“I arrest you, Harold Vreeland, for robbing the United States mail,” cried a deputy marshal; but Dan Daly had already wrenched the stolen document from the hand of the ruined trickster. He remembered the last injunctions of the woman he served.
It was now safely hidden in his breast and lying against the picture of the girl whom Daly had sworn to make the happiest wife in New York. The one who would rule his little home!
“Hold on to him, boys!” cried Daly, as he stepped away into a side room and anxiously gazed at the paper which he had recovered. Yes, it was the same one, for he had only waited weeks to catch the scoundrel with the document in his unlawful possession. The secret of the hiding-place was his alone. He called the schoolboy a “shadow” no longer, for the work was done.
“Take my carriage. Get back and tell the mistress that I have got the paper she wants. Speak to no one else; and tell her that Vreeland will be put in a cell alone in Ludlow Street Jail as a United States prisoner. He’ll have no chance to talk!
“I’ll follow you up soon, see her, and then go and have him stowed away. I will bring the paper up to her myself. Hurry now, for God’s sake! I’ll take Helms and that French devil away later. Tell her not to breathe a word to a living soul. I am acting outside of the law.
“Any one of the stolen letters that we found with Helms will do to convict him with. I’ve got one here to show up,” mused Daly, “and now the three wretches up there will all be eager to confess. It only remains to nab that scoundrel Alberg, and to face him with the returned Wilmot woman. It’s nearly all over. My God! What’s that?”
Dan Daly sprang back into the main room, pistol in hand, as a deafening explosion rang out. His eyes rested on a body lying at his feet.
“How did this happen?” he yelled, as one of the detectives excitedly knelt over Harold Vreeland lying there dying on the floor.
The last words came faintly to Vreeland’s trembling lips, flecked with a bloody froth:
“Justine, poor girl, tell her—money—oh, God!—water!—water!”—muttered the dying man, as his head fell back. He lay there, the man of art and graces—the man who had played out the lone hand in Life—dead at their feet, with the steel bands still upon his pulseless wrists. It was a barren victory!