"Heavens!" gulped Collins, too far gone to say anything else, too deeply
dejected to think of anything but that he had had the man for whom
Scotland Yard had been groping for a year; the man over whom all
England, all France, all Germany wondered, close shut in the grip of his
hands and then had let him go. He was the biggest and the boldest
criminal the police had ever had to cope with, the almost supernatural
genius of crime, who defied all systems, laughed at all laws, mocked at
all the Vidocqs, and Lupins, and Sherlock Holmeses, whether amateur or
professional, French or English, German or American, that ever had or
ever could be pitted against him, and who, for sheer devilry, for
diabolical ingenuity, and for colossal impudence, as well as for a
nature-bestowed power that was simply amazing, had not his match in all
the universe.

Who or what he really was, whence he came, whether he was English,
Irish, French, German, Yankee, Canadian, Italian, or Dutchman, no man
knew and no man might ever hope to know unless he himself chose to
reveal it. In his many encounters with the police he had assumed the
speech, the characteristics, and, indeed, the facial attributes of each
in turn, and assumed them with an ease and a perfection that were simply
marvellous and had gained for him the sobriquet of "Forty Faces" among
the police and of the "Vanishing Cracksman" among the scribes and
reporters of newspaperdom. That he came in time to possess another name
than these was due to his own whim and caprice, his own bald, unblushing
impudence; for, of a sudden, whilst London was in a fever of excitement
and all the newspapers up in arms over one of his most daring and
successful coups, he chose to write boldly to both editors and police
complaining that the title given him by each was both vulgar and cheap.

"You would not think of calling a great violinist like Paganini a
'fiddler,'" he wrote; "why, then, should you degrade me with the coarse
term of 'cracksman'? I claim to be as much an artist in my profession as
Paganini was in his, and I claim also a like courtesy from you. So,
then, if in the future it becomes necessary to allude to me, and I fear
it often will, I shall be obliged if you do so as 'The Man Who Calls
Himself Hamilton Cleek.' In return for the courtesy, gentlemen, I
promise to alter my mode of procedure, to turn over a new leaf, as it
were, to give you at all times hereafter distinct information, in
advance,