mark is accompanied by another equally glaring one in the form of a head of brilliant red hair----" "Hold on, Sturgis!" interrupted Sprague, who had been listening with growing interest; "don't you know the accountant's name?" "Yes," replied the reporter; "his name is Thomas Chatham." "Thomas Chatham!" exclaimed Sprague, as the image of the miserable young man came to his mind. "Yes," replied Sturgis, answering his thought, "the man you met only a few hours ago." There was a brief silence, broken at last by Sprague, who asked: "Has he escaped?" Sturgis hesitated. "That depends upon how we look at it," he said gravely at length; "he has paid the penalty of his crimes." "What do you mean?" "He is dead," answered the reporter. "Dead? But I tell you I saw him----" "I know; but he has died since." "Suicide?" "No;" the reporter's voice sank to a whisper; "murder!" "Murder?" repeated the artist, startled. "But how do you know that?" "This lump of lead tells the story," said Sturgis, holding up the shapeless piece of metal which he had taken out of the vat. "What is it? A bullet?" "Yes; the bullet which Chatham carried in his arm from the time that he was wounded by Arbogast, the bullet which has enabled me to trace him step by step, from his flight from the overturned cab, to Doctor Thurston's, and finally to his death in this very room; the bullet whose peculiar shape is recorded in this shadow picture taken by Thurston by means of the Roentgen rays." So saying, he handed Sprague the photograph. But the artist had ceased to listen. "In this very room?" he mused aloud, looking about him with awe. "Yes. The story is simple enough. The man whose instrument Chatham was, is not one who would care to be lumbered up with tools, which become positively dangerous as soon as they cease to be useful. This man, totally unhampered by pity, gratitude or fear, determined to destroy the accountant, whose discovery might have imperilled his own welfare. What mattered a human life or two, when weighed against the possible loss of his own life or liberty, or of his high social standing and his enormous wealth; for this man is both renowned and rich, and he appears to have brought wholesale murder to a science." "Do you mean to say that wholesale murder can be indulged in with impunity in a city like New York, at the end of the nineteenth century?" asked Sprague aghast.