WHO KILLED PAUL GRUBER?

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 29, Issue 35, 8 May 1917, Page 7

WHO KILLED PAUL GRUBER?

(.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

A THRILLING NICK CARTER DETECTIVE STORY.

By the Author of “A Bold Game,” "Caught in Their Own Trap,” etc.

PART TEN'.—CHAPTER XIX. THE RESCUE. The possibility that instantly appealed to him was like a spur driven deep into the sid'e o£ the cabman’s violent frenzy. Assuming that his confederate still was faithful, the prevention of Edna’s escape by the means she evidently, was attempting, and the effecting of his own by the same, might yet serye his desperate ends.

He crossed the 16ft like a madman. A glance revealed the situation. The sliding door had been thrown wide wide open, and the wind upon that side of the building was fortunately bearing away the rising smoke. In the narrow street far below was a confusion of moving people, a steadily swelling rabble, a rushing to and fro of firemen and police, while from the whole crowd rose an indescribable tumult, mingled with the clatter and rumble of approaching engines and the resounding clang of their bells.

Without yet having attempted to attract attention, Edna had drawn the stout line twice around her just below her arms, and linked the hook around it over her breast. To have been thus lowered to the ground would have been the work of but an Instant, and as Akers approached, unheard by her in the swelling uproar, she was stooping to raise the coll of rope and cast it to those below, and call to them to lower her.

But the cabman swept down upon her like a cyclone. With a sweep of his powerful arm he hurled her away from the door and out of possible observation, and, crushing down the scream that rose to her lips, he tore the line from about her. Then, with brutal ferocity, he raised his hand to have dealt her a blow that would have stretched her senseless ; but the woman had fainted in his arms. With a muttered oath of satisfaction, he dropped her to tne floor. "Lie there and burn ! Lie there and burn !” he gasped, hoarsely ; then sprang towards the door, and then turned back to see if she had moved.

"No, she had, not moved—did not move. She still was lying there, with |her head thrown back, her lips apparently breathless, her arms wide [extended, as if to embrace a fate already hers. The smoke was rising through the floor around her. The jvery boards on which she lay seemedi xeady to upheave from the heat and, pressure below.

The sight satisfied the criminal. .With a quick movement he hooked the rope around him under his arms, and firmly grasped Ifce line running in from over the block. His final piece of knavery, inspired in the very heat of desperation, was the most atrocious. He was about to lower himself to the ground, then quickly draw the line through and clear of the block, and so cut of! the possibility of gaining the loft save with a ladder. This, he believed, would not bo attempted, for Edna Bardolph bad not yet been observed, and the recovery of the senseless girl before the smoke and heat should have placed her far beyond recovery seemed quite impossible.

With a .glance to make sure the coll of rope was clear, Akers now secured a firm grip upon the line, and, stepping to the door, boldly swung himself clear of the threshold. Then he was seen from below, and a roar like that of breakers on a beach rose to his ears. For a moment he swung to and fro some four or five feet from the door, while the rising smoke swept round him in curling clouds and eddies, and the snap and crackle of the fire far below was borne up to his ears ; but (presently he had steadied himself and hung motionless. , I With hundreds of. anxious eyes now staring up at him, with hundreds of .voices shouting encouraging words, With many praying for the preservation of his life, little dreaming that It was scarce worthy the prayer even, pe began the task of lowering himself the forty feet to the ground.

| The rope coiled upon the loft floor •began to pay out as he began to descend, and 1 then was suddenly revealed the strategy of which he had been made the victim, and by a woman 'whose invincible will and heroic courage were destined to prove her the superior of the man. ' For Edna Bardolph’s fainting was •an assumption only, a ruse thought -of and resorted to at the very moment the ruffian’s hand was raised to fell her to the floor. Even he, with all his fury and desperation, had (thought it unnecessary to add a blow to what nature already had apparently done for him. Now she came to her feet with a bound, with her face transfigured, with her eyes bright as stars in the passion and purpose of this extreme /noment of all her terrible experience.

Darting to-the floor, she caught up ithe moving fine a ,l d took a turn with it around the peg in the doorpost. |-It instantly checked Akers’s descent, jand put the cabman as helplessly in ter power as ever man was in the power of mortal woman. With his head a foot or two below the thresEi, on which Edna bad now dropto one knee, still holding fast the i, Akers looked quickly up and saw

wnat had happened. Had he seen a vision of the gallows he was destined to cheat, a more ghastly change could not have come over him.

It must be remembered that such incidents as these transpire in far less time than it takes to relate them. Scarce five minutes had elapsed since Edna first observed that the building was on fire, yet now the street below presented all the confusion and excitement of such an occasion, and her own fatejul experience was approaching its culmination. To the hundreds gazing up with widely dilated eyes and bated breaths, the scene in the lofty doorway of the burning building was startling and inexplicable, but as intensely thrilling as ever eye beheld. The moment Akers saw her he realised not only how Edna Bardolph had duped him, but his own utter helplessness as well. With the line encircling his deep chest and hooked across his breast, already compressing his lungs till every breath was a laboured heave and gasp ; with his uplifted hands clinging desperately to that part of the rope which passed through them from the block at the end of the beam to the peg in the doorpost, and which his heavy weight bad now drawn as taut as a bent bowstring—suspended thus, with his upturned features livid and his eyes starting from his head, he cried madly, forcing forth the words, through mingled gasps and shrieks : “Let go that line ! Cureie you '. Let go the line ! I shall he killedroasted alive !” With her hand holding fast the turn about the peg Edna Bardolph knelt over the threshold and bent towards him.

“Die then ! Roast then !” she cried with a fearful display of passionate triumph, and in tones that reached the wild crowd below. “It’s the fate you deserve ! It’s the fate you meant for me 1” “Loose —the line ! You she-devil loose”

"The truth !” she interrupted, bending even lower, and presenting a Picture no pen could possibly describe. "The truth—the truth ! You said my lips should' never reveal it ! Yours, then —your own ! Confess the truth I Let all the people hear you, or you bang there till” ! "Loose that line, or”

"Never, till you confess the truth.” Still holding fast to the rope with one hand, Akers dropped his other to his hip-pocket and drew his revolver. A yell broke from the maddened crowd.

“He’s going to shoot her !” The woman kneeling on the three- 1 hold drew back a little. The cabman swung half-round when he loosed one hand from the rope, and now was swinging back. The weapon in his hand rose as he swung.

Again those mad, horrified cries from a thousand voices. _ ’ “Tie’s going to shoot ! He’s going to shoot !”

Through the jam of people some thirty feet to one side there meanwhile had rushed a paan the very soul of whose agony was mirrored in hla wild eyes. He still wore rubber boots and a reefer, but no further disguise. Clearing a small space with a single sweep of his powerful arms, he fercely commanded, above the wild 1 uproar around him ;

“In the name of the law let no one interfere !”

A revolver in his hand leaped into line with the swinging form of the cabman, and the weapon of both spoke at the same moment. The horrified crowd saw a gush of red blood cover the face of the kneeling woman, and she sank to the floor of the loft like one shot dead. The ball from the detective’s revolver passed through Akers’s thigh, but he did not feel it. The climax of the awful scene came so quickly that he never knew,he had been shot. As Edna fell, the turn of the rope round the peg was cast loose. It threw the entire strain of the cabman’s weight then sustained with one hand only, in a new direction. The change caught him unprepared. The rope was whipped from his grasp. A single shriek of terror and despair broke from him and then his heavy figure plunged through the forty feet of space, and his life was beaten out with a single blow upon the frozen ground. The fearful rapidity of his fall drew the balance of the coil of rope from the loft floor, and both lengths of the hoist hung swaying from the block to the .ground. The first man to reach the cabman's lifeless body was Clark Elgin, who had arrived with the detective. Though there were wild.cries for ladders with which to reach Edna, Ellgin, who was ghastly pale, but noticeably composed, instantly stooped and detached the line and hook from about the cabman’s form and secured it round his own.

“Hoist me up to her at once !” he cried, to Nick Carter.

The guessed his design, and needed no second bidding A score of hands were ready to do the work, and in a moment, amid the wild and utterly indiscribable enthusiasm of the crowd, while the firemen were pouring a flood into the lower windows and the smoke rolled forth thicker and darker than ever, Clark Elgin was hoisted through the same space through which the criminal had fallen to his death.

With a swing he gained the threshold of the lofty door and caught the casing. Then he was kneeling beside the woman he loved, who had done and dared so much for his sake, and for that honour he too generously had imperilled. To his intense relief—far more than relief she already was opening her eyes, and her gaze met his.

The ball from the cabman’s revolver had grazed her scalp only, and, though the concussion had stunned her, the wound inflicted was slight.

Haste was then imperative, for the flames were already rushing up the distant stairway, and, save close about the open door, the loft was dense with smoke.

Elgin instantly raised Edna in his arms, and, carefully approaching the door, called down to the men below ; “Are you ready, there ?” “All ready !” “Hold fast, thei), for a moment ! Now lower away.” With the woman held fast in his arms, he had swung clear from the burning building, and together they were lowered in safety, to the ground.

CHAPTER XX. CONCLUSION. Not often in the life of any one person, particularly of a woman, and in the heart of a well-governed city, will such a sequence of perilous adventures be crowded into the brief duration of a few honrs as had been suffered by, Edna Bardolph from early that Christmas Eve, when Nick Carter first presented himself at her home, until the afternoon of the following day, when she sat with him and Elgin in the library of the house on Riverside Drive, gravely discussing the circumstances out of which had grown the dangers now* happily passed, and considering the best course to be pursued. After her rescue from the burning storehouse, the three had come directly to her home, where the relief over her return was so great that, in deference to her wishes, an inquiry into what had happened was not immediately pressed. A complete explanation was ultimately made, however, some days later ; and Elgin, exonerated of any evil intent from the first, felt the better because of it. Nick Carter’s entrance and interposition between Edna and Jerry Moss had been purely by, chance at that moment, he having disguised himself merely for the purpose of looking into her relations with Captain John Megline, whom he until then had by no means considered a fictitious character. Of course her strange conduct immediately after shaped his own, and her subsequent disclosure and appeal enlightened him fully as to the probable criminal and his motive.

While it may have appeared strange if not hazardous, to leave Edna all alone with Akers in the storehouse, his motive was entirely characteristic of the man. He had been so deeply impressed with the heroic effort she bad made in behalf of her lover, and was so heartily anxious to aid her to elear the matter without incriminating the man for whom she had sacrificed herself, and in whom her faith was so strong, that he found it absolutely necessary, before openly arresting Akers, to ascertain of just what Elgin’s misdemeanour consisted. This he learned in the interview at the bank, and at once realised that the affair might he quietly adjusted.

That Akers would follow his instructions during his brief absence, for he knew that he would find Elgin at the bank, he had no doubt ; yet he had not dared fully 1 reveal himself to Edna, lest by some unconscious display of indifference she might arouse the cabman’s suspicions and alarm him to flight. The detective’s dismay on arriving at the burning building and seeing the desperate situation in which he had' placed her may be inferred by his immediate conduct.

However, as all had ended well, it may have been best as it was.

But little more remains to be add-

Despite his caution at the time of his crime, sufficient evidence was collected against Jerry Moss to convict him of the outrage he had committed and he suffered the legal limit of punishment. At the end of a month the affair had lost its vivid colouring in all minds, even those of the participants. Elgin had resumed the more even tenor of his way, and in the following spring was married, to the heroine of this narrative.

One thoughtful act, very like the woman, may well bo mentioned. In one of the humble persons of that lower crust of society which Edna had invaded she had observed characteristics which indicated the diamond in the rough, an honesty, a loyalty to others, and a fidelity to duty, that were far superior to those of her station. In her own home, that of her happy married, life, with education and refining influences, she gradually wore away the roughness of the diamond and made of it a brilliant.

That person was Mollie Maginnls. One theme seems inexhaustible with the wife of Clark Elgin—the story of how she worked hand in hand with the greatest living detective, and how, thanks to his genius without which her wild scheme might have ended disastrously—the honour of Elgin was saved and the real wrongdoers were meted out the penalty they so well deserved. THE END.