"There was none, and I had to ride all night to get here."
"Are you badly hit?"
The stranger drew back his coat and disclosed a shirt twice perforated over the abdomen and dark with dried and thickening blood. "Please don't try to do anything. There's no help. The damage is where it doesn't show. Only listen, please, and believe, and be frank with me."
Wilmot nodded gravely. "I don't know who you are," he said, "but you are hurt, and if you'd rather talk than try to do something about it, of course I'll listen."
"I twisted the truth out of him, and then flung him over a cliff".
"You are in wrong on the revolution," said the stranger. "It is not to come off in South America, but in the city of New York. If Blizzard's plans carry, this will happen. On the 15th of January there will be an explosion of dynamite loud enough to be heard from, the Battery to the Bronx. At that signal two-thirds of the police force, at the moment on active duty, will be shot dead in their tracks. The assassins, distinguished from law-abiding citizens by straw hats of a peculiar weave--"
"I have such a hat in my trunk."
"Are to assemble together with that third of the police force whom it was not necessary to annihilate, at the Sub-Treasury in Wall Street. Here they will receive further orders--some to loot the Sub-Treasury, some to loot banks, some Tiffany's, some the great wholesale jewellers of Maiden Lane. You, perhaps, as a man of superior talk and breeding, would be sent with a picked crew of Polacks, dagoes, and other high-minded patriots to rifle the Metropolitan Museum of Art--"