Also a prince’s cook; and even the water-carrier of that sublime lord of lords and king of kings, the Governor-General of India!  How broad they were in their tastes!  They also murdered actors—­poor wandering barnstormers.  There are two instances recorded; the first one by a gang of Thugs under a chief who soils a great name borne by a better man —­Kipling’s deathless “Gungadin”: 

“After murdering 4 sepoys, going on toward Indore, met 4 strolling players, and persuaded them to come with us, on the pretense that we would see their performance at the next stage.  Murdered them at a temple near Bhopal.”

Second instance: 

     “At Deohuttee, joined by comedians.  Murdered them eastward of that
     place.”

But this gang was a particularly bad crew.  On that expedition they murdered a fakeer and twelve beggars.  And yet Bhowanee protected them; for once when they were strangling a man in a wood when a crowd was going by close at hand and the noose slipped and the man screamed, Bhowanee made a camel burst out at the same moment with a roar that drowned the scream; and before the man could repeat it the breath was choked out of his body.

The cow is so sacred in India that to kill her keeper is an awful sacrilege, and even the Thugs recognized this; yet now and then the lust for blood was too strong, and so they did kill a few cow-keepers.  In one of these instances the witness who killed the cowherd said, “In Thuggee this is strictly forbidden, and is an act from which no good can come.  I was ill of a fever for ten days afterward.  I do believe that evil will follow the murder of a man with a cow.  If there be no cow it does not signify.”  Another Thug said he held the cowherd’s feet while this witness did the strangling.  He felt no concern, “because the bad fortune of such a deed is upon the strangler and not upon the assistants; even if there should be a hundred of them.”

There were thousands of Thugs roving over India constantly, during many generations.  They made Thug gee a hereditary vocation and taught it to their sons and to their son’s sons.  Boys were in full membership as early as 16 years of age; veterans were still at work at 70.  What was the fascination, what was the impulse?  Apparently, it was partly piety, largely gain, and there is reason to suspect that the sport afforded was the chiefest fascination of all.  Meadows Taylor makes a Thug in one of his books claim that the pleasure of killing men was the white man’s beast-hunting instinct enlarged, refined, ennobled.  I will quote the passage: 

CHAPTER XLVII.

Simple rules for saving money:  To save half, when you are fired by an eager impulse to contribute to a charity, wait, and count forty.  To save three-quarters, count sixty.  To save it all, count sixty-five. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.