o mount
the stairs and force open the door of the room, there, under a
half-opened skylight, a dead man lay, one screwed-up, contracted
hand still clutching the end of a flex, which went up and out to the
telegraph wires overhead. On a table beside the body a fused and
utterly demolished telegraph instrument stood; and it was evident
from the scrap of flex still clinging to this that it had once
formed part of that which the dead hand held; that it had snapped
somehow, and that the man was attempting to re-attach it to the
instrument when death overtook him.

"Gentlemen, the wire tapper--Boris Borovonski!" said Cleek, as he
bent over and looked at him. "Step here, Mr. Beachman, and tell me
if this is not the man who played the part of 'Miss Greta Hilmann's'
interesting papa."

"Yes, yes!" declared the dock master excitedly, after he, too, had
bent over and looked into the dead face. "It is the very man, sir,
the very one! But who--but why--but how?" He then looked upward in
a puzzled way to where the flex went up and out through the skylight
and, threading through a maze of wires, hooked itself fast to one.

"Electrocuted," said Cleek, answering that inquiring glance. "A few
thousand volts--a flash of flame through heart and head and limbs,
and then this! See his little game, Mr. Narkom? See it, do you, Sir
Charles? He was taking the message from the tapped wire with that
flex, and the fragment that reached the telegraph office only got
through when the flex snapped. The furious gale did that, no doubt,
whipping it away from its moorings, so to speak, and letting the
message flash on before he could prevent it.

"Can't you read the rest when you look up and see that other
wire--the thick one with the insulated coating torn and frayed by
contact with the chimney's rough edge? It is not hard to reconstruct
the tragedy when one sees that. When the flex snapped he jumped up
and grabbed it, and was in the very act of again attaching it to the
instrument when he became his own executioner. Look for yourself.
The wild wind must either have blown the flex against the bared wire
of the electric light or the bared wire against the flex--that we
shall never know--and in the winking of an eye he was annihilated.

"No wonder the lights in the hotel went out, Mr. Beachman. The whole
strength of the current was short-circuited through this man's body,
and it crumpled him up as a glove crumples when it is cast in the
fire. But t