What Maggie had in fact done was to say to the clerk that she was packing up some articles, which she had to move, and that she wanted to get some empty boxes. The boxes were in the rear of the store and the clerk told her she could go through and pick out what she wished. She went through, went out the back door, down a neighboring alley and took a taxicab to the railway station.
The detective waited in vain for her to appear. When finally she did not come out he went in and discovered what had happened; too late to overtake her.
Maggie went to the station, got the traveling bag, put it into the taxicab and set about to carry out the remainder of Mooney’s directions.
The detective called up headquarters and gave the alarm. The police at once went about spreading the usual net for Maggie and then they determined to arrest Mooney. They were now convinced that the man’s illness was a pretense; and, a few minutes later, the detective and three officers suddenly burst into the room where Mooney sat in bed propped up with pillows, gasping for breath, in the closing stages of pneumonia.
Mooney was painfully writing something on the blank sheet of a letter pad with a stump of a pencil.
The officers covered him with weapons.
Mooney looked at them with a queer, ghastly smile:
“You are in time,” he said, “to witness my will.”
He extended his arm with the sheet of paper in his fingers.
The astonished officers took the paper to the window and read it in amazement.