men; they could ask me no
favor, put upon me no risk, which I would decline. I became the willing
butt of their jokes; this perfected my popularity; I became a favorite.

I early found a private who lacked a thumb--what joy it was to me! And
when I found that he alone, of all the company, had lost a thumb, my
last misgiving vanished; I was SURE I was on the right track. This
man's name was Kruger, a German. There were nine Germans in the company.
I watched, to see who might be his intimates; but he seemed to have no
especial intimates. But I was his intimate; and I took care to make the
intimacy grow. Sometimes I so hungered for my revenge that I could
hardly restrain myself from going on my knees and begging him to point
out the man who had murdered my wife and child; but I managed to bridle
my tongue. I bided my time, and went on telling fortunes, as
opportunity offered.

My apparatus was simple: a little red paint and a bit of white paper. I
painted the ball of the client's thumb, took a print of it on the paper,
studied it that night, and revealed his fortune to him next day. What
was my idea in this nonsense? It was this: When I was a youth, I knew
an old Frenchman who had been a prison-keeper for thirty years, and he
told me that there was one thing about a person which never changed,
from the cradle to the grave--the lines in the ball of the thumb; and he
said that these lines were never exactly alike in the thumbs of any two
human beings. In these days, we photograph the new criminal, and hang
his picture in the Rogues' Gallery for future reference; but that
Frenchman, in his day, used to take a print of the ball of a new
prisoner's thumb and put that away for future reference. He always said
that pictures were no good--future disguises could make them useless;
'The thumb's the only sure thing,' said he; 'you can't disguise that.'
And he used to prove his theory, too, on my friends and acquaintances;
it always succeeded.

I went on telling fortunes. Every night I shut myself in, all alone,
and studied the day's thumb-prints with a magnifying-glass. Imagine the
devouring eagerness with which I pored over those mazy red spirals, with
that document by my side which bore the right-hand thumb-and-finger-
marks of that unknown murderer, printed with the dearest blood--to me--
that was ever shed on this earth! And many and many a time I had to
repeat the same old disappointed remark, 'will they NEVER corresp