Allen said that when the note was brought in by an excited secretary they had ignored its threat entirely and had gone on with their accounts, thinking the thing the work of joking friends, or a crude attempt to cash in on the dread the Invisible Master had stirred. They had forgotten its menace by the time the hour of eleven came. At that hour Van Duyck and Jackson and Sunetti had been seated on one side of a table with Allen on the other, facing the door. Allen had looked up, and had, he said, seen the door fly suddenly open and then shut without anyone entering that he could see! The Remembered Threat In an instant he had remembered the Invisible Master's threat but before he had been able to cry out three shots had crashed out and his three partners had slumped dead with bullets through their skulls from behind. In the next instant another shot had crashed out of empty air and a bullet had buried itself beside Allen in the wall, but as that shot came he had cried out and there had come cries from all in the building who had heard. The door instantly had flown open and shut as the Invisible Master had fled without stopping to grasp at the cash and securities, and those who rushed in had found Allen standing still beside the wall, and unable for minutes to speak. The unheeded threat of the Invisible Master lay crumpled on the table by the dead men. With that tragedy the chill fear that held New York dissolved into stark terror, and as Carton pushed his way north to find Wade and Grantham there was all about him a wild confusion of panic. Great crowds were forming and rolling toward the City Hall to be held back by the police and troops drawn up to guard it, where they shouted their wild demand to the city's officials that the Invisible Master be captured or killed or bought off at any price. There were wild rumors of even more terrible crimes the Invisible Master had committed, rumors of men done to death in the seething East Side, rumors of martial law to be declared and troops brought to the city. Had the great crowds that bellowed their terror but known it, the city's officials were even then face to face with the Invisible Master's purpose. For in an inner room at City Hall, with Grantham and Wade there, and Carton too, they were reading the letter that had come but minutes before to them. _To the Mayor and Officials of New York:_