isdeeds recounted in these pages; but of his life
during the quiet intervals, of his relations with confederates, and his
more honest dealings with honest folk (of which many a pretty tale was
rife), he was not to be persuaded to speak without an irritating
reserve.

"Keep to my points of contact with the world, about which something is
known already, and you shall have the whole truth of each matter," said
the convict. "But I don't intend to give away the altogether unknown,
and I doubt if it would interest you if I did. The most interesting
thing to me has been the different types with whom I have had what it
pleases you to term professional relations, and the very different ways
in which they have taken me. You read character by flashlight along the
barrel of your revolver. What you should do is to hunt up my various
victims and get at their point of view; you really mustn't press me to
hark back to mine. As it is you bring a whiff of the outer world which
makes me bruise my wings against the bars."

The criminologist gloated over such speeches from such lips. It would
have touched another to note what an irresistible fascination the bars
had for the wings, despite all pain; but Lucius Brady's interest in
Stingaree was exclusively intellectual. His heart never ached for a
roving spirit in confinement; it did not occur to him to suppress a
detail of his own days in Sydney, down to the attractions of an Italian
restaurant he had discovered near the jail, the flavor of the Chianti
and so forth. On the contrary, it was most interesting to note the play
of features in the tortured man, who after all brought his torture on
himself by asking so many questions. Soon, when his visitor left him,
the bondman could follow the free in all but the flesh, through every
corridor of the prison and every street outside, to the hotel where you
read the English papers on the veranda, or to the little restaurant
where the Chianti was corked with oil which the waiter removed with a
wisp of tow.

One day, late in the afternoon, as Lucius Brady was beaming on him
through his spectacles, and indulging in an incisive criticism on the
champagne at Government House, Stingaree quietly garroted him. A gag was
in all readiness, likewise strips of coarse sheeting torn up for the
purpose in the night. Black in the face, but with breath still in his
body, the criminologist was carefully gagged and tied down to the
bedstead, while his living image