STAMPED FOR LIFE
Little Henry had always been advanced for his age, reading almost before he could walk. His mother had seemed to know about his precociousness long before anyone else, involving herself with reading to him, sounding out words, exciting him with the world of knowledge. At five he read Great Expectations. At eight he read Plutarch's Lives. He was much wiser than his years. No one realized at that early time that Henry's true talents lay in the field of crime.
Soon after Henry had read the Iliad by Homer (age 9) his father, an investment banker, took him over to the next door neighbor's house to pay a call on a sickly old man named Gordon Mathew Davis III. During the visit the elderly gentleman brought out his treasured stamp collection. Henry could feel the energy in the room rise when Mr. Davis showed his father a special stamp with an airplane pictured on it. It was very rare, explained his father. Very few stamps had been struck with the plane upside down. While neither his father nor Mr. Davis mentioned its worth in dollars and cents, Henry's sharp eyes caught sight of a newspaper clipping in the pocket of the album. When the adults weren't looking he pulled it up far enough to see the headline with the number "$1,000,000" in the title, next to an enlarged picture of the same stamp. At that exact moment young Master Henry began devising his plan for the robbery.
As Mr. Davis showed his guests out, young Henry memorized each doorway, each turn in the hall so that he could return to the stamp collection. At night after reading books about great emperors, crusades, knights doing brave and daring feats, he dreamed about his own quest. He was not quite 10 when he snuck into Mr. Davis's house.
It was noon time on a bright sunny day. Henry had come home from grammar school to eat lunch, but his mother was still preparing the sandwiches. She asked him to go play for a few minutes. Without hesitation he went out the side door, across the hedge and into Mr. Davis's mansion. Silently he walked across the floor of the expansive living room, turned right at the pantry, then left down the hall, another right and left until he reached the location of the stamp room. Just as his little hands were beginning to turn the door knob he heard a voice speak right next to his head. It was the maid, wondering what he was doing there. "...Looking for my daddy," was the answer little Henry spoke in his best babytalk. She showed him out. Mr. Davis III died before Henry grew big enough to return with a baseball bat.