“I’m not dead yet, Shirley,” hissed Warren.  “I gave you your chance to keep out of this.  But you wouldn’t take it.  I’ll settle the score with you before I’m finished.  There’s one man in the world who knows how to get away from bars.  I’m that man.”

Then his teeth snapped together with a click.  He said nothing more that night, even during the operation for probing Shirley’s bullet, and the painful dressing.  At the station-house, and his arraignment before the magistrate at Night Court, where he saw some other familiar faces of his fellow gangsters—­now rounded up on the same charges—­he still maintained that feline silence.

And his eyes never left the face of Montague Shirley, as long as that calm young man was in sight!

Shirley merely presented his charge of murder—­for the strangling of Shine Taylor.  The names of the aged millionaires were not brought into the matter—­there was no need.  He had done his work well.

At Cronin’s agency, late that night, there came a cablegram from the greatest detective bureau of France.

“The Montfleury case” was the most daring robbery and sale of state war secrets ever perpetrated in Paris.  It had been successful, despite the capture, and conviction of the criminal, Laschlas Rozi, a Hungarian adventurer who had killed three men to carry his point.  The scoundrel had escaped after murdering his prison guard, and wearing his clothes out of the gaol.  A reward of 100,000 francs had been offered for his capture, by the Department of Justice.

“Monty, who gets all the credit for this little deal—­that’s what’s bothering me?” asked Captain Cronin, as they sipped a toast of rare old port, in his rear office.

Shirley lit the ubiquitous cigarette, and tilted back in his chair.

“Captain:  why ask foolish questions?  This case ought to buy you five or six of those big farms you’ve been planning about—­and leave you fifty thousand dollars with which to pay the damages for being a gentleman farmer.”

“And you, Monty?  You know you never have to present a bill with me.  What will you do with your pin money?”

“I’m going down on Fifth Avenue tomorrow and invest it in a solitaire ring, for a very small finger.”

CHAPTER XXIV

CONCLUSION

Shirley made some investigations in a private reading room of the Public Library:  there was much good treasure there, not salable over the counter of a grocery store, mayhap, but unusually valuable in the high grade work which was his specialty.  In an old volume enumerating the noble families of Austro-Hungary he found two distinguished lines, “Laschlas” and “Rozi.”

From the library he went to a cable office where he sent a message to the chief of police of Budapesth inquiring about the remaining members of the families.  The old volume in the library was thirty-four years behind the times:  it was the only record obtainable in America.