Nick Carter. I will
never forgive you for fooling me as you did. I shall
manage to get my liberty again, somehow, some time,
and when I do, it will be for the purpose of
wreaking vengeance on you. And I will get even some
day, never fear."

CHAPTER XVIII.

BLACK MADGE'S THREAT.

Nick Carter had entirely forgotten Black Madge's threat when he was
forcibly reminded of it one morning by the following letter which he
found on his breakfast table:

"NICK CARTER: One month ago--how time flies--I wrote
to you that I hadn't done with you yet; that I would
never forgive you, and that I would get even some
day.

"That was a month ago. I thought when I wrote that
it might take a year--but they are easy marks in
this State.

"It was my hope after you captured me and all my
followers, that I would have a chance to see you
again, and to talk to you before I was taken away to
prison. You would say probably that I wanted to
boast; for a threat, after all, is only another kind
of boasting. But it wasn't so, Nick Carter; I wanted
to tell you what you had succeeded in doing; and
this is it:

"You have succeeded in creating in me a passion
which supersedes all others in my nature--the
passion of hatred. Twice now you have foiled me;
twice you have been successful in arresting me, and
the latter of these two times you not only destroyed
the organization which I had created, and rendered
it utterly impotent for my future uses, but you
destroyed almost at one blow every ambition that I
had through that organization and by reason of it.

"You didn't know that, and you couldn't appreciate
it; and it wouldn't matter at all to you if you had;
neither has it anything to do with the purport of
this letter.

"I know you will say that I am a fool to take the
trouble to warn you, but I would be less than a
woman, and much less than the bad woman I am, if I
did not take this opportunity of exulting over the
chance that is now promised to me to get square with
you.

"Heretofore my every effort has been centred upon
playing on my fellow men; heretofore I have had only
two thoughts in pursuing my career; one was to
create an organization of which I was the supreme
head, and the other was to secure by the operation
of that organization all the money that it was
possible to obtain.

"I have always been a thief with a system. My
robberies have all been committed after careful
planning; you know that because of the one you