WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas. So I began to thinkabout my errand there. Time, noonday; and bright and sunny.

This was bad--not best, anyway; for mine was not(preferably) a noonday kind of errand. The more I thought,the more that fact pushed itself upon me--now in one form,now in another. Finally, it took the form of a distinct question:

is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by alittle sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have nightfor it, and no inquisitive eyes around. This settled it.

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road outof most perplexities.

I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to createannoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it reallyseemed best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon.

Their disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous.

Their main argument was one which has always been the first to cometo the surface, in such cases, since the beginning of time:

'But you decided and AGREED to stick to this boat, etc.; as if,having determined to do an unwise thing, one is thereby bound to go aheadand make TWO unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination.

I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good success:

under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show them that Ihad not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to blame for it,I presently drifted into its history--substantially as follows:

Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria.

In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's PENSION,1a, Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there,in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers.

She and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talkGerman to me--by request. One day, during a ramble about the city,I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps andwatches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead,and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room.

There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on theirbacks on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of themwith wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds.

Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows;and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden andburied under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands.

Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both greatand small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling,and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night,a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of anyof that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement--for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ringthat fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsingthere alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night,and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly bythe sudden clamor of that awful summons! So I inquired about this thing;asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the restoredcorpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy.

But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosityin so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way witha humbled crest.

Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed--'Come with me! I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know.

He has been a night-watchman there.'

He was a living man, but he did not look it. He was abed, and hadhis head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless,his deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast,was talon-like, it was so bony and long-fingered. The widowbegan her introduction of me. The man's eyes opened slowly,and glittered wickedly out from the twilight of their caverns;he frowned a black frown; he lifted his lean hand and waved usperemptorily away. But the widow kept straight on, till shehad got out the fact that I was a stranger and an American.

The man's face changed at once; brightened, became even eager--and the next moment he and I were alone together.

I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English;thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.

This consumptive and I became good friends. I visited him every day, and wetalked about everything. At least, about everything but wives and children.

Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and three thingsalways followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light glimmeredin the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its place camethat deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever saw hislids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for that day;lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing that I said;took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly did not know, by either sightor hearing, when I left the room.

When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two months,he one day said, abruptly--'I will tell you my story.'

A DYING MAN S CONFESSIONThen he went on as follows:--I have never given up, until now. But now I have given up.

I am going to die. I made up my mind last night that itmust be, and very soon, too. You say you are going torevisit your river, by-and-bye, when you find opportunity.

Very well; that, together with a certain strange experiencewhich fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell youmy history--for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for mysake you will stop there, and do a certain thing for me--a thing which you will willingly undertake after you shall haveheard my narrative.

Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being long.

You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to settlein that lonely region in the South. But you do not know that I had a wife.

My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely good andblameless and gentle! And our little girl was her mother in miniature.

It was the happiest of happy households.

One night--it was toward the close of the war--I woke upout of a sodden lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged,and the air tainted with chloroform! I saw two men in the room,and one was saying to the other, in a hoarse whisper, 'I toldher I would, if she made a noise, and as for the child--'

The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice--'You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them;or I wouldn't have come.'

'Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up;you done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you;come, help rummage.'

Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes;they had a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticedthat the gentler robber had no thumb on his right hand.

They rummaged around my poor cabin for a moment; the head banditthen said, in his stage whisper--'It's a waste of time--he shall tell where it's hid.

Undo his gag, and revive him up.'

The other said--'All right--provided no clubbing.'

'No clubbing it is, then--provided he keeps still.'

They approached me; just then there was a sound outside;a sound of voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held theirbreath and listened; the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer;then came a shout--'HELLO, the house! Show a light, we want water.'

'The captain's voice, by G----!' said the stage-whispering ruffian,and both robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting offtheir bull's-eye as they ran.

The strangers shouted several times more, then rode by--there seemed to be a dozen of the horses--and I heard nothing more.

I struggled, but could not free myself from my bonds.

I tried to speak, but the gag was effective; I could not make a sound.

I listened for my wife's voice and my child's--listened long and intently,but no sound came from the other end of the room where their bed was.

This silence became more and more awful, more and more ominous,every moment. Could you have endured an hour of it, do you think?

Pity me, then, who had to endure three. Three hours--? it was three ages!

Whenever the clock struck, it seemed as if years had gone by since Ihad heard it last. All this time I was struggling in my bonds;and at last, about dawn, I got myself free, and rose up and stretchedmy stiff limbs. I was able to distinguish details pretty well.

The floor was littered with things thrown there by the robbersduring their search for my savings. The first object that caughtmy particular attention was a document of mine which I had seenthe rougher of the two ruffians glance at and then cast away.

It had blood on it! I staggered to the other end of the room.

Oh, poor unoffending, helpless ones, there they lay, their troubles ended,mine begun!

Did I appeal to the law--I? Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the Kingdrink for him? Oh, no, no, no--I wanted no impertinent interference ofthe law. Laws and the gallows could not pay the debt that was owing to me!

Let the laws leave the matter in my hands, and have no fears: I wouldfind the debtor and collect the debt. How accomplish this, do you say?

How accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when I had neither seenthe robbers' faces, nor heard their natural voices, nor had any ideawho they might be? Nevertheless, I WAS sure--quite sure, quite confident.

I had a clue--a clue which you would not have valued--a clue which wouldnot have greatly helped even a detective, since he would lack the secretof how to apply it. I shall come to that, presently--you shall see.

Let us go on, now, taking things in their due order. There was onecircumstance which gave me a slant in a definite direction to begin with:

Those two robbers were manifestly soldiers in tramp disguise; and notnew to military service, but old in it--regulars, perhaps; they didnot acquire their soldierly attitude, gestures, carriage, in a day,nor a month, nor yet in a year. So I thought, but said nothing.

And one of them had said, 'the captain's voice, by G----!'--the one whoselife I would have. Two miles away, several regiments were in camp,and two companies of U.S. cavalry. When I learned that Captain Blakely,of Company C had passed our way, that night, with an escort, I said nothing,but in that company I resolved to seek my man. In conversation I studiouslyand persistently described the robbers as tramps, camp followers;and among this class the people made useless search, none suspecting thesoldiers but me.

Working patiently, by night, in my desolated home, I madea disguise for myself out of various odds and ends of clothing;in the nearest village I bought a pair of blue goggles.

By-and-bye, when the military camp broke up, and Company C wasordered a hundred miles north, to Napoleon, I secreted my smallhoard of money in my belt, and took my departure in the night.

When Company C arrived in Napoleon, I was already there.

Yes, I was there, with a new trade--fortune-teller. Not to seem partial,I made friends and told fortunes among all the companiesgarrisoned there; but I gave Company C the great bulk of my attentions.

I made myself limitlessly obliging to these particular 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 losta thumb, my last misgiving vanished; I was SURE I was onthe right track. This man's name was Kruger, a German.

There were nine Germans in the company. I watched, to see who mightbe 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 hardlyrestrain myself from going on my knees and begging him to pointout the man who had murdered my wife and child; but I managedto 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 thumbsof 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 newprisoner's thumb and put that away for future reference. He always saidthat 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. Imaginethe 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-marksof 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 repeatthe same old disappointed remark, 'will they NEVER correspond!'

But my reward came at last. It was the print of the thumb of the forty-thirdman of Company C whom I had experimented on--Private Franz Adler.

An hour before, I did no............