Chapter 46

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together,
who would escape hanging.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

On the Train. Fifty years ago, when I was a boy in the then remote and
sparsely peopled Mississippi valley, vague tales and rumors of a
mysterious body of professional murderers came wandering in from a
country which was constructively as far from us as the constellations
blinking in space--India; vague tales and rumors of a sect called Thugs,
who waylaid travelers in lonely places and killed them for the
contentment of a god whom they worshiped; tales which everybody liked to
listen to and nobody believed, except with reservations. It was
considered that the stories had gathered bulk on their travels. The
matter died down and a lull followed. Then Eugene Sue's "Wandering Jew"
appeared, and made great talk for a while. One character in it was a
chief of Thugs--"Feringhea"--a mysterious and terrible Indian who was as
slippery and sly as a serpent, and as deadly; and he stirred up the Thug
interest once more. But it did not last. It presently died again this
time to stay dead.

At first glance it seems strange that this should have happened; but
really it was not strange--on the contrary--it was natural; I mean on
our side of the water. For the source whence the Thug tales mainly came
was a Government Report, and without doubt was not republished in
America; it was probably never even seen there. Government Reports have
no general circulation. They are distributed to the few, and are not
always read by those few. I heard of this Report for the first time a
day or two ago, and borrowed it. It is full of fascinations; and it
turns those dim, dark fairy tales of my boyhood days into realities.

The Report was made in 1889 by Major Sleeman, of the Indian Service, and
was printed in Calcutta in 1840. It is a clumsy, great, fat, poor sample
of the printer's art, but good enough for a government printing-office in
that old day and in that remote region, perhaps. To Major Sleeman was
given the general superintendence of the giant task of ridding India of
Thuggee, and he and his seventeen assistants accomplished it. It was the
Augean Stables over again. Captain Vallancey, writing in a Madras
journal in those old times, makes this remark:

"The day that sees this far-spread evil eradicated from India and
known only in name, will greatly tend to immortalize British rule in
the East."

He did not overestimate the magnitude and difficulty of the work, nor the
immensity of the credit which would justly be due to British rule in case
it was accomplished.

Thuggee became known to the British authorities in India about 1810, but