“I did it, then, in order to get a line on the identity of you scamps, and to learn just how you are playing your knavish game,” Chick bluntly admitted. “Oh, is that so?” “Exactly so.” “Well, then, you shall learn,” snapped Murdock fiercely. “It will cost you your life, but you shall learn. I’ll make it a point to satisfy your foolhardy curiosity. You shall learn--but at the cost of your life.” “Suppose we make a beginning, then,” said Chick, a bit sharply. “Let’s both sail under--true colors.” He reached up quickly while speaking and seized Murdock’s grizzled beard, giving it a violent jerk. It came away in his hand, as Chick had suspected, revealing the hard-featured, smooth-shaved face of--Gaston Goulard. CHAPTER VIII. CAUGHT IN A CORNER. Patsy Garvan was hit with an idea, of course, when he started in hot pursuit of the man in gray. He suddenly suspected, having seen him come from the back door of Goulard’s private office, under the circumstances already described, that this grizzly bearded fellow was none other than Gaston Goulard himself. Patsy realized, moreover, that the investigations he had made after the suspect’s hurried departure, might prevent his overtaking him, and that was the thought uppermost in Patsy’s mind when he plunged down the rear stairway in pursuit of him. He brought up in a paved court back of the vast building. It made in from a side street, and was used chiefly for the receiving and shipping of merchandise from the store. It adjoined the broad doors of the two great basement rooms devoted to these branches of the vast business. Several wagons and teamsters then were in the court, but there was no sign of the man Patsy was seeking. “He surely came this way,” he hurriedly reasoned. “He must have gone to the side street, too, for the other end of the court brings up against a wing of the building. I’ll take that chance.” Patsy took it vainly, however, darting in that direction. He could not discover his quarry in the side street, in spite of his hurried, far-searching scrutiny. It then became a question as to which direction the man had taken. “He would have gone through the store, of course, if heading for Sixth Avenue,” Patsy continued to reason. “That would have been the nearest way, and he appeared to be in a hurry. It’s odds, then, that he went the other way, and it’s that way for mine.” Patsy started off again and walked for nearly a block, gazing sharply in every store, including that of the Acme Novelty Company, but he finally was forced to admit to himself that he had lost his man. “Gee whiz! it’s tough luck,” he muttered, pausing and then turning back. “I’ll eat my hat, crown and brim, if that wasn’t Goulard himself. Why the dickens didn’t I hook onto that idea on the jump? I then could have trailed him without sweating a hair. There’s nothing for me, now, but to return and tell the chief, when he shows up in the store.”