(3 of 3)
By an audacious infringement upon the usual tradition, the audience is assimilated into the plot. There is a magician-prestidigitator, Chatrand the Great (John Halliday). He performs his feats of hypnotism upon Alexander, his assistant, the while the audience is maneuvered into believing itself in attendance at a vaudeville show. Suddenly, Chatrand asks Alexander, the blind-folded mind reader, to recite the history of a certain gold locket with a spider design, offered by a young lady supposedly of the audience, Beverly Lane (Eleanor Griffith). Apparently there is some dark secret connected with the locket, for the young lady's guardian (Donald Mackenzie) strenuously opposes the performance. While protesting, he is shot. Immediately police patrol the aisles, the vaudeville gives way to an inspector on the stage, Alexander and Chatrand are accused. The necromancer offers to reveal the true criminal by playing upon the audience's nerves in such a manner that the guilty character among them will snap under the strain, thereby confessing himself. Several innocents almost snapped, too. But the ruse was amazingly successful in the attainment of its purposes, chilling the spectators and solving the mystery. John Halliday makes a glib magician, a genuine vaudevillian.