CHAPTER XV. MURDER IN HELL’S KITCHEN. To understand the preliminaries of the case on which Chick Carter and Patsy had been working for their chief, we must go back to a time before Simeon Rich was tried and executed, before Darwin was sent back to England, where he afterward died in prison. To begin with, Old Mother Flintstone, well known in the neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, was dead. All people have to die, and the old woman had to follow the written law of all mankind; but, what was queer, her death was a subject for police investigation. She had not lived the best of lives, this old hag, toothless and decrepit in her hovel, where her couch was rags and the walls grimy and almost black; she had been a fence and what not, and there were stories about her that made people even in that delectable quarter of Gotham shake their heads over them. She had died in the night. Death had come to the hovel in the wee sma’ hours of the darkness, when the great city was supposed to sleep the sleep of the innocent and righteous; but somehow or other there was a suspicion that a human hand had helped Mother Flintstone out of the world. She lived alone, but now and then she was visited by a boy--a waif of the streets, little, but shrewd and wiry. Mulberry Billy, as the boy was called, had a story to tell, and it was his narrative which had set the police agog. The boy had gone to Mother Flintstone’s just before day, crawling into the old place, where he knew there was always a bed for him, and had found the old lady lying on her face on the floor. Billy tried to lift the body and bear it to the couch near by, but the lot of bones slid from his hands. Then he saw the distorted face, the wide, staring eyes and the clenched hands. Then he saw that his old benefactress was past all human aid, and he stood stock-still and thought how kind she had been to him. But this was not all Billy saw. He was attracted to the right by a noise in the direction of the only window in the room, and there he saw the outlines of a face. It was not a rough face, as one would expect to see in that locality; it was not the face of a hardened ruffian, seamed with sin and desperate. It was a finely cut face, handsome, aristocratic, like those Billy sometimes saw on Fifth Avenue or Broadway. It had good eyes, white skin, a broad forehead, and well-chiseled lips. The mustache did not entirely hide the latter, but it did not let the boy get a good look at them. If the face at the window had been wicked-looking or desperate the boy would not have been astonished, for he would have thought that the desperate murderer had come back to see if the victim had yet been discovered. Mother Flintstone was reputed rich; she was said to have accumulated by her calling a good deal of wealth, which she had concealed somewhere, but where even Billy, her one little confidant, did not know.