But the desperadoes' answer was borne by leaden slugs! Drawing their six-shooters with wonderful quickness, they fired at the detectives. John's bullet struck Lull in the breast and he toppled from his saddle. Yet as he fell, he fired his revolver and John pitched to the ground, his jugular vein severed by the shot. Beside himself with grief, as he saw the blood spurting from his brother's neck, Jim emptied his revolver at the fast disappearing form of Wright, without stopping him, however. Tears pouring from his eyes, he turned toward John's dead body, when he heard a gun bark and felt a burning sensation in the fleshy part of his right hip. "Ed Daniels, I'll have your heart's blood!" he shrieked, as he leaped his horse into the underbrush in the direction from which the sound had come. Not expecting such a move, the traitor was caught facing the infuriated desperado and before he could pull the trigger of his pistol a bullet crashed through his forehead. Satisfied with the killing of the man who was responsible for his brother's death, Jim returned to the lifeless body, picked it up tenderly and, with the blood drenching his clothes, rode with it in his arms into his uncle's door-yard. Tarrying only long enough to carry the corpse inside the house and to give instructions to the miser to have it properly buried, on pain of death, Jim tossed him a bill to defray the expenses, took John's money from his clothes, kissed his lifeless lips, rushed to his horse, vaulted into the saddle and dashed from the yard, scattering the neighbours, who had been attracted by the firing, right and left as he quickly vanished from sight in the woods. CHAPTER XVII. CONCLUSION. Working with the realization of the necessity of haste, the mechanics who had been summoned to liberate young Rozier from his steel tomb in the bank at Ste. Genevieve drilled two holes in the doors and filled them with nitro-glycerine, using soap to keep the liquid from running out. When the fuse was ready, the people were ordered from the building. There was a moment of breathless suspense, then an explosion of the detonating cap was heard, followed by a deafening roar as the terrible agent of destruction went off. The sides of the bank were blown into the street and pieces of the massive doors of the vault were hurled in all directions. Rushing into the ruins, the searchers were able to get into the safe and found the banker's son unconscious on the floor, where the force of the explosion had thrown him. His youth stood him in good stead and before night he was up and about, little the worse for his soul-trying ordeal. When the robbery, the threat to repeat it every year, and the attempt to send to awful death his son and heir were telegraphed to Banker Rozier, at Monegaw Springs, he promptly wired back his resignation and with all possible haste took his family to Europe.