tive was puzzled. He could not fathom the meaning of such a sound.

Then a gust of damp night air rushed through the hall and swept Nick's
cheek.

"Ah! an open window!" he muttered. "That's easily located."

He groped his way into one of the rear chambers. There the night air was
sweeping in through an open window, to the sill of which Nick quickly
sprang.

Now the noise he had heard was instantly explained.

Cornered like a rat, yet viciously resolute to the last, Kilgore had, in
order to make his escape, resorted to a means from which a less cool and
nervy scoundrel would have shrunk on such a night as that.

He had, by reaching far out of the window, been able to grasp an
old-fashioned lightning rod with which the ancient wooden mansion was
provided, and by which he proposed to descend to the ground. Under the
swindler's weight, the beating of this swaying rod against the side of
the house was the sound Nick had heard.

Kilgore, whose courage was worthy a far better cause, already was
halfway to the ground.

Yet Nick had no idea of letting the knave escape thus, and he raised his
weapon to fire.

There was no need for a bullet, however, for the hand of the Almighty
did the work.

From the black vault of the heavens a bolt of liquid fire suddenly shot
earthward, with a crash of thunder that seemed to rend the entire
firmament.

The fiery bolt reached the earth--but it reached it through the rod to
which Dave Kilgore was desperately clinging.

Not a sound came from the doomed man as he went down--or if there was a
sound, it was drowned by the deafening crash and successive
reverberations of thunder.

Before Nick had fairly recovered from the blinding light and terrific
concussion, he heard the voice of Chick yelling loudly from below:

"Nick, Nick, come down here! The house is afire. The whole house is
afire!"

Nick heard and darted for the stairs, at once realizing how well the
lightning had done its terrific work. Before he could reach the lower
hall, dense volumes of smoke were pouring through the house, and one
entire side of the fated dwelling was in flames.

Nick thought of the woman in the cellar below, and, with Chick and Patsy
at his heels, he led the way to the diamond plant. The electric light
had been extinguished by the lightning stroke, but Nick soon located the
body of Cervera, and together the detectives brought her out and laid
her upon the ground some rods away from the burning dw