nd, happily, discovered writing material and
stamps upon a table. He would write a letter and throw it on the porch
below, where perhaps the postman would find it and send it to its
destination. He asked help. His friends must come that night. The
doctor would be on guard, and who could say he would not call in
others? The doors and windows were all well secured, all but a cellar
window on the east side. (Of this, the doctor informed him, that he,
the doctor, might not be guilty of instigating the writing of anything
that was false in any particular.) They must enter by this window. The
door leading above stairs from the cellar could be easily forced and
the noise thus occasioned could not be heard outside of the house.
They must come at two in the morning. Come before another dawn, as the
doctor was going to hold him one day before turning him over to the
police, hoping the gang would do something to involve themselves in
some way they would not if the police were after them with a hue and
cry.

The outlaw wrote the letter as ordered, addressed it to Barry O'Toole,
and threw it out of the window. It fell beyond the porch, on the
ground. But this the doctor remedied by hiring a small boy for ten
cents to pick it up and put it in a mail box. After which, the doctor
betook himself to the nearest extensive hardware establishment.

At two o'clock the next morning, the beams of a dark lantern shone
athwart the darkness of the cellar of Dr. McDill's residence.

"It's all right, boys. I can smell escaping gas, but it's all right.
There's nobody in there. Now for the doctor. We'll kill him and all
who are in there with him, and burn the house," said a voice behind
the lantern, and one after another, eleven burly men dropped into the
cellar through the narrow east window high in the wall. As the feet of
the last man struck the ground, there was a sound as of a rope jerked
by some one in the orifice by which they had just entered, and they
heard two succeeding crashes within the cellar, followed by the slam
of an iron shutter over the window. There was a sound of a spasmodic
rush upon the cellar stairs and a beating upon the door, and then a
succession of softer sounds, as of men rolling down stairs, and then
silence.

A match was struck upon the outside of the iron shutter. It revealed
the face of Dr. McDill, lighting a cigar.

"The gas alone would have been almost sufficient. But when all those
bottles of ether and chloro