Vera Cruz State is rich in criminals, and you can get yourself murdered very cheaply round about there. This fellow would have done it for you for the ridiculous sum of two shillings (a dollar); but he can't oblige you now, for he is going up to Mexico City to be shot. He is only twenty-eight, yet he has committed six murders "on his own," and has had as his accomplice in other crimes an older man, already in the hands of the authorities, who is credited with twenty! This latter criminal, long "wanted," was locally known as _El Tigre_ (The Tiger), and, cornered at last, he suspected, as such knaves will, that his young friend had given him away. So he gave as good as he thought he had got--such information to the police as has resulted in that queerly small delicate hand over there being anchored by nasty cold steel to the iron seat. They are queerly delicate hands. We have seen him stroke his black hair with the free one, and you would have taken it for a woman's, so light was the build of the fingers, so small the darkened blue of the nails. But if his claws are frail, he is a monster in very truth. His six murders have been callous butcher-work enough. He has shot a pedlar for the wretched dollar in his wallet; he has battered the brains out of an aged traveller for half as much again, and for the Indian girl whom he had made his mistress he had nothing but a knife buried to its hilt in the soft brown breast which beat with love of this human fiend. Let us pass down the car under pretext of necessity, and have a good look at him. A rounded boyish face, black-browed, his dark eyes shaded by rich black lashes, a full red sensuous mouth, bitten in at the corners in a way which tells its tale of cynical, sensual selfishness, and shaded by a boy's growth of moustache, he has just the vicious beauty calculated to eat its way to the hearts of tropic maids, who like their northern sisters long to have, but, unlike them, _must_ have. But look at the shape of the bullet head and jutting brow! See the animal glare with which he meets your curious stare! There's the murderer. Ye gods! it is the face of a wolf as it lifts its grey muzzle, blood-spattered, from the lamb's bleeding carcase. There is no mercy in those eyes: he is the foe of all, he has ranged himself as enemy of mankind; and the jut of the skull suggests the truth--how impotent we are in moulding our lives; how we bring with us, ready written, the chapters of our eternal past to shape our passing present somehow, somewhere, by hook or by crook, into an escape into an eternal future. You would not dare say as you saw the radiant man's health in him, the beauty of his flesh, that he was a lost soul. But heavens! what a climb he has before him, a climb at which these climbing engines of our train are as water-babies toddling over sand-castles on the beach.