s, Hugh Martyn was brought
before Mr. Justice Harland, and though very ably defended by his
counsel, he was quite unable to account for his movements on the night
in question.

"I was never there!" the prisoner shrieked across the court to the
judge as I sat in the public gallery watching the scene. "I know
nothing of the affair--nothing whatever. I am innocent."

"It is undeniable that the prisoner's finger-prints were left there,"
remarked the eminent counsel for the Treasury, rising very calmly. "We
have them here before us--enlarged photographs which the jury have
just seen. Gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that the prisoner is
the man who assisted in this dastardly crime!"

The jury, after a short retirement, found Hugh Martyn guilty, and the
judge, after hearing his previous convictions, sentenced him to
fifteen years' penal servitude.

But Mr. Justice Harland has never known, until perhaps he may read
these lines, that by the ingenious machinations of the super-criminal
Rudolph Rayne, Hugh Martyn, who was one of his associates who had
quarrelled with him over his share of a bank robbery in Madrid, and
had tried to betray me to Benton on Clifton Bridge, had been the
victim of a most dastardly treachery, though he was quite unaware of
it and believed Rayne to be his friend.

Only many months later I learned, by piecing together certain facts,
that old Morley Tarrant was an expert photographer and maker of
printer's "blocks." Slowly it became plain that Rayne, having been
betrayed by the astute American crook, had met him in Edinburgh and
with devilish malice aforethought, had contrived to get him to handle
the glass cube which served as a paper-weight, and which I had quite
innocently conveyed to the old hunchback, who had succeeded in taking
the finger-prints and by photography transferring them upon the
surgical rubber glove, thin as paper--really a false skin--which
Duperre had worn over his hands when he and his associates made an
attack upon the bank.

By that means Martyn's finger-prints were left upon the safe door.

Duperre had previously taken out Martyn, whom one of his friends, a
woman, had drugged, so that he lay in that furnished house near Maldon
for two days unconscious. Hence he was unable to give any accurate
account of his movements on the night in question, or prove an alibi,
and was, in consequence, convicted.

Rayne, the man with the abnormal criminal brain, had, by that
ingeni