ring upon his case. That last affair
of Raffles and mine, wherein we had successfully got away with the
diamond stomacher of the duchess of Herringdale, was still a live matter
in British detective circles, and the very audacity of the crime had
definitely fastened the responsibility for it upon our shoulders. Hence
it was America for me, where one could be as English as one pleased
without being subject to the laws of his Majesty, King Edward VII., of
Great Britain and Ireland and sundry other possessions upon which the
sun rarely if ever sets. For two years I had led a precarious existence,
not finding in the land of silk and money quite as many of those
opportunities to add to the sum of my prosperity as the American War
Correspondent I had met in the Transvaal led me to expect. Indeed, after
six months of successful lecturing on the subject of the Boers before
various lyceums in the country, I was reduced to a state of penury which
actually drove me to thievery of the pettiest and most vulgar sort.
There was little in the way of mean theft that I did not commit. During
the coal famine, for instance, every day passing the coal-yards to and
fro, I would appropriate a single piece of the precious anthracite until
I had come into possession of a scuttleful, and this I would sell to the
suffering poor at prices varying from three shillings to two dollars and
a half--a precarious living indeed. The only respite I received for six
months was in the rape of the hansom-cab, which I successfully carried
through one bitter cold night in January. I hired the vehicle at Madison
Square and drove to a small tavern on the Boston Post Road, where the
icy cold of the day gave me an excuse for getting my cabby drunk in the
guise of kindness. Him safely disposed of in a drunken stupor, I drove
his jaded steed back to town, earned fifteen dollars with him before
daybreak, and then, leaving the cab in the Central Park, sold the horse
for eighteen dollars to a snow-removal contractor over on the East
Side. It was humiliating to me, a gentleman born, and a partner of so
illustrious a person as the late A. J. Raffles, to have to stoop to such
miserable doings to keep body and soul together, but I was forced to
confess that, whatever Raffles had left to me in the way of example, I
was not his equal either in the conception of crime or in the nerve to
carry a great enterprise through. My biggest coups had a way of failing
at their very beginnin