Read it through once

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.”