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48 MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE "you've saved me the trouble killing you" "You!" shrilled, at last, the wretch on his death-hed. "You!" "Yes, John, I!" laughed out Henry Collins. "Haven't you a hetter wel- come for me after all these years? No? Well, then, listen. I came back to kill you " The sick man cowered, gasping on the pillows. "And to take the money that you've saved so carefully for me." Henry's smile deepened. He bent lower. "But you've saved me the trouble of killing you by dying so conveniently, so I'll just take the keys to the strong-box, here under the pillow, and be gone. Good-by!" As he knelt before the chest and flung back the rotting lid upon the tarnished treasure, he laughed again as Mephistopheles laughs on the stage. '' It was clever of me—very— to leave him," he muttered—"only forty-five, and he looks seventy. The devil's been his bedfellow these ten years. And now I may help myself unhindered." "No!" shrieked John Collins be- hind him—"No! I'm not so dead as you thought, you see." He rocked with insane mirth, and the lamp he carried fell crashing from his palsied talons and spluttered on the stone spiral of the secret stair. The figure, arisen from its bed, that confronted him was so horrible in its decay and OF shroud-like garments that Henry hesitated an in- stant, and the pause was his death-sentence. The rotted floor beneath h i s feet fell away, hurling him down steep and slimy walls to a vault far below. As he clawed desperately on the foul stones, vainly seeking an outlet, the hor- rible face of his brother peered over the edge. "Dug your own grave," he chuckled, with rasping wheezes for breath. "I fixed the nest for you ten years gone by — trapped! Ha, ha—you 're very clever now, aren 't you, down there, so snug! Gold ? You wanted my gold? Well, here's a little for you. I'll be generous— here—here!" A rain of coins stung the face below. Then came jewels; a merciless, cold fire thru the choking atmosphere. What was the matter, that the wild face above should twist so strangely? Is John, too, dying? The tiny treasure-vault is red as blood—the stairs a mocking spiral of flame from the ruined lamp! Escape is cut off! The miser writhes across his ill-got gold, trying to shield it; then, as the heated metal sears his flesh, ungrateful after all his love for it, he flings himself away and down IT WAS PHILIP WHO CARRIED RUTH PROM THE CRUMBLING RUIN