“There’s Nick!” Chick yelled. “At them, Patsy!”
Both dashed into the corridor, revolvers in hand.
Batty Lombard fell at that moment, pierced with a bullet from Nick’s revolver.
Baldwin turned to flee—only to find himself caught between two fires. He dropped his revolver to the floor and threw up his hands.
Andy Margate did nothing of the kind. He suddenly seemed to grasp the altered situation. He reached into his vest pocket and clapped something to his mouth.
Then he dropped as if struck by lightning, landing with a thud on the floor, face up.
An empty vial was rolling to one side, glistening in the bright light.
Nick approached, shaking hands with Chick and Patsy, and then he gazed down at the vial and the white, upturned face.
“Paying the price—that’s right,” he said a bit grimly. “He has saved us the trouble. He spoke the truth for once in his life. The price has been paid.”
Midnight saw Baldwin and Nell Breen lodged in a prison cell, Lombard dying in a hospital, and Andy Margate laid out temporarily in the back room of a city undertaker, his bier a plank, his covering a sheet.