blood runs warmly in the veins. That fearful gap of time was
filled to the brim with the peltings of a pitiless storm, hungry,
driven, toiling like a galley slave under the Summer's burning sun, or
thinly clad exposed to every blizzard and all the whirling storms of
Winter, until my early manhood had vanished and the best years of my
prime were all melted away, and at last I came forth from my dungeon,
but with the mark of suffering and desolation burned deep upon me, to
face a world of which I could not but be ignorant.

[Illustration: THE "SUGAR-LOAF" IN THE BAY OF RIO.]

CHAPTER XV.

PIRATICAL CRUISE IN TROPICAL SEAS.

The way to the bank vaults with their treasures had been laid open, but
there remained many matters of detail to be carried out before we could
enter them. There promised to be a delay of several months, but we were
impatient over the prospect of delay of even six months in securing the
fortunes we wanted, and which we had come to consider essential to our
happiness.

Our plan to ease the bank of a million or two of her forty million
sterling was, roughly stated, to borrow from day to day large sums upon
forged securities, the bad feature of the plan, from our point of view,
being the fact that the bank, as a matter of course, would retain these
documents, which could be produced at any future time to found a
criminal charge against us, provided justice ever had the opportunity to
weigh us in her balances.

Protected as we were by the police in New York, we felt that the chance
of our identity ever becoming known was remote. Still, there was an
element of chance we wanted to eliminate entirely. In our recent raid on
the bankers of France and Germany we never exhausted our letter of
credit, but had the amount of cash we drew indorsed upon it, and brought
the actual forged document away and instantly destroyed it. Had we been
arrested in Europe, no doubt, under the laws prevailing there, they
would have made us suffer upon the verbal statement of the banker; but
in America to convict one of forgery the document itself must be
produced in court.

I paid several visits to the bank, depositing and drawing out various
sums of money. I had talks with the sub-manager, and, on various
pretexts to get information, I interviewed bankers and money men in the
city. Finally, after many conferences, we came to the conclusion that
the boasted impregnability of the bank was imaginary, and that the
van