“Yes,” replied the smuggler placidly. “We were quite literally Road-Hogs. I thought at first of dressing the pigs up as millionaires and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there’s more difference than you would imagine to be possible. It was great fun when they forced me to take my pet out of the wrapping of shawls, and they found what a large pet it was.” “And do I understand,” cut in the Colonel, “that it was something like that--with the other laws?” “The other laws,” said Pierce, “are certainly arbitrary, but perhaps you do not altogether do them justice. You do not quite appreciate their motive. You do not fully allow for their origin. I may say, I trust with all modesty, that I was their origin. I not only had the pleasure of breaking those laws, but the pleasure of making them.” “More of your tricks, you mean,” said the Colonel; “but why don’t the papers say so?” “The authorities don’t want ’em to,” answered Pierce. “The authorities won’t advertise me, you bet. I’ve got far too much popular backing for that. When the real revolution happens, it won’t be mentioned in the newspapers.” He paused a moment in meditation and then went on. “When the police searched for my pug and found it was a pig, I started wondering how they could best be stopped from doing it again. It occurred to me they might be shy of a wild pig or a pug that bit them. So, of course, I travelled the next time with dreadfully dangerous animals in cages, warning everybody of the fiercest tigers and panthers that ever were known. When they found it out and didn’t want to let it out, they could only fall back on their own tomfoolery of a prohibition wholesale. Of course, it was the same with my other stunt, about the sick people going to health resorts to be cured of various fashionable and refined maladies. The pigs had a dignified, possibly a rather dull time, in elaborately curtained railway carriages with hospital nurses to wait on them; while I stood outside and assured the railway officials that the cure was a rest cure, and the invalids must on no account be disturbed.” “What a liar you are!” exclaimed Hood in simple admiration. “Not at all,” said Pierce with dignity. “It was quite true that they were going to be cured.” Crane, who had been gazing rather abstractedly out of the window, slowly turned his head and said abruptly: “And how’s it going to end? Do you propose to go on doing all these impossible things?” Pierce sprang to his feet with a resurrection of all the romantic abandon of his vow over the pig-sty.