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Updated: May 22, 2025
With qualities and advantages which might have fitted him for a useful and honorable position in life, Shinburne was at less than 30 years of age the companion of outcasts. But whatever his moral failings, his knowledge remained, and it was for him, at least, to be valuable.
A steamer was to sail for Europe that day, and it was agreed that Shinburne should go by her, with one of the other robbers as company, sell the bonds before the news of the robbery could get across the ocean, then return and fairly divide the proceeds. This was the arrangement, but Shinburne had already begun to have other dreams and other ambitions.
He came back to a world which knew him not: and few of those who notice a benevolent-looking old gentleman, who often passes an afternoon in upper Broadway, suspect that under an assumed name he hides the identity of Max Shinburne, the bank burglar.
Vanished hopes and cheated visions were their share, instead of the wealth they had anticipated, and in their devouring rage they tried to console themselves with the thought of what they would do to him if they ever met Shinburne. The only man who had any real success from the scheme was the president. Exposure had become impossible.
Hurley and Shinburne joined him, and the following Saturday they removed so much of the ceiling that but a few minutes' work was required to complete a hole which should serve as a doorway to the vaults above when the bank closed in the evening. Saturday night was the time chosen to get into the bank, and the plunderers were to remain there until Sunday.
Shinburne plied him well with liquor, taking care to mix the bottles, and when he had got him helplessly drunk he took the bonds and with his little luggage slipped quietly off to the Continent, never to see his dupe or his New York friends again. He went to Germany, called himself "Count" Shinburne, bought an estate and began to exercise large hospitality toward his neighbors.
He saw a chance to restore himself, or, at least, to snatch at a position which would give him weight to crush down sinister reports or envious whisperings, and he determined forthwith to seize it. What the bank president had done to save himself from infamy, Shinburne would do to recover himself from infamy.
This was Max Shinburne, a German, a man of considerable education, who, in some inexplicable way, had fallen so far from honor and respectability that when he saw a thief he "consented unto him." How is it that such men are often found in the ranks of professional criminals? They would probably have difficulty to explain it themselves.
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