."

"If you refuse I shall be reluctantly compelled to hand these papers
over to our attorneys--reluctantly, I say, because you can serve me
better just now out of jail than in it."

Dyckman made a final attempt to gain fighting space.

"It's an unfair advantage you're taking; at the worst, I am only an
accessory. My principals will be here in a few days, and--"

"Precisely," was the cold rejoinder. "It is because your principals are
coming home, and because they are not yet here, that I want your
statement. Oblige me, if you please; my time is limited this morning."

There was no help for it, or none apparent to the fear-stricken; and
for the twenty succeeding minutes the type-writer clicked monotonously
in the small ante-room. Dyckman could hear his persecutor pacing the
floor of the private office, and once he found himself looking about him
for a weapon. But at the end of the writing interval he was handing the
freshly-typed sheet to a man who was yet alive and unhurt.

Gordon sat down at his desk to read it, and again the roving eyes of the
bookkeeper swept the interior of the larger room for the means to an
end; sought and found not.

The eye-search was not fully concluded when Gordon pressed the electric
button which summoned the young man who kept the local books of the
Chiawassee plant across the way. While he waited he saw the conclusion
of the eye-search and smiled rather grimly.

"You'll not find it, Dyckman," he said, divining the desperate purpose
of the other; adding, as an afterthought: "and if you should, you
wouldn't have the courage to use it. That is the fatal lack in your
makeup. It is what kept you from taking the train last night with the
money belt which you emptied this morning. You'll never make a
successful criminal; it takes a good deal more nerve than it does to be
an honest man."

The bookkeeper was sliding lower in his chair.

"I--I believe you are the devil in human shape," he muttered; and then
he made an addendum which was an unconscious slipping of the
under-thought into words: "It's no crime to kill a devil."

Gordon smiled again. "None in the least,--only you want to make sure
you have a silver bullet in the gun when you try it."

Hereupon the young man from the office across the pike came in, and
Gordon handed a pen to Dyckman.

"I want you to witness Mr. Dyckman's signature to this paper, Dillard,"
he said, folding the confession so that it could not be read by the