ped palm as he bit into it. One huge
green fly flipped nimbly under the fending hand and lit on the peach.
With a savage little snarl of disgust and loathing the man shook the
clinging insect off and with the knife carved away the place where its
feet had touched the soft fruit. Then he went on munching, meanwhile
furtively watching the woman. She was on the opposite side of a small
center-table from him, with her face in her hands, shaking her head with
a little shuddering motion whenever one of the flies settled on her
close-cropped hair or brushed her bare neck.

He was a smallish man, with a suggestion of something dapper about him
even in his present unkempt disorder; he might have been handsome, in a
weakly effeminate way, had not Nature or some mishap given his face a
twist that skewed it all to one side, drawing all of his features out of
focus, like a reflection viewed in a flawed mirror. He was no heavier
than the woman and hardly as tall. She, however, looked less than her
real height, seeing that she was dressed, like a half-grown boy, in a
soft-collared shirt open at the throat and a pair of loose trousers. She
had large but rather regular features, pouting lips, a clear brown skin
and full, prominent brown eyes; and one of them had a pronounced cast in
it--an imperfection already made familiar by picture and printed
description to sundry millions of newspaper readers. For this was Ella
Gilmorris, the woman in the case of the Gilmorris murder, about which
the continent of North America was now reading and talking. And the
little man with the twisted face, who sat across from her, gnawing a
peach stone clean, was the notorious "Doctor" Harris Devine, alias
Vanderburg, her accomplice, and worth more now to society in his present
untidy state than ever before at any one moment of his whole
discreditable life, since for his capture the people of the state of New
York stood willing to pay the sum of one thousand dollars, which tidy
reward one of the afternoon papers had increased by another thousand.

Everywhere detectives--amateurs and the kind who work for hire--were
seeking the pair who at this precise moment faced each other across a
little center-table in the last place any searcher would have suspected
or expected them to be--on the second floor of the house in which the
late Cassius Gilmorris had been killed. This, then, was the situation:
inside, these two fugitives, watchful, silent, their eyes red-rimm