A knock at the door caused them to turn their heads.  The crook opened it and in walked the other crooks who had carried off Elaine in the suit of armor.

Elaine was now almost conscious, as they sat her down in a chair and partly loosed her bonds and the gag.  She gazed about, frightened.

“Oh—­help! help!” she screamed as she caught sight of the now familiar mask of the Clutching Hand.

“Call all you want—­here, young lady,” he laughed unnaturally.  “No one can hear.  These walls are soundproof!”

Elaine shrank back.

“Now, doc.,” he added harshly to Dr. Morton.  “It was she who shot him.  Her blood must save him.”

Dr. Morton recoiled at the thought of torturing the beautiful young girl before him.

“Are—­you willing—­to have your blood transfused?” he parleyed.

“No—­no—­no!” she cried in horror,

Dr. Morton turned to the desperate criminal.  “I cannot do it.”

“The deuce you can’t!” A cold steel revolver pressed down on Dr. Morton’s stomach.  In the other hand the master crook held his watch.

“You have just one minute to make up your mind.”

Dr. Morton shrank back.  The revolver followed.  The pressure of a fly’s foot meant eternity for him.

“I—­I’ll try!”

The other crooks next carried Elaine, struggling, and threw her down beside the wounded man.  Together they arranged another couch beside him.

Dr. Morton, still covered by the gun, bent over the two, the hardened criminal and the delicate, beautiful girl.  Clutching Hand glared fiendishly, insanely.

From his bag he took a little piece of something that shone like silver.  It was in the form of a minute, hollow cylinder, with two grooves on it, a cylinder so tiny that it would scarcely have slipped over the point of a pencil.

“A cannulla,” he explained, as he prepared to make an incision in Elaine’s arm and in the arm of the wounded rogue.

He cuffed it over the severed end of the artery, so cleverly that the inner linings of the vein and artery, the endothelium as it is called, were in complete contact with each other.

Clutching Hand watched eagerly, as though he had found some new, scientific engine of death in the little hollow cylinder.

A moment and the blood that was, perhaps, to save the life of the wounded felon was coursing into his veins from Elaine.

A moment later, Dr. Morton looked up at the Clutching Hand and nodded, “Well, it’s working!”

At Elaine’s head, Clutching Hand himself was administering just enough ether to keep her under and prevent a struggle that would wreck all.  The wounded man had not been anesthetized and seemed feebly conscious of what was being done to save him.

All were now bending over the two.

Dr. Morton bent closest over Elaine.  He looked at her anxiously, felt her pulse, watched her breathing, then pursed up his lips.