when she tries
to detain him, however, he escapes by leaving in her hand the hand
of a dead man he had taken along with him for just such a contingency.

F The king, baffled, now offers to pardon and reward the thief if he
will discover himself. The thief gives himself up, and is married to
the princess.

In some of the later forms of the story the king makes various other
attempts to discover the culprit before acknowledging himself defeated,
and is met with more subtle counter-moves on the part of the thief:
(D2) King orders that any one found showing sympathy for the corpse
as it hangs up shall be arrested; (D3) by the trick of the broken
water-jar or milk-jar, the widow of the dead robber is able to mourn
him unsuspected. (D4) The widow involuntarily wails as the corpse is
being dragged through the street past her house; but the thief quickly
cuts himself with a knife, and thus explains her cry when the guards
come to arrest her. They are satisfied with the explanation. (E2)
The king scatters gold-pieces in the street, and gives orders to
arrest any one seen picking them up; (E3) the thief, with pitch
or wax on the soles of his shoes, walks up and down the road, and,
unobserved, gathers in the money. (E4) The king turns loose in the
city a gold-adorned animal, and orders the arrest of any person seen
capturing it. The thief steals it as in D1, or is observed and his
house-door marked. Then as in E6. (E5) Old woman begging for "hind's
flesh" or "camel-grease" finds his house; but the thief suspects her
and kills her; or (E6) she gets away, after marking the house-door
so that it may be recognized again. But the thief sees the mark, and
proceeds to mark similarly all the other doors in the street. (E7)
The king puts a prohibitive price on meat, thinking that only the
thief will be able to buy; but the thief steals a joint.

However many the changes and additions of this sort (king's move
followed by thief's move) rung in, almost all of the stories dealing
with the robbery of the king's treasury end with the pardon of the
thief and his exaltation to high rank in the royal household. In
none of the score of versions of the "Rhampsinitus" story cited by
Clouston is the thief subjected to any further tests of his prowess
after he has been pardoned by the king. We shall return to this point.

The "Master Thief" cycle has much less to do with our stories than
has the "Rhampsinitus" cycle: hence we shall merely enumera