bbing a woman, he
murdered her; not satisfied with that, he deliberately planned the death
of an innocent man because he, in his cowardice, was afraid to take the
ordinary chances of escaping detection. By openly parading his pursuit of
breakers of the law, he secured secretly his opportunity to excel their
basest actions. He----"

Quicker than thought, Braceway lunged forward with his cane and struck
the hand Bristow had lifted swiftly to his throat. The blow sent a pocket
knife clattering to the floor. A policeman, picking it up, saw that the
opened blade worked on a spring.

The accused man sank back in his chair. The gray immobility of his face
had broken up. The features worked curiously, forming themselves for a
second to a pattern of mean vindictiveness. His right hand still numbed
by the blow, he took his handkerchief with the left and flicked from his
neck, close to the ear, a single red bead.

"Search him," Braceway ordered one of the officers.

Bristow submitted to that. When he looked at Braceway, his face was still
bleak.

"You've got me," he said in a tone thoroughly matter-of-fact. "I'm
through. I'll give you a statement."

"You mean a confession?"

"It amounts to that."

"Not here," Braceway refused curtly. "We've no stenographer."

"I'd prefer to write it myself anyway," he insisted. "It won't take me
fifteen minutes on the typewriter." Seeing Braceway hesitate, he added:
"You'll get it this way, or not at all. Suit yourself."

The detective did not underestimate the man's stubborn nerve.

"I'm agreeable, chief," he said to Greenleaf, "if you are."

"Yes," the chief agreed. "It's as good here as anywhere else."

Darkness had grown in the room. Abrahamson and the policeman pulled down
the window shades. Greenleaf turned on the lights.

Bristow limped to the typewriter and sat down. Braceway opened the drawer
of the typewriter stand and saw that it contained nothing but sheets of
yellow "copy" paper cut to one-half the size of ordinary letter paper.

Every trace of agitation had left Bristow. Colour crept back into his
cheeks.

Braceway and Greenleaf watched him closely. They had the idea that he
still contemplated suicide, that he sought to divert their attention from
himself by interesting them in what he wrote. They remembered the boast
he had made in the cell in New York.

He felt their wariness, and smiled.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE LAST CARD

He worked with surprising rapi