My heart filled with admiration for John Charles Appling. It was going to be a pleasure to do business with him.

I’d been reasonably certain he wasn’t home. He was at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West-by-God-Virginia, playing golf and taking the sun and attending a tax-deductible convention of the Friends of the American Wild Turkey, a band of conservationists dedicated to improving wilderness conditions to create a more favorable habitat for the birds in question, thereby to increase their numbers to the point where the Friends can hie themselves off to the woods in autumn with shotgun and turkey lure in tow, there to slay the object of their affections. After all, what are friends for?

I locked the door now, just in case, and I drew my rubber gloves from my attaché case and pulled them on, then took a moment to wipe the surfaces I might have touched while checking the fake alarm cylinder. There still remained the outside of the door, but I’d smudge those prints on the way out. Then I took another moment to lean against the door and let my eyes accustom themselves to the darkness. And-let’s admit it-to Enjoy the Feeling.

And what a feeling it was! I read once of a woman who spent every free moment at Coney Island, riding the big roller coaster over and over and over. Evidently she got the thrill from that curious pastime that I get whenever I let myself into another person’s place of residence. That charged-up sensation, that fire-in-the-blood, every-cell-alive feeling. I’ve had it ever since I first broke into a neighbor’s house in my early teens, and all the intervening years, all the crimes and all the punishments, have not dulled or dimmed it in the slightest. It’s as much of a thrill as ever.

I’m not boasting. I take a workman’s pride in my skills but no pride at all in the forces that drive me. God help me, I’m a born thief, the urge to burgle bred in my bones. How could they ever rehabilitate me? Can you teach a fish to leave off swimming, a bird to renounce flight?