Whipping out his revolver, he dashed into the center of the room. There stood Jack Weeden, alias Wright, the crockery man, and on the floor lay the clothes of Benny the Bum.
Here was the secret of the triple identity. The case that had so long been known to the police as “Mystery 47” was at last solved.
With his eyes starting from their sockets, the man now looking more like a wild beast than a human being, turned to Nick and said:
“I have tried my best to beat you. I find that I have lost, but you will never take me alive, as I have poisoned myself with the ring that I have on my finger. I will tell you in the minute that I have to live all about the different murders that I have committed. I do this because I like a brave man, and you have beaten our whole gang, and I respect you for it.”
“Thank you,” said Nick quietly. “Go on.”
“I have always hated the human race, and when I was a young boy I killed a man in defense of a dog that I owned; the blood from the man’s wound got on my hands, and I experienced a feeling of joy that would only return when I saw a corpse at my feet. I had lots of money, so I surrounded myself with as trusty a lot of villains as you might find in a month’s journey, and proceeded to kill people for the satisfaction that it gave me. Sometimes I would let the men rob the bodies after I had struck them down with the air gun which is concealed in the staff, so that it would look as if the motive for the murder was robbery.”
“How did you send the men to death with the air gun? Was it with the small steel projectiles that were found in the bodies of the men that you killed?”
“Yes,” said Weeden, who was now almost ready to gasp his last. “Yes, it was the small needles that I shot into them, the same kind that I shot at you a minute ago. They were all tipped with a poison that I got while I was in India a few years ago. I—I——”
A gasp—a stiffening of the body, and the man who had the triple identity was dead.
The mystery of the Astoria horrors was no longer a secret.