COMPANY, DENVER. He glanced at the dial of his cheap pocket watch—he carried nothing that might help identify him—and noted that the train was not scheduled to leave for Las Vegas for another forty-four minutes.

A quarter of a mile later, he came to the Rhyolite train station. The substantial building was a mixture of Gothic and early Spanish styles. The ornate depot had been built of stone, cut and hauled from Las Vegas. A passenger train that had steamed in from San Francisco sat alongside the station platform. The passengers had disembarked, and the seats cleaned by porters, and the train was now filling with people heading back toward the coast.

The driver reached the center of town, where the streets were bustling with activity. He turned to stare at a large mercantile establishment, the HD & LD

PORTER store. Beneath the sign was a slogan painted on a board that hung above the front entrance. It read We handle all things but Whiskey.

The 1904 gold rush had resulted in a substantial small city of solidly constructed buildings built to last a long time. By 1906, Rhyolite was a thriving community of over six thousand people. It had quickly graduated from a busy tent town to an important city meant to stand far into the distant future.

The main buildings were constructed of stone and concrete, making the small metropolis of Rhyolite the major city of southern Nevada. A four-story bank came into sight, a fine-looking structure that gave it a look of substance and wealth.

Half a block away, a three-story stone office building was going up.

There was a post office, an opera house, a twenty-bed hospital, comfortable hotels, two churches, three banks, and a large school. Up-to-date, Rhyolite boasted an efficient telephone system and its own electrical-generating plant. It also had a booming red-light district and forty saloons and eight dance halls.

The man driving the wagon was not interested in anything the town had to offer except some of the assets of the John S. Cook Bank. He knew that the safe inside could hold over a million dollars in silver coins. But it was far easier to carry cash from the payrolls of the mines, and he had yet to take a single silver, or gold, piece.

He figured that with eighty-five companies engaged in mining the surrounding hills, the payroll take should be quite considerable.

As usual, he had planned well, living in a boardinghouse for miners while entering the Cook Bank on numerous occasions to make small deposits in an account he had opened under a false name. A brief friendship was struck up with the bank’s manager, who was led into thinking the town newcomer was a mining engineer. The man’s appearance had been altered with a wig of black hair, a mustache, and a Vandyke beard. He also walked with a limp, which he said was the result of a mining accident. It proved to be a flawless disguise with which to study the banking habits of the citizens and the times when the bank was doing little business.