cular men; they could ask me no
favor, put upon me no risk, which I would decline. I became the willing
butt of their jokes; this perfected my popularity; I became a favorite.

I early found a private who lacked a thumb--what joy it was to me! And
when I found that he alone, of all the company, had lost a thumb, my
last misgiving vanished; I was SURE I was on the right track. This man's
name was Kruger, a German. There were nine Germans in the company. I
watched, to see who might be his intimates; but he seemed to have no
especial intimates. But I was his intimate; and I took care to make
the intimacy grow. Sometimes I so hungered for my revenge that I could
hardly restrain myself from going on my knees and begging him to point
out the man who had murdered my wife and child; but I managed to bridle
my tongue. I bided my time, and went on telling fortunes, as opportunity
offered.

My apparatus was simple: a little red paint and a bit of white paper. I
painted the ball of the client's thumb, took a print of it on the paper,
studied it that night, and revealed his fortune to him next day. What
was my idea in this nonsense? It was this: When I was a youth, I knew an
old Frenchman who had been a prison-keeper for thirty years, and he told
me that there was one thing about a person which never changed, from
the cradle to the grave--the lines in the ball of the thumb; and he said
that these lines were never exactly alike in the thumbs of any two human
beings. In these days, we photograph the new criminal, and hang his
picture in the Rogues' Gallery for future reference; but that Frenchman,
in his day, used to take a print of the ball of a new prisoner's thumb
and put that away for future reference. He always said that pictures
were no good--future disguises could make them useless; 'The thumb's
the only sure thing,' said he; 'you can't disguise that.' And he used
to prove his theory, too, on my friends and acquaintances; it always
succeeded.

I went on telling fortunes. Every night I shut myself in, all alone,
and studied the day's thumb-prints with a magnifying-glass. Imagine the
devouring eagerness with which I pored over those mazy red spirals,
with that document by my side which bore the right-hand
thumb-and-finger-marks of that unknown murderer, printed with the
dearest blood--to me--that was ever shed on this earth! And many and
many a time I had to repeat the same old disappointed remark, 'will they
NEVER correspond!