“Then I waited until the house was quiet, when I stole up to Lawrence’s room and killed him.
“I escaped through the window and then down the ladder to the back yard.
“I solemnly swear that Mrs. Lawrence and her daughter had nothing to do with the crime.”
The mystery of the Red Dragon Inn was solved at last, and when the newspapers published the facts in regard to the work done by Carter a sensation was created. Nick had little time to bask in the glow of journalistic applause, even had he cared to do so. He was soon plunged in the case to which his assistants had been paving his way by their investigations.
CHAPTER XV.
MURDER IN HELL’S KITCHEN.
To understand the preliminaries of the case on which Chick Carter and Patsy had been working for their chief, we must go back to a time before Simeon Rich was tried and executed, before Darwin was sent back to England, where he afterward died in prison.
To begin with, Old Mother Flintstone, well known in the neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, was dead.
All people have to die, and the old woman had to follow the written law of all mankind; but, what was queer, her death was a subject for police investigation.
She had not lived the best of lives, this old hag, toothless and decrepit in her hovel, where her couch was rags and the walls grimy and almost black; she had been a fence and what not, and there were stories about her that made people even in that delectable quarter of Gotham shake their heads over them.
She had died in the night.