Assassin

“ As far as I am concerned, I do not believe that a human being exists who is not, basically at least, an assassin. Look! when I am in a drawing room, a church, a station; on the terrasse of a cafe, at the theatre or wherever crowds pass or loiter, I enjoy considering faces from a strictly homicidal point of view. For you may see by the glance, by the back of the neck, the shape of the skull, the jaw bone and zygoma of the cheeks, or by some part of their persons that they bear the stigmata of that psychological calamity known as murder. ”

“ There is that in the tidings of a murder that thrills the human heart to its depths. When the word passes from lip to lip and from mouth to mouth that a human life has been taken by an assassin, the stoutest hearts stop beating, lips pale and cheeks blanch, strong men grow pale with the terror of the unknown and mysterious, and if that be so with what I may, perhaps, by comparison call an ordinary assassination, what were the feelings that overpowered the community when the news of this tragedy was spread by the lightning to the ends of the world? ”

“ I feel myself to be a guilty wretch, an assassin, and murderer.”
“Mon Dieu, monsieur, you are talking in a wild, incoherent manner. Assassin and murderer—​bah! Be reasonable if you please. Don’t talk in such a false and ridiculous strain. Come, here we are at our domicile. Jump out, and come in—​ha, ha! and make your life happy. I won’t have you accuse yourself thus wrongfully. Murder—​bah! it is ridiculous.” ”

“ If I deplore the fate of a man who has been assassinated, may I not paint [Pg 128] in my mind a lively picture of all that probably happened on the occasion? Shall not the assassin appear to rush forth suddenly from his lurking place? Shall not the other appear seized with horror? Shall he not cry out, beg for his life, or fly to save it? Shall I not see the assassin dealing the deadly blow, and the defenseless wretch falling dead at his feet? ”

“ I burst into tears, and wept long, unrestrainedly; for I too was young; in my heart there was a flood of pent-up tenderness, and here I was, on this perfumed, moonlit, starlit night, crouching in a dark corner, meditating murder!
No, not murder, an execution. Has my stepfather deserved death? Yes. Is the executioner who lets down the knife on the neck of the condemned criminal to be called an assassin? No! Well, then I shall be the executioner and nothing else. ”

“ A common assassin would have decoyed his victim into a house and murdered her in a more brutal manner, by cutting her throat or battering her head with a poker, but this strange assassin, secure in the possession of a weapon more deadly, engages his unhappy victim in confidential talk, and whilst embracing her causes her death in a sure manner. ”

“ It is provided, as I humbly and devoutly believe, by the divine justice itself, that no matter how craftily murder is planned, there is always some point where the skill and cunning of the assassin fails him. ”

“ It is likewise some imperfect consolation, to reflect that the assassin has himself been killed, and probably by my own hand. The shedder of blood no longer lives to pursue his vocation, and justice is satisfied. ”

“ Murderers all! Assassination has always been deified; and before it is objected to, the world must change its creeds, its celebrities, and its chronicles. 'Monsieur, you are an assassin,' says an impolite world. ”

“ The face of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, show him where to strike. The fatal blow is given! and the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the assassin’s purpose to make sure work; and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard! ”

“ Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle at the best. But here is an assassin who aims at our very essence,—who not only forbids us to be any longer, but to have been at all. Let our ancestors look to it. ”

“ God forbid that we should glorify the assassin, no matter to what party he belonged! We would only indicate, from the historical point of view, the difference that may exist between one murderer and another. ”

“ Then how plain to me, the assassin goes through the woods, watchfully, like an Indian. The tramp boatman patrols the shore, to signal to the other when the victim appears; or, should the assassin on shore be unable to creep upon his prey, the assassin in the boat may row boldly near, and, at the signal from the other, telling him there is a clear coast, fire upon the victim. If he is sure of his aim, how easy! And if seen by the victim, well—'Dead men tell no tales.'"
He muses silently awhile now, puts down the doctor's letter, and takes up the other. ”

“ With one wild cry to Heaven for assistance, he continued prostrate on the earth, bleeding, and nearly insensible. The hoarse voices of the men, and the still louder baying of the dog, were now so near, that instant destruction seemed inevitable,—already he felt himself in their fangs, and the bloody knife of the assassin appeared [pg 95] to gleam before his eyes,—despair renewed his energy, and once more, in an agony of affright that seemed verging towards madness, he rushed forward so rapidly that terror seemed to have given wings to his feet. ”

“ The Huey Long Murder Case
[1]
1 —— Prelude to an Inquest
“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”
——DISRAELI
The motives which prompt a killer to do away with a public figure are frequently anything but clear. On the other hand, the identity of such an assassin rarely is in doubt. The assassin himself sees to that, in obvious eagerness to attain recognition as the central figure of a world-shaking event. ”

“ I was impressed with the idea that the assassin was a man of great nerve. Although guards had hold of his arms, the prisoner could have walked unaided to the chair. Aside from the prisoner's last words, there was not a sound in the death chamber, and the prisoner himself gave no evidence of fear. ”

“ They have no stone, bench, nor altar upon which these cruel assassins lay the animal’s head in this operation. I should beg his pardon indeed for calling him an assassin, as he is not so merciful as to aim at the life, but, on the contrary, to keep the beast alive till he be totally eat up. ”

“ I argued. "If, as these words seem to prove, the assassin had some other motive than plunder in his assault, then your husband had an enemy, though you never suspected it."
"Impossible!" was her steady reply, uttered in the most convincing tone. "The man who shot him was a common burglar, and frightened at having been betrayed into murder, fled without looking for booty. I am sure I heard him cry out in terror and remorse: 'God! ”

“ From what we have read of the history of murderers, it would seem that there was something more than a rhetorical figure in those words in Genesis, which give a voice to the blood shed by violence. Hundreds and thousands have heard such a voice. Often it amounts to nothing, that the assassin has concealed his crime from his fellow-men, and can walk abroad in the community with no suspicious eyes turned towards him. He is haunted by something which keeps publishing his guilt. ”

“ I increased my pace, and presently turning a corner, saw a burly fellow just dragging a body beneath a gas-lamp, the better to enable him to secure the plunder on his victim's body.
The assassin had already secured most of the stricken man's valuables, when my rapid approach alarmed him, and jumping up, he sprang along the street at a break-neck pace. ”

“ The exceptional treatment of hanging and then burning the body of the criminal was owing to the crime being, over and above that of murder, the particularly heinous one, in the eye of the old laws, of petit treason, the murdered person being the master of, and person in authority over, the assassin. ”

“ Keeping now steadily in mind the points to which I have drawn your attention—that peculiar voice, that unusual agility, and that startling absence of motive in a murder so singularly atrocious as this—let us glance at the butchery itself. Here is a woman strangled to death by manual strength, and thrust up a chimney, head downward. Ordinarily assassins employ no such modes of murder as this. ”

“ A sturdy old man, rich in this world’s goods, highly esteemed, retired from active life, without a known enemy, and his equally unoffending wife were cut down in their own house, in the broad daylight; and the assassin had left absolutely no trace of himself. ”

“ Is it necessary to tell you now, sir, that since the 17th of April you have driven me from my paradise, and that you have become my executioner!
“I have but little more to say but that when I was a gray musqueteer I would have killed any one who raised his eyes toward my mistress; you, sir, have done more than raise your eyes toward her—you have robbed me of her—you have taken my little bench. It is more than an insult. It is, believe me, a murder—an assassination. ”

“ If the murder theory is true, the assassin must have planned to murder with great care. [It was all done on the spur of the moment, and the death probably an accident.] He must have had an accomplice who brought him to the boat before the murder, and took him away afterward, and he must have known in some mysterious way that Z was going to visit the boat that Sunday afternoon. ”

“ The fact that such discussion was possible showed clearly that the theory of the existence of some mysterious assassin had captured the popular imagination. There was really no reason why any murderer should not send a numbered counter to his prospective victim, but people argued, quite correctly, that murders were far more often the result of sudden impulse than of deliberate intention. ”

“ Another name with a somewhat similar meaning is assassin, which most people would not guess to have ever been the name of a collection of people. An assassin is a person who arranges beforehand to take some one by surprise and kill him. But the original assassins were an Eastern people who believed that the murder of people of a religion other than their own was pleasing to their God. The Arabs first called this sect by the name hashshash, which the scholars of the Middle Ages translated into the Latin assassinus. ”

“ The steel is in the assassin's uplifted hand. Witnessing angels are moved at the fearful sight, and cry out—"Stay thy hand! and hurt not the man!" but lo, 'tis not the hand of an Abraham [15] that holds the deadly knife on high, but of the cruel assassin, whose soul communes not with angels of good, but is in league with angels of evil, who in cooler mood might relent the fiendish order to strike—if that were possible with evil demons—but being now at the mighty on-rush, like lightning the fatal blow descends ”

“ These assassins, united in an association that could not be reached, strangled, in honor of the goddess of death, victims of every age, without ever shedding blood, and there was a time when the ground could not be dug up anywhere in this neighborhood without finding a corpse. ”

“ I have satisfied myself that the assassin, approaching from the south, made almost the circuit of that long mound, after making sure that no one was near, in order to reach the point, scarcely twelve feet from the place where the body was found, from which to fire the fatal shot. ”

“ But as thou, John Grant of Knockando, wert present at the last interview which the murdered man had with his suspected murderer only the night before, where that unjust cause of offence would seem to have been taken which whetted the cruel blade of the assassin for its purpose, we would first hear what evidence thou hast to give upon the matter. ”

“ You don’t know the kind of murderers we raise here in the country. The chances are that your city assassin would be tortured by remorse, if he escaped discovery, and that he committed the deed in a moment of passion. ”

“ The public at large are perhaps indifferent as to whether an assassin dies from a broken neck or from strangulation, but there is a widely-spread feeling that no more physical pain than is absolutely necessary should be inflicted on the miserable wretch. ”

“ One of them sprang from his horse, beheld the deathly struggle going on, and not knowing which was the aggressor, but seeing that one held the other at a fatal disadvantage, called to my assailant instantly to desist or die. The assassin again raised his arm: the horseman saw him about to strike--levelled a pistol at his head--fired--and the murderer, dropping the weapon from his hand, staggered up upon his feet--reeled for a moment, and then fell dead across my chest.
CHAPTER XV.
Oh, life! ”

“ Prowling among the rocks and shooting those who cannot tell whence the bullet comes, there is no wide gap between him and the assassin. His victims never see him, and in the ordinary course he incurs no personal danger. ”

“ The Assassins were not so called because they were murderers, but murderers are called assassins because the Assassins were murderers. The origin of the word Assassin has been much disputed by oriental scholars; but its application is sufficiently written upon the Asiatic history of the 12th century. The Assassins were not, strictly speaking, a dynasty, but rather an order, like the Templars ”

“ What strikes the stranger most, and what to-day is making the whole city talk, but only talk, is the common occurrence of assassination. To-day the victim has been an excellent artist—Schwendemann, a Swiss, a medallionist. ”