How accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when I had neither seen
the robbers’ faces, nor heard their natural voices, nor had any idea
who 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 would
not have greatly helped even a detective, since he would lack the secret
of 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 one
circumstance which gave me a slant in a definite direction to begin with:
Those two robbers were manifestly soldiers in tramp disguise; and not
new to military service, but old in it–regulars, perhaps; they did
not 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 whose
life 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 studiously
and persistently described the robbers as tramps, camp followers;
and among this class the people made useless search, none suspecting the
soldiers but me.
Working patiently, by night, in my desolated home, I made
a 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 was
ordered a hundred miles north, to Napoleon, I secreted my small
hoard 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 companies
garrisoned 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 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;