THE LAST TRICK.
"Carter!"
"Kilgore!"
Each man uttered the name of the other, as if with the same breath. The meeting came so suddenly that, for the bare fraction of a second, both men were nonplused.
Then both whipped out a weapon.
Crack!
Bang!
They fired together, and both missed, Nick's usually accurate aim being spoiled by the gloom of the cellar.
Kilgore instantly sprang further away in the darkness, and aimed again.
The hammer of his weapon fell as usual, but there was no report. In his recent fight at the Venner house he had emptied both of his revolvers, save the one bullet that had just missed Nick Carter.
Then Kilgore, failing to have found Nick at his mercy, thought only of making his own escape. He turned and ran toward the open door by which he had entered.
At that moment Chick's ringing voice sounded from outside.
"This way! this way, Patsy!" he cried, louder than the rolling thunder overhead. "I've found the rat hole!"
"I'm with you," yelled Patsy.
They were already at the door.
By the frequent flashes of lightning they had, after the fight at Venner's, succeeded in following Kilgore across the meadows, and they well knew that he was headed to get even with Nick.
Now Nick's voice rang through the cellar.
"Look out for him, Chick," he commanded. "He's coming that way. Look out for his gun."
"Hurrah!" roared Chick, the moment he heard Nick's voice. "Let him come, gun and all!"
Kilgore saw his flight cut off in that direction, but he knew every inch of the house. He turned like a rat in the darkness, and made for the stairs leading to the floor above. Up these he hurriedly scrambled.
Nick heard him through the gloom, and followed him, pitching headlong at the foot of the stairs just as Kilgore opened the door leading to the hall above.
There the dim rays from a hall lamp revealed the man for an instant, and showed Nick the way. He was up again and after Kilgore like a hound after a fox.
Kilgore dashed through the hall, but dared not take time to unlock and open the front door of the house. He had a profound respect for the revolver in the hand of his pursuer, who already had reached the hall.
It was a flight for life, and Kilgore knew it.
He turned like a flash and darted up the stairs, making for the second floor. Three at a stride he covered, and succeeded in reaching the corridor above before Nick could get a line on him.
Nick followed, gun in hand.
On the second floor Kilgore darted into a dark chamber, and then through that to one adjoining it, where he waited till he heard Nick plunging into the one first mentioned.
Then Kilgore slipped out into the hall again, hoping to retrace his steps downstairs and escape by the front door.
In the way of that, however, Chick and Patsy were now in the lower hall, the former shouting lustily up the stairs:
"Run him down, Nick! Run him down! We'll cover this way of escape!"
An involuntary oath broke from Kilgore's lips, and at the same moment a vivid flash of lightning from the inky heavens illumined all the house.
From the chamber in which he stood, Nick again caught sight of his man, and was after him in an instant.
Kilgore heard him coming, and again fled through the hall and up another flight of stairs.
"You'd better throw up your hands," roared Nick, as he followed.
The answer came back with a yell of defiance:
"Not on your life!"
"You're a lost dog," cried Nick, hoping to keep him replying.
"You'll not get me alive!"
"Then I'll get you dead!" cried Nick, as he mounted the stairs.
"You haven't got me yet!"
"Next door to it, my man."
This brought no answer.
In a moment Nick reached the second hall, where he briefly paused to listen. Save the rain beating on the roof of the house, only one sound reached his strained ears. It was like that of some one hammering against the side of the house with some heavy object. For a moment the detective was puzzled. He could not fathom the meaning of such a sound.
Then a gust of damp night air rushed through the hall and swept Nick's cheek.
"Ah! an open window!" he muttered. "That's easily located."
He groped his way into one of the rear chambers. There the night air was sweeping in through an open window, to the sill of which Nick quickly sprang.
Now the noise he had heard was instantly explained.
Cornered like a rat, yet viciously resolute to the last, Kilgore had, in order to make his escape, resorted to a means from which a less cool and nervy scoundrel would have shrunk on such a night as that.
He had, by reaching far out of the window, been able to grasp an old-fashioned lightning rod with which the ancient wooden mansion was provided, and by which he proposed to descend to the ground. Under the swindler's weight, the beating of this swaying rod against the side of the house was the sound Nick had heard.
Kilgore, whose courage was worthy a far better cause, already was halfway to the ground.
Yet Nick had no idea of letting the knave escape thus, and he raised his weapon to fire.
There was no need for a bullet, however, for the hand of the Almighty did the work.
From the black vault of the heavens a bolt of liquid fire suddenly shot earthward, with a crash of thunder that seemed to rend the entire firmament.
The fiery bolt reached the earth—but it reached it through the rod to which Dave Kilgore was desperately clinging.
Not a sound came from the doomed man as he went down—or if there was a sound, it was drowned by the deafening crash and successive reverberations of thunder.
Before Nick had fairly recovered from the blinding light and terrific concussion, he heard the voice of Chick yelling loudly from below:
"Nick, Nick, come down here! The house is afire. The whole house is afire!"
Nick heard and darted for the stairs, at once realizing how well the lightning had done its terrific work. Before he could reach the lower hall, dense volumes of smoke were pouring through the house, and one entire side of the fated dwelling was in flames.
Nick thought of the woman in the cellar below, and, with Chick and Patsy at his heels, he led the way to the diamond plant. The electric light had been extinguished by the lightning stroke, but Nick soon located the body of Cervera, and together the detectives brought her out and laid her upon the ground some rods away from the burning dwelling.
"She's done for, poor wretch!" muttered Nick, as he looked at her bloodless face.
He was right.
Señora 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 extraordinary criminal project, in which Cervera so strongly figured. It was as Nick said, the two crimes seemed bound together as if with links of steel.
In the trial which preceded the conviction and punishment of the three living members of the gang, Nick learned all of the facts of the case.
Venner & Co., it appeared, were on their last legs, and went into the game to square themselves, the design being to market vast quantities of the artificial diamonds. With this project in view, Venner had purchased the house at the rear of his own, under the name of Dr. Magruder, and there had established the plant. How well the scheme would have succeeded, but for Nick Carter, will never be known.
At all events, in the stock of Venner & Co. were found numerous stones which only the most proficient experts could prove to be artificial; and even to this day it is intimated that, among the bejeweled women of New York there are some unconsciously wearing the manufactured diamonds of Jean Pylotte. What matters, however, since where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise?
Jean Pylotte: His art died with him, alas! For in the ruins of the diamond plant there could be found no evidence sufficient to reveal his great secret.
Surely it had opened the way to a great swindle, the possibilities of which can hardly be conceived. But, fortunately, in the way of it had come—
Nick Carter.