id no more!

The scuttling crowd came up with him, broke about him, swept past
him. A loud explosion sounded; a flare of light broke full against
the cavalry hat; a stifling odour of picric acid filled the air
and gripped the throat, and with its coming, man and hat slid down
the wall and dropped at its foot a crumpled heap that never in this
world would stand erect again.

"Killed! Killed!" half-cried, half-groaned the superintendent,
staggering a bit as the crowd flew on up the alley and vanished
around the corner of the street into which it merged. "Oh, my God!
After all my care; after all my love for him! Killed like a dog. Oh,
Cleek! Oh, Cleek! The dearest friend--the finest pal--the greatest
detective genius of the age!" And then, swinging his arm up and
across his eyes and holding it there, made a queer choking sound
behind the sheltering crook of it.

But of a sudden a voice spoke up from the darkness of the open door
near by and said quietly:

"That's the finest compliment I ever had paid me in all my life, Mr.
Narkom. Don't worry over me, dear friend; I'm still able to sit up
and take nourishment. The Apaches have saved the public executioner
a morning's work. Colliver has parted with his brains forever;
and may God have mercy on his soul!"

"Cleek!" Mr. Narkom scarcely knew his own voice, such a screaming
thing it was. "Cleek, dear chap, is it you?"

"To be sure. Come inside here if you doubt it. Come quickly; there's
a crowd of quite a different sort coming: the report of that bomb
has aroused the neighbourhood; and I have quite enough of crowds for
one evening, thank you."

Narkom was inside the building before you could have said Jack
Robinson, "pump-handling" Cleek with all his might and generally
deporting himself like a man gone daft.

"I thought they'd finished you! I thought they'd 'done you in.' It
was the Apache, you know--and that infernal scoundrel Waldemar: he
must have found out somehow," he said excitedly. "But we've got it
on him at last, Cleek: he's come within the law's reach after all."

"To be sure; but I doubt if the law will be able to find him, Mr.
Narkom. He will have left the country before the trap was actually
sprung, believe me; or failing that, will be well on his way out of
it."

"But perhaps not absolutely out of it, dear chap. There are the
ports, you know; and so long as he is on English soil----Come and
see! Come and see! We may be able to head him off. Let's ge