Then who was that man? I think he lives; I think that he walks these streets daily. I think that some of us at some time or other have sat beside him in the cars going to and fro the city roads. I think that now, as I sit here writing, he is sitting somewhere hereabouts with his face dropped over upon his clenched hands, looking at that dark rock out there in the woods and wondering if he will yet reach the end of his life by the common methods of disease. I think that he often passes by the police station, with a frightened look in his eyes, and turns a corner quickly when one of the big police guards stalks like a blue-coated and silver-plated Nemesis toward him. I see him, in my mind’s eye, when he meets a girl and boy upon the sidewalk,—how he stares at them with a fixed gaze, wondering how those two whom he killed out yonder, in the old woods, are looking now!—and, when this book is advertised, I can watch him wondering what it is like; and then I trace him in his stealthy and frightened step to the bookstore to buy it; and, when he turns these leaves and comes to this sentence, I hear him curse me, and know that he would like to have his hand upon my throat for recalling the memory of his deed. But I tell him that he will not escape. He may pretend to pray when others pray, to hide his wicked past in the garb of piety; he may mutter his wrath on all of us who seek him for his punishment; he may fly now the advancing steps of justice: but, as he flies, the feet of justice may become inactive, while it sends over every railroad and steamboat line of travel, by every wire that vibrates to all the remotest places of retreat, the command of his arrest. Wherever he is now, and wherever he may be then, he is doomed; and at this instant he knows it and feels it so in every fibre of his accursed carcass, even to those blood-stained hands beneath whose nails there yet remains the red record of his crime. I have given one theory, without in the least asserting it to be the correct one; but it is as good a theory as the public can get hold of outside of that mysterious room in the City Hall wherein the tall chief of police weaves his webs.