was writing and had his back to me.
He glanced over his shoulder presently, then jumped up and said--

"Oh, dear me, I forgot all about giving instructions. I was just writing
you to beg a thousand pardons. But how is it you are here? How did you
get by that Irishman? You are the first man that's done it in five and
twenty years. You didn't bribe him, I know that; there's not money
enough in New York to do it. And you didn't persuade him; he is all ice
and iron: there isn't a soft place nor a warm one in him anywhere. That
is your secret? Look here; you owe me a hundred dollars for
unintentionally giving you a chance to perform a miracle--for it is a
miracle that you've done."

"That is all right," I said, "collect it of Jimmy Lewis."

That good dog not only did me that good turn in the time of my need, but
he won for me the envious reputation among all the theatrical people from
the Atlantic to the Pacific of being the only man in history who had ever
run the blockade of Augustin Daly's back door.

CHAPTER XLVI.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together,
who would escape hanging.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

On the Train. Fifty years ago, when I was a boy in the then remote and
sparsely peopled Mississippi valley, vague tales and rumors of a
mysterious body of professional murderers came wandering in from a
country which was constructively as far from us as the constellations
blinking in space--India; vague tales and rumors of a sect called Thugs,
who waylaid travelers in lonely places and killed them for the
contentment of a god whom they worshiped; tales which everybody liked to
listen to and nobody believed, except with reservations. It was
considered that the stories had gathered bulk on their travels. The
matter died down and a lull followed. Then Eugene Sue's "Wandering Jew"
appeared, and made great talk for a while. One character in it was a
chief of Thugs--"Feringhea"--a mysterious and terrible Indian who was as
slippery and sly as a serpent, and as deadly; and he stirred up the Thug
interest once more. But it did not last. It presently died again this
time to stay dead.

At first glance it seems strange that this should have happened; but
really it was not strange--on the contrary,. it was natural; I mean on
our side of the water. For the source whence the Thug tales mainly came
was a Government Report, and