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I confessed that this was a point beyond me, and, by mutual consent, we dropped the subject.

One night Parton came to my rooms white as a sheet, and so agitated that for a few minutes he could not speak. He dropped, shaking like a leaf, into my reading-chair and buried his face in his hands. His attitude was that of one frightened to the very core of his being. When I questioned him first he did not respond. He simply groaned. I resumed my reading for a few moments, and then looking up observed that Parton had recovered somewhat and was now gazing abstractedly into the fire.

“Well,” I said, “feeling better?”

“Yes,” he answered, slowly. “But it was a shock.”

“What was?” I asked. “You’ve told me nothing as yet.”

“I’ve seen Barker.”

“No!” I cried. “Where?”

“In a back alley down-town, where I had to go on a hospital call. There was a row in a gambling-hell in Hester Street. Two men were cut and I had to go with the ambulance. Both men will probably die, and no one can find any trace of the murderer; but I know who he is. He was Carleton Barker and no one else. I passed him in the alley on the way in, and I saw him in the crowd when I came out.”

“Was he alone in the alley?” I asked. Parton groaned again.

“That’s the worst of it,” said he. “He was not alone. He was with Carleton Barker.”

“You speak in riddles,” said I.

“I saw in riddles,” said Parton; “for as truly as I sit here there were two of them, and they stood side by side as I passed through, alike as two peas, and crime written on the pallid face of each.”

“Did Barker recognize you?”

“I think so, for as I passed he gasped–both of them gasped, and as I stopped to speak to the one I had first recognized he had vanished as completely as though he had never been, and as I turned to address the other he was shambling off into the darkness as fast as his legs could carry him.”

I was stunned. Barker had been mysterious enough in London. In New York with his double, and again connected with an atrocity, he became even more so, and I began to feel somewhat towards him as had Parton from the first. The papers next morning were not very explicit on the subject of the Hester Street trouble, but they confirmed Parton’s suspicions in his and my own mind as to whom the assassins were. The accounts published simply stated that the wounded men, one of whom had died in the night and the other of whom would doubtless not live through the day, had been set upon and stabbed by two unknown Englishmen who had charged them with cheating at cards; that the assailants had disappeared, and that the police had no clew as to their whereabouts.

Time passed and nothing further came to light concerning the Barkers, and gradually Parton and I came to forget them. The following summer I went abroad again, and then came the climax to the Barker episode, as we called it. I can best tell the story of that climax by printing here a letter written by myself to Parton. It was penned within an hour of the supreme moment, and while it evidences my own mental perturbation in its lack of coherence, it is none the less an absolutely truthful account of what happened. The letter is as follows:

“LONDON, July 18, 18–.

“My Dear Parton,–You once said to me that you could not breathe easily while this world held Carleton Barker living. You may now draw an easy breath, and many of them, for the Barker episode is over. Barker is dead, and I flatter myself that I am doing very well myself to live sanely after the experiences of this morning.

“About a week after my arrival in England a horrible tragedy was enacted in the Seven Dials district. A woman was the victim, and a devil in human form the perpetrator of the crime. The poor creature was literally hacked to pieces in a manner suggesting the hand of Jack the Ripper, but in this instance the murderer, unlike Jack, was caught red-handed, and turned out to be no less a person than Carleton Barker. He was tried and convicted, and sentenced to be hanged at twelve o’clock to-day.