“So nobody need take the trouble to come fishing about either you or me for further ‘information.’
“Imagine, then, a circle of choice spirits assembled round Charles Peace, under circumstances calculated to make him loquacious.
“‘They talk,’ said he, ‘about identifying me! Why I could dodge any bobby living! I have dodged all the detectives in London many a time. I have walked past them, looked them straight in the face; and they have thought I was a mulatto.’
“Then he asked us if we knew how he did it; and said ‘Just turn your faces away a minute, and I’ll show you.’
“We turned our heads away, and when we looked again we found he had completely altered the expression of his countenance, and so entirely distorted and disfigured it—save the mark!—that he did not look like the same man.
“He threw out his under jaw, contracted the upper portion of his face, and appeared to be able so to force the blood up into his head as to give himself the appearance of a mulatto.
“Then he laughed heartily at his cleverness; went through pantomimic gestures that would have done credit to ‘Quilp,’ and again boasted of the many times he had ‘put on that face,’ and walked past the cute detectives in London and elsewhere.
“We then made allusion to the clever way in which he dodged the police and got away from Sheffield on the night of the murder; and he at once went off into a long story of his escape, telling it with almost fiendish glee, and occasionally laughing joyously at his exploits. He said:—
“‘After that affair at Bannercross I went straight over the field opposite, and through Endcliffe Wood to Crookes, and round by Sandygate. Then I doubled and came down to Broomhill, and there I took a cab and was driven down to the bottom of Church-street.
“‘I got out and walked into Spring-street, to the house of an old pal. There I doffed my own clothes and disguised myself. I stopped there a short time, and then I went boldly through the streets to the railway station, and took train for Rotherham. I walked from that station down to Masbro’, where I took a ticket for Beverley.