egal fishing." That was the
verdict of the coroner's jury; and that is why I pride myself on the
neat and artistic way in which I finished off John Claverhouse. There
was no bungling, no brutality; nothing of which to be ashamed in
the whole transaction, as I am sure you will agree. No more does his
infernal laugh go echoing among the hills, and no more does his fat
moon-face rise up to vex me. My days are peaceful now, and my night's
sleep deep.

THE LEOPARD MAN'S STORY

He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent
voice, gentle-spoken as a maid's, seemed the placid embodiment of some
deep-seated melancholy. He was the Leopard Man, but he did not look
it. His business in life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a cage of
performing leopards before vast audiences, and to thrill those audiences
by certain exhibitions of nerve for which his employers rewarded him on
a scale commensurate with the thrills he produced.

As I say, he did not look it. He was narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered,
and anaemic, while he seemed not so much oppressed by gloom as by a
sweet and gentle sadness, the weight of which was as sweetly and gently
borne. For an hour I had been trying to get a story out of him, but
he appeared to lack imagination. To him there was no romance in his
gorgeous career, no deeds of daring, no thrills--nothing but a gray
sameness and infinite boredom.

Lions? Oh, yes! he had fought with them. It was nothing. All you had to
do was to stay sober. Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill with an
ordinary stick. He had fought one for half an hour once. Just hit him
on the nose every time he rushed, and when he got artful and rushed with
his head down, why, the thing to do was to stick out your leg. When he
grabbed at the leg you drew it back and hit hint on the nose again. That
was all.

With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he showed
me his scars. There were many of them, and one recent one where a
tigress had reached for his shoulder and gone down to the bone. I could
see the neatly mended rents in the coat he had on. His right arm,
from the elbow down, looked as though it had gone through a threshing
machine, what of the ravage wrought by claws and fangs. But it was
nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him somewhat when rainy
weather came on.

Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as
anxious to give me a story as I was