Mezzoni the Brigand — page 136: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

128 MEZZONI THE BRIGAND. plete cabinet of tools, weapons, false keys and dis- gwuises, for the purpose of successful villainy. It must have been the consummation of years. The man Beppo had at once been taken into cus- tody, not that he was believed in any sense to be guilty of complicity in his master’s misdeeds, but partly as a witness and partly that he might not be able by any means to communicate with the absent criminal, and thus enable him to escape the arrest that ayaited him on his return to the Correll pal- ace, now in the hands of the police. He who had been able to carry on unsuspected the double character which was now manifest, was too shrewd in his villainy to trust any one needlessly The man Beppo, who had so long acted as a sort of body-servant to Alberto, was a very simple-minded fellow, selected by his master, perhaps, on that very account. He was one who had infinite fear and re- spect for his master, and would have been the last to suspect him of any unlawful acts. Though he was regular in the last degree in his own habits, the ir- regularities of his master as to his hours of outgoing and incoming were unheeded by him, or were attrib- uted to his amours and gambling engagements. He had often wondered in a simple and curious way how his master had found exit from and ingress to the palace, as he had chanced to know that he must have done, without calling upon him in his capacity of porter. He now saw very clearly that the trap- door in the yard had been regularly and constantly inuse. That it could have existed at all upon the premises, and not be known to a person of the house- hold in his situation, was a fact in itself going far to prove his hopeless stupidity. Thus it was that the most thorough and elaborate comicbooks.com —