Doctor Thurston pointed to a bundle which lay upon the table. "That is Murdock's autobiography--a legacy to me. The package was found near his valise in the death chamber. He had addressed it to me at the last minute." "Did it help you in your account of the Knickerbocker bank case for the _Tempest_?" "A little; but naturally, Murdock's account of that crime was not complete. The entire journal, however, is of absorbing interest. It is a pity that it cannot be published." "Why cannot it be published?" "It would be dangerous to the welfare of society. Murdock was an extraordinary genius in his line; there is marvelous originality and ingenuity in his work. His crimes, numbered by the hundred, were all of capital importance in their results; all deep-laid and skilfully executed. It is hardly likely that such another consummate artist in crime will exist once a century. To publish the details of his schemes would be to put a formidable weapon in the hands of the vulgar herd of ordinary criminals, who lack the imagination of this brilliant villain. "I tell you, Thurston," continued Sturgis, with what seemed very like enthusiastic conviction, "this man was the originator of almost every unsolved mystery which has nonplussed the police during the last fifteen years. He had his agents in every important center throughout the country; agents working under potent incentives, and yet working in the dark, for few of them have ever known who held the mysterious power which directed their every move. Murder has been done wholesale: and so quietly and mysteriously has the work been accomplished, that, in all but this last case, the detectives have found no clue whatever which might lead to an explanation of the sudden and unaccountable disappearance of wealthy men, whose bodies, shipped to the Manhattan Chemical Company by Murdock's agents, were quietly and systematically made away with in the chemist's laboratory." "He was the fiend incarnate!" exclaimed the physician. "Well," said Sturgis, after a moment of thoughtful silence, "at any rate, he was not wantonly cruel. He was heartless; he was pitiless; but his cruelty was always a means to an end, however selfish and illegitimate that end might be. His cruelty is that, in a measure, of every human being destroying life that he may live and trampling upon his fellow men that he may be comfortable. Between Murdock and the rest of us there was a difference of degree, certainly, but was there a difference of kind?" "There is one thing which I cannot yet understand," said Thurston, "and that is, why Murdock should have pushed his audacity to the point of defying you to ferret out the mystery of this crime, when he might perhaps have avoided all risk of detection by holding his tongue."