Scotland Yard had been groping for a year--the man over whom all
England, all France, all Germany wondered--close shut in the grip of his
hands and then had let him go. The biggest and boldest criminal the
police had ever had to cope with, the almost supernatural genius of
crime, who defied all systems, laughed at all laws, mocked at all the
Vidocqs, and Dupins, and Sherlock Holmeses, whether amateur or
professional, French or English, German or American, that ever had been
or ever could be pitted against him, and who, for sheer devilry, for
diabolical ingenuity and for colossal impudence, as well as for a
nature-bestowed power that was simply amazing, had not his match in all
the universe.

Who or what he really was, whence he came, whether he was English,
Irish, French, German, Yankee, Canadian, Italian or Dutchman, no man
knew and no man might ever hope to know unless he himself chose to
reveal it. In his many encounters with the police he had assumed the
speech, the characteristics, and, indeed, the facial attributes of each
in turn, and assumed them with an ease and a perfection that were simply
marvellous, and had gained for him the sobriquet of "Forty Faces" among
the police, and of "The Vanishing Cracksman" among the scribes and
reporters of newspaperdom. That he came, in time, to possess another
name than these was due to his own whim and caprice, his own bald,
unblushing impudence; for, of a sudden, whilst London was in a fever of
excitement and all the newspapers up in arms over one of the most daring
and successful coups, he chose to write boldly to both editors and
police complaining that the title given him by each was both vulgar and
cheap.

"You would not think of calling Paganini a 'fiddler,'" he wrote; "why,
then, should you degrade me with the coarse term of 'cracksman'? I claim