CONTENTS

[1]

NICK CARTER STORIES

New Magnet Library

PRICE, FIFTEEN CENTS

Not a Dull Book in This List

Nick Carter stands for an interesting detective story. The fact that the books in this line are so uniformly good is entirely due to the work of a specialist. The man who wrote these stories produced no other type of fiction. His mind was concentrated upon the creation of new plots and situations in which his hero emerged triumphantly from all sorts of trouble, and landed the criminal just where he should be—behind the bars.

The author of these stories knew more about writing detective stories than any other single person.

Following is a list of the best Nick Carter stories. They have been selected with extreme care, and we unhesitatingly recommend each of them as being fully as interesting as any detective story between cloth covers which sells at ten times the price.

If you do not know Nick Carter, buy a copy of any of the New Magnet Library books, and get acquainted. He will surprise and delight you.

[3]

A Battle for Right

OR,

A CLASH OF WITS

BY

NICHOLAS CARTER

Author of the celebrated stories of Nick Carter’s adventures, which are published exclusively in the New Magnet Library, conceded to be among the best detective tales ever written.

STREET & SMITH CORPORATION
PUBLISHERS
79-89 Seventh Avenue, New York

[4]

Copyright, 1916
By STREET & SMITH

A Battle for Right

(Printed in the United States of America)

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.

[5]

A BATTLE FOR RIGHT

CHAPTER I.
AT A GAME OF POKER.

Five men were playing cards in a room in the Old Pike Inn.

It was a road house, on a well-traveled highway—a great favorite with automobiles—in one of the picturesque valleys that alternate with towering heights within easy motoring distance of New York City.

The Old Pike Inn had its spacious verandas, its big restaurant, its smaller dining rooms for private parties, and its great reception hall, with polished floor, in which dances, formal and informal, were in progress every evening during most of the year.

It was a place to which wealthy New Yorkers often brought their wives and daughters for luncheon or dinner, and its “tone” was regarded as above criticism. Everything suggested refinement, the lavish expenditure of money for the comfort and entertainment of guests, and an artistic atmosphere that was both subtle and unmistakable. Captain Brown, who managed the Old Pike Inn, knew his business.

Only a privileged number of his patrons were aware that they could play a quiet game of “draw” in secluded rooms, with the assurance that there could be no interference, and where their occupation would never be suspected by anybody not in the secret.

The five men playing were all young, and every one showed in the flushed countenance that something more than the excitement of the game had heated his blood and rendered his speech at times somewhat thick.

[6]

Other evidence along this line was the fact that a glass stood near each man, on a separate stand, while bottles of liquor on a table within arm’s length of the players were frequently brought into use by the two soft-footed waiters, who were the only persons in the room besides the gamblers.

There was very little talking. Men who play poker are not apt to say much. Their attention must be concentrated on the game, if they expect to hold their own.

An occasional remark on some general topic was uttered, but as a rule each player, holding his cards well concealed in the hollow of his hand, watched the play of the others, and sought, by strained vigilance, to get the better of the struggle. Silence is a good thing in a poker game.

Suddenly, just as one of the waiters leaned over to pour some liquor into one of the glasses, the person for whom it was intended jumped to his feet and sent the light stand to the floor with a crash—bottle, glass and all. At the same time he pointed an accusing finger at the man opposite him.

“Cheat!” he shouted.

At the ominous word, the other four men were also on their feet.

“What’s that, Howard?” demanded one of them.

“He heard what I said, Jack!” thundered the other. “Look at him! He knows he brought up an ace of clubs from under the table. I saw him do it. He was so clumsy that I actually was able to make out what the card was.”

“You’re a liar!” cried the man accused.

It was useless for the others to try to keep the two apart after that.

With a mighty sweep, he who had cried “Cheat!” pushed the rather heavy table, with its green baize top and its stacks of chips and scattered cards, to one side, and leaped upon the man he had denounced.

[7]

The two waiters were big fellows, notwithstanding their ability to move noiselessly about the room. They hurled themselves between the combatants.

Their interference was only just in time to prevent a straight left from landing on the chin of the player who had been charged with cheating, and at that, one of them got the fist himself in the back of his neck.

“Don’t, Mr. Milmarsh!” begged the other waiter, as he wound his arms around the waist of the infuriated owner of the fist. “Don’t make a noise! They’ll hear it downstairs. It’s a mistake! It must be!”

But Howard Milmarsh cared only for vengeance just then.

“Get away, will you?” was all he replied. “If you don’t, I’ll break your skull with a bottle. I’m going to make that scoundrel over there confess, and then I’ll thrash him till he won’t know that he ever had a face. It never will be the same face again,” he added grimly.

But the waiter hung on to the young fellow, while his comrade tried to push the other man back toward the door of an anteroom where hung the coats and hats of the players, and which was also fitted up as a lavatory.

“Come back here, you white-livered cur!” shouted Milmarsh. “You, I mean—Richard Jarvis! The fellow who calls himself a cousin of mine! Come back and let us look at what you have inside your cuff!”

The man he had called Richard Jarvis, who had been slinking behind the others, as if he had changed his mind about fighting, and desired only to get away, made a quick move toward the door leading to the other part of the house.

“Stop him!” shouted Milmarsh. “If once he gets out of that door he’ll destroy the evidence.”

“What do you mean by evidence?” asked Jack Denby. “Do you think Jarvis is hiding cards about him now?”

“I know he is,” was the hot reply.

[8]

“Bring him back, then!” cried Denby. “Let’s look!”

The two waiters and the three other players, including Jack Denby, surrounded Jarvis, keeping a wary eye on Howard Milmarsh, to see that he did not take the cowering wretch by the throat.

“His left cuff!” cried Milmarsh. “Look inside!”

“By Jove!” broke out Jack Denby.

He had thrust his fingers inside the stiff shirt cuff of the accused man and brought out three cards. They were the ace of hearts, the king of diamonds, and the king of clubs.

He threw them upon the table, faces upward, with a grunt of disgust.

“There you are, boys!” exclaimed Howard Milmarsh. “He brought out the other ace, as I told you—and I saw him do it. His idea was to ‘sweeten’ his hand, of course. He meant to do the same thing with these other cards you’ve just taken from him. He may have others about him—in his pockets, down the back of his neck, or anywhere. He seems to have the trick of hiding cards down fine.”

“I haven’t any other cards,” protested Richard Jarvis.

“You had those,” Jack Denby reminded him.

“I don’t know how they got caught in my cuff.”

A burst of laughter from Denby and the three other men rang through the room.

“You don’t know how they got ‘caught,’ eh?” sneered Denby. “Cards don’t often get ‘caught’ inside a man’s shirt cuff without some help. I guess you’d better give up all the money you have won to-night, and we’ll divide it among the rest of us. I don’t know which has lost the most, but it is quite sure that all you have is not your own—as an honest man. Eh, Milmarsh?”

“I don’t care what is done with the money he cheated us out of,” returned Howard Milmarsh coldly. “That is not of any importance to me.”

[9]

“It is to me,” declared Denby, laughing. “I was about broke. I should have had to drop out before the next hand.”

“All right, Jack! You can have my share, and welcome,” said Howard indifferently. “You have earned it by holding that rascal back when he was going to sneak away. What he has to answer to me for are two things.”

“That so? What are they?”

“In the first place, he is a cheat—a blackleg—and he insulted me by presuming to sit in a poker game with me.”

“Well, he insulted us all in that respect, old man,” observed Denby.

“In the next place, he applied a word to me that he must answer for, and which can be done only in one way,” continued Howard Milmarsh. “That way is to stand up and take his thrashing. Or, if he prefers, to take it lying down. It is immaterial to me.”

Milmarsh threw off his coat and continued to walk toward Jarvis, who was hiding behind the two big serving men.

“Come out of that, Jarvis! Stand aside there, you two!” commanded Milmarsh, addressing the waiters.

The men shrugged their shoulders. They were supposed to keep order if any persons unknown to the management of the Old Pike Inn happened to intrude. But these five young men were all members of wealthy and prominent families, and were not to be treated like mere brawlers, of no social standing.

Howard pushed past them, and they stepped out of his way. They did not care much for Richard Jarvis, anyhow.

When Jarvis saw that he could not avoid an encounter with his cousin, he tried to pull himself together, and made a show of putting up his hands.

Hardly had he done so, when Milmarsh sent a[10] crashing swing into his chest. The blow was intended for the chin, but Jarvis, by quick defense, diverted it, thus saving the vulnerable part of his person.

Jarvis knew something about boxing, and he retaliated to Milmarsh’s onslaught with a glancing blow on the forehead that made his cousin mad. The consequence was a feint to the chest, which Jarvis blocked, and then a tremendous jab at the chin that stretched the latter across the floor, senseless.

“By George, Milmarsh! He’s dead!” cried one of the other players, in startled tones, as he knelt by the side of the prostrate Jarvis. “You gave him a tap that settled him.”

The speaker was Budworth Clarke, a young doctor, who had lately taken his diploma and hung out his shingle, and he delivered himself with authority.

“It can’t be, Bud,” protested Milmarsh. “I only landed an ordinary knock-out.”

“You thought you did,” was the reply. “But he must have had a weak heart. Now, the thing for you to do is to get a lawyer, quick. We may show that it was an accident, but we can’t get over the fact that he has passed out.”

Howard Milmarsh did not wait for the end of this oration. He walked deliberately to the outer door of the room, unlocked it with the key that had never been removed from the keyhole, and went down the two flights of stairs which led to the great reception room.

The usual nightly “hop” was in progress. But Milmarsh was in evening dress, and, though a close observer might have noted his flushed face and guessed the cause to be drink, he was able to pass around the throng without particular regard from anybody.

“I’ll go right home,” he muttered. “It’s the only thing I can do. Then I will see.”

It was just as he reached the outer door—where[11] half a dozen automobiles were drawn up on the great asphalt space where visitors to the Old Pike Inn could park their machines when they did not care to have them run into the garage—that he exchanged a cheerful good evening with a handsome man, in evening clothes, whose keen eyes followed him as he passed out.

“Young Milmarsh!” observed this gentleman to himself. “He’s been drinking again! Great pity! A fine young fellow! And owner of more property than any one in this part of the country. That is, he will own it when his father dies. Well, I suppose he feels that he must have his fling. But I’m sorry.”

The maker of these observations was a person known the world over as a great detective. His name was Nick Carter.

He watched Howard Milmarsh go to a handsome car, in which the chauffeur was sitting half asleep, and get in. The young man himself took the wheel. Then, after one quick glance in the detective’s direction, he drove hurriedly away up the winding road that led to the great Milmarsh mansion on the hill.

CHAPTER II.
REMORSE.

The great steel-manufacturing firm of Howard Milmarsh & Son, with its immense plant in western Pennsylvania and its palatial offices in New York, was not any better known in business circles than was the palatial home of the head of the house among the Westchester hills.

It had been the custom of Howard Milmarsh, the elder, to entertain lavishly for years, his brilliant wife being an acknowledged leader of society. Then, one night, she took cold in her limousine, riding from a[12] ball in New York to their home, dressed only in the light ball gown, with a flimsy lace scarf over her bare shoulders.

It is unnecessary to go into the details of her illness. Pneumonia is a swift disease. In ten days she was dead, and a pall settled over the spacious and luxurious mansion.

There was a large funeral, of course. That was the last large gathering of the friends and acquaintances of the Milmarshes the house saw. Her husband became a broken man, physically and mentally. He had an efficient and honest manager at the head of his vast business interests, so that there was no lack of money. But he seemed to lose all care for the world after his wife passed away.

Howard Milmarsh, the younger—the personage who struck down his cheating cousin, Richard Jarvis, in the poker game at the Old Pike Inn—lived alone with his father, and was the only comfort the elder man had.

But young Howard was full of life and youth, and it was natural for him to desire entertainment away from the great, gloomy house.

Thus it was that he often spent days and nights in the gay districts of New York City, and often drank rather more than was good for him. He was not a drunkard. In fact, most persons would have said that he did not drink at all, measuring him by other young men of his social position and wealth. Nevertheless, he did give way occasionally—as he had done on this night in the Inn—and there was always danger that he might plunge deeper into dissipation if he were left to himself.

“But never again!” he muttered, as he drove the high-powered car up the winding hill, while the chauffeur nodded beside him. “I’ve played my last card and I’ve taken my last drink. I wish I’d made that resolution before I went into that cardroom to-night.”

[13]

“Beg pardon, sir!” interrupted the chauffeur drowsily. “Did you tell me to take the wheel?”

“I didn’t speak.”

“Oh, didn’t you, sir? I beg your pardon.”

“But we are nearly up to the house. You can take hold now.”

They changed places. Then, when the machine was again making its way up the road, Howard Milmarsh—who had been trying to collect his thoughts in the cool night air, and who had so far succeeded that he had managed to throw off the effects of the liquor he had consumed—directed the chauffeur to keep the car in front of the entrance, under the porte-cochère, while he went inside.

“I am going out again,” he added briefly, as the car drew up at the doorway.

Howard hastened, first of all, to his own room, where he found his valet, busy brushing some clothes.

“Fill two traveling bags with clothes and things for a week, Simpkins,” he ordered briefly. “But first help me into a business suit, with a soft hat. Give me my automatic revolver, and that heavy hickory stick I use for walking in the country.”

“Very good, sir,” replied the imperturbable Simpkins.

In five minutes Howard Milmarsh had changed his clothes, with the help of the valet, and, telling the latter to place the bags in the car at the door, the young man went to his father’s private room adjoining his bedroom, and knocked at the door.

“Why, Howard, what’s the matter?” demanded the millionaire, as his son entered hastily, before his father could tell him to come in. “You look excited. Haven’t been drinking, have you?”

“Not much. I’ve killed Richard Jarvis.”

The young man said this coolly, but it was the coolness of desperation. His wild eyes and haggard[14] cheeks told their own story. No further confirmation of his startling confession was necessary.

Howard Milmarsh, the elder, was a slender man, with a pale face and hollow cheeks. He arose from the cushioned chair with difficulty, and, as he moved toward his son, he swayed, as if he had not complete command of his limbs.

“How was it?” he gasped at last.

“He cheated at cards.”

“Ah! That has been charged against him before.”

“And we fought.”

“Yes?”

“I struck him a blow harder than I had intended. It killed him. He had a weak heart, Budworth Clarke said. But—father, he called me a liar.”

“I see. And you struck him.”

“Yes. He had been caught with aces up his sleeve, inside his shirt cuff. That was the beginning of the trouble. Then, when he was accused of what there was actual proof of, he applied the word to me that I could not take. I killed him!”

“Killed him!” echoed the older man vacantly, as he sank back into his chair.

“So, now, father, I am going away. I cannot stay here and face a trial for murder.”

“You would be acquitted,” his father put in quickly. “The provocation was one you could not pass over. Then, again, his death was an accident. If his heart was weak——”

“I know, father. We can make all the excuses we please, and, perhaps, they might convince a jury. But the disgrace on our name would remain, and I should still feel that I had become a murderer—even though I did not mean it. So, good-bye, father! Good-bye! I will let you hear from me when I can. I do not know where I am going, and, if I did, I would not tell you, so that you would not have to say what was not true when you said to people that you did not know.”

[15]

The manufacturer went to a safe that stood at one side of his room and took out a package of bank notes. He handed them to his son.

“There are ten thousand dollars, Howard. When you need more, let me know. And now, good-bye, my son. I may never see you again. I am not well. But come back soon, if you can. You will know what the result of the inquiry into the death of Dick Jarvis is if you watch the papers.”

“I may be where I cannot easily get New York papers, father. I intend to go as far away from what we call civilization as I can. I don’t know where. But it doesn’t matter. There is one thing I want to say in your presence, father, before I go away—one vow I mean to make.”

“Yes?”

“I will not raise my hand in anger against anybody again. I don’t care what the provocation, I will not fight.”

“I don’t see how you can make such a resolution as that, my son. Sometimes an occasion will arise when you cannot avoid fighting.”

“I know that. But I will avoid it, even under such conditions as those,” declared Howard resolutely. “Don’t you see, father, that that will be my punishment for what I did to-night to Dick Jarvis?”

The millionaire shook his head. It seemed to him that his son was making a vow that he would find it impossible to keep.

“I do not think you should hold yourself to such a pledge as that,” he said. “Anyhow, I believe I shall be able to smooth matters over for you so that you can soon return home. I only have you, now that your mother is gone, and I want you with me for the little time I have to live.”

“Nonsense, father,” returned Howard affectionately. “You will be alive twenty years from now.[16] Long before that I hope I shall have found a way to come home and be a decent citizen, but I confess I don’t see my way clear now. Good-bye!”

With a hearty clasp of his father’s hand, Howard Milmarsh turned away and fairly ran from the room.

The head of the great steel firm—whom so many thousands envied for his wealth, and presumably his happiness—sank back in his deep chair, and let the tears trickle slowly down his worn cheeks. The widower felt as if his heart had been broken for the second time.

Meanwhile, the son dashed down the wide staircase and hurried into the waiting machine.

The traveling bags were already stowed away in the back of the car, and Simpkins stood at the side of it, overcoat and hat on, to go with his employer.

“I shan’t want you, Simpkins,” said Howard calmly. “To-morrow morning go in and see my father. He will make arrangements with you. I shall be away for a week—perhaps much longer. I am going to New York. Drive on, Gustave!” he added, to his chauffeur. “Take the road straight into New York and stop at the Hotel Supremacy. You know where that is.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Gustave briefly, as he threw on the power.

The road Gustave took did not lead past the Old Pike Inn. Howard Milmarsh had remembered that when he gave the direction. He did not want to run right into the arms of the law, and he did not forget that he had seen Nick Carter watching him from the porch of the popular resort.

It was not the habit of Carter to take up any ordinary murder case, even when it came immediately under his notice. But Howard Milmarsh had a feeling that the great detective would surely concern himself in this one, for he had long been a friend of Howard’s father.

[17]

While Howard Milmarsh skimmed along at thirty miles an hour and more in the direction of New York, Nick was hurrying up to the Milmarsh mansion in the large, gray car that he generally used for his country excursions, and which had brought him to the Old Pike Inn that evening.

“Mr. Nick Carter would like to see you, sir,” announced a wooden-visaged servant in livery to the millionaire, not more than twenty minutes after the departure of his son. “He will not detain you long, he told me to say.”

“Show him in, of course!” ordered Milmarsh, arousing himself and preparing to receive his caller smilingly.

“Hello, Carter!” was his warm greeting. “I’m very glad to see you. Did you just run up from New York?”

“No,” was the grave reply. “I’ve been at the Old Pike Inn most of the evening. I came up to speak to you about your son Howard!”

The millionaire jumped forward and held up a hand close to the detective’s face to silence him, while an expression of agonized terror appeared on his haggard, aristocratic face.

“Hush!”

CHAPTER III.
WHO KILLED JARVIS?

“You know that Howard had a fight in the Inn to-night?” asked Nick, in a low tone.

“Yes. He has told me. But—but it was an accident. He did not mean to do it. You know my son too well to believe anything else.”

“I know he is hot-tempered, and that he had been drinking to-night,” was the response. “But I want to tell you——”

[18]

“No, no! Don’t tell me! I know all about——”

“I don’t think you do.”

“Yes, I do. My boy told me. What is the use of repeating——”

The detective smiled protestingly, as he took the millionaire’s wrist in his fist, to keep him quiet.

“Let me speak, Mr. Milmarsh. I came to tell you that your son did not kill Richard Jarvis.”

“Not kill him? Are you sure of that? Is he alive?”

“He was alive for ten minutes after your son struck him. In fact, he was as well as ever. The blow on the chin was only one of the sleep-producing kind that are dealt at many boxing matches. What they call a ‘knock-out.’ Jarvis had entirely recovered from that almost before Howard was out of the Inn.”

“Then Dick Jarvis is alive?” asked Milmarsh eagerly.

“No, he is dead!”

Howard Milmarsh fell back, his mouth dropping open and a terrified light gathering in his eyes.

“Dead?”

“Yes. But, as I have told you, your boy did not kill him. You need have no fear about that. Where is your son? I should like to tell him. I have no doubt he is nearly out of his mind over the belief that he has committed murder.”

“He is. But he is not at home. He has gone away—to New York, I believe. I hope he will be back in the morning. Tell me how it is that Richard Jarvis is dead. I have had no communication with him or his father since long before my wife died, but I am sorry Richard is dead.”

“He was not really a cousin of your son’s, was he?” asked Carter.

“No. His father was my wife’s half brother, so that I never considered him a relative, in the true sense of the word. And yet, if I had no son——”

“I know all about that,” interrupted the detective.[19] “Don’t think of it. You have a son, and a good one, take him altogether. As for Richard Jarvis’ death, it is not easily explained. After your son left the Inn, Thomas Jarvis, Richard’s father, appeared there, in a rage, asking for his son.”

“They always quarrel a great deal, I believe,” remarked the millionaire. “Richard’s drinking and gambling is the cause of it, I’ve been told. They have not any too much money, and it makes Thomas Jarvis angry when Richard wastes any in dissipation. But go on.”

“Thomas Jarvis forced his way upstairs, to the poker room, and there was a hot dispute between father and son. One of the waiters was the only other person in the room. He says that, in the midst of the fuss, Richard made a lunge at his father with his fist, but, being stupid with drink—for he had a lot more after the trouble with Howard—he stumbled over the disordered rug and pitched headlong on an iron fender in front of the open fireplace.”

“And it killed him?”

“Fractured the skull. I saw him. He was quite dead. But—there was a peculiar little circumstance that I have not said anything about, and shan’t, unless the coroner brings it up.”

“What was that?”

“Some small fragments of glass were in the wound, and a broken champagne bottle lay at his side. It may have been that he fell upon the bits of glass, if the bottle had been previously broken. But—if the coroner is suspicious, he might make an exhaustive inquiry in the hope of proving that the bottle had been used as a weapon and that Thomas Jarvis had killed his son. That is all I came to tell you,” added the detective. “I hope your son will be home in the morning. If not, he’ll come as soon as he learns the truth, anyhow. I don’t know just what the papers will publish about it to-morrow. I don’t think they will have anything.”

[20]

The detective said this with a curious smile that caused the millionaire to ask him why he thought so.

“There are ways of holding back news from even the livest papers—if you know how to do it, and have a little influence,” he admitted significantly.

“I wish you would stay and smoke a cigar with me, Carter,” said the millionaire, as the detective got up to go. “There is something I wanted to speak to you about.”

Carter nodded and took the seat proffered by his host. He accepted a cigar from the humidor at his elbow. Then, as he lighted up and blew a ring of smoke from his lips, he glanced inquiringly at the millionaire.

“It is only about my health, Carter,” explained Milmarsh. “I don’t believe I shall live very long. When I die, of course Howard will succeed me, and I have little doubt he will take an active part in managing the business. He won’t have to change the title of the firm. It will continue to be Howard Milmarsh & Son. That is my desire, expressed in my will.”

“I know Howard wouldn’t want to change that,” declared the detective. “Howard has considerable respect for the name you both bear. But I don’t believe you are going to die for many years.”

“I know better,” returned the other. “I know the symptoms, unfortunately, too well. That is why I am not smoking this evening. All I want to ask of you is that you will see Howard gets his birthright.”

“You have made all proper, legal arrangements, have you not? Your will is in a safe place, I suppose?”

“Yes. That is not it. One copy of my will is in my safe-deposit box in my New York bank, and another is in the possession of my attorneys, Johnson, Robertson & Judkins, of New York. What has always troubled me is that Howard is a little wild, and that he might do something which would give enemies an opportunity to rob him of his inheritance.”

[21]

“How could anybody do that?” queried Nick, smoking steadily. “Even if you had not made a will, Howard is your only child, and he would succeed as heir at law.”

“But, suppose he were not to claim his inheritance? Suppose, for some reason, he could not be found?”

“What do you mean?” asked the detective. “Don’t you know where he is now? If he went to New York, we could hear of him at the Hotel Supremacy, I have no doubt. That is where he generally goes when he’s in the city. Of course, he may have gone to one of his clubs. But, even then, it would not be hard to find him.”

Nick Carter smoked in silence for a full minute before he spoke again. Then he asked, more earnestly than he had spoken hitherto:

“Do you think Howard has gone farther than New York—that he has sailed to some foreign country, for instance?”

“I don’t know where he is,” replied the millionaire. “What I do know,” he continued slowly, and with his breath coming fast between his words, “is that I am not well to-night, and that a presentiment hangs over me that I should have taken better care of my boy.”

“Pshaw! You have nothing to reproach yourself with in that respect. I can testify to that,” said Carter encouragingly. “You have been excited over this unfortunate affair at the Old Pike Inn, and it has got on your nerves. Howard deserves to be spanked for upsetting his father in this way. Let me give you a little brandy.”

He went to the handsome mahogany cellaret at one side of the room, and brought out a decanter of brandy.

The detective had visited Howard Milmarsh many times, and he knew just where to find anything that might be wanted in this room. He poured out a little of the liquor and gave it to the millionaire.

[22]

“Thanks!” gasped Milmarsh. “That will do me good. Now, Carter, will you promise me that in case anything happens to me before Howard comes back, you will see that he is not defrauded in any way?”

“Upon my word, I don’t see the necessity,” laughed the detective. “But, of course, I will do it.”

“That is not all,” went on the millionaire, who seemed to be stronger now than at any time since Carter had been with him. “I have already taken legal measures to give you the authority you might require. The papers are in the hands of Johnson, Robertson & Judkins, all properly drawn up.”

“What papers?”

“Making you the legal guardian of my son until he is in full possession of my estate. After that, he can take care of himself.”

“Rather a queer—or, at least, an unusual—proceeding,” remarked the detective.

“Possibly. But it will make Howard safer. Now, I know you would do anything for Howard or his father. We have been friends too long for me to doubt that. But I like to do matters of business in a businesslike way. Therefore I have provided that you shall receive five per cent of the value of the whole estate when Howard takes legal possession. Will that be satisfactory?”

“Satisfactory?” repeated Nick. “Why, you are rated at ten million dollars—perhaps more. Five per cent of that would be——”

“Never mind about figuring it up,” interrupted Howard Milmarsh, smiling wanly. “You will accept the trust?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks, old friend! I felt sure you would. I hope I shall hear something about my boy by the morning.”

“You shall if I can do anything to bring it about,” said Nick, rising. “I am going to New York now, and[23] I think I know about all the places in which Howard is likely to take refuge in the great city of light.”

He went over to Milmarsh and shook hands. It struck the detective that the millionaire’s hands had never been quite so thin before, and that he had never noted such a weary look in the hollow eyes. But he made no comment, of course.

“Good night,” he called out from the door. “I’ll telephone the house as soon as I find the boy. Good night!”

“Good night!” was the response. “I’ll have some of the servants take the message. I’m going to bed. I feel that I need rest—a long rest!”

Nick Carter had not reached the bottom of the hill leading from the Milmarsh mansion to the State road, when he saw the lights of a car coming toward them, and he knew it must be the car in which young Howard had gone to New York.

“Stop!”

As the detective gave this order to his chauffeur and his big car came to a halt, the other car drew up alongside and also stopped as the driver perceived they were waiting for him.

“Where is Mr. Milmarsh in New York?” asked Carter imperatively.

“I put him down at the Hotel Supremacy,” was the reply.

“Did he put up there?” asked Nick, as the other driver pushed his lever forward, preparatory to going on. “Don’t be in a hurry, please. You know me, don’t you?”

“Yes, Mr. Carter!”

“Then you know you’d better answer me without any quibbling. I asked whether Mr. Howard Milmarsh went into the Hotel Supremacy, to stop there for the night?”

“I don’t think he did, sir.”

“Why don’t you think so?”

[24]

“Because he stood just inside the lobby after getting out of the car, and wouldn’t let any of the porters take his bags.”

“Well?”

“As I turned my car around, I had a view of the doorway, and I saw Mr. Milmarsh come out and get into a taxi.”

“Where did the taxi go?”

“I don’t know, sir. I didn’t think of following it. That would not have been any of my business. It vanished among all the other taxis and motor cars in the avenue. I shouldn’t have thought anything of it at all if you hadn’t asked me.”

“I suppose that’s true,” remarked Carter, half to himself. Then, louder: “That will do. Good night!”

The detective called up every club, hotel, restaurant, and private home in which it might be possible to hear of Howard Milmarsh. But the same answer was returned from all. Nobody had seen him that day or evening. Even the Hotel Supremacy could give him no information.

Nick Carter went to his comfortable home in New York, and settled himself behind the great oaken table he used in his library, as he lighted one of his own particular perfectos, to think over the incidents of the evening.

He was only half through his cigar when the telephone bell rang. With his customary deliberation, he picked up the instrument and responded, in his grave, firm tones:

“Hello! This is Nick Carter speaking!”

“This is Mr. Howard Milmarsh’s residence, in Westchester. Mr. Milmarsh died five minutes ago of heart failure!”

It was the voice of the millionaire steel man’s valet. The detective knew it at once.

“I will come there as soon as my car can bring me,” he answered. “In less than an hour.”

[25]

As he hung up the receiver, he pressed a button that brought into the room his confidential assistant, Chick Carter.

“Chick, Howard Milmarsh, the steel manufacturer, is dead. While I am at the house—which will be all night, and, perhaps longer, try to find the son, Howard Milmarsh, junior. At least, he is not junior, now that his father is gone. Young Milmarsh was in New York to-night, and he has not gone home. Understand?”

“I understand,” replied Chick quietly.

CHAPTER IV.
THE WHITE FEATHER.

In one of the newer towns of the Canadian Northwest, far enough away from the usual paths of travel to give it an atmosphere of mystery, as well as romance, there is—or was, for things have changed in that town in the last few years—a hotel which made a feature of its cabaret performances, and in summer considered its gardens and the water frontage on a really beautiful lake, its greatest attractions.

The place was known as the Savoy, and the hotel part of it was rather better than is generally found in the northern lumber regions.

It was on a summer night, when it was comfortable to sit out of doors, that a vaudeville entertainment was in progress on the lawn stage of the Savoy.

A monologue had just been delivered by a middle-aged comedian, in evening clothes, who had been a singer in bygone times, but, finding his voice gone, had been wise enough to “frame up” a “talking turn.”

The audience liked him, calling him “good old Joe Stokes,” many of the men inviting him to join them in a glass of beer at their tables, when he came out from the sacred precincts “back stage.”

[26]

This is a custom in many of the free-and-easy places of amusement in the West and Northwest, in small communities, and Joe Stokes accepted the invitations in the good-natured spirit in which they were tendered.

There was a large gathering, including men from the mines, from the lumber woods, and from the other industries existing for twenty miles around, including a sprinkling of workers on the railroad, with some tourists, who were there because they wanted to be.

It was this latter class that offered a round of encouraging handclaps to a delicate-looking young girl, dressed simply in white, with a white ribbon in her long, dark hair, who came slowly into view and faced the footlights.

“What’s comin’ off?” growled a rough-looking man near the stage. “Where did this kid blow in from?”

“Guess she belongs to a Sunday school, and got in here by mistake,” guffawed another of the same type. “Why didn’t old Joe Stokes give us an extra encore? This girl turn is goin’ to be punk, an’ I know it.”

The girl was evidently frightened, as if not accustomed to singing in public. She may not have heard exactly what these men were saying. But she had caught the note of unfriendliness, and she turned appealingly to the quarter whence had come the applause of the tourists.

There were, perhaps, a dozen men and women, who belonged to the tourist party, sitting apart from most of the other persons in the audience, and they gave the young girl another round of handclapping, accompanied by the rattling of glasses on the table.

The orchestra, consisting of two violins, a cornet, and piano, half hidden in foliage disposed in front of the stage, seemed to be uncertain what to play. The leader, his violin in his left hand, reached over the footlights and took a few sheets of music from the girl.

“What do you think o’ that?” chuckled old Joe[27] Stokes. “She didn’t know enough to give her music to the leader before she come on! She didn’t have no rehearsal, neither. I should have seen her if she had, and I never clapped my lamps on her before.”

There was a well-built young man, with a cap pulled over his eyes, sitting by himself at a table near that at which the two tough-looking citizens who had commented on the girl sprawled.

The young man had on the high-laced boots commonly worn in country places—East, as well as West—and his sack coat looked as if he were not at all careful of his clothes, for there were marks of clay, sand and mud on them, as well as indications that he had come in contact with the bark of trees, more or less roughly.

Men who knew the type would say he was a “lumberjack.”

He kept his eyes on the girl, but not obtrusively. It was evident that he was interested in her, but was careful not to annoy her by letting her see that he was looking in her direction.

During the time the musicians were arranging their music on the stands, she stood there, a slim little slip of a thing, trembling visibly, but determined to go bravely through what she had to do.

“What do you s’pose she’s goin’ to spiel?” grunted one of the roughs to his companion.

“Search me! ‘Nearer my God, to Thee!’ maybe.”

Both laughed coarsely. For a flash of a second, the young fellow who looked like a lumberman, and who had been regarding the girl on the stage, turned his keen eyes on the two jeering men. Then he turned his back on them, as if they were not worth steady consideration.

The opening bars of the plaintive old Scottish song, “Robin Adair,” were played by the orchestra. The melody was familiar to them—as it is to most professional musicians—and they played it well.

[28]

“Thunder!” growled one of the toughs. “Is she goin’ to give us a hymn? If she is, it will be ‘good night’ for hers!”

There were noisy laughs from many in the audience, for liquor had been flowing, and the men were not themselves. At least, it is to be hoped so, for the honor of that part of the Dominion.

The singer flushed, but she took up the song when the prelude was finished, rendering it with a delicacy and pathos that would have stirred even that rough assemblage had it not been for the ridicule a few of the hardest men saw fit to express.

Before she had finished the first verse there was a storm of hisses and catcalls, and the girl’s voice was drowned. One could see that she was still singing by watching her lips, but it was impossible for her to be heard through the growing din.

Suddenly, a big man, dressed much as was the young man who had been observing the girl in silence, got up and strode toward the stage. Here he turned and faced the audience, six feet four inches of brawn and muscle.

Many of those in the inclosure recognized him. He was a foreman up in the lumber woods, and he could strike a blow that would knock an ox senseless when he had a good swing. His name was Mackenzie Douglas.

“Stop that, will ye?” he roared.

As he spoke, he picked up one of the small tables by its twisted wire leg and flourished it over his head.

“Anither bit o’ noise, an’ I’ll be amang ye, splittin’ heads wi’ this wee bit o’ table! Ye all know me, an’ ye ken I’ll do what I say! This young leddy is singin’ a bonny Scottish song, an’ I want to hear it. Sing oot, my lassie! Sing oot! I’ll e’en keep order for ye.”

Mackenzie Douglas had a sour look, and no one was[29] inclined at that moment to fly in his face. The young man before mentioned smiled quietly.

The singer began her song again. Her voice was nothing remarkable. It was not powerful, but it had been trained, so that she sang true. Besides, the melody was one that could not be listened to long without being more or less affected by it.

This time she made an impression which assured her the sympathy of the better element in her audience. The old ballad, with its haunting air, went home to many a calloused heart, and it might have been seen that a tear sprang out upon a bronzed cheek here and there.

But there was still a disturbing group near the front, with the two ruffians who had started the fuss before, ready to drive the girl from the stage if they could. They were angry at Douglas’ interference, and they felt that they must “call his bluff,” as one expressed it, in a low tone, to the other.

As the girl finished, a storm of applause broke out, but through the handclapping, thumping, and cheering could be heard loud hisses. It has often been noticed that even one sharp hiss in a large assemblage will be heard through the most insistent applause.

The young man looked quickly in the direction of the two roughs. Even as he did so, one of them picked up the stub of a cigar from the table in front of him and hurled it at the singer. It struck her white dress, leaving a black mark.

She shrank back, terrified and wondering. It looked as if she could not understand such an outrage.

There were shouts of anger and protest from a dozen men. But it was Mackenzie Douglas who took an active part in the row that broke out so fiercely.

In a flash, he was again at the front of the stage, glaring about him.

“Who threw that?” he demanded, in a voice of thunder. “Point him out to me! Whaur is the skulkin’[30] cur that would do a thing like that to a young lassie who is too good to wipe her shoes on most of us? If I don’t find the mon that done it, I’ll come forward an’ lick a dozen of ye till I find the richt one!”

The bigger of the two men who had been making the demonstration against the singer let out a loud, defiant laugh.

“I done it, if you want to know!” he bellowed. “Now, what are yer goin’ to do about it?”

“Oh, it’s you, Dan Mosely, is it?” replied the Scot, more angry than ever. “I might ha’ known it was some one like you!”

That was all Mackenzie Douglas said just then. The young fellow who had been watching took a hand. He pushed aside half a dozen men who were in his way, chairs and all, knocked over a table, and was upon the fellow Douglas had called Dan Mosely with both of his sinewy hands.

Taking Dan by the collar, he swung him out of his chair and hurled him at full length upon the floor, with a couple of chairs on top of him.

The uproar was terrific. Many men, who had held back from the row at first, were only too anxious to get into it, now that this quiet young fellow had blazed the way.

But Dan Mosely wasn’t beaten yet. The knockdown had sobered him to some degree, and he was blistering with rage. Shoving the tables and chairs aside, he managed to reach his feet.

“Where is that dub?” he roared. “Show him to me!”

He aimed a tremendous blow at the young man’s face. But a clever duck of the head prevented its doing any harm.

“Hello, Bob Gordon!” shouted Mackenzie Douglas to the young man. “You’re there, are ye? Ye did a gude thing in layin’ out this galoot.”

He seized Dan Mosely behind as he spoke, for the[31] fellow was trying to strike Bob Gordon down from behind with a chair.

“No, ye don’t, Dan!” cried Douglas. “This is goin’ to be a fair stand-up fight. We’ll hae it by the rules. Tak’ aff yer coats, both of ye, an’ let’s see who’s best man. Ye hae twenty pounds the best of it, Dan, but I’m thinkin’ Bob can lick ye in spite of it. Come on, Bob!”

But, to the intense astonishment of Mackenzie Douglas, as well as of everybody else who had been watching the fracas, Bob Gordon turned away.

“I won’t fight him,” said Gordon, in a low voice.

“What?” howled Douglas. “Why not?”

“I don’t want to fight!”

“But what for? This Dan Mosely tried to hit ye, an’ you knocked him down just now. There was the lassie, too. Ye’ll hae to fight for her sake.”

“I won’t fight,” replied Bob Gordon steadily.

For a few moments it seemed as if Mackenzie Douglas could not comprehend. His mouth fell open, and he stared at Bob Gordon as if he were some strange animal, that he never had seen before.

Dan Mosely laughed raucously. His companion, who had helped him in annoying the girl on the stage, joined in his coarse mirth.

“He knows better than to tackle me!” snarled Dan Mosely. “I’d break him in two in the first round.”

“Bob Gordon, lad, what does it mean?”

The big Scot appealed to Gordon almost piteously. He could not make out why Gordon was backing down. He had never come across a case of this kind before, where a full-grown man, young and active, backed out of a combat that it was his actual duty to enter. It was too much for Douglas.

“I’ll tell yer what it means,” shouted Dan Mosely derisively. “He’s afraid! That’s all there is to it. He’s a cur, an’ he don’t dare to put up his hands agin’ me!”

[32]

Douglas looked searchingly at Gordon, and his great hands twitched, as if he longed to get into battle himself.

“Is that so, Gordon? Do ye mean t’ tell me that ye’re afraid?”

“Yes, Douglas,” returned the young man, after a pause, during which it could be seen he was fighting with himself. “I’m—I’m afraid!”

Mackenzie Douglas was silent for a second. Then, after raising his hand on high, as if calling Heaven to witness the awful disgrace, he pointed a long finger at Bob Gordon, saying, in a tone of denunciation and scorn:

“Hoot awa’! You—you—coward!”

CHAPTER V.
A CONFESSION.

It is hardly necessary to relate that Douglas took the part Bob Gordon should have played, and gave the burly Dan Mosely the trouncing of his life. That followed, as a matter of course. The fellow had to be punished for insulting the singer, and if Gordon would not do the work, why, Mackenzie Douglas was only too pleased to take on the job.

But Bob Gordon did not wait to see the battle.

“Coward!”

The hateful, ignominious word seemed to pursue him, as, with bent head, he forced his way through the crowd to escape from the garden. Once clear of the lights and jeering faces, he strode rapidly to a remote part of the extensive grounds that were all part of the Savoy premises.

What should he do? He could not stay up in the woods and work as a lumberman any longer. The men would make life unbearable for him—unless he were to fight a few of them.

[33]

“No, I cannot do that!” he moaned. “I cannot do that!”

It was as he uttered this lament in an incoherent wail that was somehow like the cry of a wounded animal, that a white figure came bounding toward him among the trees.

“Oh, Mr. Gordon!” she panted. “I had to come and thank you for taking my part so nobly!”

“Nobly?” he echoed bitterly. “Don’t you know that there was more of it after that, and that I was anything but noble then?”

“I know,” she answered. “And I think you were quite right. You’d done enough.”

“They call me a coward!”

“What of that?” demanded the girl, her eyes sparkling in her anger as she thought of the attack on Gordon. “You’re not a coward! You’ve given too many proofs that you are just the reverse. Just because you would not fight that big ruffian! Call you a coward! Why, I saw his head towering far above yours. He is a giant!”

Bob Gordon flushed. He knew that the girl’s excuse for him was well meant. But it hardly soothed him or helped to restore his self-respect.

“It wasn’t that,” he assured her hastily. “I was not afraid of him—not of him! I wish you would believe that, Bessie, although I’m afraid no one else ever will.”

“What was it, then?”

“Just this: I once—in a fight—killed a man!”

She recoiled a little. It was an involuntary movement, but Gordon saw it, and it caused him to continue quickly:

“I never meant to do it, Heaven knows. But we’d quarreled, and it came to a fight. I remember that. But I swear I do not recall striking a blow hard enough to kill him. It was on the point of the jaw, and he fell senseless. But he should have recovered in a few seconds. It was not a deadly blow, ordinarily. We had[34] both been drinking. That—that is why I never touch liquor now, Bessie.”

“Perhaps you didn’t kill him,” she whispered. “Perhaps he was not really dead.”

“Yes, he was. A doctor was in the room—a friend of mine. He examined him, and pronounced him quite dead. Then I ran away.”

“And that is all you know about it?”

“I heard afterward that the coroner’s jury found a verdict of ‘Accidental death.’”

“Then you have nothing to fear.”

“My own conscience. And, if I were to go back home, there are persons who know that I killed Richard Jarvis. My father is a wealthy, influential man, and he may have hushed it up. But I know. So does he.”

“Haven’t you had any letters from your father, or anybody at your home, since you left?”

“No. It was two years ago that I left, and nobody knows where I am. I have been up in the back country ever since, and I have changed my name, too. I won’t tell you my real name. It would not do any good. But you and I have been friends, and I don’t want you to think I’m a coward. That’s why I’ve told you my story.”

“I understand.”

“I’m sure you do. When I knew that Richard Jarvis was dead, I made a solemn vow never to fight again, no matter what might be the circumstances. It has been a hard vow to keep, but I’ve done it somehow. I never had to be called a coward on account of it until to-night, however. That is why I’m going away.”

“I should advise you to go home,” she murmured. “You say your father is wealthy. I always felt sure that you were not the sort of man you have allowed yourself to be regarded out here. You are not an[35] ordinary laborer. Your manners are those of a gentleman. That shows in so many little ways.”

“I’m a murderer!”

“No, no. Don’t use such a word as that. It was not murder—if it happened in a fair fight. Any of the men about here would say you had a right to do it.”

“That may be. But it would not be looked at in that way in my home near New York. I am convinced that if I were to go back I should be arrested and have to go through all the horrors of a trial for murder. The end would be, very likely, the electric chair in Sing Sing. My blood turns to water and my heart to ice when I think of such a possibility. I am a coward about that. I am not afraid of death, I believe—of death itself. But to die in that way! The shame of it!”

He shuddered and covered his face with his hands. She touched him gently on the arm.

“Don’t, Mr. Gordon! You torment yourself needlessly. Take my advice and go back home. I must leave you now. My father is going on to play his violin solo. He does a trick act, you know—plays the violin in all sorts of curious ways. Uses only one string, imitates cries of animals and birds, and so on. He doesn’t like to do it, for he is an accomplished musician, and he feels that he is degrading his art. But the audience demands it, and he is such a master of his instrument that he can do anything.”

“Good-bye, Bessie. I am going away from this place. I hope I shall see you again. You and your father travel about, and you’re quite likely to come to some camp where I am. Good-bye! Remember me to your father, Mr. Silvius.”

Before the girl could reply, Bob Gordon—or Howard Milmarsh, which, of course, was his real name—had dashed away into the darkness.

Bessie Silvius made her way slowly to the back of the stage.

[36]

It was not until the girl and Bob Gordon had both gone that a man came out from behind a large bush where he had been crouching, listening to the conversation. He was in evening dress, but his shirt front was crumpled and bore stains from the bush, while his whole suit looked as if it needed pressing.

The man was none other than the monologuist who had been hailed by his noisy admirers as “old Joe Stokes.”

He had taken himself off when the row started, because he did not care to be in a battle if it could be helped. Moreover, he had seen the girl following Bob Gordon into the darkness, and he had curiosity to see what there might be between them—if anything. Joe Stokes had a sort of liking for Bessie Silvius himself.

“Well, if this isn’t luck!” was Joe Stokes’ self-addressed remark, as he found himself alone, and ventured to stand up and stretch. “I’ve always had my suspicions about that Bob Gordon. He never seemed to me to be like the other lumbermen. I’ve lived in cities too long, and mixed too much with classy people, not to know a man who has been a gentleman, no matter what kind of clothes he wears. And now this turns out to be—I’ll get into the hotel. I’ll have to work quickly if I’m going to make anything of all this.”

It was easy for him to get to the hotel without being seen by the audience in the garden. They were some distance away from the house, and were at the back of it, besides.

Joe Stokes went around to the front of the long, rambling frame structure, and soon was in his own small bedroom on the third-story.

Opening a shabby but strong trunk—it was the sort of iron-bound thing, built to stand rough usage, which is known as a “theatrical trunk”—he took out a newspaper.

The paper was folded small, so that one particular[37] paragraph was turned outward. The paper was old and dirty, bearing marks of much handling. It was not easy to make out the print, but Stokes had read it before, and he managed to read it without trouble:

“If this should meet the eye of H.M., late of Westchester and New York, he is urgently requested to return home. His father is dead, and he is the heir to the estate.”

Joe Stokes sat on the side of his bed and considered: “‘H.M.’ means ‘Howard Milmarsh,’ of course. It must, for see how the description fits him. And there is five thousand dollars reward for anybody who finds the young man, or gives satisfactory proof of his death. ‘Communications should be sent to Johnson, Robertson & Judkins, attorneys at law, Pine Street, New York,’” he read, from the advertisement. “Good!”

He considered for some minutes. Then he muttered slowly:

“The worst of it is that I’m afraid to go to New York. If the police were to know I was there, it would be the Tombs for mine, and a trip up the river for a few years afterward. I’ll have to think this out.”

He lighted an old pipe, with strong tobacco, and composed himself to study out the problem of getting hold of the five thousand dollars without giving the police a chance to get hold of himself.

CHAPTER VI.
DOOR AND WINDOW.

While Joe Stokes sat in his room and studied, two other persons were in conference in the room immediately below his own.

They also wanted to find H.M., although their main purpose in coming to this small lumber village and[38] summer resort was to look for a man wanted for a series of crimes in and about New York City. His name was said to be Andrew Lampton, although, considering the number of aliases he used, there was a strong possibility that it was not his real name.

“Harold Milmarsh is here, Chick,” said one of the two persons, after making sure the door of the double-bedded room was locked. “I did not see him to-night about the hotel. But the landlord says he is probably over at the garden looking at the show.”

“Shall I go over and get him?”

Nick Carter—for it was the celebrated detective who was sitting in the room with his principal assistant—smiled at the impetuosity of Chick.

“Not till I tell you, Chick. We must go cautiously about this thing, or we may lose our man.”

“I don’t see why. We are only taking him back to be a multimillionaire. He doesn’t know his father’s dead, I guess, or he’d have been back before without anybody coming after him.”

“What is the name of this village—or town, or whatever it is?” asked Nick, abruptly changing the subject.

“Maple. There are forty or fifty places named ‘Maple’ in Canada. You can safely bet on running into one every few hundred miles. It’s like ‘Newark’ in the United States. Did you ever think how many Newarks there are about the country?”

“Never mind about that, Chick,” was the rather impatient rejoinder. “This place is called Maple. That is enough for me. My information was that Lampton told somebody in Chicago that he might go to Maple. It seems he heard that some girl he wanted was coming here. She is a singer, and her father plays the violin.”

“Didn’t you get their names?”

Nick glanced at his assistant with a tired smile.

“Their name is Silvius. The father is Roscoe Silvius,[39] and his daughter is known as Bessie. I suppose her full name is Elizabeth. But ‘Bessie’ will do for our purpose. We’ll go down to the restaurant and see if they will give us a cup of coffee and a sandwich. Then we can stroll over to the garden, where the vaudeville show is. That was a long, tiresome ride on the stage, and I dare say you are as hungry as I am.”

“I don’t know just how hungry you are,” returned Chick. “But I know I am about starved. I could eat the china handle off a door.”

The two detectives had, in fact, been in the Savoy Hotel only half an hour. They had arrived on the stage from the terminus of the little railroad that ran out of Edmonton, in Alberta, in company with a party of three tourists, and had passed as such themselves. There was nothing distinctive about their appearance to tell the world what their profession was.

They had come direct to the room to which they had been assigned, and, having had a wash and brush up, were ready for the meal that was always furnished for the stage passengers in the evening.

Nick Carter opened the door to go downstairs, but quickly stepped back. He left the door open wide enough to enable him to peer through the crack, and held up his hand to Chick to keep silent.

For about two minutes Carter stood still looking out. The room behind him was dark, and so was the hall. But there was light in the hallways below, and it chanced to shine feebly on the face of a man who was fumbling at a door lock about a dozen yards from where the detective watched.

“It’s our man, Chick,” whispered the chief. “He’s getting into that room with a picklock. We are sure of him now, and I guess we’ll see what he’s after in that room. We can take him back to New York to answer to that counterfeiting charge, and the other[40] things against him. But I should like to know what game he has here.”

“It was lucky that both Milmarsh and Lampton came to this place. We can kill two birds with one stone. It isn’t often things break as well as that.”

“They didn’t ‘break’ particularly,” whispered back Nick. “I knew Lampton would be likely to be here, and I had definite information before we left New York that Howard Milmarsh was working as a lumberman near Maple, in Alberta. It is all perfectly simple.”

“It is a wonder you didn’t trust somebody else to gather these men in,” remarked Chick. “You might have saved all this time for yourself if you’d just let me come. I could have handled the case, I know.”

Nick Carter did not answer this grumbling tirade. He did not seem even to hear it. Now he darted out of the doorway into the dark hall, with Chick close behind him, and tried the door, the lock of which Lampton had been working on with his bit of strong wire.

“We’ll have to break it open, Chick. Too bad! I was waiting for him to get the door open. Then I intended to nail him before he could shut it again. He was too quick for me. Lampton always was a slick individual. He slipped through and banged it shut all in an instant. It has a spring lock, you see, like our own—only with a different kind of key, of course.”

The detective was annoyed that he had allowed this rascal to keep him back, even for an instant. He pushed with all his strength at the door, resolved to break it in at all hazards. He could easily explain to the landlord who he was afterward, and a dollar or two would repair the damage.

“Mighty strong door!” exclaimed Chick, as he hurled himself against it by the side of his chief. “It[41] ain’t going to give way in a hurry. But we’ll have to smash it open if it takes all——”

He broke off suddenly, for inside the room there arose the sound of two men engaged in a fierce struggle.

They could hear furniture falling over, and the scuffling of feet, mingled with pantings, as if the contestants were in fierce grips, and putting forth all their strength.

“Listen,” said Chick. “That sounds like Lampton’s voice. I haven’t heard it for three years, but I’d swear it’s he that’s growling to the other fellow to stand back.”

“Push the door!” returned Nick. “Never mind about talking. We can do that afterward. I want to get into this room.”

For a minute or two longer the racket continued. Then they heard the sound of a window sash being wished up violently, followed by more banging and scuffling.

“Ah!” cried somebody inside.

“That’s Milmarsh!” exclaimed Carter involuntarily. “It means that the other fellow has got away. Down with this door!”

The detective had considered, for a moment, the wisdom of rushing down the stairs and out to the lawn, to pursue the person who had just jumped through the window. But he decided that it would be hard to find anybody in the darkness who had had so long a start, and he redoubled his efforts to get the door open.

“Shove, Chick!”

“I am shoving!”

“Harder!”

“Gosh! I’m doing all I can!” protested Chick.

The two moved back a few inches from the door, and flung themselves back against it with all their weight.

[42]

This time it yielded. With a smash, it fell into the room. Unfortunately, the two detectives went with it, and it took them a little time to get up and find out just where they were.

Just as they fell into the room they heard a loud noise at the window, and then the sash, which had been held up by one of the primitive catches often employed in country places, broke loose and came down with a slam, locking itself as it did so.

Nick Carter, notwithstanding that he was in such a mix-up, realized what had happened at the window. A man had just slipped through and dropped to the lawn after the first one, and, in doing so, he had disengaged the sash from the contrivance which held it up.

What worried the detective more than anything else was that he realized he had lost both the men he was after—the crook, as well as the heir to the Milmarsh millions and the big steel-manufacturing plant.

The catch of the window which held the sash down was out of order. That is a common complaint with window locks of all kinds. It had become jammed so that it was impossible to open it in the ordinary way.

Nick took from his pocket the jackknife he always carried—an implement which had a number of useful little tools in the handle. With this he pried the window open and looked out.

“See anything?” asked Chick.

“No. I did not expect to do so, either. But we won’t give up the chase just yet. They can’t get out of Maple easily. We’ll have them both before morning.”

“This is Howard Milmarsh’s room, isn’t it, do you think?” asked Chick.

“No doubt about that,” was the chief’s quiet reply, as he lighted the lamp he had found on a side table—luckily not upset in the struggle which had taken place. “By Jove! That fellow was going through[43] Howard’s trunk. Look! See how everything is tumbled over!”

“And a lot of letters scattered about. What are they?”

Nick glanced through three of the letters hurriedly, one after another.

“From lumbermen and miners, addressed to different places. Howard has traveled about considerably in the past two years, poor fellow! The significance of these letters is not in the letters themselves, for they are not important. But the way they are tossed about shows that Andrew Lampton knew there were some papers in this trunk worth taking—or he believed there were. I don’t like Lampton being mixed up in Milmarsh’s affairs at all—that is, unless we capture the blackguard. Then it won’t matter.”

“Well, we will capture him,” declared Chick, with sublime confidence in the infallibility of his chief. “We’ll have them both long before we are ready to go to bed.”

But he was mistaken. They searched every part of the grounds of the Savoy Hotel, and hunted all over Maple. But not a vestige could they find either of Andrew Lampton or Howard Milmarsh! They had got clean away!

In the end, the chief and Chick had to leave Maple without their men.

It was a mystery, but Nick only smiled when his assistant said that to him.

Solving mysteries of this kind—and even much harder ones—was the life amusement of Nick Carter.

[44]

CHAPTER VII.
TRACED BACK.

It was six weeks after the disappearance of Andrew Lampton and Howard Milmarsh from Maple, following their jumping through the window, and Nick Carter was again in his own home in New York.

He sat in his usual place, at the back of the heavy table in his library, looking through some papers. Facing him were Chick, with Patsy Garvan, the latter in a rough and ragged disguise.

Patsy had the ability to “make-up” for any age, from fifteen to seventy or eighty. He had a youthful face, with a roguish, turned-up nose, and bright eyes, so that it was easy for him to be a young boy.

That was the character he had now, and he smiled cheerfully as his chief gave him some instructions.

“This man. Andrew Lampton—who is passing by the name of Joe Stokes, according to my information—is the main worker in this counterfeiting affair. Is that what you have heard, Patsy?”

“I’ve heard somebody called ‘Joe’ in that house,” replied young Garvan. “But I never saw the man himself.”

“Well, that does not make any difference. After all, I don’t want you to do anything more than be in the house, to let Chick in when he comes. You are sure nobody followed you when you came away this afternoon?”

“I’ll bet on that,” replied Patsy. “I know Jersey City like a book, and if there’s any one can shadow me in that burg without my finding it out, I’d like to see him. I know twenty ways of gettin’ out of Jersey City without no one knowing which way I went.”

“The street is a quiet one, and it is rather away from Montgomery and the other thoroughfares where[45] a newsboy might be expected to be trying to do business.”

“A newsboy who wants to sell papers doesn’t stay on any particular street,” replied Patsy. “He follows up his business, no matter where it may lead him. That’s the kind of newsboy I am,” he added, with a cheerful grin. “This Salisbury Street is long enough—and ugly enough—for any kind of business.”

“It is No. 25 Salisbury Street. That’s the address,” remarked Nick, referring to a memorandum on his blotter. “All right! That will do. Get over there and lie low. When Chick comes, be ready. And, above all, be sure you’re not seen going in.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll go in like a shadow under a door. I’ve been hiding there for five days without anybody getting on. I am not going to fall down now, just before the blow-off. Not much!”

With this earnest assurance, Patsy nodded to Chick, waved his hand to the chief, and slipped away.

“It’s a good thing we have Patsy to help,” remarked Nick, when the door had closed. “This man Lampton is a keen rascal, and if he had the least suspicion we had traced him from Maple to New York, we should not get him this time, I’m afraid.”

“Perhaps we should not get him at all,” ventured Chick.

“Yes, we should get him some time. You ought to know that. When we go after a man as determinedly as we have for Andrew Lampton, his capture is never more than a question of time—and perseverance.”

“I hope that will be true about Howard Milmarsh.”

“It will. Strange that we should have so much trouble to find a man just to hand a fortune to him. But this is a world of strange things. Anyhow, I promised his father to see that he got his rights, and I will go through with that, just as steadily as I will keep after Andrew Lampton till I have him.”

[46]

“The secret-service men will help. That’s one thing.”

“Yes, and I wish they weren’t in it. I’d rather do without the aid of the secret-service and the police, too, if I could. But it can’t be avoided. There’s one thing—the police over in Jersey City are a pretty bright lot of men. But they’ve been looking for Lampton some time, and they’ve never dropped on this crib of his yet.”

“Which shows the smartness of Lampton and his gang.”

“Well, criminals must be smart to some degree, or they never could pull off any job. Lampton is a clever fellow, because he can do so many widely different things. He is quite a good vaudeville performer, even though his singing voice is gone.”

“Ah, yes!” laughed Chick. “Joe Stokes! They seemed to think a great deal of him at Maple. I won’t go till it gets dark to-night. I suppose I may as well get ready, however. I’ve got to look like a decent kind of hobo, haven’t I? The sort of man who is willing to work if he can get a job?”

“That’s right. You put it very neatly. But you need not do it just yet. You are quite sure Lampton is still in that house?”

“Quite. That is, unless he’s got out while Patsy was here to-day. Patsy has been keeping as sharp an eye on the crib as any one could, and he knew, before he came away to-day, that Lampton had gone to bed for a few hours. You only want this one man, don’t you?”

“Well, he is the most important. But I want to see the whole gang caught. I have no mercy for a counterfeiter. It is a dirty, contemptible business, because it generally makes people suffer who cannot afford to lose money. The secret-service men will look after them, however—when they learn where they are.”

[47]

“Which will be thanks to Nick Carter.”

“Not to me alone,” was Nick’s modest correction. “I have two able assistants, and they have done as much of this work as I have.”

“Strange the secret-service men did not find them,” remarked Chick.

The detective laughed quietly, as he took a perfecto from his drawer and clipped off the end.

“It was,” he admitted. “They would have found it soon, no doubt. But Lieutenant Brockton certainly opened his official eyes when I told him you and Patsy had discovered the den. It’s a feather in the caps of both of you.”

“I should like to have seen him.”

“Brockton wanted to make a raid right away. But I persuaded him to wait,” went on Nick. “I know what these raids are. There’s a forcible entry, generally with the breaking down of an iron-lined door, which attracts the attention of the whole neighborhood. Then there’s a rush, and, as likely as not, the very man you want most of all gets away. No raid for mine.”

The detective had his cigar alight by this time, and as he pulled at it steadily, to make sure it would draw properly, he gathered up some of his memoranda and stowed it away carefully in a secret recess under the table.

“It’s true enough that raids don’t always work out well,” agreed Chick thoughtfully. “We lost Bill the Bum just that way. And he got away with about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry, too.”

“He was drowned in that wreck off Sandy Hook, though,” remarked Nick. “So it didn’t do him much good. You remember that tramp steamer, the Lovely Maud? It was in a collision with a tank steamer. The Lovely Maud went down like a stone, and Bill the Bum, with all his loot, went down with her. Talking[48] about raids, however, we may have to make one, if our own plan doesn’t work out.”

“It will work out!” was Chick’s positive assertion.

“I hope so. Lieutenant Brockton and the chief of police in Jersey City are willing to let me try, at all events.”

“And the scheme is to decoy them out one by one, and pinch them in detail? Isn’t that it?”

“No. That would be too long and doubtful a process. I have promised Brockton that you will let us quietly into the house.”

Chick started. He had not worked out the matter along those lines. At least, he had not put it into those words, and he was not sure that he could do what was required. But he did not raise any objection. He knew better than to do that when his chief laid out a program.

“How am I to do it?” he asked calmly.

“I don’t know. That’s your business,” was the cool reply. “I shouldn’t wonder if you will find it rather difficult. But it’s your business, as I have said—not mine. I’ve promised in your name that you will do it, so, of course, you have to manage it somehow or other.”

“Somehow or other?” murmured Chick inaudibly. “I wish I knew just how it’s to be done.”

“We shall be ready a little before midnight,” continued his chief. “I shall expect a sign from you that everything is clear for us.” He took out his watch and looked at it thoughtfully. “I guess you’d better get into your hobo outfit. By that time it will be nearly dark, and you can get over to Jersey. By the time you are walking off the ferry on the other side of the river, it will be as black a night as you can want. Get busy as soon as you are over there.”

“I will.”

“And keep it in mind that, when once things begin[49] to move, they have to keep on rapidly till we have nabbed our man.”

Chick felt that he was being loaded with a heavy job. But it was not his disposition to back down on anything. He had the fighting disposition, and, besides, it pleased him that his chief had so much confidence in him.

“I’ll make it or bust!” he declared.

CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE OLD HOUSE.

Ten minutes’ skillful work in front of the mirror in his bedroom was enough for Chick in which to transform himself into the character he desired to assume.

He put on a shabby sack coat, a pair of overalls, with holes in them here and there, showing old trousers underneath, a cap that came far over his eyes. Also, he wore shoes which were patched, but which had no holes in them, and were more comfortable than they looked. Chick was always particular to wear shoes in which he could move easily.

He did not put anything on his face to change its appearance. It was not necessary. The cap covered so much of his visage that it would not be easy for anybody to recognize him at a casual glance. Around his neck a dark-colored silk handkerchief did away with the need for a collar and necktie.

He took the subway to Jersey City. Then he walked swiftly toward his destination, on the outskirts of the city.

Salisbury Street is one of the darkest and most unfrequented thoroughfares within sound of the trains on the Erie. There are boarding houses and rooming houses in Salisbury Street, as on most of the streets and avenues in that neighborhood. Tall, gloomy, narrow-fronted houses abound—houses built long before[50] the present generation, when ornamentation was not so generally demanded in residential architecture.

Each of these edifices has a deep basement, far underground, a vaultlike yard, reached by iron steps, and the whole surrounded by a rusty iron fence, giving the place a general resemblance to a wild beast’s den.

Besides boarding and rooming, there are other businesses carried on in Salisbury Street. A Chinese laundry occupies one basement, and a cobbler another. Also, there are tinsmiths, plumbers, a delicatessen store of uninviting aspect, and other commercial callings of a more or less poverty-stricken look.

At one time this part of Jersey City was a favorite residence quarter for families who sought to be exclusive, and, therefore, fashionable. But the street has fallen from its high estate, as so many like it have done in New York.

The house in which Chick was interested had a sign on the doorpost, to the effect that it was an “Artistic Agency,” whatever that might mean. There was nothing to explain it, except the sign, for most of the windows, from top to bottom, were concealed by green-slatted sun blinds. One or two, where the slats were broken away in places, revealed dingy, yellowed window shades, pulled to the bottom of the sash.

It was a double house, with an alleyway down one side. The building jammed against it on the other side looked as if it had not been tenanted for years.

Chick slipped down the steep, iron steps into the basement yard of the empty house. It was not his first visit. That had been made several days previously.

Under the high flight of steps leading to the front door was a door, hidden in gloom even in the daytime. Now, at night, it was absolutely black.

Through the keyhole of this door Chick blew two[51] peculiar notes, suggesting a cat courtship, only not so loud as one generally hears during such meetings.

Hardly had the last of the second note ceased when a bolt was noiselessly drawn back on the other side, and the door opened a little way.

“How is it, Patsy?” whispered Chick.

“That you, Chick?”

“Of course. Still there?”

“You mean the guy who——”

“Hush!” interrupted Chick. “Never mind about details. We know who we mean without mentioning names.”

“I wasn’t goin’ to mention names, Chick. Jumping Christopher! Don’t you think I know my biz? He’s here, all right. I made sure of that as soon as I got back, and he couldn’t have got away unless he went up a chimney or by aëroplane. You can bet he’s still stowed away in the crib, like a worm in last year’s hickory nut.”

“Well, you can take a walk around the block now, Patsy. There is no reason why you should stay in this moldy hole while I’m investigating. Go and get a breath of fog down by the river. There’s lots of it to-night. But be back in half an hour, in case I hit on something that I can’t handle altogether by myself. Besides, I may want you to telephone the chief or something. Get me?”

“Sure I get you, but I don’t like it,” protested Patsy Garvan. “Why can’t I stay here and lend a hand?”

“Because this part of the work can better be done by one than two. You needn’t be afraid you won’t get your share of the fun. We are going to have a hot time to-night, or I miss my guess.”

“I’ll be here in less than half an hour—a great deal less,” were Patsy’s last words, as he went soundlessly up the steps, in obedience to the orders of his superior officer. “Guess I’ll do a little picket work on[52] my own account,” he added to himself, when he reached the foggy gloom of the street.

As soon as Chick was alone, he stood perfectly still for a few moments, to get his bearings.

First, he closed and bolted the door. Then he reached about in the darkness of the narrow hall until he fumbled against the banister of a flight of stairs leading to the upper part of the house.

“I should like to have a light,” he muttered. “But it wouldn’t be safe. I could snap on my pocket flash easily enough if I dared to do it. Ah! Here’s a door open. This is the back parlor, looking over the yard. Let’s see what chance there would be for the gang to get away if we should decide to have a raid.”

He found the window so grimed that he could not make anything through it, although the light of a street electric lamp shone across several of the yards, including that of the empty house into which he had made his way.

He rubbed one of the panes with the cuff of his coat, until he was able to see through it in a fashion.

The view he obtained—such as it was, through the foggy darkness, with the pale illumination of the high arc light—comprised that of four or five small back yards, each divided from the other by a fairly high board fence. At the back was a higher fence, extending the whole length of the street, so far as he could discern. On the other side of this rear fence could be made out the black stems and branches of some jagged old elms, whose vitality had been destroyed by the sulphurous fumes from the railroad and adjacent factories long ago.

“Hello!” he exclaimed in a low, threatening tone, as he took a small blackjack from his coat pocket. “Who’s that? What are you snooping about here for? Want to bring the cops down on us?”

To his astonishment, the response of the person he knew was in the room came in the shape of a chuckle[53] of decided amusement. This was followed by the well-known tones of Patsy Garvan, in a whisper:

“It’s all right, Chick. This is Patsy!”

“It is?” exclaimed Chick, angry, but careful not to speak aloud. “And what the blazes are you doing here? I told you to take a walk.”

“I know you did, and I’ve taken it. You didn’t say how far I was to walk, and I don’t care for that kind of exercise, anyway. Why, Chick,” he added, in more serious accents, “I couldn’t stay out there while you were nosin’ about in here, liable to get a crack on your bean at any moment. I just couldn’t. I s’pose you’re mad, but I had to do it.”

“Come here!”

Patsy shuffled over to the other side of the room, where Chick’s voice sounded. He did not know what he was going to get, but he expected it would be a harsh rebuke. Instead, Chick felt for his hand and gave it a hearty squeeze, as he whispered:

“Patsy, you’re the limit. But, as you’re here, keep quiet, and do what I tell you.”

“I’ll do anything you tell me, unless you say I’m to get out,” replied Patsy. “That’s where I’m liable to disobey orders, if it gets me a licking.”

“Stay here on guard,” returned Chick quickly. “I’m going to see whether those fellows in there suspect we are around.”

“I’d bet a pumpkin to a peanut they don’t,” rejoined Patsy confidently.

Without replying Chick opened a closet in a corner of the room, near the window, and through which shone enough of the glow of the street lamp to show him where it was.

Going inside, after a final warning to Patsy to keep his eyes open, he closed the door, to exclude even the faint, murky glimmer from the window, and felt against the wall at the back.

He had been told so clearly what he would find[54] there, that he had his fingers on a certain wad of paper on the wall almost at once.

This wad of paper was stuffed into a very small hole in the wall—which, between the two houses, was only lath and plaster on the outside, with the thickness of a single brick between, before it again became lath and plaster in the other house.

To make the peephole properly, Patsy had selected a spot where the bricks joined, with rotting mortar between them. The house was very old, and mortar wears out in the course of years. He had used a long file, as well as a knife, and had cut a hole between the brick and the plastering on the other side, which, while small, was still large enough to suit the purpose of Chick.

“By Jupiter!” was Chick’s breathless ejaculation, as he obtained a good focus on the interior of the other room. “Here’s evidence—all we want!”

It was an interesting scene at which he gazed now. A workmen’s bench was before him, with a powerful lamp, shaded, so that it threw a very strong light upon the workbench.

Two men were seated at it, working on polished plates of copper that Chick recognized at a glance as intended for the printing of bank notes. The workmen were so absorbed in their work, that even if he had made a slight noise—which he didn’t—when he pulled out the plug of crumpled paper, they would not have heard it.

These two busy engravers were not the only persons in the room. There were other men in plain view of Chick.

One was sorting and examining a large pile of bank notes—counterfeits—holding each one against the light, and scrutinizing it narrowly, before he would pronounce it “safe.”

The fourth man—a burly fellow, who must have weighed more than two hundred pounds—was working[55] a roller press at the farther side of the room. Chick could not see the denomination of the bills, of course, but he heard the big man growl that “these centuries don’t look as good as some we’ve done.”

“Hundred-dollar bills, eh?” muttered Chick. “The scoundrels!”

These four were all industriously working. If their occupation had been legitimate, he might have admired them for the way they kept everlastingly at it.

But there was another person, making the fifth, in the place, who did not show even the doubtful virtue of exerting himself like the others. He was the personification of laziness and worthlessness, for he was lolling in a rickety rocking-chair, and yawning as if he were too tired to live.

Chick found himself wondering why some of the others did not lift him out of the rocker and bestow a good, swift kick where it would do the most good.

He was not at all a bad-looking fellow. His features were clean cut and rather aristocratic, and he seemed to be intelligent, so far as Chick could judge. His clothes were of a fashionable cut, and he wore them as if used to expensive raiment. Certainly, there was nothing of the laborer. It would have been difficult to imagine him laboring at anything—except, perhaps, scheming.

“There you are, Mr. T. Burton Potter,” remarked Chick, apostrophizing the elegant idler. “I guess you’re not likely to do it, either, now that we have got thus far on the case.”

He pushed the wad of paper back into the peephole, and let himself out of the closet to the room where Patsy was still on guard.

“Seen anybody, Patsy?”

“Not a soul. Have you?”

Chick chuckled softly, as he laid a hand on Patsy to keep him quiet.

“I’ve seen several persons, Patsy. Among them is[56] the man the chief is so anxious to take, T. Burton Potter.”

“I wonder why the chief is so bent on getting him,” remarked Patsy as, with Chick, they tiptoed to the door of the parlor, and stood for a moment in the dark hall.

“He has a good reason, you may be sure of that.”

“I don’t doubt it, but it puzzles me, all the same. This Potter is only the ‘shover’ for the gang. He can put over phony money easier than any of the others, because he has the front. But that doesn’t explain why the chief should think he is of so much more importance than any of the others. It looks as if there must be something behind it that we don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

Patsy snorted defiantly.

“The chief wants T. Burton Potter for other reasons than because he is passing fake bills. That’s what I think. And I believe down in your heart you think so, too.”

“Well, if I do, I have sense enough to keep quiet about it,” was Chick’s rejoinder. “And you’d better do the same. When Nick Carter is working out a case on his own plan and in accordance with theories of his own, it isn’t for us, his assistants, to interfere with him. When he is ready to spring his trap, we shall know what his real purpose is. One thing we do know, and that is that we are to make sure the trap holds T. Burton Potter when it is sprung.”

“Well, we’ll do that, all right,” returned Patsy confidently.

[57]

CHAPTER IX.
THROUGH THE CELLARS.

“We’ll go to the basement, Patsy. There are some points I want to clear up before going any further with this case. Keep close behind me, now that you insist on being here, and don’t do anything unless I tell you.”

“All right!”

“I mean what I say,” whispered Chick, more sternly. “I don’t quite like the way you said ‘all right.’ It seemed to me you were treating my orders rather lightly.”

“No, I wasn’t,” denied Patsy in a hurt tone. “I always do as I’m told, don’t I? And when you’re in charge of a case, I regard you as the chief’s representative, and I take as much notice of what you say as if you were Nick Carter himself.”

“These two houses are exactly alike, from what I can see,” mused Chick aloud, as they slowly descended to the basement again. “What do you know about it, Patsy?”

“I’d bet on it,” was the curt response.

“That’s what I think. We’ll go lower this time.”

“In the cellar?”

“Yes. The cellar stairs are under these, and the door is not locked. Be careful you don’t stumble.”

“I’ll look out,” returned Patsy. “I don’t want to break my neck by going down headfirst.”

“It isn’t that. But you might make a noise that would attract attention—that’s all.”

Patsy shrugged his shoulders at this remark. But it was too dark for Chick to see the gesture. Nor did he hear the whispered observation of his companion.

“What does my neck matter, so long as we don’t[58] spoil the case? That is a businesslike way to look at it, anyhow.”

Once in the spacious cellar, with the door above closed, Chick announced that it would be safe to use a light.

“Bring out your electric flash, Patsy, and I’ll use mine. That’s right. We’ll take a general observation down here. There are three or four cellars opening out of each other. We’ll go over into that one next to the other house.”

Many empty bottles and some wooden boxes that had held bottles of beer were scattered about.

“Help me pile some boxes over in this corner against the wall, Patsy. I want to stand on them.”

The work was soon done. Then Chick told Patsy to turn out his light and stand still, keeping his ears open the while.

The roof of the cellar was formed by the floor above, and the heavy joists, crossing from side to side, rested upon its walls. This left spaces between each pair of joists at the top of the wall.

“If I’m not entirely mistaken,” thought Chick, “I’ll be able to see something through those spaces.”

Standing on top of the piled-up wooden cases, he peered through the opening. All was blackness on the other side, and he decided that it would be safe to use his electric flash.

The white glow of his flash showed him that there was another cellar on the opposite side of the wall, very much like the one which Patsy and he were in.

“I’ve got to get through there, Patsy,” he announced, as he came down to the floor. “But it’s going to be tough. I couldn’t squeeze through that hole, nor come anywhere near it.”

“What are you goin’ to do, then?”

“Make it larger. I came prepared for something of this kind. I have a few tools belonging to ‘Fisher the Engineer,’ who is rusticating at Sing Sing or Auburn[59] at the present time. He was an expert burglar, and he had the neatest outfit of tools I ever saw. The police gave them to the chief, at his request, and I have some of them in my pocket.”

Chick produced a three-jointed crowbar of fine steel, and then brought out a shorter one, in two pieces, which he fitted together and handed to Patsy.

“Pull out those bricks at the top, Patsy. We’ll tackle one at a time simultaneously, and our combined strength, with the leverage we shall get with these ‘jimmies,’ ought to make it easy.”

Chick’s prediction was sound. It took ten minutes of hard, rather dirty work. But the young men had tackled hard work before in the course of their profession, and it did not trouble them.

When, at last, they had bricks enough out to make room for Chick to get through, they chuckled softly in unison.

“I’ll go first, Patsy. If I can make it, there is sure to be room enough for you. Here goes!”

From the top of the boxes Chick crawled through, feet first. He had to go that way, or he would have tumbled in on his head, which would have been uncomfortable, and, perhaps, dangerous.

“All right, Patsy!” he called softly, when he had disappeared through the hole. “Now you come. Don’t be afraid. I’ll catch you as you come in. It will be easier for you than it was for me.”

“Ah! What are you givin’ us, Chick?” rejoined Patsy disgustedly. “Am I ever scared at anything?”

Patsy Garvan had a right to say this, for a more fearless young American it would be hard to find in a day’s march. He did not realize, at the moment, that Chick was only “kidding” him.

Chick eased him to the floor and chuckled.

“What are you laughing about, Chick?”

“At you.”

[60]

“Why, what have I done that’s funny?” demanded Patsy.

“Getting mad because I told you not to be afraid.”

“Well, how would you like to have anybody hand a thing like that to you? If a strange guy passed me such a crack, I’d push in his face,” grunted the disgusted Patsy.

“I don’t blame you,” laughed Chick. “And I know that is just what you would do. But I was only joking. You ought to have known that. Give me your hand.”

Patsy Garvan laughed softly, and, turning on his electric flash, so that he could see what they were doing, he gave his hand to Chick, and they shook with the heartiness of comrades who knew they always could depend on each other, no matter what happened.

“What’s the move now, Chick?”

“We have to get a little closer to the gang. This is going to be the real part of the work.”

“A scrap?” whispered Patsy hopefully.

“Shouldn’t wonder.”

“Good! Fists—or guns?”

“No guns!” replied Chick quickly. “We don’t want noise. Use your fists if it comes to a show-down. Or any weapon you can get hold of that doesn’t make a racket? Get me?”

Patsy only chuckled. It was not necessary for him to say in words that he understood.

CHAPTER X.
INVESTIGATION.

Hastening up a flight of steps that were a replica of the steps in the cellar of the empty house, Chick found that the door at the top was securely fastened.

“Just what I expected,” he muttered. “But I guess I can get it open. There’s only a wooden button on the[61] other side. I might break the door right through, but it would make too much noise. My knife will fix it.”

One of the blades of his jackknife was long and thin. He thrust this between the door and the jamb, and pushed the button out of the way.

“Ridiculously easy!” he said to himself. Then, to Patsy: “We have to get at the outer doors, you know—the one into the kitchen regions, as well as the other on the main floor. The worst of it is that they are on the other side of the house. We’ll have to make our way there. Or, rather, I shall.”

“What about me?” asked Patsy.

“Stay where you are, in the dark. It will be better to have you ready in case I need help, than to let you get into the muss with me. Don’t you see that?”

“I s’pose you’re right,” grumbled Patsy. “But I don’t like this waitin’ game. Maybe I won’t get into it at all. Things are always breakin’ wrong for me. Just when I’m all primed up for a rough-house, I’m put on guard duty, like a boy at a henroost. Holy Perkins! It’s tough!”

Chick did not stop to argue with his companion. It was clear that if Nick Carter and three or four policemen were to get into the house, they could not take the time to dribble through the opening in the cellar wall by which Chick and Patsy had made their way from one cellar to the other.

When they came up the steps from the cellar, they were on the basement floor, level with the bottom of the courtyard in front of the house, and below what was known as the parlor floor, with its main hall leading to the principal door to the street, at the top of the stone steps outside.

Passing along the stone-floored hallway, after making sure that Patsy was out of sight at the door by which they had come up from the cellar, Chick found[62] a door closed, but under which could be seen a line of dusky red light.

He realized that he was coming near to the heart of the mystery he and Nick had set out to solve.

Feeling for the latch, he discovered, with a thrill of satisfaction, that it was not fastened. He lifted it without difficulty and also absolutely without sound. Then he took a peep through the crack he had made when he pushed the door a little way open.

At first, he hesitated to open the door even wide enough to permit him to peep in. He remembered the five men he had seen in the other room on the floor above, and it would not have surprised him to find as many working down here in the cellar.

But the room was empty, although evidence that somebody was close at hand was not wanting.

It was a large apartment, that looked in a general way like a kitchen. Only, there was no kitchen range, nor pots, pans, or dishes—at least, no utensils such as are generally employed in an ordinary dwelling house in the culinary quarters.

A large pine table was the only piece of furniture. There was not even a chair to be seen.

On the table was an electric battery, an iron ladle, a few tools, and some slabs of white plaster of oblong form.

Over the table glimmered a gas jet turned too low to yield any light. The red glow that Chick had seen under the door came from a large, square stove of peculiar make, which stood out a little way from the wall opposite the door by which he had entered.

“That stove was never made for honest use,” thought Chick. “You could not even cook an egg on that thing. And I’m betting with myself that I know just what that stove is doing in this place. It’s cooking new money, or I’m a long way off in my guess.”

There were two other doors in the room. One of them, he judged, led into the house, while the other[63] probably connected with the stone hallway ending at the outer door to the front yard.

“I hear boiling metal hissing on that stove,” he muttered. “The work is going on, all right. Why, yes! I see the crucible sunk into the stove. I knew that stove was built for only one kind of use.”

He went over to the door he believed led to the other part of the house, and found it locked, but the key in the door.

“That’s lucky! I didn’t want to have to stop to break it open. Besides, it would have made a big noise, and I don’t know how many men may be close by.”

Once outside the door, which he closed softly as soon as he was through, he switched on his electric light. What he found was what he had expected. In one direction were the stairs leading upward to the “parlor floor,” and in the other was the outer door to the front yard. Farther along the wall he saw the door into the room he had just left, so that it was possible to get to the yard by both exits.

“Now for the yard door,” he said to himself inaudibly. “It’s locked, no doubt.”

He was right about this. The door—a very heavy one, evidently built to resist possible attack—was locked, and there was a heavy, rusty bolt pushed into a massive socket.

Chick could have picked the lock and withdrawn the bolt. That would not have been a long or difficult operation. But he had had experiences of this kind before. Therefore, he took another course.

“That rusty bolt would screech like a jackass in agony,” he murmured. “I could never get it out of the socket without proclaiming to the whole street what I was doing. I’ll take the liberty of using some others of the ‘Engineer’s’ tools. I’m glad he is in the den, or he might be doing something with them, instead of my making honest use of them.”

[64]

Chick grinned at his own conceit, as he took out a mechanical, automatic screw driver from the canvas bag in which he kept the implements, each in its own little pocket. With this screw driver he rapidly took out the screws that held the massive socket of the bolt. Then he removed the ponderous box of the lock in the same way.

Chick was a good mechanic. He would not have suited Nick Carter otherwise. So he did his work not only swiftly, but noiselessly, and in a workmanlike manner. A regular locksmith could not have done it better.

“I’ll have to get back to Patsy, and send him out to telephone,” he said to himself, when he was satisfied that the outer door to the yard was not held by anything save the swelling wood, which kept it jammed against the doorpost, but not too firmly to be dislodged with one good push. “Let’s see! The chief told me just as I was coming out that he would be at police headquarters in Jersey City. I wonder whether I’d better telephone, or whether it wouldn’t be safer to let Patsy go there.”

He might have asked this of Patsy, only that he preferred to make up his mind from circumstances, rather than on the advice of anybody—even so shrewd a young fellow as Patsy Garvan.

When he had made his way back across the room where the metal still simmered on the funny-looking stove, and was at the door where he had left Patsy, he had determined on what should be done.

“Patsy!”

“That’s me!”

“Anything happened?”

“Not a thing. As peaceful as West Point on a summer afternoon.”

“Well, get out and see the chief.”

“See him? I thought I was to telephone.”

[65]

“I thought so, too, until I had time to think it over.”

“New York?”

“No!” growled Chick irritably. “And don’t pretend to be a bonehead, Patsy, because I know better. I’m talking about the Jersey City headquarters. Get to the chief, and tell him he can come right in by the door in the yard at the front of the house. Understand?”

“When you say ‘chief,’ you don’t mean the chief of police of Jersey City, do you?”

Patsy did not wait for a reply. He just flung this question at Chick to make him mad. Then he hustled away to deliver his message to Nick Carter, who was always the chief to himself and Chick.

Patsy had to squeeze through the hole in the cellar wall, but that was easy.

“When I get time, I’ll take Patsy to Central Park and dump him headfirst into the lake at a Hundred and Tenth Street,” muttered Chick. “He’s aching for excitement, and he needs cooling off.”

Chick decided that it might take twenty minutes for Patsy to reach headquarters and bring Nick and the police back. In the meantime, he might as well rest a little.

First he went into the back parlor and took another look through the peephole in the closet at the workmen in the other room. There was no change in the scene. The engravers and others were still busy, while T. Burton Potter continued to loll in the rocker, as if he had not a care in the world.

“A change will come o’er the spirit of his dream before he goes to bed,” was Chick’s inward remark, with a slow smile. “He may as well be as comfortable as he can while the wind blows his way. Lord! He is a lazy-looking loafer! Well, I’ll get to the other house, through that infernal cellar hole.”

In spite of the fact that there would be an exciting time for Chick in the course of half an hour or[66] so—or, perhaps, because of it—he was quite able to compose himself for a nap without allowing future business to worry him.

He went up the stairs to a back room, where Patsy Garvan had rigged up a sort of couch for himself while on watch in the house the night before. It was composed of an empty box and some burlap. Anybody who happened to be fastidious might have found it unsatisfactory. But it suited Chick. He was glad to have anything big enough for him to lie down on.

“There’s one thing about this profession of ours,” he soliloquized, “that you don’t find in every kind of work. That is, its variety, as well as its excitement. A fellow never gets dull or lonesome. If he did, I don’t think he would be any good as a detective.”

Chick looked at the dirty windows, through which glimmered the faintest reflection from the street arc light already referred to, and was wondering, in a dreamy sort of way, how many feet it would be from the window to the ground, in case it should become advisable or necessary for him to jump out, when he sprang to his feet abruptly, and relieved himself of the two words, “Blithering idiot!”

As no one was in the room but himself, it might have been a matter of speculation as to whom he referred, if he had not proceeded rapidly to make it clear.

“I am an ass—with long ears! I left that door open—the one leading from the kitchen to the stone hall and front yard door. I know I did. It was shut and locked, with the key in the door. Why in thunder didn’t I lock it when I came through? I guess I must have been in too much of a hurry. If any one goes into that room and sees the door, the beans will all be spilled, that’s sure.”

The detective knew it would not be long before somebody would be in the kitchen, to look at the crucible. The door would be found open—and then—[67]— Well, he did not stop to think about what would probably happen in that case. He hustled out of the room and down the stairs.

It was quite a trip back to the kitchen. He had to go to the sub-basement, to the cellar, and squeeze through the hole where the bricks had been taken out. Then he would have to climb stairs and make his way through doors, and at every step he might meet from one to six men, who would kill him with as little compunction as they would smash a mosquito.

“Fine prospect!” muttered Chick. “But—it’s all in the game!”

He gained the kitchen without interference. The molten metal still simmered on the stove. Everything was just as he had seen it on his previous visit. Best of all, nobody was in the place. The person, whoever he might be in charge of the metal, was still attending to matters elsewhere.

“The confounded door over there is still open,” continued Chick to himself. “Just as I left it. Well, I’ll soon fix that.”

He hastened across the room, closed and locked the door, leaving the key in the door, as before.

“Don’t know how I came to do that! It isn’t like me to forget a door when I’m in a place full of crooks. I shouldn’t like the chief to know I’d done it. He’d think I’m going dippy. Well, it’s all right now. That’s a great comfort.”

He was halfway across the room to the door by which he had entered, when the latch clicked, and he saw it jump up, indicating that somebody was pressing it down on the other side.

“Trapped!” muttered Chick. “Cut off, by Jupiter! Now what am I to do?”

[68]

CHAPTER XI.
THE RAID.

Chick was thinking at electric speed as he hesitated for a second in the middle of the floor.

He was in a bad fix, and he knew it. Only, it was not his habit to cry over spilled milk. What he wanted to do was to hit on some method of meeting the crisis.

If he could have got down to the front yard of the house he was in, he would have done that. But there was no time for him to unlock and open the door he had just secured. He would be caught before he could pass through.

Even if there were any possibility of his escaping from the room in that way, the stranger, who was already opening the other door, would see that it was still open, for Chick certainly would not have time to close it.

This may seem a great deal for Chick to think in the instant required for a person to open a door after pushing down the latch. But a whole lifetime has been reviewed in a fraction of a minute, and Chick’s brain was working like a dynamo in this moment of deadly danger.

He must do something, and quickly. He did.

At the very moment that the door opened, he sprang to the stove and crouched down between it and the wall. He had noticed, from the first, that a space of a few feet had been left there, so that the heat of the stove would not set fire to the wall.

This was the one possible place of concealment in the gaunt, bare room, and it was not much of a one, at that. And it was hot—cruelly hot!

Squeezing himself into as small a space as he could,[69] he peeped cautiously around the edge of the stove from the deep shadow that helped to conceal him.

“Holy mackerel!” he muttered. “This is a bright prospect. That man looks as if he were here for all night!”

It was the gigantic fellow he had seen working at the roller press in the room overhead. He seemed to have no fear of anybody being present besides himself, as he crossed the room to the table, and turned up the gas.

“What’s he going to do?” thought Chick. “Just as I supposed. He’s settling down for a long stay. And I’m roasting at the back of this stove. Great Scott! I feel as if I were done to a turn already. He’ll get the smell of me cooking before long. I can smell myself.”

The big man had taken up one of the plaster molds and was trimming it off with a knife. He worked as composedly as anybody might who was following a perfectly legitimate trade.

“Whew!” burst from Chick’s lips.

It was only an expression of pain and discomfort, and it was not loud; this was fortunate, for the big man started as if he believed he heard something, but was not quite sure.

He stared about the room for a moment, during which period Chick huddled back into the heat of the recess behind the stove and prepared himself for a fight, but seemed satisfied that he had not heard anything except in his fancy.

“All kinds of funny noises can be heard in the night in an old house like this,” he remarked aloud, as he resumed his work. “I’ll be glad when this night’s work is over, all the same. I’m pretty nearly all in.”

“So am I,” thought Chick. “I don’t believe I can stand this another half minute. I’m almost touching the hot stove, and the heat is something fierce. I hope the chief will understand that I’ve had a tough[70] time of it. A fellow likes to get credit for an experience like this.”

His clothing began to scorch, the flesh of his face and hands felt seared, in spite of all his efforts to protect them, and in addition to this torture, was the sickening effect of the poisonous fumes which were given off at every crevice of the stove.

“I’m about all in,” murmured Chick, as he tried to find a position a little farther away from the stove, without betraying himself. “I can begin to understand how people have felt who were burned at the stake. Hello! Here comes that big lummox to put on more heat.”

Indeed, the big man was approaching, but it was apparent that he had no suspicion of anybody else being in the room. He whistled softly as he came forward.

After tending the fire—for which Chick inwardly cursed him—he stirred the pot of metal with a steel rod. By this time Chick was compelled to crouch closer to the awful stove, to keep out of view of the big man.

“Good thing there is a black shadow back here,” thought Chick. “But for that he must have seen me.”

The fellow went back to his table and resumed work there. His manner was that of one who had a long night’s work ahead of him, and Chick had difficulty in repressing a loud groan.

“If the chief and the police would come!” he prayed. “That’s about my only hope!”

He listened eagerly to catch the slightest sound from the hall leading to the stairs to the cellar. If he could have heard anything, he would have felt pretty sure that the raiding party had arrived.

Suddenly he believed he could make out the shuffling of feet in the hall. He was not sure, but he thought the sound of feet, as well as of men whispering, came to him.

[71]

“If this big man at the table hears it, too, then there will be a circus. I’ll take a wallop at him myself, so long as I know I have friends to see that I get a square deal.”

Chick did not want any more than an equal chance. In fact, he was willing to give some odds. But he did not think he was called upon to give cards and spades, big and little casino, and everything else, to the enemy.

But it seemed now as if he must take a big, sporting chance.

Just as he was gathering the little strength he had left, to make a desperate attempt to overcome the giant at the table, he was sure he had heard a noise in the hall. There was no mistake about it now. Not only in the hall, but upstairs!

The man at the table glanced upward, with a quick start of alarm. From his throat came a low, angry oath.

“The cops!” he added savagely.

Clutching the long knife he had been using for trimming the plaster molds, he dashed to the door by which he had entered and hurled himself out of the room.

“Well, I’m glad they’ve come!” gasped Chick. “It may be too late to do me any good, but they’ll get even for me if I have to pass it up. By Grimshaw, I believe I’m dying!”

Things were reeling around him, and it was only by coming in contact for an instant with a corner of the hot stove that he was saved from swooning. He did not realize it at the time, but doubtless that was the way the sudden sting acted.

Crawling out from behind the furnace, he staggered to the door. He wanted to be in the mix-up, if only he could contrive to keep on his feet.

“I won’t follow that fellow,” was his half-conscious, inward resolve. “But I’ll take it the other way—if only I can get the door open before I drop. This[72] room is full of sulphur, and it seems to be getting thicker.”

This was not really the case, but Chick had inhaled so much of the deadly vapor that he felt as if he could not stand any more, and each moment it had a worse effect upon him.

Fortunately, he contrived to unlock the door, and lurched into the hallway beyond.

The stairs to the cellar were before him. Avoiding them, he made his way toward where fresh air was streaming in at the open yard door.

“Air!” he panted.

As he reached the doorway, he uttered an ejaculation of relief—and found himself in the grip of a pair of powerful arms. He had been seized by one of the policemen.

“All right, Bob!” shouted the officer, giving Chick a shake as involuntarily he attempted to pull away. “I have one of them!”

“Let go, you dub!” gasped Chick. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“Sure I do. But I don’t want the story of your life. Tell that to the captain when I get you to the station.”

He felt a row of knuckles grinding into the back of his neck. Under ordinary conditions, when he was himself, Chick could have made some sort of fight. Probably he would have done so, even though he knew it was useless to oppose a good policeman in the performance of his duty.

As it was, however, being sick and faint, and having hardly any strength, he suddenly collapsed, like an empty sack, in the hands of the blue-coated captor.

[73]

CHAPTER XII.
NICK SPRINGS A SURPRISE.

During all this excitement, Patsy was trying to find out where Chick was.

Patsy had found Nick and Lieutenant Brockton, in charge of the squad that was to take part in the raid, sitting in the captain’s room, smoking and wondering how long it would be before Chick would give them the signal.

They had expected it by telephone—that having been the orders to Chick—and the lieutenant hardly ever took his eyes off the instrument on the desk before him.

When Patsy came bounding in, after a brief explanation to the sergeant behind the desk, Nick was glad his young assistant had taken this course. It enabled Nick, as well as the lieutenant, to get a better idea of the situation than if they had had it over a wire. Besides, this way made it certain there could not be any “leak.”

Lieutenant Brockton did not quite like putting himself and the policemen told off to him under the orders of Nick Carter. But the detective would not consent to any other arrangement, and the lieutenant was obliged to comply. He could not afford to antagonize Carter, who seemed to have a knowledge of everything in the underworld, although he never boasted of it.

As they hurried to the house on foot—for Nick would not allow the use of a patrol wagon, which would have attracted general attention—Patsy gave the detective a very good idea of the general plan of the house.

“It’s just a few little things that ought to make it easier to put one over on the gang,” he explained. “You can’t know too much about a house when you[74] are going to get in suddenlike,” he added, with his usual good-humored grin.

“You’re quite right, Patsy,” agreed Nick. “And, as you say, the point we have to look out for particularly is at the back. They might go scooting over the back fence and get away by the other street.”

Lieutenant Brockton stationed a couple of his youngest and most agile men in the back yard. They were down the alley at the side, and climbed over the side fence.

A third man was placed in the alley, to remain there, and two more went into the front yard, below the level of the street. It was one of these two who afterward distinguished himself by capturing Chick.

The remaining three men, with the lieutenant and Nick Carter, went into the house, going in by the front yard door, which Chick had carefully left unfastened, as has been described.

Carter was in the lead. He pushed open the door in the yard without difficulty, and swiftly mounted to the floor above, where the artists in rascality were at work.

They found the room at once. It was the only one which showed a light under the door. Listening intently, they made out voices and the click of tools inside.

“Now,” whispered Nick to the men behind him. “Follow close when I open the door. Don’t give them time to rally from their first surprise! Get all that?”

“We have it,” grunted the lieutenant. “Drive on, Carter!”

The detective turned the handle without any sound, and flung the door wide open.

“Drop everything!” he commanded, in sharp, metallic tones.

He had stepped into the room as coolly as if he lived there. The lieutenant and his men were on his heels,[75] and they were prepared to subdue any of the operators who might show signs of resistance.

For a moment there was nothing of the kind. The surprise was complete. The advent of the detective and his men had been like a thunderbolt dropped into this hive of misdirected industry.

The two men still at work on the polished plates at the bench leaped up as if their chairs had suddenly become red-hot. The fellow who had been examining and passing upon the spurious bills sprang into the middle of the room. With the movement, he scattered thousands of dollars’ worth of phony money, like leaves in a wintry gale. At the same time he grunted a fierce but futile oath.

“Don’t make any fuss, gentlemen!” begged Nick blandly. “You are all prisoners! Lieutenant, you and your men attend to these parties. I have something else to look after.”

“All right, Carter.” Then, to the prisoners, the lieutenant went on: “The house is covered, back and front. Don’t try to make a get-away. If you do, some of you will get hurt, as sure as you’re here!”

“Here! Quit that!” shouted Nick. “Look out, lieutenant!”

The detective had seen one of the raided counterfeiters reaching for an iron bar under the bench, and he gave instant warning. None of the others had noticed the movement, but the detective had sharp eyes and sharp wits. He was not to be fooled by any such attempt as this.

Without waiting for the lieutenant or his men to take action, Nick sprang upon the rascal even as he shouted. By the time Brockton and his men had hurled themselves into the fracas, Nick had taken away the bar of iron, and the man who had wielded it was lying on his back.

But Nick did not give much time to this little incident. He disposed of it as a matter of course, and,[76] having seen that the man was in the hands of two of the policemen, he turned to the rocker in which the elegant T. Burton Potter still slumbered as sweetly as if he had been in a comfortable bed in a silent room. He seemed to have heard nothing of the noise of the raid.

“This will end a puzzling case,” muttered the detective, as he pushed his way through the struggling men—for all of the bench workers were at grips with the police by this time. “Who would have expected this? If I can only get to him before he wakes, why I can——”

But Nick was not to have so much luck. The man who called himself T. Burton Potter was a very wide-awake young man, indeed, when once he was awake. At a glance he saw what had occurred. He knew there was a police raid, and he did not want to stay and see how it would come out. He preferred to find his way out himself.

“Deuce take him!” muttered Nick. “He always was as quick as a cat! If he’d only stand still for a second, he’d save me a great deal of trouble—and himself, too.”

But T. Burton Potter did not see it that way. Leaping from his chair, he swung it around, so that it would be right in the detective’s way, and pushed in between the bench and press.

Nick was not foiled by the chair, however. Agile as a panther, he placed one hand lightly on the back of the chair, and vaulted completely over it, at the same moment stretching forth a hand to seize Potter.

But Potter had vaulted over the table and was through the doorway before the detective could get him, notwithstanding that he leaped over the table just the splinter of a second behind the man he wanted to capture.

But the rascal’s luck was with him. He reached the top of a long flight of stairs to the basement, and went[77] down them in a huddled heap, part of the time on his feet, and the rest of it rolling down like a ball.

Again Carter was so close to him that he almost had him, when a big man, with a knife in his hand, rushed up from the bottom, and came right between them.

It was the man Chick had seen trimming off the plaster molds in the old kitchen, while the metal boiled on the stove that had so nearly been the death of Carter’s principal assistant.

“Look out, Davis! The cops!” bellowed T. Burton Potter. “It’s a raid! Hand him one! Croak him!”

The big man, whose name, it seemed, was Davis, made a lunge at Nick with his long, dirty knife.

The detective was too quick for him, however. Dodging the knife stroke, he feinted with his right fist, and then sent his left straight into Davis’ face, between the eyes.

The blow was a magnificent one from a boxer’s point of view. Not only did it send Davis down the few stairs up which he had come, but it drove him six or eight feet along the hall.

It was not altogether satisfactory to Nick, however. He had to dispose of the big man, of course. But, in the meantime, T. Burton Potter was getting away.

Flying up the stairs, three at a time, the elegant-appearing crook ran into the first room he came to, which looked over the back yard.

Skipping to the window, he unlatched the sash and threw it wide open. He intended to drop out to the back yard. But just as he was ready to do so, he saw two officers waiting to receive him, and he ran back into the room.

“Euchred that way!” he muttered. “But I don’t know. There are others. They haven’t landed me yet.”

By this time Nick was at the doorway. He was just in time to see Potter’s head and shoulders in outline[78] against the dim light of the window, and made a spring to make him prisoner.

There was a derisive chuckle, and Potter slithered around the dark walls of the room. The next moment, as Nick advanced to the center of the chamber, Potter had slipped out of the door.

“Confound the fellow! I almost had him!” exclaimed Nick, in a low tone, and half inclined to laugh at the slipperiness of the fellow. “He’s gone! Well, I’ll have to begin all over again. If he knew what I wanted him for, perhaps it would be different. But I can’t tell him till I’ve had a chance to talk to him and make a few notes for comparison.”

CHAPTER XIII.
NICK CARTER’S QUIET HAND.

What Nick meant by the last words he had uttered, no doubt he could have told. As no one heard them, and he was talking to himself, anyhow, presumably it was nobody else’s business what he meant.

That there was something behind the detective’s willingness to take part in such a raid as this, both Chick and Patsy were sure, but neither knew just what it was. There were some things that the chief did not tell even to his most trusted employees.

That there had been a development in the room raided which had disturbed for the moment even the steady poise of the great detective, none knew but himself.

In T. Burton Potter he had recognized one of the men he most wanted to get hold of just now. The other was Andrew Lampton, but he felt that he could let the hunt for Lampton go for the present, until he had his hands on the elegant Potter.

What was Potter doing while Nick laughed at the cleverness of his escape from the room? Well, he was[79] trying to achieve a get-away under extremely difficult circumstances.

Once clear of the room where he had managed to give the detective the slip, he made a half turn toward the downward flight of stairs. But another officer showed himself at the bottom. So he swung around and dashed up the stairs to the floor above.

In the darkness, Nick was not sure whether his man had gone up or down. This involved another loss of a few moments. But his keen ear soon told him where Potter was, and up the stairs he went after his man.

T. Burton Potter heard his pursuer, and he did not dodge into any more rooms. Instead, he continued up the stairs, flight after flight, with one last, desperate hope in his heart—just one! That was that he might escape by way of the roof.

He had one advantage over Nick, in that he knew the house well, while this was the first visit of the detective.

Aided by this fact, and by the darkness, with many twists and turns at landings and on the stairs themselves, T. Burton Potter was in the garret at about thirty seconds ahead of Nick.

He lost half that gain in unbolting a trapdoor and forcing it open, so that he could crawl through to the roof. It was a serious loss to him, for the detective almost had him by the legs as he clambered through. Before he could slam down the trap door, Nick was out on the roof after him.

It is not an uncommon thing for detectives and uniformed police officers to chase crooks over roofs. Some thrilling experiences of this kind could be related by a great many policemen, but each story of the pursuit of some desperado over the roofs of skyscrapers has features of its own that make it stand out from all others.

It was so in this case.

The detective took a hasty survey, and saw that,[80] while the roofs ran along over the two houses, that was as far as they did go. Every two houses were separated from the next two by the width of a narrow alley like that in which policemen were waiting below to catch any of the fugitives from the raid.

“Come back! Don’t be a fool!” shouted Nick.

The man he was after had dashed along the roof, and now was standing on the low parapet which protected the roof on the side where it was divided from the next house by the alley.

T. Burton Potter glanced back for an instant. He could make out the form of the detective dimly in the darkness. Then, without reply, he put all his strength into a tremendous leap, and went off the parapet!

“Great heavens!” exclaimed Nick. “He couldn’t jump that. At least, I don’t see how he could. It is not less than nine feet, and he hadn’t any run to help him.”

So sure was the detective that Potter could not have jumped the gap that he hurried down the stairs to the parlor floor, where he met Brockton.

“Got them all, Brockton?”

“All except Lampton and that fellow you were after. I mean, the dude who was sleeping in the chair. Where is he?”

“Jumped off the roof. He’s in the alley at the side of the house. Send some of your men to look. He tried to leap from one roof to the next. That was craziness. He couldn’t do it, of course. And he took such a risk for the sake of avoiding a term in prison. Why, it’s sixty feet. There can’t be anything left of him.”

But not a vestige of Potter could they find, and Nick could believe only that he had really made the seeming impossible leap.

When the prisoners had been safely conveyed to the police station, to be dealt with in due course by the government officers, Nick went around there himself,[81] to make his report of what had taken place under his supervision.

That was merely a dry, official proceeding, and Nick, wearied of the whole business, and more disgusted than he would have cared to acknowledge over the way T. Burton Potter had escaped him, was about to go out of the station to the taxi he had ordered, when Brockton remarked casually:

“We have one prisoner who has a queer story to tell. He says he is your assistant?”

“What?” shouted Nick.

“He’s a young fellow. We didn’t see him in the room with the others. But he’s one of the gang. He was trying to slip out of the door into the front when one of my men grabbed him.”

“Where is he?”

Nick interrupted the narration curtly, and a black frown gathered over his keen eyes and brought his heavy brows together.

“In a cell, of course.”

“Did he tell you his name?”

“Why, yes. That was more of it. He had the nerve to say his name was Chick Carter, your assistant!”

“Good heavens! And you’ve arrested a man against whom you have no case, even when he told you he was my assistant, and that his name was Chick Carter. Didn’t you think it worth while to make any inquiries?”

“No. We——”

“Didn’t it occur to anybody in this police station that he might be telling the truth?”

“Why, no, Mr. Carter,” answered the lieutenant at the desk. “We put the name he gave us on the blotter. We always do that, even when we know it isn’t the real name. We have so many arrests where men say their name is something entirely different from the[82] one they give. We have no time to make inquiries into that sort of thing.”

“Let me see this prisoner—this man Chick Carter!” demanded Nick.

The lieutenant called out to the doorman to bring Chick up from below.

There was silence until the door opened. Nick was frowning, and every officer in the big station looked worried. They began to feel that there had been a mistake somewhere.

“Here he is, lieutenant!”

It was the uniformed officer in charge of the cells who spoke, and he held by the elbow no less a person than Chick.

“Hello, chief!” he cried, as he saw his employer. “Can’t you get me out of this?”

But he was already free. No sooner had the officer holding him seen the look of recognition on the detective’s face than he released his hold of the prisoner’s elbow.

“What’s this mean, Chick?” asked his chief.

“Search me!” laughed Chick. “One of the men grabbed me because he found me in the house, just coming out of the yard door, to take a hand in the raid with you.”

“The officer said he was drunk!” growled Lieutenant Brockton rather defiantly. “I suppose there must have been some reason for his making that statement.”

“I reckon there was,” conceded Chick. “I had been baked behind a stove where they were making silver dollars and halves, and what with the heat and the fumes of charcoal and hot metal, I was nearly a goner. Then I had a scrap with the officer, and——”

“If you’d been in such a place as that, behind a stove, it probably made you dizzy, didn’t it, Chick?”

It was Nick who asked the question, and, as he did so, he looked scornfully at Lieutenant Brockton.

“Well, what do you think, chief?” was Chick’s response.[83] “I don’t mind saying that if I seemed a drunk, I don’t blame the officer. I dare say, if I had been in his place, I should have made the same mistake.”

“I’m sure you would,” threw in the lieutenant. “When you came in, you looked as if you had one of the worst souses that ever came into this station. But I am very sorry the mistake occurred.”

“So am I,” declared Chick, grinning, but with tremendous earnestness at the same time.

“I’ll scratch your name off the blotter,” went on the lieutenant.

“Thanks!” returned Chick dryly. “What was the charge against me? ‘Drunk, resisting an officer, and suspicious character,’ I suppose?”

“You’ve hit it exactly,” was the reply of the lieutenant. “But it will all be obliterated. I hope there are no hard feelings.”

“None on my part, now that I am out,” declared Chick.

To prove it, he shook hands all around, including Lieutenant Brockton and the desk lieutenant and doorkeeper. Then he went out to the taxi with his chief.

“I’m sorry all this happened, chief,” said Chick contritely, as the cab got under way. “But the officers wouldn’t listen to a word from me. They threatened to dust me with their clubs if I didn’t shut up. So, of course, I had to shut up.”

“The wisest thing to do under the circumstances,” answered Nick in an absent tone. “We will stay in the taxi even on the ferryboat, unless you feel that you must get out for the fresh air of the river.”

“I’ll do what you do, chief,” returned Chick. “How did the raid come out? You look worried. Was anything wrong about it?”

“Yes. Very much wrong.”

“How?”

“We did not capture Andrew Lampton, for one thing, and we missed T. Burton Potter, for another.”

[84]

“Who’s T. Burton Potter?” asked Chick, puzzled. “He’s a new one on me.”

“He is not a new one to me, although to-night was the first time I’ve seen him—by that name.”

“You’ve got me going, chief,” confessed Chick. “I’m blessed if I know what you are talking about.”

“I’m talking about T. Burton Potter. He is dressed in a way that I never saw Howard Milmarsh. But if Potter is not Howard, then I’m afraid I shall find it hard to believe my own eyes hereafter.”

CHAPTER XIV.
WITH THE TIDE.

The look of amazement on the face of Chick, as he heard this extraordinary statement, as he considered it, compelled Nick to laugh aloud, bothered as he was just then.

There was no light in the cab, but they happened to be passing a lighted restaurant at that moment, and Nick had a good view of his companion’s face.

“What’s that, chief?” gasped Chick. “Won’t you say it again?”

“I will if you like. I say, that T. Burton Potter is so much like the heir to the Milmarsh millions, that I cannot think they are not the same person.”

“But—but—this Potter is a crook!” protested Chick.

“That is what makes the case so difficult to handle,” replied Nick. “If Potter were an honest, reputable member of society, I should not have to proceed so carefully. As it is——”

He did not finish the sentence. He felt that it was not necessary. He leaned back in the taxi, and not another word was spoken by either until the cab had been run upon the ferryboat. Then the chief remarked that the smell of horses was rather strong,[85] and that they might as well go to the front of the boat to get the night air on the wide river.

They got out of the cab, Nick telling the taxi driver they would get in again before the ferryboat tied up in her slip, and walked to the front of the deck on the men’s side, where Nick could continue to smoke his cigar without breaking rules.

Having looked about him, to make sure there were no eavesdroppers, he explained to his assistant how it was this case interested him so much.

“You know, Chick, that when we left Maple, and after we had pretty well combed out all the camps in that part of the country, to make sure neither Andrew Lampton nor Howard Milmarsh were in any of them, we came to the conclusion that they must have made their way East.”

“It was you came to the conclusion—not I,” corrected Chick. “I did not decide anything.”

“Well, that’s of no consequence. Anyhow, it turned out that I was right, for Andrew Lampton was traced by the police to New York, where he then disappeared, and I believe I saw Howard Milmarsh to-night in the person of T. Burton Potter.”

“That’s a hard thing to get through my head,” confessed Chick.

“I don’t wonder. But I had a good view of Potter, and every lineament was that of Howard Milmarsh. His hair was the same color, the expression of the eyes was the same, and there was a certain poise to his head that I had never seen except in Howard. I did not hear his voice, but no doubt that would only have confirmed my belief that he was the son of my old friend, Howard Milmarsh the elder, whose business, estate, and millions of dollars are seeking their rightful heir.”

“There is somebody else after the estate, isn’t there?”

“Yes. That is why I do not feel at liberty to waste[86] time over this case,” replied the chief gravely. “If we do not find Howard Milmarsh, then Thomas Jarvis, the father of Richard Jarvis—the man Howard believes he killed—will probably claim everything. He is the heir at law if Howard cannot be found.”

“Isn’t there anybody else besides that fellow?”

“No. He is the only member of the family known to be living. I understand he will put in a claim—although he is related to the Milmarshes only by marriage, and has no blood connection. I have never seen this Thomas Jarvis. But I know something about him.”

“Well, we don’t have to think about him, chief, do we, if you are sure this man Potter is Howard Milmarsh? And even if he were not the man, we saw Howard in Maple—or at least, you did—and he is still on earth in some shape or other.”

The ferryboat had been skimming across the North River in the darkness, and was rapidly approaching the Manhattan line of shore, with the masses of twinkling lights in the many skyscrapers, and the occasional sound of bells, whistles, and other signals warning craft to be careful as they approached the wharves.

“There’s the green and red lights of our slip not far ahead,” remarked Chick. “But we don’t have to get back to the taxi till we are right in. Are we going right home?”

“Yes. I want to refer to some memoranda I have there, and I can telephone more conveniently from my own library than anywhere else. We’ll go home and——”

Nick broke off suddenly and ran to the middle of the wagonway on the boat.

For an instant he seemed inclined to leap over the gates, so that he could see better whatever it was that had caught his eye, and which had made him oblivious of all else?

[87]

“What is it?”

Chick was by the detective’s side, and both were staring at the dark river in front of them, but somewhat to starboard.

What they saw was startling enough to warrant the interest of Nick Carter—a man who seldom allowed himself to become excited, or he would have been so now.

A rowboat—a yawl—was moving swiftly toward the Manhattan shore, propelled by two men, and helped along considerably by the outgoing tide.

The tide caught them in such a way that, while it forced them downstream to some degree, also took them across the river, and soon would put the boat among the tangle of piles supporting some of the big wharves below the ferry slip.

The two men were T. Burton Potter and—Patsy Garvan.

“Thunder and lightning!” burst out from Chick. “How did Patsy get him? Say, chief, he’s beaten both of us!”

“All the better!” responded Nick. “I don’t care who gets Potter so long as we have him at last.”

“What are we to do now?”

“Trust to Patsy,” was the chief’s reply. “What else can we do?”

Chick nodded. As the chief had said, what else could they do?

“We couldn’t jump off this boat, Chick. And if we did, it would not help us at all. Patsy is sure to have some plan in his mind. It isn’t likely Potter knows who is in the boat with him, and I think we can depend on the shrewdness of Patsy.”

“I believe that, too,” mumbled Chick. “But I envy him his luck. I wish I were in that boat, instead of him.”

“Don’t be jealous,” laughed the detective. “You should be above that. Patsy deserves all he has, for[88] he must have exercised judgment to have brought about what we see—the fellow we want so badly. T. Burton Potter, sitting there and rowing himself straight into the arms of the police.”

“I hope that will happen,” responded Chick. “The boat is out of sight now, for we are in the slip. We may as well get into our taxi. But I certainly have had beastly luck this night.”

“You’ve had plenty of experience, at least, Chick,” laughed his employer.

It did not take long for the taxi to run up to the detective’s home. In less than half an hour from the time they saw Patsy in the yawl with Potter, Carter was in his usual seat behind his big table, reading a short telephone message which had come about an hour before, and which the butler, who knew a great deal of the detective’s business, had taken and left for him, in the shape of a written note, on his table.

The note read, in the words that had come over the wire:

“This is Patsy. Have man. More later. Just coming over from Jersey City to New York.”

Nick read the memorandum two or three times, considering as he did so. Then a slight smile broke over his thoughtful countenance, as he looked at Chick and murmured:

“Patsy must have got to a telephone just before he entered the boat with Potter.”

“But how the dickens did he get into a boat with Potter?” asked Chick, in a puzzled tone.

“My theory is that Patsy traced Potter down to the river in some way, saw that he wanted a boat to get across without having to take the ferry, and quickly took advantage of the situation.”

“Patsy is smart enough to do that,” admitted Chick.

“Of course he is. He knows everybody along the river front. It wouldn’t be much of a feat for him to[89] get possession of a yawl and pretend to Potter that he was the owner.”

“By George! That’s what it looks like!”

“It does. But we don’t know till we hear from Patsy.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any way to get hold of Patsy. I suppose we shall have to wait,” remarked Chick. “We ought to be doing something in the meantime, I should think. What do you intend to do until Patsy comes or lets us know?”

“Well, I think our best proceeding would be to have the butler bring us up a sandwich or two and some good coffee. If you’re not hungry, I am,” replied the chief, with a smile.

CHAPTER XV.
TRACKED!

It may be interesting to know just how T. Burton Potter did escape from the roof when he made that desperate leap in the darkness across the width of the alley.

Almost any athlete would not think much of clearing nine or ten feet between marks on the ground, with everything favorable for the feat. Such performances are done at most athletic meets without causing surprise or any other particular emotion.

But, sixty feet up in the air, with the certainty that any slip would mean crashing down on hard stones, a heap of mangled nothingness, it was a different thing.

If T. Burton Potter had stopped to think for a second, he might have hesitated. It would have been no reflection on his courage if he had. But he had no time to think, and over he went.

For a few seconds after landing safely on the other roof, he lay down behind the parapet. He had two[90] reasons for this. One was to recover his breath, and the other was to keep out of sight of his pursuers.

“Unless he jumps after me, I’ve got him buffaloed,” whispered Potter to himself, with a dry chuckle. “I wouldn’t do it again for a million. What would be the use of fifty millions, even, to a dead man? Now, how am I to get out of this?”

Keeping under cover of the parapet, he crawled around to the rear of the roof. There was no parapet here—only an iron gutter. The gutter ran along to the end of the roof and emptied into an iron pipe which went straight down to the ground. At least, Potter supposed it did. He could not see in the darkness.

“I’ve got to take another chance,” he muttered. “And it looks worse than the other, when I jumped. I don’t like it, but what can I do? I don’t intend to be caught. I believe even a week in a prison would kill me, unless it drove me insane.”

Lying flat upon the roof, he gripped the pipe firmly. Then, gingerly, he lowered himself over the edge of the roof and pinched the pipe between his knees.

With a double hold on it, hands and knees, he began to inch downward!

“If this pipe should fetch loose, I’m a goner! I hope it will hold. But it seems awfully shaky.”

The pipe creaked from time to time, and more than once he heard the rusty spikes which held it to the wall in the rotting mortar grating, as if they were about to pull out.

But the thing held somehow, and in about ten minutes he was safely on the ground, uttering a prayer of thankfulness for his luck—for he was not what could be called a pious man.

He had made up his mind which way he would go if he reached the ground, and that was over the back fence. Blessed with uncommon agility, as well as hardened muscles, he swarmed over the high fence[91] without much difficulty. Then, after sitting astride for a moment or two, he dropped on the other side.

It was fortunate for him that all the police had withdrawn. They had concluded, when the raid was over, that there would not be any men trying to get away in the rear. If they thought anything about T. Burton Potter, they had decided that he was clear away.

The other side of the high fence only brought him into another back yard, and he saw that the houses were as high as those on Salisbury Street.

“If there’s a side alley and gate, I can make it easily,” he murmured. “Durn my luck, there isn’t!” he added a moment later, after a hasty survey. “The house is the full width of the yard.”

There were high, wooden fences on both sides. But he did not see that climbing over them, one after another, was likely to help him. Sooner or later he would run into somebody in one of the yards. Then he would have to explain why he was there, and he might have to tell his story to the chief of police.

“I won’t take any risk of meeting that gentleman, or any of his men, if it can be helped.”

T. Burton Potter came to this decision very quickly, and with much earnestness. For reasons of his own, he did not care to be brought into contact with blue coats and brass buttons on that night of all others.

“It will be daylight in course of time,” he reflected. “Then I should have to find my way out. I wonder if I can’t get through this house. It’s the only chance I have!”

He stole up to the back door. It was locked and bolted, of course.

“Didn’t suppose there would be any chance that way,” he muttered. “But there’s a little window, belonging to a pantry, I guess. By Jove! It’s open, I see. That’s to let air into the place, for the benefit of the milk or butter or something.”

The window was too high for Mr. Potter to reach,[92] but, as has been remarked several times, he was an athlete, and as active as a monkey. With a short, swift run, he managed to leap up and catch the sill with his fingers.

It was not easy to pull himself up, and, if he had not been in good physical training, he never could have accomplished the feat. As it was, he was up and peering through the open window in a few seconds.

To lower himself inside was the work of another ten or fifteen moments. The door of the pantry—for a pantry it was—had not been fastened, and he was in the lower hall, making for the stairs, while a slower man might have been trying to work his way through the window opening.

Up the kitchen stairs and into the main hall he rushed. There were some complicated bolts and locks on the front door, and it took him some time to overcome them. What was worse, he could not do it without noise.

Potter had a vision of a man in pajamas suddenly appearing at the top of the stairs on the second flight, with a lamp in one hand and a pistol in the other.

“Who’s that?” squeaked the man, evidently frightened out of his senses. “Hands up, or I’ll fire!”

But T. Burton Potter had the door open by this time.

“Fire and be blowed!”

He yelled this back defiantly as he rushed out and slammed the door behind him.

“I’m glad the fool didn’t fire, all the same,” muttered Potter. “It would have made racket enough to bring the policeman on post, anyhow, and I don’t want to see any of those gentry until I’ve had time to compose myself. Whew! I wish I were in good old New York.”

He walked leisurely along when he had turned the corner, for he knew that a running man, or even one[93] walking swiftly, might be questioned by the first policeman he met.

“I don’t see anybody about. Just as well. I’ll get down to the ferryhouse and slip across. I hope there won’t be any one around there who knows me. You never know where the police will put a man.”

T. Burton Potter was a slick individual, and he had the faculty of seeing all around him without appearing to stare. But, smart as he was, he did not perceive a man who had seen him come out of the house where the person in pajamas had threatened to shoot, and who was following him as closely as possible without being discovered.

“Gee! What luck! I knew he’d try to get through some of these houses if he made a get-away,” muttered this individual.

It may be hardly necessary to remark that the individual was none other than Patsy Garvan. It was, indeed, Nick Carter’s assistant.

He called it “luck” that he was on the trail of Potter when no one else was. But it was really shrewdness, reënforced by patience.

Patsy had figured out that when the raid came, the men would scatter in all directions if they could. The police would try to prevent this, of course. But some of the gang were liable to slip through their net, and it was Patsy’s opinion that, if any of them escaped, the slick T. Burton Potter would be one of them.

While the chief and Chick were in the Northwest, Patsy had been on another case, and had brought it to a successful issue. What this case was does not matter. But it is interesting to know that, as he followed it up, he got, just before the return of his chief and Chick, a side glance at T. Burton Potter. He had had his own suspicions that the rascal was mixed up in this counterfeiting affair.

Potter walked swiftly toward the river, but before he reached the ferryhouse he resolved that it[94] would be too risky for him to cross the water that way, and he plunged into a district with which he was fairly well familiar, down among the wharves, to see if he could hire a boat without making anybody suspicious.

Nick had been quite right in his belief that Patsy had managed to pass himself off as the owner of the yawl in which he and Potter were rowing. That was exactly what he had done.

As they neared the place on the Manhattan side where Patsy had decided to land, Potter paid him the dollar he demanded for rowing him across, and darted out of sight while Patsy was putting the money in his pocket.

Patsy grinned, as he leaped upon the wharf right on the heels of his late passenger, and, after hiding behind some freight till Potter walked away, followed him until he had reached the street.

Then followed a chase through the tortuous streets of lower New York, until T. Burton Potter rushed up a stairway to the elevated road at South Ferry. Patsy was not far behind him—so near, in fact, that he contrived to be on the same Sixth Avenue train that carried Potter uptown to Eighth Street.

At this station Potter got off, and Patsy, who had been in the next car, also dropped off and hid himself in the shadows until Potter went down the stairs.

In less than half an hour Patsy rapped at the door of Nick Carter’s library and walked in, cool and collected, to find his chief busy with some papers at his big table, and alone.

Nick looked up calmly.

“I was expecting you, Patsy,” he said.

“I came as soon as I could,” was Patsy’s response.

“Where’s your man?”

“My man?”

“T. Burton Potter.”

[95]

Patsy could not help showing surprise in his look and tone, and Nick regarded him imperturbably.

“How did you know, chief?”

“That doesn’t matter. Where is he?”

“I’ll take you to him if you like. But you’ll have to break into a house.”

“Very well. We’ll break in,” answered Nick, as if the act of burglary were a matter of everyday experience. “Tell Chick. I’ve sent him to his room to lie down for a while. He’ll have a very short rest, from the look of things.”

CHAPTER XVI.
A SECRET OFFER.

The house to which Patsy tracked T. Burton Potter was one of those old-fashioned residences of the kind in which the wealthy and exclusive members of New York’s society lived half a century ago, and which are plentiful in some of those quiet streets in the neighborhood of Washington Square.

There are gardens in front of some of them, just as there were fifty years ago, and at the back there are still other gardens, with flower beds and trees, in which people who have their homes in these pleasant localities stroll about on summer evenings.

Many of the houses are now devoted to boarders and lodgers, but a few are, to this day, occupied by private families who can afford the luxury of a whole house.

It was into a private house that T. Burton Potter injected himself by way of the kitchen door under the high stone steps leading to the main entrance above. He had a key to this door.

“Hello!” he whispered to himself. “Things look different. By Jove! Suppose I don’t find Lampton here! He is the only one of the crowd that would[96] know me. Well, I can explain. But what have they changed things for? It is only three weeks since I was here before.”

Cautiously, he went out of the kitchen in which he had first found himself, and up the stairs to the main hall.

At every step he realized that there had been changes since his last visit. The carpet was not the same, and when he got to the hall, where a dim gas jet burned, he saw that the hall rack was one he never had seen before, and that there were pictures on the walls which were strange to him.

He turned into a room which had been used as a sort of sitting room by the assemblage of shady characters who had made this house a sort of private clubhouse when he had known it before, although it passed to outsiders as the home of two wealthy families.

“Why, this room is altogether different,” muttered Potter. “There is a handsome sideboard over there, and I see silver enough to tempt anybody. I’ll bet the gang has moved out, and that somebody else has moved in. Now, what is this all about?”

Puzzled, he went into the front room, which was separated only by portières, and found that it was a luxuriously furnished apartment, with a piano and many pictures on the walls, which he was connoisseur enough to know were valuable.

He went out to the hall in a state of bewilderment and somewhat frightened, too—for he knew he was in a house in which the police might say he had no right to be. Why hadn’t they changed the lock on the lower door? Then he couldn’t have let himself in, and he might have been saved all this.

He would get out as quickly as he could. This was the only safe move for him!

He stole along the hall, intending to make his exit by the door which had admitted him, when, suddenly he perceived his own shadow on the wall.

[97]

You can’t have a shadow without a light, and involuntarily Potter looked up the stairs.

What he saw was a great deal like what had scared him in the house in Jersey City. A man, with a lamp in one hand and a revolver in the other, was coming down the stairs!

There were points of difference between this man and the one in Jersey City, however. This man was dressed in a well-fitting business suit, and he did not look at all frightened. The hand that held the revolver was ominously steady.

“Ha!” growled the man with the revolver.

T. Burton Potter did not say anything. It seemed to him that there was nothing to be said.

The man who had said “Ha!” had a hard face, as well as hard voice. The eyes that were transfixing T. Burton Potter were fierce and sparkling. Potter thought they looked like the heads of polished steel rivets. Under the heavy, iron-gray brows, they were enough to take the nerve out of even as daring a man as Potter really was.

“Don’t reach for a gun,” continued the man on the stairs. “This one in my hand has a mighty easy trigger, and I may remind you that I have you covered.”

“I haven’t got a gun!” grumbled Potter. “If I had, I’m sensible enough to know when I’m beaten. What I want to say——”

“Don’t say it,” ordered the other. “And don’t try to get away down those kitchen stairs. Throw up your hands and step into that room at the side—the dining room. Then I’ll telephone for the police.”

“What for? I haven’t done anything. If you’ll let me explain——”

But again the man with the gun shut him off, as he came down to the hall, making Potter precede him into the dining room.

“Go through this room into that other room at the back. I use it for a library.”

[98]

Potter obeyed. He knew the room well enough. It had been used for card playing when the house was occupied by its former tenants. It overlooked the back garden, and had always been a favorite lounge of his when he had had time to loaf a little.

With his hands up in the air, and looking very much like a cornered desperado in the moving pictures, Potter took his stand against the opposite wall, as his captor commanded, and waited for what might come.

The man took up a telephone from the heavy table in the middle of the room, at the same time switching on a bunch of electric lights depending from the ceiling, and which illuminated the room brilliantly. As he did so, he looked into Potter’s face and started violently.

“Good heavens! Howard Milmarsh!” he blurted out, putting the telephone down, but keeping the revolver in a firm grip. “What does this mean? Why have you come here? You know me, don’t you? I was head waiter at the Old Pike Inn, and I was there the night you—you——”

“What are you handing me?” demanded T. Burton Potter, his surprise getting the better of his fear. “I don’t know anybody named Howard Milmarsh. My name is Potter, and I used to live here.”

“Live here? Why did you live here? Why did you hide yourself when you could have a fortune by asking for it—by just showing yourself?”

“I know all about these fortunes!” returned Potter. “I seem to remember you as a waiter at the Old Pike Inn, however.”

“Head waiter!” corrected the other. “I was studying law all the time I was there, and now I have a pretty fair business in New York, although I don’t have to depend on fees for my living. I have other means.”

T. Burton Potter, still with his hands up, stared at this man thoughtfully. What passed in his mind was[99] Potter’s own secret. He may have had no deeper purpose than to get out of the house—or he may have had other ideas.

“Stand still there for a minute. If you are willing to listen to a proposition, I think I can show you how you can make some money—more than you’ve ever had in your life, and without having to work for it.”

“That would suit me,” declared Potter earnestly.

“No doubt. It would suit most men of your stripe. Let me find out for myself whether you have any weapons about you. Turn your face to the wall.”

In a minute or two the man of the house had been through Potter’s pockets and found that he had told the truth. Potter knew that there was a law making it a criminal offense to carry deadly weapons, and he was too cautious to take a chance of being caught with anything of the kind. Besides, he did not believe in murder.

“Put your hands down, and have a drink,” said the stern man, when he was satisfied that Potter was not armed. “You will notice that my gun is ready for action, at my finger ends. There’s a bottle on that table at your side, and glasses. Drink! I don’t care for any myself.”

T. Burton Potter had had a hard night, and he was willing to refresh himself with a little liquor.

“Now listen to me,” said the strange host. “I have something to say.”

For an hour the two men were in close confab. What they were talking about may be revealed later. For the present, it is enough to say that the man told his unexpected guest to call him Louden Powers, and that henceforth T. Burton Potter must remember his own name was—something else.

It would have surprised both the gentlemen in that back room if they had known that they had for all that time been under the eye of one who never did a thing, no matter how strange it might appear, save[100] with a set purpose—Nick Carter, the world-renowned detective.

Yet it was true. Nick had “broken in,” as he had told Patsy Garvan he might. He had not had much trouble, for T. Burton Potter had forgotten to lock the door after letting himself in.

The detective had come in that way, about the time Louden Powers was absorbed in the business of keeping Potter under his pistol while he parleyed with him in the library.

If Powers had not been so much taken up with his prisoner, he might have been more careful. In that case, he might have looked into the dining room, to make sure neither of his two servants—who slept at the top of the house—were spying on him. That would have meant that Nick must have dodged.

As it was, there was nothing of the kind, and he merely stood behind a big chair and looked over the top of it until the conference between the two persons in the back room came to an end.

“You will sleep in this house till we get things going,” were the closing words of Louden Powers. “I live here entirely alone, except for my two maidservants and a man who drives my car and does heavy work about the house. The maids and the man are all Scandinavians, and they can’t speak English. They say they can’t, at least, but I watch them, anyhow. Now, let’s go up to bed. I’ll show you your room.”

Nick stayed in the dining room until the house was quite quiet, and he figured Louden Powers and his man were both asleep.

Then he went down to the back door to let himself out, with a satisfied smile on his face.

As he reached the front gate of the little garden in front of the house, Patsy came rushing up to him out of the darkness, panting from a hard run.

“Chief!” he gasped.

“Well?”

[101]

“He’s beat it!”

“Beat it? Who?”

“I don’t know. He got out of a third-story window, on that old iron balcony. He let himself down to the other, and then got to the ground. Chick and I were waiting for him. But he got over a side fence and was gone before we were on to his game.”

“And you let him get away?”

The sternness in Nick’s voice made Patsy wilt.

“Chick is after him. But it’s awfully dark, and I don’t figure that he will ever catch up. I feel mighty bad over it. But it was all done so quickly that we didn’t have a chance. I thought I’d better be here in case you came out.”

“Louden Powers locked him in his room, and, of course, he got away by the window,” said the chief, more to himself than to Patsy. “I should have been out here sooner, I suppose. Come on, Patsy! We’ll go home.”

CHAPTER XVII.
WHAT NICK CARTER KNEW.

For two days Nick Carter and his assistants tried to find T. Burton Potter, but without result.

Chick had not been able to follow the man who escaped from the third-story window of Louden Powers’ house. In the darkness and among the crooked streets that run west from Sixth Avenue, in the neighborhood of Jefferson Market, it was not difficult for a quick-moving fellow like Potter to elude even such a keen pursuer as Chick.

Nick did not reproach Chick for his ill success. After his first disappointment, the famous detective took his usual philosophical view of the set-back. He never mourned over what could not be helped.

It was on the evening of the second day, while Chick[102] and Garvan both were out, trying to get some clew to the whereabouts of the much-wanted Potter, that Nick strolled over to the East Side, and dropped into a rather pretentious saloon—one of the kind that calls itself a “café”—in Third Avenue.

The detective had not disguised himself in the ordinary sense. But he wore a cap, instead of his usual well-brushed hat of latest style, and he had on a long raincoat, which concealed the rest of his attire. It had been raining a little, which gave him an excuse for the raincoat.

There were a number of men in the large, overdecorated barroom, and it was easy for him to step up to the bar and order a Scotch highball without being observed particularly.

He sipped his highball slowly, while his keen eyes gazed over the rim of his glass, taking in the whole assemblage, one by one.

At last he picked out a rather burly man, who was sitting at a table by himself, with an evening paper held up so that only occasional glimpses of his face could be obtained. One of those glimpses had told him who the man was.

“Andrew Lampton!” he breathed softly. “And, in the same person, my old friend, Joe Stokes! I thought I might catch him here. That is the advantage of having friends in the underworld.”

He strode over to the table, and looked over the top of the paper, and said, in low, distinct tones:

“Lampton, I want you!”

The man made a quick movement toward his side pocket. As he did so, the muzzle of an automatic pistol broke its way through the paper, and he kept his hand still.

“All right! I cave!” he growled. “Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t know me,” was the detective’s reply. “But I believe you do. Wait a moment!”

[103]

Dexterously, Nick dipped into the coat pocket from which Lampton had meant to take something, and from it lifted a businesslike automatic.

“Any more besides this, Andrew?”

“A knife in my inside waistcoat pocket,” he replied briefly. “It’s in a sheath. Take it out if you like, but I don’t mean to use it.”

“It would be foolish if you did,” returned Nick. “Anyhow, I’m not here to arrest you. I want to talk business.”

“Why didn’t you say so at first?”

“I haven’t had time to say anything, first or last,” rejoined the detective. “Have you anything on for to-night?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, you may as well pick up that bundle of money you’ve just dropped under the table. We can burn it later.”

Andrew Lampton grinned and picked up a roll of counterfeit bills which had been noticed by the sharp eyes of the detective as soon as they were put on the floor.

“Can’t fool you, Mr. Carter!”

“Not on some things, I hope. We are going to my house. Any of your pals in this house?”

“Not that I know of. Some of them were taken in the raid in Jersey City the other night, and the others are lying low for the present. I wasn’t in that thing, but I heard about it.”

“I supposed you would,” said Nick, with a smile. “Where’s T. Burton Potter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell the truth, Lampton.”

“I am telling it. Potter has vanished, and there isn’t any of the gang know where he is exactly.”

“Well, come on. We’ll walk across. You don’t mind the exercise, do you?”

Nick asked this question as politely as if he had[104] been addressing some intimate friend. Lampton grinned, as he answered, with equal courtesy:

“Not at all, I assure you. It will give me pleasure, especially with an agreeable companion.”

They strolled out of the café together, and any person who observed them might have said they were on the best of terms. Nobody would have suspected that Carter was keeping a sharp eye on the smiling man at his side, and that he would have used his pistol if that had been necessary to prevent his running away.

But nothing of the kind happened. Andrew Lampton chatted on the topics of the day—the theaters, politics, literature, and so forth. He did not mention criminal matters, nor speak of anything that might have the slightest bearing on his own favorite occupation, “shoving the queer.” And yet the roll of phony notes was still in his pocket, waiting to be burned as soon as they should be in Nick’s home.

Once seated in the library, in an easy-chair, Lampton handed the bills to the detective. The latter placed them in a small brazier, and, with the aid of a certain chemical, reduced them to ashes in an infinitesimal space of time—much quicker than he could have done it with simple fire.

“Rather a pity to see such good stuff burned up,” remarked Andrew Lampton, with a wry smile, as he began to puff on the perfecto Nick had passed to him. “I don’t think better hundreds and fifties were ever turned out, even in Washington.”

“It would have been more of a pity if they had been left in your pocket,” answered the detective. “They might have meant a five years’ stretch for you in a Federal prison.”

“That’s immaterial,” laughed Lampton. “I expect to be taken in sooner or later, if I stay in the game. It’s only a question of time. Now, what do you want me for?”

[105]

“I want those papers you took out of Howard Milmarsh’s trunk in Maple, for the first thing.”

“Go on,” said Lampton, smoking comfortably. “What next?”

“You are to go on with that trick you have arranged with Louden Powers, to beat Howard Milmarsh out of his fortune. You got the idea while you were in the Northwest, the night we chased you through the window.”

“I didn’t know it was you who did it,” snarled Lampton, frowning for the first time. “What do you know about Louden Powers and me?”

“Everything!” was the quick reply. “You were to see him to-night, at eleven o’clock. You’ll keep that appointment, and, if you are wise, you won’t tell him that you saw me this evening. Now, where is Potter?”

“I don’t know! Curse him!”

There could be no doubt of the sincerity with which Andrew Lampton uttered this malediction. Carter was sure the fellow did not know what had become of the man who seemed to be as slippery as a greased pig.

“Give me those papers belonging to Howard Milmarsh. They are of no use to you now.”

“How do you know?” grinned Lampton, recovering his equanimity a little. “A man with those letters and other documents would have no difficulty in proving himself the real Howard Milmarsh, especially when nature had made them so much alike that it is difficult to tell one from the other.”

“Give me the papers!” repeated Nick, apparently undisturbed by what the other had said. “I shall produce the real Howard Milmarsh when the time comes, never fear.”

“I don’t know now what you’ve brought me up here for,” complained Lampton wearily. “I’ve had a pleasant smoke—this cigar is excellent—but I would[106] rather have been left alone, to spend my evening in my own way. What is the game?”

“I’ll tell you,” replied Nick, leaning easily back in his chair and placing the end of his cigar in an ash tray. “It’s a pretty story, and some people would call it a romance.”

“Drive on!”

“Howard Milmarsh disappeared a few years ago, just after his father died. Howard did not know of his father’s death, but he knows of it now. He hesitates to come back and claim his estate for reasons I need not repeat.”

“No, you need not repeat them,” broke out Lampton. “I know them well enough. Keep on talking.”

“So you and your rascally friend, Louden Powers, decided to produce a Howard Milmarsh, who might claim the property, giving you and Powers each a fair share—or what you would consider a fair share—of the estate.”

“That’s nonsense, Mr. Carter. Who’d believe such a wild tale as that?”

“I would, when I have proof—and I have that,” rejoined the detective. “The real Howard Milmarsh has changed considerably in experience in the years he has been away. You know that, because you saw him at Maple, and you’ve seen him elsewhere. It struck you that you knew a man who looked so much like him that he might pass for the missing heir if he were carefully coached.”

“Who is the man?”

“T. Burton Potter,” was the swift reply of the detective.

“Pooh!”

“That is the man,” went on Nick, disregarding the contemptuous ejaculation. “I don’t care how you may try to pretend otherwise. I know. He is so much like Howard Milmarsh, that, in the first few moments that I saw him, I was actually not sure myself. But[107] soon I saw him doing things that I knew would be impossible to the man you want him to impersonate, and, besides, there are minute points of difference which anybody who knew Howard Milmarsh as well as I would distinguish immediately.”

“T. Burton Potter is a gentleman of leisure, I’ve been told,” grinned Andrew Lampton. “But as for his being like Howard Milmarsh, I don’t know anything about that.”

“I don’t mind your being a liar, Lampton,” retorted Nick quietly. “But I wish you would not pretend to be a stupid one. Did I not tell you that I know?”

“Why do you want me to go and see Louden Powers to-night?”

The question came abruptly. Andrew Lampton had seen that it would be useless to continue his bluffing tactics with the detective.

“Go and see him and find out, if you can, where T. Burton Potter is. I want him. And, before you go, give me those letters and papers. You can’t use them now, and Louden Powers might try to take them from you if he knew they were in your pocket.”

“Looks to me as if this game were about up,” commented Lampton, as he handed over the bundle of papers. “There they are! Just as I got them from the trunk. I’ll have to depend on your good nature now.”

“If you help me with this case, I’ll wipe everything off the slate to date,” replied Nick. “Of course, what you may do afterward is at your own risk.”

“I’ll go and see Powers,” promised Lampton, rising from his chair. “But I don’t believe he knows where Potter is. By the way, what earthly use is T. Burton Potter to you, if he is not the real Howard Milmarsh?”

“I think Potter knows where Howard is,” answered Flint. “He is a pretty slick scoundrel, and can keep[108] a secret. But I think I can swing some influence with him, considering what I have found out about him.”

“Ah! I tumble,” laughed Lampton. “Another thing I wanted to ask you. When you were chasing him so hard on the night of the raid, didn’t you, honest, believe he was the real Howard Milmarsh?”

“I did at first. I’ve already told you that.”

“And when did you find out that he wasn’t?”

“That’s my own private business,” rejoined the detective. “Report to me here to-morrow night. That’s all.”

He pointed to the door as a sign of dismissal.

“You’re not afraid that I’ll work up some scheme against you, or beat it for parts unknown?” asked Lampton, smiling. “You seem to feel sure I’ll obey your orders.”

“I think you have too much regard for your own good to do otherwise,” answered the detective, without looking up from the letter he was reading.

CHAPTER XVIII.
A LOVELY SCRAP.

For half an hour after the departure of Andrew Lampton, the detective sat at his table, reading letters and other papers, and occasionally making notes for answers to be returned or business to be done. He was a very busy man, and he was essentially methodical. Efficiency was his watchword, as it is that of most successful men.

“If I can get hold of this Potter, it won’t be long before I shall be able to trace Howard Milmarsh. It is absurd for a young man to remain out of his home and birthright for a mere idea. That Howard is somewhere in New York I am convinced. I am inclined to think this fellow Lampton knows also. If I were[109] sure of it, he never would have left my house to-night. As it is, I must have patience.”

He lighted a cigar and smoked reflectively for ten minutes. Then, suddenly, there was a sharp tap at his door, and Chick came in, followed by Patsy Garvan. The faces of both indicated that they had news.

“I guess we’ve found T. Burton Potter!” cried Chick. “Although I never expected to see him settle down seriously to work.”

“What’s he working at?”

“He’s doing some kind of clerical work in Partrom’s steel works, in Harlem.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite. I saw him in the yard, moving about among the men. He was in a business suit, but he didn’t seem afraid to get his hands dirty. I saw him lifting some black timbers out of the way when he wanted to get to another part of the yard, and he helped some men to shove a truck along the rails when it got stalled.”

“Well, Potter is a well-built, powerful fellow,” observed Nick. “And we know he can jump. The way he went across that alley on the roofs would have stamped him an athlete without anything else.”

“He’ll need to be an athlete up there at Partrom’s,” put in Patsy. “I heard that a lot of the men are down on a certain foreman up there, and that Potter is taking his side against the others. That generally means a fight with a rough set of men like those at Partrom’s.”

“I suppose Potter works only in the daytime?” asked Nick.

“No. He’s on the night shift. You could get at him right now if you wanted to go up there.”

“I do want to go up there, and now,” interrupted the chief. “We’ll use the big car. Telephone the chauffeur to bring it around right away.”

While Patsy telephoned the chauffeur to come around[110] with the big racing car that Nick used when he was in a great hurry to get anywhere, the detective put away his papers and got up, ready to go.

He wore the cap he had on when he went to the café after Andrew Lampton, but not the raincoat. He had given Lampton back his pistol, but he had his own in his pocket, although he did not expect to have to use it. But, then, he never did expect to use a weapon when he went out. If there were a fight, it was pretty sure to start up all in a hurry, without preliminaries.

The big car took them up to within four blocks of Partrom’s big steel mill and then Nick told his assistants to get out and walk the remainder of the distance with him.

“Stay here till we come back,” he directed his chauffeur.

It did not take the three long to get to the front gates of the mill. When they reached there, they found a lively scene, that none of them had anticipated. The yard was full of fighting men.

“What’s it all about?” asked Chick of the nearest man, who seemed to be trying to break into the row without knowing just whom to hit. “Who’s fighting?”

“Everybody!” howled the man. “It’s that guy, Gordon, who’s got the thing going. He and Douglas.”

Nick remembered that Milmarsh had assumed the name of Robert Gordon when working in the lumber woods at Maple, and he recalled also that there had been a foreman named Douglas out there. He wondered whether this was merely a coincidence, or whether it had some special significance.

There was no time for speculation on anything, however. The detective could see that about a dozen men were aiming at one young fellow, who, broad-shouldered and active as he was, found it difficult to stand off all his assailants at once.

The young man backed away from the crowd—not in haste or with any show of fear, however. As he[111] came nearer to Carter and his two assistants, they were able to see his face in the red glow of the mill.

“T. Burton Potter!” cried Chick.

“That’s who it is!” agreed Patsy.

“Howard Milmarsh or his wraith!” breathed Nick.

Until now he had been a little doubtful as to the identity of T. Burton Potter, although his mind was pretty nearly made up. But he felt sure that this clean-limbed young man, who used his fists so scientifically, could not be any one but the heir to the Milmarsh fortune.

“Come on, boys!” cried Nick to his two assistants. “We’ll have to take a hand in this.”

Bob Gordon, as he chose to call himself, was holding back his foes with considerable skill and pluck, but one pair of fists, no matter how well they are employed, cannot do much good against twenty pairs.

The men opposing him did not care much about fair play. All they wanted was to beat down this bold young man, who set at defiance the whole crowd, and defended the name of the absent foreman, Douglas, with a courage worthy of one with eight generations of American blood in his veins.

Some of the men were trying to pin down Gordon’s arms so that he would have no driving room, while some of the others, reaching over, struck viciously at his head with their fists, knowing he could not reach them when hemmed in so thoroughly.

“They’ll be taking iron bars to him after a while, I guess, chief!” remarked Patsy. “Let’s get into this!”

Nick was already into it. A finished boxer, the detective bestowed a scientific tap here and there on the faces and necks of those who were crowding Gordon, thus compelling them to give him breathing room.

At this moment, Chick caught a mean-looking fellow trying to sneak in an uppercut on Gordon’s undefended face, while he was busy with half a dozen others.

[112]

“I reckon I’ll just hand you this!” observed Chick.

As he spoke, he sent a good, hard crack to the sneak’s chin, doubling him up like a jackknife, and sending him backward at full length. Chick’s jab had been a “rock me to sleep,” as Patsy expressed it.

“Keep back, some of you!” shouted Nick in a tone of thunder. “Twenty against one! Aren’t you men? You can’t be Americans, or you wouldn’t act like cowards!”

His taunt may have shamed one or two of the better sort. But, as a matter of fact, there were very few Americans in the mob. The effect of this speech was to bring half a dozen of the big fellows—ironworkers, and, therefore, powerful—against the detective.

These men had a rough idea of how to use their fists, and they pressed hard against Nick, who had to bring all his skill into play to defend himself. It was a lively battle, and the shouts of boys, girls, and men and women outside, together with the squeal of a police whistle, helped to make it more so.

Bob Gordon might have backed out now and got away if he had chosen to do so. He had a sprained wrist, and his wind had been mostly knocked out of him. But he came up to the side of Nick, anyhow.

Chick and Patsy were both fighting like heroes. But the weight of numbers was beginning to tell. There were too many for these four, especially with one of them practically disabled. It began to look dubious for Nick’s side.

It was at this moment that a tall, rawboned man of about thirty, in a blue sweater, who had been driving past the gateway on a truck, saw what was going on inside the yard, and decided that it was the place for him to break in.

He swung off his truck and hurled himself through the gateway as if he had been sent for. He was a big, two-fisted truckman, with a natural love of fighting,[113] which had had plenty of encouragement in many a combat with other truckmen, and with rough-and-tumble battlers among longshoremen on the various water fronts.

“Come on, you dubs!” he bellowed. “Catch ’em as I hand ’em out. Take ’em anywhere you like—on your chin, in your eye, on the nose, or anywhere. They’re all free, and every one is warranted full weight and hundred per cent the real thing!”

Evidently overjoyed at the prospect of a scrap that might last for an hour, the big truckman, whose arms were long and his fists like wooden mallets, ranged himself alongside Nick and his forces, and soon turned the tide of battle.

Five minutes later it looked like a regular rout for the enemy.

But, just as the big truckman was beginning really to enjoy himself, the police arrived in force, and Nick whispered to Chick to “Get Patsy and come along. I don’t want to have to explain to the police now. Where’s that man Gordon?”

“I’m afraid he’s gone,” replied Chick. “I didn’t see him get away, but that’s what he’s done.”

“Too bad!” exclaimed the chief, allowing his chagrin to have voice for once. “We had him right here, and now he’s gone.”

“Well, anyhow, it was a lovely scrap!” chuckled Patsy, tenderly feeling a bump over his left eye. “Did you see who that truckman was? It was Bonesy Billings, who used to be a butcher in Fourth Avenue, and who always brought your meat. I guess he recognized you, and that’s what brought him into the fight.”

“It was not only that,” added Chick. “I heard him say that Gordon roomed at his house, and that he’d lick anybody who touched a roomer of his.”

“Do you know where Bonesy Billings lives?” asked Nick.

[114]

“No. But I’ll bet I can find out,” replied Patsy. “Bonesy has driven away now, or I’d ask him.”

“Well, if he lives in this neighborhood—as I suppose he does—we ought to get track of him. Look him up to-morrow, Patsy, and we’ll call on him in the evening. He may hold the key to the mystery we are trying to probe.”

“You mean the finding of Howard Milmarsh?” asked Chick.

“That’s it exactly,” replied the chief. “I am tired of this fooling. I want the case off my hands. Come along! Let’s get home.”

CHAPTER XIX.
A WELL OF FIRE.

“So you are living in this brick house, and running the delicatessen store as well?” said Nick the next evening, as he and his two assistants stood outside Bonesy Billings’ home. “This is better than being in a flat house downtown.”

“You bet it is,” assented Bonesy. “Besides, my work is up here in this section, and I’ve no reason to go downtown to live. There’s plenty of these old brick houses up here that can be rented for about what you’d pay for a flat around Ninety-seventh Street, and it’s much more airy and nice here. Then we have some roomers, that help out.”

“Who are they? Anybody I know, I wonder?” ventured Nick.

“Not likely. There’s a musician and his daughter—a nice young girl, and I have another one—that fellow the gang was trying to do up at Partrom’s last night. His name’s Gordon.”

“All!” remarked Carter, trying to be calm. “I’d like to see him again.”

“Well, I guess you can. I think he’s up in his room[115] now. He isn’t working to-night. The superintendent of the mill has laid him off until inquiries are made into that fuss where you took a hand. It’s a rotten shame! Gordon wasn’t to blame for that. The others jumped on him, and he had to hold ’em off. He’s told me often that nothing can make him fight—and he ain’t no coward, either.”

“Look, chief. What’s that?” shouted Patsy Garvan excitedly, running toward the house. “Fire!”

“Heaven save us!” ejaculated Billings wildly. “It’s my house!”

He dashed into the store, and through to the back room, where he saw at once what had happened. His wife had put kerosene on the kitchen range, and there had been an explosion which meant destruction for the house.

Billings lifted his unconscious wife from the floor and ran out to the street. Then he went back to save what few pieces of furniture he might hope to get back before the fire took everything its own way.

The only hope lay in the fact that it was a brick structure, and not a frame one. The house had been built after the fire laws had forbidden the putting up of wooden buildings in that area. But there had been many brick houses put up before the era of iron-frame skyscrapers, and this was one of them.

An alarm had been turned in, and already members of the fire department were dashing up with their machines. It looked as if the fire would soon be overcome, when somebody shouted:

“Look! There’s somebody up top!”

The firemen, with their ladders, had already rescued a woman and two children from another window. But these people who were shouting for help from an attic were in the next house, which also had caught fire.

The firemen—efficient and cool-nerved, as all New York firemen are—put their ladders up. But owing[116] to the formation of the house, it was impossible to get at the attic quickly.

Nick Carter had seen that it was a young girl at the window, and his wonderful memory carried him back to that night at Maple, where he had seen the girl they called Bessie Silvius, with her father, Roscoe Silvius, who had played and sung in the garden of the Savoy.

“That only confirms my belief that Howard Milmarsh is here,” he told himself. “It would be likely for them to live in the same house in New York if they could, after being friends in the wilds of Canada.”

This passed his mind like a flash as he looked to see how they might be rescued. He had seen that the firemen could not do it from the outside, and he made up his mind to a desperate undertaking.

Fortunately, Nick was known to all the battalion chiefs of the fire department, and to most of the other men. They all recognized him as a wonderful detective, and he was allowed privileges that ordinary citizens do not possess, even though they may have influence and great wealth.

It is not an easy thing to get inside the fire lines and be permitted to move about freely—unless you happen to be a newspaper man.

“Keep back, Patsy!” shouted Nick, as he dashed into the house, amid a shower of sparks and through a flood of water pouring from two or three lines of hose. “I’m going alone!”

“Come back!” bellowed a battalion chief. “You can’t get through there!”

Patsy and Chick would both have followed their chief, but firemen held them back, and they were obliged to yield.

As they looked up, they saw a man lean from the attic window of Billings’ house and Patsy yelled that it was Potter.

“It’s either Potter or Howard Milmarsh,” called[117] out Chick. “I don’t know one from the other these days.”

“He’s going to try and save that girl!” said Patsy.

“Sure enough!” assented Chick. “But where’s the chief?” he added, in a tone of agony. “That’s what he went into that house for. I wish we’d never heard of this Milmarsh case!”

“Come down out of that attic!” roared a chief through his megaphone at Potter or Milmarsh, whichever it was. “You can’t reach the girl. Hurry down, and you may save yourself. Another moment will be too late!”

But the man at the attic window paid no heed. His eyes were on the girl, who still leaned from the other window, and who was uttering scream after scream of despairing terror.

The roar of the fire, the hissing of the water, and the thud of the fire engines all made up a deafening confusion of sounds. But, through it all, Chick heard the man at the other window call out cheerfully:

“Don’t give way, Bessie! I’m coming to save you by the roof!”

“Oh, Howard! Howard!” responded the girl, shrill with horror. “My father is here, and he’s helpless!”

“Keep up your heart!” responded the man. “I’m coming!”

“Say, Patsy, she called him ‘Howard.’ Did you hear it?”

“Sure!”

“Then that looks as if he is the real thing, doesn’t it?”

But Patsy did not reply. He was wondering whether the man would reappear. He had vanished from the window, and he might have fallen back, exhausted, into the awful caldron of flame and smoke behind him.

“We’ll have to get a ladder up there!” cried a fire chief. “Up with her, boys! The third house is on[118] fire now. We must get this fellow out somehow. There’s a better chance with the ladder at this house than either of the others.”

It was Bonesy Billings’ house in which the young man called “Howard” by the girl had just disappeared from the attic window. It was not burning so fiercely as the other two.

Whether the firemen succeeded in getting the ladder to the window where the young man was believed to be, neither Chick nor Patsy could see for the smoke. Besides, their attention was distracted from it in their anxiety for their beloved chief.

Meanwhile, Nick was bounding, head down, up the flaming stairs. As he reached—barely reached—the landing of the second floor, the whole staircase collapsed behind him. As it did so, it sent a great gush of flame and burning embers far upward and out of the front door. Several firemen, who had been trying to follow him, tumbled out, half suffocated, into the arms of their comrades outside!

Nick glanced over his shoulder as he heard the crash. He saw the well of fire where the stairs had been, and he knew that death in its most appalling form had missed him by only a few inches!

He pressed on still upward, with smoke and sparks around him, and death—almost certain, as it seemed—ahead!

CHAPTER XX.
FIVE SECONDS FROM DEATH.

Somehow—he never knew how—Nick found his way to the top of the house. Here he was obliged to pause for a moment. His heart was pounding and his breath came short. Some little rest he must have!

“Hello! There’s something thudding overhead!” he gasped. “By Heaven! It is somebody trying to[119] break through that trapdoor in the roof! It may be some of the firemen!” he added hopefully. “That means that we shall get the girl and the others yet. Hurrah for the firemen of New York!”

A door was burst open on his right and a girl rushed forth, wild with excitement.

“Oh, Howard!” she cried. “I’m so thankful you are here! Quick! Quick! My father!”

Then, in the gloom and lurid glare of the fire, she found she was talking to a stranger, and she hesitated to say more.

But Nick Carter quickly reassured her, and his cheery tones acted like a stimulant, as he called out:

“Don’t be afraid, and be ready! Leave your father to me! We must get out by the roof. There is no other way. The firemen are up there. They’ll soon break through with their axes. Don’t you hear them hammering on the trapdoor?”

“No,” she cried. “It isn’t the firemen. It’s Howard—Mr. Milmarsh! He can’t open that trap! Oh, can’t we help? Can’t we do something?”

The name Milmarsh was spoken by this girl as if he were a close friend! It struck the detective with peculiar force, and he resolved more than ever that the young man, as well as the girl, must be saved. Here was the end of his strange case, if only he could get every one clear of the fire!

But other things soon crowded these thoughts out of his mind—which, indeed, they had held only for a second or two. He rushed into the attic and seized a small pine table. This made a platform for him under the trapdoor, and enabled him to reach up and shoot back the bolt.

“It’s open!” he shouted.

Then he pushed his head through and found himself looking into the face of—either T. Burton Potter or Howard Milmarsh, he did not know which, for certain.

[120]

The grime on the detective’s face had changed it so completely that he was not surprised that there was no recognition in the eyes of the man looking down at him. Indeed, the man did not see him. He only peered past him into the gloom, where the girl stood.

“Where is your father, Bessie?” he asked. “I’m coming down.”

“No, stay where you are!” interposed Nick. “You can be more helpful up there. I’ll bring her father.”

Old Roscoe Silvius, haggard from illness, sat up on a bed in the adjoining room. Nick wrapped him in a blanket and had him out before the old man knew what was happening.

It was not an easy task to lift the helpless old man through the trap. But Howard Milmarsh helped from above, and it was accomplished in less time than might have been expected.

“Now, you!” cried the detective to the girl. “I’ll lift you.”

Bessie Silvius helped herself a great deal, and in a moment was on the roof, by the side of her father and Howard Milmarsh—as, for convenience, we will continue to call the young man.

Nick followed the girl with one active spring, and, standing upright on the roof, looked around. One glance was enough to show him that their only hope of escape lay in crossing the roof of the next house, and so reaching a place where they might descend to the street.

The next house was the one which had suffered most by the fire, and the roof looked as if it might fall in at any moment. Therein lay most of their peril.

“Go ahead with the young lady,” directed the detective, as Howard looked at him inquiringly. “I will bring her father. Push on!”

Howard drew the girl away, and Nick lifted the old[121] man, carrying him on a stalwart shoulder along the shaky roof. Fortunately, the roof was flat, and there was only a low parapet dividing it from the next house, one that it was easy to step over.

It was here that the real peril began, however. The house was a mere blazing shell. In many places the roof had burned through, revealing fire and blazing rafters below in the awful hell-like pit.

At every step there was danger of a plunge into the abyss of death below. But, with the luck that often attends daring and desperation, they reached the third house in safety.

“We shall have to climb down the front,” said Nick. “The firemen ought to have a ladder there by this time. But there’s a sloping roof to be negotiated. We must be very careful, or it will send us headlong to the street, after all.”

“I’ll go first,” offered Howard.

Before Nick could object—if he had intended to do so—Howard Milmarsh had crawled up the steep and slippery slate roof, and was holding to the ridgepole.

Reaching down, he took Bessie Silvius’ hand and pulled her up to the ridge, so that she could slide down the other side of the flat part of the roof.

“Wait a moment!” called Howard to the detective. “I’ll come back and help you!”

“No! You and the young lady get to the ground as soon as you can. I do not need any help. But this roof is getting worse every minute. There is no time for argument.”

This was obvious. The slates were splitting off in the growing heat, and the rafters below were burning fiercely. It would be only a question of seconds when everything would tumble in at once.

Having seen that Howard and the girl had obeyed him, Nick then attacked the fearsome task of climbing[122] the roof with the weight of the old musician, and getting down the other side.

He accomplished the feat, and then saw that Howard Milmarsh was on the ladder at the top, ready to help him. The girl had already been carried or had climbed herself to the ground and safety.

“No, no!” cried Carter to Howard. “Go down! I can manage. The ladder won’t bear three of us.”

It called for all the iron nerve possessed by the detective to crawl across the remainder of the roof, carrying the dead weight of Roscoe Silvius, and it was a ticklish thing to work his way over the edge of the building to the ladder. One false step would have hurled both headlong down.

But that false step was never taken. The detective seldom made anything of the kind at any time. There was no fireman at the top of the ladder to assist him by relieving him of his burden.

He knew that was because Milmarsh had not yet reached the bottom, but he could not afford to wait. The entire roof was likely to collapse at any instant.

Slowly he began to descend. As he placed his foot on the third rung from the top, he heard the ladder crack loudly about halfway down.

“Quick!” came the shout from below. “The ladder’s sprung! Slide down! It’s your only chance!”

But that was just what Nick, having only one hand free, could not do. He kept on moving downward as fast as he could, step by step. There was nothing else to be done.

It was a period of breathless suspense. There were no more cries from below. The great crowd was watching this one man fighting death to save another, and they felt instinctively that any unnecessary noise might disturb him.

Suddenly one broad-shouldered young man rushed out from the throng held back by a cordon of police. It was Chick!

[123]

Dodging the police and firemen who tried to stop him, he gained the foot of the ladder and went swarming up like a monkey.

Almost immediately he was standing just below Carter, and speaking to him with the coolness that was characteristic of both of them in moments of fierce peril.

Just as Chick got there the ladder began to sag in the middle!

“Drop him on my shoulder, chief!”

“All right! Glad you’re here!”

Carefully, but not too fast, the weight of the old man was transferred to Chick’s arm and shoulder.

“I have him!” announced Chick. “I’ll have to walk down with him. But you slide! Just wait till I’m nearly down. Then come!”

Chick had already begun to move while he spoke, and he was at the bottom in such a short time that his feat would have done credit to any old sailor of the ancient windjammer days.

Nick was not far behind him. He walked down the rungs till a shout told him his assistant was off the ladder. Then, gripping the sides, he slid down like a streak.

He had not a fraction of a second to spare! The ladder cracked in the middle just as he passed the weak place. He had to drop a few feet, as it was.

“Get back there!” roared the fire chief, through his megaphone.

The warning was none too soon. As the crowd sprang away, the roof and upper walls of the middle house fell with a crash, and a great volcano of smoke, sparks, and dust flew up into the air.

Some of the débris fell among the crowd. It could not be otherwise. Cries of fright and pain arose here and there, and there was danger of a panic.

But the police were efficient—as New York police always are—and soon there was comparative order,[124] as those who were injured were carried away in the ambulances which had been waiting on the chance that they might be needed.

Neither Nick Carter, Chick, nor Patsy Garvan were hurt. The girl and her father had disappeared, but the detective felt sure they were being cared for by somebody, and it did not worry him. What he wanted was to find the man he had been hunting so long, Howard Milmarsh.

Chick and Patsy both knew what was passing in the mind of their chief, and they, too, were looking about for Milmarsh.

“There he is!” shouted Patsy. “I wonder if he’s hurt!”

Nick Carter wondered this, too, as he saw Howard Milmarsh leaning on the iron fence of a house a little distance away, across the street, with his head resting on his hand.

“It didn’t get you, did it?” asked Nick, hurrying over to him.

“No. I’m all right! A little shaken, that’s all. But we saved Bessie! That’s the main point!”

“Hum!” grunted Patsy significantly. “When a fellow’s stuck on a girl, he don’t care for much else—eh, Chick?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” grinned Chick, who felt happy over the way everything had turned out. “What do I know about girls?”

Nick slipped an arm around Howard Milmarsh’s shoulder, and there was sympathy in his strong, smoke-begrimed face, which drew forth response from the other at once.

“A brick struck me on the head,” he said, with an involuntary groan. “It hurt my head. But it’s nothing serious.”

“You need rest and quiet for a while, and I’ll see that you get it. Come with me.”

Howard Milmarsh was willing to accept anybody’s[125] kindly ministrations now. The reaction had come, and he felt as weak as a little child. Without answering, he suffered himself to be led away, Carter on one side of him, and Chick on the other, while Patsy ran ahead to see that the chauffeur was there with the big motor car.

When they had lifted the now half-fainting young man into the car and disposed him comfortably with the rugs that were always in the car, Chick and Patsy got in with him.

Nick took his place by the side of the chauffeur. As the car started, on its way to the detective’s home, Nick tried to compose his mind and comprehend the strange happenings that had brought to him the heir to the Milmarsh millions.

“‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will,’” he quoted softly to himself.

CHAPTER XXI.
ANOTHER KINK.

Although Howard Milmarsh had declared that he was not much hurt, and soon would be well again, it was found that his injuries were more serious than either he or Nick Carter had believed at first.

The patient was kept at Nick’s home that night, and the detective’s own physician, the famous Doctor Grant, came in. He gave the sick man a long examination. Then, after prescribing a sedative, he beckoned Nick one side, for a private report.

“The truth is, Carter, his mind has gone.”

The detective started and a look of genuine horror appeared in his face.

“Do you mean that he is permanently insane?”

“No. I wouldn’t say that. But the blow on the head, with the excitement and mental strain, have been too much for his brain. It has produced a condition[126] of aphasia, or loss of memory, which makes him unable to talk in a coherent manner, simply because he can’t think.”

“I understand. But I hope he will soon recover.”

Doctor Grant shrugged his shoulders. As a physician, he was more interested in the case from a scientific point of view than anything else. At the same time, he was not wanting in sympathy.

“My advice is to have him removed to a hospital, where he will be under constant supervision and will have proper care. You can put him in a private room—that is, if you do not mind the expense——”

“The expense is nothing,” interrupted the detective impatiently.

“Very well. Then that is what you’d better do. In time, with quiet and careful nursing, together with medical attention, he will come around, I have no doubt. I will see him every day. I’m on the staff of the Universal Hospital—where I should advise you to send him—and I will put him on my regular list.”

An ambulance conveyed the patient to the Universal Hospital, and he was put to bed in one of the best private rooms. Special nurses were engaged for him—one day nurse and one for the night—and orders given that he be not left alone for an instant.

Having done this, the detective could only wait, although it worried him to think that, now that he had found the missing heir, it was only to see him physically unable to take possession of his rights.

“I suppose you are sure this is the real, genuine Howard Milmarsh, eh?” suggested Chick, the evening that they had had the sick, and still partly unconscious, young man taken to the hospital.

“I am not sure of anything,” returned his chief, lighting a perfecto. “But if he isn’t, then I am worse fooled than I am generally in a matter of identity.”

[127]

A tap at the door, and the butler entered, to announce “Mr. Andrew Lampton!”

“Show him in.”

Lampton came in with rather a jaunty step, bowed to Carter and glanced questioningly in the direction of his companion.

“You can say what you have to say, Lampton,” was Nick’s reply to this silent query. “This is Chick Carter, and he is my confidential assistant. Take a chair.”

Andrew Lampton seated himself slowly, at the same time keeping his eyes fixed on the detective, while a cynical smile played about his lips.

“Where is T. Burton Potter?” asked Nick, handing a cigar box to his visitor. “You have not brought him with you?”

Andrew Lampton took a perfecto from the box, and accepted a light before he answered. Then he said calmly:

“I have not brought him with me, because he is in the Universal Hospital. He was badly hurt at a fire last night, I have been told, and has been removed to the hospital, where it is expected he will not recover.”

It was with difficulty that Nick maintained his usual calm exterior. Here was an assertion that he could not disprove while the patient at the Universal Hospital was unable to speak for himself. True, the girl, Bessie Silvius, had called him Howard Milmarsh. But if T. Burton Potter were slick enough to deceive others, why should he not have fooled the girl also?

These thoughts ran like lightning through the detective’s brain, as he and Andrew Lampton both smoked steadily. The former was staring at a picture on the opposite side of the room, as if his mind were quite occupied with it, to the exclusion of everything else.

[128]

“What makes you think the man in the hospital is T. Burton Potter?” he inquired, at last.

“Well, I was told by Louden Powers that he lived in that house, and that he had been accepted by some of Milmarsh’s intimate friends as Milmarsh, and that he had been injured at last night’s fire.”

“You know I was at that fire?” asked Nick quietly.

“Naturally. Everybody knows that.”

“How does everybody know it?”

“Haven’t you seen the evening papers?”

“No. I saw the morning papers, and my name did not appear in them. I requested that it should not. Also, I asked that Howard Milmarsh’s name be kept out of the account of the fire.”

“Well, here is an evening paper,” returned Lampton, handing him one. “It is evident that the news leaked. I don’t mind saying, however, that Louden Powers and I were both at that fire, and that we saw you come down the ladder with that old man. Somebody else—the gentleman over there, whom you tell me is your assistant—carried him down the lower part of the ladder. Then you slid down by yourself.”

Nick glanced down the column of print detailing the incidents of the fire, and saw that his own name and Howard Milmarsh’s were both mentioned. He had little doubt that the “leak” had been contrived by Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton. But he did not say so. It was his custom to let the other party play his hand out before he showed his own, if it could be done.

“How long had T. Burton Potter been living in that house where the fire was?” he asked, at last.

“Only a few days, I understand. That’s what the man who rents the house tells me. He is a truckman, and his name is said to be Billings. They call him Bonesy Billings, but I should think the ‘Bonesy’ is only a nickname. At all events, that is the only first name I heard for him. He calls his roomer Howard[129] Milmarsh. But that only shows how much alike Potter and this Milmarsh must be; when nobody can tell which is which. You haven’t heard anything of the real Milmarsh, have you?”

“I think I have,” was Nick’s curt reply.

He had to admit to himself that Andrew Lampton and Louden Powers were playing a cunning game. They had taken instant advantage of the sickness of the man hurt at the fire to declare that he was T. Burton Potter, and not Howard Milmarsh. And the worst of it was that it could not be disproved unless the poor fellow whose memory was gone could be brought to his senses.

“Where is Louden Powers?”

This question came suddenly, but it did not disturb Lampton. He puffed contentedly at the good cigar between his lips, and answered briefly:

“I don’t know.”

“You saw him last night?”

“Yes. But that is the last time I saw him. Louden said he had a little business to attend to, which would keep him out of New York for a few days. Then he hopped on a street car and was gone. Mighty slick citizen, Louden!”

“What is to prevent my putting you in the Tombs while I look into this matter?” suddenly demanded Nick.

Chick, who had been sitting at his desk in a corner of the room, jumped to his feet as his chief abruptly flung the question at Lampton. Chick was as much surprised as anybody—more so than Lampton appeared to be, for that worthy did not move in his chair, and took the time to inhale a few more puffs of his cigar, before he answered coolly:

“Your word, my dear boy! You promised me you would not do anything of that kind so long as I did what you requested. Well, I’ve done it. You wanted me to bring T. Burton Potter to you, and you have[130] him in your own care. He is in the hospital, it is true. But he’s under your own eye, and you might not have had him if I had chosen to get him away before the fire broke out. I could have done it easily, but I was pledged to you, and, of course, I could not go back on you. I know you will keep faith with me.”

“That is true,” admitted the detective. “It would be better if I had you securely in a cell. But I won’t do it at present.”

“Thanks!”

“I do not concede that you had anything to do with putting T. Burton Potter into my hands—if the young man in the hospital really is Potter—but I will allow you to have your own way about that.”

“It is the truth. That’s why. You know it, too, Mr. Carter. Well, if there is nothing else, I reckon I’ll be going. If you want me again, you can hear of me at the café in Third Avenue, where you found me before. So long!”

With the remnant of the perfecto sticking up from the corner of his mouth, Andrew Lampton strolled to the door, opened it, and disappeared. As the door closed, Chick remarked casually:

“Patsy will see where he goes. I’ve given him a standing order not to lose sight of Andrew Lampton when once he has been here.”

“Quite right!” commended the chief. “Now we have a lot of our work to do all over again! I believed I really had Howard Milmarsh and could close up the case. But these rascals have started a new game, and we shall have to see it through.”

“You don’t believe it is really T. Burton Potter who is in the hospital, do you?” asked Chick.

“I shall have to prove it isn’t. That’s the task they have set for me, and it will not be an easy one.”

[131]

CHAPTER XXII.
ANOTHER SCHEME.

The weeks went slowly by, and the patient in the private room at the Universal Hospital remained in the bewildered condition in which he had been since the night of the fire. He improved physically, but his mind was still a blank.

“Have you seen this, chief?” asked Chick one morning, as, after breakfast, he opened the morning paper, which Carter had been too busy to look at yet. “Another scheme to open up a beautiful section in Muddyford or Eden-in-the-Swamp. It’s an advertisement, and it reads like a romance. Listen!”

He read the principal display lines in a full-page advertisement, as follows:

“‘The new Paradise City! Artistic Homes for Everybody, which are paid for the same as rent. A bower in the midst of nature’s loveliness.’ And so on. Get on to that old gag, chief, ‘Paid for the same as rent?’ That’s a lulu.”

“Advertisements of that kind are always in the papers,” remarked Nick carelessly. “Some of those real-estate developments are all right, too. Others are not, of course.”

“I don’t know anything about this one,” went on his assistant. “But I couldn’t help noticing it, because it’s the same one we’ve been getting booklets about. Here’s one that was in the mail box yesterday. It was just shoved through the slit by hand. That’s what makes it look fishy. As if they were afraid to use the mails, in case of government inquiries.”

“You may be wrong about that, Chick,” answered his employer absently, as he lighted his after-breakfast cigar. “What’s the booklet about?”

“Well, the heading looks as if it might possibly interest[132] us. It reads: ‘The Lost Heir Found! The Story of a Great Estate to be Given to the Use and Benefit of Everybody.’”

“What’s that?” demanded Nick, suddenly interested.

“Well, there’s a lot in it about a long-lost heir having suddenly returned and claimed his own. He has traveled far during his years of absence, and, while away, he has made a deep study of country homes for the masses at a low cost. It is a hobby with him.”

“Go on. Are you reading from the book?”

“I am picking out the important parts,” returned Chick. “Do you want to see it? Here it is.”

He handed the gaudy-covered pamphlet to his chief, who rapidly absorbed the salient points of its contents. He had the faculty of skimming pages and getting their purport in a few hasty glances.

One paragraph that particularly interested him explained things in these rather bombastic terms:

“The long-lost heir of this estate—which is within a few miles of New York City—has resolved that some of the broad acres which have now become his shall be surrendered to the people. Upon these acres he will build a model settlement, a city of beautiful homes, each set in a fair garden of its own. To these he invites those who have heretofore been cooped up in city flats to come and live, really, in the lap of bounteous nature. Come to the new Paradise City and see for yourselves.”

The exact situation of the new Paradise City was not given. Those who were interested could call at room No. 2006 in one of the great skyscraping office buildings downtown, and there learn all they might wish to know. It was also stated that a small sum down would be required. After that the property could be paid for in monthly payments.

“There is nothing remarkable about this,” remarked Nick, “except about the long-lost heir. That gives me a feeling that it may be the Milmarsh estate somebody[133] is playing with. I don’t see how it is, exactly, unless some one has seen the attorneys, Johnson, Robertson & Judkins, and persuaded them that Howard Milmarsh has turned up.”

“How can that be?” asked Chick.

“Do you know for certain whether it is T. Burton Potter or Howard Milmarsh lying in that room at the Universal Hospital?”

Nick put this query significantly, and Chick immediately screwed up one eye.

“We might call up the lawyers on the telephone and find out something about it,” he suggested.

“We might. But I prefer to look into it myself. The lawyers will take what evidence is presented, and act upon it. They may have done so already. It looks to me as if they have. If I were to call them up there would be a lot of bustle immediately, and the scoundrels, if they really have tried to steal a march on me, would be on their guard.”

“It’s Lampton, I suppose.”

“And Louden Powers,” added Nick. “I have not much doubt about that. We’ll go up to room No. 2006 in that building and see what we can find out.”

“What are we to look like?” asked the young man, quite as a matter of course.

“I’ll be an old man, in shabby clothes. You can be my son, with spectacles and a cap pulled down low. That will be disguise enough. They would spot us at once if we didn’t do something to change our appearance. I hate to do that kind of thing, but it can’t be helped in this case.”

Half an hour later a feeble old man, in a long, thin overcoat and wearing a soft, black hat with a wide brim, was helped upon a Broadway car by a young man with dark spectacles and wearing a cap. The rest of the young fellow’s apparel was a shabby sack suit and a blue necktie under a frayed collar. His shoes were of tan leather and badly scuffed.

[134]

The look of the two suggested that they had a little money saved, but were the kind of people who were obliged to watch their nickels carefully.

They found that there were three offices belonging to the Paradise Improvement Company, although only one was open to the public. It was a sort of anteroom, and there were a number of people waiting to see the big man in the inner office when Nick Carter and his assistant forced their way in through the throng.

“Say, chief!” whispered Chick. “There’s Billings!”

Sure enough, Bonesy Billings was there to purchase a lot at Paradise City. He did not care who heard him talk about his business. He was telling a chance acquaintance that his house had caught fire, but that his furniture was all insured, and he had enough money now to go and live in the country, to raise chickens and garden truck and keep a cow. He figured he could make a fair living that way and wouldn’t have to work as he had in New York.

“I’d like to warn him to be careful,” remarked Chick, in a low tone, to his chief. “He’s just the kind of simple fellow to swallow all that is told him, and I don’t like the general look of these offices. They are too gorgeous to be entirely honest, I’m afraid.”

Bonesy Billings went into the inner sanctum, and after about fifteen minutes came out with a quantity of “literature” in his hands. This consisted of booklets, circulars, statements of what had been done to improve the plots to be sold, and plenty of gay-colored pictures.

“Well, I’m going to look it over,” announced Bonesy, to anybody who would listen. “It’s out in the country, all right, and it’s been a private estate for a hundred years. But it’s such a big place that the present owners can afford to have this Paradise City built in one part of it without its ever being seen from the windows of the big house. The folks in that mansion will be[135] neighbors of them that buys in Paradise. I guess I’ll go up there of evenings and hear the daughter of the family—if there is one—play the pianner. Good old ragtime, I hope.”

“Where is the place?” ventured Chick.

“Why, it’s a family by the name of Milmarsh,” replied Bonesy. “Howard Milmarsh, who has been away for three years or so, is home again, and it’s him that’s laying out this new place. He’s all right, Howard is.”

“Is he inside the offices now?”

“No, I guess not. It’s the manager who does the business. He’s a lawyer, I was told.”

“I’d like to see him,” put in Nick, in a quavering voice. “I hope I shan’t have to wait long.”

There was a note of appeal in this from the seemingly old man that touched the hearts of most of the people waiting to see the manager.

“Let him go in first. I’m willing,” declared a man who evidently was one who worked hard with his hands, and who was the next in line. “If everybody else is agreeable, let the old gentleman go right in.”

There was no dissent, and Chick, taking his chief by the elbow, propelled him into the inner office.

Three persons were in the room, but none of them were known to the detective or Chick.

“Too slick to give themselves away,” whispered the latter, as they entered. “I half expected to see Louden Powers or Lampton.”

“They are in the background, I guess,” was the hasty reply.

They advanced into the large room, and Nick bowed humbly to a portly, dignified man behind the large table. On either side of him were younger men, who appeared to be assistants. There was a typewriter in front of one of them.

It would be tedious to describe the interview in detail. Suffice it that when Nick and his assistant came[136] out of the offices, they had a bundle of circulars and booklets, and had learned positively that somebody who called himself Howard Milmarsh had taken possession of the estate.

One thing rather relieved Nick, and that was the admission from the big man behind the desk that Mr. Milmarsh had not formally taken possession of his property yet. There were some legal matters to be adjusted, he said, which might take a month or more. But Mr. Milmarsh was selling plots now, with the understanding that buildings would begin after the settlement of his estate.

“It’s a swindle, of course. But it is in the hands of good lawyers, and they know just how to smooth over the rough places for their clients,” remarked Nick. “I should like to see Lampton.”

Little more was said until the two were again at home. They had not used the street cars this time. Chick caught a passing taxi, and they rode quickly home.

“Let Patsy run over to that café and find out something about Andrew Lampton. I understand he has lost sight of him in the last three weeks.”

“Well, you did not want him to spend any more time watching the fellow,” Chick reminded him.

“I know that. We traced him to a hotel uptown, and he was living there till three weeks ago. Then he vanished, and I did not think it worth while to trouble Patsy about it any longer.”

Chick looked at his chief in a peculiar way. He felt convinced that there was something passing in the detective’s mind that he had not chosen to divulge. He was right, as his next words showed.

“I had information that he was in the neighborhood of the Milmarsh home. Captain Brown is an old friend of mine. I telephoned him, and he said a man who did not give his name, but who, he since has learned, calls himself Powers, stayed at the Old Pike[137] Inn one night. After that he went up to the Milmarsh home, and is believed to be the guest of Howard Milmarsh. If Louden Powers is there, the chances are that Andrew Lampton is not far away.”

Patsy hastened out on his errand, and in about half an hour returned with the information that Andrew Lampton had gone to the country, but that no one knew what was his destination.

“That will do, Patsy. You will have to remain on watch here for a few days. Chick and I are going out to the Old Pike Inn on the midnight train.”

“There’s a train two hours earlier than the ‘Owl,’” suggested Patsy.

“I know that,” was Nick’s reply. “But I do not care to reach there while many people are about.”

“I see,” said Patsy with a grin. “You want to sneak in on rubbers.”

CHAPTER XXIII.
WHICH WAS WHICH?

At eight o’clock the next morning the chief and Chick faced each other across a well-served breakfast in a private dining room in the Old Pike Inn, while Captain Brown, the proprietor, smiled on them from a chair at the window.

“Well, of course, Carter,” went on Brown, who had been speaking, “we can’t tell much about this Howard Milmarsh. I used to see him down here at the Inn pretty often, and I thought I knew him. He has changed a little in the few years he has been away. But the features are the same, of course, and his size and shape have not much altered. In fact, I thought he would have grown heavier than he has.”

“Does he come down to the Inn now?”

“Never seen him since the night he arrived, with that man Andrew Lampton. That was before Louden[138] Powers came. Powers stayed here one night, but the other two went straight up to the Milmarsh residence. I happened to be down at the railroad station when they arrived, or I wouldn’t have seen them at all.”

“Did you speak to them?”

“Oh, yes. Milmarsh shook hands with me, and said I had not changed since he saw me last, and I handed him back a similar line of talk. You know how men do when they haven’t seen each other for a long time.”

Carter nodded and poured out another cup of coffee for Chick.

“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Captain Brown jovially. “What humbugs men are! I could see a lot of changes in him, but I did not think he would want me to say so, and, of course, I didn’t.”

“Well, we came up here to learn what really was going on,” observed Nick, after a pause. “What are they doing at Paradise City?”

“Nothing.”

“No building going on?”

“Why, no. They couldn’t build there. It’s that swampy place over to the northeast. Mr. Milmarsh—I mean this Howard Milmarsh’s father—never did anything with it. He talked about having it filled in some time. But he never did it. If he had, he would have made it an extension to his golf links.”

“They are selling plots, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Do the people who buy the plots think the swamp won’t hurt?” threw in Chick, as he finished his breakfast.

“They don’t see the swamp,” replied Captain Brown.

“How do they buy, then?”

“From a map. Ha, ha, ha! Swamps don’t show on maps—unless you want them to. You ought to know that.”

“I do know it,” replied Chick. “But I didn’t suppose[139] they could put over such a bluff as that. It isn’t Howard Milmarsh who does it, is it?”

Nick listened with some show of interest for Captain Brown’s reply to this.

“I don’t know who is at the back of the Paradise City project,” he answered more seriously. “I suppose Howard Milmarsh must sanction it, or it wouldn’t be going on. But the fellows engineering the game are Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton.”

It was apparent to Nick Carter that Captain Brown could have told more about the business if he had chosen to do so. But he was manager of the Old Pike Inn, and it was his policy not to say anything about anybody which might rebound and hurt his trade. He was an innkeeper first of all, and he never forgot his own interests.

“Well, captain, you will be careful not to let anybody know who we are, of course?” adjured the detective. “We shall go and see the swamp during the day, and to-night there will be something else we shall have to attend to. Secrecy is important, but I was sure we could depend on you.”

“You can bank on me to the last cent,” replied Captain Brown impressively. “You say you want to look at that swamp?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to walk through it, I suppose?”

“Hardly,” said Nick, with a smile. “It must be pretty wet about this time.”

“Almost a lake! What I was about to suggest is that I can take you along the east road in my car, and you can see the swamp over the fence. If that is all you want of it.”

“That will be just what we do want,” replied Nick. “I should like to assure myself that nothing has been done to alter the appearance of the place. How soon do we start?”

“In ten minutes, if you like. I’ll go down and telephone[140] the garage at once, and have the machine at the door by the time you are ready. It will be an open car—unless you would rather ride in a limousine. You would not be so exposed to view then.”

“It’s a lonely road, and if we do see anybody staring, we can pull our hats down over our eyes, and be looking for something that we may have dropped in the car,” said the chief. “We’ll take the open car.”

Neither Carter nor Chick made any attempt to disguise themselves for this trip. They appeared merely to be two visitors to Old Pike Inn looking at the country as the guests of Captain Brown. He often took guests out in his car.

Nick knew something about the section of the Milmarsh estate generally spoken of by those who lived in the neighborhood as “the swamp.” But he wanted to look it over, to make sure that it had not been changed.

He kept in mind the instructions of the elder Howard Milmarsh, to see that his son was not deprived of any of his rights.

If this was the real Howard Milmarsh who had seated himself in the mansion, with these two shady characters, Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton, as his chief advisers, then it was the detective’s clear duty to go there and tell the new head of the Milmarsh family what his father’s wishes were.

“I shall know more about it after to-night,” was the way he finally settled it with himself.

The swamp looked about the same as he always had seen it, and he ground his teeth in indignation as he thought of the poor people who were giving up their money for worse than nothing at all.

It was just as they had passed the swamp, and were turning into another road, away from the Milmarsh estate, that Nick caught sight of a man walking in a narrow path not far from the big house, apparently in deep thought.

[141]

His head was bent and his hands were clasped behind him, as he strolled, looking neither to the right nor left.

“Who is that?” asked Nick, who had not had a look at the man’s face.

But at that instant the musing one looked up, and the morning sun fell right across his countenance, bringing up plainly every feature.

It was only a momentary glimpse that the chief and Chick had of the man’s face. But it was enough for both of them to see it so clearly that both knew it was the man who called himself Howard Milmarsh.

“Either that man is Howard Milmarsh, or I can’t tell the rightful owner of this place from a rascal who ought to be in jail. I wonder whether I shall find out which is which?”

Carter had said this loudly enough for his assistant to hear, and it was in a tone of conviction that the latter replied:

“You’ll find out, chief, and, by ginger, I believe I know already what the verdict will be.”

“You are more sure than I am, Chick. I thought I knew that the man who is in the Universal Hospital is Howard Milmarsh. But that man we have just passed looks as much like the real one as the other. It’s a puzzle. But I must untangle it somehow.”

“We are going to do it to-night, aren’t we?”

“Yes. At least, we’ll try. You have the long dusters and big caps in that suit case, haven’t you, Chick?”

“All right, chief. We won’t look like ourselves when we are rigged up for our little visit to the big house on the hill. You can bet on that.”

[142]

CHAPTER XXIV.
BY UNDERGROUND.

It was soon after darkness had set in—a darkness helped by a drizzling rain which had begun in the afternoon—when two men in long dusters and with large caps pulled over their eyes crept through the shrubbery at the back of the Milmarsh mansion and moved along the stone foundation wall, as if looking for something.

“Here it is, Chick. Howard Milmarsh, the father, showed it to me once when we were walking through the grounds. It’s the hole through which they used to take the colored people so that they could keep them in safety till they could be sent up State and over the border into Canada.”

“It was part of the ‘underground railroad’ in slavery days, I suppose?”

“Yes. The Milmarsh who lived here seventy years ago was an abolitionist, and his wife was particularly enthusiastic in trying to help negroes to escape from the South. It’s a good thing for us now. Come along!”

The hole that Nick had discovered in the stone foundation wall was about four feet square, and was covered by a wooden board on which composition had been placed, so that it looked like the stones all about it. Only one who knew where to look would be likely to discover that there was any break at all in the wall.

The disguised board was easily removed by pressing a secret spring.

“Get in, Chick. Enter feet first. Sit down and let yourself go.”

“I may get a hard bump,” protested the young man.

[143]

“No, you won’t. I promise you that,” replied his chief.

Chick gingerly stepped into the hole, with his back to the outer world and his feet straight out before him.

Hardly had he assumed his position when he began to slide, and in a second he was scooting down a long, smooth chute in black darkness. Suddenly he stopped in the midst of what felt like a gigantic feather bed.

He heard his chief chuckling at the hole, and he realized that when slaves were brought into this house, every care was taken that they should not be hurt in the process.

He got to his feet, and found himself standing on a smooth floor, while Nick softly warned him to keep out of the way.

There was a slight scuffle in the distance, then a whisking sound, and his employer shot into the midst of the feather bed, just as he had done.

The glow of an electric flash light showed him that his chief was by his side, smiling, as he cast the light about.

“You see, Chick, this room is cut off from all the inhabited part of the house—except in a roundabout way that I will show you later. It is solidly built, and no one could get at the people housed here except by that one opening in the outer wall. The one by which we came in.”

Nick also pointed out marks on the wall where bunks had been, and told his assistant that it had been possible for nearly two hundred persons to sleep in the room at one time.

“I have been told that more than two hundred refugees have stayed here all night on occasion. But I doubt whether they slept much. Now come with me. I’m going to find out to-night, if I can, where the real Howard Milmarsh is.”

Chick did not reply. He had implicit confidence in[144] the great detective by whom he was proud to be employed, and he only wondered how the object was to be accomplished—not whether it would be.

In one corner the detective fumbled for a few moments, and a panel in the wooden wall swung open on a pivot in the center, top, and bottom. There was space enough for an ordinary-sized person to go through, and even a stout one could have squeezed in.

Nick went ahead, and from the darkness beyond told his assistant to follow.

No sooner were they both in, than Nick directed the glow of his flash light up a flight of narrow, winding stairs. They seemed as if they might go to the top of the house, for Chick felt as if he never would be at the end of turning around.

But the chief stopped after a while, and, opening another concealed door, went through, followed by Chick. They were in a narrow hall now—one with half a dozen twists and turns.

“Hush!”

It was the chief’s voice in a low tone of warning, for Chick had just made an exclamation of annoyance as he stumbled over a low stool.

Chick was silent. Then he started, for there were voices close to him, although he could not see anybody but his employer.

“That sounds like Andrew Lampton,” whispered Chick.

“It is Lampton.”

“And there’s Louden Powers.”

“Right!”

“Where are we, chief?”

“I’ll show you. Sit on that stool—the one you just now fell over.”

Nick turned the light on the stool, and also revealed that a similar stool was by its side.

[145]

The chief sat on one stool and Chick sank upon the other. This brought their faces close against the wall.

“Move that little, round piece of wood in front of you, Chick. It works on a pivot. I have another one here.”

“Gosh!” ejaculated Chick. “It’s a peephole!”

“Yes. It’s in the carved frame of a big picture. That prevents the hole being observed from the other side. We are now looking into the dining room. I suppose this narrow place we are in was used when negroes were being helped to freedom. Anyhow, it’s mighty useful to us now. I’m glad Howard Milmarsh’s father showed it to me.”

“Why did he do it?”

“Only because I was curious about this wonderful old house. He was proud of its mysteries and unexpected twists and turns. He and I were good friends, and he knew he could depend on my keeping a silent tongue about anything he might show me. Take that lesson to yourself.”

“Of course,” returned Chick, in rather a hurt tone. “You never knew me to talk about anything you told me, did you?”

The chief reached over and took his assistant’s hand. He had not meant to injure his feelings.

“Look through the hole and take note of everything you see. There are chinks all about the big picture in front of us—in the frame, that is—and we ought to hear easily.”

Nick was right in this. They could see and hear to perfection.

The dining room of the Milmarsh mansion was an immense, lofty room—more a hall than a room indeed. It was hung with pictures of dead-and-gone Milmarshes, in the manner of a baronial hall in Europe, and was richly lined with tapestries, while frescoes and other ornamentation seemed never-ending.

From the center of the ceiling hung a gorgeous[146] chandelier, which had been fitted with electric lights when that style of illumination came in. But there were old-fashioned sconces for wax candles still on the gilt arms, with the curious crystal pendants which went with the candles, as well as pipes and tips for gas.

At a table in the middle of the room, on which remained the white cloth for dinner, sat three men. They were Louden Powers, Andrew Lampton, and the young man whom Lampton had declared to be Howard Milmarsh.

The last-named was speaking, in a thick voice that made Nick think of that night, years ago, when Howard Milmarsh had rushed from the Old Pike Inn, believing himself the murderer of his distant cousin, Richard Jarvis. The voice seemed to be absolutely the same.

“I don’t like this Paradise City business, Lampton,” he was saying, in an angry tone.

“You have nothing to say about it,” snapped Louden.

“It’s my property, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s your property,” assented Lampton. “But you never would have proved your right to it without our help.”

“Oh, I think I could,” snarled Milmarsh. “Carter would have helped me if I’d asked him.”

The other two men laughed derisively.

“Why, you idiot!” broke out Powers. “He would not admit that you are Howard Milmarsh.”

“His Howard Milmarsh is in a hospital in New York.”

“He doesn’t believe that man is Howard Milmarsh,” declared the man whom we will call that for convenience, as has been done before in this narrative.

“He doesn’t know who he is,” said Powers. “He took him there as Milmarsh, and, of course, he doesn’t like to have to confess that he has turned out to be T. Burton Potter, after all.”

[147]

“If that fellow ever should recover his mind and memory——”

The young man said this musingly, as he poured himself out another glass of champagne.

“If he did, all the fat would be in the fire again,” finished Andrew Lampton, also taking some more champagne.

“Well, now, the point is what are we going to do about the Paradise City affair?” said Louden Powers. “There is a row brewing, and the people who have put their money into it want to know when they will get their plots. Can’t you get those lawyers in New York to settle matters for you, Howard?”

“How am I to do that? They have let me take possession, but they are slow to believe things—like all lawyers. They pretend to have some doubts still whether I am the right man.”

“What do they want?”

“They insist that until Carter concedes in writing that the estate is in the hands of the real Howard Milmarsh, they can allow me to remain here only on sufferance.”

“Well, then, the people can’t have their Paradise City plots. That’s all there is to it. When you get a good hold on the bank account, as well as just this property, we shall be able to pay those who make a fuss, and we shan’t care what the others do.”

Louden Powers said this in harsh, grating tones, as he grinned over his wineglass at the other two.

“How much money is there in the Paradise City treasury?” asked Andrew Lampton.

“After paying the manager and assistants, and the rent for the offices, I have three thousand dollars and a few odd hundreds,” announced Powers, consulting a small notebook.

“Well, I’ll take a thousand of it. I’m tired of having no money. It’s all very well to live in a fine house, but I want some cash.”

[148]

“You have everything you want here,” snapped Louden Powers. “Plenty of the best kind of food, wines, motor cars, servants, and everything else a man could want. What are you bothering about money for?”

“None of your business, Louden, what I want it for. Are you going to hand over that thousand?”

“You may as well,” put in Andrew Lampton. “If you have three thousand clear, each of us is entitled to a thousand. The odd hundreds you can throw back into the treasury. We may want another dividend before this matter is all straightened out. I begin to doubt whether Howard Milmarsh ever will come into his own.”

“I don’t doubt it,” whispered Carter significantly to Chick.

CHAPTER XXV.
DOUBTS.

There was more squabbling over the division of the booty, and much more champagne was disposed of before an agreement was reached. But at last, with a grudging look, Louden Powers brought out a leather wallet and slowly counted out ten hundred-dollar bills to each of his companions.

“There you are!” he grunted. “But it is a foolish thing to draw all the capital out of a business before the time comes to wind it up. I’m going to bed. It’s early—not much after eleven. But I’m tired. I have to go down to New York to-morrow, to see how things are at the office.”

“Hear that, chief?” whispered Chick.

“Of course I do.”

“Well, he may be going to make a get-away.”

“He won’t succeed.”

“How do you know?”

[149]

“Patsy Garvan will be with you,” was the chief’s short reply. “Now, keep still and watch.”

Louden Powers staggered to his feet, and Carter realized, for the first time, how drunk he was.

“I’ll have to get some help to find my way to the elevator,” he mumbled. “What kind of wine is that, anyhow, Howard?”

“You’ll have to ask my father—if you know where he is,” laughed Howard Milmarsh. “He bought it.”

“Good for the old man!” squealed Andrew Lampton. “I say it’s durned good booze! I wish I never had to drink anything worse! Whee! Come on, old top! We’ll find the elevator!”

He lurched over to Louden Powers, and the two worthies reeled out of the room, and across the hall to the elevator, which was operated by an electric button by the passenger.

“I doubt whether they will be able to get upstairs in that,” muttered Chick. “I wish we could sail in and knock their heads together!”

“Why?”

“We’d make such a racket that somebody might tell the actual truth in the confusion. I can’t believe that fellow sitting at the table is the real Howard Milmarsh.”

“Neither can I, Chick. But he has possession, and he could not have got that if he had not convinced the lawyers. And Johnson, Robertson & Judkins are not easily convinced.”

“That guy down there at the table is a blackguard. The real Howard Milmarsh never behaved that way, did he?”

Nick was thoughtful for a few moments, and he did not answer until he saw the man in the dining room reach down into the pail on the floor at his side, in which was still an unopened bottle of champagne, and take out a large piece of ice, which he pressed to his forehead.

[150]

“I have seen the real Howard Milmarsh do just what this fellow is doing now. Of course, that does not prove that they are the same person, but it is an indication. I have not quite made up my mind yet.”

For another fifteen minutes the young man at the table sat there holding ice to his forehead. Occasionally he drank some water from the carafe on the table.

At last he got up and walked the length of the room and back, as if to test his ability to do it without staggering.

He was fairly successful, and he uttered a mirthless laugh as he dropped again into his seat.

“The blackguards!” he burst out suddenly. “The infernal, low-bred rascals! They can’t even be decent crooks! This game they’ve played on the poor devils who are paying for that swamp land is worse than stealing the pennies from a blind man’s dog!”

He took from a pocket the ten hundred-dollar notes and gazed at them thoughtfully.

“For two cents I’d put a match to these. I may not be a saint, but, by the big bull of Bashan, I never was a robber of widows and orphans. At least, not when I knew it!”

He reached over to the silver match box on the table, and savagely struck a light. He held the lighted match till it burned up brightly, and then, with the notes in his left hand and the match in his right, laughed again in the hollow way he had before.

“Look!” whispered Chick excitedly. “The dub is going to burn up a thousand dollars!”

But he didn’t do it. Just as he was about to touch the flame to the money, he shook his head, and, with another dry chuckle, blew out the match and dropped it in an ash tray.

“No, I won’t!” he mumbled. “What would be the use of that? The people who paid it in wouldn’t get[151] it. Besides, if those two scoundrels have a thousand apiece, why shouldn’t I? And I need cash. This business of having a big house, with servants and everything else, but no money, isn’t the kind of thing I like. I suppose there’ll be hail Columbia when it comes time to pay these servants, to say nothing of the butcher and groceryman and all the rest of the tradesmen.”

He was about to pour himself out another glass of champagne, but changed his mind and took some water from the carafe instead. It looked as if he were trying to sober up.

“Well, I’ll go to bed,” he exclaimed, after another pause, during which he seemed to be trying to collect his thoughts in some sort of orderly array. “And, in the morning, I’ll begin to have this affair brought to a focus. I’m tired of going on this way for nothing at all, just to please other people.”

He got up from his chair, and made his way out of the room with much better grace than had the other two men.

In a moment or two a man in livery, who seemed to have been waiting somewhere close by until the convivial trio should disappear, came into the room and began to clear away the remnants of the feast, as well as the glasses and other paraphernalia that spoke of a carouse.

He had not proceeded far in his work when another man, dressed just like him, also stole into the room and silently assisted the first.

When they had taken everything out of sight, including the tablecloth, leaving the handsome mahogany table, with its highly polished surface, glittering in the light of the chandelier, one of the men solemnly addressed the other:

“What do you think of it, Dobbs?”

“Don’t know! How does it strike you, Kelly?”

“I’ll tell you better at the end of the month.”

[152]

“Ah! I could tell you now—if I wanted to,” blurted out Dobbs.

“Better not. Don’t give yourself away,” interrupted Kelly.

“Well, I say that if I don’t get my wages the day they’re due, it will be a lawyer for mine.”

“That’s different. The same here.”

“Then you think it is——”

“I’m not saying.”

“Punk?”

“Nothing doing!”

“Hum! Let’s get out! There’s some good bottled beer downstairs.”

“I’m with you,” responded Kelly, with alacrity.

When they’d both gone out of the room, Chick again turned to his chief, with a grin:

“Isn’t this the queerest joint you ever struck, chief?”

“It seems so. At the same time, I have more serious work here than to speculate on the intentions of footmen, or even of the men who have the privilege of drinking champagne ordered by my old friend, the late Howard Milmarsh. I made him a promise the last time I saw him alive, and I’m going to keep my word. Follow me, and I’ll show you something more about this house that you may regard as curious.”

CHAPTER XXVI.
GHOSTLY VISITANTS.

Wonderingly, Chick followed his employer along the dark corridor, lighted at intervals by the electric flash, until they came to some more winding stairs leading upward.

“There seems to be a secret house within a house here, chief,” muttered Chick. “A great place for ghosts, I should say.”

[153]

Carter permitted himself a low laugh, and turned to place a hand on Chick’s shoulder, as he replied:

“Do you know, Chick, you have just about struck the nail on the head without meaning it?”

“I don’t get you.”

“You will in a few minutes. Here we are!”

They had gone up so many stairs that Chick had no clear idea of how high they were in the house, when Carter pressed on the wall to his right and opened a panel door like that which had admitted them to the mysterious region they had been in for so long.

This panel led into a large, lofty room, with the moonlight streaming through a skylight.

“What’s this, chief?”

“This used to be Howard Milmarsh’s laboratory and studio,” was the quiet answer. “It is at the top of the house, as you see, and there is only one other way of reaching it besides that we came in by. That is through the bedroom he used in his lifetime. It is on the floor below this.”

“Wonder whether the present Howard Milmarsh is in the same bedroom?”

“I don’t know,” replied Nick. “But if he isn’t, he is sure to be in one very near it, for the best bedchambers are all on the floor below this.”

“Where do the servants sleep?”

“In the west wing, some distance away from this part of the building. But come over here. I may want some help.”

There was a table and mirror against a wall across from the panel door, with two electric lights each side of the glass.

Chick turned on these lights without hesitation. He knew that the room was so arranged that the light would not show outside, even if anybody should happen to be watching, which was not at all likely.

“Howard Milmarsh was deeply interested in theatricals,” explained Nick. “He often had private performances[154] in this house while his wife was alive, and he always took part in them himself. This was his dressing room. He used to ‘make-up’ here, and I suppose he had as fine a collection of grease paint and other articles needed in a theatrical dressing room as you could find anywhere in America to-day.”

“But what are you going to do?” asked Chick.

“I’m going to make myself look as much like the late Howard Milmarsh as I can,” was the reply. “He always wore a mustache and pointed beard as long as I knew him, and they were iron-gray toward the end of his life. Here are the very things in this drawer.”

Carter took some false beards and mustaches, and began to examine them, occasionally twisting one to bring it to the desired shape.

“Am I to take a hand in this?” asked Chick.

“You certainly are, and you must not waste time, either. We’ve both to be ready before midnight. You make-up like Howard Milmarsh, the present one. There is a full wardrobe in those closets along the wall. You can find anything you want. Just a plain sack suit is all you will need. But there’s a black-and-white check that Howard used to wear a great deal. Put that on. It’s distinctive.”

It was five minutes to twelve when Nick Carter surveyed himself critically in the mirror and decided he was enough like the father of the present Howard Milmarsh to pass for him. Then he looked at his assistant. He was much pleased, and he gave him the praise he felt he deserved.

“Excellent, Chick! Grease paint is a wonderful transformer—if you know how to use it. You have changed all your features. When that fellow downstairs sees you, he’ll think it’s himself.”

“Or his ghost!” said Chick, with a smile.

“Ghost!” repeated the chief. “That’s it exactly. Haven’t you wondered what we are doing all this for?”

[155]

“I supposed you had your reasons,” replied Chick humbly.

“I have. I’m going to scare that fellow into telling the truth, if I can. If he isn’t the real Howard Milmarsh, I’m in hopes I’ll make him confess the fraud.”

“But suppose he is the real one, how will you work it then?”

“That’s a question,” answered the detective soberly. “But I do not expect to be called on to answer that. Now, put a little talcum powder on your cheeks, so that you will look a little more ghostly.”

“How about a smudge of phosphorus? Here’s some in this box. The old gentleman certainly did not overlook anything.”

“It might add still more ghostliness to the general effect,” assented Nick. “Rub some on your cheeks and hands, and I will do the same.”

Nick Carter had not exaggerated when he said that anybody seeing Chick might think him the real Howard Milmarsh of the present day.

He might have remarked that his own make-up was also perfect. If the elder Milmarsh had been alive, anybody meeting the detective would have declared him to be the multimillionaire steel manufacturer.

A distant clock somewhere in the house, with deep, cathedral tones, boomed out twelve strokes.

“Midnight!” observed Nick. “Just the time for a ghostly visit.”

He went to a door, which was fastened, like the others, by a secret spring, and opened it wide. A narrow, winding staircase, of the kind with which they had become familiar that night, led to a hall, and along this a short walk brought them to a large door with heavy portières in front.

Howard Milmarsh, the elder, had been so intimate with the great detective that he had told him[156] more about the ways of his mansion than he ever had confided to any one else.

So Nick soon opened the door, and then another one beyond.

“Stand still, Chick!” he whispered. “I must see whether he is in bed.”

A moment later he returned to his assistant and whispered:

“He is in bed and fast asleep. Do not speak a word unless I give you a signal. Walk softly, and keep out of sight for the present.”

Chick followed his chief into a large room which looked more like a bedchamber of a hundred years ago than of to-day.

Instead of the light furniture to which people are accustomed now, with brass or mahogany bedstead and other articles to correspond, there was an immense four-poster, with mahogany cornices, from which depended thick hangings of purple velvet with lace lambrequins draped over them.

A small electric light in a ground-glass globe hung over a table where it would not shine in the face of an occupant of the bed, but which relieved the gloom of the great, shadowy apartment.

The man who might or might not be Howard Milmarsh lay asleep in the bed. His potations had stupefied him to such an extent that he slumbered heavily, his breath coming in long, stertorous snores, and he did not move.

Nick took from his pocket his electric flash, and, turning the light full into the face of the sleeper, shook him gently and continuously.

It required several seconds to bring the man to his waking senses, and even then he was only half-conscious. Lazily opening his eyes, he closed them quickly, for he had been blinded by the glaring eye of the flash light. When, after a pause, he opened them again, the light was gone.

[157]

“Hello! What’s this?” he mumbled. “I must have been dreaming!”

Satisfied that this was the explanation of the strange light he thought he had seen, Howard Milmarsh composed himself to drop asleep again, when a deep voice commanded him to “Awake!”

He started up in bed and rubbed his eyes.

“Heavens, I heard somebody speak!” he muttered. “Lampton or——”

It was at this instant that he made out a shadowy form standing near the bed, and as he stared the light of the flash was turned full upon the figure of the ghostly visitor, and, traveling slowly upward, at last came to the face of the elder Howard Milmarsh. Then the light was blotted out, and the man in the bed, shaking with superstitious fear, fell back upon his pillow.

“Who are you?” asked the strange voice out of the gloom.

Hardly knowing what he said, the man in the bed replied:

“I am Howard Milmarsh. Who the deuce are you?”

There was a touch of defiance in the last sentence that did more to make Nick believe in the genuineness of this Howard Milmarsh than anything else he might have said. But he remembered that a man who would have the nerve to impersonate another to the extent of taking possession of a large estate, with an eye to an immense fortune in money later, would hardly be lacking in self-assurance.

“I am your father, Howard Milmarsh, who desires to see his son come into his rights. That is why I am here.”

“Ah!”

Nick realized that it would be impossible to frighten this rather cool individual very long. At first, when he had been awakened from his sleep in such a curious fashion, he had shown terror. But that was passing[158] away, and the detective expected that soon he would be called on to deal with this young man in a material way, if at all.

“This looks as if he might be the real Howard,” was his inward comment. “Howard was never afraid of anything, and certainly he had no superstition in his nature. He would be quite likely to send a bullet through a ghost. Perhaps it is well this gentleman has no gun handy.”

“If you are my son, you will be able to answer certain questions that I shall put to you,” went on Nick.

There was a pause. Then, in an incredulous tone, the young man in the bed said:

“I’ll answer any questions. But be honest about it, and don’t say you said things you didn’t.”

He had been edging away to the other side of the bed, and after the first startled moment it struck the detective that the young man was remarkably self-possessed, considering that he was talking to a supposed ghost.

“What did I say to you just before you went down to the Old Pike Inn that night you killed Richard Jarvis?”

The detective watched narrowly to see what effect his recalling Jarvis’ death would have on the man who had killed him.

He saw a decided start, and then the man in the bed fell upon his face on the farther side of the bed, his face buried in the pillow.

“What did I say?” repeated Nick, in hollow tones.

He waited for a full quarter of a minute, during which the supposed Howard Milmarsh writhed about the bed, with his face in the pillow.

“Will you answer me?”

“I can’t,” moaned the other.

“Why not?”

“Can’t you understand?”

There was such agony in the voice that asked this[159] that Nick was puzzled. Surely it must be remorse that caused the alleged slayer to groan in such utter despair.

“You really are Howard Milmarsh?” asked Nick, after a pause.

“Of course I am,” came the answer in muffled tones from the depths of the pillow. “Why do you ask that?”

“Look up—and see!”

Before Nick said this he beckoned to Chick. When Howard Milmarsh slowly lifted his face from the pillow and turned it toward the other side of the bed his eyes rested upon what might have been the reflection of himself in the clothing he had worn on the night of the fatal poker party at the Old Pike Inn.

For an instant he gazed at the figure of Howard Milmarsh, with its creeping flames on the cheeks—for Chick had not been sparing of his phosphorus—and a muffled shriek sprang from his lips.

Then, as Carter opened his mouth to speak, there was a loud noise outside the room, and a door at the farther end crashed open!

CHAPTER XXVII.
A FIGHT IN THE DARK.

Two men came surging into the room just as Nick and his assistant backed away into the shadows behind the bed curtains.

“The light, Chick!” whispered Carter.

Chick understood, and instantly snapped out the electric light in the ground-glass globe on the table, putting the room in black darkness.

They could hear somebody padding about without shoes not far away, and they knew that Howard Milmarsh had jumped from the bed and was ready to fight.

[160]

It was no part of the detective’s plan to have an open battle with this young man, however. Whether he were the real Howard Milmarsh or not, the detective did not desire to let him know who was on his track. He might guess, but he shouldn’t know, if it could be helped.

Nick Carter had been in this bedchamber before, in the lifetime of the elder Milmarsh, and he remembered where the switch was that controlled the whole lighting of the room.

Taking out his jackknife and feeling his way to a certain part of the wall behind him, he put the electrical connection out of business with a skillful twist. He knew there could be no light in the bedchamber now unless one were brought in from outside.

As he jumped back from the disabled switch, he heard the padding feet moving toward it, followed, an instant later, by a muffled oath in the tones of the young man from the bed.

“Fooled him!” muttered Nick.

Suddenly there arose a terrific racket across the room, and he knew that Chick had come into collision with one of the two men who had come in, at least.

“Get out, you monkey!” growled Chick in a disguised tone. “Here’s one for you!”

A crash told the detective that Chick had floored his assailant, but a quick renewal of the battle was indicated by more noise, with the panting of two men in desperate contest.

It was at this moment that a sinewy arm was thrown around the detective’s neck from behind, while a knee was thrust into his back. The assailant evidently understood the gentle art of garroting, for he pulled hard while he pressed his knee harder against the detective’s back.

There could be only one result to an attack like this, made suddenly and unexpectedly—Nick Carter had to let himself go to the floor.

[161]

As he did so his adversary was on top of him, trying to hold him down and obtain a grip on his throat.

This was something different, however. Nick had no intention of allowing such a liberty to be taken with him. He had yielded to the garrote, because it was the only thing to be done. Now, however, when he had a fair chance, things wore another aspect.

He rolled over like a panther, and in a second had his assailant by the collar of his pajamas. It was not the detective’s desire to hurt the young man. The thing was to escape from the bedchamber without being recognized.

It was hardly likely that his identity was suspected. His disguise was so good that nothing of his real personality could show through it, and no one in the house had any reason to suppose he and Chick were near Milmarsh.

The two men who had crashed into the room—and who had been summoned by an electric bell sounded by a push button from the bed—were the two liveried men—Kelly and Dobbs—who had cleared away the cloth and glasses from the dining table, but who were without their coats when they broke in.

It was these two men with whom Chick was engaged in the darkness while his chief dealt with the occupant of the bed.

“You’ll spring ghosts on me, will you?” mumbled Nick’s adversary, trying to break loose. “I’ll give you something that will make you wish you were a ghost.”

Nick was obliged to admire the pluck and determination of the man. It seemed to him just what the real Howard Milmarsh would do, and it made the affair more complicated than ever to his mind.

There was a second crash at the other end of the room, followed by a grunt of satisfaction which Nick knew was in the tone of his assistant and which indicated that he was the victor.

[162]

But he could not say anything, for fear of betraying himself. He had resolved that, at all odds, he must hide from this man who was fighting so hard to get away from him that he had been followed into his very bedroom by one who was resolved that the actual Howard Milmarsh should have his rights.

“Somebody coming outside!” Chick squealed, hiding his real voice most effectively. “Which way?”

“The same!” thundered his chief, in a husky bass entirely unlike his own voice. “Hurry!”

He had been obliged to speak at last, but he did not think his tones had revealed who he was.

There was no time for consideration. The disturbance in the room—particularly the falling to the floor of the two servants under the impact of Chick’s hard and skillfully used fists—had awakened the two rascals who had been carousing in the dining room, and they were coming to see what the fuss was about.

Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton were both seasoned drinkers. When they staggered out of the dining room and into the elevator, both were well steeped in wine. Many men in such a condition would have slept through any disturbance.

But these were not of that kind. Powers awoke first, and, getting into some of his clothing, went to the next room to get Lampton out. Then the two went along the hall to see what was going on in Howard Milmarsh’s bedroom.

It would not have mattered so much to Carter about these men coming if they had been in the dark. But each one had lighted a candle—placed in their room so that they could have a light for cigars—and these candles gave light enough for them to see where they were going.

As soon as Nick knew that others were coming to the room, and that they bore lights with them, he felt that he must act quickly to escape recognition.

“Now we’ll have you, and find out what the game[163] is!” chuckled the supposed Howard Milmarsh, as he pushed Nick a little backward. “I’ll tell you a ghost story of my own before I’m through.”

This boasting assertion was the last he had the opportunity of making. Stooping and catching the young man around the waist, the stalwart detective lifted him from the floor and hurled him clear across the bed to the floor beyond.

As he fell, his head struck the wall, and he doubled up, unconscious.

Nick did not trouble himself to find out whether the man was hurt badly or not. There was no time. Instead, he felt in the bed for pillows, and grabbed up two of them.

“The door! Get!” he shouted, but carefully disguising his voice in a sort of squeak. “You know where it is. I’ll attend to these others!”

Chick had seen the two men coming along the hall, and had recognized them. Before he could obey his chief and retreat, they had seen him, and Louden Powers cried out hastily:

“What’s the game, Howard? Why aren’t you undressed? Is it the jimjams you have? Say, young fellow, you ought to let the wine alone after this. It’s too much for that bean of yours. You’re not used to it. Get into bed and sleep. That will give the rest of us a chance. Holy blue! Have you been knocking the butlers down, too? Say, this is going to make trouble. None of ’em will stay with us, and they’ll be wanting their pay before they will get out, too!”

Louden Powders was advancing, with Lampton, as he said all this, and both men were in the bedroom, candles and all.

Nick did not give them time to say anything more, and he stopped their further progress into the room in a most effective fashion.

He hurled the two pillows, one after the other, at each candle, sending them both flying out of the hands[164] of their holders and plunging the room again into black darkness.

Before he had thrown the pillows he saw that Chick had reached the part of the wall where the secret panel door was situated, and he knew that a simple pressure in the right spot would provide them both with an exit.

His aim was true with the pillows. Notwithstanding that he was hidden from the two rascals by the bed hangings, and that he had to hurl the pillows nearly the whole length of the room, he sent each straight to its mark, and neither Louden Powers nor Andrew Lampton saw where they came from.

No sooner was the apartment in darkness than Carter rushed over to where Chick stood and seized him by the arm.

“Do we beat it now?” whispered Chick.

“Yes! Quick!”

The secret panel swung open, and the chief shoved his assistant ahead of him through the opening. Ere he could follow, he heard Louden Powers’ voice remarking, with a shiver:

“What’s that? A window open? Hurry, Lampton! He’s getting out that way! Come on! We’ll fool him yet!”

Nick slipped through the narrow doorway made by the opening of the panel, and, as he closed it softly, he whispered to his assistant, with a low laugh:

“Looks to me as if they are the persons who are fooled!”

[165]

CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE ELDER JARVIS.

Although the adventure had not turned out as satisfactorily as he could have wished, Nick felt that he had made some gain toward getting at the truth with regard to the identity of Howard Milmarsh.

The conspirators knew that they were watched, and whether this young man whom they seemed to be leading by the nose was the real heir or not, they had been made aware that they would not have it all their own way without investigation by other parties.

It was while they were removing the make-up and costumes they had worn in the characters of the two Howard Milmarshes that Carter and his assistant discussed the probability of this being the actual young Howard, after all.

“The preponderance of evidence is on his side, I must confess,” declared Nick, as he finished dressing in his own clothes, after removing all the grease paint and false hair from his face, as well as the iron-gray wig he had worn as the elder Milmarsh. “He looks like Howard, has the same voice, and certainly fights like him.”

“And yet you can’t quite believe in him?”

“Not quite. If only the Howard Milmarsh who is sick in the Universal Hospital would get well, there would be little trouble in deciding positively whether he or this one who has possession of the place is the true one. It is a curious case—and as puzzling a one as I ever attacked.”

“What are we going to do now?” asked Chick.

“You are right, Chick,” smiled his chief. “That is getting right down to business. Well, I think we’ll go back to the Old Pike Inn and get some sleep. There will be a busy day for us to-morrow.”

[166]

“All days are busy—especially since we took up this Howard Milmarsh case,” observed Chick, smiling.

“That’s true. Well, come on, and don’t make a noise as you move along. There are listening ears on the other side of the wall, remember.”

They made their way out of the Milmarsh mansion without discovery, and in due time reached the Old Pike Inn, where they went to bed and slept till the morning was fairly well advanced.

Indeed, they were still at breakfast in the private dining room into which Captain Brown had led them, so that none of the other guests should see them, when the captain came in and told them that Thomas Jarvis was in the office and wanted to see Mr. Carter.

“Thomas Jarvis! Do you mean Richard Jarvis’ father?”

“Yes. He has been living here in the inn for a month past. He must have seen you come in or go out, and recognized you. Those raincoats and caps are pretty good, but a man who knows you and could get a good look at your face would know you in spite of them.”

“Well, you may as well show him in here,” answered Nick. “I believe I know what he is after.”

In ten minutes Thomas Jarvis had visited the detective, told his story, and been dismissed. He had come to say that, as Howard Milmarsh had not appeared to claim the property of his late father, it came automatically to the Jarvis branch, and as he, Thomas, was the only living Jarvis, of course it was his.

“You know that Howard Milmarsh has appeared, and that he is living in the Milmarsh residence at this very time?” asked Carter.

“I know that a man calling himself Howard Milmarsh is there,” was the reply.

“You don’t believe he is the real man, then?”

“I didn’t say so.”

“Your tone said it,” was the detective’s rejoinder.

[167]

“Do you believe he is the real Howard Milmarsh?” asked Thomas Jarvis.

“Unless another one should turn up with a better claim, I have no right to doubt it.”

“Well, I more than doubt it,” declared Jarvis roughly. “I am the heir at law of this property, and I’m going to have it.”

“I wish you luck,” returned Nick.

With the exception of formal “Good mornings!” that was all of the interview, and Thomas Jarvis retired.

“This puts a new twist into the case,” laughed Nick, when the door closed. “Is it not strange that, with a great fortune like the Milmarsh estate, to say nothing of the wonderful steel-manufacturing business that goes with it, there should be at least one claimant outside of these two Howard Milmarshes. But I wouldn’t give much for Thomas Jarvis’ chance.”

“He’s the fellow who killed his son accidentally, isn’t he?” asked Chick.

“Not so bad as that, although Richard Jarvis was killed while quarreling with his father. He stumbled over something as he was about to strike his father, and fell, with his head against an iron fender. If he were still alive, I suppose he would be claiming to be Howard Milmarsh’s heir.”

“Are we going back to New York to-day?” asked Chick.

“Yes. There is nothing to be done here. Until we can bring the poor fellow in the Universal to his senses, I don’t see much hope of coming to a decision. And that may never be, according to one of the nurses who has been watching the patient.”

“Doctor Grayson doesn’t say so, does he?”

“The doctor is away from the city, unfortunately. He has been called to attend a wealthy and influential patient of his in Chicago. But he’ll be in New York[168] to-morrow, I’m told, and then I may obtain some dependable information.”

But the detective and Chick did not go to New York that day. Circumstances arose to prevent them of a nature that neither had anticipated.

They were still in the room in which they had breakfasted and had their interview with Thomas Jarvis, when Captain Brown, after a hasty knock, burst into the room with excitement flaming out all over him.

“Carter! What do you think?”

“I don’t know. What is it?”

“They’re here!” spluttered the captain.

“Who? What’s the trouble?”

“The Paradise City people!”

“Upon my word, I don’t know what you’re driving at, Captain Brown,” returned Nick, somewhat impatiently. “Who are the Paradise City people?”

Captain Brown had cooled down a little by this time, and he took a seat and fanned himself with his hat for a few moments, as he pointed to the window.

Chick stepped over and looked out.

“Well, what’s broken loose?”

Before he could answer, there was another knock at the door. In quick response to the detective’s “Come in!” a young man, also in considerable excitement, surged into the apartment.

The young man was Patsy Garvan!

“Say, chief, I been wanting to get to you, but I thought I’d better wait till I knew you’d want me.”

“Well?”

“There’s going to be merry hilltop to pay at Milmarsh’s to-day, and we ought to get busy, or there won’t be any house for Howard Milmarsh to take when he does prove his rights.”

“What do you know about it, Patsy?” put in Chick. “I see a big mob of people going up the road—men and women—and they look ugly.”

“They are ugly. See that big fellow at the head[169] of the procession in a blue sweater? Know who he is?”

Chick peered harder at the disorderly gathering making its way up the winding road toward the gates of the Milmarsh estate. But the big man had gone too far for sure recognition.

“Looks as if it might be Bonesy Billings!” said Chick. “It’s about his build, and I know he has bought property in the Paradise City place.”

“You’ve hit it, Chick,” nodded Patsy. “It is Bonesy, and he’s hotter’n the inside of a coke oven. He’s got on to the fact that this isn’t any more than a swamp, and he’s come up here to have it out with the guys that sold him the plot.”

“How about the manager and his men at the office in New York, Patsy?” asked Nick.

“The office is busted up and the men are gone. I’m told they only hired the furniture there, so they didn’t have to move it. They paid up everything in the way of rent and for the furniture two days ago, and beat it for—for—Paradise, I guess,” laughed Patsy.

“They paid up everything, you say?”

“Everything about the office. You can bet they were slick enough to do that. They didn’t want to have any more publicity than they could help. If they’d tried to beat the office rent or the furniture hire, they’d have been followed up here to Milmarsh, and that would have meant a fuss for the other guys who are living high in that big house on the hill.”

“You mean the Milmarsh residence?” asked Captain Brown.

“Sure, that’s what I mean,” replied Patsy. “It’s the only big house on a hill around here that I know anything about. Gee! Look at that bunch going up the road. There’s nearly a hundred of them.”

“And women among them,” remarked Captain Brown.

“Sure! That’s what’s going to make it so hard on[170] the other side. The women have helped to save the money that’s gone into that phony real-estate, and they’re going to get back their coin or bust somebody. You can bet your bottom dollar on that!”

“Who is at the back of all this swindle?” asked Captain Brown. “Do you know, Carter?”

“I know only what is apparent to everybody,” was the detective’s answer. “The property is on the Milmarsh estate, and there is a Howard Milmarsh living on it at present. The advertisements of Paradise City say that the long-lost heir is back to his own, and that he means to give people of limited means an opportunity to find homes in the country. You’ve seen the booklets, haven’t you, captain?”

“Yes, but I thought you might know something more than they made public. Advertisements are splendid things in their way, and as a rule they are truthful. But exaggeration will creep into them occasionally, and often there are details which the writer of the advertisement forgot to put in.”

“That’s what Bonesy Billings says,” remarked Patsy. “He told me that coming up on the train.”

“Oh, you came up from New York with this crowd, then?” asked Nick.

“Yes—those that came from New York. Some of ’em live at places along the railroad. There’s a bunch from Yonkers, for instance, and others from the Bronx. But they are all here.”

“How was it worked up?” asked Chick, smiling, for he knew Patsy had the whole matter in his head.

“They’ve been having meetings for more than a week,” explained Patsy. “I heard about them two days ago, and I’ve been to two of the meetings. They were hot stuff, I’m telling you. Some of the speakers were in favor of coming up here with dynamite bombs and blowing everything to blazes.”

“You mean the Milmarsh house?” queried Captain Brown.

[171]

“I mean everything up here. The Old Pike Inn was to go, too, because some of them say it harbors men who are mixed up in this swindle to rob poor people of their savings.”

“Is that so?” exclaimed Captain Brown, more interested than ever. “Look here, Carter! We can’t let this go on! We’ll have to take a hand in it. You will go up to the house with me, won’t you?”

“I intended to go up there,” was the quiet reply. “Can we use your big motor car?”

“Of course. I’ll have it got ready at once. Then we can take a roundabout way and get to the house before the mob.”

“That was what I calculated on,” returned the detective.

Captain Brown hustled out of the room to order his car, while Nick gazed out of the window at the excited mob of both sexes on their way to the Milmarsh mansion.

“We shall have to save the property at all events, Chick,” he remarked, without turning around. “The rightful heir must not have his place destroyed before he has time to settle down.”

“Have you found the rightful heir, chief?” asked Patsy Garvan eagerly.

“I believe I have,” was the detective’s calm reply.

CHAPTER XXIX.
THE INSURGENTS.

While Nick Carter and his two assistants were waiting for the motor car that was to take them up to the Milmarsh home ahead of the crowd of angry purchasers of Paradise City property there was increasing wrath among the men and women following Bonesy Billings.

[172]

“We’ll burn the place down over his head!” yelled one frantic woman, who had given up every cent her late husband had left her to make a payment on Paradise City. “Any man who would rob a poor widow ain’t fit to live.”

“Kill him first and burn down the house with his carcass in it!” screamed another feminine voice.

“Louden Powers! He’s the one!” roared a big man.

“He ain’t no worse than Andrew Lampton!” declared another.

“Kill Howard Milmarsh! He’s the worst!” shrieked the woman who had spoken first—the widow. “If he had any of the goodness of his father in him, he couldn’t have done it.”

“What are we waitin’ for, Bonesy?” demanded a man nearly as big as himself, who acted as a sort of lieutenant. “Ain’t we goin’ right up there?”

“Yes, but we want to know what we’re goin’ to do when we’re there,” returned Billings. “Things has to be did reg’lar an’ up to the handle. These mugs we’re goin’ to see is mighty slick. Don’t forget that.”

“Ain’t slick enough to rob us!” shouted the widow.

“They’ve did it already,” cried the other woman.

“Yes, but we’re goin’ to get our money back, an’ take it out of ’em by lickin’ ’em, too,” growled a man who had not spoken heretofore.

“If you guys will keep still a minute, I’d like to address the meeting,” announced Bonesy Billings, somewhat pompously.

“Good ol’ Bonesy!” enthusiastically shouted a young fellow in the background. “Let him spiel!”

“Shut up!” ordered Bonesy ungraciously. “This here ain’t your put-in nohow.”

“Scuse me!” rejoined the other, with a sarcastic inflection that he would not have dared to employ if he’d been nearer the powerful Billings. “It was in my nut that I had the floor. Scuse me!”

[173]

Bonesy Billings cast a look of disgust in the direction of the rather “fresh” young man in the rear. Then he cleared his throat for a speech, with a loud and impressive “Hem!”

“Feller citizens—an’ ladies!” he began. “It has been decided that we has all been soaked good an’ hard by the mugs what is up in that house on the hill—the same as is knowed by all on us as the Milmarsh mansion.”

“Good stuff!” interrupted the irrepressible man at the back of the gathering.

“I’ll come over an’ paste you in the jaw if you don’t shut up!” menaced Billings. Then, resuming his oratorical tone, he continued: “We have tried to get satisfaction at the office in N’ York, an’ we’ve been told ev’rything will come out all right, though we can see it won’t. The fellers at the office has beat it for parts unknown, an’ what have we?”

“Swamp!” cried the regular interrupter at the back.

“That’s right,” agreed Billings. “It is jest swamp, an’ sech swamp you couldn’t dry it out in a million years, nor fill it in, nuther. As for buildin’ houses there, it couldn’t be did. Yet we’ve paid out our good money for this here swamp land, an’ now the guys that beat us out of our coin is laughin’ at us. What are we goin’ to do about it?”

“Kill ’em!” shouted the widow.

“With hatpins,” added the other woman.

“We ain’t goin’ to take chances on the ’lectric chair—unless they make us,” returned Billings. “But we are goin’ right into the house an’ demand our money back. If we don’t git it, then we will——”

Bonesy Billings flourished a long, powerful arm, and there was a bludgeon in his grip.

There could be no doubt as to what he intended. His hard face was set, and he meant business.

He did not continue his harangue. He looked over the stern faces of his followers, and he knew that[174] they would stand by him to the end. They felt that they had suffered the worst kind of injustice and that no punishment would be too great for the men guilty of it.

It was only about a week before that suspicion began to ripen into conviction. There had been mumblings among those who could not get to see the places they had bought. They wanted to know what they had to show for their money besides the gaudy “certificates” that had been issued by the Paradise City Improvement Company.

There were no real signatures on the certificates. Such names as were there had not been written. They were facsimiles of signatures that no one recognized. Neither “Powers,” “Lampton,” or “Howard Milmarsh” were among them. This omission had been pointed out in the meetings that had been held. Bonesy Billings laid particular stress on this. He also had his eye on other details which did not appeal to him as sound.

For example, he had known the young man who lay in Universal Hospital very well, and had liked him. To Billings he was known as Bob Gordon. But Billings knew that Bessie Silvius and her father, old Roscoe Silvius, declared that he was really Howard Milmarsh. If this Bob Gordon could only tell what he knew, it might straighten out the Paradise City affair. Billings could not see how anybody else had a right to the name of Howard Milmarsh and to sell land belonging to the estate.

He turned to look again at his followers. He had taken his place on a large stump at the side of the road when he made his speech, and he was still there when he decided to send forth a last word of direction and warning.

“It’s near two mile up to the front door of the Milmarsh house,” he told them in his stentorian tones. “You’d better walk in reg’lar double formation—that[175] is, two by two. Me an’ Kid Plang,” indicating his stalwart lieutenant, “will lead. Keep yer lamps on us, an’ be ready to take orders as I give ’em. We’ve got to have discerpline if we’re goin’ to git anywhere. Don’t fail to remember that there. Forward! March!”

Steadily the double column moved on. The road was smooth, and, though it was uphill, no one seemed to mind it. All were keyed up for action, and thought only of obtaining recompense for what they paid out and suffered as the result of what, they were now convinced, was nothing but a heartless fraud.

Up the winding carriage drive they marched, and soon were gathered on the wide porch in front of the tall, forbidding-looking house.

Every window was closed and protected by sun blinds. The outer door, which usually stood open, was also closed. There were no signs of life to be seen.

Yet Bonesy Billings was convinced that there were eyes behind those sun blinds which had taken careful note of their approach. He knocked at the door with his knuckles at the same time that his lieutenant, Kid Plang, rang the electric bell again and again.

For several minutes there was no response. Then suddenly a voice hailed them from above, and they saw that Andrew Lampton was at an open window at the third-story.

“What do you want, gentlemen?” he asked suavely.

“Ah, can that ‘gentlemen’ stuff!” shouted the lieutenant. “We want to come in for a conference.”

“What about?”

“You know what about well enough,” roared Bonesy Billings. “Where’s Howard Milmarsh?”

“He’s here. But he is not saying anything. I’ll do the talking—if there is to be any.”

“Well, you can bet there’s going to be talking![176] We want our money back that’s been paid for those plots in Paradise City.”

“You do? Why?”

“Because the whole thing is a swindle!” replied Billings. “That’s why!”

“You’re mistaken. Paradise City is there, and as soon as Howard Milmarsh has settled certain details connected with the estate, buildings will go up and you will all have the homes, as agreed.”

“We’re coming in,” declared Billings doggedly. “We can’t talk business standin’ out here.”

“You can’t come in. Mr. Milmarsh would not care to have so many people walking over his carpets and rugs. I’ve told you all there is to tell. Now I’ll say good morning!”

A clod of earth was hurled by somebody in the crowd. It smashed itself against the wall, by the side of the window, not more than a foot from Andrew Lampton’s head. He drew it in quickly, closing the window.

“Give him another!” screamed the widow. “Send a stone up there and smash the glass. He’s only tryin’ to put us off.”

“Shet up!” ordered Billings. “I’m runnin’ this thing. Don’t nobody chuck anything at the house unless I tell you to.”

Billings was so big, and his habit of having his own way gave him such command, that several men who had taken stones from their pockets they had picked up on the way put them back.

“What are we goin’ to do, Bonesy?” asked Kid Plang, in a low tone.

“We’ll rush that front door if somebody don’t come out and give us satisfaction,” replied Bonesy. “Look! There’s somebody else at the window. Wait a moment, and let’s see what he’s goin’ to do.”

It was Louden Powers this time. He opened the[177] window at which Lampton had appeared, and called out sharply:

“Look here, you people! There’s nothing to be made by your coming up here making a disturbance.”

“We’re not making a disturbance,” interrupted Billings. “We want to see Mr. Milmarsh.”

“You can’t see him. Is that all?”

“No; it isn’t all by a jugful!” snapped back Bonesy Billings, trying to hold back his wrath. “We’ve been beaten on this Paradise City deal, and we are goin’ to find out what Howard Milmarsh means to do about it.”

“I can tell you that,” replied Powers. “He is going to see that every one gets what is right. There is no reason for you to say you have been beaten. You have not. Paradise City is all right—that is, it will be.”

“We want to see Howard Milmarsh,” repeated Billings resolutely.

“You can’t see him. And if you don’t get away from here and go back to where you came from, there’s going to be a lot of arrests and some clubbing, most likely. We’ve telephoned the police, and they’ll soon be here.”

With this threat, Louden Powers suddenly pulled the outside sun blinds shut, and directly afterward Billings and his followers heard the window come down with a slam.

“Well, boys! There’s only one thing to be done now. The front door, and—altogether!”

[178]

CHAPTER XXX.
NICK CARTER’S WORD.

While the threat about the police caused some of the more timid spirits in the crowd to hang back and even talk of going home, the majority were determined to fight their way into the house at all hazards.

“We’ll git there, if everybody joins in!” proclaimed Billings. “As many men as can squeeze in help me to push down this door.”

But the door was heavy and solidly bolted in place, and the combined strength of half a dozen powerful men was insufficient to force it from its hinges on one side or its fastenings on the other.

“We’ll keep on till we do it,” was Billings’ decision, and the attack was renewed.

Meanwhile, there was a decided feeling of apprehension inside the house. Andrew Lampton, Louden Powers, and the man whom they called Howard Milmarsh were all in the bedroom which had been occupied by Louden, which was at the front of the house, and at whose window had taken place the parley with Bonesy Billings.

“I’ve got the outside blinds bolted,” announced Louden Powers, “and the window is closed. Of course, if ever they got through the sunblinds, they could easily smash the window. My idea is to fight them off as they come in. We can’t hope that the house is strong enough in itself to keep them out. It is not a castle.”

“Can’t we make some terms with them?” suggested the alleged Howard.

Louden Powers turned on him with a snarl.

“What for? And how are you going to do it? Do you want to give up your thousand dollars?”

“I might not have to do that.”

[179]

“Yes, you would. And they would expect Lampton and me to do the same. Well, I won’t do it. Neither will Lampton. All we can do is to keep these people out till the police get here.”

“You haven’t telephoned the police, have you?” asked Lampton, with a look of alarm.

Louden Powers contrived to wink at Lampton, while, in a loud tone, he replied:

“Of course I have. We may not be able to hold off this crowd ourselves, and we’ve got to have the police. You can see that, Howard.”

“I don’t see anything, except that you have got me into an infernal scrape with your Paradise City idea. What is the use of it, just for a little ready money now, when we shall have plenty of it as soon as the estate is settled. I was a fool to give in to you.”

“I don’t know that,” put in Lampton. “Things are getting mighty hot in this house, and I’m inclined to get away from it while the going is good. What was the meaning of all that fuss last night? Who were those two men who looked so much like the two Howard Milmarshes?”

“I don’t know who the old man was. But it’s my belief the other was the fellow who got hurt in that fire and who says he is the real Howard Milmarsh. It couldn’t have been anybody else.”

“Well, how do you suppose he got into your bedroom?”

“There’s only one way to account for it, and that is that Nick Carter had a hand in it. He has been trying to beat me out of this property with that fellow who is in the hospital, and it may be that his man has recovered enough to come here.”

“Got his memory back, eh?”

“I don’t know about that. He could be brought here to scare me without that. He didn’t speak last night—only looked at me.”

“He was quite a scrapper,” observed Lampton.

[180]

“Well, he could be that and still not have all his senses about him,” maintained the other.

“I’ll tell you one thing, fellows,” suddenly broke in the possessor of the Milmarsh mansion. “I’m just about sick of this whole thing. It looks to me as if I’m the scapegoat, while you get all the profit. I’m going to give up. There’s too much trouble in trying to prove that I am the rightful heir. I’d rather be poor, and worry along as I have done for years than take all this that I’ve gone through with since I’ve been up in this devilish house.”

“What’s the matter with you? Are you——”

“Yes,” broke in the young man violently. “I’m going to give the whole game away. I don’t care what you say. I’m not going to take the chance of five years in the pen just to——”

“Oh, shut up!” broke in Louden in his usual masterful way. “You have to do what you’re told. You are the heir to the Milmarsh fortune. We’ve proved that for you. Now you talk about backing out, just because you have not nerve to hold on to what is your own. You make me sick!”

“Here! Quit fighting over that!” broke in Andrew Lampton, running into the room from the landing, where he had been listening to the noise outside. “Those fellows have broken down the outer door, and they are coming in. They won’t have much trouble forcing the inner door, for that’s half glass.”

There was a crash of glass below, which told that the mob had made its way into the house.

“Where is he?” roared the voice of Bonesy Billings. “Bring him down! We want him!”

Already they could hear the rumbling of many feet upon the lower floor, when a clear, ringing voice rose far above the din.

“Stop!”

It was the voice of Nick Carter.

[181]

It seemed as if his voice had some power far above that wielded by the order of authority. The men on the third-story heard the mob actually falling back and stumbling down the stairs.

“How did he get in here?” growled Louden Powers.

“Didn’t come in with the mob, did he?” suggested Lampton.

“I told you,” gasped the man they called Howard Milmarsh. “I knew this man, Carter, was in it. He brought those two people into my bedroom last night when I had been drinking so much that my nerve was nearly gone. I was sure of it! He told me some time ago he’d get me if I didn’t act square. Now I know I haven’t been square with him, and here he is.”

“Well, he’s taking our side, you idiot!” grumbled Powers. “He’s holding them back.”

“He has his own purposes to serve if he is. Look here, Louden, I’m going to tell him just what is the truth.”

“Howard Milmarsh,” broke in Andrew Lampton. “You’re crazy. All this bother over your estate has turned your brain. Isn’t that so, Louden?”

“Of course. But, listen!”

“We want Howard Milmarsh!” they heard Bonesy Billings shout. “He’s robbed us, and we want him.”

Nick Carter had come out of one of the rooms on the second floor and now stood at the head of the lower flight of stairs, with Chick and Patsy Garvan on either side of him. All three were looking down at the mob with a coolness that caused even the excited men and women below them to wonder.

“You can’t have Howard Milmarsh,” said Carter. “Bonesy Billings, you know me, don’t you?”

Billings came a step nearer, so that he could look into the face of the detective. Then he uttered an ejaculation of astonishment.

“Mr. Carter!”

[182]

“Yes. And this is Chick by my side. You know him, and Patsy Garvan!”

“Sure I do!”

“Say, Bonesy,” put in Kid Plang behind impatiently, “what’s all this guff you’re giving us? Who are these guys? None of ’em is Howard Milmarsh. I know that. And they ain’t Louden Powers nor Andrew Lampton, either, I’m willing to bet. Lead us up them stairs if you’re goin’ to. If not, I’ll do it!”

Kid Plang tried to push past Billings. One sweep of Bonesy’s powerful arm sent him down among the others in a disgruntled heap.

There was a hubbub of shouting and grumbling, and Bonesy turned to shake his fist at them as he bellowed:

“Shut up down there, or I’ll come an’ lick some of you! Can’t you see I’m talking to a gentleman for the benefit of all of us?”

“It don’t look like it,” growled Plang, as, he got to his feet, but carefully kept out of reach of Bonesy’s arm and fist.

“Now, Mr. Carter,” went on Billings, addressing the detective, “I know you are square, and so are them two with you. But we’ve come here to get back the money what’s been stole from widders an’ orphans an’ workin’ men who have had to work hard for everything they have. The money was stole on the pretense that there was a fine tract of land on this estate what was to be sold on easy terms for homes.”

“I know that’s true,” remarked Nick quietly.

“What do you suppose he’s getting at?” muttered Lampton to Powers on the upper landing.

“Listen, and we’ll find out. Then we’ll know what to do.”

Louden Powers spoke calmly. He was much the bolder rascal of the two. His iron nerve it was that had brought the plot to its present point. He did not despair yet of putting it through to entire success.

[183]

“We’ve looked into this thing, and we find the land is nothing but swamp, and it wouldn’t be possible to build houses on it—at least, not till thousands of dollars had been spent on draining it and filling it in. There ain’t no sign as these ducks what have our money mean to do any such thing.”

“Well?”

“Then we’re going to see this Howard Milmarsh and make him give back our money first of all. After that we’ll sue him for damages. There’s good lawyers in New York what will take our cases and not ask no fee unless they win for us. An’ we’d be sure to win, so we’re goin’ up here to find this Howard Milmarsh—if you’ll step out of our way, Mr. Carter.”

“That’s the talk!” called out somebody in the heart of the crowd. “Take us to Howard Milmarsh!”

“Howard Milmarsh is not here,” said the detective in loud, clear tones.

“What?” blurted out Billings. “Not here? We have had positive word that he is in this house.”

“Look here, Bonesy,” returned Nick, still in a quiet, distinct voice, “did you ever know me to say a thing that was not absolutely true?”

“Never,” was the unhesitating testimony.

“Then, I tell you, Howard Milmarsh is not in this house. Do you believe me?”

There was a moment of silence. The crowd below and the three men on the third floor, at the top of the stairs, were waiting for what Bonesy Billings would say. At last came the response:

“I believe you, Mr. Carter.”

The man who stood between Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton, and whom they had persistently addressed as Howard Milmarsh, made a movement as if he would go down the stairs.

The other two dragged him back savagely.

[184]

CHAPTER XXXI.
NICK CALLS A COUNCIL.

The trouble was not over yet, however. The emphatic manner in which Bonesy Billings had said he believed the detective made a great impression upon the majority of his followers.

But there were some who were not prepared to accept the dictum in the face of what they had been told. It was common report that Howard Milmarsh was living in the house he had inherited from his father, and that he was there now. For some reason it seemed that the detective was trying to shield him.

Few of those in the mob had not heard of the famous detective, and all knew his reputation for straightforwardness. They were fully aware that a falsehood would be simply impossible for him. Still, how could they reconcile what he had just said with what they believed to be their actual knowledge?

“Look here, Bonesy!” ventured Plang while discreetly remaining out of arm’s reach. “If Howard Milmarsh isn’t in the house, we can’t do any harm by going up to talk to those other two men. We know they are here.”

“That’s a good idea!” agreed three or four voices at the back.

“What about it, Bonesy?”

Billings looked inquiringly at Carter.

“It would do no good,” said the detective. “The men you refer to would not give you any satisfaction, and they would probably mislead you. If you will go away now, I will give you my personal pledge that you shall not lose anything over this Paradise City affair. You shall have back the money you have laid out, and with it enough to compensate for any loss or trouble you have suffered.”

[185]

“I don’t see how you can guarantee that,” grumbled Kid Plang.

“I promise it in the name of Howard Milmarsh!”

“You seem to think you have a right to speak for him,” persisted Plang. “How did you work that, if you haven’t seen him? You didn’t know we were coming here to-day. Nobody did for certain, because we kept it a secret. Bonesy can tell you that.”

“Shut up!” ordered Billings. “Leave me out while you’re takin’ it on yourself to conduct these here negotiations. I’ll ’tend to you later,” he added, with menacing significance.

“Well, I’m speakin’ for most of the crowd when I say we’re goin’ up them stairs,” rejoined Kid Plang. “We want to see Louden Powers an’ Andrew Lampton. This bunch hasn’t come all the way from New York without wantin’ a run for its money. An’ I’ll help ’em to get it.”

“Hey! Look there!” suddenly screamed the widow who had been prominent from the first. “There he is! See! Look at him!”

“Who?” roared half a dozen voices.

“Howard Milmarsh! There he is. I’ve seen his picters, an’ I know it’s him. He’s hidin’ behind them other two men! No, they’re shovin’ him back! I don’t care for nobody. I’m goin’ up!”

The woman tried to force herself to the front, but the mob was too solidly packed in, and she could not move.

Kid Plang tried to take advantage of the disturbance caused by the shrieking woman to edge his way past Bonesy Billings.

A straight left, delivered by Billings with splendid precision, sent Kid Plang back for the second time since he had been on the stairs. Only this time he was knocked senseless. The point of the chin had received the blow. He fell in a heap in a corner of the stairs.

[186]

This encounter was the signal for a general rush forward on the part of the men and women below.

The widow had caught a glimpse of the white face of the man who was known to them, from his pictures, as Howard Milmarsh, and, while most of the crowd did not believe she had seen the man she said she had, a few held that Carter had been mistaken when he said Howard Milmarsh was not in the house.

“Chick!” whispered the detective.

“Yes.”

“Tell Patsy!”

“All right.”

Patsy Garvan was on the other side of Chick, and Carter did not care to give orders that would be heard by the others.

But it was easily understood by his two assistants that they were to hold the stairs at all hazards, even before Nick called down to Bonesy that the crowd must not come up.

“I’m with you, Mr. Carter!” was Billings’ reply. “I wouldn’t care if Howard Milmarsh came and stood at the top of them stairs now; I would take your word, even agin’ my own eyesight.”

The detective smiled. The loyalty of this burly truckman—who had seen how he was willing to risk his life to save a girl and her father from a fire, and who therefore respected him from the bottom of his heart—touched him.

“I will explain to you later, Billings,” he said, as he thrust one man back by sheer strength, and then lifted another to throw him on top of the now frantic mob which was storming the staircase.

For five minutes Billings, Carter, Chick, and Patsy kept the crowd back. Some blows were struck, but not many, considering how many persons were in the fray. The truth was that Nick abstained from hitting anybody unless he were forced into it, while his assistants, taking their cue from him, also used[187] their strength instead of fighting the frenzied invaders.

Bonesy Billings was as unwilling to strike as were the detectives. These men whom he was now striving to push out of the house were his friends. But a short time before he had been helping them to batter down the doors to the house. It would have been hard indeed if he had felt obliged to employ his tremendous fists against them now.

His faith in Nick Carter was so great that he had resolved to end the siege, but he did not feel any the better disposed toward Howard Milmarsh or the two men who had been with him at the back of the Paradise City enterprise.

When he had kept his tacit pledge to the great detective and cleared the house, then he would return to know what it all meant.

That was exactly what he did. In due time, by alternate threats and persuasions, plus considerable physical force, he put the last of the mob on the porch outside, and saw them headed for the railroad station, three miles away.

“Wait there for me,” were his parting words. “I’ll be your delegate, and you shall hear all that I find out here. Mr. Carter is on our side, and he is going to see that we have justice.”

“Three cheers for Carter!” shouted an enthusiastic man in the mob.

“Hurrah!” yelled Bonesy. “That’s the right thing! Give ’em with a will, boys—and girls, too!” he added, as a fortunate afterthought.

The women joined with the men, their shrill tones being plainly audible through the gruff voices of the men as they cheered the great detective again and again while marching down the road.

“There you are, Mr. Carter!” cried Bonesy, with a grin, as he returned to the house. “Now, what is the next thing to be done.”

[188]

“Louden, come down here!” called out Nick, as he looked up the stairs. “And bring with you Andrew Lampton and that man who looks like Howard Milmarsh.”

“He is Howard Milmarsh!” grunted Louden. “How did you get into this house?”

“That ought not to matter much to you,” said Nick. “It is a good thing for you I got in somehow. Patsy, run around and tell Captain Brown he can come in by the front entrance now. He is still sitting in his car, I guess.”

Louden Powers raised his eyebrows as he heard Carter give these instructions. He began to wonder how many persons were to be brought into the house by this detective who had taken charge of matters so completely.

“Come down, Louden!” repeated Nick. “It will be better for you.”

There was a threat in these quiet words that Louden Powers well understood. Although he had not been caught in the raid in Jersey City a few nights before, he did not know how much evidence there was against him in connection with the counterfeiting proceedings. He came downstairs.

“Is Lampton and the other man with you?” asked Nick.

“We are coming,” replied Lampton for himself.

“And the other man?”

“He’s here.”

Nick Carter had appeared to trust to the rascals to bring down the man who had been called Howard Milmarsh. As a matter of fact, he did not depend entirely on them. He had given a private signal to Chick, and that exceedingly efficient assistant was ready to compel obedience by Louden and Lampton if there had been too much hesitation on their part.

“We’ll go into the dining room,” said Carter. “Get[189] some of your servants to come and open the sun blinds. We may as well have light from the outside.”

The two men—Dobbs and Kelly—who had been keeping discreetly in the background while the row lasted, now stepped forward and let the sunshine into the great dining room.

“Now, chairs for everybody!” ordered Nick. “I will sit here, near the door. Is Captain Brown coming?”

“Here I am, Carter,” answered Captain Brown for himself, as he came in with Patsy. “I saw that mob going down the road. I hope they won’t stay at the Old Pike Inn and make a fuss.”

“You have plenty of employees and special police to deal with them, haven’t you?” asked Nick carelessly.

“Oh, yes. Only I shouldn’t like my guests to be disturbed. It would hurt the reputation of my house.”

“They have taken another road and gone straight down to the railroad station,” announced Patsy. “There’s another party wants to come in, chief. I told him I’d ask you.”

“Who is he?”

“Mr. Thomas Jarvis.”

“Jarvis?” cried Nick. “Let him come in, by all means! This is going to be a most interesting gathering. Mr. Billings, you will kindly move over to that other chair. I should like Mr. Jarvis to sit next to me.”

“Anything you say, Mr. Carter,” said Billings, with a grin. “I wasn’t never in sech a swell place as this before—not to set down with the people who belonged to it, anyhow.”

[190]

CHAPTER XXXII.
MURDER WILL OUT.

When Thomas Jarvis, with a grim expression on his tightly closed lips, came into the room, there was a look of curiosity on the faces of both Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton.

The man who had been called Howard Milmarsh was the only person in the large circle about the massive mahogany table who seemed not to be interested. He was sitting opposite Nick Carter, his head bent forward, so that his chin almost rested on his chest, and his eyes fixed vacantly upon the table.

“Now that we are all here, you may go,” said the detective, dismissing the two menservants.

“Don’t we have anything to drink?” asked Louden Powers. “Or is this to be a dry session?”

“We won’t drink,” replied Nick. “But I don’t think it will be so very dry. We shall see.”

He did not say anything more until Dobbs and Kelly had withdrawn. Then he made a motion to his assistant, Chick, who locked the door and handed the key to his chief.

“Now, Mr. Jarvis, we’ll hear you first,” announced Carter. “What are you here for?”

“I’m here to take possession of my property,” replied Jarvis. “I have had my attorney go through all the necessary legal forms, and I demand that you all leave this house forthwith.”

Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton laughed aloud, and even Chick and Patsy indulged in a quiet smile.

“I don’t think there is anything to be said about that, Mr. Jarvis, except to inform you that Howard Milmarsh is here, and that therefore your claim is[191] nothing at all. Your attorney should have known that.”

“I’m my own attorney!” snapped Jarvis. “I have been a lawyer long enough to know my rights.”

“Your knowledge of law may be fairly good—very good,” returned the detective. “But the action of law must be based on sound facts, and it seems as if you have overlooked them. I tell you that Howard Milmarsh is here to claim his inheritance.”

“You mean that man at the table?” barked Jarvis. “He is not Howard Milmarsh.”

“You’re wrong,” interposed Louden Powers. “That’s just who he is.”

Billings had been gazing curiously at the man Powers pointed to, and who still sat with bent head, taking no part in the proceedings, and seeming hardly to know that he was there.

Nick Carter understood what was passing in the big truckman’s mind.

“There are things that seem to you contradictory, Billings,” said Nick, as their eyes met for a moment. “I will explain to you later. You will find that I told you the truth.”

Bonesy Billings shook his head in an embarrassed way, as he answered hastily:

“I hadn’t no thought of nothing else, Mr. Carter. But I saw that gentleman over there, and I didn’t know what it meant.”

“Now, that is all I have to say,” interrupted Jarvis. “This is my house, and I should like to have it to myself. In the absence of any other legal heir, I am the owner. The property passes all to me, as next of kin. My son would have inherited it had he lived. But he died.”

“He was killed!” suddenly thundered Nick. “He was struck down by a champagne bottle. There are witnesses to prove it. I have one of them in this room——”

[192]

“Now, Carter!” interrupted Captain Brown, jumping to his feet. “You have kept that quiet all these years. Why should——”

“I’ll tell you why, Captain Brown,” broke in the detective. “There is an effort on the part of Thomas Jarvis to rob the owner of this property of his rights, and I am obliged to say what I do, in the interests of justice.”

“Justice?”

It was Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton who uttered this word in unison in an apprehensive tone. There seemed to be something about it that grated on their sensibilities.

Thomas Jarvis was sitting stiff in his chair, his eyes fixed upon Nick Carter’s face, while he tried to mumble some protest.

“I intended to keep this a secret to the end, because I have always felt that the slayer of Richard Jarvis had great provocation, and doubtless was carried away by the excitement of the moment to do a deed that he has been remorseful for ever since.”

“Didn’t it come out at the time?” asked Bonesy Billings. “Murders don’t often get away from the police in these days.”

“You’re right, Billings. I don’t suppose this would have been hushed up if a person who—who has some influence had not prevented all the facts becoming known.”

“I’d let it go at that, if I were you, Carter,” pleaded Captain Brown, his usually bronzed face a grayish white. “There’s no sense in raking up such a thing as this.”

“Yes, there is,” rejoined Nick. “Jarvis here has challenged me, and I will take it up. He claims this property is——”

“It is mine,” put in Jarvis doggedly.

“Because your son is dead?”

“Yes.”

[193]

“And when you knew that Howard Milmarsh had run away from this part of the country, you figured that he never would dare return, and that your son Richard would be the heir.”

“You can say what you like. The property is mine,” growled Jarvis, as if determined to stick to one idea.

“If your son Richard were to die, it would leave you the next of kin, so far as legal forms go. Therefore, it might be to your interest if Richard were to be put out of the world. He was not really your son, you know, but your stepson.”

“How did you know that?” demanded Jarvis, half rising. “It isn’t true, anyhow.”

“Oh, yes, it is. I can prove it, if necessary,” was the detective’s answer. “You knew that Howard Milmarsh the elder was in poor health. You had learned that his doctor gave him only a few more months of life, and predicted that he would die suddenly. All that was part of your knowledge.”

“I don’t care to stay here any longer,” abruptly declared Thomas Jarvis, rising to his feet. “I will go. But there will be proper officers here during the day to eject the rascals who are trying to steal my estate. Good morning!”

But the door was locked and the key in Nick Carter’s pocket.

“Better sit down till I have finished speaking,” he advised coolly. “I do not intend to let you leave this room until I am ready.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell the rest of my story, and then you can answer your own question. You will know what I mean.”

“Rot!”

Thomas Jarvis resumed his seat and stared at the detective. Those about the table observed that he seemed to have grown very much older in the last minute[194] or two. His eyes had become dull, his jaw sagged, and he did not appear to be as truculent as he had been when he came into the room.

“The truth is,” went on Nick, “that you killed your son Richard in a quarrel, in the Old Pike Inn——”

“Carter!” protested Captain Brown. “This will ruin my house!”

“You knocked him down with a champagne bottle, as he came toward you to strike you. He fell flat, with his head against the corner of the iron fender. But the blow against the fender was a trifle. It glanced and hardly cut the skin. The stroke that killed him was delivered by the champagne bottle in your hand!”

Bonesy Billings, Captain Brown, Louden Powers, and Lampton were all on their feet, in their excitement. The man who was supposed to be Howard Milmarsh and Thomas Jarvis were the only persons who remained in their chairs. Chick and Patsy had both arisen, as if to prevent any demonstration by Powers or Lampton.

“Sit down!” commanded the detective. “There is nothing to be done. The man who killed Richard Jarvis cannot escape.”

The others dropped into their seats again. The two crooks showed more terror than had been in their faces since first they knew Carter was in the house. If this shrewd, deep-seeing detective could wind the toils so easily about Thomas Jarvis for a crime committed years ago, why would he not put them in cells for offenses of yesterday, as it were?

Both Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton were uneasy. It is true that the latter had practically a promise of safety if he delivered T. Burton Potter into the hands of the detective. But he was not prepared to produce Potter except as a last resort to keep himself out of prison.

As for Louden Powers, he was a bold scoundrel,[195] and he intended to make a desperate fight to get away if he found Carter and his men closing in on him. Only, he wished he were not locked in a room like this, with the odds in numbers against him.

“There’s Carter and his two men,” he mused. “Captain Brown, I guess, and that big Billings. That would be five against one—for I don’t suppose I could count on that weak-kneed Lampton. He has some sort of pull on the detective. I wouldn’t mind betting he’s a ‘squealer.’”

“Now, Mr. Jarvis,” continued Nick. “You have forced me to take this action. If you had not attempted to cash in your crime, I should have been inclined to let it rest in the oblivion to which you thought it consigned. The fact that you have compelled me to remind you of it, in the presence of these witnesses, emphasizes the world-old truth that ‘murder will out.’ What have you to say?”

There was no answer. Thomas Jarvis’ gaze was fixed on the opposite wall, and he had slumped curiously down in his large armchair.

“Look here, Carter,” broke in Captain Brown again. “You don’t have to drag me into this.”

“You were a witness,” replied Nick coldly. “As a good citizen, your duty is to tell the truth—if you are asked.”

It has been remarked already that Captain Brown was a business man. He thought more of the Old Pike Inn and its reputation than anything else on earth probably. He groaned at this suggestion.

“Chief!” suddenly shouted Chick.

He and Patsy rushed to Thomas Jarvis simultaneously. But they were not in time to prevent his slipping to the floor.

Half a minute later, Nick, on one knee by the side of the prostrate man, with a finger on the stilled pulse, looked up and said solemnly:

[196]

“You need not worry about being called on to testify, Captain Brown. The matter will never come up.”

“Is he dead?”

The response of the detective was to reverently cover the face of Thomas Jarvis with his own handkerchief.

CHAPTER XXXIII.
STILL HUNTING.

“Of course, Thomas Jarvis never was a real factor in this matter,” remarked Nick, fifteen minutes later, when all that was mortal of Jarvis had been removed to another room. “But we will go into the claims of that young man who has been sitting silently at the other side of the table from the beginning of the conference, and who——”

The detective broke off. The chair occupied by the man who had been declared by Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton to be Howard Milmarsh was empty, and he was not in the room!

Patsy and Chick had both helped remove the body of Thomas Jarvis, and no one had taken any notice of the young man. He had been sitting there when everybody else went out, watching the disposal of the still form on a large sofa in the library.

They were just returning, with Nick Carter in the lead, and speaking as he came, when he saw that the alleged Howard Milmarsh had disappeared.

There was a search all about the house and grounds which lasted for an hour or more. At the end of that time, when not a trace of the missing man could be found, Carter decided that there was nothing more to be done there, and he told Chick and Patsy privately that he was going back to New York.

Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton had both taken an active part in the hunt. They were loud in[197] their protestations that he was the real heir, and that somebody must have spirited him away in the interests of enemies.

“What do you mean by enemies?” asked the detective quietly, when the whole party were again assembled in the dining room. “Do you mean that persons who believe him to be actually Howard Milmarsh have hidden him so that they can bring a spurious one in to take possession?”

“You guess well,” grinned Louden Powers.

“Mind I don’t guess a little too well for your peace of mind, Powers,” was Nick’s rejoinder. “This estate has not been settled yet. Besides, those people waiting at the station for Billings might come up here again and hold you personally responsible for the fraud of Paradise City. They count you partly in the swindle, as you know.”

Powers sniffed scornfully, and lighted a cigarette, to show how much at his ease he was. Andrew Lampton was discreetly silent. He had not the bravado of his companion.

“The crowd has gone back,” announced Patsy, who had been at the telephone. “They got tired of waiting for Bonesy, and they took that train which went out an hour ago. It’s lucky for these two guys that they didn’t come back. The station agent tells me they was as hot as fresh tamales. If it hadn’t been a three-mile walk, some of ’em was coming back to lick the pair of ’em, just for luck.”

“It is just as well,” put in Nick. “Come over here, Billings. I want to talk to you.”

The result of a minute or two of private converse between the detective and Billings was that the big truckman smiled grimly and stood by the door of the dining room, to indicate that he was ready to obey orders at once.

“You see, Chick,” explained Carter to his principal assistant, “I want you to come back with me to[198] New York, and it would be asking too much of Patsy to guard those two men alone.”

“He could do it, all right,” returned Chick. “I don’t think they would get away if Patsy wanted to hold them. Besides, there are menservants in the house.”

“I don’t depend on servants, Chick—especially when they are new and have no personal interest in the place in which they are employed. You remember we heard two of them talking about their situation when they did not suspect that they were overheard?”

“When we were behind that big picture?”

“Yes. So I’ve engaged Billings to stay here and act as a sort of sergeant at arms while we are away. He and Patsy together will insure Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton being here when we return.”

“What are we going to do about Howard Milmarsh?” broke in Louden Powers, who had been wondering what the detective was talking about, but could not very well inquire. “I think I’d better go down to New York and look around.”

“Where would you look?”

“In places where he generally hangs out. There’s a lot of joints where you could find him ’most any time, and I——”

“I never knew Howard Milmarsh to hang about in New York,” interrupted Carter. “I think you have somebody else in mind.”

“Who?” demanded Powers defiantly.

“T. Burton Potter, for instance.”

“I’m talking about Howard Milmarsh.”

“Well, we will let you remain in the house here, while I look for Howard Milmarsh. I’m quite as anxious as you are to find him,” was the detective’s reply. “Come on, Chick!”

“You want Andrew Lampton and me to stay here?” asked Powers, with a suspicious inflection. “That’s something different from what you’ve been giving us.[199] You were handing it to us that we had no business in this house.”

“You have business in it now, Louden, because I believe you may help to solve the problem of the missing heir. Captain Brown, you will take us down to the station, won’t you? My car has gone back to New York.”

“I’ll take you down with pleasure,” was the prompt response of the manager of the Old Pike Inn.

Captain Brown was so relieved to know that he would not be called on as a witness to prove that Thomas Jarvis killed his son, that he was willing to do anything for anybody.

“I’ll go with you if you like,” volunteered Lampton. “Even if I can’t find Howard Milmarsh, I might get my hands on T. Burton Potter. You remember you wanted me to find him.”

“I did want you to do that,” admitted Nick. “But not now. Even if I don’t, it won’t make much difference as things have turned out. You remain here with Louden Powers. Billings, you know what to do. You too, Patsy!”

Nick Carter and Chick swung out of the dining room, with Captain Brown. No sooner were they outside than the door closed, and they heard a key click in the lock.

“Patsy and Billings are not taking any chances,” observed Chick, smiling.

“That is the only way to deal with men of that stripe, Chick. Captain, if we hurry, we can make that two train for New York.”

They just made the train, and, as Nick and his assistant sat silently side by side, while the train rushed toward the metropolis, each was occupied with his own thoughts.

“Where shall we go first?” asked Chick, as they left the train at the Grand Central and walked through[200] the lofty concourse to Forty-second Street. “Home, I suppose?”

“Yes. We’ll go there and see what mail there is, and if anything special calls for attention. Then we’ll visit the Universal Hospital.”

“What do you suppose has become of that fellow who vanished from the house up there this morning—the man who called himself Howard Milmarsh?”

“That I don’t know. And I don’t much care, at present. But I should like to correct you in one little particular, Chick. It is Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton who have been calling him Howard Milmarsh. You did not hear him say much about it.”

“That’s true,” assented Chick reflectively. “Here’s a taxi. I called him up just now.”

“There’s an old man and a young lady waiting for you in the library, sir,” said the butler, as they went into Nick’s quiet house. “I told them I didn’t know when you would be back, but they said they would wait half an hour, anyhow. Perhaps by that time you might be home. They’ve been in the library an hour already. I was up there ten minutes ago.”

“They must want to see me rather badly,” was the chief’s comment, as he ran lightly up the stairs. “Did they give you their names?”

“No, sir. They said they would tell you when they saw you?”

“Very well!”

Nick opened the door of his library. As he stepped inside, he knew who his visitors were.

“Why, it’s the young lady who was in the fire that night,” he exclaimed, in a tone of warm welcome. “Miss Silvius, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And this is my father. If it hadn’t been for you, we couldn’t be here now. We wanted to see you so much, Mr. Carter. I didn’t know till to-day who it was that got us out of that fearful fire.[201] I have not seen Mr. Gordon—I mean Mr. Milmarsh since.”

The detective shook hands with Bessie Silvius and her father, and then introduced Chick, who thought the girl wonderfully pretty, and showed it in his face.

“I—I—wanted to thank you for what you did, Mr. Carter,” faltered the girl. “And also—to ask if you knew where Mr. Milmarsh is.”

“I know where he is,” replied Nick gravely.

CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE GIRL IN THE CASE.

“Will you take me to him?” asked the girl, with a blush. Then she went on in a more resolute tone, and as if she knew she had nothing of which to be ashamed: “He has asked me to marry him, Mr. Carter.”

“Ah!”

“Yes, that’s what I told him,” she continued innocently. “I said it could never be.”

“I didn’t say anything,” smiled the detective.

“I know you didn’t. At least, you only said ‘Ah!’ But I know what you meant, and I agree with you.”

“I wish you would explain, Miss Silvius.”

“You mean that he is a multimillionaire, if he chooses to claim his own. If I were to marry him, people might say he was throwing himself away on a poor girl.”

“I don’t think it would matter what people might say.”

“It would matter a great deal to me,” she interrupted, with decision. “I am getting a living by teaching music. My father teaches the violin. We both play when we get a chance. And—and—sometimes the places we play at are not at all—at all nice.”

“Poor girl!” murmured Nick, below his breath.[202] Then, aloud: “We all have to do things we don’t like sometimes, Miss Silvius. I can assure you, knowing Howard Milmarsh as well as I do, that if he asked you to marry him, he will insist on your doing it—providing, of course, that you care for him.”

“I do,” burst out the girl involuntarily. Then she blushed again. “I did not mean to say that. I’ve told him I shall never marry, and I intend to keep my word.”

“No doubt. Girls always intend to keep their word when they make a rash assertion of that kind,” said Nick, with a laugh. “You say you haven’t seen him since the night of the fire?”

“No. We were all so much excited, and my poor father, who had rheumatism, was in such a dangerous state, that I was only too glad that some of the neighbors took us in and cared for us. When I came to myself, and could make inquiries about Mr. Gordon, no one knew where he was. I couldn’t find any one who remembered seeing him after he came down the ladder, except that a policeman said he was hurt.”

“I took him away in my motor car,” said the detective quietly.

“You did? And is he well? Can you take me to him? Is he here, in your house?”

“Not at present. But what made you think of coming here to-day? Why did you connect me with the disappearance of this—er—Mr. Gordon?”

“The same policeman who told me he was taken away in a motor car saw me on the street this morning. We have always been on speaking terms since the fire. He said to-day he had heard that the motor car in which Mr. Gordon—as everybody called him where he lived—was taken away belonged to the detective, Nick Carter.”

“Yes?”

“It was not difficult to find your address. So my father and I came down to try to see you. I was so[203] disappointed when your man said you were away. We had come a long way, and I was determined to see you if I could. So we said we would wait.”

“You have been here more than an hour?”

“Yes, but we didn’t mind waiting, so long as you are here at last. We should have waited another hour, and more than that. And if we had not seen you to-day, we should have been here again to-morrow.”

“That’s true, sir,” added Roscoe Silvius, who had hardly spoken. “I can’t say all I should like, but I don’t think I need speak my gratitude. You surely must know. Why, Mr. Carter, you plucked me out of the very jaws of a horrible death!”

“I’m very glad I happened to be there,” returned Carter earnestly. “At such a time as that any man would have done what I did. Mr.—er—Gordon, was as active as I was.”

“Yes, but he couldn’t have done it alone, although I saw that he would have given his life to save us. Then there is the young man over there at the other side of the room—Mr. Chick. I remember how he helped to get my father down the ladder when it was breaking in the middle. I wish I could say something to him that would seem only partly adequate.”

“Don’t say anything, Miss Silvius,” put in Chick, blushing like a girl himself. “It was the chief who did it. I only helped him a little. And—and—it was all in my day’s work. Nothing to talk about!”

“Well, now, Mr. Carter, will you take me to him?” asked the girl, going back to her former request.

“I should hardly like to do that without first seeing him,” answered the detective kindly. “You see——”

“He is still ill? Isn’t that it, Mr. Carter?”

There was an agony of anxiety in her voice that caused it to tremble as she looked eagerly into his face.

[204]

“Yes, he is ill,” admitted Nick. “I am going to see him at the hospital.”

“Is—is he very bad?”

“I don’t know. I do not think so. The last time I saw him, some days ago, he was up and dressed. The trouble is with his mind. The shock of the injuries he suffered at the fire still affects him. I hope—and expect—it will soon pass away.”

“I wish I could see him.”

“I intend that you shall—but not just now.”

“When?”

“Let me see. It is now four o’clock. I will go to the hospital. You may have an opportunity this evening. I cannot promise, but it may be so. Will you remain here until I get back. You have spent over an hour in this room,” he added, smiling. “You won’t mind another half hour or so, I’m sure.”

“How kind you are!” she murmured.

“Not at all. As Chick says, it is all in my day’s work.”

Chick brought a bundle of magazines to her, and placed a chair for her at the big table, with another for her father.

Carter smiled inwardly as he noted the assiduous attentions of his assistant. Bessie Silvius was a pretty girl.

With a cheerful nod of farewell to Bessie and her father, and another for Chick, the detective went out, picked up a taxi at the next corner, and sped away to the Universal Hospital.

He knew his way about the big building, and did not require anybody to show him how to reach the private room he had engaged for Howard Milmarsh. It was on the fourth floor, and there was good elevator service. In fact, there were two passenger elevators, besides others for taking patients, on cots, from one floor to another, and for other hospital uses.

Most of the doctors and nurses knew him, and he[205] had to stop and speak to several of them before he was allowed to enter the elevator and tell the attendant to put him off on “the fourth.”

As he walked down the long corridor on his way to the room, he met the nurse who was in charge of Howard Milmarsh at night.

“How is he, Miss Jordan?” he asked.

“He had a good night, Mr. Carter. But I haven’t seen him since seven this morning.”

“His mind?”

“I fancy it is better. He seems to remember things a little. I feel sure he will recover in time.”

This nurse had had long experience, comparatively. She was nearly thirty years of age, and was considered one of the most competent of her profession in the hospital. When she said a patient was better, there was reason to believe she was right.

“I’m glad to hear it, Miss Jordan. Were you going to see him now?”

“Yes. I don’t go on till seven. But as I am in the hospital, I’ll go in, of course, to see my patient. I am deeply interested in the case. It is a sad one, it seems to me, for I hear that he is a very wealthy man.”

Miss Jordan looked inquiringly at Nick. But if she expected to receive any information from him as to Howard Milmarsh’s private affairs, she was disappointed. The detective was not given to idle gossip.

The young man was known in the hospital as Robert Gordon. If he had been entered in the name of Howard Milmarsh, there would have been altogether too much curiosity about him, in Nick’s opinion.

The two reached the door of the private room, and Miss Jordan tapped at the door.

It was opened quickly, and Nick saw that there were three doctors and as many nurses standing between him and the bed, and all were talking with more excitement than is usual in a sick chamber.

[206]

“Is anything the matter?” demanded the detective.

“He’s gone!” replied one of the doctors, with a jerk. “The patient has left the hospital, and we are questioning Miss Sawyer, the day nurse, to find out how it happened.”

“Gone?” echoed Nick sharply. “Do you mean he ran away without anybody knowing he had done so?”

“No, no, Mr. Carter. Not so bad as that. Such a thing could not happen in a well-managed institution like the Universal Hospital. But he went for a stroll about the building, and on the lawn, and slipped out of the front door without anybody in the office on the main floor noticing him. That is the report.”

“Oh, that’s the report, is it?” observed Nick dryly.

CHAPTER XXXV.
GETTING A FOCUS.

“Do you mean that he was allowed to go walking about the hospital by himself, so that he could slip away unnoticed?”

It was Nick Carter asking the question, and he was seated in the room from which Howard Milmarsh had vanished, talking to the day nurse, Miss Sawyer, while the night nurse, Miss Jordan, listened.

“I did not say that,” replied Miss Sawyer. “His brother was here.”

“His brother?”

“Yes. He was the very picture of Mr. Gordon—except that he was not pale, from staying indoors, like the patient. In everything else they were so much alike that you knew they were twins.”

“Oh, you knew it.”

“Yes. You could tell it from their remarkable resemblance to each other. Besides, the other Mr. Gordon said they were twins.”

[207]

“Had you ever seen the visiting brother before?”

“No.”

“He had never paid a visit to the patient till to-day? Did he explain why that was?”

“Yes. He said he had been away from New York for a long time—in the West. He had heard of his brother being sick, and had come to the hospital as soon as he arrived in the city.”

“And then—what?”

“He talked to Mr. Gordon for a little while, trying to make him understand. He spoke of being in the West, and mentioned a place he called Maple.”

“Well?”

“Mr. Gordon appeared to recognize that name, for he smiled and said something that sounded like a girl’s name.”

“What name?”

“Bessie or Letty or Nelly. I could not be sure what it was, for he does not talk plainly, you know. He never has had complete control of his tongue since he came here.”

“Was that all you noticed when they were talking? Was there any other word that seemed to penetrate to his brain?”

“Not that I saw. They talked for about fifteen minutes. Then Mr. Gordon, as he said his name was—the visitor—proposed that he should walk his brother about the hospital and out to the garden at the back.”

“And you let him do it?”

“Yes. It seemed reasonable that they should like to be together, after so long a parting. Reasonable for the visitor, that is. The patient did not make any sign one way or the other. Beyond a half smile, as if he were pleased when the name of the girl was on his tongue, he was just as he always is.”

“It might have been better if you’d gone along, too, Miss Sawyer,” remarked the detective. “You would[208] then have seen them when they went out of the front door. The patient had his hat, I suppose?”

“Yes. He wore his usual clothing, hat and all. There was nothing in his appearance different from hundreds of men you may see on Broadway or Fifth Avenue at any time. I wish I had gone with them. But I argued that he would be quite safe with his twin brother, and his absence gave me an opportunity to look after little things about the room which are difficult to attend to when he is there.”

Nick saw the nurse’s point of view, and resolved not to make a complaint at the office, as he might easily have done. Instead, he walked out, stepped into his waiting taxicab, and hastened home.

He told exactly what he had found at the hospital, leaving it to Chick to make any comments that occurred to him.

The girl and her father simply looked bewildered. They did not feel that any harm had been done by the patient leaving the hospital with his twin brother. Indeed, Bessie smiled, as if pleased that he was well enough to go out.

“You know who the twin brother is, of course, chief?” observed Chick.

“It is not hard to guess.”

“What is the game?”

“That we must find out.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Where are you going to do it?”

“The Milmarsh residence, it appears to me,” replied Nick.

“Milmarsh, did you say?” asked the girl. “Do you suppose he has gone there?”

“It seems probable.”

“So it does,” assented Bessie Silvius. “Oh, Mr. Carter! Perhaps he is quite well—recovered his memory and everything! Well, if he has, that is all I want[209] to know. It is all I have a right to know. We’ll go now, my father and I. You won’t mind my coming again—to-morrow, or the next day—to hear how he is, will you?”

The pitiful appeal in her tones would have touched a much harder heart than the detective’s. He walked close to her and took one of her hands in his.

“Miss Silvius, I hope you will not have to wait until to-morrow to hear how Mr.—Mr. Gordon is. I was about to ask if you would go with us to Milmarsh.”

“Milmarsh?”

“That is the name of the little place where the residence of the Milmarshes is up on the hill. There is not much else there besides the Old Pike Inn and a cluster of small stores to supply the country homes around. We shall take a train in three-quarters of an hour.”

“It will get us up there in less than an hour,” added Chick. “It’s an express. The chief has that train schedule down fine. He never has to look at a timetable.”

“Meanwhile, I will have the housekeeper give us a meal of some kind. She is a wonder at preparing a tasty luncheon or supper at short notice.”

“I don’t think I’m hungry,” protested the girl.

“I know better,” contradicted Carter, smiling as he saw that Chick was already at the house telephone, giving directions to the housekeeper. “And your father needs something, too. You wouldn’t deprive him of the refreshment he needs, I am sure, even if you were to refuse it for yourself.”

Thus chatting, to prevent Bessie Silvius objecting further, Nick led the way into the dining room, where, in a wonderfully short space of time, there were tea, coffee, cold meat, cake, pie, and other articles of food, set forth in appetizing array.

Roscoe Silvius evidently was hungry. The old gentleman attacked everything set before him, and praised[210] each dish as it reached him. Bessie also was hungry, although she was not so ravenous as her father, while the chief and Chick disposed of their food in the businesslike manner of sensible men, who did not know when they would get a meal again, and were determined to make the most of the one they had.

The taxi that was to take them to the Grand Central was at the door when they went downstairs, and they were comfortably seated in a parlor car two minutes before the time for the train to pull out.

“It all seems so wonderful,” declared Bessie, smiling, as she settled down in the comfortable, roomy chair, and looked along the car. “This morning I had no thought of finding him again in this world. Now, in the evening, I am on my way to see him.”

“You are almost too optimistic, I’m afraid,” said Nick, with a smile. “We may not find him at Milmarsh. Only, I think that he may be there. I have reasons of my own for believing so, but they may all turn out fallacious. There goes the train.”

In less than half an hour they were in a motor car, hired at the station, and on their way up to the Milmarsh mansion.

“Hello! What’s all the fuss on the porch?” exclaimed Chick. “Look, chief! It isn’t the poor people that were fooled on Paradise City there again, is it?”

“I see Billings moving about very actively,” said the chief. “Hurry, driver! Let’s get there!”

The chauffeur put on more power and sent his machine along at a headlong pace, which brought it up in front of the porch at the main door with a rush.

“What is it?” shouted Nick, at Patsy Garvan, who was by the side of the big truckman.

“The guy they called Howard Milmarsh is back again,” was the reply hurled back by Patsy.

[211]

CHAPTER XXXVI.
WHERE THEY FOUND HIM.

Nick Carter jumped out of the car, leaving to Chick the congenial task of helping out Bessie Silvius, and bolted into the house.

“Where is he?”

“In the dining room, locked in with the others,” reported Billings coolly. “As soon as he came snooping up, I shoved him in with Louden Powers and Lampton, and let them have it out between them. Then I came out, to see who it was coming up the road in an automobile. It was you. The other guy came only just a little while ago.”

“You mean the man you have in the dining room?”

“Yes. He said he walked up from the station, talking to another fellow who was with him, when suddenly he missed him.”

“Who?”

“The other guy he was talking to.”

“Do you mean to say that he allowed a man to get away from him while they were actually talking, and didn’t see where he’d gone?”

“That’s what he told us.”

“I don’t believe it, for one,” put in Chick.

“Unless this mug in the dining room is daffy. Then it might have happened,” suggested Patsy. “Who is he, anyhow?”

Nick did not stop to answer, although he could have done it. He went over to Bessie Silvius, and asked her to wait in the drawing-room with her father, for a little time, while he straightened out a little misunderstanding that had occurred.

“But, Mr. Carter, is that Mr. Gordon in the dining room? I mean, the man they say came walking up[212] the road with somebody else? Or was it he who suddenly left the other?”

“I shall have to go into the dining room to see the man before I can answer that question.”

He directed Chick to stay in the drawing-room with Bessie and her father. It was a mission that Chick undertook with cheerfulness. Carter saw him leading Bessie and Roscoe Silvius to the drawing-room with Chesterfieldian politeness, and did not trouble any further about him.

Billings opened the door of the dining room with the key he had in his pocket, and Nick went in.

He saw just about what he expected. Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton each had a cigar going, and between them, still slumped down in his chair, as if he never had moved, was the individual who had been put forward as the real heir of the stupendous Milmarsh estate.

Nick went to this man and shook him until he looked up vacantly.

“Where is he?” demanded Nick.

“I don’t know. I was bringing him here, because you wanted him. But he wouldn’t come the whole distance, and it was no fault of mine. I guess he is somewhere about the grounds.”

“Why didn’t you search for him, instead of coming up to the house?”

“Because I believed he’d come here. It is what anybody would have believed. But as soon as I came up to the porch, some of these fellows of yours saw me and dragged me into this room.”

The speaker was not exactly stupid. He seemed to be rather dazed by a rapid surge of events. That was the way Nick regarded him, and doubtless he was right. He bent over and whispered in the man’s ear.

The result was a brightening up, and a much firmer tone of voice, as he said aloud:

“Of course, I’ll go with you, and I reckon I can[213] find him, too. But you will have to keep these two men off me,” pointing to Powers and Lampton. “They feel that things are slipping away from them, and they will kill me if they have a chance.”

“That is quite probable,” muttered the detective inaudibly.

He led the cowed man out of the room, and saw that Patsy followed. He turned to his young assistant and told him not to let anybody out of the house till they returned.

Once in the open air, Nick’s companion seemed to become a different man. His step was springy, and when they came to a fence separating them from a part of the ground that was full of high grass and tangled shrubbery, he vaulted over it as lightly and cleanly as Nick himself. His voice was almost firm, as he said:

“I saw him looking over here as we came up the road, and once I heard him mutter something about the west meadow. He seemed to know that part of the estate, although I did not hear him say anything else.”

“The west meadow,” repeated Nick. “Yes, I think I know where that is.”

They walked for some little distance through the bushes and grass, until the detective stopped and pointed to what was evidently a recent trail.

“See! Somebody has walked through this high grass and made a deep, wide furrow. We shan’t have much trouble in finding him now, I think.”

Perhaps Nick was surprised to find that the trail ended at the stone foundation wall of the house, at the back, where the cover of the tunnel that used to be part of the “underground railway” was made to look like the surrounding stones. The tunnel has already been described.

“Get in there!” commanded Carter.

The man was not inclined to obey. He seemed to fear it meant getting him at a disadvantage—perhaps[214] locking him up in some dungeon from which he might never emerge save to go into a regular prison.

But Nick was not in a mood to be held back by anybody—least of all by one whom he felt had no right to consideration.

So the man went down the chute, just as Chick had, not so long before, and the detective followed him.

There is no necessity to tell bit by bit how they went along the secret corridor which finally brought them to the back of the large picture in the dining room, where Nick and his assistant had listened to the conversation of the conspirators—one of whom was now actually in the corridor himself.

Suddenly a man sprang out of the blackness and seized Nick by the throat, forcing him backward and almost to his knees.

It was only for an instant that the detective was held at a disadvantage. He hurled his assailant away, and, bringing out his pocket flash, saw the man who had come with him lying on the floor in the narrow space, while facing him, with wild, vengeful eyes, was the sick man from the Universal Hospital!

It was evident that the escaped patient did not recognize either Nick or the other man, and equally certain that he regarded them both as enemies.

Even as the detective watched, he could see the long fingers, lean and clawlike from long illness, twitching to get at his throat, while the madman’s feet shuffled slightly, as if preparing for a sudden spring.

Nick took the initiative. Telling the man on the floor to get up and lend a hand, he threw one arm around the strange creature who had found his way in some mysterious way to this secret corridor, and seized his wrist from behind. By this wrestling trick, the detective had both the hands of his captive firmly held.

[215]

“Hold him for a moment!” he commanded the other man, who had arisen by this time. “Poor fellow! He is too weak to resist much. Had you any notion where he was?”

“How could I have?” was the rejoinder, in an injured tone. “I never was in this hole before. Where are we, anyhow?”

“I’ll show you,” replied Nick.

He felt along the wall until his linger touched a small knob.

The next moment a panel turned open silently, and they were looking through a doorway some four feet wide, down into the dining room, where sat the men they had left there half an hour before.

A shriek of horror burst from Andrew Lampton. But Louden Powers only smiled derisively. He had an iron nerve, and nothing could surprise him very much. He had always known there were secret passages about this strange old house, although he never had found them for himself.

The appearance of the two ghostly personages in the bedchamber on that night had confirmed what he had heard about the hidden places in the house. So it did not seem so very extraordinary that Nick Carter should suddenly show himself in the wall, by two of the large pictures.

At first only Nick was visible to the people in the dining room. But, as he stepped forth upon a chair, and thus to the door, he led the escaped sick man from the hospital, while following him was the person the two conspirators had declared to be Howard Milmarsh.

“What, chief?” shouted Patsy Garvan, in delight. “Did you get him?”

“By hooky,” roared Bonesy Billings. “There’s two of ’em! They look just alike! Now I know how you told the truth, Mr. Carter, while it looked like—like the other thing.”

[216]

The detective only nodded, as he put a large chair for the pale-faced invalid, and forced him into it gently.

The belligerence had gone from the face of the newcomer. He seemed to be wondering—that was all.

The most peculiar thing in the whole affair was that the man who had been set forth as the real owner of the Milmarsh estate, and who had appeared so dazed and in such terror of Powers and Lampton, now held up his head and actually smiled, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

Louden Powers scowled at him, but he replied only by a stare of defiance.

“That mug is going to give the whole snap away,” muttered Andrew Lampton, in the ear of his fellow conspirator.

“I’ll kill him if he does,” whispered back Louden Powers.

CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE RIGHTFUL HEIR.

“Bring in that young lady and her father, with Chick,” ordered the detective, as he swung the secret panel shut and nodded to Patsy.

“Gi’ me the key, Bonesy.”

Billings unlocked the door, and, while Patsy was absent, he stood guard. Not that it was needed, for nobody made an attempt to get out.

“Here they are, chief!” cried Patsy, as he came in with the three persons he had been sent for.

The girl would have run to the sick man as soon as she saw him, and it could be seen that a cry of recognition was ready to spring from her lips.

“Not yet!” warned Nick. “Patience for just a moment!”

She nodded obediently and sank into the chair Chick[217] set for her. Her father, bewildered, was already seated.

“Now, gentlemen,” went on the detective, “in the first place. I will ask this man, who has been posing as Howard Milmarsh, what his name really is.”

“What is the use of my saying?” grumbled the man he addressed. “You know it, and, of course, these other fellows do.” He pointed to Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton. “They thought it was a slick game, and that we could get away with the bluff. I knew we couldn’t.”

“You could, if you’d had any nerve,” snarled Louden Powers. “But you never could see a thing through. You are all right at the beginning. But you haven’t the pluck to stay with a thing to the end. You’re like a wet firecracker. There’s a whiz and a puff, and you’re done! You make me sick, T. Burton Potter!”

Potter smiled. He did not care what was said, now that the truth had come out.

“Then, if this guy’s name is Potter, the other one must be——” began Bonesy Billings.

Nick held up a hand to silence him. Then he whispered to Bessie Silvius.

“Yes, Mr. Carter,” she answered aloud. “I believe he’ll know me. I’ll try him.”

She stepped over to the man who had spent so long a time in the Universal Hospital, and laid a hand on his arm. He started and looked at her.

“Bob!” she whispered. “Don’t you know me?”

It was very difficult for him to draw his senses together, but it could be seen that her voice had touched a responsive chord in his being. He held out his hand to her.

As she took it, he murmured brokenly:

“Bob Gordon? Yes, that is what they call me. But—but—it isn’t quite right. How is it—Bessie?”

[218]

She laughed half hysterically.

“Did you hear that, Mr. Carter? He knows me! He called me by my name! He is coming to himself!”

The detective shook his head doubtfully. He was willing to admit that remembering the girl’s name was a good sign, but it was not enough.

“Let me try,” he said.

Touching the young man on the shoulder, he bent over and whispered sharply in his ear:

“Howard Milmarsh!”

There was a slight movement. But it could not be said that the name had brought him to his senses. He slumped down in his chair again, and in a weary voice murmured: “Bessie!”

“The only thing he can think of,” remarked Chick. “He’s a lucky man.”

“I don’t see where the luck comes in, if he’s off his nut,” rejoined Patsy.

Bonesy Billings, Chick and Patsy were all gathered about him, each one watching for some other indications of returning intelligence besides that contained in the single word, “Bessie!”

It was this moment of which Louden Powers took advantage. With a sign to Lampton, Louden crept toward the door.

But Nick was on the alert, even though so deeply engaged.

“Not yet, Louden!” he shouted, as he rushed forward to cut off the rascal’s escape.

“Get back!” roared Powers. “You’d better, if you don’t want to get this.”

He had picked up a heavy, cut-glass water bottle from the table, and was swinging it around his head.

Nick dashed at him, and Louden let the bottle go with all his force.

The detective ducked, and the bottle went past.

[219]

A shriek from Bessie Silvius made him turn quickly.

Howard Milmarsh—the real one—was lying back in his chair, and a thin, red stream trickled over his forehead.

“Get that fellow!” shouted Nick, over his shoulder, as he rushed to the wounded man crumpled up in the big armchair.

“I’ve got him, all right,” replied Bonesy Billings.

Billings had backheeled Louden Powers just as he got to the door, and now was kneeling on the chest of the discomfited scoundrel.

Lampton, scared, was in his chair. He had jumped up when Louden tried to get away. Then, seeing that the attempt would fail, he prudently resumed his seat in a hurry.

Nick was examining the wound, putting his handkerchief to it and noting at the same time that the sufferer was talking rapidly.

“It just caught him with a glancing stroke,” announced the detective. “It jarred him, but that is all. It is not serious. Just enough of a concussion to——”

He stopped and looked around him, with a hopeful look in his keen, dark eyes.

“What’s this?” the wounded man was saying, in a natural, though weak, voice. “Are we off the roof? Is the fire still burning? We didn’t go through, did we? Where’s Bessie?”

“Here I am! Here I am!” she answered eagerly.

He took her hand and stared into her face. Then he smiled. This time it was with as much intelligence as her own.

“Mr. Carter! Mr. Carter!” she screamed.

“Yes?”

“He has got back his senses! Look at him!”

“Do you know who you are?” asked Nick, close to him.

“Howard Milmarsh to you, Mr. Carter. Howard[220] Milmarsh! What is the use of my saying my name if anything else? You know me. I don’t care who knows it now, anyhow. I had determined to give myself up. I killed Richard Jarvis.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re mistaken. You did not kill him,” declared the detective emphatically. “You will take my word, won’t you?”

“Take your word, Mr. Carter? Of course I will—I must! But are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I can prove it.”

“Then is Richard Jarvis alive?”

“No. But he died by an accident—after he had quite recovered from the blow you gave him. It was only a knock-out. He came to in a few minutes. You were scared unnecessarily. Now you will come into your own.”

“But—my father? Ah, yes! I know! My poor father!”

Tears—real, comforting, natural tears—flowed from his eyes. They would have proved, if there had been nothing else, that Howard Milmarsh was again himself, and that he was prepared to face whatever might be his fate.

Nick Carter turned away, to see what Bonesy was doing to the prostrate, cursing Louden Powers.

“Take him away, Billings. Lock him up in a cellar, till the police come.”

As Bonesy Billings promptly obeyed, by yanking Louden Powers to his feet as if he had been a sack of oats, Andrew Lampton exclaimed, in a terrified tone:

“Police? Have you sent for the police?”

Nick waited till Louden Powers was out of the room. Then he went close to Lampton, and spoke to him quietly:

“Look here, Lampton. I promised that if you brought T. Burton Potter to me, I would do something[221] for you. I will keep my word by giving you half an hour’s start of the police. Get out! I’d advise you to get over the Canadian border as soon as you can do it. Don’t ever show up in New York again. If you do. I won’t answer for the consequences. Understand?”

Andrew Lampton did understand. He was out of the house almost before the detective had finished speaking.

“Are you going to bring any charge against me?” whimpered T. Burton Potter. “Or may I go?”

“I know you are a crook, Potter. But in this case I recognize that you were led into mischief by stronger wills than your own. Your attempt to defraud Howard Milmarsh of his rights would mean, perhaps, ten years in Sing Sing if the charge were pressed. But you helped me find the right man at last, and I believe you are really sorry for what you have done.”

“Yes. And——”

“Get out of this house,” interrupted Nick. “The same advice I gave to Andrew Lampton applies to you. Lose no time in jumping over the line into Canada. You may escape that way. It is your own lookout. Go, and may you lead a better life in future.”

“I will!” returned T. Burton Potter earnestly. “I have had such a scare this time that I’m through with crookedness for all time.”

“I hope that’s true.”

“You bet it’s true,” insisted Potter, as he hurried from the room.

“It seems to me that you’re letting all the crooks get away, chief,” protested Chick mildly. “I think both Potter and Lampton ought to have been handed over to the police, with Powers.”

“Strictly speaking, according to the law, I suppose they should,” conceded the chief. “But I have to consider[222] Howard Milmarsh. He has recovered his senses, it is true—thanks to that bottle over there—but it will be some time before it will be safe to put him through another mental strain.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Of course he’s right,” put in Patsy. “He’s always right. It seems to me that you had a lot of nerve to tell him he wasn’t.”

“That will do,” interposed Nick, smiling. “I can’t afford to have my two men—both of them the most loyal lieutenants a man could have—arguing over me.”

“But he said——” blurted out Patsy.

“I know what he said, and he was right, in a way. But there are circumstances that make it desirable that Howard Milmarsh should take possession of his estate with as little fuss as possible. I promised his father that I would see he was allowed to do so, and that’s what I have to do.”

*   *   *   *   *

It was three months after that exciting night at the great Milmarsh mansion on the hill. Another night of an exciting nature may be mentioned. The excitement this time was of a much more pleasant kind, however. The wedding of Howard Milmarsh and Bessie Silvius had just taken place.

Nick Carter, Chick, and Patsy were all there, together with Billings—who wore evening clothes, for the first and only time in his life. Chick had been the best man at the ceremony, and a niece of Captain Brown’s was the bridesmaid.

Among the guests were all the people who had been swindled over the Paradise City land project. They had got back their money, with a large bonus to each person in addition, and now were there to cheer the finest man who ever had lived in that part of the country, in their opinion, Howard Milmarsh.

[223]

“That’s all right, so far as it goes,” remarked Patsy Garvan to Chick, sotto voce, “but where would Howard Milmarsh have been to-day if it were not for the chief?”

“That’s so,” agreed Chick. “Howard is like all of us. He has to take off his hat to Nick Carter.”

THE END.

No. 1002 of the New Magnet Library, entitled “A Game of Craft,” is a most exciting story in which Nick Carter displays his skill, as well as his courage, in running down smart crooks.

[224]

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