With an exclamation he sprang away just as the man's hand was stretched out to grasp his coat, and, followed by Jerry Buck, who did not comprehend the situation at all, dashed up the street with the speed of the wind, without pausing to look behind. But Jerry was possessed of no such fears as at that moment filled our hero's breast. As they turned the corner of Cherry street he shot a hurried glance behind him and beheld the singular accident already described, which served to bring the detective to a sudden halt. "Hist! hist!" he whispered, seizing Frank by the arm. "He's down, and there comes one of the bank burglars now!" Even as he spoke the man who had dropped the basket of fish dashed round the corner and past them up Cherry street at the top of his speed. "That's the one wot carried the bag!" whispered the boy, excitedly. "Who's the feller that made you cut an' run?" "The detective what arrested me--I don't know his name." "The deuce? Well, you don't want him to see you, and there's no danger of it. I can give him the slip twenty times in this neighborhood--never you fear. If yer a-goin' to give yerself up you' better do it. Don't let that fellow take you in, or they won't believe a word you say." But the detective on whom their eyes were fixed from around the corner of the building by the side of which they stood, showed no disposition to follow. On the contrary. He remained stooping over the basket dropped by the flying man in the snow. As the boys watched him there emerged from the alley at the side of the Donegal Shades two men, who, moving unobserved through the crowd which had now gathered about the building, hurried up Catherine street, passed within two feet of the spot where the boys now were. "I know the big fellow," whispered Jerry Buck, seizing Frank by the arm. "That's another of them--that's the fellow who carried the carpet-bag away from the bank." But Frank Mansfield made no response. He stood staring at the vanishing forms like one in a trance. If the larger of the two men was one of the robbers of the Webster Bank, what was his companion doing in such company as his? For the man who walked by the burglar's side was the old-time friend of the boy himself--was the father of the girl he loved--that most respectable stock operator and member of the Tenth Baptist Church, Elijah Callister, and no one else! CHAPTER X. IN THE CHAMBER OF DEATH. Caleb Hook stared at the fearful sight which in that darkened chamber met his gaze with feelings of mingled horror and surprise. Could this, indeed, be the strange creature whose footsteps he had followed--who but a few short moments before he had seen in life. It was hard to realize it, but there could be no doubt that such was the fact. There lay the same attenuated form, the same pale and worn features, the thin gray hair, now falling in a tangled mass to the floor, behind the head.