[45]

Drawing nearer still to her hesitating partner, the woman began to whisper rapidly, gesticulating fiercely now and then, while the old man listened in amazement, admiration, doubt, and fear; asking eager questions, and feeling his way cautiously toward conviction.

When the argument was ended, he said, slowly:

“I shall never feel safe until it’s over, and we are away from this place. When can you do—the job?”

“To-morrow night.”

“To-morrow night!”

“Yes; it’s the very time of times. To-morrow night it shall be.”

“It’s a big risk! We will have to bluff the detectives, old woman.”

“A fig for the detectives! They will have a cold scent; besides—we have dodged detectives before.”

CHAPTER IV.

ENLISTED AGAINST EACH OTHER.

It is early in the evening of the day that has witnessed the events recorded in the preceding chapters, and the Chief of the detectives is sitting in his easiest office chair, listening attentively to the words that fall from the lips of a tall, bronzed, gray-bearded man who sits opposite him, talking fast and earnestly.

[46]He has been thus talking, and the Chief thus listening, for more than an hour, and the story is just reaching its conclusion when the stranger says:

[46]

“There, sir, you have the entire case, so far as I know it. What I ask is something unusual, but what I offer, in compensation, is something unusual too.”

“A queer case, I should say,” returns the Chief, half to himself; “and a difficult one. Twenty years ago a man was murdered—killed by a nail driven into his skull. Detectives have hunted for the murderer, singly, in twos and threes. English experts have crossed the ocean to unravel the mystery and it remains a mystery still. And now, when the secret is twenty years old, and the assassin dead and buried, perhaps, you come and ask me for my two best men,—men who have worked together as 

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