Far away, the Kootab Minar, rising three hundred feet in air, bore its mute witness to the splendor of the vanished rulers of Delhi, the peerless Ghori swordsmen of Khorassan. But, even as the soldiers of the old Pathan fort had marched out into the shadowless night of death to join Ghori and Baber and Nadir Shah, so the spirit of the lonely old miser nabob had sought the echoless shore. When Simpson had unavailingly endeavored to awaken his master, the locked doors were burst in at last by the anxious servants, and they found only the tenantless shell of the mighty millionaire, as cold and rigid as the iron pillar which veils to-day its mystery of a forgotten past, when the jackals howl in the ruins of old Delhi. Then rose up a wild outcry, and the sound of hurrying feet. The alert old veteran servitor, with instinctive military obedience, dispatched two messengers, on the run, to notify General Willoughby and Major Alan Hawke. And then, with quick wit, he forbade the gaping crowd to touch even a single article. Not even the stiffened body, as it lay prone upon its face, was disturbed. Simpson stood there, pistol in hand, on guard until properly relieved, and as silent as a crouching rifleman on picket. The whole room bore the evidence of a thorough ransacking, and the disordered clothing of the nabob proved, too, that the body had been rifled. The mysterious nocturnal visits returned to Simpson’s mind. “Could it have been some once-wronged woman?” he mused while waiting for his “military superiors.” For the simple old soldier scorned all civilian control. His keen eye had caught the strange facts of the fastened windows, the disappearance of the two mahogany boxes, and the startling absence of the key of the chamber door. “Whoever did this job knew what they came for and when to come!” mused Simpson. He gazed at the window sill. There was the mark of damp earth still upon it. “Just as I fancied!” growled Simp-son. “They came in at the window, and when their work was done, left by the door. There was more than one murderer in this job!” And, then, certain old stories of a mysterious Eurasian beauty returned to cloud the old man’s judgment. “Was it robbery, or vengeance?” he grumbled. “The black gang are in this, but their secrets are safe forever! They are a close corporation--these devils!” With certain ideas of an endangered life pension, and a sudden yearning for the absent Hardwicke’s counsel, stern old Simpson awaited the coming of his betters. And, the ghastly news of Johnstone’s “taking-off” flew over Delhi to furnish a nine days’ wonder.