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Copyright, 1914, by
THE JOHN C. WINSTON Co.


c911"
CONTENTS
The M otive Force ........ “05
II. “Number One” ......... 42
III. The H ousemaid’s Followers . .1 . . 80
IV. The Gifts of Chance ....... 115
V. By-products of Industry ..... 159
VI. The Trail of the Serpent ..... 195
VII. The Uttermost Farthing ...... 253
(5)


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
M y wife lay on the hearth rug. She was
stone dead. I saw that at a glance
Frmtispiece
PAGE
I took the hair to the window and examined
it under a lens ........... 51
“And look ’ere, guo’nor,” he added, “where
did you git all them skellintons from?”. 125
“I ’ve been looking for you for twenty
years, and now I ’oe caught you” . . . 293
(7)


THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
I
THE MOTIVE FORCE
T is not without some misgivings that I
I at length make public the strange history
communicated to me by my lamented
friend Humphrey Challoner. The outlook
of the narrator is so evidently abnormal,
his ethical standards are so remote from those
ordinarily current, that the chronicle of his
life and actions may not only fail to secure
the sympathy of the reader but may even
excite a certain amount of moral repulsion.
But by those who knew him, his generosity
to the poor, and especially to those who
struggled against undeserved misfortune, will
be an ample set-off to his severity and even
ferocity towards the enemies of society.
Humphrey Challoner was a great savant
spoiled by untimely wealth. When I knew
(9)


10 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
him he had lapsed into a mere dilettante;
at least, so I thought at the time, though
subsequent revelations showed him in a
rather different light. He had some reputa-
tion as _a criminal anthropologist and had
formerly been well known as a comparative
anatomist, but when I made his acquaintance
he seemed to be occupied chieﬂy in making
endless additions to the specimens in his
private museum. This collection I could
never quite understand. It consisted chieﬂy
of human and other mammalian skeletons,
all of which presented certain small deviations
from the normal; but its object I could never
make out—until after his death; and then,
indeed, the revelation was a truly astounding
one.
I ﬁrst made Challoner’s acquaintance in
my professional capacity. He consulted me
about some triﬂing ailment and we took
rather a liking to each other. He was a
learned man and his learning overlapped my
own specialty, so that we had a good deal
in common. And his personality interested
me deeply. He gave me the impression of a
man naturally buoyant, genial, witty, whose


THE MOTIVE FORCE 11
life had been blighted by some great sorrow.
Ordinarily sad and grave in manner, he
exhibited ﬂashes of a grim, fantastic humor
that came as a delightful surprise and showed
what he had been, and might still have been,
but for that tragedy at which he sometimes
hinted. Gentle, sympathetic, generous, his
universal kindliness had yet one curious excep-
tion: his attitude towards habitual offenders
against the law was one of almost ferocious
vindictiveness.
At the time that I went away for my autumn
holiday his health was not quite satisfactory.
He made no complaint, indeed he expressed
himself as feeling perfectly well; but a
certain, indeﬁnable change in his appearance
had made me a little uneasy. I said nothing
to him on the subject, merely asking him to
keep me informed as to his condition during
my absence, but it was not without anxiety
that I took leave of him.
The habits of London society enable a
consultant to take a fairly liberal holiday.
I was absent about six weeks, and when I
returned and called on Challoner, his appear-
ance shocked me. There was no doubt now


12 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
as to the gravity of his condition. His
head appeared almost to have doubled in
size. His face was bloated, his features were
thickened, his eyelids puffy and his eyes
protruding. He stood, breathing hard from
the exertion of crossing the room and held
out an obviously swollen hand.
“Well, Wharton,” said he, with a strange,
shapeless smile, “how do you ﬁnd me?
Don’t you think I’m getting a ﬁne fellow?
Growing like a pumpkin, by Jove! I’ve
changed the size of my collars three times
in a month and the new ones are too tight
already.” He laughed—as he had spoken——
in a thick, mufﬂed voice and I made shift to
produce some sort of smile in response to his
hideous facial contortion.
“You don’t seem to like the novelty, my
child,” he continued gaily and with another
horrible grin. “Don’t like this softening of
the classic outlines, hey? Well, I’ll admit it
isn’t pretty, but, bless us! what does that
matter at my time of life?”
I looked at him in consternation as he
stood, breathing quickly, with that uncanny
smile on his enormous face. It was highly


THE MOTIVE FORCE 13
unprofessional of me, no doubt, but there
was little use in attempting to conceal my
opinion of his case. Something inside his
chest was pressing on the great veins of the
neck and arms. That something was either
an aneurysm or a solid tumor. A brief
examination, to which he submitted with
cheerful unconcern, showed that it was a
solid growth, and I told him so. He knew
some pathology and was, of course, an excel-
lent anatomist, so there was no avoiding a
detailed explanation.
“Now, for my part,” said he, buttoning
up his waistcoat, “I’d sooner have had an
aneurysm. There’s a ﬁnality about an aneu-
rysm. It gives you fair notice so that you
may settle your affairs, and then, pop! bang!
and the affair’s over. How long will this
thing take?”
; I began to hum and haw nervously, but
be interrupted: “It doesn’t matter to me,
you know, I’m only asking from curiosity;
and I don’t expect you to give a date. But
is it a matter of days or weeks? I can see
it isn’t one of months.” "as
“I should think, Challoner,” I said huskily,


14 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
“it may be four or ﬁve weeks—at the out-
side.”
“Ha!” he said brightly, “that will suit
me nicely. I’ve ﬁnished my job and rounded
up my aﬂ'airs generally, so that I am ready
whenever it happens. But light your pipe
and come and have a look at the museum.”
Now, as I knew (or believed I knew) by
heart every specimen in the collection, this
suggestion struck me as exceedingly odd;
but reﬂecting that his brain might well have
suﬂered some disturbance from the general
engorgement, I followed him without remark.
Slowly we passed down the corridor that led
to the “museum wing,” walked through the
ill-smelling laboratories (for Challoner pre-
pared the bones of the lower animals him-
self, though, for obvious reasons, he acquired
the human skeletons from dealers) and entered
the long room where the main collection was
kept.
Here we halted, and while Challoner recov-
ered his breath, I looked round on the famil-
iar scene. The inevitable whale’s skeleton—
a small sperm whale—hung from the ceiling,
on massive iron supports. The side of the


THE MOTIVE FORCE 15
room nearest the door was occupied by a
long glass case ﬁlled with skeletons of ani—
mals, all diseased, deformed or abnormal.
On the ﬂoor-space under the whale stood
the skeletons of a. camel and an aurochs.
The camel was affected with rickets and the
aurochs had multiple exostoses or bony
tumors. At one end of the room was a
large case of skulls, all deformed or asym-
metrical; at the other stood a long table and
a chest of shallow drawers; while the remain-
ing long side of the room was ﬁlled from
end to end by a glass case about eight feet
high containing a number of human skele-
tons, each neatly articulated and standing
on its own pedestal.
Now, this long case had always been some-
what of a mystery to me. Its contents dif-
fered from the other specimens in two respects.
First, whereas all the other skeletons and the
skulls bore full descriptive labels, these hu-
man skeletons were distinguished merely by
a number and a date on the pedestal; and,
second, whereas all the other specimens
illustrated some disease or deformity, these
were, apparently, quite normal or showed


16 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
only some triﬂing abnormality. They were
beautifully prepared and bleached to ivory
whiteness, but otherwise they were of no
interest, and I could never understand Chal-
loner’s object in accumulating such a num-
ber of duplicate specimens.
“You think you know this collection inside
out,” said Challoner, as if reading my
thoughts.
“I know it pretty well, I think,” was
my reply.
“You don’t know it at all,” he rejoined.
“Oh, come!” I said. “I could write a
catalogue of it from memory.”
Challoner laughed. “My dear fellow,”
said he, “you have never seen the real gems
of the collection. I am going to show them
to you now.”
He passed his arm through mine and we
walked slowly up the long room; and as
we went, he glanced in at the skeletons in
the great case with a faint and very horrible
smile on his bloated face. At the extreme
end I stopped him and pointed to the last
skeleton in the case.
“I want you to explain to me, Challoner,


THE MOTIVE FORCE 17
why you have distinguished this one by a
different pedestal from the others.”
As I spoke, I ran my eye along the row
of gaunt shapes that ﬁlled the great case.
Each skeleton stood on a pedestal of ebon-
ized wood on which was a number and a
date painted in white, excepting the end
one, the pedestal of which was coated with
scarlet enamel and the number and date
on it in gold lettering.
“That specimen,” said Challoner, thought-
fully, “is the last of the ﬂock. It made the
hcollection complete. So I marked it with
a distinctive pedestal. You will understand
all about it when you take over. Now come
and look at my gems.”
He walked behind the chest of drawers
and stood facing the wall which was cov-
ered with mahogany paneling. Each panel
was about four feet wide by ﬁve high, was
bordered by a row of carved rosettes and
was separated from the adjoining panels by
pilasters.
“Now, watch me, Wharton,” said be.
“You see these two rosettes near the bottom
of the panel. You press your thumbs on


18 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
them, so; and you give a half turn. That
turns a catch. Then you do this.” He
grasped the pilaster on each side of the
panel, gave a gentle pull, and panel and
pilasters came away bodily, exposing a mod-
erate-sized cupboard. I hastily relieved him
of the panel, and, when he had recovered
his breath, he began to expound the contents
of this curious hiding-place.
“That row of books you will take posses-
sion of and examine when my lease falls in.
You are my executor and this collection will
be yours to keep or give away or destroy,
as you think ﬁt. The books consist of a
ﬁnger-print album, a portrait album, a cata-
logue and a history of the collection. You
will ﬁnd them all quite interesting. Now
I will show you the gems if you will lift
those boxes down on to the table.”
I did as he asked; lifting down the pile
of shallow boxes and placing them, at his
direction, side by side on the table. When
they were arranged to his satisfaction, he
took off the lids with somewhat of a ﬂourish,
and I uttered an exclamation of amazement.
The boxes were ﬁlled with dolls’ heads;


THE MOTIVE FORCE 19
at least, such I took them to be. But such
dolls! I had never seen anything like them
before. So horribly realistic and yet so un—
natural! I can only describe the impression
they produced by that much-misused word
“weird.” They were uncanny in the extreme,
suggesting to the beholder the severed heads
of a company of fantastic, grotesque-looking
dwarfs. Let me try to describe them in
detail.
Each head was about the size of a small
monkey’s, that is, about four inches long.
It appeared to be made of some ﬁne leather
or vellum, remarkably like human skin in
texture. The hair in all of them was dis-
proportionately long and very thick, so that
it looked somewhat like a paint-brush. But
it was undoubtedly human hair. The eye-
brows too were unnaturally thick and long
and so were the mustache and beard, when
present; being composed, as I could plainly
see, of genuine mustache and beard hairs
of full length and very closely set. Some
were made to represent clean-shaven men,
and some even showed two or three days’
growth of stubble; which stubble was dis-


20 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
proportionately long and most unnaturally
dense. The eyes of all were closed and the
eyelashes formed a thick, projecting brush.
But despite the abnormal treatment of the
hairy parts, these little heads had the most
astonishingly realistic appearance and were,
as I have said, excessively weird and rather
dreadful in aspect. And, in spite of the closed
eyes and set features, each had an expression
and character of its own; each, in fact,
seemed to be a faithful and spirited por-
trait of a deﬁnite individual. They were
upwards of twenty in number, all male and
all represented persons of the European type.
Each reposed in a little velvet-lined com-
partment and each was distinguished by a
label bearing a number and a date.
I looked up at Challoner and found him
regarding me with an inscrutable and hideous
smile.
“These are very extraordinary productions,
Challoner,” said I. “What are they? And
what are they made of?”
“Made of, my dear fellow?” said he.
“Why, the same as you and I are made
of, to be sure.”


THE MOTIVE FORCE 21
“Do you mean to say,” I exclaimed,
“that these little heads are made of human
skin?”
“Undoubtedly. Human skin and human
hair. What else did you think?”
I looked at him with a puzzled frown and
ﬁnally said that I did not understand what
he meant.
“Have you never heard of the Mundu-
rucu Indians?” he asked.
I shook my head. “What about them?”
I asked. .
“You will ﬁnd an account of them in
Bates’ “Naturalist on the Amazon,” and
there is a reference to them in Gould and
Pyle’s “Anomalies.”
There was a pause, during which I gazed,
not without awe, at the open boxes. Finally
I looked at Challoner and asked, “Well?”
“Well, these are examples of the Mun-
durucu work.”
I looked again at the boxes and I must
confess that, as my eye traveled along the
rows of impassive faces and noted the per-
fect though diminutive features, the tiny
ears, the bristling hair, the frowning eye-


22 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
brows—so discordant with the placid expres-
sion and peacefully closed eyes—a chill of
horror crept over me. The whole thing was
so unreal, so unnatural, so suggestive of some
diabolical wizardry. I looked up sharply at
my host.
“Where did you get these things, Chal-
loner?” I asked.
His bloated face exhibited again that
strange, inscrutable smile.
“You will ﬁnd a full account of them in
the archives of the museum. Every speci-
men is fully described there and the history
of its acquirement and origin given in detail.
They are interesting little objects, aren’t
they?’ ’
“Very,” I replied abstractedly; for I was
speculating at the moment on the disagree-
ment between the appearance of the heads
and their implied origin. Finally I pointed
out the discrepancy.
“But these heads were never prepared by
those Indians you speak of.”
“Why not?”
“Because they are all Europeans; in fact,
most of them look like Englishmen.”


THE MOTIVE FORCE 23
“Well? And what about it?” Challoner
seemed quietly amused at my perplexity,
but at this moment my eye noted a further
detail which—I cannot exactly say why—
seemed to send a fresh shiver down my
spine.
“Look here, Challoner,” I said. “Why is
this head distinguished from the others?
They are all in compartments lined with
black velvet and have black labels with
white numbers and dates; this one has a
compartment lined with red velvet and a
red label with a gold number and date,
just as in the case of that end skeleton.”
I glanced across at the case and then it
came to me in a ﬂash that the numbers
and the dates were identical on both.
Challoner saw that I had observed this
and replied: “It is perfectly simple, my
dear fellow. That skeleton and this head
were acquired on the same day, and with
their acquirement my collection was com-
plete. They were the ﬁnal specimens and
I have added nothing since I got them.
But in the case of the head there was a
further reason for a distinctive setting: it is


24 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
the gem of the whole collection. Just look
at the hair. Take my lens and examine it.”
He handed me his lens and I picked the
head out of its scarlet nest—it was as light
as a cork—and brought it close to my eye.
And then, even without the lens, I could
see what Challoner meant. The hair pre-
sented an excessively rare abnormality; it
was what is known as “ringed hair;” that
is to say, each hair was marked by alter-
nate light and dark rings.
“You say this is really human hair?”
I asked.
“Undoubtedly. And a very ﬁne example
of ringed hair; the only one, I may say,
that I have ever seen.”
“I have never seen a specimen before,”
said I, laying the little head down in its
compartment, “nor,” I added, “have I ever
seen or heard of anything like these uncanny
objects. Won’t you tell me where you got
them?”
“Not now,” said Challoner. “You will
learn all about them from the ‘Archives,’
and very interesting you will ﬁnd them.
And now we’ll put them away.” He placed


26 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING


“I suppose I can have a cigar, Wharton?
Won’t shorten my life seriously, h’m?”
If it would have killed him on the spot,
I should have raised no objection. I replied
by pushing the box towards him, and, when
he had selected a cigar and cut off its end
with a meditative air, he looked up at me
and said:
“I am inclined to be reminiscent tonight,
Wharton; to treat you to a little autobiog-
raphy, h’m?”
“By all means. You will satisfy your own
inclinations and my curiosity at the same
time.”
“You’re a deuced polite fellow, Wharton.
But I’m not going to bore you. You’ll be
really interested in what I’m going to tell
you; and especially will you be interested
when you come to go through the museum
by the light of the little history that you
are going to hear. For you must know that
my life for the last twenty years has been
bound up with my collection. The one is,
as it were, a commentary on and an illus-
tration of the other. Did you know that
I had ever been married?”


THE MOTIVE FORCE 27
“No,” I answered in some surprise; for
Challoner had always seemed to me the
very type of the solitary, self-contained
bachelor.
“I have never mentioned it,” said he.
“The subject would have been a painful
one. It is not now. The malice of sorrow
and misfortune loses its power as I near the
end of my pilgrimage. Soon I shall step
across the border and be out of its juris-
diction forever.”
He paused, lit his cigar, took a few labored
draughts of the fragrant smoke, and re-
sumed: “I did not marry until I was turned
forty. I had no desire to. I was a soli-
tary man, full of my scientiﬁc interests and
not at all susceptible to the influence of
women. But at last I met my late wife
and found her different from all other women
whom I had seen. She was a beautiful girl,
some twenty years younger than I, highly
intelligent, cultivated and possessed of con-
siderable property. Of course I was no
match for her. I was nothing to look at,
was double her age, was only moderately
well off and had no special standing either


28 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
socially or in the world of science. But
she married me and, as I may say, she mar-
ried me handsomely; by which I mean that
she always treated our marriage as a great
stroke of good fortune for her, as if the
advantages were all on her side instead of
on mine. As a result, we were absolutely
devoted to each other. Our life was all
that married life could be and that it so
seldom is. We were inseparable. In our
work, in our play, in every interest and
occupation, we were in perfect harmony.
We grudged the briefest moment of sepa-
ration and avoided all society because we
were so perfectly happy with each other.
She was a wife in a million; and it was
only after I had married her that I realized
what a delightful thing it was to be alive.
My former existence, looked back on from
that time, seemed but a blank expanse through
which I had stagnated as a chrysalis lingers
on, half alive, through the dreary months of
winter.
“We lived thus in unbroken concord, with
mutual love that grew from day to day, until
two years of perfect happiness had passed.


THE MOTIVE FORCE 29
“And then the end came.”
Here Challoner paused, and a look of
unutterable sadness settled on his poor, mis-
shapen face. I watched him with an uncom-
fortable premonition of something disagree-
able in the sequel of his narrative as, with
his trembling, puffy hand, he re-lighted the
cigar that had gone out in the interval.
“The end came,” he repeated presently.
“The perfect happiness of two human beings
was shattered in a moment. Let me de-
scribe the circumstances.
“I am usually a light sleeper, like most
men of an active mind, but on this occasion
I must have slept more heavily than usual.
I awoke, however, with somewhat of a start
and the feeling that something had hap-
pened. I immediately missed my wife and
sat up in bed to listen. Faint creakings
and sounds of movement were audible from
below and I was about to get up and inves-
tigate when a door slammed, a bell rang
loudly and then the report of a pistol or gun
echoed through the house.
“I sprang out of bed and rushed down
the stairs. As I reached the hall, someone


30 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
ran past me in the darkness. There was
a blinding ﬂash close to my face and a
deafening explosion; and when I recovered
my sight, the form of a man appeared for
an instant dimly silhouetted in the opening
of the street door. The door closed with
a bang, leaving the house wrapped in silence
and gloom.
“My ﬁrst impulse was to pursue the
man, but it immediately gave way to alarm
for my wife. I groped my way into the
dining-room and was creeping towards the
place where the matches were kept when
my bare foot touched something soft and
bulky. I stooped to examine it and my
outspread hand came in contact with a
face.
“I sprang up with a gasp of terror and
searched frantically for the matches. In a
few moments I had found them and trem-
blingly struck a light; and the ﬁrst glimmer
of the ﬂame turned my deadly fear into
yet more deadly realization. My wife lay
on the hearth-rug, her upturned face as
white as marble, her half-open eyes already
glazing. A great, brown scorch marked the


THE MOTIVE FORCE 31
breast of her night-dress and at its center
was a small stain of blood.
“She was stone dead. I saw that at a
glance. The bullet must have passed right
through her heart and she must have died
in an instant. That, too, I saw. And
though I called her by her name and whis-
pered words of tenderness into her ears;
though I felt her pulseless wrists and chafed
her hands—so waxen now and chill——I knew
that she was gone.
“I was still kneeling beside her, crazed,
demented by grief and horror; still stroking
her poor white hand, telling her that she
was my dear one, my little Kate, and beg-
ging her, foolishly, to come back to me,
to be my little friend and playmate as of
old; still, I say, babbling in the insanity
of grief, when I heard a soft step descending
the stairs. It came nearer. The door
opened and someone stole into the room
on tip-toe. It was the housemaid, Harratt.
She stood stock still when she saw us and
stared and uttered strange whimpering cries
like a frightened dog. And then, suddenly,
she turned and stole away silently as she


82 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
had come, and I heard her running softly
upstairs. Presently she came down again,
but this time she passed the dining-room
and went out of the street door. I vaguely
supposed she had gone for assistance, but
the matter did not concern me. My wife
was dead. Nothing mattered now.
“Harratt did not return, however, and I
soon forgot her. The death of my dear one
grew more real. I began to appreciate it
as an actual fact. And with this realization,
the question of my own death arose. I took
it for granted from the ﬁrst. The burden
of solitary existence was not to be enter-
tained for a moment. The only question
was how, and I debated this in leisurely
fashion, sitting on the ﬂoor with Kate’s
hand in mine. I had a pistol upstairs and,
of course, there were keen-edged scalpels in
the laboratory. But, strange as it may
appear, the bias of an anatomical training
even then opposed the idea of gross mechan-
ical injuries. However, there were plenty
of poisons available, and to this method I
inclined as more decent and digniﬁed.
“Having settled on the method, I was


THE MOTIVE FORCE 33
disposed to put it into practice at once;
but then another consideration arose. My
, wife would have to be buried. By some
hands she must be laid in her last resting-
place, and those hands could be none other
than my own. So I must stay behind for
a little while.
“The hours passed on unreckoned until
pencils of cold blue daylight began to stream
in through the chinks of the shutters and
contend with the warm gaslight within.
Then another footstep was heard on the
stairs and the cook, Wilson, came into the
room. She, like the housemaid, stopped
dead when she saw my wife’s corpse, and
stood for an instant staring wildly with her
mouth wide open. But only for an instant.
The next she was ﬂying out of the front
door, rousing the street with her screams.
“The advent of the cook roused me.
I knew that the police would arrive soon
and I instinctively looked about me to see
how this unspeakable thing had happened.
I had already noticed that one of my wife’s
hands—the one that I had not been holding
—was clenched, and I now observed that it


34 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
grasped a-little tuft of hair. I drew out a
portion of the tuft and looked at it. It
was coarse hair, about three inches long and
a dull gray in color. I laid it on the clean
note-paper in the drawer of the bureau book-
case to examine later, and then glanced
around the room. The origin of the tragedy
was obvious. The household plate had been
taken out of the plate chest in the pantry
and laid out on the end of the dining table.
There the things stood, their polished sur-
faces sullied by the greasy ﬁnger-marks of
the wretch who had murdered my wife. At
those tell-tale marks I looked with new and
growing interest. Finger-prints, in those
days, had not yet ?been recognized by the
public or the police as effective means of
identiﬁcation. But they were well known
to scientiﬁc men and I had given the sub-
ject some attention myself. And the sight
of those signs-manual of iniquity had an
immediate effect on me ,‘ they converted the
unknown perpetrator of this horror from a
mere abstraction of disaster into a real,
living person. With a sudden ﬂush of hate
and loathing, I realized that this wretch


THE MOTIVE FORCE 35
was even now walking the streets or lurking
in his accursed den; and I realized, too,
that these marks were, perhaps, the only
links that connected him with the foul deed
that ‘he had done.
“I looked over the plate quickly and
selected a salver and a large, globular tea-
pot, on both of which the prints were very
distinct. These I placed in a drawer of the
bureau, and, turning the key, dropped it
into the pocket of my pajamas. And at
that moment the bell rang violently.
“I went to the door and admitted a police
constable and the cook. The latter looked
at me with evident fear and horror and the
constable said, somewhat sternly:
“ ‘This young woman tells me there’s
something wrong here, sir.’
“I led him into the dining-room—the cook
remained at the door, peering in with an
ashen face—and showed him my wife’s corpse.
He took off his helmet and asked rather
gruflly how it happened. I gave him a
brief account of the catastrope, on which
he made no comment except to remark
that the inspector would be here presently.


36 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
“The inspector actually arrived within a
couple of minutes, accompanied by a ser-
geant, and the two ofﬁcers questioned me
closely. I repeated my statement and saw
at once that they did not believe me; that
they suspected me of having committed the
murder myself. I noted the fact with dull
surprise but without annoyance. It didn’t
seem to matter to me what they thought.
“They called the cook in and questioned
her, but, of course, she knew nothing. Then
they sent her to ﬁnd the housemaid. But
the housemaid had disappeared and her out-
door clothes and a large hand-bag had dis-
appeared too; which put a new complexion
on the matter. Then the ofﬁcers examined
the plate and looked at the ﬁnger-marks
on it. The constable discovered the tuft
of hair in my poor wife’s hand, and the
inspector having noted its color and looked
rather hard at my hair, put it for safety in
a blue envelope, which he pocketed; and
I suspect it never saw the light again.
“About this time the police surgeon ar-
rived, but there was nothing for him to do
but note the state of the body as hearing


THE MOTIVE FORCE 37
on the time at which death took place. The
police took possession of some of the plate
with a dim idea of comparing the ﬁnger-
prints with the ﬁngers of the murderer if
they should catch him.
“But they never did catch him. Not
a vestige of a clue to his identity was ever
forthcoming. The housemaid was searched
for but never found. The coroner’s jury
returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ against
some person unknown. And that was the
end of the matter. I accompanied my dear-
est to the place where she was laid to rest,
where soon I shall join her. And I came
back alone to the empty house.
“It is unnecessary for me to say that
I did not kill myself. In the interval I had
seen things in a new light. It was evident
to me from the ﬁrst that the police would
never capture that villain. And yet he
had to be captured. He had incurred a
debt, and that debt had to be paid. There-
fore I remained behind to collect it.
“That was twenty years ago, Wharton;
twenty long, gray, solitary years. Many
a time have I longed to go to her, but the


88 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
debt remained unpaid. I have tried to
make the time pass by getting my little
collection together and studying the very
instructive specimens in it; and it has light-
ened the burden. But all the time I have
been working to collect that debt and earn
my release.”
He paused awhile, and I ventured to ask:
“And is the debt paid?”
“At last it is paid.”
“The man was caught, then, in the end?”
“Yes. He was caught.”
“And I hope,” I exclaimed fervently,
“that the scoundrel met with his deserts;
I mean, that he was duly executed.”
“Yes,” Challoner answered quietly, “he
was executed.”
“How did the police discover him, after
all?” I asked.
“You will ﬁnd,” said Challoner, “a full
account of the affair in the last volume of
the ‘Museum Archives’;” then, noting the
astonishment on my face at this amazing
statement, he added: “You see, Wharton,
the ‘Museum Archives’ are, in a sense, a
personal diary; my life has been wrapped


THE MOTIVE FORCE 39
up in the museum and I have associated
all the actions of my life with the collection.
I think you will understand when you read
it. And now let us dismiss these recollec-
tions of a ruined life. I have told you my
story; I wanted you to hear it from my
own lips, and you have heard it. Now let
us take a glass of wine and talk of some-
thing else.”
I looked at my watch and, ﬁnding it
much later than I had supposed, rose to
take my leave.
“I oughtn’t to have kept you up like
this,” I said. “You ought to have been
in bed an hour ago.”
Challoner laughed his queer mufﬂed laugh.
“Bed!” exclaimed he. “I don’t go to bed
nowadays. Haven’t been able to lie down
for the last fortnight.”
Of course he hadn’t. I might have known
that. “Well,” I said, “at any rate, let me
make you comfortable for the night before
I go. How do you generally manage?”
“I rig up a head-rest on the edge of the
table, pull up the armchair, wrap myself
in a rug and sleep leaning forward. I’ll


40 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
show you. Just get down Owen’s ‘Com-
parative Anatomy’ and stack the volumes
close to the edge of the table. Then set
up Parker’s ‘Monograph on the Shoulder-
girdle’ in a slanting position against them.
Fine book, that of Parker’s. I enjoyed it
immensely when it ﬁrst came out and it
makes a splendid head-rest. I’ll go and get
into my pajamas while you are arranging the
things.”
He went off to his adjacent bedroom and
I piled up the ponderous volumes on the
table and drew up the armchair. When he
returned, I wrapped him in a couple of thick
rugs and settled him in his chair. He laid
his arms on the massive monograph, rested
his forehead on them and murmured cheer-
fully that he should now be quite comfort-
able until the morning. I wished him
“good-night” and walked slowly to the door,
and as I held it open I stopped to look
back at him. He raised his head and gave
me a farewell smile; a queer, ugly smile,
but full of courage and a noble patience.
And so I left him.
Thereafter I called to see him every day


THE MOTIVE FORCE 41
and settled him to rest every night. His
disease made more rapid progress even than
I had expected; but he was always bright
and cheerful, never made any complaint and
never again referred to his troubled past.
One afternoon I called a little later than
usual, and when the housemaid opened the
door I asked her how he was.
“He isn’t any better, sir,” she answered.
“He’s getting most awful fat, sir; abOut the
head I mean.”
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“He’s in the dining-room, sir; I think
he’s gone to sleep.”
I entered the room quietly and found him
resting by the table. He was wrapped up
in his rugs and his head rested on his beloved
monograph. I walked up to him and spoke
his name softly, but he did not rouse. I
leaned over him and listened, but no sound
or movement of breathing was perceptible.
The housemaid was right. He had gone to
sleep; or, in his own phrase, he had passed
out of the domain of sorrow.


11
“NUMBER ONE ”
T was more than a week after the funeral
I of my poor friend Humphrey Challoner
that I paid my ﬁrst regular visit of
inspection to his house. I had been the only
intimate friend of this lonely, self-contained
man and he had made me not only his sole
executor but his principal legatee. With
the exception of a sum of money to endow
an Institute of Criminal Anthropology, he
had made me the heir to his entire estate,
including his museum. The latter bequest
was unencumbered by any conditions. I
could keep the collection intact, I could sell
it as it stood or I could break it up and
distribute the specimens as I chose; but
I knew that Challoner’s unexpressed wish
was that it should be kept together, ulti-
mately to form the nucleus of a collection
attached to the Institute.
It was a gray autumn afternoon when
(4!)


“NUMBER ONE ” 43
I let myself in. A caretaker was in charge
of the house, which was otherwise unoccupied,
and the museum, which was in a separate
wing, seemed strangely silent and remote.
As the Yale latch of the massive door clicked
behind me, I seemed to be, and in fact was,
cut off from all the world. A mysterious,
sepulchral stillness pervaded the place, and
when I entered the long room I found myself
unconsciously treading lightly so as not to
disturb the silence; even as one might on
entering some Egyptian tomb-chamber hidden
in the heart of a pyramid.
I halted in the center of the long room
and looked about me, and I don’t mind
confessing that I felt distinctly creepy. It
was not the skeleton of the whale that hung
overhead, with its ample but ungenial smile;
it was not the bandy-legged skeleton of the
rachitic camel, nor that of the aurochs, nor
those of the apes and jackals and porcupines
in the smaller glass case; nor the skulls
that grinned from the case at the end of
the room. It was the long row of human
skeletons, each erect and watchful on its
little pedestal, that occupied the great wall-


44 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
case: a silent, motionless company of ﬂesh-
less sentinels, standing in easy postures with
unchanging, mirthless grins and seeming to
wait for something. That was what dis-
turbed me.
I am not an impressionable man; and,
as a medical practitioner, it is needless to
say that mere bones have no terrors for me.
The skeleton from which I worked as a stu-
dent was kept in my bedroom, and I minded
it no more than I minded the plates in
“Gray’s Anatomy.” I could have slept com-
fortably in the Hunterian Museum—other
circumstances being favorable; and even
the gigantic skeleton of Corporal O’Brian—
which graces that collection—with that of
his companion, the quaint little dwarf, thrown
in, would not have disturbed my rest in the
smallest degree. But this was different.
I had the feeling, as I had had before, that
there was something queer about this museum
of Challoner’s.
I walked slowly along the great wall-case,
looking in at the specimens; and in the
dull light, each seemed to look out at me
as I passed with a questioning expression


“NUMBER ONE” 45
in his shadowy eye-sockets, as if he would
ask, “Do you know who I was?” It made
me quite uncomfortable.
There were twenty-ﬁve of them in all.
Each stood on a small black pedestal on
which was painted in white a number and
a date; excepting one at the end, which
had a scarlet pedestal and gold lettering.
Number 1 bore the date 20th September,
1889, and Number 25 (the one with the
red pedestal) was dated 13th May, 1909.
I looked at this last one curiously; a massive
ﬁgure with traces of great muscularity, a
broad, Mongoloid head with large cheek-
bones and square eye-sockets. A formidable
fellow he must have been; and even now,
the broad, square face grinned out savagely
from the case.
I turned away with something of a shud-
der. I had not come here to get “the
creeps.” I had come for Challoner’s journal,
or the “Museum Archives” as he called it.
The volumes were in the secret cupboard
at the end of the room and I had to take
out the movable panel to get at them. This
presented no difﬁculty. I found the rosettes


46 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
that moved the catches and had the panel
out in a twinkling. The cupboard was ﬁve
feet high by four broad and had a well in
the bottom covered by a lid, which I lifted
and, to my amazement, found the cavity
ﬁlled with revolvers, automatic pistols, life-
preservers, knuckle-dusters and other weap-
ons, each having a little label—bearing a
number and a date—tied neatly on it. I
shut the lid down rather hastily; there was
something rather sinister in that collection
of lethal appliances.
The volumes, seven in number, were on
the top shelf, uniformly bound in Russia
leather and labeled, respectively, “Photo-
graphs,” “Fihger-prints,” “Catalogue,” and
four volumes of “Museum Archives.” I was
about to reach down the catalogue when
my eye fell on the pile of shallow boxes on
the next shelf. I knew what they con-
tained and recalled uncomfortably the strange
impression that their contents had made on
me; and yet a sort of fascination led me
to take down the top one—labelled “Series
B 5”——and raise the lid. But if those dread-
ful dolls’ heads had struck me as uncanny


“NUMBER ONE ” _ 47
when poor Challoner showed them to me,
they now seemed positively appalling. Small
as they were—and they were not as large
as a woman’s ﬁst—they looked so life-like—
or rather, so death-like—that they suggested
nothing so much as actual human heads
seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
There were ﬁve in this box, each in a sepa-
rate compartment lined with black velvet
and distinguished by a black label with
white lettering; excepting the central one,
which rested on scarlet velvet and had a
red label inscribed in gold “13th May, 1909.”
I gazed at this tiny head in its scarlet
setting with shuddering fascination. It had
a hideous little face; a broad, brutal face
of the Tartar type; and the mop of gray-
brown hair, so unhuman in color, and the
bristling mustache that stood up like a cat’s
whiskers, gave it an aspect half animal, half
devilish. I clapped the lid on the box,
thrust it back on the shelf, and, plucking
down the ﬁrst volume of the “Archives,”
hurried out of the museum.
That night, when I had rounded' up the
day’s work with a good dinner, I retired


48 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
to my study, and, drawing an armchair up
to the ﬁre, opened the volume. It was a
strange document. At ﬁrst I was unable
to perceive the relevancy of the matter to
the title, for it seemed to be a journal of
Challoner’s private life; but later I began
to see the connection, to realize, as Challoner
had said, that the collection was nothing
more than a visible commentary on and
illustration of his daily activities.
The volume opened with an account of
the murder of his wife and the circumstances
leading up to it, written with a dry circum-
stantiality that was to me inﬁnitely pathetic.
It was the forced impassiveness of a strong
man whose heart is breaking. There were
no comments, no exclamations; merely a
formal recital of facts, exhaustive, literal and
precise. I need not quote it, as it only
repeated the story he had told me, but I
will commence my extract at the point where
he broke off. The style, as will be seen, is
that of a (continuous narrative, apparently
compiled from a diary; and, as it proceeds,
marking the lapse of time, the original dry-
ness of manner gives place to one more


“NUMBER ONE ” 49
animated, more in keeping with the tempera-
ment of the writer.
“When I had buried my dear wife, I waited
with some impatience to see what the police
would do. I had no great expectations.
The English police system is more adjusted
to offences against property than to those
against the person. Nothing had been stolen,
so nothing could be traced; and the clues
were certainly very slight. It soon became
evident to me that the authorities had given
the ease up. They gave me no hope that
the murderer would ever be identiﬁed; and,
in fact, it was pretty obvious that they had
written the case oﬁ as hopeless and ceased
to interest themselves in it.
“Of course I could not accept this view.
My wife had been murdered. The murder
was without extenuation. It had been com-
mitted lightly to cover a paltry theft. Now,
for murder, no restitution is possible. But
there is an appropriate forfeit to be paid;
and if the authorities failed to exact it, then
the duty of its exaction devolved upon me.
Moreover, a person who thus lightly commits
murder as an incident in his calling is unﬁt
4


50 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
to live in a community of human beings. It
was clearly my duty as a good citizen to see
that this dangerous person was eliminated.
“This was well enough in theory, but its
realization in practice presented considerable
diﬂiculties. The police had (presumably)
searched for this person and failed to ﬁnd
him. How was I, untrained in methods of
detection, to succeed where the experts had
been bafﬂed? I considered my resources.
They consisted of a silver teapot and a salver
which had been handled by the murderer
and which, together, yielded a complete set
of ﬁnger-prints, and the wisp of hair that
I had taken from the hand of my murdered
wife. It is true that the police also had
ﬁnger-marked plate and the remainder of the
hair and had been unable to achieve any-
thing by their means; but the value of
ﬁnger-impressions for the purposes of identi-
ﬁcation is not yet appreciated outside scien-
tiﬁc circles.* I fetched the teapot and salver
from the drawer in which I had secured them
and examined them afresh. The teapot had
been held in both hands and bore a full set
* The narrative seems to have been written in 1890.—-L. W.


I took the hair to the window and examined it under a lens


“NUMBER ONE ” 51
of prints; and these were supplemented by
the salver. For greater security I photo-
graphed the whole set of the ﬁnger-impres-
sions and made platinotype prints which
I ﬁled for future reference. Then I turned
my attention to the hair. I had already
noticed that it was of a dull gray color, but
now, when I came to look at it more closely,
I found the color so peculiar that I took it to
the window and examined it with a lens.
“The result was a most startling discovery.
It was ringed hair. The gray appearance
was due, not to the usual mingling of white
and dark hairs, but to the fact that each
separate hair was marked by alternate rings
of black and White. Now, variegated hairs
are common enough in the lower animals
which have a pattern on the fur. The tabby
cat furnishes a familiar example. But in
man the condition is inﬁnitely rare; whence
it was obvious that, with these hairs and
the ﬁnger-prints, I had the means of infallible
identiﬁcation. But identiﬁcation involves
possession of the person to be identiﬁed.
There was the diﬁiculty. How was it to
be overcome?


“NUMBER ONE " 53
But I should want a housemaid .and a cook,
and if I acted judiciously in the matter of
references, I might get the sort of persons
who would help my plans. For there are
female rats as well as male.
“But there were certain preliminary meas-
ures to be taken. My physical condition
had to be attended to. As a young man
I was a ﬁrst-class athlete, and even now I
was strong and exceedingly active. But
I must get into training and brush up my
wrestling and boxing. Then I must ﬁt up
some burglar alarms, lay in a few little neces-
saries and provide myself with a suitable
appliance for dealing with the ‘catch.’
“This latter I proceeded with at once.
To the end of a rod of rhinoceros horn about
two feet long I aﬁixed a knob of lead weigh-
ing two pounds. I covered the knob with a
thickish layer of plaited horsehair, and over
this fastened a covering of stout leather;
and when I had ﬁtted it with a wrist-strap
it looked a really serviceable tool. Its pur-
pose is obvious. It was an improved form
of that very crude appliance, the sand-bag,
which footpads use to produce concussion of


54 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
the brain without fracturing the skull. I may
describe it as a concussor.
“The preliminary measures were proceed-
ing steadily. I had put in a fortnight’s
attendance at a gymnasium under the super-
vision of Professor Schneipp, the Bavarian
Hercules; I had practiced the most approved
‘knock-outs’ known to my instructor, the
famous pugilist, Melchizedeck Cohen (popu-
larly known as ‘Slimy’ Cohen); I had given
up an hour a day to studying the manage-
ment of the concussor with the aid of a
punching-ball; the alarms were ready for
ﬁxing, and I even had the address of an
undoubtedly disreputable housemaid, when a
most unexpected thing happened. I got a
premature bite. A fellow actually walked
into the trap without troubling me to set it.
“It befell thus. I had gone to bed rather
early and fallen asleep at once, but about
one o’clock I awoke with that unmistakable
completeness that heralds a sleepless night.
I lit my candlelamp and looked round for
the book that I had been reading in the
evening, and then I remembered that I had
left it in the museum. Now that book had


“NUMBER ONE ” 55
interested me deeply. It contained the only
lucid description that I had met with of the
Mundurucu Indians and their curious method
of preserving the severed heads of their
enemies; a method by which the head—
after removal of the bones—was shrunk until
it was no larger than a man’s ﬁst.
“I got up, and, taking my lamp and keys,
made my way to the museum wing of the
house, which opened out of the dining-room.
I found the book, but, instead of returning
immediately, lingered in the museum, look-
ing about the great room and at the unﬁn-
ished collection and gloomily recalling its
associations. The museum was a gift from
my wife. She had built it and the big labora-
tory soon after we were married and many
a delightful hour we had spent in it together,
arranging the new specimens in the cases.
I did not allow her to work in the evil-
smelling laboratory, but she had a collection
of her own, of land and fresh-water shells
(which were cleaner to handle than the
bones); and I was pulling out some of the
drawers in her cabinet, and, as I looked over
the shells, thinking of the happy days when


56 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
we rambled by the riverside or over furzy
commons in search of them, When I became
aware of faint sounds of movement from the
direction of the dining-room.
“I stepped lightly down the corridor that
led to the dining-room and listened. The
door of communication was shut, but through
it I could distinctly hear someone moving
about and could occasionally detect the
chink of metal. I ran back to the museum
-—my felt-soled bedroom slippers made no
sound—and, taking the ‘concussor’ from the
drawer in which I had concealed it, thrust
it through the waist-band of my pajamas.
Then I crept back to the door.
“The sounds had now ceased. I inferred
that the burglar—for he could be none
other—had gone to the pantry, where the
plate-chest was kept. On this I turned the
Yale latch and softly opened the door. It
is my habit to keep all locks and hinges
thoroughly oiled, and consequently the door
opened without a sound. There was no one
in the dining-room; but one burner of the
gas was alight and various articles of silver
plate were laid on the table, just as they


“NUMBER ONE” ' 57
had been when my wife was murdered.
I drew the museum door to—I could not
shut it because of the noise the spring latch
would have made—and slipped behind a
Japanese screen that stood near the dining-
room door. I had just taken my place
when a stealthy footstep approached along
the hall. It entered the room and then
there was a faint clink of metal. I peeped
cautiously round the screen and looked on
the back of a man who was standing by
the table on which he was noiselessly deposit-
ing a number of spoons and forks and a
candlestick. Although his back was towards
me, a mirror on the opposite wall gave me
a good view of his face; a wooden, expres-
sionless face, such as I have since learned
to associate with the English habitual crim-
inal; the penal servitude face, in fact.
“He was a careful operator. He turned
over each piece thoroughly, weighing it in
his hand and giving especial attention to
the hall-mark. And, as I watched him, the
thought came into my mind that, perchance,
this was the very wretch who had murdered
my wife, come back for the spoil that he had


58 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
then had to abandon. It was quite possible,
even likely, and at the thought I felt my
cheeks ﬂush and a strange, ﬁerce pleasure,
such as I had never felt before, swept into
my consciousness. I could have laughed
aloud, but I did not. Also, I could have
knocked him down with perfect ease as he
stood, but I did not. Why did I not? Was
it a vague, sporting sense of fairness? Or
was it a catlike instinct impelling me to
play with my quarry? I cannot say. Only
I know that the idea of dealing him a blow
from behind did not attract me.
“Presently he shufﬂed away (in list slip-
pers) to fetch a fresh cargo. Then some
ferociously playful impulse led me to steal
out of my hiding-place and gather up a
number of spoons and forks, a salt-cellar,
a candlestick and an entrée-dish and retire
again behind the screen. Then my friend
returned with a fresh consignment; and as
he was anxiously looking over the fresh
pieces, I crept silently out at the other end
of the screen, out of the open doorway and
down the hall to the pantry. Here a lighted
candle showed the plate-chest open and half


“NUMBER ONE” 59
empty, with a few pieces of plate on a side
table. Quickly but silently I replaced in
the chest the spoons and other pieces that
I had collected, and then stole back to my
place behind the screen and resumed my
observations.
“My guest was quite absorbed in his
task. He had a habit—common, I believe,
among ‘old lags ’—of talking to himself;
and very poor stuff his conversation was,
though it was better than his arithmetic, as
I gathered from his attempts to compute the
weight of the booty. Anon, he retired for
another consignment, and once more I came
out and gathered up a little selection from
his stock; and when he returned laden with
spoil, I went off, as before, and put the
articles back in the plate-chest.
“Theée manoeuvres were repeated a quite
incredible number of times. The man must
have been an abject blockhead, as I believe
most professional criminals are. His lack
of observation was astounding. It is true
that he began to be surprised and rather
bewildered. He even noted that ‘there
seemed a bloomin’ lot of ’em;’ and the


60 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
quality of his arithmetical feats and his
verbal enrichments became, alike, increas-
ingly lurid. I believe he would have gone
on until daylight if I had not tried him too
often with a Queen Anne teapot. It was
that teapot, with its conspicuous urn design,
that ﬁnally disillusioned him. I had just
returned from putting it back in the chest
for the third time when he missed it; and
he announced the discovery with a profusion
of perfectly unnecessary and highly inap-
propriate adjectives.
“ ‘Naa, then!’ he exclaimed truculently,
‘where’s that blimy teapot gone to? Hay?
I put that there teapot down inside that
there hontry-dish—and where’s the bloomin’
hontry? Bust me if that ain’t gone to!’
“He stood by the table scratching his
bristly head and looking the picture of
ludicrous bewilderment. I watched him and
meanwhile debated whether or not I should
take the opportunity to knock him down.
That was undoubtedly the proper course.
But I could not bring myself to do it. A
spirit of wild mischief possessed me; a
strange, unnatural buoyancy and ﬁerce play-


“NUMBER ONE” 61
fulness that impelled me to play insane,
fantastic tricks. It was a singular phenom-
enon. I seemed suddenly to have made the
acquaintance of a hitherto unknown moiety
of a dual personality.
“The burglar stood awhile, muttering idiot-
ically, and then shuﬁﬂed off to the pantry.
I followed him out into the dark hall and,
taking my stand behind a curtain, awaited
his return. He came back presently, and,
by the glimmer of light from the open door,
I could see that he had the teapot and the
‘hontry.’ Now some previous tenant had
ﬁtted the dining-room door with two external
bolts; I cannot imagine why; but the pres-
ent circumstances suggested a use for them.
As soon as the burglar was inside, I crept
forward and quietly shut the door, shooting
the top bolt.
“That roused my friend. He rushed at
the door and shook it like a madman; he
cursed with incredible ﬂuency and addressed
me in terms which it would be inadequate
to describe as rude. Then I silently shot
the bottom bolt and noisily drew back the
top one. He thought I had unbolted the


62 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
door, and when he found that I had not,
his language became indescribable.
“There was a second door to the dining-
room also opening into the hall at the farther
end. My captive seemed suddenly to remem-
ber this, for he made a rush for it. But so
did I; and, the hall being unobstructed by
furniture, I got there ﬁrst and shot the top
bolt. He wrenched frantically 'at the handle
and addressed me with strange and unseemly
epithets I repeated the manoeuvre of pre-
tending to unbolt the door, and smiled as
I heard him literally dancing with frenzy
inside. It seemed highly amusing at the
time, though now, viewed retrospectively, it
looks merely silly.
“Quite suddenly his efforts ceased and
I heard him shufﬂe away. I returned to
the other door, but he made no fresh attempt
on it. I listened, and hearing no sound,
bethought me of the open door of the museum.
Probably he had gone there to look for a
way out. This would never do. The plate
I cared not a ﬁg for, but the museum speci-
mens were a different matter; and he might
damage them from sheer malice.


“NUMBER ONE ” 63
“I unbolted the door, entered and shut it
again, locking it on the inside and dropping
the key into my pocket. I had just done
so when he appeared at the museum door,
eyeing me warily and unobtrusively slipping
a knuckle-duster on his left hand. I had
noted that he was not left-handed and drew
my own conclusions as to what he meant
to do with his right. We stood for some
seconds facing each , other and then he
began to edge towards the door. I drew
aside to let him pass and he ran to the door
and turned the handle. When he found the
door locked he was furious. He advanced
threateningly with his left hand clenched,
but then drew back. Apparently, my smiling
exterior, coupled with my previous conduct,
daunted him. I think he took me for a
lunatic; in fact, he hinted as much in coarse,
ill-chosen terms. But his vocabulary was
very limited, though quaint.
“We exchanged a few remarks and I could
see that he did not like the tone of mine.
The fact is that the sight of the knuckle-
duster had changed my mood. I no longer
felt playful. He had recalled me to my


64 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
original purpose. He expressed a wish to
leave the house and to know ‘what my
game was.’ I replied that he was my game
and that I believed that I had bagged him,
whereupon he rushed at me and aimed a
vicious blow at my head with his armed
left ﬁst, which, if it had come home, would
have stretched me senseless. But it did not.
I guarded it easily and countered him so
that he staggered back gasping.
“That made him furious. He came at
me like a wild beast, with his mouth open
and his armed ﬁst ﬂourished aloft as if he
would annihilate me. I tried to deal with
him by the methods of Mr. Slimy Cohen,
but it was useless. He was no boxer and
he had a knuckle-duster. Consequently We
grabbed one another like a pair of monkeys
and sought to inﬂict unorthodox injuries.
He struggled and writhed and growled and
kicked and even tried to bite; while I kept,
as far as I could, control of his wrists and
waited my opportunity. It was a most
undigniﬁed affair. We staggered to and fro,
clawing at one another; we gyrated round
the room in a wild, unseemly waltz; we


“NUMBER ONE ” 65
knocked over the chairs, we bumped against
the table, we banged each other’s heads
against the walls; and all the time, as my
adversary growled and showed his teeth like
a savage dog, I was sensible of a strange
feeling of physical enjoyment such as one
might experience in some strenuous game.
I seemed to have acquired a new and un-
familiar personality.
“But the knuckle-duster was a complica-
tion; for it was his right hand that I had
to watch; and yet I could not afford to free
for an instant his left, armed as it was with
that shabbiest of weapons. Hence I hung
on to his wrists while he struggled to wrench
them free, and we pulled one another back-
wards and forwards and round and round in
the most absurd and amateurish manner,
each trying to trip the other up and failing
at every attempt. At last, in the course of
our gyrations, we bumped through the open
door into the passage leading to the museum;
and here we came down together with a
crash that shook the house.
“As ill luck would have it, I was under—
neath; but, in spite of the shock of the
6


66 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
fall, I still managed to keep hold of his
wrists, though I had some trouble to prevent
him from biting my hands and face. So
our position was substantially unchanged,
and we were still wriggling chaotically when
a hasty step was heard descending the stairs.
The burglar paused for an instant to listen
and then, with a sudden eﬂort, wrenched
away his right hand, which ﬂew to his hip-
pocket and came out grasping a small revolver.
Instantly I struck up with my left and
caught him a smart blow under the chin,
which dislodged him; and as he rolled over
there was a ﬂash and a report, accompanied
by the shattering of glass and followed imme-
diately by the slamming of the street door.
I let go his left hand, and, rising to my
knees, grabbed the revolver with my own
left, while, with my right, I whisked out
the concussor and aimed a vigorous blow at
the top of his head. The padded weight
came down without a sound—excepting the
click of his teeth—~and the effect was in-
stantaneous. I rose, breathing quickly and
eminently satisﬁed with the efﬁciency of my
implement until I noticed that the uncon-


“NUMBER ONE” ‘67
scious man was bleeding slightly from the
ear; which told me that I had struck too
hard and fractured the base of the skull.
“However, my immediate purpose was to
ascertain whether this was or was not the
man whom I wanted. In the passage it
was too dark to see either his ﬁnger-tips or
the minute texture of his hair; but my
candle-lamp, with its parabolic reﬂector,
would give ample light. I ran through into
the museum, where it was still burning, and,
catching it up, ran back with it; but I had
barely reached the prostrate ﬁgure when
I heard someone noisily opening the street
door with a latch-key. The charwoman had
returned, no doubt, with the police.
“I am rather obscure as to what I meant
to do. I think I had no deﬁnitely-formed
intentions but acted more or less automatic-
ally, impelled by the desire to identify the
burglar. What I did was to close the museum
door very quietly, with the aid of the key,
unlock the dining-room door and open it.
“,A police sergeant, a conStable and a
plain-clothes oﬂicer entered and the char-
woman lurked in the dark background.


68 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘Have they got away?’ the sergeant
demanded.
“ ‘There was only one,’ I said.
“At this the ofﬁcers bustled away and
I heard them descending to the basement.
The charwoman came in and looked gloat-
ineg at my battered countenance, which
bore memorials of every projecting corner of
the room.
“ ‘It’s a pity you come down, sir,’ said
she. ‘You might have been murdered same
as what your poor lady was. It’s better to
let them sort of people alone. That’s what
I say. Let ’em alone and they’ll go home,
as the sayin’ is.’
“There was considerable truth in these
observations, especially the last. I acknowl-
edged it vaguely, while the woman cast fas-
cinated glances round the disordered room.
Then two of the ofﬁcers returned and took
up the enquiry to an accompaniment of dis-
tant police whistles from the back of the
house.
“ ‘I needn’t ask if you saw the man,’ said
the plain-clothes ofﬁcer, with a faint grin.
“ ‘No, you’re right,’ said the sergeant. ‘He


“NUMBER ONE ” 69
set upon you properly, sir. Seems to have
been a lively party.’ He glanced round the
room and added: ‘Fired a pistol, too, your
housekeeper tells me.’
“I nodded at the shattered mirror but
made no comment, and the ofﬁcer, remarking
that I ‘seemed a bit shaken up,’ proceeded
with his investigations. I watched the two
men listlessly. I was not much interested
in them. I was thinking of the man on
the other side of the museum door and
wondering if he had ringed hair.
“Presently the plain-clothes ofﬁcer made
a discovery. ‘Hallo,’ said he, ‘here’s a
carpet bag.’ He drew it out from under
the table and hoisted it up under the gas-
light to examine it; and then he burst into
a loud and cheerful laugh.
“ ‘What’s up?’ said the sergeant.
“ ‘Why, it’s Jimmy Archer’s bag.’
H (No !7 '
“ ‘Fact. He showed it to me himself.
It was given to him by the ‘Discharged
Prisoners’ Aid Society’ to carry his tools in.
Ha! Ha! O Lord!’
“The sergeant examined the bag with an


_ 70 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
appreciative grin, which broadened as his
colleague lifted out a brace, a pad of bits,
a folding jimmy and a few other triﬂes.
I made a mental note of the burglar’s name,
and then my interest languished again. The
two ofﬁcers looked over the room together,
tried the museum door and noted that it
had not been tampered with; turned over
the plate and admonished me on the folly
of leaving it so accessible; and ﬁnally de-
parted with the promise to bring a detective-
inspector in the morning, and meanwhile to
leave a constable to guard the house.
“I would gladly have dispensed with that
constable, especially as he settled himself in
the dining-room and seemed disposed to
converse, which I was not. His presence
shut me off from the museum. I could not
open the door, for the burglar was lying just
inside. It was extremely annoying. I wanted
to make sure that the man was really dead,
and, especially, I wanted to examine his hair
and to compare his ﬁnger-prints with the
set that I had in the museum. However,
it could not be helped. Eventually I took
my candle-lamp from the sideboard and went


“NUMBER ONE ” 71
up to bed, leaving the constable seated in
the easy-chair with a box of cigars, a decanter
of whiskey and a siphon of Apollinaris at
his elbow.
“I remained awake a long time cogitating
on the situation. Was the man whom I had
captured the right man? Had I accomplished
my task, and was I now at liberty to ‘deter-
mine,’ as the lawyers say, the lease of my
ruined life? That was a question which the
morning light would answer; and meanwhile
one thing was clear: I had fairly committed
myself to the disposal of the dead burglar.
I could not produce the body now; I should
have to get rid of it as best I could.
“Of course, the problem presented no
difﬁculty. There was a ﬁre-clay furnace in
the laboratory in which I had been accus-
tomed to consume the bulky refuse of my
preparations. A hundredweight or so of
anthracite would turn the body into undis-
tinguishable ash; and yet—well, it seemed
a wasteful thing to do. I have always been
rather opposed to cremation, to the wanton
destruction of valuable anatomical material.
And now I was actually proposing, myself,


72 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
to practice that which I had so strongly
deprecated. I reﬂected. Here was a speci-
men delivered at my very door, nay, into
the very precincts of my laboratory. Why
should I destroy it? Could I not turn it
to some useful account in the advancement
of science?
“I turned this question over at length.
Here was a specimen. But a specimen of
what? I am no mere curio-monger, no
collector of frivolous and unmeaning triﬂes.
A specimen must illustrate some truth. Now
what truth did this specimen illustrate?
The question, thus stated, brought forth its
own answer in a ﬂash.
“Criminal anthropology is practically an
unillustrated science. A few paltry photo-
graphs, a few mouldering skulls of forgotten
delinquents (such as that of Charlotte Cor-
day), form the entire material on which
criminal anthropologists base their unsatis-
factory generalizations. But here was a
really authentic specimen with a traceable
life-history. It ought not to be lost to
science. And it should not be.
“Presently my thoughts took a new turn.


“NUMBER ONE ” 73
I had been deeply interested in the account ‘
that I had read of the ingenious method by
which the Mundurucus used to preserve the
heads of their slain enemies. The book was
unfortunately still in the museum, but I
had read the account through, and now
recalled it. The Mundurucu warrior, when
he had killed an enemy, cut oﬂ’ his head with
a broad bamboo knife and proceeded to pre-
serve it thus: First he soaked it for a time
in some non-oxidizable vegetable oil; then
he extracted the bone and the bulk of the
muscles somewhat as a bird-stuffer extracts
the body from the skin. He then ﬁlled up
the cavity with hot pebbles and hung the
preparation up to dry.
“By repeating the latter process many
times, a gradual and symmetrical shrinkage
was produced until the head had dwindled
to the size of a man’s ﬁst or even smaller,
leaving the features, however, practically
unaltered. Finally he decorated the little
head with bright-colored feathers—the Mun-
durucus were very clever at feather work—
and fastened the lips together with a string,
by which the head was suspended from the


74 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
eaves of his but or from the beams of the
council house.
“It was highly ingenious. The question
was whether heads so preserved would be
of any use for the study of facial characters.
I had intended to get a dead monkey from
Jamrach’s and experiment in the process.
But now it seemed that the monkey would
be unnecessary if only the preparation could
be produced without injuring the skull; and
I had no doubt that, with due care and skill,
it could.
“At daybreak I went down to the dining-
room. The policeman was dozing in his
chair; there was a good deal of cigar-ash
about, and the whiskey-decanter was less
full than it had been, though not unreason-
ably so. I roused up the ofﬁcer and dis-
missed him with a ﬁnal cigar and what he
called an ‘eye-opener’—about two ﬂuid-
ounces. When he had gone I let myself
into the museum lobby. The burglar was
quite dead and beginning to stiffen. That
was satisfactory; but was he the right man?
I snipped off a little tuft of hair and carried
it to the laboratory where the microscope


“NUMBER ONE ” 75
stood on the bench under its bell-glass. I
laid one or two hairs on a slide with a drop
of glycerine and placed the slide on the stage
of the microscope. Now was the critical
moment. I applied my eye to the instru-
ment and brought the objective into focus.
“Alas! The hairs were uniformly colored
with brown pigment! He was the wrong man.
“It was very disappointing. I really
need not have killed him, though under the
circumstances there was nothing to regret
on that score. He would not have died in
vain. Alive he was merely a nuisance and
a danger to the community, whereas in the
form of museum preparations he might be
of considerable public utility.
“Under the main bench in the laboratory
was a long cupboard containing a large zinc-
lined box or tank in which I had been accus-
tomed to keep the specimens which were in
process of preparation. I brought the bur-
glar into the laboratory and deposited him
in the tank, shutting the air-tight lid and
securing it with a padlock. For further
security I looked the cupboard, and, when
I had washed the ﬂoor of the lobby and dried


76 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
it with methylated spirit, all traces of the
previous night’s activities were obliterated.
If the police wanted to look over the museum
and laboratory, they were now quite at
liberty to do so.
“I have mentioned that, during the actual
capture of this burglar, I seemed to develop
an entirely alien personality. But the change
was only temporary, and I had now fully
recovered my normal temperament, which is
that of a careful, methodical and eminently
cautious man. Hence, as I took my break-
fast and planned out my procedure, an
important fact made itself evident. I should
presently have in my museum a human
skeleton which I should have acquired in
a manner not recognized by social conven-
tions or even by law. Now, if I could place
myself in a position to account for that
skeleton in a simple and ordinary way, it
might, in the future, save inconvenient
explanations. _
“I decided to take the necessary measures
without delay, and accordingly, after a rather
tedious interview with the detective-inspector
(whom I showed over the entire house, in-


“NUMBER ONE ” 77
cluding the museum and laboratory), I took
a cab to Great St. Andrew Street, Seven
Dials, where resided a well-known dealer in
osteology. I did not, of course, inform him
that I had come to buy an understudy for
a deceased burglar. I merely asked for an
articulated skeleton, to stand and not to
hang (hanging involves an unsightly sus-
pension ring attached to the skull). I looked
over his stock with a steel measuring-tape
in my hand, for a skeleton of about the
right size—sixty-three inches—but I did not
mention that size was a special object. I
told him that I wished for one that would
illustrate racial characters, at which he smiled
—as well he might, knowing that his skele-
tons were mostly built up of assorted bones
of unknown origin.
“I selected a suitable skeleton, paid for
it (ﬁve pounds) and took care to have a
properly drawn invoice, describing the goods
f and duly dated and receipted. I did not take
my purchase away with me; but it arrived the
same day, in a funeral box, which the detective-
inspector, who happened to be in the house at
the time, kindly assisted me to unpack.


78 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“My next proceeding was to take a set
of photographs of the deceased, including
three views of the face, a separate photo-
graph of each ear, and two aspects of the
hands. I also took a complete set of ﬁnger-
prints. Then I was ready to commence
operations in earnest.”
The rest of Challoner’s narrative relating
to Number One is of a highly technical
character and not very well suited to the
taste of lay readers. The ﬁnal result will be
understood by the following quotation from
the museum catalogue:
“Specimens Illustrating Criminal Anthro-
pology.
“Series A. Osteology.
“1. Skeleton of burglar, aged 37. 6‘.
Height 63 inches. (James Archer.)
“This specimen was of English parentage,
was a professional burglar, a conﬁrmed recid-
ivist, and—since he habitually carried ﬁre-
arms—a potential homicide.' His general
intelligence appears to have been of a low
order, his manual skill very imperfect
(he was a gas-ﬁtter by trade but never
regularly employed). He was nearly illit-


“NUMBER ONE ” 79
erate and occasionally but not chronically
alcoholic.
“Cranial capacity 1594 cc. Cephalic in-
dex 76.8.
“For ﬁnger-prints see Album D 1, p. 1.
For facial characters see Album E 1, pp. 1,
2 and 3, and Series B (dry, reduced prepa-
rations). Number 1.”
I closed the two volumes—the Catalogue
and the Archives—and meditated on the
amazing story that they told in their unemo-
tional, matter-of-fact style. Was poor Chal- ,
loner mad? Had he an insane obsession on
the subject of crime and driminals? Or was
he, perchance, abnormally sane, if I may use
the expression? That his outlook was not
as other men’s was obvious. Was it a
rational outlook or that of a lunatic?
I cannot answer the question. Perhaps
a further study of his Archives may throw
some fresh light on it. ‘


III
THE HOUSEMAID’S Fonnownns
THE contrast in effect between sus-
picion and certainty is very curious
to observe. When I had walked
through the private museum of my poor
friend Challoner and had looked at the
large collection of human skeletons that it
contained, a suspicion that there was some-
thing queer about those skeletons had made
me quite uncomfortable. Now, after read-
ing his ﬁrst narrative, I knew all about them.
They were the relics of criminals whom he
had taken red-handed and preserved for the
instruction of posterity. Thus were my
utmost suspicions veriﬁed, and yet, strange
as it may seem, with the advent of certainty,
my horror of them vanished. Even the
hideous little doll-like heads induced but a
passing shudder. Vague, half superstitious
awe gave place to scientiﬁc interest.
I took an early Opportunity of renewing
(80)


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 81
/ In re
my acquaintance with the astonishing and
gruesome “Museum Archives.” The second
narrative was headed “Anthropological Series,
2, 3.and 4.” It exhibited the same singular
outlook as the ﬁrst, showing that to Chal-
loner the criminal had not appeared to be
a human being at all, but merely a sub-
human form, anatomically similar to man.
“The acquisition of Specimen Number
One,” it began, “gave me considerable occu-
pation, both bodily and mental. As I labored
from day to day rendering the osseous frame-
work of the late James Archer ﬁt for exhibi-
tion in a museum case, I reﬂected on the
future to which recent events had com-
mitted me. I had been, as it were, swept
away on the tide of circumstance. The death
of this person had occurred by an inadvert-
ence, and accident had thrown on me the
onus of disposing of the remains. I had
solved that diﬁiculty by converting the de-
ceased into a museum specimen. So far,
well, but what of the future?
“My wife had been murdered by a crim-
inal. The remainder of my life—short,
I hoped—was to be spent in seeking that


82 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
criminal. But the trap that I set to catch
him would probably catch other criminals
ﬁrst; and since the available method of
identiﬁcation could not be applied to newly-
acquired specimens while in the living state,
it followed that each would have to be
reduced to the condition in which identi-
ﬁcation would be possible. And if, on
inspection, the specimen acquired proved to
be not the one sought, I should have to add
it to the collection and rebait the trap.
That was evidently the only possible plan.
“But before embarking on it I had to con-
sider its ethical bearings. Of the legal posi-
tion there was no question. It was quite
illegal. But that signiﬁed nothing. There
are recent human skeletons in the Natural
History Museum; every art school in the
country has one and so have many bo‘ard
schools. What is the legal position of the
owners of those human remains? It will
not bear investigation. As to the Hunt-
erian Museum, it is a mere resurrectionist’s
legacy. That the skeleton of O’Brian was
obtained by ﬂagrant body-snatching is a
well-known historical fact, but one at which


THE HOUSEMAIDS’ FOLLOWERS 83
the law, very properly, winks. Obviously
the legal position was not worth considering.
“But the ethical position? To me it looked
quite satisfactory, though clearly at variance
with accepted standards. For the attitude
of society towards the criminal appears to
be that of a community of stark lunatics.
In effect, society addresses the professional
criminal somewhat thus:
“ ‘You wish to practice crime as a pro-
fession, to gain a livelihood by appropriat-
ing—by violence or otherwise—the earnings
of honest and industrious men. Very well,
you may do so on certain conditions. If
you are skilful and cautious you will not be
molested. You may occasion danger, annoy-
ance and great loss to honest men with very
little danger to yourself unless you are clumsy
and incautious; in which case you may be
captured. If you are, we shall take posses-
sion of your person and detain you for so
many months or years. During that time
you will inhabit quarters better than you
are accustomed to; your sleeping-room will
be kept comfortably warm in all weathers;
you will be provided with clothing better


84 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
than you usually wear; you will have a
sufﬁciency of excellent food; expensive oﬁ‘i-
cials will be paid to take charge of you ;
selected medical men will be retained to
attend to your health; a chaplain (of your
own persuasion) will minister to your spiritual
needs and a librarian will supply you with
books. And all this will be paid for by
the industrious men whom you live by rob-
bing. In short, from the moment that you
adopt crime as a profession, we shall pay
all your expenses, whether you are in prison
or at large.’ Such is the attitude of society;
and I repeat it is that of a community of
madmen.
“How much better and more essentially
moral is my plan! I invite the criminal to
walk into my parlor. He walks in, a public
nuisance and a public danger; and he emerges
in the form of a museum preparation of
permanent educational value.
“Thus I reﬂected and mapped out my
course of action as I worked at what I may
call the foundation specimen of my collec-
tion. The latter kept me busy for many
days, but I was very pleased with the result


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 85
when it was ﬁnished. The bones were of a
good color and texture, the fracture of the
skull, when carefully joined with ﬁsh-glue,
was quite invisible, and, as to the little dried
preparation of the head, it was entirely
beyond my expectations. Comparing it with
the photographs taken after death, I was
delighted to ﬁnd that the facial characters
and even the expression were almost per-
fectly retained.
“It was a red-letter day when I put Num-
ber One in the great glass case and took
out the skeleton that I had bought from the
dealer to occupy its place until it was ready.
The substitute was no longer needed and
I accordingly dismantled it and destroyed it
piecemeal in the furnace, crushing the cal-
cined bones into unrecognizable fragments.
“Meanwhile I had been pushing on my
preparations for further captures. A large,
mahogany-faced safe was ﬁxed in the dining-
room to contain the silver; a burglar alarm
was ﬁtted under the ﬂoor in front of the
safe and connected with a trembler-drum that
was kept (with the concussor and a few other
appliances) locked in a hanging cupboard at


86 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
my bed-head, ready to be switched on and
placed under my pillow at night. I secretly
purchased a quantity of paste jeweh'y—
bracelets, tiaras, pendants and such like glit-
tering trash—and when everything was ready
I engaged two new servants of decidedly
queer antecedents. I was at ﬁrst a little
doubtful about the cook, but the housemaid
was a certainty from the outset. Her char-
acter from her late reverend and philanthropic
employer, urging me as a Christian man
(which I was not) to ‘give her another
chance,’ made that perfectly clear.
“I gave her another chance, though not
quite of the kind that the reverend gentle-
man meant. Two days after her arrival I
directed her to clean the plate and handed
her the key of the safe, of which I have
reason to believe that she took a squeeze
with a piece of dough. The sham diamonds
were locked in a separate division of the
safe, but I introduced them to her by taking
them out in her presence, spreading them
on the table and ostentatiously cleaning their
rolled-gold settings with a soft brush. They
certainly made a gorgeous and glittering


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 87
show. I could not have distinguished them
from real diamonds; and as for Susan Slod-
ger—that was the housemaid’s name—her
eyes fairly bulged with avarice.
“It was less than a week after this that
the next incident occurred. I was lying in
bed, dozing ﬁtfully but never losing con-
sciousness. I slept badly at that time, for
memories which I avoided by day would
come crowding on me in the darkness. I
would think of my lost happiness, of my
poor, murdered wife and of the wretch who
had so lightly crushed out her sweet life as
one would kill an inconvenient insect; and
the thoughts ﬁlled me alternately with un-
utterable sadness that banished sleep or
with profound anger that urged me to seek
justice and retribution.
“The long-case clock on the stair had just
struck two when the trembler-drum beneath
my pillow suddenly broke into a prolonged
roll. Someone was standing in front of
the safe in the dining-room. I rose quietly,
switched off the drum, replaced it in the
hanging cupboard, and, taking from the
same receptacle the concussor and a small


88 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
leather bag ﬁlled with shot and attached
to a long coil of ﬁshing-line, softly descended
the stairs. On the mid-way landing I laid
down the shot-bag and paid out the coil of
line as I descended the next ﬂight. In the
hall I paused for a few seconds to listen.
Both the doors of the dining-room were shut,
but I could hear faint sounds within. I
approached the door further from the street
and carefully grasped the knob. The locks
and hinges I knew were thoroughly oiled,
for I had attended to them daily in common
with all the other doors in the lower part
of the house. I turned the knob slowly
and made gentle pressure on the door, which
presently began to open without a sound.
As it opened I became aware of a low mut-
tering, and caught distinctly the half-whis-
pered words, ‘Better try the pick ﬁrst, Fred.’
“So there was more than one at any rate.
“When the door was wide enough open
to admit my head, I looked in. One burner
of the gas was alight but turned very low,
though it gave enough light for me to see
three men standing before the safe. Three
Were rather more than I had bargained for.


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 89
Number One, by himself, had given me a
good deal of occupation, both during and
after the capture. Three might prove a
little beyond my powers. And yet, if I
could only manage them, they would make
a handsome addition to my collection. I
watched them and turned over the ways
and means of dealing with them. Evi-
dently the essence of the strategy required
was to separate them and deal with them
in detail. But how was it to be done?
I watched the three men with their heads
close together looking into the safe. The
door stood wide open and a key in the lock
explained the procedure so far. One of the
men held an electric bulls-eye lamp, the
light of which was focussed on the keyhole ‘
of the jewel-compartment, into which another
had just introduced a skeleton key.
At this moment, the third man turned
his head. By the dim light I could see
that he was looking, with a distinctly startled
expression, in my direction; in fact, I seemed
to meet his eye; but, knowing that I was in
complete darkness in the shadow of the
door, I remained motionless.


90 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘Fred,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘the door’s
open.’
“The other two men looked round sharply,
and one of them—presumably Fred—retorted
gruﬂiy, ‘Then go and shut it. And don’t
make no, bloomin’ row.’
“The man addressed felt in his pocket
and advanced stealthily across the room.
His feet were encased in list slippers and his
tread was perfectly noiseless. As he ap-
proached I backed away, and grasping the
" newel-post of the staircase gave it a sharp
pull, whereat the whole of the balusters
creaked loudly. Then I slipped behind the
curtain that partly divided the hall, poised
the concussor as a golf-player poises his
club, and gathered in the slack of the ﬁsh-
ing-line.
“The burglar’s head appeared dimly in
silhouette against the faint light from within.
He listened for a moment and then peered
out into the dark hall. The opportunity
seemed excellent if I could only lure him a
little farther out. In any case, he must
not be allowed to retire and shut the door.
“I gave a steady pull at the ﬁshing-line. ‘


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 91
The shot-bag slid over the carpet on the
landing above with a sound remarkably like
that of a stealthy footstep.
“The burglar looked up sharply and raised
his hand; and against the dimly-lighted
wall of the dining-room I saw the silhouette
of a pointed revolver. The practice of carry-
ing ﬁrearms seems to be growing amongst
the criminal classes, perhaps by reason of
the increasing number of American crim-
inals who visit this country. At any rate,
the matter should be dealt with by appro-
priate legislation.
“The burglar then stood looking out with
his revolver pointed up the stairs. I was
about to give another tweak at the ﬁshing-
line when an unmistakable creak came from
the upper stairs. I think this somewhat
reassured my friend, for I heard him mutter
that ‘he supposed it was them dam girls.’
He stepped cautiously outside the door, and,
fumbling in his pocket, produced a little
electric bulls-eye, the light of which he threw
up the stairs.
“The opportunity was perfect. Against
the circle of light produced by his lamp


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 93
the dark end of the room I could see them
peering out of the other door and listening
intently. After a short interval they tip-
toed out into the hall and I lost sight of
them.
“Close to the farther door was a large,
four-fold Japanese screen. It had sheltered
me in my last adventure and I thought it
might do so again, as the prostrate burglar
was lying a’couple of yards past the opening
of the door and his two friends were probably
examining him. Accordingly I stepped softly
along the room and took up a position behind
the screen in a recess of the folds. My
movements had evidently been unobserved
and my new position enabled me to peep
out into the hall—at some risk of being
seen—and to hear all that passed.
“For the moment there was nothing to
hear but a faint rustling from the two men
and an occasional creak from the upper stairs.
But presently I caught a hoarse whisper.
“ ‘Dam funny. He seems to be dead.’
“ ‘Yus; he do look like it,’ the other
agreed and then added optimistically, ‘but
p’raps he’s only took queer.’


94 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘Dam!’ was the impatient rejoinder. ‘I
tell yer he’s dead—dead as a pork chop.’
“There was another silence and then, in
a yet softer whisper, a voice asked:
“ ‘D’yer think somebody’s been and done
’im in, Fred?’
“ ‘Don’t see no marks,’ answered Fred;
‘besides there ain’t no one here. Hallo!
what’s that?’
“ ‘That’ was a loud creak on the upper
stairs near the ﬁrst-ﬂoor landing, doubtless
emanating from Miss Slodger or the cook.
I have no doubt that these sounds of stealthy
movement were highly disturbing to the
burglars, especially in the present circum-
stances. And so it appeared, for the answer
came in an obviously frightened whisper:
‘There’s someone on the stairs, Fred. Let’s
hook it. This job ain’t no class.’
“ ‘What!’ was the indignant reply. "Ook
it and leave all that stuff. Not me! Nor
you neither. There’s more’n what one of us
can carry. And you put away that barker
or else you’ll be lettin’ it off and bringin’ in
the coppers. D’ye ’ear?’
“ ‘Ain’t going to be done in the dark


THE HOUSEMAIDS’ FOLLOWERS 95
same as what J oe’s been,’ the other whispered
sulkily. ‘If anyone comes down ’ere, I
pots ’im.’ 7
“At this moment there was another very
audible creak from above, and then fol-
lowed rapidly a succession of events which
I subsequently disentangled, but which, at
the time, were involved in utter confusion.
What actually happened was that Fred had
begun boldly to ascend the stairs, in some
way missing the ﬁshing-line, and being closely
followed by his more nervous comrade. The
latter, less fortunate, caught his foot in the
line, stumbled, tightened the line and brought
the shot-bag hopping down the stairs. What
I heard was the sound of the stumble, fol-
lowed by the quick thud, thud, of the de-
scending shot-bag, exactly resembling the
footfalls of a heavy man running down the
stairs barefoot. Then came two revolver
shots in quick succession, a shower of plaster,
a hoarse cry, a heavy fall, and, from above,
a loud scufﬂing followed by the slamming
of a door and the noisy turning of a key;
a brief interval of Silence and then a quaver-
ing whisper.


96 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘I ain’t ’it yer, Fred, ’ave I?’
“To this question there was no answer
but a gurgling groan. I stepped out from
my hiding-place, passed through the open
doorway and stole softly along the hall,
guided by-the sound of the survivor extricat-
ing himself from his fallen comrade. A few
paces from him I halted with the concussor
poised ready to strike and listened to his
fumbling and scufﬂing. Suddenly a bright
light burst forth. He had found Fred’s
electric lantern, which was, oddly enough,
uninjured by the fall (it had a metal ﬁla-
ment, as I subsequently ascertained).
“The circle of light from the bulls-eye,
quivering with the tremor of the hand which
held the lantern, embraced the ﬁgure of the
injured burglar, huddled in a heap at the
foot of the stairs and still twitching at inter-
vals. It could not have been a pleasant
sight to his companion. The greenish-white
face with its staring eyes and blood-stained
lips stood out in the bright light from its
background of black darkness with the vivid
intensity of some ghastly wax-work.
“The surviving burglar stood petriﬁed,


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 97
stooping over his comrade, with the lantern
in one shaking hand and the revolver still
grasped in the other; and as he stood, he
poured out, in a curious, whimpering under-
tone, an unending torrent of incoherent
blasphemies, as appears to be the habit of
that type of man when frightened. I stepped
silently behind him and looked over his
shoulder at the expiring criminal, speculat-
ing on what he would do next. At the
moment he was paralyzed and imbecile with
terror, and I had a strong inclination to
dispatch him then and there; but the same
odd impulse that I had noticed on the last
occasion constrained me to daily with him.
Again I was possessed by a strange, savage
playfulness like that which impels a cat or
leopard to toy daintily and tenderly with its
prey for a while before the ﬁnal scrunch.
“We remained thus motionless for more
than half a minute in a silence broken only
by his blasphemous mutterings. Then, quite
suddenly, he stood up and began to ﬂash
his lantern on the stairs and about the hall
until at length its light fell full on my face
which was within a foot of his own. And
7


98 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
at that apparition he uttered a most singular
cry, like that of a young goat, and started
back. Another moment and he would have
raised his pistol arm, but I had foreseen this
and was beforehand with him. Even as his
hand rose, the concussor struck the outer
side of his arm, between the shoulder and the
elbow, on the exact spot where the musculo-
spiral nerve turns round the bone. The
effect was most interesting. The sudden
nerve stimulus produced an equally sudden
contraction of the extensors. The forearm
straightened with a jerk, the ﬁngers shot out
straight and the released revolver ﬂew clat-
tering along the hall ﬂoor.
“Anatomy has its uses even in a mid-
night scufﬂe.
“The suddenness of my appearance and
the promptness of my action paralyzed him
completely. He stared at me in abject
terror and gibbered inarticulately. Only for
a few moments, however. Then he turned
and darted towards the street door.
“But I did not mean to let him escape.
In a twinkling I was after him and had him
by the collar. He uttered a savage snarl


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 99
and dropped the lamp on the mat to free
his hands; and, as the spring switch was
released, the light went out, leaving us in
total darkness. Now that he was at bay,
he struggled furiously, and I could hear him
snorting and cursing as he wriggled in my
grasp. I had to drop the concussor that
I might hold him with both hands, and it
was well that I did, for he suddenly got one
hand free and struck. It was a vicious blow
and had it not been partly stopped by my
elbow the adventure would have ended very
differently, for I felt the point of a knife
sweep across my chest, ripping open my
pajama jacket and making a quite unpleasant
little ﬂesh-wound. On this I gripped him
round the chest, pinioning both his arms as
well as I could and trying to get possession
of the knife, while he made frantic struggles
to aim another blow.
“So, for awhile we remained locked in a
deadly embrace, swaying to and fro, and
each straining for the momentary advantage
that would have brought the affair to a
ﬁnish. The end came unexpectedly.
“One of uS tripped on the edge of the mat


100 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
and we both came down with a crash, he
underneath and face downwards. As we
fell, he uttered a sharp cry and began to
struggle in a curious, convulsive fashion; but
after a time he grew quieter and at last
lay quite still and silent.
“At ﬁrst I took this for a ruse to put
me off my guard, and held on more ﬁrmly
than ever; but presently a characteristic
limpness of his limbs suggested a new idea.
Gradually and cautiously I relaxed my hold,
and, as he still did not move, I felt about
on the mat for the lamp; and when I had
found it and pushed over the switch I threw
its light on him. ,
“He was perfectly motionless and did not
appear to be breathing. I turned him over
and then saw that it was as I had suspected.
He had held the knife ready for a second
blow when I had pinioned him. He was
still grasping it so when we fell, and the
point had entered his own chest near the
middle line, between the fourth and ﬁfth
ribs, and had been driven in up to the very
haft by the force of the fall. He must have
died almost instantaneously.


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 101
“I stood up and listened. The place was
as silent as the grave; a remarkably apt
comparison, by the way. The pistol shots
had apparently not been heard by the police,
so there was no fear of interruption from that
quarter; and as for the maids they were
very carefully keeping out of harm’s way.
“Still, there was a good deal to do, and
not so very much time to do it in. It was
now getting on for three o’clock and the sun
would be up by four. Daylight would bring
the maids down and everything must be clear
before they made their appearance.
“I wasted no time. One by one, I con-
veyed the bodies to the laboratory and
deposited them in the tank, the accom-
modation of which was barely equal to the
occasion. The sudden death of the ﬁrst
man had rather puzzled me, but when I
lifted him the explanation was obvious
enough. The heavy blow, catching the
head obliquely, had dislocated the neck. So
the concussor was not such a very harm-
less implement after all.
“The slight traces left in transporting the
'material to the laboratory, I obliterated


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 103
said the cook, ‘and so did Susan. That’s
why she came in here.’
“ ‘Ah!’ said I, ‘then it was not a dream.
Then just now I distinctly heard the street
door shut, so I went down and found the
gas alight in the dining-room and the safe
open.’
“ ‘Lor’, sir!’ exclaimed Susan, ‘I hope
nothing’s been took.’ (She spoke exceed-
ingly badly for a good-class housemaid.)
“ ‘That,’ said I, ‘is what I wish you to
ﬁnd out. Perhaps you will come down and
take a look round. There is no one about
now.’
“On this they came down with alacrity,
each provided with a candle, all agog, no
doubt, to see what success their friends had
had. The ﬁrst trace of the intruders was a
large blood-stain at the foot of the stairs,
at which Susan shied like a horse. There
was another stain near the street door, and
there was the burglar’s knife on the mat,
which the cook picked up and then dropped
with a faint scream. I examined it and
discovered the letters ‘G. B.’ cut on the
handle.


104 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
“ ‘It looks,’ I remarked, ‘as if the burglars
had quarreled. However, that is none of
our business. Let us see what has happened
to the safe.’
“We went into the dining-room and the
two women looked eagerly at the open safe;
but though they both repeated the hope
that ‘nothing had been took,’ they could
hardly conceal their disappointment when
they saw that the contents were intact.
I examined the roughly-made false key with-
out comment but with a signiﬁcant glance
at them which I think they understood;
and I overhauled a couple of large carpet
bags, neither of which contained anything
but the outﬁt of appliances for the raid.
“ ‘I suppose I ought to communicate
with the police,’ said I (without the slight-
est intention of doing anything of the kind).
’ “ ‘I don’t see what good that would do,
sir,’ said Susan. ‘The men is gone and
nothing hasn’t been took. The police would
only come in and turn the place upside down
and take up your time for nothing.’
“Thus Susan Slodger, with a vivid con-
sciousness of the false key, made exactly


106 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
ingly I set forth after breakfast with a spring
tape and a note of the measurements in my
pocket. Fortunately the dealer had just
received a large consignment of skeletons
from Germany (Heaven alone knows whence
these German exporters obtain their supply),
so I had an ample number to select from;
and as they ran rather small—I suspect they
were mostly Frenchmen—I had no difﬁculty
in matching my specimens, which, as is
usual with criminals, were all below the
average stature.
“On my return I found that the house-
maid was out, ‘doing some shopping,’ the
cook explained. But she returned shortly,
and as soon as I saw her I knew that she
had been making ‘kind inquiries.’ Her
manner was most peculiar, and so was the
cook’s for that matter. They were both
profoundly depressed and anxious; they both
regarded me with evident dislike and still
more evident fear. They mumped about
the house, silent and restless; they showed
an inconvenient desire to keep me in sight
and yet they hurried out of the rooms at my
approach.


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 107
“The housemaid was very much disturbed.
When waiting at table, she eyed me inces-
santly and if I moved suddenly she jumped.
Once she dropped a soup tureen merely
because I looked at her rather attentively;
she was continually missing my wine-glass
and pouring the claret on to the table-cloth;
and when I tested the edge of a poultry-
carver, which had become somewhat blunt,
she hurried from the room and I saw her
watching me through the crack of the
door.
“The arrival of the ‘understudy’ skele-
tons from the dealers a couple of days later
gave her a terrible shock. I was in the
dining-room when they arrived and through
the open door heard what passed; and cer~
tainly the incident was not without a humor-
ous side.
“The carrier came to the front door and
to Susan, who answered his ring, he ad-
dressed himself with the familiarity of his
class.
“ ‘Here’s three cases for your master.
Funny uns, they are, too. He don’t happen
to be in the resurrection line, I suppose?’


108 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Susan
replied, sourly.
“ ‘You will when you see the cases,’ the
man retorted. ‘Three of ’em, there are.
Big uns. Where will you have ’em?’
Susan came to me for instructions and
I directed that they should be taken throuin
to the museum, the door of which I unlocked
for the purpose.
“The appearance of the cases was unde-
niably funereal, not in shape only but also
in color; for the dealer, with an ill-timed
sense of ﬁtness, had had them painted black.
And the effect was heightened by the con-
duct of the two grinning carriers, who bore
each case on their shoulders, cofﬁn-wise, and
proceeded to the museum at a slow, funereal
walk; and when I was out of sight, though
not out of earshot, I heard the leading car-
rier, who seemed to be somewhat of a humor-
ist, softly whistling the ‘Dead March in
Saul.’
' “Meanwhile, Susan Slodger stood in the
hall with a face as white as a tallow candle.
She stared with fearful fascination at the
long, black cases and uttered no sound even


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 109
when the facetious carrier questioned her as
to the destination of ‘our dear departed
brother.’ She was absolutely thunderstruck.
“When the carriers had gone I directed
her to come to the museum and help me to
unpack the cases, which she ﬂatly refused
to do unless supported by the cook. To
this, of course, I had no objection, and when
she went oﬂ to the kitchen to fetch her
colleague, I took up a position just inside
the laboratory door and awaited develop-
ments. The cases had hinged lids secured
with a simple hook, so that when the bind-
ing cords were out there would be no difﬁ-
culty in ascertaining the nature of the
contents.
“The two women came briskly through
the lobby, the cook babbling cheerfully and
the housemaid silent; but at the museum
door they both stopped short and the former
ejaculated, ‘Gawd! what’s this?’
“Here I stepped out and explained, ‘These
are some cases of specimens for the museum.
I want you to unfasten the cords. That is
all. I will take out the things myself.’
With this I went back to the laboratory;


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 111
stupid, but I think she vaguely associated
my labors in the laboratory with her absent
friends.
“This perpetual spying on my actions
became at last intolerable and I was on the
point of sending the two hussies about their
business when an accident put an end to the
state of affairs. I had gone out of the front
door and let myself in by the side entrance,
but, by some amazing inadvertence, had left
the lobby door unfastened; and I had barely
got on my apron to begin work when I heard
someone enter the, lobby. Then came a
gentle tapping at the door of the laboratory.
I took no notice, but waited to see what
would happen. The tapping was repeated
louder and yet louder, and still I made no
move. Then, after an interval, I heard a
wire inserted in the lock.
“I determined to make an end of this.
Quietly concealing the material on which I
was working, I took down from a hook a
large butterﬂy-net (my poor wife had been
interested in Lepidoptera). Very softly I tip-
toed to the door and suddenly ﬂung it open.
There stood Susan Slodger with a hair-pin


112 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
in her hand, absolutely paralyzed with terror.
In a moment, before she had time to recover,
I had slipped the butterﬂy-net over her head.
“That revived her. With a piercing yell
she turned and ﬂed, and with such pre-
cipitancy that she pulled the net off the
handle. I saw her ﬂying down the lobby
with the net over her head, looking like an
oriental bride; I heard the street door bang,
and I found the butter-ﬂy net on the door-
mat. But Susan Slodger I never set eyes
on again.
“The cook left me the same day, taking
Susan’s box with her. It was a great relief.
I now had the house to myself and could
work without interruption or the discom-
fort of being spied upon. As to the products
of my labors, they are fully set forth in the
catalogue; and of this adventure I can only
say to the visitor to my museum in the
words of the well-known inscription, ‘Si
monumentum requiris, Circumspice?”
Such was Challoner’s account of his ac-
quisition of the specimens numbered 2, 3
and 4. The descriptions of the preparations


THE HOUSEMAID’S FOLLOWERS 113
were, as he had said, set out in dry and pre-
cise- detail in the catalogue, and some of the
particulars were really quite interesting, as,
for instance, the fact that “the skull of
Number 4 combines an extreme degree of
dolichocephaly (67.5) with a cranial capacity
of no more than 1523 cubic centimeters.”
It was certainly what one might have expected
from his conduct.
But to the general reader the question
which will suggest itself is, What was the
state of Challoner’s mind? Was he mad?
Was he wicked? Or had he merely an
unconventional point of view? It is to the
latter opinion that I incline after long con-
sideration. He clearly rejected the criminal
as a fellow-creature and regarded himself
as a public benefactor in eliminating him.
And perhaps he was right.
As to the apparently insane pleasure that
he took in the actual captures, I can only
say that sane men take a pleasure in the
slaughter of harmless animals—such as the
giraffe—for which they have no need; and
other sane men actually go abroad and kill
——by barbarous methods—foreign men of
8


1 14 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
estimable character with whom they have no
quarrel. This sport they call war and seem
to enjoy it. But killing is killing; and a
foreign peasant’s life is surely worth more
than a British criminal’s.
This, however, is only an obiter dictum
from which many will no doubt dissent.


IV
THE GIFTS or CHANCE
HE testamentary arrangements of
l eccentric people'must, from time to
time, have put their legatees in pos-
session of some very queer property. I call
to mind an old gentleman who bequeathed
to a distant relative the products of a life-
time of indiscrimate collecting; which pro-
ducts included an obsolete ﬁeld gun, a stuffed
camel, a collection of bottled tapeworms, a
ﬁre engine, a church pulpit and the internal
ﬁttings of a public-house bar. And other
instances could be quoted. But surely no
legatee ever found himself in possession of a
queerer legacy than that which my poor friend
Challoner had bequeathed to me when he
made over to me the mortal remains of some
two dozen deceased criminals.
The bequest would have been an odd one
under any circumstances, but what made it
much more so was the strange intimacy
(115)


116 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
that became established between me and
the deceased. To the ordinary observer a
skeleton in a museum case or in an art
school conveys no vivid sense of humanity.
That this bony shape was once an actual
person, a Me, that walked abroad and wore
clothes, that loved and hated, sorrowed and
rejoiced, that had friends and lovers, parents
and perhaps children; that was, in short,
a living man or woman, occurs to him but
vaguely. The thing is an osteological speci-
men; a mere anatomical abstraction.
Now these skeletons of Challoner’s were
quite different. Walking down the long
room and looking into the great wall-case,
I was confronted with actual individuals.
Number One was Jimmy Archer, who had
tried to steal the “blimy teapot.” Number
Three was the burglar Fred; I could tell
him by the notch on his ﬁfth rib that his
comrade’s bullet had made. Number Two
was the man who had ﬁred that shot, and
Number Four was Joe, who was “done in
in the dar .” ' I knew them all. The weird
“Museum Archives” had told me all about
them; and as to the rest of that grisly com-


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 117
pany, strangers to me as yet, the neatly
written, Russia-bound volume that Challoner
had left would give me their histories too.
It was some days before I was able to
resume my reading of the uncanny little
book, but an unoccupied evening at length
gave me the opportunity. As ten o’clock
struck, I put on my slippers, adjusted the
light, drew an armchair up to my study ﬁre
and opened the volume at the place marked
by the envelope that I had inserted at the
end of the last reading. The page was
headed “Circumstances attending the ac-
quirement of Numbers Five and Six,” and
the account ran as follows:
“The most carefully conceived plans, when
put into practice, are apt to discover unfore-
seen defects. My elaborate plan for the
capture of burglars was no exception to the
rule. The idea of employing palpably dis-
honest servants to act as decoy ducks to
lure the burglars on to the premises was
an excellent one and had fully answered my
expectations. But it had a defect which
I had overlooked. The burglars themselves,
when reduced to a condition suitable for


118 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
“exhibition in a show-case, were entirely inocu-
ous. There was no danger of their making
any indiscreet statements. But with the
servants—female servants, too—it was quite
otherwise. From the shelter of my roof
they had gone forth to sow distrust and
suspicion in quarters where perfect con-
ﬁdence and trustfulness should prevail. It
was a most unfortunate oversight. Now,
when it was too late, I saw clearly that
they ought never to have left me. I ought
to have added them to the collection, too.
“The evil results of the mistake soon
became apparent. I had replaced the late
cook and housemaid by two women of quite
unimpeachable dishonesty, of whom I had,
naturally, great hopes. But nothing hap-
pened. I let them handle the plate freely,
I gave them the key of the safe from time
to time, I brushed the sham diamond pend-
ants and bracelets under their very noses,
and still there was no result. It is true
that the silver spoons dwindled in number
and that a stray candlestick or salt-cellar
would now and again ‘report absent’; that
the tradesmen’s bills were preposterous and


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 119
that the tea consumed in a week would have
impaired the digestion of a Lodge of Good
Templars. But that was all. No aspirant
for museum honors made his appearance.
The concussor became dusty with disuse;
the safe in the dining-room remained neglected
and untouched, and as for the burglar alarm,
I had to stand on it myself at stated intervals
to keep it in working order.
“I had already resolved to get rid of
those two women when they saved me the
trouble. I directed them to accompany me
to the laboratory to clean out the furnace,
whereat they both turned pale and ﬂatly
refused; and I saw them half an hour later
secretly handing their boxes up the area
steps to a man with a barrow. Obviously
someone had told them something of my
methods.
“The cook and housemaid who succeeded
them were jail-birds pure and simple. They
were dirty, dishonest, lazy and occasionally
drunk. But for their actual function they
were quite useless. They drank my whiskey,
they devoured and distributed my provisions,
they stole my portable property, and once,


120 THE UTTERMOST FARTHle
when I had incautiously left the door unfas-
tened, I caught them browsing round the
museum; but they brought no grist to my
mill.
“It is true that during their reign I had
one visitor, a scurvy little wry-faced knave
who sneaked in through the scullery window;
but I think he had no connection with them
or he would have entered by some more
convenient route and have used a false key
instwd of a jimmy to open the safe. He
was a wretched little creature and his cap-
ture quite uninteresting; for, when he had
bitten me twice, he crumpled up like a rag
doll and I carried him to the tank as if he
had been a monkey.
“Yet I ought not to disparage him unduly,
for he was the one specimen in my collec-
tion, up to that time, who presented the
orthodox ‘stigmata of degeneration.’ His
hair was bushy, his face strikingly asym-
metrical, and his ears were like a pair of
Lombroso’s selected examples; outstanding,
with enormous Darwinian tubercles and al-
most devoid of lobules.
“Still, whatever his points of interest, he


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 191
was but a stray catch. Chance had brought
him as it might bring others of the same
kind in the course of years. But this would
not answer my purpose. Numbers were
what I wanted and what I had arranged
for; and it was with deep disappointment
that I recognized that my plan had failed.
The supply of anthropological material had
come to an end. In a word, the criminal
class had ‘smoked’ me.
“This was not mere surmise on my part.
I had direct and very quaint evidence of it
soon after I had completed the preparation
of Number Five. I was returning home one
evening and was approaching the vicinity of
my house when I became aware of a small
man of seedy aspect who appeared to be
following me. I slackened my pace some-
what to let him overtake or pass me, and
when nearly opposite my side door (the
museum entrance) he edged alongside and
addressed me in a hoarse whisper.
‘ “ ‘Guv’nor.’
“I halted and looked at him attentively;
a proceeding that caused him evident dis-
comfort. ‘Did you speak to me?’ I asked.


122 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“He edged up closer, but still did not meet '
my eye, and, looking ﬁrst over one shoulder
and then over the other, replied, ‘Yus, I did,
guv’nor.’
“ ‘What do you want?’ I demanded.
“He edged up yet closer and said in a
hoarse undertone, ‘I want to know what
you’ve been and done with my cousin
Bill.’ ,
“ ‘Your cousin Bill,’ I repeated. ‘Do I
know him?’
“ ‘I dunno whether you know ’im,’ was
the reply, ‘but I see ’im go into your house
and I never see ’im come out agin, and I
want to know what you’ve been and done
with ’im.’
“Now here was an interesting circum-
stance. I had already noted something
familiar in the man’s face. His question
explained it. Cousin Bill was clearly Num-
ber Five in the Anthropological Series. In
fact, the resemblance was quite remarkable.
The present example, like the late Bill, was
an undergrown creature, and had the same
curiously-twisted nose, the same asymmetrical
face and similar ears—large, ﬂat ears that


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 123
stood out from his head like the handles of
an amphora, that had strongly marked Dar-
winian tubercles, unformed helices and un-
developed lobules. Lombroso would have
loved him. He would have made a delight-
ful photograph for purposes of illustration,
and—it suddenly occurred to me—he would
make a most interesting companion prepa-
ration to Number Five.
“ ‘Your Cousin Bill,’ I said, with this new
idea in my mind. ‘Was he the son of your
mother’s sister?’ (A few details as to hered-
ity add materially to the value and instruc-
tiveness of a specimen.)
“ ‘And supposin’ he was. What about it?
I want to know what you’ve been and done
with ’im.’
“ ‘What makes you think I have done
anything with him?’ I asked.
“ ‘Why, I see ’im go into your ’ouse and
I never see ’im come out.’
“ ‘But, my good man,’ I protested, ‘that
is exceedingly bad logic. If you saw him
go in, there is a fair presumption that he
went in ’
“ ‘I see ’im with my own eyes,’ my friend


124 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
interrupted, as though there were other
alternative means of vision.
“ ‘But,’ I continued, ‘the fact that you
did not see him come out establishes no pre-
sumption that he did not come out. He
may have come out unobserved.’
“ ‘No, he didn’t. He never come out.
I see ’im go in ’
“ ‘So you have mentioned. May I ask
what his business was?’
“ ‘His business,’ my acquaintance replied
with some hesitation, ‘was of a private
nature.’
“ ‘I see. Did he go in by the front door?’
“ ‘No, ’e didn’t. ’E went in by the soul-
lery window.’
“ ‘In the evening, no doubt?’
“ ‘Two hay hem,’ was the reply.
“ ‘Ah!’ said I. ‘He went in by the soul-
lery window at two A. M. on private busi-
ness. Quite so! Well, you see, the common
sense of the position is that if he went into
the house and never came out, he must be
in the house still.”
“ ‘That’s just what I think,’ my friend
agreed.


“And look ’ere, guv’rwr,” he added, “where did you git all them
skellintons from?”


‘MM‘
'7
2‘-


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 125
“ ‘Very well. Then in that case perhaps
you would like to step in and look round to
see if you can ﬁnd him.’ I took out my
latch-key and motioned invitineg towards
the museum door.
“ ‘No. yer don’t,’ exclaimed the man,
backing away hastily down the street. ‘Yer
don’t git me in there, so I tell yer straight.’
“ ‘What do you want me to do, then?’
“ ‘I want to know,’ he reiterated, ‘what
you’ve been and done with my cousin Bill.
I see ’im go into————’
“ ‘I know,’ I interrupted impatiently.
‘You said that before.’
“ ‘And look ’ere, guv’nor,’ he added.
‘Where did you git all them skillintons from?’
Evidently somebody had been talking to this
little rascal.
“ ‘I can’t go into questions of that kind;
you know,’ I replied.
“ ‘No, I don’t suppose yer can,’ he re-
torted; ‘but I’ll tell yer what I think you’ve
been and done with Bill. You got ’im in
there and you done ’im in. That’s what
I think. And I tell yer it ain’t the cheese.
When a cove goes into an ’ouse for to do


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 127
of legal proceedings gave me much matter
for reﬂection. To him burglary presented
itself as a legitimate sporting pursuit governed
by certain rules. The players were respect-
ively the burglar and the householder, of
whom the latter staked his property and the
former a certain period of personal liberty;
and the rules of the game were equally bind-
ing on both. It was a conception worthy
of comic opera; and yet, incredible as it
may seem, it is the very view of crime that
is today accepted and acted upon by society.
“The threat uttered by my diminutive
acquaintance had the sound of broad, farce,
and so, I may confess, I regarded it. The
idea of a burglar proceeding against a house-
holder for hindering him in the execution
of his private business might have emanated
from the whimsical brain of the late W. S.
Gilbert. The quaint topsy-turveydom of it
caused me many a chuckle of amusement
when I recalled the interview during the next
few days; but, of course, I never dreamed
of any actual attempt to carry out the threat.
“ Imagine, therefore, my astonishment when
I realized that not only had the complaint


128 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
been made, but the law had actually been
set—at least tentatively—in motion.
“The stunning discovery descended on me
with the force of a concussor three days after
the interview with Number Five’s cousin.
I was sitting in my study reading Chevers’
‘Crime against the Person’ when the house-
maid entered with a visiting card. ‘A gentle-
man wished to see me to discuss certain
scientiﬁc matters with me.’
“I looked at the card. It bore the name
of ‘Mr. James Ramchild,’ a name quite
unknown to me. It was very odd. A
scientiﬁc colleague would surely have written
for an appointment and stated the object
of his visit. I looked at the card again.
It was printed from script type instead of
the usual engraved plate and it bore an
address in Kennington Park Road. These
were weighty facts and a triﬂe suspicious.
I seemed to scent a traveler from beyond the
Atlantic; a traveler of commercial leanings.
“ ‘Show Mr. Ramchild up here,’ I said,
and the housemaid departed, to return anon
accompanied by a tall, massive man of a
somewhat military aspect.


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 129
“I could have laughed aloud, but I did
not. It would not have been politic and it
would certainly not have been polite. But
I chuckled inwardly as I offered my visitor
a chair. ‘Experientia docet!’ I had seen
quite a number of plain-clothes police ofﬁcers
in the last few months and the present speci-
men would have been typical even without
his boots. I prepared to enjoy myself.
“ ‘I have taken the liberty of calling on
you, Mr. Challoner,’ my visitor began, ‘to
make a few enquiries concerning—er—skele-
tons.’
“ ‘I nodded gravely and smothered a
giggle. He was a simple soul, this Ram-
child. ‘Concerning skeletons!’ What an
expression for a man of science to use! An
artless creature indeed! A veritable Ram-
child of nature, so to speak.
“ ‘I understand,’ he continued, ‘that you
have a famous collection of—er—skeletons.’
I nodded again. Of course I had not anything
of the kind. Mine was only a little private
collection. But it was of no consequence.
‘So,’ he concluded, ‘I have called to ask if
you would be so kind as to let me see them.’


130 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘From whom did you hear of my col—
lection?’ I asked.
“ ‘It was mentioned to me by my friend
Mr.—er—Mr. Winterbottom, of Cambridge.’
“ ‘Ah,’ said I, ‘I remember Winterbottom
very well. How is he?’
“ ‘He’s very well, thank you,’ replied the
detective, looking mightily surprised; and
not without reason, seeing that he had un-
doubtedly invented the name Winterbottom
on the spur of the moment.
“ ‘Is there any branch of the subject
that you are especially interested in?’ I
asked, purposely avoiding giving him a lead.
“ ‘No,’ he replied. ‘No, not particularly.
The fact is that I thought of starting a col-
lection myself if it wouldn’t be too expensive.
But you have a regular museum, haven’t
you?’
“ ‘Yes. Come and have a look at it.’
“He rose with alacrity and I led him
through the dining-room to the museum
wing, and I noticed that, if he did not know
much about osteology, he was uncommonly
observant of the details of house-construction.
He looked very hard at the safe, the mahog-


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 131
any easing of which failed to disguise its
nature from the professional eye, and noted
the massive door that gave entrance to the
museum wing and the Yale lock that secured
it. In the museum his eye riveted itself
on the ﬁve human skeletons in the great
wall-case, but I perverser led him to the
case containing my curious collection of
abnormal and deformed skeletons of the
lower animals.
“ ‘There,’ I said complacently, ‘that is my
little hoard. Is there any specimen that you
would like to take out and examine?’
“He gazed vaguely into the case and
murmured that ‘they were all very interest-
ing,’ and again I caught his eye wandering
to the great case opposite. I was in the
act of reaching out a porcupine with an
ankylosed knee-joint, when he plucked up
courage to say frankly, ‘The fact is, I am
principally interested in human skeletons.’
“I replaced the porcupine and walked
across to the great wall-case. ‘I am sorry
I have not more to show you,’ I said apol-
ogetically. ‘This is only the beginning of a
collection, you see; but still, the specimens


132 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
are of considerable interest. Don’t you ﬁnd
them so?’
“Apparently he did, for he scrutinized the
dates on the dwarf-pedestals with the deepest
attention and ﬁnally remarked, ‘I see you
have written a date on each of these. What
does that signify?’
“ ‘The dates are those on which I acquired
the respective specimens,’ I answered.
“ ‘Oh, indeed.’ He reﬂected, with a pro-
foundly speculative eye on Number Five.
I judged that he was trying to recall a date
furnished by Number Five’s cousin and that
he would have liked to consult his note—
book.
“ ‘The particulars,’ I said, ‘are too lengthy
to put on the labels, but they are set out in
detail in the catalogue.’ -
“ ‘Can I see the catalogue?’ he asked
eagerly.
“ ‘Certainly.’ I produced a small manu-
script volume—not the catalogue which is
attached to the ‘Archives,’ but a dummy
that I had prepared for such a contingency
as had arisen—and handed it to him. He
opened it with avidity, and, turning at once


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 133
to Number Five, began, with manifest dis-
appointment, to read the description aloud.
“ ‘5. Male skeleton of Teutonic type ex-
hibiting well-marked characters of degenera-
tion. The skull is asymmetrical, subdolicho-
cephalic.’ (He pronounced this word ‘sub-
dolichocolophalic’ and paused abruptly, turn-
ing rather red. It is an awkward word.) ‘
‘Yes,’ he said, closing the catalogue, ‘very
interesting, very remarkable. Exceedineg
so. I should very much like to possess a
skeleton like that.’
“ ‘You are much better off with the one
you have got,’ I remarked.
“ ‘Oh, I don’t mean that,’ he rejoined
hastily. ‘I mean that I should like to acquire
a specimen like this Number Five for my pro-
posed collection. Now how could I get one?’
“ ‘Well,’ I said reﬂectively, ‘there are
several ways.’ I paused and he gazed at
me expectantly. ‘You could, for instance,’
I continued slowly, ‘provide yourself with a.
lasso and take a walk down Whitechapel
High Street.’
“ ‘Good gracious!’ he exclaimed excitedly;
‘do you really mean to say that ’


134 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘Certainly,’ I interrupted. ‘You would
ﬁnd an abundance of material. For my own
part, not being gifted with your exceptionally
ﬁne physique, I have to adopt the more
prosaic and expensive plan of buying my
specimens from the dealers.’
“ ‘Quite so, quite so,’ he agreed. He was
deeply disappointed and inclined to be huffy.
‘Of course you were joking about the lasso.
But would you mind giving me the address
of the dealer from whom you obtained this
specimen?’ And once more he pointed to
Cousin Bill.
“He thought he had cornered me; and so
he would have done if I had been less cautious.
I congratulated myself on the wisdom and
foresight that had led me to provide myself
with those dummy skeletons. For now I
held him in the hollow of my hand.
“ ‘That specimen?’ I said, scanning the
date on the pedestal; ‘I fancy I got it from
Hammerstein. You know his place in the
Seven Dials, no doubt. A very useful man.
I get most of my human osteology from him.’
I fetched my receipt ﬁle and turned over
the papers in leisurely fashion while he


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 185
gnawed his lips with impatience. At last
I found the receipted invoice and he read it
aloud with a ludicrous expression of dis-
appointment. _ H
.lh“ ‘Complete set superﬁne human osteology
strongly articulated with best brass wire
and screw-bolts, with springs to mandible
and stout iron supporting rod. All bones
guaranteed to be derived from the same
subject. £5.3.4.’
“The invoice was headed, Oscar Hammer-
stein, Dealer in Osteology, Great St. Andrew
Street, London, W.C.,’ and was dated 4th
February, 1891.
“The detective entered the name and
address in a black-bound note-book of ofﬁcial
aspect, compared the date with that on
Cousin Bill’s pedestal and prepared to depart.
“ ‘There is one thing I must point out to
you,’ I said, anticipating an early visit on
my friend’s part to Mr. Hammerstein; ‘the
skeletons as you get them from the dealers
are not always up to museum style in point
of ﬁnish. They are often of a bad color
and may be stained with grease. If they are,
you will have to disarticulate them, clean


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 137
wife and to exact from him payment of his
debt. Of this purpose, the collection had
been, at ﬁrst, a mere by-product; and though
it was gradually taking such hold of me
as to become a purpose in itself, it was but
a minor purpose. The discovery of that
unknown wretch was the Mecca of my
earthly pilgrimage, from which no diﬂ‘iculties
or obstacles should divert me.
“The hint that ultimately guided me into
new ﬁelds of research came to me by the
merest chance. A few days after the visit
of the detective I received a letter from one
of my few remaining friends, a Dr. Grayson,
who had formerly practiced in London as a
physician, but who, owing to age and inﬁrm-
ity, had retired to his native place, the village
of Shome, near Rochester. Grayson asked
me to spend a day with him, that we might
talk over some matters in which we were
both interested; and, being now rather at a
loose end, I accepted the invitation, but
declined to sleep away from home and my
collection.
“It is signiﬁcant of my state of mind at
this time that, before starting, I considered


138 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
what weapon I should take with me. For-
merly I should no more have thought of arm-
ing myself for a simple railway journey than
of putting on a coat of mail; but now a train
suggested a train robber—a Lefroy, with a
very unsubmissive Mr. Gold—and the long
tunnel near Strood was but the setting of a
railway tragedy. My ultimate choice of
weapon, too, is interesting. The familiar
revolver I rejected utterly. There must be
no noise. My quarrel with the criminal
was a personal one in which no outsiders
must be allowed to meddle. I should have
preferred the concussor, which I now handled
with skill, but it was hardly a portable tool,
and my choice ultimately fell on a very ﬁne
swordstick, supplemented by a knuckle-duster
which had been bequeathed to me by one of
my clients after trial on my own countenance.
And after all, nothing happened. I got
into an empty ﬁrst-class compartment and
when, just as the train was starting, a burly
fellow dashed in and slammed the door,
I eyed him suspiciously and waited for
developments. But there were none. The
fellow sat huddled in a comer, watching me


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 189
and keeping an eye on the handle of the
alarm over his head; but he made no sign.
When we emerged from the long tunnel he
was as white as a ghost and he hopped out
on to Strood platform almost before the train
had begun to slow down.
“I reached my bag down from the rack
and got out after him, smiling at my own
folly. The criminal was becoming an obses-
sion of which I must beware if I would not
end my days in an asylum; a fact which
was further impressed on me when I saw
my late fellow-passenger, who had just caught
sight of me, ‘legging it’ down the station
approach like a professional pedestrian and
looking back nervously over his shoulder.
Resolving ﬁrmly to put the subject out of
my mind, I walked slowly into the town and
betook myself to the London Road; and
though, as I passed the Falstaﬂ Inn and
crossed Gad’s Hill, ﬂeeting reminiscences of
Prince Henry and the men in buckram came
unsought, with later suggestions of a stage-
coach struggling up the hill in the dark and
masked ﬁgures creeping down the banks
into the sunken road, I kept to my good


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 141
Hill. Take the road down to Higham and
catch the train there.’
“ ‘Why, what is the matter with Gad’s
Hill?’ I asked.
“ ‘Nothing much by daylight, but a great
deal at night. It has always been an unsafe
spot and is especially just now. There has
been quite an epidemic of highway robberies
lately. They began when the hoppers were
here last autumn, but some of those East-
end ruﬂians seem to have settled in the
neighborhood. I have seen some very queer-
looking characters even in this village; aliens,
apparently, of the kind that you see about
Stepney and Whitechapel.
“ ‘Now, you get down to Higham, like a
good fellow, before the country settles down
for the night.’
“Needless to say, the prowling alien had
no terrors for me, but as Grayson was really
uneasy, I made no demur and took my leave
almost immediately. But I did not make
directly for Higham. The moon was up
and the village looked very inviting. Tree
and chimney-stack, thatched roof and gable-
end cut pleasant shapes of black against the


142 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
clear sky, and patches of silvery light fell
athwart the road on wooden palings and
weather-boarded fronts. I strolled along
the little street, carrying the now light and
empty bag and exchanging greetings with
scattered villagers, until I came to the lane
that turns down towards the London Road.
Here, by a triangular patch of green, I halted
and mechanically looked at my watch, hold-
ing it up in the moonlight. I was about
to replace it when a voice asked:
“ ‘What’s the right time, mister?’ ' "
“I looked up sharply. The man who had
spoken was sitting on the bank under the
hedge and in such deep shadow that I had
not noticed him. Nor could I see much of
him now, though I observed that he seemed to
be taking some kind of refreshment; but the
voice was not a Kentish voice, nor even an
English one; it seemed to engraft an un-
familiar, guttural accent on the dialect of
East London.
“I told the many the time and asked him
if the road—pointing to the ridgway—would
take me to Higham. Of course I knew it
would not and I have no very distinct idea


144 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
road in a spirit of mere curiosity to see if
it were really so.
“Presently I came to a gate at the
entrance of a cart-track and here I halted to
listen. From the road behind me came the
sound of footsteps; quick steps but not
sharp and crisp; rather of a shufﬂing, stealthy
quality. I climbed quietly over the gate
and took up a position behind the trunk of
an elm that grew in the hedgerow. The
footsteps came on apace. Soon round a
bend of the moon-lighted road a ﬁgure
appeared moving forward rapidly and keep-
ing in what shadow there was. I watched
it through the thick hedge as it approached
and resolved itself into a seedy-looking man
carrying a thick knobbed stick.
“Opposite the gate the man halted and,
as I could see by his shadow, looked across
the silvery ﬁelds that stretched away down
to the valley and listened, but only for a
few moments. Then he started forward
again at something between a quick walk
and a slow trot.
“As soon as he had gone I came out and
began to walk down the cart-track. My


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 145
ﬁgure must have stood out conspicuously on
the bare ﬁeld and must have been plainly
visible from the ridge-way. I did not hurry.
Pursuing my way quietly down the gentle
slope, I went on for some three hundred
yards until the ground fell away more steeply;
and here, before descending, I looked over my
shoulder.
“A man was getting over the gate.
“I walked on more quickly now until I
topped a second rise and then I again looked
back. The ﬁgure of the man stood out on
the brow of the hill, black against the moon-
lit sky. And now he was hurrying forward
in undisguised pursuit.
“I quickened my pace and looked about
me. The night was calm and lovely, the
ﬁelds bathed in silvery light and the wooded
uplands shrouded in a soft, gray shadow,
from the heart of which a single lighted
window gleamed forth, a spot of rosy warmth.
The bark of a watch-dog came softened by
distance from some solitary farmstead, and
far away below, the hoot of a steamer, creep-
ing up the river to the twinkling anchorage.
“Presently I came to a spot where the
10


146 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
rough road divided. One well-worn track
led down towards the footpath that ulti-
mately enters the London Road; a fainter
track led, as I knew, to an old chalk-pit
where, in mysterious caverns, the farm carts
rested through the winter months. Here
I halted for a moment as if in doubt. The
man was now less than a hundred yards
behind me and walking as fast as he could.
I turned round and looked at him, be ap-
peared once more to hesitate, and then started
at a run along the track to the chalk-pit.
“There was no disguise about the man’s
intentions. As I started off, he broke into
a run and followed, but he did not hail me
to stop. I suppose he knew whither the
path led. But if his purpose was deﬁnite,
so was mine. And again I noted with faint
surprise that I had no feeling of nervous-
ness. My contact with the criminal class
had left me with nothing but a sentiment
of hostile contempt. That a criminal might
kill me never presented itself as a practical
possibility. I was only concerned in inducing
him to give me a fair pretext for killing him.
So I ran on, wondering if my pursuer had


148 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘I’ll tell yer,’ he said conﬁdentially.
‘I’m a pore man, I am; I ain’t got no watch,
I ain’t got no money and I can’t get no work.
Now you’re a rich man. You’ve got a very
’andsome watch—I see it—and lots more at
’ome, I dessay. Well, you makes me a
present 0’ that watch, that’s what you do;
and any small change that you’ve got about
yer. You do that and I’ll let yer go peace-
able.’
“ ‘And supposing I don’t?’
“ ‘Then some 0’ them farm blokes ’ill ﬁnd
a dead man in a chalk-pit. And it ain’t
no good for you to holler. There ain’t no
one within a mile of this place. So you
pass over that watch and turn out yer
bloomin’ pockets.’
“ ‘Do I understand——’ I began; but he
interrupted me savagely:
“ ‘Oh, shut yer face and hand over!
D’yer hear?’ “He advanced threateningly,
grasping his bludgeon by the smaller end,
but when he had approached within a couple
of paces I made a sudden lunge with my
stick, introducing its ferrule to his abdomen
about the region of the solar plexus. He


150 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“His lack of skill deprived the encounter
of much of its interest. I think he felt this
himself, for I saw him looking about fur-
tively as if in search of something. Then
he espied a large and knobbly ﬂint and would
have picked it up; but as he was stooping
I plied the point of my stick so vigorously
that he staggered back with yelps of pain.
“And now it was suddenly borne in upon
me that he had had enough. I realized it
just in time to plant myself on the track
between him and the entrance to the chalk-
pit. He was still as savage and murderous
as ever, but his nerve was gone. He shrank
away from me and as I followed closely he
tried again and again to dodge past towards
the opening.
“ ‘Look ’ere, mister,’ he said at length,
‘you chuck it and I’ll let yer go peaceable.’
“Let me go! I laughed scornfully, but
stood my ground. And yet it was unpleasant.
One cannot go on hammering a beaten man
and it is difﬁcult to refuse a surrender. On
the other hand, it was out of the question
to let this fellow go. He had come here
prepared to murder me for a paltry watch


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 151
and a handful of loose change. Common
justice and my duty to my fellow men de-
manded his elimination. Besides, if I let
him escape into the open, what would hap-
pen? The ﬁelds were sprinkled with big
ﬂints. It was practically certain that
I should never leave the neighborhood
alive. ' .
“Even as I stood hesitating, he furnished
an illustrative commentary on my thoughts.
Springing back from me, he suddenly stooped
and caught up a great ﬂint nodule; and
though I ducked quickly as he ﬂung it and
so avoided its full force, I caught such a
buffet as it glanced off the side of my head
as convinced me that a settlement must be
speedily arrived at. Rushing in on him,
I bore him backwards until he was penned
up in the entrance of one of the caverns
against the shafts of a wagon. Then sud-
denly he changed his tactics. Realizing at
last that a clumsily-wielded bludgeon is
powerless against a stick expertly handled
rapier-wise, he dropped his club, and the
next moment the moonbeams ﬂashed from
the broad blade of a knife. This was quite


152 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
a different affair. He now stood on guard
with the knife poised and his left hand out-
spread ready to snatch at my stick. It
was a much more effective plan; only he
did not know that inside my stout malacca
reposed a keen Toledo sword-blade.
“I slipped my thumb on the press-button
of the sword-stick and watched him. From
time to time he made a dash at me with
his knife, and when I prodded him back,
he snatched at the stick. Again and again
he nearly caught it, but I was just a little
too quick for him, and he fell back, gasping
and cursing, on the wagon-shafts. And then
the end came with inevitable suddenness.
He rushed out on me with upraised knife.
I stopped him with 'a vigorous poke in the
chest; but before I could whisk away the
stick he had clutched it with a howl of joy.
I gave a ﬁnal drive, pressed the button and
sprang back, leaving the scabbard-end in
his hand. Before he had realized what had
happened, he darted out, brandishing the
knife, and came fairly on the point of the
sword-blade. At the same moment I must
have lunged, though I was not aware of it,


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 153
for when he staggered back the handle was
against his breast.
“It was over, and I had hardly realized
that the ﬁnal stage had begun. In an in-
stant, as it seemed, that yelping, murderous
wretch had subsided into a huddled, inert
heap. It was a quick and merciful dispatch.
By the time I had cleaned the blade and
replaced it in its scabbard, the last twitch-
ings had ceased. As I stood and looked
down at him, I felt something of the chill of
an anticlimax. It had all gone off so easily.
“Now that it was ﬁnished, my thoughts
went back to the ﬁnal purpose of my quest.
Was this man, by any chance, the wretch
whom I was seeking? It did not seem
likely, and yet the possibility must be con-
sidered. The ﬁrst question was as to his
hair. Stooping down, with my pocket scis-
sors I cut off a good-sized lock and secured
it in an envelope for future examination.
Then, taking out my pocketbook, I pressed
his ﬁngers on some of the blank leaves.
The natural surface of his hands offered a
passable substitute for ink and the ﬁnger~
prints could be further developed at home.


THE GIFTS OF CHANCE 155
the middle of the weed-grown space, I cov-
ered it lightly with twigs and various articles
of loose rubbish. It was now quite invisible,
and I was turning away to go when sud-
denly I bethought me of the dry preparation
of the head that ought to accompany the
skeleton. Without that, the specimen would
be incomplete; and an incomplete specimen
would spoil the series. I reﬂected awhile.
It seemed a pity to spoil the completeness
of the series for the sake of a little trouble.
I had a good-sized bag with me and a quantity
of stout brown paper in it in which the bulbs
had been wrapped. Why not? I
“In the end, I decided that the series
should not be spoilt. I need not describe
the obvious details of the simple procedure.
When I came up out of the chalk-pit a quarter
of an hour later, my bag contained the ma-
terial for the required preparation of a mum-
miﬁed head.
“I soon struck the familiar footpath and
set forth at a brisk pace to catch the late
train from Gravesend. It was a long walk
and a pleasant one, though the bag was
uncomfortably heavy. I thought, with grim


156 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
amusement, of Grayson’s gang of footpads.
It would be a quaint situation if I encoun—
tered some of them and was robbed of my
bag. The possibilities that the idea opened
out were highly diverting and kept me enter-
tained until I at last reached Gravesend
Station and was bundled by the guard into
a ﬁrst-class compartment just as the train
was starting. I should have preferred an
empty compartment, but there was no choice;
and as three of the corners were occupied,
I took possession of the fourth. The rack
over my seat was occupied by a bag about
the size of my own, apparently the property
of a clergyman who sat in the opposite corner,
so I had to place my bag in the rack over
his head.
“I watched him during the journey as he
sat opposite me reading the Church Times
and wondered how he would feel if he knew
what was in the bag above him. Probably
he would have been quite disturbed; for
many of these clerics entertain the quaintest
of old-world ideas. And he was mighty near
to knowing, too; for when the train had
stopped at Hither Green and was just about


158 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
seum, for I duly collected the bones from
the great nettle-bed in the chalk-pit early
in the following September, and set them,
properly bleached and riveted together, in
the large wall-case. But this specimen had
a further, though indirect, value. From him
I gathered a useful hint by which I was
subsequently guided into a new and fruitful
ﬁeld of research.
“(See Catalogue, Numbers 6A and 6B.) ”


V
BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY
HE next entry in the amazing “Mu-
l seum Archives” exhibited my poor
friend Humphrey Challoner in cir-
cumstances that were to me perfectly incred-
ible. When I recall that learned, cultivated
man as I knew him, I ﬁnd it impossible to
picture him living amidst the indescribably
squalid surroundings of the London Ghetto,
the tenant of a sordid little shop in an East
End by-street. Yet this appears actually
to have been his condition at one time——
but let me quote the entry in his own words,
which need no comments of mine to heighten
their strangeness.
“Events connected with the acquirement
of Numbers 7, 8 and 9 in the Anthropological
Series:
“We are the creatures of circumstance.
Blind chance, which guided that unknown
wretch to my house in the dead of the night
(159)


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 161
But how? That detective had completely
upset my plans and, for a time, I could think
of no other. Then came the dirty rascal
who had tried to murder me in the chalk-
pit; and from his mongrel jargon, half cock-
ney, half foreign, I had gathered a vague
hint. If I could not entice the criminal
population into my domain, how would it be
to reconnoiter theirs? The alien area of
London was well known to me, for it had
always seemed interesting since my visit to
Warsaw, and, judging from the police reports,
it appeared to be a veritable happy hunting-
ground for the connoisseur in criminals.
“Hence it was that my unrest led me
almost daily to perambulate that strange
region east of Aldgate where uncouth foreign
names stare out from the shop signs and
almost every public or private notice is in
the Hebrew character. Dressed in my shab-
biest clothes, I trudged, hour after hour and
day after day, through the gray and joyless
streets and alleys, looking earnestly into the
beady eyes and broad faces of the East—
European wayfarers and wondering whether
any of them was the man I sought.
1].


162 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“One evening, as I was returning home-
ward through the district that lies at the
rear of Middlesex Street, my attention was
arrested by a large card tacked on the-door
of a closed shop. A dingy barber’s pole
gave a clue to the nature of the industry
formerly carried on, and the card—which was
written upon in fair and even scholarly
Hebrew characters—supplied particulars. I
had stopped to read the inscription, faintly
amused at the incongruity between the rec-
ondite Oriental lettering and the matter-of-
fact references to ‘eligible premises’ and
‘ﬁxtures and goodwill,’ when the door opened
and two men came out. One was a typical
English Jew, smart, chubby and prosperous;
the other was evidently a foreigner.
“Both men stood aside to enable me to
continue my reading, and, as I was about
to turn away, the smarter of the two ad-
dressed me.
“ ‘Good chanth here, misther. Nithe little
bithness going for nothing. No charge for
goodwill or ﬁxtures. Ready-made bithneth
and nothing to pay but rent.’
“ ‘Ja!’ the other man broke in, ‘dat shop


164 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
rare good line while it lathted. Got the
st-huff for nothing, you thee.’ His tone at
this point was regretfully sympathetic.
“ ‘What happened in the end?’ I asked.
“ ‘The copperth dropped on him. Thome-
body gave him away.’
“ ‘Some of the ladies, perhaps,’ I suggested.
“ ‘Ach! Zo!’ the other man burst in ﬁercely,
‘Of gourse it vas der vimmen! It is always
der vimmen. Dese dam vimmen, dey makes
all der drubble!’ He thumped the table
with his ﬁst, and then, catching the Hebrew’s
eye, suddenly subsided into silence.
“From the shop we proceeded to the little
parlor behind, from which a door gave access,
by a ﬂight of most dangerous stone steps, to
the large cellar. This was lighted by a
grating from the back yard, with which it
also communicated by a ﬂight of steps and
a door. We next examined the yard itself,
a small paved enclosure with a gate opening
on an alley, and occupied at the moment
by an empty beer-barrel, a builder’s hand-
cart and a dead cat.
“ ‘Like to thee the upstairth roomth?’
inquired the Hebrew gentleman, whose name


166 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
pose?’ said 1;" and Mr. Nathan nearly jumped
clear off the ﬂoor. A few minutes later I
departed, the accepted tenant (under the
pseudonym of Simon Vosper) of Samuel
Nathan, with the understanding that I should
deliver my advance rent in bank-notes and
that he should have the top-dressing of dirt
removed from the house and the name of
Vosper painted over the shop.
“My preparations for the new activities
on which I was to enter were quickly made.
In my Bloomsbury house _I installed as care-
taker a retired sergeant-major of incomparable
taciturnity. I looked up the museum wing
and kept the keys. I took a few lessons in
haircutting from a West-End barber. ‘ I paid
my advance rent, sent in a set of bedroom
furniture to my new premises in Saul Street,
Whitechapel, abandoned the habit of shaving
for some ten days, and then took possession
of the shop.
“At ﬁrst the customers were few and far
between. A stray coster or carman came
in from time to time, but mostly the shop
was silent and desolate. But this did not
distress me. I had various preparations to


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 167
make and a plan ofv campaign to settle.
There were the cellar stairs, for instance;
a steep ﬂight of stone steps, unguarded by
baluster or handrail. They were very dan-
gerous. But when I had ﬁtted a sort of
giant stride by suspending a stout rope from
the ceiling, I was able to swing myself down
the whole ﬂight in perfect safety. Other
preparations consisted in the placing of an
iron safe in the parlor (with a small mirror
above it) and the purchase of a tin of stiff
cart-grease and a few large barrels. These
latter I bought from a cooper in the form
of staves and hoops, and built them up in
the cellar in my rather extensive spare time.~
“Meanwhile trade gradually increased.
The harmless coster and laborer began to
be varied by customers rather more in my
line; in fact, I had not quite completed my
arrangements when I got the ﬁrst windfall.
“It was a Wednesday evening. I had
nearly ﬁnished shaving a large, military-
looking laborer when the door opened very
quietly and a seedy, middle-aged man entered
and sat down. His movements were silent——
almost stealthy; and, when he had seated


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 169
the fellow who was with Joe Bartels in that
job at—er—you know?’
“ ‘No, I don’t,’ said my friend. ‘And
’00’s Joe Bartels?’
“ ‘Oh, I thought you knew him; but if
you don’t I’d better say no more. You see,
I don’t know who you are.’
“ ‘Don’t yer. Then I’ll tell yer. I’m
Spotty Bamber, of Spitalﬁelds, that’s ’00 I
am. So now you know.’
“I made a mental note of the name (the
ﬁrst part of which had apparently been sug-
gested by Mr. Bamber’s complexion) and my
attention must have wandered somewhat, for
my patient suddenly shouted: "Ere! I say!
I didn’t come ’ere to be scalped. I come to
’ave my ’air cut.’
“I apologized and led the conversation
back to Polensky.
“ ‘Ah,’ said Bamber, "e was a downy un,
’e was. Bit too downy. Opened his mouth
too wide. Wanted it all for nix. That was
why he got peached on—’ Here Spotty
turned his head with a jerk—‘ What are you
looking at me through that thing for? My
’ed ain’t as small as all that.’


170 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘That thing’ was a Coddington lens,
through which I examined the hair of every
customer with a view to identiﬁcation. But
I did not tell Mr. Bamber this. My explana-
tion was recondite and rather obscure, but
it seemed to satisfy him.
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re a rum cove.
Talk like a blooming toff too, you do.’ I
made a careful mental note of that fact
and determined to study the local dialect.
Meanwhile I explained, ‘I wasn’t always a
hairdresser, you know.’
“ ‘So I should suppose,’ answered Spotty,
twisting his neck to get a look at his poll
in the glass. ‘What you’d call a bloomin’
ammerchewer.’ He stood up, shook himself
and tendered a half-crown in payment, which
I examined carefully before giving change.
Then I brought out of my pocket a handful
of assorted coins, including two sovereigns,
a quantity of silver and some coppers. I do
not ordinarily carry my money mixed up
in this slovenly fashion, but had adopted
the habit, since I came to the shop, for a
deﬁnite reason; and was now justiﬁed by
the avaricious glare that lighted up in


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 171
Spotty’s eye at the sight of the coins in my
hand. >
“I picked out his change deliberately and
handed it to him, when he took it and stood
for a few seconds, evidently thinking hard.
Suddenly he thrust his hand into his pocket
and said, ‘I suppose, mister, you haven’t
got such a thing as a ﬁ-pun-note what you
can give me in exchange for ﬁve jimmies?’
He held out ﬁve sovereigns, which I took
from him and inspected critically.
“ ‘Oh, they’re all right,’ said Spotty, as
I weighed them in my hand. And so they
were.
“ ‘I think I can let you have a note if you
will wait a moment,’ I said; and, as I turned
to enter the parlor, Spotty sat down osten-
tatiously in the chair.
“I drew the door to after me, but did not
latch it. A small jet of gas was burning in
the parlor and by its light I unlocked the
safe, pulled out a drawer, took from it a
bundle of banknotes and looked them over;
all very deliberately and with my eye on
the mirror that hung above the safe. That
mirror reﬂected the door. It also reﬂected


172 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
me, but as the light was on my back my
face was in the shadow. Hardly had I opened
the safe when, slowly and silently, the door
opened a couple of inches and an eye appeared
in the space. I picked a note out of the
bundle, returned the remainder to the drawer,
closed the safe and slowly walked to the door.
When I re-entered the shop, Spotty was
seated in the chair as I had left him, with
the immovable air of an Egyptian statue.
“I have no doubt that Spotty Bamber
chuckled with joy when he got outside.
I should like to think so, to feel that our
pleasure was mutual. For as to me, my
feelings can only be appreciated by some
patient angler who, after a long and fruit-
less sitting, has seen his
“ ‘quill or cork down sink
With eager bite of perch or bleak or dace.’
“Spotty was on the hook. He would
come again, and not alone—at least, I trusted
not alone. For my brief inspection of his
hair had convinced me that he was not the
unknown man whom I sought; and, though


174 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
which I professed total ignorance—kept me
pretty well amused until closing time ar-
rived. Then, as the shop emptied, my hopes
and fears began to revive together.
“I was about to begin shutting up the
premises when the door opened softly and
a man slipped into the- shop. My heart
leaped exultingly. The man was Spotty
Bamber. '
“And he was not alone. By no means.
Two more men stole in in the same stealthy
fashion, and, having ﬁrst glanced at one
another and then peered suspiciously round
the shop, they all looked at me. For my
part, I regarded them with deep interest,
especially as to their hair. ‘Habitual Crim-
inal’ was written large on all of them. As
anthropological material they were quite ex-
cellent.
“Mr. Bamber opened the proceedings with
one eye on me and the other on the door.
“ ‘Look, ’ere, mister, we’ve come about a
little matter of business. You know Polensky
used to do a bit of trade?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘and now he’s doing a bit
of time.’


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 177
“It comes back to me now rather oddly
that I weighed these probabilities quite im-
personally, as though I were a mere spectator.
And such was virtually the case. The fact
is that, although I had long since abandoned
the idea of suicide, I remained alive as a
matter of principle and not by personal
desire. My objection to being killed was
merely the abstract objection to the killing
of any worthy member of society by these
human vermin. But if any such person
must needs be killed, I was quite indifferent
as to whether the subject of the action were
myself or some other. I had no personal
interest in the matter. Hence, when I un-
bolted the door and beckoned the three men
into the room, though doubtful of the issue,
I had no feeling of nervousness.
“ The advantage that my impassiveness gave
me over those three rascals was very evident
when they slouched in, for they were all
trembling and twitching with nervous excite-
ment. And no wonder. To a man who
values his life above everything on earth, it
is a serious matter to walk into the very
shadow of the gallows. As soon as they
12


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 179
French style of boxing. Bamber’s advance
was the signal. I had seen the Jew’s hand
steal under his coat skirt. He now made
a quick movement—and so did I. Whisk-
ing round, in an instant I had his wrist in
that kind of grip that dislocates the elbow-
joint, and, as I turned, I planted my foot
heavily on Spotty Bamber’s chest. The swift
movement took them all by surprise. The'
Jew screamed and dropped his knife, stag-
gering heavily against the cellar door, which
swung back on its well-oiled hinges. Bamber
ﬂew backwards like a football, and, as he
cannoned against the third man, the two
crashed together to the ﬂoor. I thrust the
Jew through the open doorway, released his
wrist; and then followed a slithering sound
from the cellar steps, ending in a soft thump.
“The position was marvelously changed
in those few moments. The Jew, I took it,
was eliminated, and the odds thus brought
down to a reasonable ﬁgure. As to the other
two, though they scrambled to their feet
quickly enough, they kept their distance,
Bamber in particular having some little difﬁ-
culty with his breath. I picked up the con-


180 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
cussor and faced them. If I had been quick,
I could have dispatched them both without
difﬁculty. But I did not. Once more I
was aware of that singular state of conscious-
ness to which I have elsewhere alluded as
possessing me in the presence of violent crim-
inals; a vivid pleasure in the mere act of
physical contest, perfectly incomprehensible to
me in my normal state of mind. This strange
joy now sent the blood surging through my
brain until my ears hummed; and yet I kept
my judgment, calmly attentive and even wary.
“Thus, when the third rufﬁan rushed at
me with a large sheath-knife, I knocked
his hand aside quite neatly with the con-
cussor and drove him out of range with a
heavy blow of my left ﬁst. But at this
moment I observed Bamber frantically lug-
ging something from his hip-pocket; some-
thing that was certainly not a knife. It was
time for a change of tactics. Before the
third rascal could close with me again, I
darted at the open doorway, grasped the
rope, and in an instant had swung myself
clear of the steps down into the darkness
of the cellar.


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 181
“In swinging I had turned half round,
and, as I alighted, I saw my aggressor,
knife in hand, come through the doorway in
pursuit. He had more courage than Spotty
but less discretion. In the haste of his pur-
suit, he actually sprang over the sill on to
the slippery top step, and the next moment
was bumping down the stairs like an over-
turned sack of potatoes. As he picked him-
self up, half-stunned, from the prostrate Jew,
on whom he had fallen, I regretfully felled
him with the concussor. It was a dull
ﬁnish to the affair, but there was Bamber’s
revolver to be reckoned with.
“To’ do Mr. Bamber justice, he was not
rash. In fact, he was so unobtrusive that
I began to fear that he had made off, and,
it being obviously unsafe to go up and ascer-
tain, I proceeded to make a few encouraging
demonstrations.
“ ‘Oh!’ I shouted, ‘Let me go! Let go
my hands or I’ll call for the police!’
“This appeal had the desired effect. The
dimly lighted doorway framed the ﬁgure of
Spotty Bamber, with revolver poised, peer-
ing cautiously into the darkness.


182 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“I renewed my protests, and, retiring to
the darkest corner, shufﬂed noisily about the
brick ﬂoor.
“ "Ave yer got ’im, Alf?’ inquired the
discreet Bamber, leaning forward and stepping
over the sill. I continued to dance heavily
in my corner and to utter breathless snorts
and exclamations such as, ‘Let go, I tell you!’
‘Aha! would you?’ and so forth. Bamber
took another step forward, craned his neck
and called out, ‘Shove ’im over this way,
Alf, so as I can ’ \
“He did not ﬁnish the sentence. Watch-
ing him, I saw his feet suddenly ﬂy from
under him, the revolver clattered on the
cellar ﬂoor, and Spotty, himself, having
slipped half-way down the steps, fell over
the edge on to the hard brick pavement.
“As he picked himself up, breathing heav-
ily, I dropped the concussor into the big
pocket of my apron and pounced on him.
He uttered a yell of terror and began to
struggle like a maniac to free himself from
my grip, while I edged him away from the
dangerous vicinity of the revolver. At ﬁrst
he was disposed to show a good deal of


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 183
ﬁght, and, as we gyrated round the cellar,
tugging, thrusting, wrenching and kicking,
I found the strenuous muscular exercise
strangely exhilarating. Evidently there is
something to be said for the ‘simple life,’
as lived in those primitive communities where
every man is his own policeman.
“But this physically stimulating bout came
to a sudden end. Our mazy revolutions
brought us presently near the foot of the
steps, and here Spotty tripped over the
prostrate form of the third man. He stag-
gered back a few paces and uttered a husky
shriek, and then we came down together on
top of the Jew. That ﬁnished him. The
contact with those two motionless shapes
shattered his nerves utterly and reduced
him to sheer panic. He ceased to ﬁght
and only whimpered for mercy.
_ “It was very unpleasant. As long as the
ﬁght was hot and strenuous, the revived
instincts of long-forgotten primitive ances-
tors kept my blood racing. But, with the
ﬁrst cry for mercy, all my exhilaration died
out and the degenerate emotions of civilized
man began to make themselves felt. If I


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 185
costly machinery of the law is unable to
cope! Verily, there must be a good many
fools besides the dishonest ones!
“I shut up the shop when my customer
departed, indulged in a good wash and a
substantial supper. For there was much
to be done before I could go to bed. I had
providently laid in six casks of a suitable
size, of which two were put together and
the remainder in the form of loose staves and
hoops. One of these would have to bemade
up at once, since it was necessary that the
specimens should be packed before rigor
mortis set in and rendered them unmanage-
able. Accordingly, I fell to work after
supper with the mallet and the broad chisel-
like tool with which the hoops are driven
on, and did not pause until the bundle of
staves was converted into a cask, complete
save for the top hoop and head.
“I proceeded systematically. Into one
cask I poured a quart of water and wetted
the interior thoroughly, to make the wood
swell and secure tight joints. Then into it
I introduced the Jew, in a sitting posture,
and was gratiﬁed to ﬁnd that the specimen


188 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
plans for the removal of the casks. At ﬁrst
I had thought of taking them to Pickford’s
receiving ofﬁce. But there was danger in
this, though it was a remote danger. If
one of the casks should be accidentally
dropped it would certainly burst, and then
—I had no particular objection to being
killed, but I had a very great objection to
being sent to Broadmoor. So I decided to
eﬂect the removal myself with the aid of
the builder’s truck that I had allowed the
owner to keep in my yard. But this plan
involved the adoption of some sort of dis-
guise; a very slight one would be suﬁicient,
as it was merely to prevent recognition by
casual strangers.
“Now, among the stock of my predecessor,
Polensky, I had found a collection of powder
colors, grease paints, toupée-paste, spirit-gum
and other materials which threw a curious
light on his activities. On my return to
the shop I made a few experiments with
these materials and was astonished to ﬁnd
on what trivial peculiarities facial expression
depends. For instance, I discovered that a
strip of court-plaster, carried tightly up the


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 189
middle of the forehead—where it would be
hidden by a hat—altered the angle of the
eyebrows and completely changed the ex-
pression, and that a thin scumble of purple,
rubbed on the nose, totally altered the char-
acter of the face. This was deeply interest-
ing; and, as it ﬁnally disposed of one difﬁ-
culty, it left me free to consider the rest
of my plans, which I continued to do until
every possible emergency was anticipated and
provided for. ,
“Early on Monday morning I went out
and purchased four lengths of stout quarter-
ing—two long and two short—a coil of rope,
a two-block Mtackle of the kind known to
mariners as a ‘handy Billy’ and a pair of
cask-grips. With the quartering and some
lengths of rope I made two cask-slides, a
long one for the cellar and a short one for
the hand-cart. Placing the long slide in
position, I greased it with cart-grease, hooked
the tackle above the upper end, attached
the grips and very soon had the three casks
hoisted up into the passage that opened
into the back yard. With the aid of the
short slide and the tackle, I ran them up


190 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
into the cart, lashed them ﬁrmly in position
with the stout rope, threw in the slide and
tackle and was ready to start. Running
into the shop, I ﬁxed the necessary strip of
court-plaster on my forehead, tinted my
nose, and, having pocketed the stick of
paint and a piece of plaster, put on my
shabbiest overcoat and a neck-cloth, trod on
my hat and jammed it on my head so that
it should cover the strip of plaster. Then
I went out and, trundling the cart into the
alley, locked the back gate and set forth on
my journey.
“Navigating the crowded streets with the
heavy cart clattering behind me, I made
my way westward, avoiding the main thor-
oughfares with their bewildering traﬂic, until
I found myself in Thebbald’s Row at the end
of Red Lion Street. Here I began to look
about for a likely deputy; and presently
my eye lighted on a sturdy-looking man who
leaned somewhat dejectedly against a post and
sucked at an empty pipe. He was evidently
not a regular ‘corner-boy.’ I judged him to be
a laborer out of work, and deciding that he
would serve my purpose I addressed him.


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 191
“ ‘Want a job, mate?’
“He roused at once. ‘You’ve ’it it, mate.
I do. What sort of job?’
“ ‘Pull this truck round to 6A Plimsbury
Street and deliver the tubs.’
“ "Ow much ’11 you give me?’ was the
inevitable inquiry.
“ ‘Old chap ’11 give you half-a-crown, if
you ask him.’
' “ ‘And ’ow much am I to keep?’
“ ‘Oh, we won’t quarrel about that. I’ve
got to see about another job or I’d take ’em
myself. You deliver the tubs—and be care-
ful of ’em. They’re full of valuable chemicals
—and meet me here at ten o’clock and I’ll
give you another job. Will that do you?’
“My friend pocketed his pipe and spat
on his hands. ‘Gi’ me the bloomin’ truck,’
said he; and when I had surrendered the
pole to him, he set off at a pace that made
me thankful for the stout rope lashings of
the casks.
“I let him draw ahead and then followed
at a discreet distance, keeping him in sight
until he was within a few hundred yards of
my house. Then I darted down a side


192 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
turning, took a short cut across a square,
and, arriving at the museum entrance, let
myself in with my Yale key.
“To remove my hat, overcoat and coat,
to tear off the plaster and wash my nose,
was but the work of a minute. I had placed
in readiness my laboratory apron, a velvet
skull-cap and a pair of spectacles, and
scarcely had I assumed these and settled
my eyebrows into a studious frown, when
the bell rang. A glance into a little mirror
that hung on the wall satisﬁed me as to the
radical change in my appearance and I went
out conﬁdently and opened the street door.
My deputy was standing on the door-step
and touched his cap nervously as he met
my portentous frown.
“ ‘These here barrils for you, sir?’ he
asked.
“ ‘Quite right,’ I replied in deep, pompous
tones; ‘I will help you to bring them in.’
“We brought the cart up on the pave-
ment with the pole across the threshold, and
I ﬁxed the slide in position while my assistant
cast off the lashings. In a couple of minutes
we had run the casks down the slide and


BY-PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY 193
I had the satisfaction of seeing them safely
deposited in the hall. The dangers and
difﬁculties of the passage were at an end.
“I handed my proxy the half-crown which
he sheepishly demanded, with an extra shil-
ling ‘for a glass of beer,’ and saw him go on
his way rejoicing. Then I went back to the
laboratory, stuck on a fresh strip of plaster,
rubbed on a tint of grease-paint and resumed
my disreputable garments. When I came
forth into the street, the hand-cart had
already disappeared, leaving me to pursue
my way unobserved to the rendezvous, where
I presently met my friend, and, having
rejoiced him with a further shilling, resumed
possession of the cart.
“On my arrival at my Whitechapel prem-
ises, I afﬁxed a notice to the window inform-
ing the nobility and gentry that I was ‘ absent
on business.’ Then I clothed myself decently,
emptied the contents of the safe into a hand-
bag, in which I also put the cooper’s chisel,
locked up the premises and hurried off to
Aldgate Station. My ﬁrst objective was the
establishment of Mr. Hammerstein, the dealer
in osteologr, from whom I purchased three
’13


194 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G
articulated human skeletons, and obtained
the invaluable receipted invoices; and having
thus taken every precaution that prudence
and human foresight could suggest, I repaired
to my Bloomsbury house, let myself in at
the museum door, rolled the casks through
into the laboratory and proceeded to unpack
the specimens.
“The initial processes occupied me far
into the night, while as to the ﬁnishing opera-
tions, they kept me busy for over a month;
during which time I shaved and cut hair
throughout the day up to nine o’clock at
night, reserving the laboratory work for a
relaxation after the prosaic labors of the
day.
“Looked at broadly, the episode was highly
satisfactory and successful—excepting in one
vital respect. None of the three specimens
had ringed hair. The completed prepara-
tions were, after all, but the by-products of
my industry. The wretch whom I sought
was still at large and unidentiﬁed. My
collection still lacked its crowning ornament.”


VI
THE TRAIL or THE SERPENT
ITHERTO, in my transcriptions from
Humphrey Challoner’s “Museum
Archives” I have taken the entries
in their order, omitting only such technical
details as might seem unsuitable for the
lay reader. Now, however, I pass over
a number of entries. The capture of Num-
bers 7, 8 and 9 exhibits the methods to which
Challoner, in the main, adhered during his
long residence in East London; and, though
there were occasional variations, the accounts
of the captures present a general similarity
which might render their recital tedious.
The last entry but one, on the other hand,
is among the most curious and interesting.
Apart from the stirring incidents that it
records, the new light that it throws on a
hitherto unsolved mystery makes it worth
extracting entire, which I now proceed to do,
with the necessary omissions alluded to above.


(195)


196 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“Circumstances connected with the ac-
quirement of Numbers 23 and 24 in the
Anthropological Series.
“The sand of my life ran out with vary-
ing speed—as it seemed to me—in the little
barber’s shop in Saul Street, Whitechapel.
Now would my pulses beat and the current
of my blood run swift. Those were the
times when I had visitors; and presently
a new skeleton or two would make their
appearance in the long wall-case. But there
were long intervals of sordid labor and dull
inaction when I would cut hair—and examine
it through my lens—day after day and won-
der whether, in electing to live, rather than
pass voluntarily into eternal repose, I had,
after all, chosen the better part. For in
all those years no customer with ringed hair
ever came to my shop. The long pursuit
seemed to bring me no nearer to that unknown
wretch, the slayer of my beloved wife. Still
was he hidden from me amidst the unclean
multitude that seethed around; or per-
chance some sordid grave had already offered
him an everlasting sanctuary, leaving me
wearin to pursue a phantom enemy.


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 197

“But I am digressmg. This is not a record
of my emotions, but a history of the con-
tents of my museum. Let me proceed to
specimens 23 and 24 and the very remark-
able circumstances under which I had the
good fortune to acquire them. First, how-
ever, I must describe an incident which,
although it occurred some time before, never
developed its importance until this occasion
arose.
“One drowsy afternoon there came to my
shop a smallish, shabby-looking man, quiet
and civil in manner and peculiarly wooden
as to his countenance; in short, a typical
‘old lag.’ I recognized the type at a glance;
the ‘penal servitude face’ had become a
familiar phenomenon. He spread himself
out to be shaved and to have the severely
oﬂicial style of his coiﬂ'ure replaced by a
less distinctive mode; and as I worked he
conversed aﬁfably.
“ ‘Saw old Polensky a week or two ago.’
“ ‘Did you indeed?’ said I.
“ ‘Yus. Portland. Got into 'ot water,
too, ’e did. Tried to fetch the farm and
didn’t pull it orf.’ (‘The farm,’ I may


198 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
explain, is the prison inﬁrmary.) ‘Got
dropped on for malingering. That’s the
way with these bloomin’ foreigners.’
“ ‘He didn’t impose on the doctor, then?’
“ ‘Lor’, no! Doctor ’d seen that sort 0’
bloke before. Polensky said he’d got a pain
in ’is stummik, so the doctor says it must
be becos ’is diet was too rich, and knocks
orf arf ’is grub. I tell yer, Polensky was
sorry ’e’d spoke.’
“Here, my client showing a disposition to
smile, I removed the razor to allow him to
.do so. Presently he resumed, discursively:
“ ‘I knoo this ’ouse years ago, before
Polensky’s time, when old Durdler had it.
Durdler used to do the smashin’ lay up on
the second ﬂoor and me and two or three
nippers used to work for ’im———-plantin’ the
snide, yer know. ’E was a rare leery un, was
Durdler. It was ’im what made that slidin’
door in the wall in the second ﬂoor front.’
“I pricked up my ears at this. ‘A sliding
door? In this house?’
“ ‘Gawblimy!’ exclaimed my client.
‘Meantersay you don’t know about that
door?’


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 199
“I assured him most positively that I
had never heard of it.
“ ‘Well, well,’ he muttered. ‘Sich a use-
ful thing, too. Durdler used to keep ’is
molds and stuff up there, and then, when
there was a scare of the cops, he used to
pop the thing through into the next ’ouse—
Mrs. Jacob ’ad the room next door—and the
coppers used to come and sniff round, but
of course there wasn’t nothin’ to see. Reg-
ler suck in for them.. And it was useful if
you was follered. You could mizzle in through
the shop, run upstairs, pop through the door,
downstairs next door and out through the
back yard. I’ve done it myself. ’Oo’s got
the second ﬂoor front now?’
“ ‘I have,’ said I. ‘I keep the whole of
the house.’
“ ‘My eye!’ exclaimed my friend, whose
name I learned to be Towler, ‘you are a
bloomin’ toif. Like me to show you that
door?’
“I said that I should like it very much,
and accordingly, when the trimming opera-
tions were concluded and I had secured a
wisp of Mr. Towler’s hair for subsequent


200 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
examination, we ascended to the second ﬂoor
front and he demonstrated the hidden door.
“ ‘It’s in this ’ere cupboard, under that
row of pegs. That peg underneath at the
side is the ’andle. You catches ’old of it,
so, and you gives a pull to the right.’ He
suited the action to the words, and, with
a loud groan, the middle third of the back
of the cupboard slid bodily to the right,
leaving an opening about three feet square,
beyond which was a solid-looking panel
with a small knob at the left-hand side.
“ ‘That,’ whispered Towler, ‘is the back
of a cupboard in the next ’ouse. If you
was to pull that ’andle to the right, it would
slide along same as this one. Only I expect
there’s somebody in the room there.’
“I rewarded Mr. Towler with half a sov-
ereign, which he evidently thought liberal,
and he departed gleefully. Shortly after-
wards I learned that he had ‘got a stretch’
in connection with a ‘job’ at Camberwell;
and he vanished from my ken. But I did
not forget the sliding doors. No special
use for them suggested itself, but their
potentialities were so obvious that I resolved


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 201
to keep a sharp eye on the second ﬂoor front
next door.
“I had not long to wait. Presently the
whole ﬂoor was advertised by a card on
the street door as being to let and I seized
the opportunity of a quiet Sunday to recon-
noiter and put the arrangements in going
order. I slid back the panel on my own
side and then, dragging at the handle, pushed
back the second panel. Both moved noisily
and would require careful treatment. I
passed through the square opening into the
vacant room and looked round, but there
was little to see, though a good deal to smell,
for the windows were hermetically sealed
and a closed stove ﬁtted into the ﬁreplace
precluded any possibility of ventilation. The
aroma of the late tenants still lingered in
the air.
“I returned through the opening and
began my labors. First, with a hard brush
I cleaned out both sets of grooves, top and
bottom. Then, into each groove I painted
a thick coating of tallow and black lead,
mixed into a paste and heated. By moving
the panels backwards and forwards a great


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 208
met. In the end they were both killed—
one by his own hand—but not until they
had murdered a gallant constable and a
poor little child and injured in all, twenty-
two persons.
“I read the newspaper account with deep
interest and the conviction that this was
only a beginning. Those two frenzied degen-
erates belonged to a common enough type;
the type of the Slav criminal who has not
sense enough to take precautions nor courage
enough to abide the fortune of war. The
automatic pistol, I felt sure, would bring
him into view; and I was not-mistaken.
“One night, returning from a tour of
inspection, I met a small excited crowd
accompanying a procession of three police
ambulances. I joined the throng and pres-
ently turned into a small blind thorough-
fare in which had gathered a small and
nervous-looking crowd and a few ﬂurried
policemen. Several of the' windows were
shattered and on the ground were three
prostrate ﬁgures. One was dead, the others
were badly wounded, and all three were
members of the police force.


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 207
shivering and complaining, with little bundles
of their possessions hastily snatched up, and
collected in a miserable group on the pave-
ment. I opened my shop door and invited
them to come in and rest while their mes-
sengers went to look for a harbor of refuge;
but I stayed outside to see the upshot of
the proceedings.
“When the last of the tenants had come
out, a sergeant emerged and quietly closed
the street door with a latch-key. The rest
of the policemen took up sheltered positions
in doorways after warning the idlers to dis-
perse and the sergeant turned to me.
“ ‘Now, Mr. Vosper, you’d better keep
your nose indoors if you don’t want it shot
off. There’s going to be trouble presently.’
He pushed me gently into the shop and shut
the door after me.
“I found the evicted tenants chattering
excitedly and very unhappy. But they
were not rebellious. They were mostly
Jews, and Jews are a patient, submissive
people. I boiled some water in my little
copper and made some coffee, which they
drank gratefully—out of shaving mugs; my


208 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
outﬁt of crockery being otherwise rather
limited. And meanwhile they talked volubly
and I listened.
“ ‘I vunder,’ said a stout, elderly Jewess,
‘how der bolice know dose shentlemens gom
to lotch mit me. Zumpotty must haf toldt
dem.’
“ ‘Yus,’ agreed an evicted tenant of doubt-
ful occupation, ‘some bloomin’ nark has giv
’em away. Good job too. Tain’t playin’
the game for to go pottin’ at the coppers
like that there. Coppers ’as got their job
to do same as what we ’ave. You know
that, Mrs. Kosminsky.’
” ‘Ja, dat is droo,’ said the Jewess; ‘but
dey might let me bring my dings mit me.
Do-morrow is Ky-fox-tay. N 0w I lose my
money.’
“ ‘How is that, Mrs. Kosminsky?’ I asked.
“ ‘Pecause I shall sell dem not, de dings
vot I buy for Ky-fox-tay; de ﬁreworks, de
gragers, de masgs and oder dings vor de
chiltrens. Dvendy-vaive shillings vort I
buy. Dey are in my room on ze zecond
ﬂoor. I ask de bolice to let me vetch dem,
bot dey say no; I shall disturb de chentle-


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 209
mens in de front room. Z0 I lose my money
pecause I sell dem not.’ Here the unfor-
tunate woman burst into tears and I was
so much affected by her distress that I in-
stantly offered to buy the whole consignment
for two pounds, whereat she wept more
copiously than ever, but collected the pur-
chase-money with great promptitude and
stowed it away in a very internal pocket,
displaying in the process as many layers of
clothing as an old-fashioned pen-wiper.
“ ‘Ach! Mizder Fosper, you are zo coot to
all de boor beebles, dough you are only a
boor man yourzelf. Bot it is de boor vot is
de vriendts of de boor;’ and in her grati-
tude she would have kissed my hands if I
had not prudently stuck them in my trousers
pockets.
“A messenger now arrived to say that a
refuge had been secured for the night, and
my guests departed with many thanks and
benedictions. The street, as I looked out,
was now quite deserted save for one or two
prowling policemen, who, apparently bored
with their hiding-places, had come forth to
patrol in the open. I did not stay to watch
14


210 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
them, for Mrs. Kosminsky’s remarks had
started a train of thought which required
to be carried out quickly. Accordingly I
went in and fell to pacing the empty shop.
“The police, I assumed, were waiting for
daylight to rush the house. It was a mad
plan and yet I was convinced that they
had no other. And when they should enter,
in the face of a stream of bullets from those
terrible automatic pistols, what a carnage
there would be! It was frightful to think
of. Why does the law permit those cowards’
tools to be made and sold? A pistol is the
one weapon that has no legitimate use. An
axe, a knife—even a riﬂe, has some lawful
function. But a pistol is an appliance for
killing human beings. It has no other pur-
pose whatever. A man who is found with
house-breaking tools in his possession is
assumed to be a house-breaker. Surely a
man who carries a pistol convicts himself of
the intention to kill somebody.
“But perhaps the police had some reason-
able plan. It was possible, but it was very
unlikely. The British policeman is a grand
fellow, brave as a lion and ready to march


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 211
cheerfully into the mouth of hell if duty
calls. But he knows no tactics. His very
courage is almost a disadvantage, leading
him to disdain reasonable caution. I felt
that our guardians were again going to sacri-
ﬁce themselves to these vermin. It was
terrible. It was a wicked waste of precious
lives. Could nothing be done to prevent it?
“According to Mrs. Kosminsky, the ‘chen-
tlemens’ were in the second ﬂoor front——
the room with the sliding panel. Then I
could, at least, keep a watch on them. I
walked slowly upstairs gnashing my teeth
with irritation. The sacriﬁce was so un-
necessary. I could think, offhand, of half
a dozen ways of annihilating these wretches
without risking a single hair of any decent
person’s head. And here were the police,
with all the resources of science at their
disposal and practically unlimited time in
which to work, actually contemplating a
ﬁght with all the odds against them!
“I stole into the second ﬂoor front and,
by the light of a match, found the cup-
board. The inside panel—as I will call the
one on my side—slid back without a sound.


212 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
There was now only the second panel between
me and the next room, and I could plainly
hear the murmur of voices and sounds of
movement. But I could not distinguish what
was being said; and as this was of some
importance, I determined to try the other
panel. Grasping the handle, I gave a ﬁrm
but gradual pull, and felt the panel slide
back quite silently for a couple of inches.
Instantly the voices became perfectly dis-
tinct and a whiff of foul, stuﬁy air came
through, with a faint glimmer of light; by
which I knew that the cupboard on their
side was at least partly open.
“ ‘I tell you, Piragoﬁ',’ a voice said in
Russian, ‘you are nervous about nothing.
The police are looking for us, but they know
none of us by sight. We can go about quite
safely.’
“ ‘I am not so sure,’ replied another voice
-—presumably Piragoif’s. ‘The babbling fool
who let us the house may talk more; and
who knows but some of our own people
may betray us. That woman Kosminsky
looked very queerly at us, I thought.’
“ ‘Bah!’ exclaimed the other. ‘Come and


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 213
lie down, Piragoﬁ. Tomorrow we will leave
this place and separate. We shall go away
for a time and they will forget us. Put
some more coke in the stove and let us go
to sleep.’
“How incalculable are the groupings of
factors that evolve the causation of events!
Those last words of the invisible rufﬁan
seemed quite trivial and inconsequent; and
yet they framed his death warrant. I did
not myself realize it fully at the moment.
As I closed the slide and stepped back, I
was conscious only that a useful train of
thought had been started. ‘Put some more
coke in the stove and let us go to sleep.’
Yes; there was a clear connection between
the idea of ‘stove’ and that of ‘sleep,’ a
sleep of inﬁnite duration. Therein lay the
solution of the problem.
“I walked slowly down the stairs tracing
the connection between the ideas of ‘stove’
and ‘sleep.’ The nauseous air that had
ﬁltered through from that room spoke elo-
quently of sealed windows and stopped crev-
ices. It was a frosty night and the mur-
derers were chilly. A back-draught in the


214 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
stovepipe would ﬁll the room with poisonous
gases and probably suffocate these wretches
slowly and quietly. But how was it to be
brought about? For a moment I thought
of climbing to the roof and stopping the
chimney from above. But the plan was a
bad one. The police might see me and make
some regrettable mistake with a revolver.
Besides it would probably fail. The stop-
page of the draught would extinguish the
ﬁre and the pungent coke-fumes would warn
the villains of their danger. Still closely
pursuing the train of thought, I stepped into
my bedroom and lit the gas; I turned to
glance round the room; and, behold! the
problem was solved.
“In the ﬁreplace stood a little brass stove
of Russian make; a tiny affair, too small
to burn anything but charcoal; but, as char-
coal was easily obtainable in East London,
I had bought it and ﬁxed it myself. It
was perfectly safe in a well-ventilated room,
though otherwise very dangerous; for the
fumes of charcoal, consisting of nearly pure
carbon dioxide, being practically inodorous,
give no warning.


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 215
“‘My course was now quite clear. The
stove was ﬁtted with asbestos-covered han-
dles; a box of charcoal stood by the hearth,
and in the corner was an extra length of
stovepipe for which I had had no use. But
I had a use for it now.
“I lit the charcoal in the stove, and,
while it was burning up, carried the stove-
pipe and the box of fuel upstairs. Then
I returned for the stove, inside which the
charcoal was now beginning to glow brightly.
I ﬁxed on the extra length of pipe and, with
my hand, felt the stream of hot air—or
rather hot carbon dioxide gas—pouring out
of its mouth. I tried the pipe against the
opening and found that it would rest com-
fortably on the lower edge; and then, very
slowly and cautiously, I drew back the slid-
ing panel about six inches. The rufﬁans
were still wrangling on the same subject,
for I heard one exclaim:
“ ‘Don’t be a fool, Piragoﬂ". You’ll only
attract attention if you go nosing about
downstairs.’
“ ‘I don’t care,’ was the answer; ‘I feel
uneasy. I must go down and see that all
, '


216 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
is quiet before I go to sleep.’ Here the
sound of the opening and shutting of the
door put an end to the discussion, save for
a torrent of curses and maledictions from the
two remaining men. But in a few moments
the door opened noisily and Piragolf shouted:
“ ‘Come out! Come out! The house is
empty! We are betrayed.’
“A howl of dismay was the answer. The
two wretches burst into a grotesque mixture
of weeping and cursing, and I heard them
literally dancing about the room in the
ecstasy of their terror.
“ ‘Come out!’ repeated Piragoﬁ. ‘We will
kill them all! We will shoot those pigs,
every one of them! Some of us shall get
away. Come!’
“ ‘It is of no use, Piragoff,’ whimpered
one of his comrades. ‘They are in the house.
It is an ambush.’
“ ‘Yes,’ cried the third man, ‘it is as
Boris says. The house is dark and they
are hiding in it. Bolt the door and let them
come up to us; and we will kill them—kill!
—'kill!—kill!’ he ended with an unearthly
shriek and a burst of hysterical sobs.


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 217
“ ‘I shall go,’ said Piragoff. ‘There is a
chance.’
“ ‘There is none,’ shrieked the other.
‘Come back, madman!’
“The door slammed, the key turned in
the lock and a heavy bolt was shot. I
quietly closed the slide and ran down to the
open window of the ﬁrst ﬂoor front room.
“The street appeared to be empty save
for two constables who stood at a corner
conversing in low tones. A profound silence
reigned—an unusual silence, as it seemed!—
through which the subdued murmur of the
constables’ voices was faintly audible. I
looked out anxiously, debating whether I
ought not to warn the unconscious sentinels
even at the risk of defeating my plans.
Suddenly two sharp reports in quick succes-
sion rang out from below; both constables
fell, and a ﬁgure darted out of the doorway
and raced madly up the street.
“One of the fallen constables lay motion-
less; the other grasped his hip with one hand
and with the other ﬁred his revolver repeatedly
at the retreating murderer, but apparently
missed him every time. In a few seconds


218 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
a sergeant and another constable came ﬂying
round the corner; police whistles began to
sound their warning in all directions; and
the previous silence gave place to a very
Babel of noise. But Piragoff had shot up a
side turning before the sergeant arrived, and
the persistent clamor of the whistles told me
that he had, for the moment, at least, escaped.
I turned away. Piragoff was out of my
hands, and what I had seen only made it
more imperative that I should prevent further
bloodshed.
“As, once more, I softly opened the slide,
the voices of the miserable wretches within
came to me in a strange and unpleasant
mixture of curses, blasphemies and hysterical
sobs. They cursed Piragoﬂ, they cursed the
police, they invoked death and destruction
on every man, woman and child in this
nation of pigs; and between the curses they
wept and lamented. I had shut the damper
of the stove before going down, but the
charcoal was still alight, though dull. I now
arranged the stove in position, resting the
long pipe on the bottom edge of the opening
so that its end projected a few inches into


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 221
crouch, shuddering, over the coke stove,
while the other restlessly paced the room.
“And still the stream of deadly gas trickled
unceasineg from the pipe.
H “Presently the former rose and yawned
heavily. ‘Bah!’ he growled, ‘I am tired.
I shall lie down. If I fall asleep, Boris,
do you watch, and wake me if you hear
them coming.’
“By craning my neck through the opening
I could just continue to get a glimpse of him
as he threw himself on a mattress that was
spread on the ﬂoor. The other man con-
tinued for a while to pace the room; then
he sat down on the chair and spread his
hands out over the stove, muttering to him-
self. I watched him as well as I could
through the chink of the cupboard doors
by the dim light of the stinking paraﬂin
lamp; a greasy, unwholesome-looking wretch,
sallow, pallid and unshorn; and thought how
striking he would look in the form of a
reduced, dry preparation.
“But that was impossible. I was now
working only for the police. Regrettable as
it was, I should have to surrender these


222 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
two specimens to the coroner and the grave-
digger. A deplorable waste of material, but
unavoidable—even if one of them should
prove to be my long-sought enemy.
“At this thought I started; and at that
moment the man on the mattress gave a
strange, snorting cry. The rufﬁan, Boris,
looked round, rose, went over to the mattress
and stirred the other with his foot. ‘Louis!
Louis!’ he cried angrily, ‘what the devil are
you making that noise for?’
“The other man scrambled up with a cry
of terror, pistol in hand. ‘Ah! it is you,
Boris! I was dreaming. I thought they
had come.’ He sat down again on the
mattress and yawned. ‘Bah! I am sleepy.
I must lie down again. Watch a little longer,
Boris.’ '
“ ‘Why should I watch?’ demanded Boris.
‘They will make enough noise opening that
door. I shall lie down a little, too.’
“He ﬂung himself down beside his com-
rade, but in a minute or two started up,
taking deep breaths. ‘My God!’ he ex-
claimed. ‘I can’t breathe lying down. I feel
as if I should choke. And you, too, Louis;


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 223
you are snorting like a pig. Get up,
man.’
“He shook the prostrate man roughly, but
eliciting only a few drowsy curses, resumed
his restless pacing of the room. But not
for long. Yawn after yawn told me that the
gas was already in his blood; and the loud
snoring of the other man indicated plainly
the state of the air in the lower part of the
room. Presently Boris halted in his walk
and sat down by the stove, muttering as
before. Soon he began to nod; then he
nearly fell forward on the stove. Finally he
rose heavily, staggered across to the mattress
and once more ﬂung himself down.
“I breathed more freely, notwithstanding
that the gas, having partially diffused up-
wards to the level of the opening, now began
to ﬁlter through to my side. I waited a
minute or two listening to the breathing of
the two murderers as it grew moment by
moment more stertorous and irregular, and
then, having ﬁlled up the stove, went down
to the ﬁrst floor and sat awhile by the open
window to breathe the relatively fresh air
“All was now quiet in the street. No


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 225
street made dimly visible the mattress on
the ﬂoor and two indistinct dark shapes
stretched on it. I stepped quickly across
the room, breathing as little as possible of
the unspeakany foul air, and struck a wax
match. It burned dimly and smokily, but
showed me the two murderers, lying in easy
postures, their faces livid and ghastly in hue
but peaceful enough in expression. When
I lowered the match, its ﬂame dwindled and
turned blue, and at eighteen inches from the
ﬂoor it went out as if dipped in water. At
that height the heavy gas must have been
nearly pure. The room was a veritable
Grotto del Cane.
“I stooped quickly, holding my breath,
and felt the wrists of the two men. They
were chilly t0 the touch and no vestige of
pulse was perceptible. I shook them both
vigorously, but failed to elicit any responsive
movement. They were quite limp and inert
and I had no doubt that they were dead.
My work was done. The policemen were
now safe, whatever follies they might com-
mit; and it only remained for me to remove
the traces of the fairy godmother who had
15


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 227
Whitechapel High Street. That chest of
drawers was of unusual size; it was four
feet wide by nearly ﬁve feet high, and the
two bottom drawers were each fully eighteen
inches deep, and W811 far larger than was
necessary for my modest stock of household
linen.
“I pulled out the bottom drawer, then,
and as its great cavity yawned before me,
it offered a not unnatural suggestion. The
length of an average man’s head and trunk
is under thirty-six inches. Allowing a few
inches more for his feet and ankles, a cavity
forty-eight inches long is amply sufﬁcient for
his accommodation. Flinging out the towels
and sheets that lay in the drawer, I got in
and lay down with my knees drawn up. Of
course there was room and to spare.
“It was an interesting fact but not very
applicable to present circumstances. Still,
it set me thinking. I went into the front
room and glanced out of the open window.
A faint lightening of the murky sky heralded
the approach of dawn, and from afar came
the murmur of commencing traﬂic out in
High Street. I was about to turn away


228 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
when my ear caught a new and unusual
sound rising above that distant murmur;
the measured tread of feet mingling with
the clatter of horses’ hoofs and a heavy,
' metallic rumbling. I looked out cautiously
in the direction whence the sounds came
and was positively stupeﬁed with amazement.
At the end of the street I saw, byﬂthe light
of the lamps, a company of soldiers appear-
ing round the corner and taking up a position
across the road. I watched breathlessly.
Soon, at a sign from the oﬁicer, the men
spread mats on the muddy ground and lay
down on them, and then appeared a train
of horses, dragging a ﬁeld-piece or quick-
ﬁring gun, which was halted behind the
infantry and unlimbered. A minute later
the black shapes of a number of soldiers
appeared on the sky-line as they crept along
the parapets of the opposite houses where,
save for their heads and the barrels of their
riﬂes, they presently disappeared.
“It seemed that I had misjudged the
police in the matter of caution. It almost
seemed that my labors had been useless;
for surely these portentous preparations indi-


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 229
cated some masterpiece of strategy. What
an anticlimax it would be when the defenders
of the fort were found to be dead! But
what a still greater anticlimax if they were
not there at all!
“At this moment a police sergeant strolled
down the middle of the road and, observing
me, motioned to me with his hand to get
inside out of harm’s way. I obeyed with
grim amusement, thinking of that absurd
anticlimax; and somehow this idea began to
connect itself with those two bottom drawers.
But the casks were the difficulty. The
cooper from whom I had obtained them some-
times kept me waiting nearly a week before
supplying them—for I was only a small
customer; and that would never do even
at this time of year. Besides, the police
would make a rigid search; not that that
would have mattered if I could have made
proper arrangements for the concealment and
removal of the specimens. But unfortunately
I could not. The specimens would have to
go; to be borne out ingloriously in the face
of the besieging force, limp and passive, like
a couple of those very helpless guys that are


280 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
wont to be produced by what Mrs. Kosmin-
sky would call ‘der chiltrens.’ There would
be a certain grim appropriateness in the inci-
dent. For this was the ﬁfth of November.
“The generation of new ideas is chieﬂy
a matter of association. The ideas ‘guys,’
‘ Mrs. Kosminsky’ and ‘ the ﬁfth of November’
unconsciously formed themselves into a group
from which in an instant there was evolved
a new and startling train of thought. At
ﬁrst it seemed wild enough; but when the
two bottom drawers joined in the synthetic
process, a complete and consistent scheme
began to appear. A ﬂush of pleasurable
excitement swept over me, and as I raced
upstairs fresh details added themselves and
fresh difﬁculties were propounded and dis-
posed of. I slid open the panels, stepped
through and, holding my breath, strode across
the poisoned room with only one quick glance
at the two still forms on the mattress. Re-
moving the barricading chair, I unlocked and
unbolted the door and passed out, closing it
after me.
“Mrs. Kosminsky’s room was at the back;
a dreadful nest of dirt and squalor, piled


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 231
almost to the ceiling with unclassiﬁable rub—
bish. The air was so stiﬂing that I was
tempted to raise the heavily-curtained window
a couple of inches; and thereby got a useful
idea when, by peeping over the curtain, I
saw the ﬂat leads of a projecting lower story.
The merchandise piled on all sides, and
even under the bed, included very second-
hand wearing apparel, sheets, blankets, crock-
ery and toys. Among them were the ﬁre-
works, the masks and other appliances for
commemorating the never-to-be-forgotten
‘Gunpowder treason,’ and a couple of large
balls of a dark-colored cord sometimes used
by costers for securing their loads. That
gave me an idea, too, as did the frowsily-
smart female garments. I appropriated four
of the largest masks and a quantity of oakum
for wigs; some colored-paper streamers and
hat-frills; two huge and disreputable dresses
—Mrs. Kosminsky’s own, I suspected—the
skirts of which I crammed with straw from
a hamper; two large-sized and ragged suits
of clothes, a woman’s straw hat, four pairs
of men’s gloves and the biggest top-hat that
I could ﬁnd. These I put apart in a heap


234 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“Soft footsteps advanced across the room.
Someone gave a choking cough and then
a brassy voice fairly shouted, ‘Why,
man, they’re dead! My Lord! What a let-
off!’
“An unsteady laugh told of the effort it
had cost the worthy oﬂicer to take this
frightful risk.
“ ‘Yes,’ said another voice, ‘they’re dead
enough. They’ve cheated us after all. Not
that I complain of that. But, my eye, sir;
what a sell! Think of all those Tommies
and that machine gun. Ha! ha! Oh! Lord!
I suppose the beggars poisoned themselves
when they saw the game was up.’ He
laughed again and the laugh ended in a ﬁt
of coughing.
“ ‘Not they, Sergeant,’ said the other.
‘It was that coke stove that gave them their
ticket. Can’t you smell it? And, by Jove,
it will give us our ticket if we don’t clear
out. We’ll just run down and report and
send for a couple of stretchers.’
“ ‘Hadn’t I better wait here, sir, while
you’re gone?’ asked the sergeant.
“ ‘Lord, no, man. What for? We shall


238 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
have stuck the air of that room. It would
have settled my bash in ﬁve minutes.’
“ ‘Yes,’ agreed' the sergeant; ‘and how
they could have let themselves down from
that window without being spotted. I
wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen
the cord. The constables must have been
asleep.’
“ ‘Yes,’ grunted the inspector; ‘thick-
headed louts. Let’s have a look out here.’
He strode into the second ﬂoor back and
threw up the window. ‘Now you see,’ he
continued, ‘what I mean. This house has
no connection with the next one. That
projecting wing cuts it off. This back yard
opens into Bell’s Alley; the yard next door
opens into Kosher Court. That’s the way
they went. They couldn’t have got to this
house excepting by the roof, and we’ve seen
that they went down, not up.’ He stuck his
head out of the window and looked down
sourly at the guys.
“ ‘Those things yours?’ he asked grufﬂy,
pointing at the eﬂ'igies.
“ ‘No,’ I answered. ‘I think one of Piper’s
men is getting them ready to take round.’


242 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
efﬁgy. I lashed the two ﬁgures very securely
to the standards, ﬁxed on their hats ﬁrmly,
and attached their name-cards. Then I went
into the shop to attend to my own appearance.
“I had brought back from my Blooms-
bury hOuse the shabby overcoat and battered
hat that I had worn on the last few expedi-
tions. These I now assumed; and having
ﬁxed on my cheek a large cross of sticking-
plaster—which pulled down my eyebrow and
pulled up the corner of my mouth—begrimed
my face, reddened my nose, and carefully
tinted in a not too emphatic black eye, I
was sufﬁciently transmogriﬁed to deceive
even my intimate friends. Now I was
ready to start; and now was the critical
moment.
“I went out into the yard, unlocked the
gate, trundled the barrow out into the alley,
and locked the gate behind me. At the
moment there was not a soul in sight, but
from the street close by came the unmis-
takable murmur of a large crowd. I must
confess that I felt a little nervous. The
next few minutes would decide my fate.
“I grasped the handles of the barrow and


THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT 249
were safely deposited, I came out, softly
closing the door after me with the key, and
once more took up the barrow-handles.
Slowly I trundled the invaluable little vehicle
up the street, never losing touch of the curb,
ﬂinging the stakes and cordage into the road
as I went, until I had brought it to the corner
of a street about a quarter of a mile from
my house; and there I abandoned it, making
my way back as fast as I could to the museum.
“My ﬁrst proceeding on my return was
to carry my treasures to the laboratory,
light the gas and examine their hair. I had
really some hopes that one of them might
be the man I sought. But, alas! It was the
old story! They both had coarse black hair
of the mongoloid type. My enemy was
still to seek.
“Having cleaned away my ‘make-up,’ I
spent the rest of the day pushing forward
the preliminary processes so that these might
be completed before ‘decay’s effacing ﬁngers’
should obliterate the details of the integu-
mentary structures. In the evening I re-
turned to Whitechapel and opened the shop,
proposing to purchase the dummy skeletons


250 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING

on the following day and to devote the suc-
ceeding nights and early mornings to the
preparation of the specimens.
“The barrow turned up next day in the
possession of an undeniable tramp who was
trying to sell it for ten shillings and who
was accused of having stolen it but was
discharged for want of evidence. I com-
pensated the green grocer for the trouble oc-
casioned by my carelessness in leaving the
back gate open; and thus the incident came
to an end. With one important'exception,
for there was a very startling sequel.
“On the day after the expedition, I had
the curiosity to open the panels and go
through into the room that the murderers
had occupied, which had now been locked
up by the police. Looking round the room,
my eye lighted on a shabby cloth cap'lying
on the still undisturbed mattress just below
the pillow. I picked it up and looked it
over curiously, for by its size I could see
that it did not belong to either of the men
whom I had secured. I took it over to the
curtained window and carefully inspected its
lining; and suddenly I perceived, clinging


252 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
villain in the hollow of my hand and he
had gone forth unscathed!
“I ground my teeth with impotent rage.
It was maddening. All the old passion and
yearning for retribution surged up in my
breast once more. My interest in the new
specimens almost died out. I wanted Pira-
goﬂ'; and it was only the new-born hope
that I should yet lay my hand on him that
carried me through that time of bitter dis-
appointment.”


254 THE UTTERMOST FARTHIN G

“Circumstances attending the acquirement
of the specimen numbered ‘twenty-ﬁve’ in
the Anthropological Series (A. Osteology.
B. Reduced dry preparations).
“The months that followed the events
connected with the acquirement of the
specimens 23 and 24 brought me nothing
but aching suspense and hope deferred. The
pursuit of the common criminal I had aban-
doned since I had got scent of my real quarry.
The concussor lay idle in its basket; the
cellar steps were greased no more. I had
‘ but a passive role to play until the hour
should strike to usher in the ﬁnal scene——
if that should ever be. Though the term
of my long exile in East London was draw-
ing nigh, its approach was unseen by me.
I could but wait; and what is harder than
waiting?
“I had made cautious inquiries among the
alien population. But no one knew Piragoff
——or, at least, admitted any knowledge of
him; and as to the police, when they had
made a few arrests and then released the
prisoners, they appeared to let the matter
drop. The newspapers were, of course, more


256 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
that man a wave of instinctive dislike and
Suspicion swept over me. He was, indeed,
an ill-looking fellow enough. A broad,
lozenge-shaped Tartar face, with great cheek-
bones and massive jaws; a low forehead
surmounted by a dense brush of up-standing
grayish-brown hair; beetling brows and eyes
deep-set, ﬁerce and furtive; combined to
make a sufficiently unprepossessing counten-
ance. Nor was his manner more pleasing.
He scowled forbiddingly at me, he scrutin-
ized the other customer, craning sideways to
survey him in the mirror, he looked about
the shop and he stared inquisitively at the
parlor door. Every movement was expres-
sive of watchful, uneasy suspicion.
“I tried to avoid looking at him lest my
face should betray me, and, to divert my
thoughts, concentrated my attention on the
other customer. The latter unconsciously
gave me every assistance in doing so. Though
by no means a young man, he was the vain-
est and most dandiﬁed client I had ever
had under my hands. He stopped me
repeatedly to give exhaustive directions as
to the effect that he desired me to produce.


THE UTTERMOST FARTHING 257
He examined himself in the glass and con-
sulted me anxiously as to the exact disposi-
tion of an artiﬁcially curled forelock. I
cursed him inwardly, for I wanted him to
be gone and leave me alone with the other
man, but for that very reason and that
I might conceal my impatience, I did his
bidding and treated him with elaborate care.
But now and again my glance would stray
to the other man; and as I caught his ﬁerce,
suspicious eye—like the eye of a hunted
animal—I would look away quickly lest he
should read what was in my mind.
“At length I had ﬁnished my dandy client.
I had brushed his hair to a nicety and had
even curled his forelock with heated tongs.
With a sigh of relief I took oﬂ the cloth and
waited for him to rise. But he rose not.
Stroking his cheek critically he decided that
he wanted shaving, and, cursing him in my
heart, I had to comply.
“I had acquired some reputation as a
barber and, I think, deserved it. I could
put a perfect edge on a razor and I wielded
the instrument with a sensitive hand and
habitual care. My client appreciated my
17


262 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
like a cat, and kept his hands thrust into
the hip pockets of his coat.
“Again and again these mental oscillations
occurred. Now I was simply and savagely
homicidal, and now I was rational—almost
judicial. Now the vital necessity was to
prevent his escape; and yet, again, I shrank
from the dreadful risk of killing an innocent
man.
“What the issue might have been I cannot
say. But suddenly the door opened, a burly
carter entered and sat down, and the oppor-
tunity was gone. The Russian waited for no
lengthy inspection in the glass like his pre-
decessor. As soon as he was ﬁnished he
sprang from the chair, slapped down his
coppers in payment and darted out of the
shop, only too glad to take himself off in
safety. There must have been something
very sinister in my appearance.
“The carter seated himself in the chair
and I fell to work on him mechanically.
But my thoughts were with the man who
was gone. What a ﬁasco it had been!
After waiting all these years, I had met a
man whom I suspected to be the very wretch


THE UTTERMOST FARTHING ‘ 269
Without bringing him to my net, I had the
uncomfortable feeling that his hair must have
grown and been trimmed by someone else;
unless, indeed, he had fallen into the clutches
of the law.
“Meanwhile I quietly made my prepara-
tions—which involved one or two visits to
a ship chandler’s—and laid down a scheme
of action. It would be a delicate business.
The villain was some ﬁfteen years younger
than I; a sturdy ruﬂian and desperate, as
I had seen. My own strength and activity
had been failing for some time now. Obvi-
ously I could not meet him on equal terms.
Moreover, I must not allow him to injure
me. That was a point of honor. This was
to be no trial by wager of battle. It was to
be an execution. Any retaliation by him
would destroy the formal, punitive character
which was the essence of the transaction.
“The weeks sped by. They lengthened
into months. And still my visitor made no
appearance. My anxiety grew. There were
times when I looked at my white hair and
doubted; when I almost despaired. But
those times passed and my spirits revived.


THE UTTERMOST FARTHING 275
into the little room, shutting and bolting the
door after him.
“I watched him closely. I am no believer
in the rubbish called telepathy, but, by
observing a person’s face and actions, it is
not difﬁcult to trace the direction of his
thoughts. Piragoﬁ' gazed round the room
with the frank curiosity of the barbarian,
and the look of pleased surprise that he
bestowed on the safe and the way -in which
his glance traveled from that object to my
person were easy enough to interpret. Here
was an iron safe, presumably containing
valuables, and here was an elderly man with
the key of that safe in his pocket. The
corollary was obvious.
“ ‘Is that another room?’ he asked, point-
ing to the cellar door.
“I threw it open and let him look into the
dark cavity. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is the cellar.
It has a door opening into the back yard,
which has a gate that opens into Bell’s Alley.
It might be useful. Don’t you think so?’
“He did think so; very emphatically, to
judge by his expression. Very useful indeed
when you have knocked down an old man


THE UTTERMOST FARTHING 277
uneasily, being evidently sorry he had spoken,
and continued:
“ ‘And you can get all this when you want
it, hein? But where is it now?’
“I smiled slyly. ‘It is in a sort of private
museum; but where that museum is I am
not going to say, or perhaps I may ﬁnd it
empty when I call.’
“Piragoff looked at me earnestly. He had
evidently written me down an abject fool——
and no wonder—and was considering how
to manage me.
“ ‘But this place—this museum—it must
be a strong place. How are you going to
get in? Will you ring the bell?’
“ ‘I shall let myself in with a latch-key,’
I said jauntily.
“ ‘Have you got the latch-key?’
“ ‘Yes, and I have tried it. I had it
from a friend who lives there.’
“Piragoff‘ laughed outright. ‘And she
gave you the latch-key, hein? Ha-ha! but
you are a wicked old man. And it is strange
too.’ He glanced from me to his reﬂection
in the little mirror over the safe; and his
expression said as plainly as words, ‘Now,


280 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
with me. I will be your comrade and you
shall give a quarter—or even less if you like.’
“He could afford to make easy terms—
under the circumstances.
“I reﬂected awhile and at length said,
‘Perhaps you are right. Some of the things
are large and gold is heavy—we should leave
the silver. It would take two to carry it
all. Yes, you shall come with me and
bring the necessary tools. When shall we
do it? Any night will do for me.’
“He reﬂected, with an air of slight embar-
rassment, and then asked:
“ ‘Do you open your shop on Sunday?’
“The question took a load off my mind.
I had been speculating on what plan of
action he would adopt. Now I knew. And
his plan would suit me to a nicety.
“ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I never open on Sunday.’
“ ‘Then,’ said be, ‘we will do the job on
Saturday night or Sunday morning That
will give us a quiet day to break up the
stuff.’
“ ‘Yes. That will be a good arrangement.
Will you come here on Saturday night and
start with me?’


284 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
I drove to the museum, where I loitered,
making a ﬁnal inspection of my arrangements,
until twenty-ﬁve minutes past twelve. Then
I came forth and walked quietly to Upper
Bedford Place.
“As I turned the corner and looked down
the wide thoroughfare the long stretch of
pavement contained but a single ﬁgure; a
dim, dark blot on the gray of the summer
night. It moved towards me, and, resolving
itself into a deﬁnite shape, showed me Pira-
goﬂ' in evening dress, enveloped in a volumin-
ous overcoat and carrying a small handbag.
“ ‘You are punctual, Vosper,’ he said
graciously. ‘Shall we make our visit now?
Is the house quiet yet? These are not,
you see.’ He nodded at the boarding-houses
that we were passing, several of which still
showed lights in the windows.
“ ‘Our house has settled down,’ I answered.
‘The collector is an early bird. I have just
been past it to see that all the lights were
out.’
‘We walked quickly across the square
towards the neighborhood of my house.
Piragoff was very affable. He conversed


286 THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
“ ‘Those skeletons?’ said I. ‘They are
part of the collection. The fellow who owns
this place hoards all sorts of trash. Come
round and have a look at them.’
“ ‘But skeletons!’ he whispered. ‘Skele-
tons of men! Ah, I do not like them!’
“Nevertheless he followed me round the
room, peering in nervously at the case of
skulls as we passed. I walked him slowly
past the whole length of the wall-c'ase and he
stared in at the twenty-four motionless, white
ﬁgures, shuddering audibly. I must admit
that their appearance was very striking in
that feeble light; their poses were so easy
and natural and their faces, modeled by
broad shadows, so singularly expressive. I
was very pleased with the effect.
“ ‘But they are horrible!’ gasped Piragoff.
‘They seem to be alive. They seem to
beckon to one—-to say, “Come in here:
come in and stay with us.” Ah! they are
dreadful! Let us go away from them.’
“He stole on tiptoe to the other side of
the room and stood positively shaking; shak-
ing at the sight of a mere collection of dry
bones. It was amazing. I have often been


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2333 SR 3:: was 653 55.5 sex SS. a3. @5338 :25 SR:


THE UTTERMOST FARTHING 293
it answered its purpose, for it reduced his
shouts to mere muﬁ‘led bellowings, inaudible
outside.
“Now that the poor wretch was pinioned
and gagged and helpless, my feelings urged
me to get the business over quickly. But
certain formalities had to be observed. It
was an execution. I stepped in front of
the prisoner and addressed him.
“ ‘Listen to me, Piragoff.’ At the sound
of his name he stopped bellowing and stared
at me, and I continued, ‘Twenty years ago
a burglar came to this house. He was in
the dining-room at two o’clock in the morn-
ing preparing to steal the plate. A lady came
into the room and disturbed him. He tried
to prevent her from ringing the hell. But
she rang it; and he shot her dead. I need
not tell you, Piragoﬁ, who that burglar was.
But I will tell you who I am. I am the
husband of that lady. I have been looking
for you for twenty years, and now I have
caught you; and you have got to pay the
penalty of that murder.’
“As I ceased speaking he broke out into
fresh bellowings. He wagged his head from


THE UTTERMOST FARTHING 295
“I sat in the dark laboratory slowly re-
covering and thinking of the long years that
had slipped away since the hand of this mis-
creant had robbed me of my darling. Grad-
ually I grew more calm. But fully an hour
passed before I could summon resolution to
go back into the museum and satisfy myself
that the long-outstanding debt had indeed
been paid at last to the uttermost far-
thing. I
“On Monday morning I withdrew from
my bank a hundred pounds in notes, which
I handed to my landlord’s widow—Mr.
Nathan had died some years previously—
with a note surrendering the shop and house
in Saul Street. I emptied the safe and
brought away such things as I cared to keep,
leaving the rest for Mrs. Nathan. Then
I shaved off my ragged beard and white
mustache, set my Bloomsbury house in
order, pensioned off the sergeant-major (who
was now growing an old man) and engaged
a set of respectable servants. When the
last specimen was ﬁnished and put in its
place in the museum, my work was done.
I had now only to wait quietly for the end.