The most sensational passage of the report, which was regarded as "the story," or principal feature by most of the papers, was the fact that Jules Jeanjean, having been charged at Bow Street with robbery and murder, was placed in the cells to be brought up next morning before the magistrate.
A warder, however, on going to the cell about half-past eight in the evening, found the prisoner standing before him in defiance.
"I refuse to be tried, after all!" he cried in English, in a loud voice, "I'll escape you yet!"
And before the man was aware of the prisoner's intention, he had placed his right hand to his mouth, and with his left held his nostrils tightly.
The warder sprung upon him, but beneath his teeth the prisoner crushed a small capsule of glass, while the fact that his nose was held caused him to inhale the gas compressed within the capsule, and next second he fell, inert, dead.
I read the report in breathless eagerness, and then I realized that Jules Jeanjean, alias Arendt, alias dozens of other names, had destroyed himself with that combination of nitrate of amyl and hydrocyanic gas, a single whiff of which was sufficient to cause instant death--the same lethal gas which the criminal had discharged in the face of young Perceval, and alas! into the faces of others of his victims who had been found mysteriously dead on the scenes of the bandit's daring and desperate exploits.
Truly he had been a veritable artist in crime, but as he sowed, so also had he reaped. The wages of sin are, indeed, death.
From Sommerville, a few weeks later, I gathered a few further interesting details.
The man Hodrickx, together with two other men named Kunzle and Lavelle, had been arrested while committing a clever burglary at a jeweller's in the Corso in Rome; while tests at the private wireless station in Arkwright Road and at the Villa Beni Hassan, near Algiers, had proved conclusively that messages could be exchanged, as no doubt they often were, but, being in a prearranged code, could not be read by the dozens of other receiving stations, commercial and amateur, which picked them up.
In due course Bertini, the ex-customs officer of Calais, was extradited to Paris, where he took his trial before the Assize Court of the Seine, and was sentenced to a long term of penal servitude, which he is at present serving at the penal island of New Caledonia, in the far Pacific.