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 Henry was thinking thoughts like this as they sat in White's office waiting for something. . . for what? Oh, yes; the official deliverance. It was to come. Lahleet had said so. His mind, his eyes came back from distance and he turned to speak to Lahleet; but—why. . . where was she?

"She—she just sort of stepped out," remembered Jailor White, in answer to Henry's look of complete mystification.

"The little devil!" muttered Henry in the hollow tones of chagrin and self-reproach. "My mind just went off for one minute and she—she gets huffy and"

A confusion of voices echoed out of the tunnel of the causeway from the courthouse. It was the officers who had come with Lahleet. One of them was a United States Marshal. The three men in the tonneau represented among them the Secret Service of the United States and an international detective agency, while the fourth with the Vandyke beard was the man they had run down and captured—with the recent assistance of a woman—and after a chase that was more than twenty-four months long, a master criminal—one with a most unusual relationship to confidence men on one side and yeggmen upon the other—making him the most dangerous felon of his brand in all the country.

Behind them had arrived another car with local officers and a local prisoner.

"My old friend! Count Ulric!" exulted Henry, recognizing the beard. "Why—which materialization of yours is this Count? Where on earth did you come from?"

Count Ulric only scowled.