Then Kilgore slipped out into the hall again, hoping to retrace his steps downstairs and escape by the front door.

In the way of that, however, Chick and Patsy were now in the lower hall, the former shouting lustily up the stairs: 

“Run him down, Nick!  Run him down!  We’ll cover this way of escape!”

An involuntary oath broke from Kilgore’s lips, and at the same moment a vivid flash of lightning from the inky heavens illumined all the house.

From the chamber in which he stood, Nick again caught sight of his man, and was after him in an instant.

Kilgore heard him coming, and again fled through the hall and up another flight of stairs.

“You’d better throw up your hands,” roared Nick, as he followed.

The answer came back with a yell of defiance: 

“Not on your life!”

“You’re a lost dog,” cried Nick, hoping to keep him replying.

“You’ll not get me alive!”

“Then I’ll get you dead!” cried Nick, as he mounted the stairs.

“You haven’t got me yet!”

“Next door to it, my man.”

This brought no answer.

In a moment Nick reached the second hall, where he briefly paused to listen.  Save the rain beating on the roof of the house, only one sound reached his strained ears.  It was like that of some one hammering against the side of the house with some heavy object.  For a moment the detective was puzzled.  He could not fathom the meaning of such a sound.

Then a gust of damp night air rushed through the hall and swept Nick’s cheek.

“Ah! an open window!” he muttered.  “That’s easily located.”

He groped his way into one of the rear chambers.  There the night air was sweeping in through an open window, to the sill of which Nick quickly sprang.

Now the noise he had heard was instantly explained.

Cornered like a rat, yet viciously resolute to the last, Kilgore had, in order to make his escape, resorted to a means from which a less cool and nervy scoundrel would have shrunk on such a night as that.

He had, by reaching far out of the window, been able to grasp an old-fashioned lightning rod with which the ancient wooden mansion was provided, and by which he proposed to descend to the ground.  Under the swindler’s weight, the beating of this swaying rod against the side of the house was the sound Nick had heard.

Kilgore, whose courage was worthy a far better cause, already was halfway to the ground.

Yet Nick had no idea of letting the knave escape thus, and he raised his weapon to fire.

There was no need for a bullet, however, for the hand of the Almighty did the work.

From the black vault of the heavens a bolt of liquid fire suddenly shot earthward, with a crash of thunder that seemed to rend the entire firmament.

The fiery bolt reached the earth—­but it reached it through the rod to which Dave Kilgore was desperately clinging.