"My dear Mr. Merriwether, there are so many ways of safely getting money from you Wall Street magnates that the only thing that really protects you is the sad fact that the professional crooks are even more stupid than you. Men like you are compelled to bet your entire fortune, your very life, on averages. The average man is both stupid and honest; so you and your like are fairly safe for fairly long periods of time. Of course if we had been obliged to kill you we should have done so and buried you, and we should have been wise enough to utilize your death in as many ways as possible in the stock-market--and out of it. For instance, I should have instantly telephoned to all the men in your class and told them we had eliminated you--as an example--and to remember that in case we ever had occasion to ask anything from them. We should also give them a countersign, so that they would be able to recognize us when the proper time came. I can kidnap or permanently suppress any millionaire in New York, with neatness, despatch, and safety."
"But killing a well-known man--" began Mr. Merriwether.
"If Big Tim Sullivan could be killed and lie in the Morgue for days unrecognized, what chance do relatively unknown people like you great millionaires stand to be found, once dead? A dead capitalist, remember, is no more impressive than a dead streetcar conductor. If I got you into this house on the strength of Tom, as I got Tom to come in on the strength of you, what millionaire would refuse, for example, to go, in answer to a telephone message that his child had been run over and was now, let us say, at 128 East Seventy-ninth Street? Or that his wife, acting more or less as if she were intoxicated, was scattering money at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street? And suppose the millionaire is bound and chloroformed, and taken to the top floor of a tenement hired by a humpback with red beard and one leg shorter than the other--same humpback not being really a humpback or red-bearded or a cripple, but a fake, to furnish false clues in advance--and this humpback has previously given fire-extinguishing hand-grenades to all the other tenants, as advertisements! Then we have a charge of dynamite inserted in the thoroughly prepared corpse of the millionaire--his face burned off in advance--and he is also soaked in inflammable material and set on fire. And the deed is done at 11 a.m.; so that all the children will be in school and all the adults awake and able to get out. Find you? Bits of flesh and sympathy for the poor humpback is all the police would find in that tenement. Oh! sir, you were wise to pay--very wise indeed!"