When they returned to the conference room, below them, on the street, the deposed favorite of fortune was chatting with a new officer on the beat. "McNerney? Oh, yes," grinned the strange policeman. "He has taken two-months' leave and goes over to see his ould mother, in Oireland. His home address, sure, I don't know. Mayhap the sergeant can tell ye." While the bluecoat sauntered away, Ferris mentally recorded another mistake. "I should have thrown the hat-box after the hat," he murmured. "A few hundred dollars would have been well spent. And yet he is probably in their ring now. His 'leave of absence' indicates a very sudden return of affection for the 'ould mother.'" Ferris now decided upon a policy of open frankness and calm indifference. "There is no one I could have made use of, but that Jew office boy," he mused, as he sauntered up Broadway, "and they have bought him out, over my head. I will let my little bill for "legal services" ripen. I can afford to let my 'legal field' lie fallow for the summer." And yet he cursed the memory of the innocent victim of the mysterious murder. "But for her sentimental hubbub, I could have easily managed Alice. This fellow's strange death gives him the halo of martyrdom. He is out of my reach now. The old man must have feared the 'Iron Gate' of Death! And, after all, his plans to 'efface' Clayton were only inchoate. I cannot terrify them with any hearsay projects. I must get what I can, cling to Dunham, and keep silence. "The marriage! That means just the one hundred thousand dollars! I will save it and my good name by submitting in silence." He signalled a passing carriage and ordered the man to drive him far "up the road," out of range of the shrill-voiced newsboys, hawking their "extras," with "Full accounts of the great murder mystery." For a brief day the name of Randall Clayton was on every one's lips. There were hundreds clustered around the morgue, where already the mute witness who had drifted back under the arch of the Brooklyn Bridge lay in the gloomy state of death. The hasty verdict of "death from murder committed by parties unknown," was all the record of the darkly-veiled happening. It was a blind trail, after all, which had ended this open and honorable career in the sight of all men. The electric lights were throwing fitful gleams upon the black waters whirling past the Brooklyn Bridge, when the executors, with Witherspoon, gathered around Miss Alice Worthington in the drawing-room of the Stillwell residence. There was also the tired counsellor, who had also vainly probed the officials of the company, the employees of the Astor Place Bank, and every reachable occupant of the huge business building. Poor old Somers, for the hundredth time, had rehearsed his story, and yet it all ended in a blind trail.