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 kinds 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.