treat this case as you do?"

"What do you mean?"

"You don't seem to want to go ahead with it."

"I don't want to go ahead with it any faster than the facts will
justify. If you had had more experience in such matters you would know
the folly of arresting a man first and getting facts to warrant the
arrest afterward. As I say, I want more facts, and you must help me to
get them."

The last part of this conversation was held as Nick, Deever and Klein
passed out upon the street.

A ragged young man who was leaning against a tree heard it, and was much
surprised.

For the ragged young man was Patsy, and he had never heard Nick Carter
ask anybody except his regular assistants to help him in that way
before.

CHAPTER II.

THE DEAD MAN'S HEAD.

Dr. Jarvis, chief of the staff of St. Agnes' Hospital, was well known as
a peculiar man.

He was rich enough to take his leisure, but he worked like a slave. He
had an elegant house on St. Nicholas avenue, but he spent all his days
and more than half his nights at the hospital.

A rude cot in a little room adjoining his laboratory in the hospital was
his bed four nights in seven on the average. His only recreation was
found in the care of a little garden in the hospital grounds; and it was
the common talk of the younger physicians that Dr. Jarvis enjoyed
finding fault with the gardener more than he did cultivating the
flowers.

He had a wife and a young, unmarried daughter, whom he loved devotedly,
but to whom he gave only a few hours of his time in the course of a
week.

A negro named Caesar Augustus Cleary was the doctor's assistant in the
laboratory.

The other physicians in the hospital said that Cleary had become so
accustomed to Jarvis' ways that, like a Mississippi mule, he had to be
cursed before he could be made to understand anything.

Cleary slept in a little closet similar to the doctor's, and on the
opposite side of the laboratory. He was asleep there, about twelve
o'clock on the night after Nick's visit to Lawrence Deever, when Nick
crept softly through the window.

All these rooms were on the ground floor and entrance was easy.

Nick had spent a part of the evening in the garden. He had watched till
the light went out in the laboratory and another appeared in the
doctor's bed-room. Then he was ready for a search of the premises.

If, in a moment of anger, Dr. Jarvis had struck Patrick Deever and
killed him, it was likely that the laborat