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One second more, and the rumal was on the neck of the victim, the well-trained iron fingers of the Thug tightly holding the ends of the sacred handkerchief; another second, the joints of the fingers performed their artistic twist, pressing the larynx, and the victim fell down lifeless. Not a sound, not a shriek! The Thugs worked, as swiftly as lightning.
Three companies of deputies and vigilantes, about one hundred and fifty thugs in all, marched down the street and divided up in three companies. One of the deputies came up and told me he wanted me and grabbed me off the box. "They took me up to the jail, took my description, and my money and valuables, which were not returned. By that time Fellow Worker Roberts was brought in.
Detective Ferrett, whose skill and shrewdness and remarkable memory enabled him to bring this brutal criminal within the reach of justice, warns parents not to let their children play in spots unfrequented by their elders, because of the numerous thugs and desperate characters cast adrift by the war and the present period of unemployment.
If I believed in God, as I used to once, I'd be down on my knees to Him this minute, asking Him to let me live long enough to see these two hypocritical thieves, thugs, sandbaggers, hit the bottom!" He turned away, walked to the north end of the veranda, where the flare of the rekindled furnace was redly visible over the knolls, and presently came back.
The majority of the first sweepings were low thugs "Sydney Ducks," hangers-on, and the worst class of criminals; but a certain number were taken from what had been known as the city's best. In the law courts these men would have been declared as white as the driven snow; in fact, that had actually happened to some of them. But they were plainly undesirable citizens.
They go up and down the rivers in their own boats, pretending to be travellers of consequence, or pilgrims, proceeding to, or returning from Benares, Allahabad, or other sacred places. The boatmen, who are also Thugs, are not different in appearance from the ordinary boatmen on the river. The artifices used to entice victims on board are precisely similar to those employed by the highway Thugs.
It would make intercommunication in a measure ungeneral. India had eighty languages, and more custom-houses than cats. No clever man with the instinct of a highway robber could fail to notice what a chance for business was here offered. India was full of clever men with the highwayman instinct, and so, quite naturally, the brotherhood of the Thugs came into being to meet the long-felt want.
The bodies were stripped and covered up in the graves, the spoil packed for transportation, then the Thugs gave pious thanks to Bhowanee, and departed on further holy service. The Report shows that the travelers moved in exceedingly small groups twos, threes, fours, as a rule; a party with a dozen in it was rare. The Thugs themselves seem to have been the only people who moved in force.
For not betraying the subject secretly, for a bribe, into the hands of bands of professional Thugs, to be murdered and robbed in the prince's back lot. Those were rather common princely industries in the old times, but they and some others of a harsh sort ceased long ago under English rule.
The cow is so sacred in India that to kill her keeper is an awful sacrilege, and even the Thugs recognized this; yet now and then the lust for blood was too strong, and so they did kill a few cow-keepers. In one of these instances the witness who killed the cowherd said, "In Thuggee this is strictly forbidden, and is an act from which no good can come. I was ill of a fever for ten days afterward.
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