The first necessity was an accomplice.  The connivance of Doctor Walker was suggested by his love for Louise.  The man was unscrupulous, and with the girl as a bait, Paul Armstrong soon had him fast.  The plan was apparently the acme of simplicity:  a small town in the west, an attack of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting-room shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco, and palmed off for the supposed dead banker.  What was simpler?

The woman, Nina Carrington, was the cog that slipped.  What she only suspected, what she really knew, we never learned.  She was a chambermaid in the hotel at C—­, and it was evidently her intention to blackmail Doctor Walker.  His position at that time was uncomfortable:  to pay the woman to keep quiet would be confession.  He denied the whole thing, and she went to Halsey.

It was this that had taken Halsey to the doctor the night he disappeared.  He accused the doctor of the deception, and, crossing the lawn, had said something cruel to Louise.  Then, furious at her apparent connivance, he had started for the station.  Doctor Walker and Paul Armstrong—­the latter still lame where I had shot him—­hurried across to the embankment, certain only of one thing.  Halsey must not tell the detective what he suspected until the money had been removed from the chimney-room.  They stepped into the road in front of the car to stop it, and fate played into their hands.  The car struck the train, and they had only to dispose of the unconscious figure in the road.  This they did as I have told.  For three days Halsey lay in the box car, tied hand and foot, suffering tortures of thirst, delirious at times, and discovered by a tramp at Johnsville only in time to save his life.

To go back to Paul Armstrong.  At the last moment his plans had been frustrated.  Sunnyside, with its hoard in the chimney-room, had been rented without his knowledge!  Attempts to dislodge me having failed, he was driven to breaking into his own house.  The ladder in the chute, the burning of the stable and the entrance through the card-room window—­all were in the course of a desperate attempt to get into the chimney-room.

Louise and her mother had, from the first, been the great stumbling-blocks.  The plan had been to send Louise away until it was too late for her to interfere, but she came back to the hotel at C—­ just at the wrong time.  There was a terrible scene.  The girl was told that something of the kind was necessary, that the bank was about to close and her stepfather would either avoid arrest and disgrace in this way, or kill himself.  Fanny Armstrong was a weakling, but Louise was more difficult to manage.  She had no love for her stepfather, but her devotion to her mother was entire, self-sacrificing.  Forced into acquiescence by her mother’s appeals, overwhelmed by the situation, the girl consented and fled.

From somewhere in Colorado she sent an anonymous telegram to Jack Bailey at the Traders’ Bank.  Trapped as she was, she did not want to see an innocent man arrested.  The telegram, received on Thursday, had sent the cashier to the bank that night in a frenzy.