six. I swear it to you!"

"No," I said, "I cannot permit such a risk. Did you read account
Number Seven? He not only cut off the head, but he dismembered----"

"You can't back out!" he screamed as he shook my arm. "You can't, you
can't!"

"But Carse, this is a girl--a mere child. Don't you realize it would
be unpardonable even for you? No, I can never take such a risk. I must
turn you over to the police."

Carse slapped me viciously, then stumbled back against the table. His
face was a mask of suffused blood, his eyes wild with desperation.

"Damn you!" he cried savagely. "You are no friend; you're a cheat, a
betrayer!"

Suddenly his groping fingers touched the butcher knife and he drew
himself taut. His fingers wound around the hilt like slowly moving
worms. For a moment there was scarcely a breath between us; then he
lifted his arm and brought the knife slowly out before him. I watched,
horror-stricken, unable to lift my feet from the floor. A numbing
paralysis of fright seemed to come over me.

"Carse, Carse!" I muttered.

He didn't hear me; his body was tensed for the deadly spring that
would bring him down upon my throat. I saw a ripple of galvanizing
energy race through his hands; then I managed an outcry. At the same
instant he was in the air.

~ ~ ~

There is no need for me to relate the events which followed; for the
newspapers had assiduously described the capture and arrest of Carse,
and his subsequent history, brief as it was, has become public
property. To my dying day I shall carry the five-inch scar along my
cheek where his knife descended upon me, and I can never cease to be
thankful for that one outburst of absolute fear which tore from my
lips and attracted a passing policeman; otherwise I might have been
Number Seven in the grim line of epitaphs that marked the close of
this fantastic case. Only by bludgeoning Carse with his stick could
the officer overcome him, and it was necessary to keep him in a
straitjacket until the hour of his execution.

It is a curious fact that the psychiatrists who examined Carse,
several of them his former pupils, could not find him unbalanced
enough to be irresponsible for his crimes. Those long and tiring
vigils in the mental clinic will haunt me for life; there was no end
to their searching and probing of his subconscious mind, no end to the
tests and questions, the examinations and analyses which ended
hopelessly against him. But even if the