g his escape.

But the law has long arms. Paul Armstrong evidently studied the
situation carefully. Just as the only good Indian is a dead Indian, so
the only safe defaulter is a dead defaulter. He decided to die, to all
appearances, and when the hue and cry subsided, he would be able to
enjoy his money almost anywhere he wished.

The first necessity was an accomplice. The connivance of Doctor Walker
was suggested by his love for Louise. The man was unscrupulous, and
with the girl as a bait, Paul Armstrong soon had him fast. The plan
was apparently the acme of simplicity: a small town in the west, an
attack of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting-room
shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco,
and palmed off for the supposed dead banker. What was simpler?

The woman, Nina Carrington, was the cog that slipped. What she only
suspected, what she really knew, we never learned. She was a
chambermaid in the hotel at C--, and it was evidently her intention to
blackmail Doctor Walker. His position at that time was uncomfortable:
to pay the woman to keep quiet would be confession. He denied the
whole thing, and she went to Halsey.

It was this that had taken Halsey to the doctor the night he
disappeared. He accused the doctor of the deception, and, crossing the
lawn, had said something cruel to Louise. Then, furious at her
apparent connivance, he had started for the station. Doctor Walker and
Paul Armstrong--the latter still lame where I had shot him--hurried
across to the embankment, certain only of one thing. Halsey must not
tell the detective what he suspected until the money had been removed
from the chimney-room. They stepped into the road in front of the car
to stop it, and fate played into their hands. The car struck the
train, and they had only to dispose of the unconscious figure in the
road. This they did as I have told. For three days Halsey lay in the
box car, tied hand and foot, suffering tortures of thirst, delirious at
times, and discovered by a tramp at Johnsville only in time to save his
life.

To go back to Paul Armstrong. At the last moment his plans had been
frustrated. Sunnyside, with its hoard in the chimney-room, had been
rented without his knowledge! Attempts to dislodge me having failed,
he was driven to breaking into his own house. The ladder in the chute,
the burning of the stable and the entrance through the card-room
window--all