Monday morning about six
o'clock
Unknown persons had entered it through a rear window sometime during Sunday night , and on Monday morning when the mailing clerk arrived , the stove was scattered in fragments around the floor , the letter boxes had been emptied , the safe blown open , its entire contents missing , and the room still retained a strong odor of powder . It was a genuine robbery , and , for a place of the breadth and thickness of Attica , it was something much more than an ordinary , every-day affair . The postmaster had barely enough money left to wire for help . When I arrived on Wednesday he informed me that no strange persons were seen in town prior to the robbery , but that on Monday morning about six o'clock , two young men called at the residence of Mr. James Beasley , a farmer residing about six miles eastward , and wanted to engage him to take them to Thorntown , a distance of about twenty miles as an Indiana crow flies . Beasley was a busy farmer , and , not being in the livery business , declined . They than asked the distance to the nearest station on the Wabash railroad , and when Beasely informed them , they told him if he would hitch up and take them over they would give him a dollar and a half for his trouble . Beasley said he would do it , just to be accommodating , and by so doing made a blunder .