e will not
fail as we did Wednesday. If you want your daughter back, go yourself,
alone and without telling a soul, to Enrico Albano's Saturday night
at the twelfth hour. You must provide yourself with $10,000 in bills
hidden in Saturday's _Il Progresso Italiano_. In the back room you
will see a man sitting alone at a table. He will have a red flower
on his coat. You are to say, "A fine opera is 'I Pagliacci.'" If he
answers, "Not without Gennaro," lay the newspaper down on the table.
He will pick it up, leaving his own, the _Bolletino_. On the third
page you will find written the place where your daughter has been left
waiting for you. Go immediately and get her. But, by the God, if you
have so much as a shadow of the police near Enrico's your daughter
will be sent to you in a box that night. Do not fear to come. We
pledge our word to deal fairly if you deal fairly. This is a last
warning. Lest you shall forget we will show one other sign of our
power to-morrow.

LA MANO NERA.

* * * * *

The end of this ominous letter was gruesomely decorated with a skull
and cross-bones, a rough drawing of a dagger thrust through a bleeding
heart, a coffin, and, under all, a huge black hand. There was no doubt
about the type of letter that it was. It was such as have of late
years become increasingly common in all our large cities, baffling the
best detectives.

"You have not showed this to the police, I presume?" asked Kennedy.

"Naturally not."

"Are you going Saturday night?"

"I am afraid to go and afraid to stay away," was the reply, and the
voice of the fifty-thousand-dollars-a-season tenor was as human as
that of a five-dollar-a-week father, for at bottom all men, high or
low, are one.

"'We will not fail as we did Wednesday,'" reread Craig. "What does
that mean?"

Gennaro fumbled in his pocketbook again, and at last drew forth a
typewritten letter bearing the letter-head of the Leslie Laboratories,
Incorporated.

"After I received the first threat," explained Gennaro, "my wife and
I went from our apartments at the hotel to her father's, the banker
Cesare, you know, who lives on Fifth Avenue. I gave the letter to
the Italian Squad of the police. The next morning my father-in-law's
butler noticed something peculiar about the milk. He barely touched
some of it to his tongue, and he has been violently ill ever since. I
at once sent the milk to the laboratory of my friend Doctor Leslie