of
them. He went, also, among people who were not yet criminals, and by
degrees made them so, to his own profit. The case of Henning, the
correspondence clerk, was one that had come under Hewitt's eyes. He used
his faculty also with great cunning in other ways--as we had seen in the
matter of the Admiralty code. And it was even said among the gang that a
man he had once hypnotised he could force by suggestion to commit
suicide when he became useless or inconvenient.

Sims and the ragged fellow who had decoyed me into Mayes's den were the
only members of the gang whom we could identify after his death, but
many others must have shared their relief; and I sincerely hope--though
I hardly expect--that they all availed themselves of their liberty to
abandon their evil courses. As in fact the two I speak of did, and took
to honest work.

All that had remained mysterious in the earlier cases now became clear.
In the first, the case of Samuel's diamonds, Denson had been put into
the office where Samuel had found him, by Mayes, with the express design
of effecting a diamond robbery. The robbery was effected, and the
unhappy Denson formed a plan of making a bolt of it himself with the
diamonds. He was, perhaps, what is called a difficult subject in
hypnotism--amenable enough to direct influence, but not sufficiently
retentive of post-hypnotic suggestion. He hid the jewels and adopted a
disguise, but Mayes was watching him better than he supposed. The
diamonds were lost, but Denson was found and done to death--probably not
in that retreat near Barbican, but at night in some empty street. The
diamonds were not found on him, and the body, with the mark of the
Triangle still on it, was taken by night to a central spot in London and
there left. Mayes probably thought that a notable example like this, so
boldly displayed and so conspicuously reported in the Press, would
impress his auxiliaries throughout London with the terror that was one
of his weapons; for they would well understand the meaning of the Red
Triangle, and they would receive a striking illustration of the
consequences of rebellion or bad faith. The money and the watch were
left in the pockets because they were trifles after the loss of fifteen
thousand pounds' worth of diamonds, and their presence in the pockets
made the murder the less easy to understand--which was a point gained.
And as to the keys--Mayes knew nothing of where the diamonds were
hidden, and so had no