BLACK MADGE'S THREAT.
Nick Carter had entirely forgotten Black Madge's threat when he was forcibly reminded of it one morning by the following letter which he found on his breakfast table:
"Nick Carter: One month ago—how time flies—I wrote to you that I hadn't done with you yet; that I would never forgive you, and that I would get even some day.
"That was a month ago. I thought when I wrote that it might take a year—but they are easy marks in this State.
"It was my hope after you captured me and all my followers, that I would have a chance to see you again, and to talk to you before I was taken away to prison. You would say probably that I wanted to boast; for a threat, after all, is only another kind of boasting. But it wasn't so, Nick Carter; I wanted to tell you what you had succeeded in doing; and this is it:
"You have succeeded in creating in me a passion which supersedes all others in my nature—the passion of hatred. Twice now you have foiled me; twice you have been successful in arresting me, and the latter of these two times you not only destroyed the organization which I had created, and rendered it utterly impotent for my future uses, but you destroyed almost at one blow every ambition that I had through that organization and by reason of it.
"You didn't know that, and you couldn't appreciate it; and it wouldn't matter at all to you if you had; neither has it anything to do with the purport of this letter.
"I know you will say that I am a fool to take the trouble to warn you, but I would be less than a woman, and much less than the bad woman I am, if I did not take this opportunity of exulting over the chance that is now promised to me to get square with you.
"Heretofore my every effort has been centred upon playing on my fellow men; heretofore I have had only two thoughts in pursuing my career; one was to create an organization of which I was the supreme head, and the other was to secure by the operation of that organization all the money that it was possible to obtain.
"I have always been a thief with a system. My robberies have all been committed after careful planning; you know that because of the one you helped to commit yourself. But now I have only one ambition left—to get square with you. I haven't decided yet how I shall do it, or when, or where it shall be done. If I had so decided I would not tell you, so it makes no difference.