The Slave of Silence

by Fred M. White

The doctor vanished from the house, which was empty now, save for Berrington and Field. The latter put out the lights and prepared to leave by way of the front door.

"What are you going to do next?" Berrington asked.

"Go back to headquarters and report progress," Field explained. "The rest is a matter of chance. I fancy I can see my way pretty clearly as to what has happened. Come along, sir; on the whole we have no call to be dissatisfied."

But the events of the night were by no means over yet. A battered constable at the Yard who had just had his head bandaged up had a story to tell. The prisoners from No. 100, Audley Place, had not been conveyed to durance vile without one accident that had been attended with a fatal tragedy. The officer told his story painfully.

"It was that little devil by the side of the driver," he said. "It's lucky for me that he was not a big man instead of a bag of bones. We'd come about half way when he turned and half throttled the driver and then put speed on the motor. There was a struggle for the steering gear, and then the whole show came to grief on a bridge. We were all pitched out, but we hung to our prisoners, who are a pretty sight, sir. Mr. Richford pitched over the side of the bridge on to the metals of the railway lines below and he was killed on the spot. I don't want another game like that."

Surely enough Richford had been killed. His neck had been broken, and he had died without the slightest pain. Berrington, listening gravely to the story, felt

no shock from the recital that he had heard. The world was well rid of a poisonous scoundrel, and Beatrice would be free now to marry the man of her choice.

"Was Sartoris hurt?" he asked, a little ashamed to feel that he would have been glad to hear so for Mary's sake. "A delicate man like that——"

"Internally, the doctor says," the officer went on; "been spitting blood ever since he has."

Berrington expressed a desire to see the cripple, who received him without any sign of feeling. He was lying back in an arm chair, his face white and set.