nd
blistered, and the sudden agony had no doubt caused it to emit the
warning hiss which had put Amaxosa on his guard, whilst the severe
nature of its injuries had probably contributed, in no small degree, to
the success of his attack, by rendering the motions of the reptile
unusually slow and extremely painful. Anyhow, it was a miraculous and
providential escape, for which all felt uncommonly thankful, and Leigh
heard with unconcealed satisfaction that the snake in question was
positively the only one so trained which the vindictive Madame Zero had
in her possession.

This unpleasant adventure had fairly killed all chance of sleep for that
night, so after our trio of friends had lighted their pipes, Kenyon drew
Leigh and Grenville on one side out of earshot of the rest of the party.
"And now," said he, "let us seriously consider our position, for it is
one of very great danger; but first, give me your attention, Leigh,
whilst I fulfil my promise and relate to you the history of Zero so far
as it is known to me, after which your cousin will doubtless cap my
information with a few interesting and instructive details regarding the
life and opinions of the greatest scoundrel on the face of the earth.

"Zero, whose real name by the way is Monckton Bassett, is, I am ashamed
to admit, an American by birth, and hails from New York, where his
father originally figured as a respectable and a fairly successful
foreign merchant. Master Bassett was an only and a precocious child,
and having at the early age of twenty-three succeeded in breaking his
poor mother's heart by the wild wickedness of his ways, and ruining his
foolishly indulgent father by wheedling him into bearing from time to
time the expense of a systematic and unsuccessful gambling career, next
threw in his lot with a villainous card-sharper named Weston Harper,
through whose instrumentality he first came under the notice of the
police, being, as I proved at the time, very nearly concerned in a
burglary committed upon the house of a wealthy New Yorker, to whose
daughter he had formerly been engaged. This gentleman, however, Mr
Harmsworth by name, had abruptly put a stop to the embryo love affair
when he accidentally learned the life that his would-be son-in-law was
leading. The burglary was not the worst of it; for Mr Harmsworth was
deliberately and unnecessarily shot dead in his bed, and there was every
reason to believe that young Bassett's hand had fired the f