Enough that the
under-secretary, knowing the history of the new line, and following
the negotiation step by step through all its stages, determined to
waylay Mr. Dwerrihouse, rob him of the seventy-five thousand pounds,
and escape to America with his booty.
In order to effect these ends he obtained leave of absence a few days
before the time appointed for the payment of the money; secured his
passage across the Atlantic in a steamer advertised to start on the
twenty-third; provided himself with a heavily loaded "life-preserver,"
and went down to Blackwater to await the arrival of his victim. How he
met him on the platform with a pretended message from the board; how he
offered to conduct him by a short cut across the fields to Mallingford;
how, having brought him to a lonely place, he struck him down with the
life-preserver, and so killed him; and how, finding what he had done, he
dragged the body to the verge of an out-of-the-way chalk-pit, and there
flung it in, and piled it over with branches and brambles,--are facts
still fresh in the memories of those who, like the connoisseurs in De
Quincey's famous essay, regard murder as a fine art.
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