundred, a gent’s leather pocket-book that we afterward found to contain six hundred dollars, a 32-calibre revolver; and the only thing of the lot that could have been a lady’s personal property was a silver bracelet worth about fifty cents.

I said: “Madame, here’s your property,” and handed her the bracelet. “Now,” I went on, “how can you expect us to act square with you when you try to deceive us in this manner? I’m surprised at such conduct.”

The young woman flushed up as if she had been caught doing something dishonest. Some other woman down the line called out: “The mean thing!” I never knew whether she meant the other lady or me.

When we finished our job we ordered everybody back to bed, told ’em good night very politely at the door, and left. We rode forty miles before daylight and then divided the stuff. Each one of us got $1,752.85 in money. We lumped the jewellery around. Then we scattered, each man for himself.

That was my first train robbery, and it was about as easily done as any of the ones that followed. But that was the last and only time I ever went through the passengers. I don’t like that part of the business. Afterward I stuck strictly to the express car. During the next eight years I handled a good deal of money.

The best haul I made was just seven years after the first one. We found out about a train that was going to bring out a lot of money to pay off the soldiers at a Government post. We stuck that train up in broad daylight. Five of us lay in the sand hills near a little station. Ten soldiers were guarding the money on the train, but they might just as well have been at home on a furlough. We didn’t even allow them to stick their heads out the windows to see the fun. We had no trouble at all in getting the money, which was all in gold. Of course, a big howl was raised at the time about the robbery. It was Government stuff, and the Government got sarcastic and wanted to know what the convoy of soldiers went along for. The only excuse given was that nobody was expecting an attack among those bare sand hills in daytime. I don’t know what the Government thought about the excuse, but I know that it was a good one. The surprise — that is the keynote of the train-robbing business. The papers published all k inds of stories about the loss, finally agreeing that it was between nine thousand and ten thousand dollars. The Government sawed wood. Here are the correct figures, printed for the first time — forty-eight thousand dollars. If anybody will take the trouble to look over Uncle Sam’s private accounts for that little debit to profit and loss, he will find that I am right to a cent.

By that time we were expert enough to know what to do. We rode due west twenty miles, making a trail that a Broadway policeman could have followed, and then we doubled back, hiding our tracks. On the second night after the hold-up, while posses were scouring the country in every direction, Jim and I were eating supper in the second story of a friend’s house in the town where the alarm started from. Our friend pointed out to us, in an office across the street, a printing press at work striking off handbills offering a reward for our capture.