As soon as I had taken Shorty—not without a fight—The Fin regretted his hastiness. He saw that if Shorty got a long sentence, he, The Fin, would perhaps never get near him for vengeance, whereas, had he allowed him to remain at liberty, a quick shove down some stair or toss out at some window when Shorty was drunk would have settled the whole business. The Fin’s regret did not last long, for before many hours he was in the cells too, Shorty having in turn revealed some awkward facts which seemed likely to put The Fin as long out of harm’s way as himself. These expectations were fully verified shortly after, when they both received sentence of seven years’ penal, and were duly removed to the penitentiary.

And now I come to the bit of tobacco pipe, which will prove how a mean and insignificant trifle often comes into the world to accomplish a great work, and confer a blessing on all mankind. Every one who knows anything of prison life can understand how a bit of an old tobacco pipe is valued by convicts shut off from tobacco for years. The smallest crumb of it, having the faintest taste of nicotine, is treasured and passed from prisoner to prisoner, to be sucked and finally broken up and chewed to its inmost recesses. It is worth twenty times its weight in gold to them. When The Fin had spent a year in prison in almost absolute silence, he got into hospital for some trifling complaint, and so ingratiated himself with the doctor that he was once or twice allowed into the laboratory. There by some means he had managed to secrete a minute quantity of a deadly poison, which he inserted into the hole in a piece of old tobacco pipe shank. This bit of tobacco pipe he concealed till he was again among the working convicts. He and Shorty were tacit foes, but this difficulty The Fin got over in a manner worthy of the cause. Once, when the warder was approaching, and a search possible, he managed, in sight of Shorty, to conceal the bit of tobacco pipe in a place easily accessible to his old pal, and then, when the danger was past, forgot to go back for it until Shorty had had a chance of appropriating the treasure. Not many minutes later Shorty took a fit and dropped dead among the convicts.

Every one was horrified and astonished, till one of the warders noticed a smell of tobacco about the mouth of the dead convict, and fished out of his clenched teeth the bit of tobacco pipe. It was then supposed that part of the pipe shank had been bitten off by Shorty and drawn back into the windpipe so as to cause his death; and he duly occupied his six feet of prison soil.

And was The Fin convicted and hanged? Not a bit of it. He lived out his sentence and was released, and went about long enough to boast of his deed, though I am bound to confess that few believed him, and the general opinion was that Shorty died of the bit of tobacco pipe without the poison. However, The Fin claimed all the credit, and insisted that he was not to blame for the result, seeing that he did not administer the poison, and that Shorty, in appropriating what he knew was not his own, committed a grave offence against convict society, and could not complain if he suffered for the crime.

The Fin should have been a lawyer, and with education might have risen to be one, had he not been soon after choked by an overdose of shebeen whisky.

THE BROKEN CAIRNGORM.

I had to take Jess Murray for her share in a very bold robbery, in which a commercial traveller, peaceably walking home to his hotel, had been waylaid and stripped of pocket-book, purse, and watch, the haul altogether amounting to upwards of £100 in value, the greater part of which was not his own. The gentleman could give no description of the men, but remembered that they had been assisted at a critical moment by a woman, who, so far as he could judge, was tall and handsome, and not very old. It was the style of the robbery as much as that brief and imperfect description which directed my attention to Jess Murray. She was a bold wench, strong as a lion, and so thoroughly bad that I took the trouble of hating her—an exceptional case indeed, as in general one gets to look upon her kind with as much indifference as a drover does upon a herd of horned knowte, under his care one day and gone the next.

I believed Jess to be one of the few who have not one redeeming quality or trait, and was eager for the chance which should put her out of harm’s way for a good long term of years.

I had really no evidence, but an instinctive feeling, connecting Jess with the robbery; but when on my way to her place I chanced to pass one of her acquaintances on the street. I let him pass, and then a thought struck me, and I turned back and stopped him. A scared look at once came into his face, so I asked him to come with me—back to the Office. He came reluctantly, and the cause I speedily understood when he tried to throw away behind his back a £20 bank note taken from the pocket-book of the commercial traveller. The number and description of this note was already in my possession, and I picked up the paper money with the most lively satisfaction, when the fellow immediately began to protest that he had only been sent to change the note, and was willing to tell all about the robbery if things were made right for himself.

The result of this chance capture was that we had abundant evidence against Jess and another, and I went for her with the greatest of pleasure. She was in the “kitchen” of the place among a crowd of her kind when I entered, and it needed only a motion of my finger and a nod of my head to chase the merriment from her face, and bring her slowly across the floor to my side. It is not usual for me to be communicative, but on the present occasion I was elated, and said in reply to her sullen inquiry—