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

Fifty years ago, when I was a boy in the then remote and sparsely peopled Mississippi valley, vague tales and rumors of a mysterious body of professional murderers came wandering in from a country which was constructively as far from us as the constellations blinking in space--India; vague tales and rumors of a sect called Thugs, who waylaid travelers in lonely places and killed them for the contentment of a god whom they worshiped; tales which everybody liked to listen to and nobody believed, except with reservations.

It was considered that the stories had gathered bulk on their travels.

The matter died down and a lull followed.

Then Eugene Sue's "Wandering Jew" appeared, and made great talk for a while.