Chapter LV: The Mystery Solved

“How did you come to discover that the man Weeden was Benny the Bum?”

“I followed the tramp one night, and saw him steal into the shop. He went into the rear part of the shop and took off the false beard that he wore, also the wig of matted hair that hung over his shoulders. He kept saying to himself: ‘I am the king of murderers! I am the king! I love to see their ghastly faces as they look up at me.’

“Then he went over into the corner and set down the long staff or walking stick that he carried, and unscrewed the ferrule, and out dropped a small tube of compressed air.

“He went to a closet and took out another one and inserted it into the end of his staff.”

Later in the day, Nick and several of the men from headquarters went out to the place where Jack Weeden and his gang held forth. They surrounded the shop, and Nick opened the door to enter, when swish! something whizzed past his side and embedded itself in the woodwork of the door.

Whipping out his revolver, he dashed into the center of the room. There stood Jack Weeden, alias Wright, the crockery man, and on the floor lay the clothes of Benny the Bum.

Here was the secret of the triple identity. The case that had so long been known to the police as “Mystery 47” was at last solved.

With his eyes starting from their sockets, the man now looking more like a wild beast than a human being, turned to Nick and said:

“I have tried my best to beat you. I find that I have lost, but you will never take me alive, as I have poisoned myself with the ring that I have on my finger. I will tell you in the minute that I have to live all about the different murders that I have committed. I do this because I like a brave man, and you have beaten our whole gang, and I respect you for it.”

“Thank you,” said Nick quietly. “Go on.”

“I have always hated the human race, and when I was a young boy I killed a man in defense of a dog that I owned; the blood from the man’s wound got on my hands, and I experienced a feeling of joy that would only return when I saw a corpse at my feet. I had lots of money, so I surrounded myself with as trusty a lot of villains as you might find in a month’s journey, and proceeded to kill people for the satisfaction that it gave me. Sometimes I would let the men rob the bodies after I had struck them down with the air gun which is concealed in the staff, so that it would look as if the motive for the murder was robbery.”

“How did you send the men to death with the air gun? Was it with the small steel projectiles that were found in the bodies of the men that you killed?”

“Yes,” said Weeden, who was now almost ready to gasp his last. “Yes, it was the small needles that I shot into them, the same kind that I shot at you a minute ago. They were all tipped with a poison that I got while I was in India a few years ago. I--I----”

A gasp--a stiffening of the body, and the man who had the triple identity was dead.

The mystery of the Astoria horrors was no longer a secret.

Nick Carter had solved the hardest case that had ever come to the attention of the police, “Mystery 47.”

THE END.

“A Titled Counterfeiter” will be the title of the next volume, No. 931, of THE NEW MAGNET LIBRARY. As the name indicates, the story has to do with the most troublesome type of criminal with which the government has to deal. How Nicholas Carter rounds up this daring gang of crooks makes a narrative that you will find most entertaining.

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