The Green-Goods King

Roy Glashan's Library
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ARTHUR B. REEVE

THE GREEN-GOODS KING

First published in The Popular Magazine, 1 May 1912
(this version)

This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2023
Version Date: 2023-11-28

Produced by Gordon Hobley, Matthias Kaether and Roy Glashan
Proofread by Gordon Hobley

All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright.

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Mr. Reeve has discovered a new kind of detective in Professor Kennedy—a man who spends a good deal of time in his laboratory and applies science to his detective work with astonishing success, In this complicated case, which involves two prominent men and a host of smaller fry, only the scientific methods of Professor Kennedy could have succeeded in unraveling the tangled plot. It is a mystery story of more than ordinary merit.

Chapter I. A Note of Appeal.
Chapter II. Between the Devil and the Deep Sea.
Chapter III. Across the Dead Line.
Chapter IV. The Girl in the Bubble.
Chapter V. Setting Traps.
Chapter VI. The Black Hand Letter.
Chapter VII. Scientific Eavesdropping.
Chapter VIII. In the Paragon.
Chapter IX. The Secret-Service Man.
Chapter X. The Mystery of the Money Vault.
Chapter XI. The Infernal Machine.
Chapter XII. The Temptation of Kennedy.
Chapter XIII. The Plan of Attack.
Chapter XIV. The Raid on the Counterfeiters' Den.
Chapter XV. The Dummy Director.
Chapter XVI. The Green-Goods King.

CHAPTER I.
A NOTE OF APPEAL.

"THAT'S a peculiar letter, Walter," I remarked to Craig Kennedy, one morning, as we were winnowing the real letters from the one-cent advertising chaff of our mail.

He tossed the note over to me, and leaned back in his revolving chair, with his hands behind his head, watching my face intently as I read it.

The lithographed heading bore the name of the Stock Exchange Trust Company, and I jumped at the conclusion that it was a get-rich-quick proposal, for the trust company in question, with its high-sounding and misleading name, was not—well, conservative. Indeed, it had for some time been figuring in the newspapers because of its connection with certain shady mining-stock deals. The State banking authorities had investigated it, but, to the surprise of everybody, had found nothing legally wrong, and had pronounced it solvent. But the first paragraph showed me that I was mistaken in the character of the letter, and the second aroused my curiosity to the burning point. The letter was brief:

Your name has been suggested to me by a friend who informs me that you have achieved marked success in the application of science in detective work. If your engagements permit, will you kindly make an appointment to see me at your earliest possible convenience?

There are certain peculiar matters in relation to the trust company that I should like to have investigated, both financial and of a personal nature, involving a certain young person whose fascination seems to have proved too great for one of our directors.

Please let me know over the telephone when to expect you, but under no circumstances communicate with me at the trust company; my private telephone is 3300 Trinity.

"'A certain young person whose fascination seems to have proved too great for one of our directors,'" I re-read. Then I looked at the heading, and found that James Snead was the fifth in the list of ten directors of the trust company, whose president was Chester C. Miller, and vice president William K. Moore, of the unsavory firm of Miller & Moore, bankers and brokers. The other names on the board were Henry Pembroke, Norman Lloyd, Philip Barclay, Thomas Warner, George Rector, Paul Stevens, and Jacob New.

"What do you make of it, yourself?" I asked at length, looking up and catching Kennedy's bland smile at my bewilderment.

He had been fumbling with a file of the Star, which we kept in our den, and at last had drawn out the magazine section of the Sunday edition several weeks before.

"Either I've got a case, or it's a very novel way of circularizing to catch suckers," he replied tentatively, turning the pages of the newspaper. "Oh, yes, here it is—you remember that article?"

He tossed over the paper, and I saw that he had opened it to a lurid story, entitled "The Girl in the Get-Rich-Quick Game."

I did remember the article, but not seeing the connection with the present case, I glanced over it hastily again. It began with a statement by the United States marshal:

In every get-rich-quick concern I've ever investigated, sitting close beside the desk of the manager, I've always found a girl who shares his secrets and helps him spend the money he's making. Often she is seen with him in restaurants and helps him in his business. Nearly always she's wise—or quickly becomes so.

The newspaper artist had been inspired to depict a get-rich-quick broker blowing bubbles, and in each bubble, floating across the page, was a girl's face. I read further:

Whenever the bubble bursts, young woman invariably pops out. Sometimes innocently, sometimes not, she is part of the setting for nearly every scheme from bunko to bogus bonds and from flim-flam to forgery.

It began to dawn on me that Craig Kennedy had picked out the article because of the sentence that had aroused my curiosity, and I quickly ran my eyes over the columns, expecting to catch the name of "a certain young person" connected with Miller & Moore.

Kennedy noted my gaze traveling up and down the columns, and he hastened to add: "No, Walter, you won't find anything there about this case—not yet. This bubble hasn't burst." Then, as he reached for the telephone, he said: "Perhaps I can tell you more about it in a minute."

"It's a case, all right," remarked Craig, as he hung up the receiver, "and as peculiar as the letter. I am to meet three of the directors at luncheon at the Lawyers' Club to-day, and I have taken the liberty of inviting my partner, Mr. Jameson. You must manage to have the Star let you off. You've given them some good stuff lately—and this may be a big story, too, if we can carry it through."

"Certainly," I replied quickly. "I can fix it up with the Star all right. But look here, Craig, we're not going to buy any mining stock from these people, or hand over—"

"Oh, it's nothing like that, Walter," he laughed, then went on seriously: "These are the honest directors in the trust company, I take it—the insurgents. Heaven knows how they got mixed up in it, but they are in it, and there is some kind of scrap on in the board. As near as I can make out from what Snead would say over the wire, there are two women who figure in the case. Oh, well, we shall hear the whole story soon enough. I'll meet you at the club a little before one o'clock."

CHAPTER II.
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA.

JAMES SNEAD was one of the old school in Wall Street, a lawyer by training, dignified and conservative, the last person in the world whom one would expect to find mixed up with the dubious proceedings of which Miller & Moore and all their creatures, including the Stock Exchange Trust Company, were the promoters. His story was plausible enough, however. Like so many of the old school, he had been taken in early in the game, before it was apparent what manner of promotion the trust company was to be led into. Miller, Moore, and their dummy directors had wanted him because his name would lend a dignity to the board which otherwise it would be hard to secure. I rather liked the old man—especially as it was evident that it went sorely against his grain to have to admit that he had made a mistake, even though the admission was part of the process of squaring himself with the world.

Much the same thing could be said of Pembroke and Lloyd, who were the other two directors waiting to meet us. They were younger men, though of excellent reputation. Pembroke came of a fine Southern family, and after his graduation from college had settled down in New York to learn the stock and bond business, being mostly interested in the development of the "new South," where his own family had large holdings. Lloyd was a Canadian by birth, and, though a man of considerable experience, a comparative newcomer in Wall Street. I fancy that the fact of their large outside interests accounted for their ready acquiescence in the plans of Miller & Moore when the trust company was incorporated, for neither Pembroke nor Lloyd were "fall guys."

Snead was quite evidently the leader, and both the younger men deferred readily to him. The three had apparently talked the thing over, and, after conferring with some of the larger stockholders who were getting uneasy, and were not satisfied with the examination by the State authorities of the resources of the trust company, had determined to do a little sleuthing on their own account quietly. Hence the letter to Kennedy.

Snead selected an isolated round table off in a corner, where conversation could not be readily overheard, and we five sat down, the formalities of introduction being very simple, in view of the large issues that seemed to weigh on the minds of at least three of our party. Downtown lunching clubs are surely a boon to the busy man, for they enable him to transact business without risking either starvation or the lining of his stomach.

"There is no use hesitating or mincing matters in the least, Mr. Kennedy," began Snead, coming directly to the point, the moment we had given our order to the waiter, and his back was turned. "I think I can put the case in a nutshell when I say that we—the minority—do not at all approve of how matters are going in the trust company, or of the use that is being made of the trust company by Miller & Moore, and particularly of the junior member of the firm, in promoting some of their schemes."

"Particularly of the latest," broke in Lloyd. "The American Telephotograph Company, which claims to have the rights to a new invention for telegraphing photographs. The machine may be all right, but the promoters—"

"Oh, you can say the same of practically all the schemes, Lloyd," interrupted Pembroke. "That isn't the point we are interested in just now. Mr. Snead will agree with me, I am sure, when I say that our main concern is the trust company with which we are all three connected, and hence responsible for?"

"Exactly," nodded Snead. "There are certain suspicious things, Mr. Kennedy, that we should like to have you look into, with a view to clearing them up, if possible, without a scandal. It is too long a story to tell you just how we came to be involved in this business, but, having let our names become connected with it in the first instance, we feel that we cannot withdraw lest something may come out which will put us in a bad light; something that has already taken place unknown to us, and which we should be powerless to control or remedy if we sever our connection just now. But we cannot stay without knowing more than we do. In short, we are between the devil and the deep sea. We can't get out, and we can't stay in."

Pembroke and Lloyd murmured an approval, and the conversation was suspended while the waiter deposited the light luncheon which we had ordered.

"Just what are your suspicions?" asked Kennedy, as soon as we were free again, for it was evident that the three directors regarded themselves as somewhat in the position of conspirators, and were fearful lest even a breath of their intentions should reach ears for which they were not meant.

"As you doubtless know," resumed Snead, "the president of the trust company and head of the board of directors is Chester Miller. But, from our standpoint, Moore is even more dangerous—the vice president, you know. I think I may say that all the other directors, except ourselves, are merely the tools of these two. You see, we three are outvoted three to one. Yet we do not propose to lie down and take whatever comes without a protest."

"Indeed, we do not," interjected Pembroke, as Snead paused, evidently for the approval of the others. "Miller has involved the trust company in many schemes of—ah—high finance against our advice and votes."

"But Moore is the real power, to my way of thinking," asserted Lloyd vigorously.

Snead was leaning forward over the table, and in a half whisper resumed the story:

"Loans are being made to dummies, and kept secret by some system or other of bookkeeping—that is, we suspect they are. Moore has got mixed up in some deals—of his own, I mean—that are positively scandalous. Where has he got the money? In a small way the dummy directors are mixed up in things that call for a good deal of money, too. Now, none of them has money of his own. I tell you, if you sit down with a paper and pencil, as I have, and figure up the cash that these people must have put up to launch their schemes privately on the unsuspecting public, you would really begin to wonder that the Stock Exchange Trust Company had a cent of its legal cash reserve left in its vaults."

"You mentioned in your letter something about a certain young person whose fascinations—"

"That's another thing we most strenuously object to, Professor Kennedy," whispered Snead, cracking his knuckles nervously. "We object to some of the personal actions of both Mr. Moore and Mr. Miller. Of course, you know that in all such schemes as these get-rich-quick firms are promoting there is generally a woman in the case. Women with money are investing more and more, and even the legitimate brokers are not averse to having departments run especially for the benefit and attraction of women investors. Miller & Moore, who have offices on the seventh floor of the building where the trust company occupies the ground floor and basement, make a great specialty of catering to women investors. They have a woman managing that department, a Miss Fairchild, who is as clever as any man who ever managed a bucket shop."

"Yes," drawled Pembroke, with just a trace of his Southern accent cropping out, "and I reckon that the other woman in the case is just about as important, too."

"It's just this," continued Snead. "We do know that it is the common talk of the employees of the trust company that Miller has a mysterious friend who calls herself Mrs. Fitzherbert. She is never seen at the bank, or in the office of Miller & Moore; in fact, never even lunches downtown. Miller, however, frequently finds that business engagements make it necessary for him to lunch uptown. We haven't the slightest idea who she is, or whether she may not represent some financial interest or other, but the telephone switchboard operator in Miller & Moore's, whom we have paid to report certain things to us, says that she always gives the name of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and always calls up from the swell hotels and restaurants, or else pay stations uptown. So there is no way of tracing out who she is in that way. We can't follow Miller ourselves—that's too risky."

"There's something else, too, Mr. Snead," added Lloyd. "Moore, who usually takes his cue from Miller, or at least used to do so, until he got to speculating so heavily on his own private account, is now more master than pupil. Moore, we understand, is pretty friendly with Miss Fairchild, who is really a rather unusual type of girl. Of course, it may be all right. It may be that he finds that she is more useful to him than any of the men in the office in selling stocks and planning campaigns—but it's rather queer, rather queer. And in Moore's case it's much worse than in Miller's, because, while Miller is divorced, Moore has a wife, whom we understand he neglects frightfully."

"Oh, it may be all right," said Snead, trying hard to be generous. "Business is business, after all, and some women are wonders nowadays in coaxing dollars out of investors. To sum it all up, this depression in the stock market has come along. Miller should be retrenching, protecting the trust company against the depreciation in some of the wild investments that were made in more prosperous times. Instead of that, he advocates pouring more money into them, says stocks are cheap, and that we have a chance to make money both going and coming. Moore ought to be scratching around to protect the trust company, as well as his own private schemes. They don't seem to realize how heavily they are involved. If Miller & Moore go under, a run will start on the trust company, and when that starts it is as good as a failure; the doors would close after the first day. No other company would risk coming to our assistance. Indeed, the more conservative bankers would rather welcome our failure if they could check the trouble with us alone."

"This is all very interesting and important," remarked Kennedy, slowly turning the revelations over in his mind. "I should be inclined to start with trying to discover who the mysterious Mrs. Fitzherbert is, and what is back of the friendliness between Moore and Miss Fairchild. I suppose your telephone girl could get me started?"

"Surely," agreed Snead. "Pembroke will let you know to-morrow morning whether any engagements have been made by any of them. It is too late to do anything to-day."

"Meanwhile," pursued Kennedy, anxious to get down to action, "I think it would be well to know something more—even if it isn't much more—about the actual cash in the possession of the company."

No one spoke for a moment. "I move, then," said Pembroke, breaking the silence, "that Mr. Snead, who has the necessary authority, be appointed a committee of one to visit the trust company's vaults to-night, examine the cash reserve, and, if there is any reason to suspect anything, we'll come out in the open, and demand another investigation."

"Meanwhile, Mr. Kennedy," concluded Snead, "until you hear from me, consider that you are engaged by us in this case, formulate your plans, but do not do anything openly. If I find nothing, it will make our case so much the harder."

CHAPTER III.
ACROSS THE DEAD LINE.

"FOR Heaven's sake, Walter, look at this," cried Kennedy, as we were dressing the next morning. The hall boy had just brought up our papers, and Craig was glancing over the headlines on the first page, as he struggled with a refractory collar button.

I glanced down on the table, and read the news item he was indicating with his finger. It was in the space reserved for short news items that come in just as the paper is going to press, and too late to be played up with a full story and a black-type heading:

JAMES SNEAD, DIRECTOR OF STOCK EXCHANGE TRUST COMPANY, DISCOVERED DEAD LAST NIGHT FROM SELF-INFLICTED PISTOL WOUND UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES.

When Patrick Kelly, night watchman for the Stock Exchange Trust Company, nodded "Good evening" to James Snead, one of the directors, as he entered the safe-deposit vaults of the trust company, there was nothing in his manner to indicate that half an hour later the well-known banker and lawyer would be found stretched in a pool of red blood on the white marble floor of the vault, with the door of the vault open and all the lights glowing brightly.

"No other person except myself and Mr. Snead was in the building at the time," says Kelly. "Mr. Snead had come in with the necessary credentials, and I suppose the combinations, and had spoken cheerfully to me, as he always did when we met. I accompanied him down, switched on the lights, and left him in the vault unlocking one of the deposit boxes. Patrolman Kavanaugh stopped and tried the door to the office building as I came back to the hall to sit down in my armchair in front of the elevators. He caught sight of me and waved his nightstick by way of greeting, and went on.

"A moment later came a cry from the vault below. I had gone to the door and opened it to talk to Kavanaugh, who had not reached the next office building. He heard the cry out on the street. Together we rushed down into the vault. On the floor we found Mr. Snead, groaning. We carried him upstairs and placed him on a divan in the directors' room. Officer Kavanaugh summoned an ambulance, but Mr. Snead never regained consciousness, and was dead before it arrived. I heard no sound of an explosion or of a shot fired."

The rest of the account consisted of a biography of Snead, and a brief reference to the rumors current regarding the financial condition and speculations of the trust company.

"What does it mean?" I asked, looking at Kennedy in amazement. "What did he discover? Why should Snead commit suicide?"

"Did he commit suicide?" Kennedy replied by asking another question. "Walter, don't you see anything peculiar in it?"

"And that means that Snead did not commit suicide?" I queried. "You think he was murdered?"

Before Craig had time to answer, the buzzer on our door sounded, and Pembroke, pale and nervous, walked in, and dropped heavily into a chair.

"You have read it?" he cried excitedly. "I was notified early this morning, and went directly to the trust company. I've just come from the office."

To our anxious inquiries for later news he went on: "The body has been examined by the coroner, and removed to the rooms of a burial company, pending the notification of Snead's relatives in the West. He had no home here—lived at an uptown club."

"Too bad," remarked Craig ruefully. "I wish I had been notified in time. I should like to have seen the way in which the body was found in the vault. Didn't the coroner notice anything peculiar about the case?"

"Of course, but he has said nothing about it for publication. They are working on it now. So you noticed that nothing was said about finding a pistol?"

"I noticed it at once when I read the account. There is one other thing I wish to speak about, Mr. Pembroke. Now that Mr. Snead has been killed in this mysterious manner, how does that affect me? My dealings were with him, you know. Does this end my connection with the case?" asked Kennedy.

"Not a bit of it," replied Pembroke hurriedly. "On the contrary, we need your help more than ever. In the publicity that will now come to the trust company's affairs, we must have some one we can rely on. You won't desert us, Mr. Kennedy? There are only two of us left now—Lloyd and myself."

"Pembroke," he answered, with all the earnestness that he usually displayed when thoroughly interested in clearing up a baffling mystery, "my only anxiety has been that you might want to drop the case, now that Mr. Snead is dead. I will follow this trail if it takes me to the ferry of Charon."

"I don't think it would have made much difference. You know they had already carried him upstairs. But you can see the body at the burial company. I expect Lloyd any moment. We are going up there now to complete the financial arrangements."

When Lloyd entered, a few minutes later, Pembroke could restrain himself no longer. "How were the securities and the cash reserve, Norman?" he asked anxiously. "Was anything wrong?"

"No," replied Lloyd. "We went over everything hurriedly. All seems to be correct. All the directors were there except Moore and yourself. Everything looks O.K. So far there can be no doubt of that."

We looked at each other blankly. The case was cloudier yet; so cloudy that for the time it obscured Craig's clue of the missing pistol.

Kennedy's examination was brief. For a quarter of an hour or so he worked, while with averted faces we waited impatiently to learn what he expected to find. As he looked up at last, his expression was such as to cause us to cry out simultaneously: "What is it? What have you found?"

He looked again, though not with the air of a man who hesitated. Then he said, slowly and deliberately: "James Snead was not a suicide. He was murdered in cold blood."

"Yes; no one could possibly, have inflicted such a wound as this on himself. The bullet entered the back of his skull, was deflected, and passed on below the right ear, where it was stopped. He would have had to hold the pistol in the most awkward position imaginable, and with his left hand, too. Mr. Snead was not left-handed. I remember that from yesterday."

Craig had by this time probed a steel bullet out of the gaping wound, and had laid it on the table. He was thoughtfully turning it over with a steel knife.

It was a small thing, perhaps, but might it not prove very important? But it did not convey any clue to me, nor do I think it did to Kennedy, yet. At least, he said nothing about it.

"As nearly as I can make out," he continued, half to us, and half to himself, "the strangest part of the whole affair is that no one was seen to enter the trust company that night except Snead. Kelly is absolutely exonerated by Kavanaugh, the policeman, as I understand it. And certainly no one could have left the trust company after the shooting without being observed. There is no secret entrance or passageway into the vault?"

"Of course not," exclaimed Pembroke. "The vault has a chrome-steel lining inside of two feet of steel railroad rails, re-enforced by concrete. No, it is absolutely inexplicable, any way you look at it."

"There are seven other directors," remarked Kennedy sententiously. Then, as if to avoid the leading question, he asked quickly: "Have you found out about this Mrs. Fitzherbert and Miss Fairchild? There is where I want to begin."

"Yes," replied Lloyd, "I almost forgot to tell you. The telephone central at the office told me as I was leaving that Mrs. Fitzherbert had talked to Miller early in the morning, and that he had arranged to meet her and lunch at the Mozambique Hotel to-day. I have learned, also, that Moore purchased two orchestra tickets at the Répertoire Française for to-night. The other directors show their grief in equally touching fashion. No doubt they would give a beefsteak dinner if Pembroke and myself should cross the dead line, too."

"That's interesting. I think I shall start right there. It's an old rule, and a good one, of 'Cherchez la femme,'" said Craig.

"Ah!" exclaimed Pembroke, as he gazed at the face of his dead friend, "if he could only speak, what a tale he might tell."

CHAPTER IV.
THE GIRL IN THE BUBBLE.

KENNEDY'S next step was to become familiar with the faces of Miller, Moore, and the other directors, and as for that purpose he did not wish to come out into the open, and make personal visits even under pretext, I suggested that we drop into the Star office. The art department found most of the photographs in the files, and for several minutes Craig studied them carefully. In the meantime I had asked for the envelopes from the biographical department containing all the clippings about those mentioned in the case. Miller's envelope was fairly bulky, and so was Moore's, but beyond a record of some of their daring coups in floating wildcat stocks there was nothing that shed any light. The other directors had never been prominent in the news, and as for Miss Fairchild and Mrs. Fitzherbert, there was absolutely nothing either in the clippings or in the art department about them.

We had just time to ride uptown to the Mozambique Hotel in the noon hour. We sauntered into the parlor, after the highwayman at the door had captured our hats and consented to issue a brass check against our ever wanting them again. There were several ladies in the parlor, evidently waiting for friends. Which of them was the mysterious Mrs. Fitzherbert I could not even guess.

There were only a dozen or so tables occupied in the handsome big dining room, as we glanced in at the door. Kennedy looked over the diners perfunctorily, though it was quite certain that we were early, and that Miller had not arrived. Then we settled ourselves in a corner beneath a cluster of palms to wait.

"There he is," I heard Kennedy whisper at length, as he tugged on my arm surreptitiously.

Miller was a tall, well-built man, not quite of middle age, with a high forehead, curly, raven-black hair, and two rows of splendid teeth that fairly gleamed as his face lighted up with a smile at catching sight of a woman waiting for him in the farthest corner.

"There's no mystery about the fascination of that man," commented Kennedy, "you can see daring and high animal spirits sticking out all over him. That fellow's dangerous—among the ladies. Look at his clothes; they sit on him like a fashion plate, and yet the last thing you would call him would be a fop."

Mrs. Fitzherbert, for of course it must have been she, had risen to meet him, extending a delicately gloved hand. I shall not attempt to describe how she was gowned. A tall, queenly-looking woman she was, with ruddy cheeks that needed no artificial coaxing to display the real glow of health. There was an air of culture and refinement about her, too—of the woman who thought deeply and strongly on anything that interested her. As a matter of fact, I was not surprised to see that the book which she had been reading was Ellen Key's "Love and Marriage."

She had evidently been reading something in it that met a response in her own feelings, for she indicated a passage to Miller which he read politely but quickly. It was apparent that bank books and perhaps even betting books were more in Miller's line, though the passage seemed to strike his fancy, and he nodded as their eyes met. He assumed charge of book, wraps, and other paraphernalia, and escorted her into the dining room, his head bent earnestly as she spoke.

A moment later Craig rose, and looked at his watch as if to indicate that we had waited long enough for some one who had not arrived. We entered the dining room, which by this time was well filled, and I saw Miller and Mrs. Fitzherbert seat themselves at the farther end near the windows.

Of course, the head waiter and a flock of his minions swarmed down on us, but Craig deftly shook them off, and managed to secure the next table. They were so engrossed in each other that they did not pay any attention to us, and in order not to let them catch a glimpse of his face Kennedy sat down with his back to Mrs. Fitzherbert, who was nearest our table, and hence in the position in which he could most easily overhear any chance remark that might be made.

I didn't pay much attention to the luncheon, letting Kennedy do the ordering. From my position I could see Miller and Mrs. Fitzherbert without any trouble, but of course could not hear what they were saying. They were conversing earnestly in low tones—I am sure it was about the death of Snead, for Mrs. Fitzherbert's sensitive face wore a shocked expression as Miller spoke earnestly. But they were very guarded, and Craig leaned over to inform me that he could distinguish nothing of what was passing between them.

"Tell me when they get to the coffee," he said finally, after we had toyed with the ostentatious creations of the famous chef at the Mozambique.

"They are ordering pastry and coffee now," I reported a few moments later, and without waiting Kennedy caught the eye of our own waiter, and paid the check. We left as quietly as possible, and I do not think we attracted the attention of the pair at the adjoining table.

Craig summoned a taxicab. As the door closed the driver leaned back for directions. Craig slipped a bill into his hand. "Across the street," he said. "We are waiting for some friends to come out of the Mozambique. It's all right. I'll give you the directions in a minute."

The driver must have thought we were crazy, to pay for a waiting cab in that way, but with much changing of gears and backing and going ahead he managed to take a position opposite the carriage entrance, across the narrow street.

A moment later Miller and Mrs. Fitzherbert appeared. A big limousine, which had been waiting down the street, pulled up in front of the hotel, and Miller handed the woman gallantly into it, bowing and calling a taxicab for himself.

"Follow that black limousine. There's a five-spot in it if you don't let them shake you."

We were off down Broadway to Union Square, around the square, then over to Fourth Avenue. On downtown the black limousine sped, turning into the Bowery, and finally into a side street, overflowing with children, until at last it stopped in the heart of the Italian quarter.

Our chauffeur evidently knew his business, for he did not follow so closely as to be caught by a sudden stop of the car ahead. We pulled up about half a block behind, before a little Italian restaurant, a progressive place, with an electric sign telling the world that it was "Petto's."

Mrs. Fitzherbert had entered a dingy little East Side photograph gallery whose sign bore the name of the Union Photograph Company. We could not stand there with apparently nothing to do, so we entered Petto's restaurant, drank of his surpassing coffee, and partook of his unrivaled macaroni sparingly, for we were eager to get started again. Meanwhile our chauffeur found something conveniently out of order with his engine, and had one side of the hood up in such a way that he could close it quickly.

It must have been fifteen or twenty minutes that we waited for the black limousine to continue its peregrinations about the city. So keen was I now for the chase that I forgot the mounting charges on the taximeter.

At length Mrs. Fitzherbert appeared at the entrance to the photograph gallery, ran down the steps, and the door of her car banged shut. Our chauffeur quickly closed up his engine, called us, and we were off, not two blocks behind.

Uptown we went, retracing our journey, and as we reached the region where traffic was more dense our cab pulled up close to the limousine in order not to lose it. At last it turned into Park Avenue, and stopped at one of the large, new apartments, the Alden Arms. Mrs. Fitzherbert dismissed her chauffeur, and entered. Hastily Craig paid our own driver, adding a handsome gratuity, and we were walking slowly up from the next corner. We entered the apartment.

"I'm looking for a Mrs. Fitzherbert," said Kennedy, taking out an address hook, and pretending to consult it. "I think this is the number—yes—this must be it."

"That's strange. I could have sworn that the lady who came in just now, as we were looking at the numbers, was she."

"Yes, I think she did come in an automobile. I just saw her coming up the steps."

"Oh, yes," remarked Craig, consulting the directory. "Mrs. William K. Moore. I see. Thank you, just the same. I must have made a mistake in putting the number down." Outside he gasped: "Now, what do you know about that, Walter? Mrs. Fitzherbert is Mrs. Moore."

He stopped in a drug store, and consulted both the directory and the telephone book. Sure enough, the address given under Moore's name was the Alden Arms.

Far from making the case more luminous, our shadowing had really made it more shady.

"We must find out something about that photograph gallery," said Craig thoughtfully, planning our next step as we walked over to the nearest car line. Suddenly he pulled out his watch. "Walter, it isn't late. And we have several hours to kill before the performance at the Répertoire. Suppose you run down to one of the commercial agencies, and see what they have to say about the Union Photograph Company, while I try to get orchestra seats for tonight."

Thanks to my connection with the Star, I was given access to information quickly, and it proved an easier thing than I had anticipated to find out about the photograph company. At the commercial agency where I called it chanced that the man who wrote up that line of trade was in, and, with the permission of an officer of the agency whom I knew, I was able to get him to talk.

The company, he told me, was capitalized for a very small sum, and had been in business only a short time, but its credit rating was high as far as it went.

He could have knocked me over with a feather when he added confidentially: "Of course, I don't say this for publication, but you can take it for what it is worth. In my report to the agency I said that the company was run by a Professor Francesco, an Italian. Now, that is strictly true. He does the photographic work—that is, what work they get. But it is understood that Mr. Moore, of Miller & Moore, is backing the thing. Why, I can't say. But at least two of the firms from which they purchase materials have told me that they have been given to understand that William K. Moore is interested. You know of him, of course—the man who is connected with that Stock Exchange Trust Company."

Kennedy was quite puzzled at my report. It did not seem to fit in with the theory he had half formed about the case, but he said nothing, though I could see he was mentally revising the theory. "Now, why should Moore be backing a little photograph gallery on the East Side?" he asked, thinking aloud. "The more we get into the ramifications of this thing the more puzzling it appears. I'm glad that we are booked to spend the evening studying the habits and movements of Moore."

As chance had it, Kennedy had luckily been able to get seats at the Répertoire only a few rows back of those obtained by Moore, though in the next aisle. We could see, without being seen, and Kennedy leveled his opera glass in Moore's direction as often as he could without attracting attention.

Miss Fairchild was a dashing and pronounced blonde. The woman, as I learned afterward, had started her business career typewriting aphorisms of success which were used for Western bait, picturing in alluring phrases how by turning over one hundred dollars, according to a new fortune-for-a-farthing system, prosperity could be made to order.

That had been before she was employed by Miller & Moore. Another promoter, who had since "busted," had discovered her ability. And, as prosperity in easy-money enterprises always carries with it the ready sharing of the proceeds, the girl at the elbow of the promoter was not forgotten. She was invited out to dinner, saw rare vintages in the bottles on the table, received occasional gifts of jewelry, and was painstaking in her efforts for the welfare of the enterprise. Her case had not been like many others. When the promoter went "busted," he had been able to cover his tracks so well that all thought of prosecution had been snuffed out. Therefore she had not seen the seamy side of the adventures with other people's money. When she started she knew no more about frenzied finance than the girl in the department store knows of the manufacture of mercerized cotton. But she had learned quickly, with the stock ticker on one side, the telephone on the other, and her typewriter before her. Miss Innocence soon became Miss Sophisticated.

As I studied her face I became convinced that here at least was a girl who knew thoroughly well how to take care of herself. She had had ample opportunity, and had profited greatly. That was why, when Miller & Moore had awakened to the value of catering to women, and also to a certain type of men with money that cried for investment, they had engaged Miss Vida Fairchild on the spot.

They were very good friends, it appeared, the junior partner and the manager of the women's investing department. I shall not attempt to describe the play. In fact, I did not see much of it. I was totally occupied in watching the animated vibration of the black pearl ear drops of Miss Fairchild as she discussed something with Moore in the intermissions between the scenes and acts. I am sure Kennedy, also, saw nothing of the play, for he was fully occupied in watching the other drama before us, and when he was not watching I found him with his eyes half closed, which I knew meant that he was dreaming out a course of action or a theory which explained some one of the many baffling points of the mystery of which we found ourselves so strangely a part.

At last the show was over, and we leisurely made our way out with the crowd to the brilliant lights of Broadway. It all seemed unreal to me, until Kennedy, by skillful maneuvering in the crush, succeeded in getting me so close behind Moore and Miss Fairchild that we could have reached over and touched them.

"I'm not so sure of that," Moore was saying. "I've heard hints of it before. I intend to ask Mrs. M. to explain tomorrow. I won't say anything to-night, for it'll be late when I get home, and I shan't see her at breakfast—I never do. But I'll call up on the telephone about noon, and see if she has gone out again. I've a good notion to engage a private detective agency to make a report on her activities."

"Oh, I wouldn't do that," remonstrated Miss Fairchild. "People will talk, you know, and if she retaliated you'd get very little sympathy. Besides, you don't want anything else on your mind until we get the uptown office of the Telephotograph Company launched. Put it off."

"But it won't make any difference with Telephotograph," he returned doggedly. "Mixing personal affairs and business—"

We heard no more, for they had been walking slowly along Broadway, and had turned sharply into the Café Rivière.

I turned to Kennedy. "Come, Walter," he said, continuing up the blazing white way. "I think we have done enough shadowing for to-day. I don't relish it. We seem to have uncovered a most surprising mix-up."

CHAPTER V.
SETTING TRAPS.

THE next morning Kennedy had me up bright and early. As usual when he was well into a case, eating and sleeping were necessary evils that were allowed to hinder its progress only as little as was compatible with not stopping it altogether. Kennedy bolted his breakfast perfunctorily; I held back, and insisted on performing the operation properly.

Really, it did Craig much more good to arrive at his laboratory at the university and shake himself free of the few duties it happened to be necessary for him to perform that day, than many hours of sleeping or courses of eating. . He donned an old, acid-stained suit of clothes which he kept there, and filled a worn hand bag with tools. He had a square box on the table, which he asked me to carry very carefully. Outside there was nothing to indicate what its real nature might be, except that there were places for electric connections.

It was a rather bulky box, and not exactly light in weight. The farther we walked the heavier the box got, although there was nothing occult about that, especially as I despised carrying packages.

"What's in this thing?" I asked at length, as I shifted it rather petulantly from arm to arm.

"I thought as much," I replied sarcastically. But I did not pursue the subject. If Kennedy did not want to say anything he would not say anything. I had found out after a long acquaintance with him that when he started out to apply some apparatus to a certain thing he was as mute as an oyster—until he had succeeded. In other words he was very human. He didn't like to admit a failure even to me—perhaps least of all to me.

A ride on a surface car, and we found ourselves at the Alden Arms again. Kennedy took the heavy box from me as we entered and slouched forward, in much the manner of the loose-jointed mechanic.

I don't know how he worked it, but he easily managed to impress the telephone operator that he was from the company, and that there had been a complaint about the crossing of wires, or some other equally mythical mishap, in one of the apartments.

Without disturbing anything in the switchboard that would entail an explanation at the central office, he located what I afterward learned were the wires connecting with the Moore apartment.

"Now, if you will be so kind as to go up to apartment twenty-six—yes, twenty-six it is—and call down here to me," he asked of the operator, "I shall be very much obliged to you."

"Apartment twenty-six is not the Moore apartment," I suggested under my breath, running my eye quickly over the directory.

"I know it," he agreed, working feverishly to take advantage of this opportunity he had created. "I simply wanted to get rid of the operator for a time. Hello—yes. It's all right. You can come down now. I guess there'll be no more trouble."

He had seet the square box down near the back of the switchboard, out of the way, when he came in, and during the few minutes that he had been working he had connected it in an inconspicuous way with the wires leading to the Moore apartment. Then he had wound up some clockwork inside. By the time the operator returned he was replacing the coverings of the switchboard, which he had taken down.

"May I ask you to keep this box here for me?" he asked, tapping it gently with a screw driver. "I've put it back here out of the way. It's pretty heavy, and I don't want to carry it around with me all day. I'll call and get it later, if you don't mind. But please don't move it. It's a delicate thing, and easily put out of adjustment if you don't know how to handle it, and the company'll give me the deuce if anything happens to it. That's why I don't like to carry it around. I've just used it at a place below here on Park Avenue, and my next call is 'way up in the Bronx."

The operator agreed, and we departed, Kennedy back to the university, where he had a class after lunch, and I down to the Star, where I hoped to find our financial man at leisure to talk over his opinions of the Miller & Moore outfit and the trust company.

The thing that puzzled me about the Snead murder had been the loss of the pistol, and the silence observed by everybody concerning it. I was surprised to learn that it was the general impression on the "Street" that Snead had really committed suicide, and that the pistol had been made away with by some friend of his for the purpose of covering up the disgrace of a suicide. More than that, the coroner was inclined to accept that version, though he had not ceased to hunt for the person who had been responsible for removing the weapon. The Star financial man pooh-poohed my suspicions that Snead had been murdered, and, indeed, I could hardly blame him, for there was nothing, so far, in the facts of the case to convince an outsider.

I did not go with Kennedy when he went to get the instrument which he had left at the Alden Arms, and consequently I was waiting for him, somewhat impatiently, at the laboratory when he returned with it in triumph late in the afternoon.

"It was all right," he announced. "No one had touched it. I simply snapped the connections when they weren't looking, and thanked them for taking such good care of it. So here I am. Let's see what we have."

The box inclosed what Kennedy described as a very sensitive telephone receiver. But the main part of the apparatus was another box, part of whose mechanism was a steel disk something like that used in the mechanical music boxes, only without any perforations.

He handled the disk very carefully as he took it off, and placed it on another instrument, which he brought out of a cabinet. The second instrument consisted of a box also, and was topped by what looked very much like a graphophone horn.

"This is a telegraphone," explained Kennedy, talking eagerly now that he had succeeded in carrying out his plan. "You see, it works on what is a very novel principle. The Danish Edison, Poulsen, is the inventor. He discovered that he could localize very minute charges of electricity on a piece of piano wire—one charge right after another through a whole strand of yards and yards of wire. You wouldn't believe it possible, but it's a fact. Next he applied the thing practically by devising a sort of phonograph, in which the record was made, not by a needle traveling over a cylinder, but by localizing these little charges of electricity. Then he found that it made no difference if he coiled up the wire in a flat spiral—in other words, that a big disk did just as well as the long wire. All that was needed was the mechanical means of localizing these electric charges on the disk, and another means of using them to reproduce the sounds which they recorded. Here on this disk I have recorded all that was said to-day over the Moore telephone. I could take a magnet, and, by passing it over the disk, wipe out the whole record, and use the disk over again. It's needless to say that I won't do it—yet. But until I do, the record is practically permanent. Let us see what the telegraphone has to report."

He set the telegraphone going, and to my amazement words began to issue from it, precisely as from a talking machine. Most of the conversation at the start was of no value. There were calls to various tradesmen, and orders for the household, a call to a fashionable ladies' tailor on Fifth Avenue, and so on. One could judge of the progress of the morning by the progressive change in the character of the calls.

During the noon hour, apparently, the following conversation took place. Kennedy evinced great interest:

"Yes, lunching out. You were out yesterday when I called up about this time, and the day before."

"You know why not. I don't care if you go out shopping, or to visit friends, or anything like that, but—"

"Well, Caesar's wife should be above suspicion, you know. A little bird tells me that you have been lunching uptown rather often lately with a gentleman. He doesn't know—this little bird, you understand—who the gentleman is, but he saw you at the Mozambique the other day, and happened to mention it to me casually."

"Will, I'd advise you to believe only half you see, and nothing you hear. If you call up, trying to spy on my movements, I think perhaps I might make some inquiries about your business engagements and dates at night at the club. Good-by."

"Whew," exclaimed Kennedy. "That was icy. She never gave him a chance to say good-by, either. I can't say I blame her much, though."

"The nerve of him!" I ejaculated, mindful of what we had seen the night before at the Répertoire.

A long blank space followed. Then came a call. "That's Miller & Moore's number," remarked Kennedy. "She must have been excited. She never did that before. She always went outside so that the call could not be traced. Listen."

"No. Just went out to lunch with one of the directors of the trust company. Why?"

"Listen. He just called me up, thinking he'd catch me out at luncheon. Some one has been so kind as to inform him that I have been observed lunching—"

"No; I don't think he knows that. But he will know it. We must be careful, Chester. He's playing a game for high stakes, you know. He's dangerous."

"Oh, I don't understand what he is up to. I don't know, and maybe it's only a woman's foolish fears, but sometimes he makes me tremble. He seems to have such power and success when he starts out to do anything, and he never lets anybody stand in his way. I used to admire him for it. But now I'm afraid of him. All these schemes of his, I mean, alarm me. And he's out nearly every night. Oh, I can't say over the telephone all that I should like to say, but, Chester, can't I meet you somewhere downtown so that we can talk it over without having any of his friends spying on us?"

"I'm afraid I can't to-day. This Snead affair has upset things terribly. There are rumors of all kinds in the papers, and I'll just have to sit down on the lid to-day and deny everything to every reporter who comes to the office. Won't to-morrow do?"

"Well, yes. I have a little office over in the Exchange Building—an office I opened up when I thought I would go into promoting that wireless telephone patent. The lease hasn't expired, and I still have it. You could meet me there."

"Good-by, Harriet. Now, don't worry. It'll all come out right in the end. See you to-morrow."

As the telegraphone concluded, Craig shut it off quickly, and glanced at the clock on his desk.

"Quarter to six," he exclaimed. "Whatever we do, we must do to-night. Walter, is there anybody you know of who has an office in that building?"

"There most certainly is," I replied. "The Wall Street office which we keep for the financial writers on the Star is there. It's only a little cubby-hole on the eighteenth floor, but I suppose that will be just as good as a suite."

"Yes. Good! They won't be working there at night, I suppose. Can you get a key to it?"

"Surely. I'll stop at the house of our financial man on the way down to-night and get it."

"Just the thing, then," agreed Kennedy. "But we must hurry. You see, Walter, I want to get into the building while the cleaners are still working there to-night. This will be my only chance to prepare for to-morrow night without being observed."

He was wrapping up a lot of fine copper wire hastily, and from a cabinet in his laboratory he took a round disk of vulcanized rubber, perhaps three or four inches in diameter, and an inch or more thick. The whole thing did not make much of a package, and we were ready to start in a few minutes.

Fortunately we caught a subway express, and were able to make good time downtown.

The woman who was cleaning on the twentieth floor was at work around an "L" in the hall as we got off the elevator. Room 2016 bore the name of the International Wireless Telephone Corporation. Miller, as well as Moore, ran to high-sounding names for his companies, which was all right. They cost no more, and were heaps more effective in coaxing out dollars.

Kennedy, always glib in concocting stories to serve on the spur of the moment, persuaded the cleaner to let us into the office with her pass-key, and she went back to her work.

"Now, which do you suppose is Miller's desk?" asked Craig, when we were alone. "Ah, this must be it. Yes, these are his letters. Let me see. That's fortunate. The desk is near the window. Where am I going to put this thing, anyway?"

He had unwrapped the copper wire, and had taken the vulcanized rubber disk out of his pocket, and was taking a mental inventory of the furniture and the windows. Having no ideas on the subject, I prudently kept my mouth shut.

At last Kennedy fixed on a suitable place on the side of Miller's desk, where neither the electric light nor the daylight in the room would show anything. There he carefully and quickly fixed the black disk with some screws. Next he attached two wires to it, and carried them down to the floor and across in the shadow of the baseboard to the window as skillfully as an expert electrician. The woodwork around the window served to hide them also, and when it came to leading the wires out of the window itself, a pile of books and letter files on the inside window sill served admirably to conceal them. He moved the books and files carefully, tacked down the wires, and then replaced the stuff precisely as he had found it.

"Where is the Star office?" he asked, as we leaned out and looked down from our dizzy height into the now yawning darkness.

"Go down there, Walter, and catch these wires when I swing them over to you. We'll have to be careful not to let them cross the windows diagonally on the intervening floor, or some one will see them and pull them down. After you catch them, we'll see if we can't fix that in some way, perhaps let them go straight down and catch on the ledge of eighteen-sixteen, directly under us, pull them taut under that ledge, and then let them go horizontally across to your Star office window. Understand?"

I did, and a few minutes later I caught the wires which he swung over to me. After several minutes of gymnastics, at the imminent risk of our necks, we had fixed the wires in such a way that they were not noticeable. I had brought the ends in, and had attached them in such a way that none of our reporters would bother with them.

By that time Kennedy had finished his work up in Miller's office, and had joined me in the office of the Star.

"There," he said, with an air of satisfaction, as we washed up. "Now we are prepared, I think, for anything. I'm glad I had an opportunity to get that instrument in. I don't know what I should have done otherwise. I'll bring the other part of it down with us tomorrow night, and I think I can treat you to a surprise or two—that is, if the thing works, and I have every reason to believe that it will, unless somebody gets to fooling with those wires."

As in the case of the telegraphone, I said nothing, although I was burning with curiosity as to the purpose of the little black infernal machine he had installed in the modest office with the high-sounding name on the door.

CHAPTER VI.
THE BLACK HAND LETTER.

IT was fairly late when we returned to our apartment from a rather prolonged dinner at a restaurant and a general discussion of the Snead case. Following out the opinion I had already heard expressed, the papers had made much of the disappearance of the pistol, and nearly all of them hinted broadly that some one of the directors had hidden it to save Snead the stigma of suicide.

"That is the next point we must clear up," remarked Kennedy. "'I should have begun there, anyhow, only we could not have got on the scene early enough to get the first clues. I think we have done pretty well for to-day. These were things we could not put off. The matter of the pistol will keep, though I must admit it is all very puzzling—at present."

Things were happening now thick and fast in the case. Still turning over the matter of the missing pistol in my mind, and wondering how Kennedy would go about finding it, I was not prepared to have a new complication again postpone our search for that interesting bit of evidence. We had walked over to the laboratory, intending to stop there only a few minutes before going up to our apartment.

Sticking in the letter slot in the door was an envelope. Kennedy pulled it out. It was just a plain white envelope, or, rather, it had once been a plain white envelope. In a trembling and laborious hand, apparently of foreign origin, was traced the address:

Craig tore the envelope open quickly, and spread the single sheet out on the table under the light.

"This begins to look serious, Walter," he exclaimed, as he cast his eye over the curious document before us.

I glanced at the note. At the top appeared a rough and blotted drawing of a huge black hand, and down the margin were knives dripping with inky blood. The bottom of the letter was decorated with a large skull and cross-bones.

"There's no doubt of what that is," remarked Kennedy. "This is a Black Hand letter, sure enough, of the usual type."

This is to warn you that you are being watched. You beter stop befor it is too lat. DEATH is the only thing you will get if you folow up this cas. Death or Suicide. Rememher Snead. It was too much for him.

This is a first and last warning. We give you one day from midnite to let it be nown that you hav droped the cas. After that, by the saints, Death.

I looked at Craig in amazement. "Who do you suppose has put this gang, if it is a gang, on our trail?" I blurted out. "What are you going to do?"

"This is what I think of that letter," he replied, snapping his jaws shut like a steel vise as the lines in his face hardened. He struck a match, and lighted a little Bunsen burner-on his laboratory table, and deliberately stuck the letter into it.

"No," he cried. "I'il not destroy it. I'd better keep it. There may be some evidence I can get from it."

"It's a disguised handwriting," I said, picking up the envelope that had fallen to the floor.

"Oh, I don't mean the handwriting," he replied. "Whoever inspired this was too clever to let any one write it but the gangsters themselves. That may come later. There are other clues that anonymous letter writers have overlooked because they have never been up against real science before. By the way, do you notice by the postmark that this was mailed in the district on the East Side where that little photograph gallery is?"

"Well, yes," I admitted doubtfully; "but it's a large district—with several people in it."

"I know that," persisted Kennedy. "But there are ways of tracing down even a thing like this on the congested East Side. There's not much I can do with it to-night, but I can make a start, and get things ready for to-morrow, anyway. I shall be here rather late tonight, Walter, so I think perhaps you had better go over to the apartment and turn in, for I want to start out the first thing in the morning on this fresh scent."

I hesitated. "If you're going to return late, Craig, don't you think I had better stay, so I can accompany you home? Two are better than one if anything should happen, and this part of town is pretty deserted late at night."

"No, thanks, Walter. Never mind. We've got at least twenty-four more hours of safety, as far as that goes. These fellows are usually pretty true to their word on such scores. After that, we shall have to stick pretty closely together, perhaps call on my old friend, First Deputy O'Connor, at police headquarters, though I hope it won't come to that. I'd much rather finish this case without police assistance."

His decisive tone left nothing for me to do but to let him work as he pleased, and I returned alone to the apartment. Even then I was minded to look sharply at every shadowy spot on the street, and keep on the alert when any particularly rough character passed me.

We sallied forth early the following morning. Kennedy had put the ban on shaving, and had superintended my dressing so that I found myself arrayed in the very oldest clothes that I had. No one had anything on us when it came to general seediness of appearance.

Kennedy bent our steps toward the Bowery, as inevitably as if our clothes made us gravitate in that direction. We entered the back room of several saloons—those adjacent to lodging houses, or connected with them—and in each case Kennedy, after ordering drinks, which, needless to say, we did not drink, asked the proprietor for a sheet of paper and a bottle of ink. He then proceeded to write himself a letter, which he carefully folded and stowed away in his pocket.

Place after place we visited, sometimes going upstairs into the general living room of the lodging house, where on benches and chairs dozens of men were lounging and smoking, or sitting about a huge pot-bellied stove in the center of the room. |

But wherever we went, and whatever the purchase or excuse, Kennedy did not neglect to ask for the inevitable sheet of paper, on which I noted he placed the address and some of his hasty impressions of the place.

"We're taking a chance on wasting our time, Walter," he remarked, as the morning wore away, and we still sought new lodgings to visit, "but I think it is a good one. Even if it comes to nothing, you'll at least have local color for another Star special."

I looked at my hands. The local color was black. Still Craig laughed and pursued his search.

It was some hours later when Kennedy decided we had investigated sufficiently, and was off again to the laboratory, leaving me with the remainder of the afternoon to dispose of as best I could. I made use of the time to seek out Pembroke and Lloyd, but the errand proved fruitless as far as I was concerned, for they had nothing to add. Still, my report of what we had done, at least as much as I thought it prudent to tell, keyed them up to the proper pitch, so that I was reasonably sure that they had less intention than ever of dropping the case.

As the afternoon passed I could not restrain myself any longer, and determined to go up to the laboratory, whether Craig liked it or not. I found him with his feet up on the table, smoking indolently, his eyes fixed on Labrador or some equally remote goal.

"I was wishing you'd come in, Walter," he said. "I called up the apartment, but found you had gone out. I think I have traced out that Black Hand letter," he went on, bringing his eyes to bear on things in his immediate vicinity.

Near him was a microphotographic camera of solid construction, which could be used in either a vertical or horizontal position. It was mounted on a pedestal that made it free of vibration, and he had been using artificial light with it, ray filters of colored glass, and liquids for increasing the contrasts in what he had been photographing.

"That is a microphotograph of the fibers of the paper in the Black Hand note we received last night," he explained. "You will notice that the fibers are rather different from those in ordinary cheap paper—at least, you will when you compare it with the hundred or so microphotographs I had already in my possession before I made this. That was what made me determine last night, after you had gone, that it was worth while trying to find the paper that matched this note. Hence our delightful outing this morning."

I recalled what Kennedy had said once about a German case, in which some crumpled fragments of a Wurtemburg government bond had been found in a jail yard. They had been chewed up into spitballs, and had evidently been thrown out from a cell occupied by a man who had just been arrested on suspicion of robbery and murder. A government bond was missing, and the spitballs were the only way of connecting the prisoner with the case. Microphotographs of the fibers in the chewed mass, compared with others of the government bond paper, showed perfect identity in the character of the fibers, which differed markedly from the fibers in other papers.

"Here are some of the microphotographs of the papers we gathered this morning," continued Craig. "I didn't have to do as much work as I expected. I came across the right one after I had examined only about fifteen or sixteen."

Perhaps to my unskilled eye the differences and similarities were not so apparent as to Kennedy. Still, he was not vexed at my failure to follow his rapid conclusions.

"To make it doubly sure," he added, "so that not even a court of law might properly doubt it, I went ahead and analyzed the inks* also. The result was absolutely conclusive. That Black Hand letter was written in the back room of the Paragon—do you remember the place?"

* EDITOR'S NOTE—Owing to lack of space, it is impossible to describe here how Craig Kennedy analyzed the inks, but any reader can obtain such information by addressing the editor of The Popular, and inclosing a stamped envelope for reply. This applies also to other sections of the story where fuller particulars may be desired.

I recalled it distinctly. It was in a section where a few years ago everything had been Jewish, but with the great increase of Italians in New York the character had gradually changed—a strange thing about the East Side, where successive waves of immigration have stratified the population, each wave of new arrivals shoving the others up a peg, as it were, on their broad backs, and by their nimble fingers.

Right here, I may as well say that personally I entertain nothing but good will toward these latest arrivals, the Italians. Up to the time we had received the Black Hand letter, I had considered the Black Hand largely a newspaper myth. And though I found that it could be also a grim reality, I did not forget that among all races there are criminals no less than honest men, and that the honest men very largely outnumber the crooked. Kennedy himself has often said that it is our own criminals he fears, quite as much as any brand that has ever been imported.

The Paragon had impressed me very much that morning, because it had seemed a peculiarly dark and vicious place. I had not fancied the looks and actions of the cosmopolitan groups that swaggered about, and I remember thinking at the time that it would be a splendid place to hire an agent at the lowest rates either to kidnap a baby or chloroform an old man.

"Are you game to visit the Paragon again before the time limit of our letter expires?" asked Kennedy suddenly.

CHAPTER VII.
SCIENTIFIC EAVESDROPPING.

"NOW for a bite to eat, and a look-in on that tête-à-tête down in the office of the International Wireless Telephone," remarked Kennedy. He was wrapping up a little oblong box of weathered oak, and as we went out he locked up the laboratory carefully, adding: "We might as well begin to learn caution. The Black Hand letter will soon begin to mean business."

Our dinner was eaten in haste and silence, and we arrived at the little financial office of the Star with time to spare. The building was dark for the most part, as we rode up in the elevator, and the contrast with the bustle of the day was striking.

In the office Kennedy raised the window, leaned out, and looked up. "There's a light up there," he remarked. "Some one must be in. The wires are all right, too. I guess no one has observed them."

He placed the oblong box on a flat-topped desk in the middle of the room, found the ends of the wires where I had stuck them out of the way, and connected them with the box. Then he adjusted something, and turned down a switch.

"I guess no one is up there, after all," he said, looking at his watch again. "It's past the time now. I wonder if this thing works?"

I regarded the oblong box with curiosity. What was it? In one of its larger oblong faces was set a thin sheet of metal within a round opening. Just then, as if from this magic box itself, came a sound that I could have sworn was as if a door had opened and shut.

It seemed to be somewhere in the room with us, and I turned, startled, as if in the silent office building a ghost had taken a notion to walk.

"Hello, Harriet," answered another voice, which I could have sworn was Miller's.

I was nonplused, and looked first at the oblong box, and then at Kennedy for an explanation. His face was triumphant.

"It works, Walter, it works," he cried. "This is a dictograph—consists of one of the most highly sensitive telephone transmitters ever made, that thing I put up there in Miller's office last night. At this end we have a receiver equally delicate. We could hear them if they whispered, turned their backs to the transmitting apparatus—anything. You remember how carefully I placed the thing beside his desk? You wouldn't believe it possible to construct an instrument so delicate unless you saw it. The dictograph has been used by the Secret Service, the inventor tells me, with marvelous success. I only put the transmitting part up there, but if I had placed the whole thing I could startle the lives out of them by bursting into their conversation at the psychological moment. Only, that is just what I don't want to do. Listen!"

"Yes. All day there has been a man watching in front of the apartment. The man was there when I came out. I saw him follow me. Fortunately I had started early, for one of the maids told me about it, and I wanted plenty of time to get here. So I rode uptown, and across to one of the ferries, where I gave him the slip. My shadow went to Jersey, and I came down here."

"So you see, no one knows I'm here, at any events. But, Chester, it's too risky. We shall have to give up the luncheons. Don't you think so? If he finds out, there's no telling what he will do. You know he has an ungovernable temper."

"Well, what of it? I'm almost ready to quit and break up the firm, anyway. And I'm sure he is, too, if he gets his Telephotograph company started. You remember that thing I told you about that he was starting with Miss Fairchild, on the side?—not one of the firm's ventures."

"Yes, but he'll never do it quietly. He isn't that kind. You don't know him as I do. He may have neglected me, but he'd never forgive you for taking pity on my loneliness. No man would, you know."

"But it looks as if he was doing the same thing himself. The other night he took Miss Fairchild to the theater. One of the boys in the office got the tickets."

"I haven't any facts. I can't afford to hire detectives, and all that sort of thing."

"No, no, Chester. The scandal of the thing would be too great. I could never stay here and face my friends through it all, for he would fight to the last ditch. That's the kind of man he is. Perhaps you wouldn't mind, but you are not like me. I couldn't stay here in New York."

"Chester, I'm tired of it all. It's eating my heart out. I can't stand much more. He has treated me shamefully—shamefully. Chester, I can think of only one way out. Will you go with me to Paris—anywhere? Let us begin all over again somewhere. Get what you can out of the thing now. We'll have money enough. We'll be careful of it, invest it safely, and live economically. You can do it abroad. You know William will ruin the firm if he keeps on in these reckless deals of his. You've got out of the firm and the trust company all you can expect. Remember what you told me at luncheon the other day."

"Let's cut loose, and we can invest what money you have. We'll live abroad, never come back to America again. No one will know us. And if they do, we won't care for them. We can start a new life together."

"Why not? William's speculations are beginning to make people talk. I read about it in the newspapers, and I hear people make little remarks now and then. Why not get out before the crash comes?"

"You oughtn't to put it that way. That's not fair. It's really for you that I want to stay a little longer, until I have carried the thing through."

"This?" replied Mrs. Moore. "This is a little grain of ricinus which I have carried wrapped up in this paper. It's a poison more deadly than strychnine or cyanide of potassium. Since William began persecuting and neglecting me, I have carried it with me constantly. Suppose I should swallow it? Would you care? I don't believe you would. You wouldn't like the notoriety, perhaps the suspicion that you had poisoned me, but beyond that—"

"Care? You know I care. Harriet, you can be unkind, unjust to me sometimes. You know better than to carry a thing like this around with you."

"Put it in my vest pocket for the present; throw it away later. Harriet—look at me—there—now, promise me you won't do anything rash like that again?"

"Harriet, give me a week—one week to realize on what securities I have that I can market. Let me set things straight. You wouldn't want me to leave things in such shape that I could be brought back to straighten them out, would you? Now, see. Here's a newspaper. The Crown Prince sails a week from to-day. I'll see if I can engage passage to-morrow."

"Oh, Chester, forgive me. Really, I didn't mean to take it—that poison, I mean. But, Chester, I do believe he has driven me half insane."

"I'll try to slip away from the detectives, and call you up. If I can't, I'll meet you here as we did to-night—say Sunday. Only wait for me. I may have a harder time to get rid of them than I did to-day. Now good-by until Sunday, Chester, unless you hear from me."

The door closed. We heard the elevator bell ring, and the elevator shoot up to the floor overhead, then down again.

A noise came out of the dictograph like a man's fingers drumming thoughtfully on a desk. A short time afterward a door banged shut again, and the elevator bell rang a second time.

Craig looked out of the window, and craned his neck around at the floors above us. "He's gone, too. The light is out," he said, as he closed the window, detached the dictograph, and placed it in an empty drawer of a desk.

CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE PARAGON.

IT was still comparatively early in the evening as we left the towering spectral office building, and walked up Broad and around into Wall Street. The clock on old Trinity chimed the quarter after nine. There was no noise except the rattle of an occasional trolley on Broadway, and the sharp squawk of an automobile horn as it warned a belated pedestrian of its approach.

"Now for the Paragon," announced Kennedy, as we swung on one of the surface cars.

I must admit that I had considerable misgiving about visiting that part of the city since we had received the Black Hand letter. Still, I reasoned, the twenty-four hours would not be up until midnight.

We rode up as far as one of those narrow, deserted streets off Broadway, which in the daytime are jammed with trucks, and whose sidewalks are blocked with packing cases until it is impossible for man or beast to get through. Here Craig left the car, and we walked rapidly toward the Bowery. The streets were deserted enough now, and I felt that here was as good a place as any to commit a murder. Therefore I hurried.

"Come on," I urged. "I don't like these deserted streets, especially when we know we are marked. They're too dark and eerie. Let's at least get on a street with some light and life to it."

I turned to see what was keeping him. As I looked I gasped in astonishment. He had a dark mustache and beard.

"I intended it to be. You don't think I want to go around the Bowery looking like a dude, do you? Come, step into this dark corner a minute. Here is another, lighter one, that will just suit your complexion."

From his pocket, Kennedy produced another hirsute disguise, straightened it out, and rumpled it up to make it look natural, and fastened it on me. They were good false beards, too. Kennedy had selected them for utility and deceptiveness rather than style. We mussed up our clothes a bit, distributed a little dirt judiciously on our hands and linen, turned up our cuffs, and hid the shine of our shoes under a coat of dust. Altogether we looked like a couple of clerks who had enjoyed the Bowery not wisely, but too well. At last we were ready to proceed again.

The Paragon was an evil-looking place even from the outside. Moreover, this was exactly the proper time of the night to see it at its best, or, rather, worst, after nine o'clock, on a cold winter evening, with the streets cheerless and deserted.

We lounged into the back room, and sat down at one of the tables. Kennedy rolled a cigarette. I tried to assume an air as if I was used to such a place, and enjoyed it. The table opposite us was occupied by a party of four Italians, conversing in low, gruff voices that seemed to remove all the music from that sunny language. Now and then a voice louder than the rest would rise, and a few words of a remark would be wafted over to us. A newspaper was lying on the table, and Kennedy picked it up, passing part of it to me. We busied ourselves reading it and talking about it, though in reality taking in the place and its occupants, and endeavoring to catch scraps of what was said.

Then there was another group that I would have sworn was composed of experienced yeggmen, ready to rob anything from a roost to a post office. A more murderous-looking band I doubt if I have ever seen.

In the farthest corner sat a man, all hunched up at a table, alone. I thought he was asleep, and had paid little attention to him until once, looking up suddenly to make a genuine remark to Craig about the news, I caught him gazing furtively under his lowered eyelids in our direction. Instantly he shifted his eyes, stretched languidly and unsteadily, and gazed vacantly on the yeggs.

The next time I looked up he had again shifted his position, and was draped ungracefully over the table, with his ear toward the party of Italians, and his eye again fixed on us. This time he continued to look at me without meeting my eye, and I felt a shudder pass over me as I recalled having a considerable sum of money in my pocket. Why I had not left it at home I could not say, except that Kennedy had hurried me so that I had forgotten it. Anyhow, I felt certain that that fellow had an X-ray eye, and knew as well as I did that I had something worth while in my pocket.

Kennedy was confining his attention to the group of Italians. One of them, a thickset fellow of perhaps thirty-six or seven, seemed to be the leader. He had the swarthy complexion of southern Italy, his ears were small, and his hair brown and curly. But for the scars on his cheeks, and the hardened look on his face, he would have been a handsome man. As it was, his face had a sort of intelligence about it that was more sinister than the commonplace looks of his companions.

"Mafia or Camorra?" I whispered to Kennedy, as I found him, too, stealing a glance at our cultured friend.

I was too engrossed in trying to watch the Italians without seeming to do so to notice that the man in the corner, who wore a greenish-faded suit, and a broken derby pulled down over his eyes, was gradually limbering himself up, preparatory to moving. Kennedy had seen him, and had noted his attention to us, however.

The leader of the Italians rose and stretched himself, and the others pushed back their chairs with much noise and gesticulation, and together the party, four in all, went out of a side door.

Kennedy casually kicked me under the table. We too rose, and, with the air of sight-seers who had seen quite enough, we departed.

The man in the corner waited long enough to make sure that we were actually going, then walked unsteadily out into the front room.

On the street, once again in good, bracing, fresh air, Kennedy looked up and down to catch a glimpse of the group of Italians who had just left. They were walking slowly along the other side of the street, and he followed, somewhat behind them, at a safe distance.

They turned down a side street, which I instantly recognized as that on which we had followed Mrs. Moore to the little photograph gallery the other afternoon. For a moment they stopped in front of Petto's restaurant, seemed to consider going in, then turned away, and continued to walk up the street, talking earnestly. At last they entered the photograph gallery, led by the good-looking fellow, who opened the door with a key, and went in last himself. Kennedy had pulled me into a doorway, so that as the man looked out on the street he could not see us watching him.

Standing out there in front of the photograph gallery was out of the question, so we retraced our steps and entered Petto's restaurant. Petto did not remember our faces, of course, for our disguise was at least good enough for that.

"Well," remarked Kennedy, as we warmed ourselves with a steaming oyster stew, "I've learned one thing tonight. I'll swear that was the gang that sent us the letter. And there's that other fellow who was all alone—you remember him?—peering through the corner of the window to see if we are in here."

The face had disappeared before I could turn to see him. We hurriedly finished the stew, and again walked down on the side of the street opposite the photograph gallery. There was a dim light burning in it, but the shades were pulled down, and except for a solitary shadow now and then we could see nothing. As Kennedy turned to go back to the Bowery he exclaimed in my ear:

"By George, Walter, see that fellow slouching along across the street? It's the same one who was in the Paragon, and followed us to Petto's. He's following us now. I wonder if he is part of it, too? Let's see what he will do."

We had stopped on the corner. A surface car was bearing down rapidly. It stopped. Just as it started Kennedy darted out, followed by me, and we jumped aboard. Our friend of the faded suit suddenly forgot his shambling gait, and ran for the car, too. But it did not slow up at the next corner, and we watched him retreat, defeated, into the darkness from which he had darted.

I was really too tired after the adventures of the evening to care much about anything just at that time, except getting a good night's rest.

As we entered the apartment, the sleepy hall-boy handed Craig a letter. The address was printed in rough capitals.

"A messenger boy left it about a quarter of an hour ago, sir," said the hall boy, as Kennedy tore it open.

Inside, on a sheet of paper, otherwise blank, was the date of the day which had just begun, and under it the words:

"That's pleasant," yawned Kennedy, as we let ourselves into our apartment. "Well, anyhow, we have another day in which to work. Many things may happen before they get us."

CHAPTER IX.
THE SECRET-SERVICE MAN.

KENNEDY did not seem to be very much perturbed by even the second Black Hand letter—in fact, not so much as I was. But as nothing happened during the night I, too, felt reassured with daylight Still, I did not relish being followed as we had been the night before.

Admiration for Kennedy's coolness was turned to sheer amazement, however, when at breakfast he calmly proposed: "We certainly must visit that photograph gallery to-day."

"But, Craig," I remonstrated, "it was bad enough to go into the Paragon, without sticking your head right into a trap like this. Now, if you would call up O'Connor, and have him detail three or four of the men on the Italian squad, that would be different. I suppose you want to walk in there and have your picture taken," I added sarcastically, "and your life."

He smiled. "No," he persisted. "I think perhaps it would be better to go as salesmen for something or other."

The assurance with which he said it was startling. He seemed to assume tacitly that the program was all agreed to without further argument. And, as usual, I did agree without further argument, for I knew that he would go without me, and to desert Kennedy in danger, even of his own seeking, was not the sort of friendship I had for him. Nevertheless I muttered something about its being a foolhardy undertaking. Craig ignored it with the air of one who charitably overlooked a shortcoming.

"I was thinking we would disguise ourselves in some way," he proceeded. "What do you say to going as the agents for a new system of color photography in natural colors? Come over to the laboratory, and I'll give you an article to read on the subject, so that you can talk intelligently. Fortunately I have some prints that have been sent to the university from Paris. I can take them along to carry out the bluff."

I immersed myself in the article, for, though the subject did not interest me, the expedition did, and I felt that it was important that I should be able to carry the thing off properly. I was half through when I glanced up to ask Kennedy a question.

He had heaped up on a table a large part of his belongings, and three husky porters were transferring them to a room on the floor above, which was occupied by another department of the university.

"No," he replied, "but it occurred to me that perhaps as long as this is known as my room it might be well to get a few of the things I prize out of it. You know," he whispered, so that the men could not hear, "the note said something about to-night, and—I shall be ready."

It was quite late in the morning when we found ourselves at last on the street where the Union Photograph Company had its studio. The real office proved to be on the top floor.

I do not know how good our disguises were. In fact, I had some misgiving, for I had heard that criminals were quite as good as detectives in penetrating such things.

Imagine my surprise and relief, as we entered the door, to find that, in place of our stocky, scarred friend of the Paragon, the fascinating Miss Fairchild was seated at a desk with her hat on, busily engaged in looking over the cash book and ledger. She at least did not know us, I reasoned.

Miss Fairchild rose with an engaging smile as we stood in the doorway, and I must confess that I was flattered when she advanced toward me, and asked: "What can we do for you to-day, gentlemen? The photographer is not in just at present, but I am acquainted with his business."

"We are representing a French firm, the Pideaux Frères, from whom we have acquired the American rights to their new natural color process," I began, coached by Kennedy on the way downtown.

"Indeed? That's very interesting. Have you any samples of the work? I should like to see them. I have heard it spoken of highly."

I turned to Kennedy, who produced a number of prints, and spread them on the desk on which she had been working, talking rapidly, like a salesman, as he did so. I noticed that she hastily closed the books, and gathered up some papers from the desk, shoving them into a drawer. I could have sworn that in the back of that drawer I caught a glimpse of a pile of bills, crisp new greenbacks, lying loose as in a bank.

While Kennedy talked, I took the opportunity to note the layout of the place. A rough board partition, reaching not quite up to the ceiling, closed off the back part of the floor from the smaller front portion in which we were. Over all was a glass skylight, such as one sees in all photographer's studios. As Kennedy paused I could hear sounds from the other side of the partition, a sort of pounding, as if a press or other machinery were at work.

My curiosity did not escape the alert Miss Fairchild. "We rent out the back part of the office to an amateur, a man who does special work for the magazines, I believe," she explained.

Neither Kennedy nor myself betrayed the slightest interest in the fact, so she went on, taking up one after another of the prints: "They are fine, no doubt. But I am sure that our manager, Mr. Francesco, would say that the business had not developed enough to warrant any experiments. Of course, if we were up on Fifth Avenue, we should be interested, but, you know, clown here on the East Side, I'm afraid the price for such pictures would be prohibitive."

"Still," Kennedy persisted, "it could do no harm for us to call again. When is he most likely to be in?"

"Oh, he is very irregular in his hours," she replied evasively. "There is always some one here in the office. You see, people come in, and if he is not here they make appointments, and he is always here to do the work."

"I'm afraid not—that is, I'm afraid it would be wasting your time as well as his. You see, when it comes to laying out more money"—she smiled sweetly—"it does not interest him just now."

"But will you be here this afternoon?" I asked. "Perhaps you could bring the matter to his attention, and we could get his answer from you."

"Oh, that would be impossible," she answered. "I'm not, here much. I simply happen to be here this morning looking over his books. I drop in once in a while to see that the accounts are straight, that's all. I haven't any other connection with the place. In fact, I don't really know anything at all about photography. I'm an accountant."

She was most baffling. I felt that the answer was unsatisfactory, and yet it was given in such a convincing way that it left no room for conjecturing what her real motive for being here was. There was nothing else to do but to gather up the prints and beat a retreat, which Kennedy did slowly and deliberately, in order to give us as much time as possible to look around. I noticed that the sound of our voices seemed to have disturbed the "amateur" across the partition, for all was silent behind it.

As we turned the corner opposite the Paragon, a slouchy figure, which I recognized instantly, seemed to spring up from apparently nowhere. It was our anonymous shadow of the night before. He had evidently been watching for us to come out of the photograph gallery, and now was on our trail like a bloodhound. I felt positive that this man had penetrated our disguise.

"Craig," I whispered, "don't look back yet, but in a moment stop at a shop window, and then look around. There is—"

"Yes, I saw him. He was standing by the Paragon when we went into the photograph gallery. Let us quicken our pace," he added.

The man quickened his pace also. We stopped and looked into a pawnbroker's window. The man stopped, and looked into a hardware store, two doors down. We started again; he started, too. Every corner we turned, he turned.

We waited for a car. He waited also, only a few feet away, as though mindful of how we had given him the slip last night, and not disposed to let it happen again. Craig crossed the street, and started up the elevated railroad steps. The man did the same. Suddenly, at the top of the flight, Craig turned and ran down two steps at a time. The man was taken by surprise as Kennedy squarely confronted him.

"Say," growled Craig, "if you follow me one more block I shall call an officer, and have you arrested as a vagrant or a suspicious character."

The man met the threat brazenly. "You will, will you?" he said defiantly. "You don't dare."

"Don't dare? I'll show you whether I don't dare," replied Craig, his anger rising. "I've a good mind to do it, anyhow."

"Go ahead," grinned the man, with an assurance that was positively uncanny. "I dare you!"

"You don't suppose I'm afraid of you and your whole crowd, do you?" asked Kennedy, restraining himself with difficulty. "Now just look at this"—he pulled the Black Hand letter out of his pocket, and shoved it at the man, withdrawing it quickly, as the man's hand went out eagerly to seize it. "Here, don't try to snatch it away. I know who sent it, and you can tell--"

"What was it?" asked the man, his face undergoing one of the most startling changes I had ever seen. He was no longer a dull, leaden-eyed creature, but a man with a keen, cool, gray eye, and strong, forceful lines in his cheeks.

"You know well enough what it was," replied Craig. "Black Hand letters are not so common but that you might know one when you saw it.

"No," laughed Kennedy scornfully; then, turning to me, he explained: "A polite little way of asking a fellow if he is an accomplice in the gentle art of getting counterfeit money into circulation, Walter. What do you think of that?"

The man's tone was so evidently sincere that Kennedy looked up at him sharply and said: "And you are not a member of the Pietro gang?"

"You ought to know," said Kennedy guardedly, though it was his turn now to show surprise.

"I suppose I ought, by this time," said the man, straightening up naturally, "but I don't. That's just the trouble. Honest, now, was that a Black Hand letter? It was? Well, then, I beg your pardon. I've made a mistake, and wasted a good deal of time. How did you happen to receive it? Is it from Pietro's gang?"

"And what business is it of yours, anyway?" asked Craig, rather nettled at the unenlightening turn the conversation was taking.

The man unbuttoned his coat, looked around to see if any one but ourselves was watching, and showed us a badge inside. It read:

"I am Officer Baird," he added. "Who are you, and why are you here? I can see now how you fooled me. You are disguised, and a good disguise it is, too. I don't mind a bit telling you who I am, under the circumstances."

Kennedy took a card from his case, and handed it to the man with the Secret-Service badge, who read it, and extended his hand quickly, with a look of admiration on his face. "Glad to meet you, Professor Kennedy," he said. "I've heard of you before. Then I suppose this is Mr. Jameson, of the Star? Glad to meet you, sir, too."

I took the proffered hand doubtfully. Having heard of forged Secret-Service badges, I nudged Kennedy to go along. But he shook his head quickly, and the three of us went into a restaurant near by.

"Professor Kennedy," began the Secret-Service man, "since it is you, and you are working on the case, I may as well admit that you fooled me. I certainly thought you were a part of the gang, thought you were the one who was putting the phony money into circulation. Ha, ha!"

"Who are your clients?" asked the detective. "That is, I don't want to pry into your affairs, but the thing interests me, if you don't mind telling."

"I'll tell you, so long as it isn't the other bunch of directors. I thought you meant them first. It's like this. Not long ago a few counterfeit bills were discovered by one of the banks downtown in a deposit. The depositor was perfectly innocent, but from this bank through him we traced them to a business firm, also innocent, and from them to the Stock Exchange Trust Company. But there the clues ended.

"Well, I decided to take up the case from the other end. So I examined the notes. They are very clever counterfeits, what we call 'dangerous,' 'Now,' I said to myself, 'there is only one man who is capable of an artistic job like this, and he is an Italian who was released after serving a term in Aloyamensing, in Pennsylvania, this year.' I don't know whether you ever heard of him before, but I think he holds a record. While he was in jail he made a counterfeit die that was smuggled out, and caused a good deal of trouble. He is Pietro, whose nickname is 'Il Bove,' the Ox."

"About the same time word reached us of shipments of camera plates, acids, and engraving tools to this little Union Photograph Company in New York. I put two and two together, and rented a flat across the street from the gallery, and I have been watching them for two days now. By George, it's such a good imitation they are putting out that expert receiving tellers and even men employed in the New York subtreasury have taken them without hesitation."

On the United States National Bank of —— check letter B, series of 1904-1911. J.W. Graham, Register of the Treasury; Ellis H. Grace, Treasurer of the United States. Charter No. —, Bank No. —, Treasury No. —, picture of Gallatin.

This counterfeit is a photographic production on excellent paper. The seal is properly colored, as are the number and large numerals on the face of the note. The back of the note is of the proper shade of yellow, on gold certificates. Issued in several denominations from different plates, mostly $100 and $10 (head of Roger P. Taney). Thought to have been issued in other denominations also, but none detected so far.

An especially dangerous counterfeit, and more than likely to deceive even the very careful handler of money.

As he folded up the description, and put it back into his pocketbook, the Secret-Service man went on meditatively: "Pretty state of affairs, isn't it? Here's a counterfeit so clever that old bank cashiers bite at it like fish. How many are there out? We can't tell. Only a few have been detected, but that's not to say that the whole country may not be flooded with them. Who floats them? That's what I'm here for, to find out. I thought you had something to do with it at first.

"Why," he added, "I have dropped everything to run down this gang, one of the cleverest that ever operated. I suppose you know something about the geometrical-lathe work, ruling-engine work, vignettes, and solid print on a bill? You know, for instance, that the fine network of lines you see crossing each other at all angles never has a break in a genuine bill, even if you look at it under a magnifying glass? The lines never lose themselves, or are irregular. That's the wonderful and beautiful work of the geometrical lathe. Say, if these fellows should take a notion to go in for that, I don't know what we'd do. Of course, they couldn't. The sale of such machines would be traced. Well, in ordinary counterfeits it is impossible to produce the perfect lines. They are dull and sunken and scratchy, and dark or light in spots."

Kennedy was examining one of the bills that Baird shoved over to him, a bill bearing two parallel scores from one corner to the other, straight across its face, in order to denote that it was a counterfeit, and prevent its use again.

"Yes," said Baird, his manner plainly showing how pleased he was to meet in Kennedy a kindred spirit of scientific inquiry into crime.

"How do they do it, Craig?" I asked, leaning over and looking at the bill before us.

"Why, in photo-etching the lines are sunk, instead of raised, as in the ordinary half-tone of the newspaper or magazine, Walter," he explained. "A plate of glass is coated with a thin film of gelatine, sensitized, and the real bill photographed on it. Wherever the light strikes it the gelatine hardens on the plate in the camera. The soft parts are soluble in warm water, and they are washed away, while the hard parts remain. You see the glass plate is then a negative. In ordinary photography you print from such a negative a positive on the paper. I believe the next step is to expose this glass plate on another, and wash the unhardened parts of the second away, producing a transparency or positive, isn't it, Baird?"

Baird nodded. "I'm glad I know you now, Kennedy," he said playfully. "Otherwise I should be taking you into custody, for knowing too much."

"A zinc or copper plate is coated with the sensitized material," continued Kennedy, smiling at the compliment, "then the positive is printed on that, and the soft material washed out again. Mordants or etching acids bite into the plate, and an intaglio printing plate is produced. It's printed, I believe, by the steel-plate method. These photographic plates are made with little labor compared with relief plates, but of course they are not so good. Nothing can deceive you when you lay such a counterfeit beside one printed from the regular steel plates."

"Still," put in Baird, "the photo-etcher can produce counterfeits to deceive all but experts. These fellows tooled out the lines to make them really artistic. The seal is done separately from a relief plate in red, and the numbers are put in in blue separately, also. The paper is the best quality bond, with the silk threads drawn in with red and blue ink, the only penwork on the whole thing."

"Pietro certainly is a wizard," remarked Kennedy, handing back the diagonally-scored bill.

"Yes. You could tell that from merely seeing him as he was last night in the Paragon," said Baird. "You and Jameson were sitting at another table, and seemed to be watching the party of Italians, I thought, as if you wanted to speak to them, yet were holding aloof. I heard them say something in Italian about having spoken to the boss, and I inferred that they did not mean Pietro himself, for the boss had told them never under any circumstances to appear to recognize him. Pietro said that the boss had told him to go ahead and hurry up the job to the finish. When they got up and went out, and you followed them, I jumped at the conclusion that you were either the boss or else his agent, and that that was the reason you and Pietro did not appear to notice each other."

"Pietro was the amateur, then, Walter, that we heard at work back of the partition just now," said Kennedy excitedly. "Pietro, the Ox, is the man whose alias is Francesco, manager of the Union Photograph Company. He was hurrying up his job."

We chatted for a few minutes, Kennedy giving in outline no more of his connection with the case than was plausible.

"Kennedy," said Baird, as we paid our check, "can I rely on you? Will you shake hands over a partnership in this matter? You may take all the glory and the fun and the fees—everything, for all I care. Only let the Secret Service take the prisoners. My reputation is at stake, and the treasury department is wild. The greatest menace to the integrity of the currency ever conceived is this thing of Pietro's."

"And now," panted Kennedy, as we hurried along the street at a great pace, after leaving Baird, whose parting words were to call on him for aid at any time we needed it, "now, let us go into the booth of this telephone pay station. I must get hold of Pembroke and Lloyd right away. I want to go down to the trust company with them to-night when we shall be alone. At last we are on the trail of the murderer of Snead."

CHAPTER X.
THE MYSTERY OF THE MONEY VAULT.

IT was some time after banking hours had closed when Pembroke and Lloyd let us into the trust company, as Kennedy had requested. The night watchman, Kelly, nodded, and accompanied us down into the vaults. It was evident that if there were to be any accidents he wanted to see what happened.

For some minutes Kennedy scrutinized the floor and walls and ceiling of the vault. He noted carefully the spot where Snead had been found dead. Then he stood as Snead must have been standing when he was shot. As nearly as he could he seemed to be figuring out the direction from which a bullet must have come in order to hit Snead as it had, when he was standing up. That did not satisfy him, so he began all over again, on the theory that Snead had been shot while bending over, looking at something.

Then he crossed to the opposite side of the vault, making me take the position that Snead must have assumed. Tired of stooping over in this uncomfortable position, I raised my head, to see what Craig was doing. The opposite side of the vault was lined with little safe-deposit boxes. Kennedy was carefully examining each one, but before I could speak a satisfied smile flitted across his face, and he walked over toward the large deposit box of the trust company itself, near which we were all standing.

"Now, let us see," he began, half to himself. "Nothing could have happened to Snead until he opened the door to this large safe-deposit compartment. It was open, wasn't it, Kelly?"

"Yes, sir," replied the night watchman. "Open, but nothing disturbed or missing."

"Well, I think, then, it will be safe for us to go ahead and open it. What was that combination, Pembroke? You understand the thing. Go on and open it. I'll tell you what to do next."

Pembroke's hand trembled as he fumbled with the lock. Twice he had to go through the whole thing before he could make it work. At last he succeeded, and swung the thick steel door open on its delicately poised hinges.

As the bright light from the incandescent bulbs in the central ceiling of the vault flooded into the dark interior of the now open compartment, Kennedy leaned over and grasped Pembroke by the shoulders firmly, and swung him back quickly.

"Stand back, everybody," he cried, drawing us almost to the entrance to the vault itself, at the foot of the stairs.

"What did you see in there?" gasped Pembroke, in a daze. "I didn't see anything."

"Nothing—yet," replied Kennedy, his eyes and ears as alert as an Indian's. "Let us wait a minute. I can't be mistaken. Snead was not shot down for some time; several minutes. Let us be patient, and see what happens."

We gazed about apprehensively, as if we expected the gaunt form of an avenger to stalk in and pick us off remorselessly with an automatic gun. For two or three minutes, which seemed like ages, so compressed with excitement were they, we waited. Still nothing happened. The vault was silent as the grave. Lloyd started forward, only to be dragged back by Kennedy.

A little steel bullet rolled at our feet on the floor. Kennedy reached over and picked it up. From his pocket he drew his penknife, and turned the bullet over in the palm of his hand. It was magnetic, like the bullet which had killed Snead. It stuck to the penknife, as the other bullet had to the scalpel.

Five, ten, fifteen minutes we waited, expecting to hear another of those sharp "pings." But nothing happened.

"I guess it is safe enough now," said Kennedy, as the novelty of the thing began to wear off, and we became restive. "Anyhow, I'll risk it."

He walked over to the compartment, and looked in through the open door. Evidently he was looking for something else besides money and securities. He stuck his hand in, and ran it over the sides and floor.

At last his search was rewarded. In a corner where the glare of the light from the outside shone brightest into the compartment, he pried loose a little piece of grayish stuff that had adhered to the steel wall. It was scarcely distinguishable from the steel itself. In prying it loose he broke a wire connection. Imbedded in the grayish stuff which he held in his hand were the other broken ends of the connection.

"That's strange," he remarked, as he stuck his head into the compartment, and his voice sounded muffled. "Those wires penetrate the back of this compartment like a protected burglar alarm, insulated. They must run around in a hollow groove through the steel lining of the vault itself. That must have been put in when the vault was built. It's all hidden inside the wall, composed of two feet of concrete and steel rails. You can't trace it. But I can tell you where it must end, even if I can't trace how it gets there."

He was pointing to one of the safe-deposit boxes on the opposite side to the trust company's compartment. "I suppose none of you ever noticed that minute hole there."

Pembroke and Lloyd shook their heads. Kennedy had laid his finger on a round hole in the corner of one of the boxes. It was less than a quarter of an inch in diameter, and entirely concealed by the way the shadows fell over it.

"I noticed it when I was trying to figure out how Snead must have been bending over when he was shot. It occurred to me that if I could reconstruct the scene I might get some interesting information by following the straight line along which the bullet must have traveled to hit him in the peculiar way it did. I found this box perforated with this little hole. None of the others, that are outside of the shadow, are perforated in that way. Don't touch it. I'm not through."

From his pocket he pulled out a little bottle of what looked like blackish glue.

"This is a rubber composition," he explained, "with which I am going to paint my hands and fingers. Abroad, the clever criminals use it to defeat the law; I shall use it to aid the law. It fills up all the ridges and lines on the fingers and hands, and makes them all perfectly smooth. I suppose I could use rubber gloves, but you lose the delicacy of touch through a rubber glove. This composition was invented by a clever Apache in Paris, I understand, for the purpose of preventing the finger prints on objects he touched from telling the story of who had touched them. I am using it so that my finger prints will not become mixed, and destroy any that may be here already."

"I believe the law provides that if the charges for the use of a safe are unpaid for two years the company may open the safe in the presence of one of its officers and of a notary, and take out the contents and hold them. Pembroke has a list of the combinations, which I asked him to get."

"I don't care if they are," replied Kennedy. "Let us assume that this is an unrented box, anyway."

With the aid of Pembroke, Kennedy was now opening the little obscure safe-deposit box. As he pulled the drawer out, I saw inside of it one of the most curious arrangements I had ever heard of. A long cylinder or tube seemed to extend back from the little round opening in the box. It was surrounded by innumerable little coils of wire, sticking out from the tube at right angles, and arranged in concentric rings around the outside of the tube, throughout its entire length. It was a queer-looking thing, and its very strangeness gave it a deadly and murderous look. Nothing is so fearful as the unknown.

We drew back, and simultaneously turned to Kennedy for an explanation. Was this the thing that had killed Snead, and might have killed us if we had not been on guard against some diabolical contrivance?

"That's how the mystery of the shooting of Snead arose," exclaimed Kennedy. "This is an electro-magnetic gun—powderless, smokeless, flashless, noiseless."

"An electro-magnetic gun?" asked Lloyd, in bewilderment. "What is that? Isn't it something new? The man who invented that and put it here must be a devil."

"Oh, the man who put it here didn't invent it," replied Kennedy, as we stood looking at it in awestruck amazement. "He was only clever and up to date enough to know about it, and have one made."

Craig took one of the bullets that lay in the bottom of the drawer beside the gun, and placed it in an opening in the back of the tube.

"I suppose I broke the connection somewhere along the line," he remarked. "But perhaps we can use the regular electric-light current just to demonstrate how it works."

He was studying out the mechanism of the thing. In a few minutes he seemed to understand it. Detaching a cluster of electric-light bulbs, he connected them by a wire with two of the posts on the "breech" of the electric gun, if such it might be called.

Motioning us to stand out of the way, he turned a switch. Instantly the little projectile shot out of the hole in the safe-deposit box, and struck the opposite wall with a "ping," just as we had heard before.

"Of course, this current of electricity which I am using is only a makeshift," he said. "I virtually put the gun out of effective commission when I snapped the connection in the other compartment. Still, even that would inflict a painful and dangerous wound, I guess. I wouldn't experiment by getting in the way of it."

"Yes," agreed Kennedy. "It is marvelous. Or, rather, I might say it will be marvelous. Of course, the thing has never been perfected for big guns, but I believe it will be, some day, and then it will revolutionize war. Of course, here we have the thing in its elementary stages."

He seemed to regard the little cylinder, with its surrounding coils of wire, almost respectfully. "No wonder they never found any pistol when Snead was murdered. There was none. The person who had something to conceal in that compartment over there must have had confederates in the bank, who could guard the secret during banking hours. Probably then he disconnected this gun. But how was he to guard against invasion when neither he nor any of his confederates were around? Very simply, with this electric gun. When he left he turned a switch, and his mechanical confederate guarded the secret more effectually than any human being could, no matter how vigilant."

Craig concluded his explanation in triumph at having at last cleared up so much of the mystery. He was endeavoring to lift the gun out of the drawer. The wires clearly connected through the back of the drawer with a hollow groove, something like that in the back of the larger compartment opposite.

"How did it work?" I asked. "How was the electric gun fired automatically, like a trap gun, at the proper moment? Of course, we can't see, but it is reasonable to suppose that there is a connection."

Kennedy drew the grayish piece of material from his pocket, which he had pried off the wall opposite. As it lay in his hand he regarded it with interest.

"A selenium cell," he answered. "Selenium is a curious substance—an excellent insulator of electricity in the dark; a good conductor in the light. Some day, I suppose, they will be constructing burglar alarms out of it. The thief will think he is perfectly safe as he flashes his bull's-eye lantern about—until it strikes a selenium cell concealed somewhere. Then the alarm will be given, and he will be caught in the act. It is tasteless, odorless, and, when heated, gives off a red vapor that is exceedingly poisonous, and it has to be handled carefully. In this form it is a hard, slate-colored, metallic substance, with two hundred times the conductiveness of electricity in light that it has in darkness.

"Open that door across there, you let the light in from the outside. That acts on the selenium cell in a few moments, closes the circuit, a system of relays concealed somewhere is put into action, and a powerful electric current is turned into the gun opposite. It is fired automatically, and the unsuspecting intruder, engrossed in the discovery he has made, is shot dead, without warning or clue. The secret is dead with him."

"We sent Snead to his death," they exclaimed, "that night when we allowed him as a committee of one to examine the contents of that compartment. Who has done this diabolical thing?"

"When a criminal handles anything nowadays near the scene of his crime," he said, "it is a hundred to one that he has left a valuable clue for the detectives. By handling things, unless he wears rubber gloves, or paints his fingers as I have done, he virtually signs the warrant for his own arrest. That is the heritage to scientific criminal-catching which the famous scientist Galton bequeathed—the infallible finger-print system. If you discover finger prints, or even have reason to think there are faint impressions, a little powder, known to chemists as 'gray powder,' will settle the question. It is a mixture of mercury and chalk. Sprinkle it over the markings, and then brush it off with a camel's-hair brush. This brings out the imprint more clearly. If one places his dry thumb upon a piece of white paper, no visible impression is seen. But if the powder is sprinkled over the spot, and then brushed off lightly, ten to one a distinct impression is seen. Here I have a sort of atomizer filled with this powder. I am going to blow it over the gun and the safe-deposit drawer."

As he sprayed the various objects, and carefully brushed them off, I could clearly see finger prints appear on the metal.

"That's even better than the results would have been on paper," remarked Kennedy, as he set up a camera which he had brought down with him. "I'll just photograph those prints while they are fresh, and enlarge them later in my laboratory, and study them."

Whose finger prints were they? I asked myself. Who was the archfiend who had contrived this devilish manner of covering up his tracks, only to be brought to justice at last by the acute and analytical brain of Kennedy?

The same thought must have been running through all our minds at once as we stood speechless. Only Pembroke's mind ran ahead of mine. He had much at stake in the case.

"What was it that was concealed?" he asked nervously, anxious to know the skeleton in the closet, yet at the same time fearful of it.

"I suspect that I already know what the secret is," replied Kennedy, folding up his camera. "Look at the cash reserve if you have nerve enough to know the truth."

Both Pembroke and Lloyd looked, turning over the big piles of bills hurriedly. There was fabulous wealth, to me. Here were thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars, a fortune beyond my wildest dreams.

"It seems all right," said Pembroke. "Do you think it is worth while to make a quick inventory of it and add it up?"

Kennedy carefully selected a bundle of hundred-dollar bills, tore off the piece of paper that held them together, and placed one in the light under the magnifying glass.

"Notice the line network of lines in the part that is made by the geometrical lathe," he said quietly. "Some are broken, some are dark, some are light; some lose themselves, and run into others. That never happens in a genuine bill. No, gentlemen, the cash reserve is not all right. On the contrary, it is practically all gone, and in its place, as fast as they could be manufactured, thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of the most clever and deceptive counterfeit bills that were ever made have been substituted. That was the secret Snead discovered, and in discovering carried to the grave with sealed lips."

CHAPTER XI.
THE INFERNAL MACHINE.

IT was late when we left the trust company after the amazing revelations of the evening, and the streets were long vistas of alternating glare of electric lights and deep shadows in the dark recesses of which almost anything might lurk.

I would have preferred going to the apartment, but as the trail grew hotter Kennedy found it less easy to rest. If it had been possible he would have finished the thing up without delay or sleep. Everything that crossed his path to the goal he was aiming at seemed to chafe him. Even the rapid transit, which late at night really deserves its name—when you are fortunate enough to catch a train—seemed too slow for him. "Where are you going?" I asked, as we came to the station nearest our apartment, and he still kept his seat.

"To the laboratory," he replied. "I feel that I must make a start in developing these pictures of the finger prints."

His tone was so insistent that I did not remonstrate, as I probably should have done had my mind been clearer. The fact of the matter was that I was so excited by the clearing up of the mystery of the money vault, that almost every other thought, except fatigue, had been knocked out of my mind.

Not so with Kennedy. As we neared the laboratory, he hesitated, and began to look sharply around. The Chemistry Building, in which his workshop was, stood facing the campus on one side, and a street on the other. We approached it from the street, but his laboratory was on the other side, facing the campus, and in the shadow both of the electric lights on the street and the moon, which was sinking in the heavens.

"What's the matter?" I asked, for his manner was not like his usual air of certainty.

"Nothing that I know of," he replied. "That's the trouble. You haven't forgotten the second Black Hand letter, have you? We have had a pretty quiet evening so far—that is, free from interruption. I was just thinking, what would be the most vulnerable spot in which to attack us? Not the apartment, with its hall boys and people coming and going at all hours of the night. Why, the laboratory, of course. Whoever knows anything about me, knows about this laboratory. That was why I took the things out of it this morning, so as to make sure that whatever happens to it, I shall save the most valuable. But I can't keep away from it, even though I feel that I must approach it cautiously."

"For instance," he went on, "it occurs to me that they might leave some kind of arrangement with a time fuse to explode when they think I am likely to be here. I don't smell anything just now, and, besides, they would hardly think I'd drop in after midnight. Still, it won't hurt to look around."

As I smelled nothing, either, we turned and looked out of the door at the shadows of the campus. The swaying of the branches of the trees which, under ordinary circumstances, I should not have noticed at all, now had a gruesome meaning. Was it their shadows I saw moving, or was it a human figure skulking over by the clump of evergreens near the Physics Building? Inasmuch as the same thought impressed me when I looked at the Engineering Building on the other side, I dismissed it as the subjective impression of my own brain. I could not repress a slight shudder, however, as I thought of the unknown danger that might be hidden anywhere about us.

Unlocking his own laboratory door, Kennedy was just about to push it open when he seemed to hesitate again.

"He who hesitates isn't always lost," he said, as, instead of opening it, he walked around the outside of the building, and tried the windows of his lecture room and workshop, which were on the ground floor. One of them was unlocked.

He raised the sash, and stepped in. Then he struck a light with a match. I could not see anything, as he was standing directly in front of me.

"Walter," he cried, as he switched on the electric lights quickly, "it's a good thing I did hesitate about opening that door."

I scrambled in through the window hurriedly. Hanging on a hook on the inside of the door, at about the level of our heads, was a piece of plank, and on it was fastened a queer-looking arrangement, composed of a hollow, cast-iron cylinder.

Kennedy approached it gingerly, and examined it several minutes before he could make up his mind to touch it.

"It must be a pyloclaste, or door-breaker, such as European criminals have used," he said at length.

Careful not to disturb the equilibrium of the thing even by a fraction of an inch, he removed the top covering, inserted a pair of pincers, and drew forth one after the other two thin glass vials of liquid.

Then he took the thing down, and laid it on the table calmly, as if he were examining a specimen that had been sent to him for analysis. I half expected an explosion even yet, but nothing happened. He turned the thing upside down over a newspaper, and a large quantity of fine explosive, mixed with scores of sharp pieces of metal, ran out of it. At the bottom were some yellow wax and resin.

"Only dangerous when the explosive and the liquids in the two vials come together," he remarked reassuringly. "But, as it was, the slightest motion of the door would have turned over the two liquids, startled a chemical combustion, and the door and whoever was entering it would have been shattered to atoms. This is really, I suppose, what would be called a petard. A thing like this with only the explosive is a bomb. Filled with all this metal, it is an infernal machine. Perhaps it's a distinction without a difference. In this case the machine was put into place, and these two tubes, open at the top, were inserted afterward. Then the dynamiter made his exit by the window, knowing too well the danger of the door. It would take very little to upset the tubes, disseminate the liquids through the explosive, and—the sequel is better imagined than experienced. This is one of the most delicate kinds of infernal machine. In some the tubes are closed at the top, and made of very fragile glass, as, for instance, in ring bombs full of explosive and with two tubes, one in each hemisphere of the ring."

Then he pulled the door open carefully, using a long window pole for the purpose, lest there might be another bomb or a cap placed in some way that it might explode by toppling over or by being trodden upon in the dark.

"Do you hear something ticking?" he asked. "These Black Handers are clever enough to have a clockwork bomb, also."

I did hear something, and we instituted a thorough search of every nook and corner of the laboratory. At last we found the cause, a worn washer on a water faucet in a sink.

If you have ever been dogged or hunted relentlessly, you can appreciate our feelings in the silence of that midnight. We were now in the midst of alarms. Every sound, every crack of the furniture, every gust of wind that blew a shade had its effect. I thought bitterly that we could never more have any habits, while this thing lasted. Once let it be known that we did a certain thing at a certain time, and we were marked for the slaughter. We could never go to the same restaurant twice at the same hour. We must observe the most extreme caution in approaching any of our favorite haunts. We had received no word from the Black Hand that was more fearsome than this infernal machine. They had not forgotten us.

What were we to expect next? We closed and locked both the door and the outside window, and mounted the stairs to the room above, where Kennedy had now established his temporary quarters. Kennedy, with a hand that never for an instant betrayed the fact that he had nerves, began to get things ready for developing the photographs we had taken of the finger prints.

As I watched him and turned the case over in my mind, I felt that now we were making excellent progress in clearing things up, and that it would be only a question of hours before we could run down the real murderer of Snead and the looter of the trust company. Therefore I was soon absorbed in watching Kennedy develop the plates.

Both Kennedy and myself were thrown by the concussion off our feet and down on the floor. Every pane of glass in the Chemistry Building was shattered. The lights winked out. A little oil lamp toppled over, and blazed up. Instantly Kennedy seized a rug, and threw over it, smothering the flames.

As I picked myself up, Kennedy struck a match, and lighted a stub of a candle, which was lying on a table. Together we gathered up the scattered negatives. Some were broken, and in all probability the precious information could never be duplicated, but, as luck would have it, several were still intact. We placed them in a cabinet, between folds of cotton felt for safe-keeping, and groped our way in the inky blackness of the hallway downstairs.

A night watchman was running up from one direction, and a belated passer-by from another, while the motor-man and conductor of a passing car came up from the street side. A policeman on the avenue, two blocks down by the library, was running with all his strength after something or somebody who disappeared across a short cut over the athletic field. No one else joined in the chase, for it was evident that it was hopeless at that distance, and the policeman came up five minutes later, with a breathless circumstantial account of a figure slinking out of the campus a few minutes after the explosion.

Every one was talking at once, except Kennedy, who said not a word as he regarded the destruction ruefully.

Finally, under his breath, he remarked to me: "I ought to have foreseen something like this. It vexes me. When I discovered that infernal machine I thought that that ended it, at least for to-night. But I guess they were watching to see what effect it would have. I must have forgotten to put the light out, and they probably thought I was in, and that this was an opportunity to get me with a bomb, like a hand-grenade."

The exploded bomb had been thrown probably by a man standing out on the roadway that ran through the campus. It had crashed through the window-pane, and had exploded immediately, tearing out the whole sash bodily, and damaging the stone- and brick-work of the window, as well as everything brittle or movable in the entire building.

Leaving the night watchman to make the best arrangements with the police that he could to guard the laboratory until repairs could be made in daylight, we walked slowly down the street toward our apartment, several blocks away. Kennedy had an automatic pistol in his pocket, and he kept his hand on it constantly, with the ratchet turned to "Fire," ready for instant use to pump bullets into any one who might molest us.

Who was it among the directors of the trust company who was setting the Black Handers on us with such vindictiveness? I asked myself, as we walked along. I could find no answer, though many suspicions.

Kennedy must have been thinking the same thing, for he burst out suddenly: "I suppose Pietro's gang doesn't know that the Secret Service is on their trail, or, if they do, so much the worse for us. They will attribute it to us. Our real green-goods king who is substituting the phony money for the real in the trust company must have put them on. We'll catch him yet, with the goods, too. Only we must play the game safely, and act quickly. He's a desperate man, and both of us are now gambling with death."

CHAPTER XII.
THE TEMPTATION OF KENNEDY.

THE day began with the same feverish activity on Kennedy's part with which he had ended yesterday. He woke me up telephoning eagerly to the Secret-Service office in the customhouse. Of course, Baird was not there, but Kennedy insisted that word be got to him in some way that he wanted to speak to him, and he added that the message must be delivered with particular care to say that "Mr. Kennedy was in such a position that he did not consider it wise to be seen in the neighborhood where Baird was working."

No repairs had been made yet in the dynamited Chemistry Building when we arrived, though an efficient guard was placed over it, and several score of curious students hung about. They looked with a mixture of awe and respect at Kennedy as he entered, and it was plain that he was the hero of the campus for the moment.

Consequently, we had no fear about working, though it was rather unpleasant, for the broken windows made it very drafty, and we had to work with our overcoats on. Nevertheless we completed the developing of the photographs and their enlargement, and as the morning passed we had an excellent collection of finger prints, in spite of the misfortune of the night before.

Kennedy rose and yawned, for the strain and late hours were beginning to tell even on his iron constitution. "Do you notice," he said, with an air of satisfaction, "that all the prints are from the same fingers? Of course, we don't know whose they are, but when we come to the last act there will be no complications. It will be a straight case. What's that?" he added, as a man employed in the college offices poked his head in the door. "I'm wanted on the telephone? Good! Walter, that must be Baird at last. Come on!"

At the office he literally grabbed for the telephone in his eagerness. "Is that you, Baird?" he cried. "Well, I'm afraid we'll have to move against that Pietro gang sooner than we expected. They've put me in a pretty dangerous position. I'll see you this afternoon, and arrange the details, but it must positively be done to-night, or I don't know but you'll have a man named Kennedy as the principal in a funeral."

As he hung up the receiver, he seemed to be revolving something over and over in his mind, his features working nervously. It was of a delicate nature, I apprehended, and yet he did not feel like asking my advice on it.

"I suppose," he said, "that the thing for us to do is to lie low until this final attack is arranged."

Nevertheless, I could see that he did not intend to do so. It seemed impossible for Kennedy to remain inactive. A moment later he had made up his mind, and we returned to the wreck of his laboratory. He took out two complete dictographs, tested them, found them still uninjured, and wrapped them up.

At a taxicab stand near the university he motioned me to enter the machine at the head of the line, and as he shut the door I heard him say: "The Alden Arms, on Park Avenue." I turned to him inquiringly.

"It is an unpleasant job that is ahead of us, Walter," was all he said in explanation. "But I believe it my duty to tell Mrs. Moore what we heard over the dictograph. The lines are tightening, and the more I think about it the more I think it is only fair to give that woman a chance. I don't believe she is within a thousand miles of knowing what she is really up against."

Kennedy sent his card in, and the maid returned with word that Mrs. Moore would see us in a moment.

As she entered, she plainly showed the effect of nervous strain. Pier face was pale, and it was evident that she realized that Kennedy had some connection with the cause of her nervousness. She was quite evidently on her guard, for she had dressed in her street gown, with her hat on and her hand bag in her hand, as if she had calculated on having a good excuse to terminate the interview if she should desire.

"Mrs. Moore," began Kennedy slowly, as she sought to avoid his penetrating gaze, "I believe that you know I have been retained by certain persons in the case of the death of Mr. Snead. I beg that anything I may say to you be considered in strict confidence."

She inclined her head the fraction of an inch, as if to acknowledge that she felt compelled to listen.

"Among others, I have been watching your husband," Kennedy shot out quickly. I almost gasped. What was he doing? Was he giving the whole case away to a woman who would go straight from this room to spread the fact broadcast?

"Yes," repeated Kennedy emphatically, "and I have something to say which concerns you both very intimately. Nothing but a spirit of chivalry, mistaken, perhaps, but nevertheless present, impels me to say it."

"Indeed!" she answered, sparring for time, in order to control herself. "I did not know that there was anything that concerned us both that any outsider had the right to talk about."

"I'm not so sure of that," replied Kennedy. "Now, for instance, I know something about a little photograph gallery down on the East Side, in which it is reported"—he laid particular stress on the word—"that Mr. Moore is interested."

"Photograph gallery?" she repeated. "Mr. Moore?" It was now her turn to appear surprised.

"Yes; we saw you enter it the other clay, and we have also seen Miss Fairchild there, too."

She bit her lip, but on second thought seemed to think it best to say nothing, though it was evident to a blind man that the mere mention of Miss Fairchild's name was the signal either for absolute silence or a storm of words.

"Still," remarked Kennedy coolly, "it is not that about which I wished to speak. Possibly you do not know that there is another secret which the world does not know, but which is not such a sealed book as you perhaps suppose."

He was talking rapidly, and it was evident that she was thinking rapidly, for the color was mounting in her pale cheeks.

"Mrs. Moore," he went on, his voice assuming a tone as if he were an elder brother or intimate friend, "suppose a certain person were to meet another certain person secretly in a downtown office building. And suppose that a third party had learned of this meeting beforehand, and wished to find out what passed between them. And suppose, further, that this third party had placed in the room one of these little instruments."

"It is a dictograph, an instrument which magnifies sound so much that a whisper in any part of the room where the receiving instrument is placed is reproduced by the instrument at the other end of the line with unfailing accuracy. I say, suppose that this third party had privately installed one of these machines in the room where the meeting was to take place, and had overheard the conversation."

"Will it do that?" she asked. "Somebody overheard—" She stopped, and, controlling her feelings, added: "I don't believe it is possible. Mr. Kennedy, you have no right to work on my weakness in this way. I am ill. I am not myself. You are taking an unfair advantage of a woman to force her to tell something of value to your employers, whoever they are. The thing is impossible."

Craig had set one of the instruments up on the table of the drawing-room in which she had received us, and with her permission he directed me to carry the other one into the next room, which proved to be the dining room. He connected them with flexible wires and a dry cell which he had brought.

"Now," he said, picking up a magazine, "I will ask Mr. Jameson in the next room to read a few paragraphs, in a low tone, standing in the farthest corner of the room, with his back to the machine."

"Mrs. Moore," he said, as I came to a pause, "there is one thing above all else that I wish to warn you against."

I was listening over the dictograph at my end of the line—in fact, could not help but listen, for Kennedy had apparently forgotten about it, and Mrs. Moore was too overwhelmed with the demonstration that it was indeed not only possible but probable that some one had overheard her conversation on a certain interesting occasion.

She uttered a little, startled scream, as if in the remark she had read an answer to an unspoken question in her mind. She knew he knew.

"Before it is too late," urged Kennedy. "Don't leave your husband at what is a critical moment in his life, as well as in your own. Think for a moment about it as you would about the same thing in the case of a friend. Are you going to be your own worst adviser? If there is any change to be made, why put yourself in the worst possible light before the world? Two wrongs will not make a right. Perhaps you think you know just what is going on in this complicated affair. Let me assure you that forces are at work that you in reality know nothing of. As a disinterested friend I think I may not too strongly urge you to leave the contending forces in this business to fight the thing out among themselves without involving yourself, your life, your future in the debacle that must inevitably come soon."

"I almost hate him," she murmured. "He hounds me, watches my every action, treats me like a chattel, a thing to do with as he pleases. And at the same time, if I question any of his actions which, to say the least, are suspicious, he grows angry. Yet some hints of his relations with that woman in the office have reached me. I can't stand it. I won't! I won't!"

"But in what way will you better yourself by becoming an unnecessary exile?" asked Kennedy persistently.

"I must get away, get away before this debacle of which you speak happens," she cried wildly.

"Do you think you will avoid it by going away, with—with Mr. Miller?" he asked, point-blank. "Do you think that is the road to happiness?"

"Do you think the fact that he has been kind to you is sufficient to warrant your sacrificing your very soul in a game in which—you will pardon my saying it—you are one of the pawns?"

"You mean that neither my husband nor Mr. Miller has played fair with me, and told me all?" she asked, in a startled tone, that plainly indicated that it was a new idea to her.

"No," she said at length, and her voice had a tinge of fatalism in it, I thought; "there is nothing to do but to follow out the course I have planned to the end."

"On the contrary," urged Kennedy, "there is every reason why you should not follow that course."

"You do not know," she continued, on the defensive. "You do not know. Things have reached such a pass that were Mr. Moore even to want it, he could not extricate himself. He has woven the web about himself, and—"

"Do you think in the downfall he will let any one escape?" interrupted Kennedy. "It needs only a word, a hint, to him, and before the toils close on him he can involve you in ways that are worse than anything that may happen to him."

What did Kennedy mean? I asked myself. Was he playing on the knowledge that it was still several days before she could be free from the immediate power of her husband? At least she took that meaning from his words, I argued.

"Would that be the chivalrous thing to do?" asked Kennedy reproachfully. "Should I have come here first to tell you, if I were going directly from this room to tell him also? But you know that soon your actions will be speaking louder than any words of mine."

"Then really," she cried eagerly, "I must confess it. You have wrung the words from me. I like Mr. Miller, but I do not—I do not love him. You have rescued me from myself. I throw myself on your mercy. I will do as you say. I will wait. You will not play false with me? You will not desert me?"

He must have been a man of adamant who could have resisted the woman's appeal for aid in her perplexity. Yet I could not help asking myself whether she was in earnest. A woman in distress is even more dangerous than a woman in anger. For the first time in my life a suspicion flitted across my mind in regard to Craig himself. Was she playing on his sympathies, or was he playing on her fears? She had evidently dried her tears, and they were talking earnestly.

"Gladly," he replied, and the tone of his voice contained that fascinating quality of his which carried conviction.

"Let us shake hands, then," she said. "I shall do nothing at all. Oh, how can I ever thank you!"

I had been an involuntary listener; now I felt that I must get out somehow. Before I realized what I was doing I opened the door into the drawing-room.

Kennedy was now looking down into her eyes, apparently oblivious even to the noise I had made in opening the sliding door. She had placed her small hand in his, and he had clasped it as if to seal the compact.

Catching sight of me, she gave a little gasp of surprise, as if she had totally forgotten that I had ever existed, or certainly that I was in the house. Then, without a word, she hurried from the room.

For some moments Kennedy and I stood in embarrassed silence. That is, I did. I knew what was in my heart to say, but the words seemed to stick. As for Kennedy, my intrusion did not seem to bother him in the least. I think that made matters even worse, for it set me wondering how far the fascination of this woman had penetrated into his very soul.

Her hand bag was lying on the table, beside the dictograph. Idly, Kennedy picked it up. He weighed it, first in one hand, then in the other, as if uncertain what to do. At last he seemed to decide the question. He opened it, and took something out, shoving it into his pocket.

In the past few minutes a critical attitude had come into my mind toward Kennedy. I thought it was an ungallant, not to say dishonest, action. At another time I might have been willing to wait and see. But now I condemned it.

He walked into the dining room, and, as he returned with the other dictograph under his arm, I thought I saw him placing something that looked very much like a folded piece of paper in the bag. Anyhow, he snapped it shut, and laid it down on the table in the same careless heap in which he had found it. I must admit that my mind was now full of questioning. What was the exchange he had made? Had he left her some final word, a note?

At last I found that I could speak calmly, and was surprised to see that disappointment had changed into anxiety. "Craig," I said simply, "remember, you are not dealing with a scientific machine now. This is a woman, whose feelings you have no right to experiment with, and whose effect on you you do not understand as you understand the effect of a new chemical or a new apparatus for measuring force."

Kennedy smiled quietly. Really I began to think the crisis was even more serious than I had at first imagined.

It was several moments before we spoke again, and then it was on a subject entirely foreign to that uppermost in my mind.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE PLAN OF ATTACK.

BAIRD was waiting impatiently for us in his office that afternoon. Several of his best men were outside in another room as we entered, apparently awaiting orders from their chief. The Secret-Service leader himself was quite evidently anxious to have the preliminaries settled, in order to allow him to go back to his watch, opposite the photograph gallery.

"Whew!" he exclaimed, before we had fairly entered. "You fellows had a narrow escape, all right. I read about it in the papers before you told me over the wire, but the papers didn't know anything about the reason for it, of course. I knew the moment I read it. This Pietro gang is getting dangerous. There's something going on over there, too. They seem to be working at all hours of the night, and the night you almost were blown up they were up until daylight.. It was Pietro himself who came home, about three o'clock in the morning, so I think it is pretty safe to conclude that he did it. Well, they say that you can purchase a murder for two hundred dollars—that is, some of the yellow papers say it. But it's my opinion that you can get one from the Pietro gang for the pure love of the thing. By Heaven, I wish they were behind the bars with the legal evidence that would convict them."

"I've got it," replied Kennedy quietly. "I can trace the green goods from the making to the finish. The question before us now is how to catch the gang red-handed."

"It's no use to move against them in the daytime," said Baird. "Of course, some of them are there all the time, but you've got to wait your chance to catch them all together at night. Usually they have a session at the Paragon, and by ten o'clock have adjourned for the night's work at the photograph gallery. Of course, they darken the windows, but from my flat across the street I can see that there is a light in there all night."

"Do you ever see a blond woman visit the place?" asked Kennedy, describing Miss Fairchild.

Baird nodded. "I think it is she who takes the finished product of this green-goods factory away with her. She always brings a leather document case, and when she leaves it is suspiciously stuffed out with something."

"Then we can't count on getting her that way. We must devise some other way to capture her. Have you ever seen Moore there? I'm sure you haven't, but I may as well ask."

"No, I haven't seen him there—that is, unless he is disguised pretty well. I don't think he could get past me or the other men that I have on the job now. I forgot to tell you that since I saw you I have put two of my best men at work in the neighborhood. One is the janitor of the building next door to the photograph gallery."

"Good!" agreed Kennedy. "Now we must have all our plans made for a raid of the place to-night, at, say, ten. And at the same time I want arrests made of Miss Fairchild, Miller, and Moore. I will attend to the rest. Simply produce the Pietro gang and these people, and I will have the evidence ready to hold them. I suppose it would be a good thing if you could fix it up with the magistrate sitting in the night court to have an examination right away. Do you think you could arrange that?"

"You are sure you can get men who are acquainted with Moore, Miller, and Miss Fairchild to follow them that night, and make sure that they are produced at the proper time?"

"Oh, yes," answered Baird; "easily. I will put three of my best fellows on the job."

"Very good! I'll leave the details to you, Baird; but I should suggest that we split our raiding party into three. If Jameson, you, and myself take the front, we can start from your flat. Another party should be on the roof—your man who is the janitor next door can attend to that. And I think there ought to be a third party in the rear of the house, to prevent escape that way. You know best how many men will be necessary, and what signals to use to start the raid simultaneously from all three points. They will fight desperately, and you want men who are just spoiling for a scrap."

Baird smiled. "Depend on me for that," he said. "That is my middle name. I've been waiting for this moment until I feel that if it isn't pulled off soon I'll make a raid some time in a fit of desperation all by myself."

Not even the piquant excitement of planning the raid on the Pietro gang could oust the thought that was now uppermost in my mind. It would crop out, that question of Kennedy's attitude toward Mrs. Moore. Here again it was. Why had he said nothing about her to Baird? He had required the presence of all the rest at the prospective roundup of the Black Handers, but he had not even mentioned her name in that connection. Yet it was she who had given us our first clue by her visit to the little photograph gallery. Was Craig deliberately shielding her from the odium which I felt she deserved?

"Now," said Kennedy, as at last we left Baird in the office, picking his men for the particular parts they were best fitted to play, "I suppose the proper thing for us would be to quietly efface ourselves until to-night. But I can't. There is just one more thing I want to do. Do you suppose there is any way to find out where the new office will be that Moore is to open uptown with Fairchild in charge to promote that Telephotograph Company?"

"There must be some way," I replied. "They have probably applied for a telephone. Why not ask 'Information'?"

My suggestion proved a good one, for we soon found that the new office was in "the highest office building in the world," a huge white tower overlooking a park. It was indicative of Moore's aspiring genius, I felt.

A man was lettering the door with the resounding name of the new company. Workmen were putting up railings and partitions and other office fixtures. Handsome rugs lay rolled up along the side walls, and office furniture of the latest "efficiency" was being uncrated.

We looked in at the open door in much the same way as any one of the tenants might have gazed curiously. Moore was not there, evidently. Miss Fairchild stood with her back toward us, directing the workmen. I could see that she was gowned in the most modish style, a peculiarity of the new "business woman," who is often slandered as being utterly regardless of matters of dress.

Kennedy advanced toward her. She did not recognize us, for on the only other occasion when she had seen us we had been disguised.

"It is," she answered, pausing in directing the shifting of a huge spherical safe to a corner, where it would look most impressive to the prospective buyers of Telephotograph.

Kennedy handed her his card. "Miss Fairchild," he began, "I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting—"

"I'm sure it is no pleasure," she snapped back. "I know that you have been retained by some of our directors who arc dissatisfied with the management of affairs in the trust company. What is it you wish? Please hurry, for we are very busy here, sir."

With exasperating deliberation, Craig said: "I was wondering whether you could give me some information about this company."

"James," she said to a boy, "open that box over there that has just come from the printer, and give the gentleman a 'pros.'"

I could already foresee what was coming—a handsome, artistic booklet, printed in colors with the softest of half tones on the finest of coated paper, showing the machinery of the telephoto-graph instruments, examples of telegraphed pictures, everything convincing and alluring, and calculated to turn the trick according to the accepted practice of these Pied Pipers of Easy Money. The "pros," otherwise prospectus, was all that I had imagined it, and more.

"Yes," replied Kennedy, as he turned over the pages carelessly, and watched the opportunity to speak when none of the workmen was listening. "I saw Mrs. Moore to-day. I do not think that she quite understands the situation between you and her hus—"

"I must positively decline to discuss Mrs. Moore," interrupted Miss Fairchild, with an expression that never for a moment seemed to betray more than she intended. "If you have any matter of business to discuss, I shall be glad to let you go over our books, examine our accounts, anything reasonable. But you must remember I am a business woman. Mr. Moore's wife does not interest me to any greater extent than his cook."

She could not help betraying what, I felt, was just a trace of feeling in that last sentence, in spite of her astuteness.

"The books do not interest me," said Kennedy. "I am not an accountant. Besides, I understand on good authority that nothing technically wrong has been discovered by the experts."

I fancied I saw a look of complacency and triumph cross her face as Kennedy made this apparently reassuring admission, for what purpose I could not then guess.

"More than that," he added, "I was about to say a moment ago, when you interrupted me, that while Mrs. Moore does not understand the situation, she knows that her husband—"

"I may as well tell you, Miss Fairchild, that the farther I go into this case, the more I feel that there is nothing to investigate. Mr. Snead's suicide"—he laid particular stress on the word—"seemed at first baffling, but there is nothing to do but accept it as a fact. And so it goes. Do you think I could have a frank talk with Mr. Moore tomorrow, and tell him that I am sick of my job?"

"All till to-morrow," he said, and his voice betrayed not the slightest intimation that down in his heart he knew there would be no to-morrow in this matter.

"Then, good-day," she said, almost cordially. "I shall let you know over the telephone if Mr. Moore cares to discuss the affair to-morrow."

As we bowed ourselves out, I did not hesitate to condone Kennedy's action in this case, even though I did not understand it. Still, the old question in my mind would not down: Why was Kennedy urging this woman on, and holding the other back? Was he playing another game, deeper than the detection of a crime, and trying thus to eliminate at once all obstacles that separated him from the woman whom he had gone out of his way to protect?

CHAPTER XIV.
THE RAID ON THE COUNTERFEITERS' DEN.

IT was a bitter-cold night. Passers-by on the Bowery were hurrying along, huddled up, past the flaming arc lights of stores and moving-picture shows.

It was still lacking some minutes of ten o clock when from Baird's window we saw Pietro and his followers leave the Paragon, and walk toward the photograph gallery. I counted them. There were five in all. Who was that fifth figure, who had not been with them on other nights? There was no way to guess.

Our plan had been to converge on the gallery from three points. Baird, Kennedy, and myself were to give the signal by mounting the steps in front of the house, and, if necessary, beat down the door. We would perhaps give them a compelling motive to seek flight, if not fight. At any rate, either contingency had been provided for. Three men were waiting in the house next door, hidden by the janitor, and ready to rush up to the roof and down into the counterfeiters' den from above. At the same time three more thick-necked, close-cropped fellows who could give an excellent account of themselves had been stationed, also by the janitor, in a corner of the back yard concealed in the shadow.

All was ready. We waited anxiously until we saw a light in the photograph gallery, the shades pulled down, and something placed over them to darken every ray.

We hurried quietly downstairs, and out on the street. Baird threw a handful of shot against the basement window of the house in which his men were waiting.

Baird was by far the most impatient of us all. In a minute he gave the doorbell of the photograph gallery a yank that nearly tore it out by the roots. There was no answer. Again he rang. Still no answer.

With a crash he sent his whole weight against the door. A gong sounded upstairs, as if it were a warning of our approach. I could hear hurried footsteps. Again we hurled ourselves against the door unitedly. It yielded, and we half fell, half rushed into the darkness of a hallway. Baird regained his feet, but, before he could recover, Kennedy had darted past him up the stairs. We three pressed forward until we came to the door of the photograph gallery. It was locked.

In an instant there came a blinding flash of light, followed by the whir of a bullet over my shoulder, apparently from another half-open door in the darkness down the hall. The door closed again, but before it could be bolted Baird had hurled himself against this second line of defense, pistol in hand, followed by Kennedy and myself. We could hear our men at work on the roof, trying to pry the skylight up.

The door yielded, and in the inky blackness of the interior of the room five men, headed by Pietro himself, made a lunge at us. The fight was sharp, but we were outnumbered. Baird had been too precipitate.

Fortunately for us, the hallway in which we had been driven back was narrow, and we three were just as good as five, except that their superior weight told in the hand-to-hand struggle that followed. A keen stiletto gleamed in the hand of Pietro, who headed the gang. Kennedy dodged the blow which was aimed at him, but in so doing another Black Hander wrenched his pistol away, and for an instant he was defenseless.

A crash, and a shower of broken glass fell on us as the skylight overhead gave way. Literally from the sky three of our men dropped into the midst of the fray.

"Shoot!" yelled Pietro, fighting viciously. "We are surrounded. Shoot them, and break through."

A volley of shots followed, filling the room with stifling smoke. Our men and the gangsters had fired simultaneously. One of our men dropped groaning to the floor, and the Black Handers closed up around one of their own number, whose right arm had been splintered.

They were now massed together for a final rush, a sort of flying wedge, with Pietro at the apex. Before we knew it they had brushed desperately past us toward the stairs, all except one, whom Kennedy had tackled like a football player, and brought to the floor with such force that his pistol had been discharged wildly into the air. Kennedy reached for the gun, and in his viselike grip twisted it from the man's hand.

Sounds of feet on the stairs below told us that our men in the rear of the house had heard the fighting, and had gained entrance, fearing to let us tackle the Black Handers alone.

Pietro and the other three were now tumbling downstairs, hotly pursued by Baird, and myself, and two of our men, who, though cut with knives, were still full of fight. As they met our three men coming up from the back yard, they bowled them over on the stairs like tenpins. We pressed forward, for if they passed our last line they might still escape.

Our men had succeeded in gaining entrance from the back, had locked that door, and had had the forethought to barricade the door which we had burst in from the street. It furnished just the instant of delay we needed. Instantly we were upon them. They were now outnumbered two to one. Still they fought desperately.

The last to be captured was Pietro himself, and it took Baird and two of his best men to hold him while the "nippers" were slipped on him. They had all fought like tigers, and would have won had we not overwhelmed them by sheer numbers.

Panting, perspiring in the icy night air, and streaming with blood from many gashes, we all stood glaring at each other, the four counterfeiters, Pietro, Salvatore, Francesco, and Domenico now safely handcuffed and disarmed.

"Come, Walter, strike a light while I let this one up," called Kennedy, from above. We had forgotten him in the mêlée.

I took the stairs two at a time, followed by the rest, Baird never taking his eyes off his prize, Pietro, whom he drove before him as if he were a Caesar triumphantly leading the most ferocious barbarian in chains.

The man that Craig was holding was not Moore, as I had half expected. It was Miller.

As we paused for an instant to collect our prisoners and the evidence, we looked about the back room of the photograph gallery in amazement.

Here was an engraving plant in itself, neat and compact. In bundles lay some very handsome specimens of ten and one-hundred-dollar bills. Scattered about everywhere were instruments enough to make an engraver's heart leap with pride.

The press on which the green goods were printed was the same make as that used in the government printing office. It had been bought, as we learned later, and sent to another address, where it was disassembled by Pietro, the master mechanician of the gang, who could tear apart and rebuild anything with cogs and levers. Then it had been smuggled in here, piece by piece, and assembled again.

Pietro it was, too, who made the original photographs, while Domenico and he made the plates. Francesco did the presswork, and Salvatore was the skilled man with the pen, who filled in the lines on the paper with red and blue ink to imitate the threads. There had been the utmost division and specialization of labor, but over all presided the evil genius of Pietro.

Baird's men were gathering up the parts of the press, the plates, and a small fortune in bills, preparatory to sending them on to Washington the next day to the custodian of contraband property, who receives all the stuff that is captured in raids—plates, molds, metal, bad money, presses—a vast collection of junk that is locked in the government vaults safely, and destroyed every two years or so.

Kennedy seemed particularly interested in what he saw about the shop. "It's a wonderful thing, Walter," he remarked, as he fingered one piece of apparatus after another, "but there are thousands of photo-engraving establishments scattered all over the country. Every one of them is equipped completely for the making of counterfeit money up to the point of buying the paper and ink. It has always been a wonder to me that more men don't go wrong. It is a fine tribute to the honesty of the craft that there are so few instances like this where the opportunity has been put to work."

Evidently Pietro had experimented with many methods before hitting on the most effective, for we found copper, steel, zinc, glass, and other plates, lithograph stones, electrotypes, even some plaster, steel collars, dies, blanks, punches, and metal, as if he contemplated going into the coining as well as the printing business.

Spools of red and blue silk indicated that they had even considered putting the real fibers in the paper, but had found another method just as good, with the pen. There were sheets of paper cut in size for notes, reams of Crane bond paper and onion-skin treasury paper, oak-leaf linen, and other paraphernalia, even including a couple of bogus Secret-Service badges.

Besides the press there were a camera and lenses, a planchette cutter, lamps, drills, funnels, crucibles, acids, chemicals, paints, inks, and materials for water-color and oil reproductions. On copper plates we found the seal used on bills as well as some numbers. In fact, it was the most perfectly equipped counterfeiters' den Baird had ever seen, and he said so.

Well it might have been. For never had counterfeiters had a better chance to work off their product in huge quantities without fear of detection at least for many days, perhaps weeks.

They had been working overtime during the past few days, we found. In a suit case were hundreds of unfinished bills, besides the fortune in completed bills. Our raid had been timed to the dot. Another day or so and the printing would have been completed; the real cash would have been drained from the trust company vaults to the very last genuine bill.

CHAPTER XV.
THE DUMMY DIRECTOR.

IT seemed hours before the gong of the patrol sounded outside, and we hustled our handcuffed prisoners down into "the wagon," while three of the Secret-Service men prepared to camp on the spot, and guard the spoil until it could be removed to Washington.

When at last we reached the court we found Moore already there, storming furiously in the detention pen, while Miss Fairchild was in the care of a matron in the judge's chambers, her head bowed, and weeping softly into a lace handkerchief. They had been arrested, not, as I expected, together, but Moore at his club, and Miss Fairchild in her suite at a hotel.

Moore, at least, was furious. "What is the charge against me?" he kept demanding angrily, whenever anybody in authority approached the inclosure in which he was detained. "I demand the services of my attorney immediately! Here, has that messenger boy returned with him yet?"

Was he shamming righteous indignation? I asked myself. From his manner I could not but conclude that his violence was too great to be accounted to him for innocence. It was clear, anyway, that Moore by every action was putting himself in a bad light with the police and Secret-Service men who were responsible for his arrest.

Miller sat quietly aloof from the other prisoners, his head resting on his hand, occasionally glancing up, self-confident and collected.

The counterfeiters, grouped together, talked volubly in low and flowing Italian, waving their arms excitedly, and apparently being coached by Pietro, himself an adept in police law. He seemed to realize that this was the last opportunity to make sure that their stories would agree.

At last the attorneys for Moore and Miller had arrived. The greater part of the evening's business in the night court had been disposed of by the magistrate, who had expected this counterfeiting case after his talk with Baird during the afternoon.

The prisoners, including Miss Fairchild, were at last arraigned, and the machinery of the law began slowly and ponderously to overcome its inertia.

Hardly had the case been opened when there was a stir in the court. The judge rapped for order, but to no effect. The thing had long since got beyond court precedent, for never before had the room been charged with such potential excitement.

Mrs. Moore had been endeavoring to force her way through the crush in the back of the room, and had been detained by a court attendant. She broke away, and, with wild eyes and startled face, pushed frantically through the crowd, inside the railing.

At the gate she stood and hesitated for a moment. In some way news had reached her of the catastrophe which Kennedy had predicted. She had hurried to meet it. I felt that it was a crucial moment in many ways.

To whom would she turn as she stood there alone in the cleared space that separated the actors in this final drama from the gaping crowd in the courtroom? I watched her keenly.

Moore was sitting at the end of the group, nearest her. Yet she passed him by without a word.

She hesitated, and looked about again. Was it Kennedy she sought, I wondered? The thing was so unusual that no one attempted to hinder her. Even the judge seemed to realize that the woman was beside herself, and paused, as if in doubt what to order.

It was indeed Craig that her eyes were wildly seeking among the many strange faces about her. Before any one could interfere she advanced toward him. I wondered if she would throw herself on him for protection.

Instead, as she stood motionless, she slowly raised her finger, and denounced him scornfully, passionately, turning toward the judge, in a half daze.

"You have deceived me, you have played the spy, you have eavesdropped on my conversations, you have insulted me, and now you are ending it by ruining all that I hold dear in the world. I hate you. I will tell my story in court, and shout it in the newspapers. I will have justice—and I will save the man you have dragged here under a false charge."

One of the court officers had recovered from his surprise, and was at her side, endeavoring to lead her gently away.

I looked at Kennedy sharply. This was a new phase of the case, which I did not understand. What new element had his action of this morning injected into the mystery? Craig betrayed neither by line nor muscle of his face that he was surprised or chagrined at the unexpected turn of events.

In an instant it dawned on me. He had been playing a game, not being played with as a pawn in somebody else's game. What it was I did not know as yet, but I felt all of the old confidence in my friend flooding back into my mind. What a fool I had been to doubt him for a moment!

"Order in the court!" roared the judge, glaring now at Mrs. Moore, who seemed to realize for the first time where she was. She moved meekly to one side, and took a chair which the officer gave her, near the rail, opposite Miller. Miller's eyes were fixed on her face in eager expectancy, but she did not look at him. It was as if she could not trust herself to do so. She dropped her gaze, and studied the worn floor, while the ghastly white of her face changed to a deep flush. She seemed to realize that all eyes were fixed on her, and that every action was watched. Her breath came and went convulsively.

Absorbed in my thoughts, I was aroused by hearing the voice of Baird on the witness stand. Quickly he was sketching over how the counterfeits had first been detected, and how he had traced them first to the trust company in one direction, and then, starting all over again, to the Pietro gang in the other; how he had followed the gang; how he had watched them; and finally the story of the arrest.

My head swam as I heard my own name called a few minutes later. Collecting my wits hurriedly, I told the story of the discovery of the counterfeits by Kennedy in the bank's vaults, of the attempt on our lives in the laboratory after tracing the Black Hand letter to the Pietro gang. Then the testimony reverted to the death of Snead, the discovery of the electric gun in the safe-deposit box, and I swore to the discovery of finger prints on the gun and the drawer in which it had been found.

Pembroke and Lloyd followed, with testimony corroborating my longer account, and as the courtroom was electrified by the startling revelations that we were making, I turned to read their effect on the actors who interested me most. Moore had now regained a large measure of his self-control, and was following the course of events keenly. I could not fathom him. Miller was still cool and collected, still seeking eagerly to catch the eye of the woman who had dared so much for him, while she, by a mighty effort, was still keeping her face averted.

"Who was the person responsible for the death of Mr. Snead?" I heard Kennedy repeat after the question of the judge, who was conducting the examination informally, in order to determine what persons to hold, and whom to dismiss. "Your honor, if you will allow me I will piece together the parts of the testimony that have been given, and before I have finished I shall show that a certain person in this court was engaged in engineering this gigantic counterfeiting swindle, that that person was using the services of Miss Fairchild in doing so as a go-between, while she also played another role of stirring up domestic strife in this amazing case.

"Now, first, as to the matter of the electric gun which killed Mr. Snead. Who placed it there to guard the secret during those hours when he could not personally guard it himself? On the walls of that safe-deposit box, as has been testified, I found a large number of finger prints, which I photographed. Here are the photographs."

He solemnly laid the prints before the judge. Then he took an inking pad from the court clerk, and a pad of clean white paper. Under Craig's direction, each of the prisoners, as well as Mrs. Moore herself, were summoned to press their finger tips on the inking pad, and then on a sheet of paper, which he labeled with the names.

You could have heard a pin drop as together Kennedy and the magistrate studied the impressions carefully, and conversed in an undertone.

One by one the ringer prints of the Pietro gang were compared and rejected, even Pietro's, much to the surprise of the judge, who seemed to have a suspicion that the Black Hand leader was in some way concerned with the death of Snead.

"They are not the same as these prints of Mrs. Moore," I could hear Kennedy say. "Nor are they like these of Miss Fairchild. No, these are the finger prints of a man."

"Will you kindly step up to the table, Mr. Moore, and place your ringers on this inking pad, and then on this sheet of paper?" asked Craig.

Moore sullenly complied, glancing at Mrs. Moore, who met his eye calmly, and without any apparent emotion.

The magistrate and Kennedy bent over the finger prints, while we waited impatiently to hear the result.

"Mr. Miller," Kennedy's voice rang out sharply, "will you kindly step up to the table?"

As Craig laid this last set of prints down beside the photographs, a look of satisfaction was plainly visible on his face.

"This is the man who employed the Pietro gang to make the counterfeits, who set the gang on me to prevent his discovery, who placed the electric gun in the safe-deposit vault to protect his secret until he should complete the job and have time to disappear," asserted Kennedy. "This is the murderer of the unfortunate Mr. Snead, who fell into the trap set for any one who might discover the secret prematurely. This man was the person who abstracted the genuine cash reserve, and left in its place counterfeits so clever that they would deceive almost any one. But he slipped up when some of the notes were put into circulation inadvertently ahead of time, and were discovered by the vigilance of those always on the lookout for such frauds.

"And, more than that, he not only planned to loot the trust company, but he planned to cover his escape by casting the blame on his partner, in whose name he engaged the little photograph gallery in which the counterfeits were made and to which he sent his partner's wife often on some pretext or other. He caused his confidential manager of the investment department of the firm to interest his partner in a scheme for floating a new company, cleverly twisted and distorted the actions of his partner for his own purposes, and sought to cast the whole blame for the counterfeiting plot on him when it should be discovered.

"Miller, you have played a crooked and artful game, but it is all straightened out now, and the man whom you would have ruined, even to alienating his wife's affections, stands vindicated before the world of every charge except his too great eagerness to amass a fortune in questionable stock deals. Mr. Moore, your partner has used you as few dummy directors and silent partners have ever been used. Let me congratulate you on the turn events have taken, for, since the start, suspicion has been resting on you, which must soon have become overwhelming."

Not a word or a sound broke the stillness of the courtroom as we listened breathlessly to the exposure.

"Mr. Miller, you are held at the request of the federal authorities to await the action of their grand jury," said the judge decisively.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE GREEN-GOODS KING.

MILLER sat coolly fingering his watch chain, the calmest person in the courtroom. He looked about cynically, as if he was merely a spectator of the exposure which at one blow had placed his name high in the rolls of the great get-rich-quick swindlers of the time.

A proved counterfeiter, murderer, embezzler—why had Craig omitted so carefully to add anything of Miller's effort to wreck his partner's home?

Miller's eyes wandered slowly from one face to another, until he was looking squarely at the woman whom he had so cruelly deceived. They exchanged a glance, and she turned from him coldly, and shuddered.

Miller rose, took out his wallet, as if to hand her something. Out of a compartment he drew a little piece of white paper, and unrolled it deliberately, betraying not a tremor of nervousness as he did so.

At the sight of it, Mrs. Moore seemed frozen with horror. Before she could cry out or reach forward for it, he had folded it lengthwise, thrown back his head, and poured a white powder from the paper on his tongue.

As the erect form of Miller sank convulsively to the floor, she uttered a scream, and rushed madly from him, into the crowd at the back of the courtroom.

"Quick—a doctor, an ambulance, anything. Miller has taken poison," cried Moore, bending over the partner who had treated him so blackly, oblivious to the past, and thinking only of the human tragedy of the life that was being snuffed out before us.

"There is nothing they can do," whispered Kennedy to me. "It is the poison he snatched from Mrs. Moore that night when we listened over the dictograph. Ricinus is derived from the castor-oil bean, and one grain of it will kill a million and a half guinea pigs, according to the poison experts."

Instinctively I turned to see what had become of Mrs. Moore after her frightened flight. She was standing near a water cooler in the back of the courtroom, unobserved in the excitement.

I saw her open her hand bag. A similar piece of white paper to that which now lay on the floor by Miller was in her hand, before I could reach her through the crowd she had swallowed the stuff with a glass of water.

She fell heavily on the floor, and the glass was shattered into a thousand bits.

"Has fainted," he said, as he half dragged me over toward her, then added, in an undertone: "This morning, while she was out of the room, I substituted common table salt for the ricinus in the paper in her hand bag. Don't say a word about it, Walter. She has really and truly simply fainted from the excitement."

I understood instantly. As we bent over her, Kennedy bathed her face with the ice water, and fanned her with his hat, while I felt her pulse and chafed her hands. A third figure was now bending over her, also. It was her husband.

"Just fainted," said Kennedy, as we three carried her into the judge's chamber, and placed her on a couch.

"Poor little woman," said the now penitent Moore. "How I have neglected her, and how unjust and mean I have been, since the rumors were brought to my ears by people whom Miller must have put up to it! And how she must have hated me for making such a fool of myself chasing after that girl who was working for Miller! Thank God it stopped in time. But will she ever forgive me, Kennedy? Will she ever believe that I have been only a plain fool?"

Craig said nothing. "See if you can find a little brandy, or some other stimulant, Moore—quick."

He continued to fan Mrs. Moore as her husband dashed bareheaded out upon the street to the nearest drug store.

"Just in time," murmured Kennedy, as her eyelids fluttered. "I didn't want her to see her husband yet. But she is all right now."

At the mention of her husband's name she opened her big blue eyes, and gazed wildly about the strange room.

"Where is Will? Does he—does he know? Has he left me? What did he say about me?" she asked weakly. "Professor Kennedy, I swear to Heaven that I did not know Chester—Mr. Miller—had put the photograph gallery in my husband's name. I knew about the counterfeits. I was guilty of that knowledge. But he swore that Mr. Snead committed suicide. What did my husband say of me?"

"He thinks you fainted. Trust me if you want me to bring this out for the best. You have both been in the wrong. Believe me, your secret is safe. It was only table salt you swallowed, anyway. Do you feel better now?"

Moore had secured the stimulant, and was kneeling now by the couch. She turned her face away from him, as if she could not summon courage to meet his eye.

"Will you forgive me, Harriet? Say yes. I'm not such a bad lot, after all—only a plain, ambitious fool. I—"

She turned toward him slowly. "You can ask that, William, after—after—you have heard and—seen all that has taken place to-night?" she asked eagerly.

He bent over and looked earnestly at her, then, with a significant glance at the courtroom, added: "Let the dead past bury its dead."

"Come, Walter," whispered Kennedy, as he took my arm and closed the door softly. "I want to make sure that Pietro and his gang are held for both the counterfeiting and the wrecking of the laboratory, or we shall regret that we ever got mixed up in this case."

"Craig," I confessed, as we stood for a moment alone together, watching the excited scene in the room before us, "forgive me for ever doubting that you could be any other than my old, honest, honorable friend—even if there was a woman in the case."

"Walter," he replied, smiling, and then letting the smile fade into seriousness, "I don't know what I would not have done for that woman if I had really loved her and knew how much she could care for a man."

THE END

ARTHUR B. REEVE

THE GREEN-GOODS KING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.
A NOTE OF APPEAL.

CHAPTER II.
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA.

CHAPTER III.
ACROSS THE DEAD LINE.

CHAPTER IV.
THE GIRL IN THE BUBBLE.

CHAPTER V.
SETTING TRAPS.

CHAPTER VI.
THE BLACK HAND LETTER.

CHAPTER VII.
SCIENTIFIC EAVESDROPPING.

CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE PARAGON.

CHAPTER IX.
THE SECRET-SERVICE MAN.

CHAPTER X.
THE MYSTERY OF THE MONEY VAULT.

CHAPTER XI.
THE INFERNAL MACHINE.

CHAPTER XII.
THE TEMPTATION OF KENNEDY.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE PLAN OF ATTACK.

CHAPTER XIV.
THE RAID ON THE COUNTERFEITERS' DEN.

CHAPTER XV.
THE DUMMY DIRECTOR.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE GREEN-GOODS KING.

THE END

ARTHUR B. REEVE

THE GREEN-GOODS KING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. A NOTE OF APPEAL.

CHAPTER II. BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA.

CHAPTER III. ACROSS THE DEAD LINE.

CHAPTER IV. THE GIRL IN THE BUBBLE.

CHAPTER V. SETTING TRAPS.

CHAPTER VI. THE BLACK HAND LETTER.

CHAPTER VII. SCIENTIFIC EAVESDROPPING.

CHAPTER VIII. IN THE PARAGON.

CHAPTER IX. THE SECRET-SERVICE MAN.

CHAPTER X. THE MYSTERY OF THE MONEY VAULT.

CHAPTER XI. THE INFERNAL MACHINE.

CHAPTER XII. THE TEMPTATION OF KENNEDY.

CHAPTER XIII. THE PLAN OF ATTACK.

CHAPTER XIV. THE RAID ON THE COUNTERFEITERS' DEN.

CHAPTER XV. THE DUMMY DIRECTOR.

CHAPTER XVI. THE GREEN-GOODS KING.

THE END

CHAPTER I.
A NOTE OF APPEAL.

CHAPTER II.
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA.

CHAPTER III.
ACROSS THE DEAD LINE.

CHAPTER IV.
THE GIRL IN THE BUBBLE.

CHAPTER V.
SETTING TRAPS.

CHAPTER VI.
THE BLACK HAND LETTER.

CHAPTER VII.
SCIENTIFIC EAVESDROPPING.

CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE PARAGON.

CHAPTER IX.
THE SECRET-SERVICE MAN.

CHAPTER X.
THE MYSTERY OF THE MONEY VAULT.

CHAPTER XI.
THE INFERNAL MACHINE.

CHAPTER XII.
THE TEMPTATION OF KENNEDY.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE PLAN OF ATTACK.

CHAPTER XIV.
THE RAID ON THE COUNTERFEITERS' DEN.

CHAPTER XV.
THE DUMMY DIRECTOR.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE GREEN-GOODS KING.