elling.

"She's done for, poor wretch!" muttered Nick, as he looked at her
bloodless face.

He was right.

Senora Cervera had danced her last dance--a terrible one it was! She
had lapsed into a merciful unconsciousness, from which she never
emerged.

Next came Kilgore, and they easily found him. He lay stretched upon the
ground, dead and scorched almost beyond recognition, at the base of the
metallic rod through which he had met his fate.

"Lend a hand here," said Nick. "We'll place him with his confederate
until we can have them properly removed."

"So be it," said Chick, gravely. "It's about the last we can do for
them, and this nearly ends our work on this job."

"You've got the others?"

"Every man of them."

"Well done!" nodded Nick, as they raised the lifeless form between them.
"Behold the way of the transgressor."

"Hark!" exclaimed Patsy. "There goes the fire alarm. In three minutes
there'll be a mob about here."

"Much good the firemen will do," rejoined Nick. "That house is doomed,
and all that's in it."

He was right. With the passing of the tempest, and the first sign of a
star in the eastern sky, all that remained of the house above the
diamond plant was a heap of red, smoldering embers, filling the cellar
and the secret chamber--and blotting out, though perhaps not forever,
the secret art of that misguided genius, Jean Pylotte, dead with a
bullet in his brain, on the floor of Rufus Venner's hall.

There remains but little to complete the record of this strange and
stirring case.

Before morning Nick had lodged Venner and Spotty Dalton in the Tombs,
and had Garside arrested at his residence. The lifeless bodies of their
three confederates,--Cervera having died at dawn--were taken to the
Morgue.

Early the following day, Harry Boyden, the young man arrested for the
murder of Mary Barton, was discharged from custody, and hastened to the
home of Violet Page, to make her happy with the news of his release and
his story of Nick Carter's extraordinary work. Both called upon Nick a
day or two later, and expressed their gratitude and affection in terms
which here need no recital. Incidentally it may be added that they were
married, as planned, the following summer.

How strangely the circumstances and experiences of life are knit and
bound together. But for the vicious crime of a jealous woman, Nick might
have labored long, and possibly vainly, to run down the Kilgore gang and
their extraord