Transcriber’s Notes:
The original spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been retained, with the exception of apparent typographical errors which have been corrected.
For convenience, a table of contents, which is not present in the original, has been included.
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | AN INQUISITIVE CLERK. | 5 |
| II. | MODERN HIGHWAYMEN. | 14 |
| III. | NICK CARTER HELD UP. | 24 |
| IV. | THE ESCAPE. | 35 |
| V. | THE HOUSE IN LAUREL ROAD. | 46 |
| VI. | MADAME VICTORIA. | 62 |
| VII. | THE DEEPER MYSTERY. | 76 |
| VIII. | UNDER THE SURFACE. | 89 |
| IX. | BODY AND LIMBS. | 103 |
| X. | THE ANCHOR TO WINDWARD. | 116 |
| XI. | THE INCENTIVE TO TREACHERY. | 126 |
| XII. | THE ROAD TO CANTON. | 133 |
| XIII. | CLOSE QUARTERS. | 147 |
| XIV. | SHADOWS AND SHADOWED. | 158 |
| XV. | ON NICK’S TRAIL. | 169 |
| XVI. | A TERRIBLE PREDICAMENT. | 182 |
| XVII. | A CRISIS. | 194 |
| XVIII. | A LAST RESORT. | 205 |
| XIX. | NICK CARTER’S ESCAPE. | 215 |
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 troubles 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.
| ALL TITLES ALWAYS IN PRINT | |
| 850—Wanted: A Clew | By Nicholas Carter |
| 851—A Tangled Skein | By Nicholas Carter |
| 852—The Bullion Mystery | By Nicholas Carter |
| 853—The Man of Riddles | By Nicholas Carter |
| 854—A Miscarriage of Justice | By Nicholas Carter |
| 855—The Gloved Hand | By Nicholas Carter |
| 856—Spoilers and the Spoils | By Nicholas Carter |
| 857—The Deeper Game | By Nicholas Carter |
| 858—Bolts from Blue Skies | By Nicholas Carter |
| 859—Unseen Foes | By Nicholas Carter |
| 860—Knaves in High Places | By Nicholas Carter |
| 861—The Microbe of Crime | By Nicholas Carter |
| 862—In the Tolls of Fear | By Nicholas Carter |
| 863—A Heritage of Trouble | By Nicholas Carter |
| 864—Called to Account | By Nicholas Carter |
| 865—The Just and the Unjust | By Nicholas Carter |
| 866—Instinct at Fault | By Nicholas Carter |
| 867—A Rogue Worth Trapping | By Nicholas Carter |
| 868—A Rope of Slender Threads | By Nicholas Carter |
| 869—The Last Call | By Nicholas Carter |
| 870—The Spoils of Chance | By Nicholas Carter |
| 871—A Struggle With Destiny | By Nicholas Carter |
| 872—The Slave of Crime | By Nicholas Carter |
| 873—The Crook’s Blind | By Nicholas Carter |
| 874—A Rascal of Quality | By Nicholas Carter |
| 875—With Shackles of Fire | By Nicholas Carter |
| 876—The Man Who Changed Faces | By Nicholas Carter |
| 877—The Fixed Alibi | By Nicholas Carter |
| 878—Out With the Tide | By Nicholas Carter |
| 879—The Soul Destroyers | By Nicholas Carter[2] |
| 880—The Wages of Rascality | By Nicholas Carter |
| 881—Birds of Prey | By Nicholas Carter |
| 882—When Destruction Threatens | By Nicholas Carter |
| 883—The Keeper of Black Hounds | By Nicholas Carter |
| 884—The Door of Doubt | By Nicholas Carter |
| 885—The Wolf Within | By Nicholas Carter |
| 886—A Perilous Parole | By Nicholas Carter |
| 887—The Trail of the Finger Prints | By Nicholas Carter |
| 888—Dodging the Law | By Nicholas Carter |
| 889—A Crime in Paradise | By Nicholas Carter |
| 890—On the Ragged Edge | By Nicholas Carter |
| 891—The Red God of Tragedy | By Nicholas Carter |
| 892—The Man Who Paid | By Nicholas Carter |
| 893—The Blind Man’s Daughter | By Nicholas Carter |
| 894—One Object in Life | By Nicholas Carter |
| 895—As a Crook Sows | By Nicholas Carter |
| 896—In Record Time | By Nicholas Carter |
| 897—Held in Suspense | By Nicholas Carter |
| 898—The $100,000 Kiss | By Nicholas Carter |
| 899—Just One Slip | By Nicholas Carter |
| 900—On a Million-dollar Trail | By Nicholas Carter |
| 901—A Weird Treasure | By Nicholas Carter |
| 902—The Middle Link | By Nicholas Carter |
| 903—To the Ends of the Earth | By Nicholas Carter |
| 904—When Honors Pall | By Nicholas Carter |
| 905—The Yellow Brand | By Nicholas Carter |
| 906—A New Serpent in Eden | By Nicholas Carter |
| 907—When Brave Men Tremble | By Nicholas Carter |
| 908—A Test of Courage | By Nicholas Carter |
| 909—Where Peril Beckons | By Nicholas Carter |
| 910—The Gargoni Girdle | By Nicholas Carter |
| 911—Rascals & Co | By Nicholas Carter |
| 912—Too Late to Talk | By Nicholas Carter |
| 913—Satan’s Apt Pupil | By Nicholas Carter |
| 914—The Girl Prisoner | By Nicholas Carter |
| 915—The Danger of Folly | By Nicholas Carter |
| 916—One Shipwreck Too Many | By Nicholas Carter |
| 917—Scourged by Fear | By Nicholas Carter |
| 918—The Red Plague | By Nicholas Carter |
| 919—Scoundrels Rampant | By Nicholas Carter |
| 920—From Clew to Clew | By Nicholas Carter |
| 921—When Rogues Conspire | By Nicholas Carter |
| 922—Twelve in a Grave | By Nicholas Carter |
| 923—The Great Opium Case | By Nicholas Carter |
| 924—A Conspiracy of Rumors | By Nicholas Carter |
| 925—A Klondike Claim | By Nicholas Carter |
| 926—The Evil Formula | By Nicholas Carter |
| 927—The Man of Many Faces | By Nicholas Carter |
| 928—The Great Enigma | By Nicholas Carter |
| 929—The Burden of Proof | By Nicholas Carter |
| 930—The Stolen Brain | By Nicholas Carter |
| 931—A Titled Counterfeiter | By Nicholas Carter |
| 932—The Magic Necklace | By Nicholas Carter |
| 933—’Round the World for a Quarter | By Nicholas Carter |
| 934—Over the Edge of the World | By Nicholas Carter |
| 935—In the Grip of Fate | By Nicholas Carter |
| 936—The Case of Many Clews | By Nicholas Carter |
| 937—The Sealed Door | By Nicholas Carter |
| 938—Nick Carter and the Green Goods Men | By Nicholas Carter |
| 939—The Man Without a Will | By Nicholas Carter |
| 940—Tracked Across the Atlantic | By Nicholas Carter |
| 941—A Clew From the Unknown | By Nicholas Carter |
| 942—The Crime of a Countess | By Nicholas Carter |
| 943—A Mixed Up Mess | By Nicholas Carter |
| 944—The Great Money Order Swindle | By Nicholas Carter |
| 945—The Adder’s Brood | By Nicholas Carter |
| 946—A Wall Street Haul | By Nicholas Carter |
| 947—For a Pawned Crown | By Nicholas Carter |
THE MAN WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE
OR,
FROM ROGUE TO CONVICT
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
Copyright, 1906
By STREET & SMITH
The Man Without a Conscience
(Printed in the United States of America)
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian.
THE MAN WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE.
CHAPTER I.
AN INQUISITIVE CLERK.
“Bureau of Secret Investigation.”
Nick Carter glanced at the above sign over the door, an unpretentious and somewhat faded reminder of better days, while he descended the flight of stone steps leading into the basement offices of the Boston police department.
The sunlight lay warm and bright in Pemberton Square at ten o’clock that May morning, shedding over the magnificent new court-house a golden glory consistent, no doubt, with the wise dispensation of justice, yet in monstrous anomaly with some of the dreadful experiences and grim episodes sometimes enacted within those splendid sunlit walls.
Nick turned to the right in the main corridor and entered the adjoining office, quite a commodious room, in which the general business of this secret service branch of the local police department was conducted.
The enclosure back of the chief clerk’s high desk,[6] which also was topped with a brass grating, happened to be vacant when Nick entered. In one corner of the room, however, a subordinate clerk was busily engaged in attempting to repair a slight leak in the faucet of the ice-water vessel, and to this young man the famous New York detective addressed himself.
“Has the chief been in this morning?” he asked.
The clerk bobbed up from his work as if startled, drying his hands with his handkerchief, and stared sharply at Nick for several moments. But he saw nothing familiar in the stranger’s grave, clean-cut features.
For all that this clerk knew, or surmised, Nick might have been an ordinary or very humble citizen, who had quietly dropped in there for want of something better to do.
“Chief Weston?” he returned inquiringly, still sharply scrutinizing Nick.
“There is no other chief in this department, is there?” was Nick’s reply, with a subtle tinge of irony.
“Well—no.”
“Chief Weston, yes,” bowed Nick. “Is he in his office?”
“I believe so.”
“Busy?”
“I reckon he is, just now.”
“Reckon, eh? Don’t you know?”
“Yes, sir, he’s busy,” the clerk now said, a bit curtly, flushing slightly under the detective’s keen eye and quietly persistent inquiries.
“He’s not too busy to see me, I think,” replied Nick, with dry assurance. “Go in and tell him I’m here.”
“Who are you?”
“Never mind who I am.”
“I’ll take in your card.”
“No card,” said Nick tersely.
“Your name, then?”
“Nor any name.”
“But——”
“Merely tell the chief that his friend from New York is here.”
The expression in the eyes of the irritated clerk lost none of its searching interest, yet they now took on a rather different light, as if he had been suddenly hit with an idea. Yet he still frowned slightly and said:
“If you object to having your name mentioned——”
“I do object, young man,” Nick now interrupted, with ominously quiet determination. “Your chief may possibly have persons in his office before whom I do not care to have my name announced. Now, you go to him and deliver my message just as I gave it to you, neither more[8] nor less, or you’ll very suddenly hear something drop—providing you still retain your senses.”
Now the clerk laughed, as if amused by the cool terms of the quiet threat, and then he turned quickly and vanished into a short passageway between the outer room and Chief Weston’s private office.
Nick gazed after him with a rather quizzical stare—a slender chap of about twenty-five, with reddish hair, thin features, a sallow complexion thickly dotted with freckles, and a countenance lighted by a pair of narrow gray eyes, that greenish-gray sometimes seen in the eyes of a cat.
“I wonder what use they have for him around here?” Nick said to himself, while waiting. “If I were chief in this joint, it’s long odds that that red-headed monkey would get his walking-ticket in short order.”
The subject of these uncomplimentary cogitations returned in less than a minute.
“You are to walk right in, sir—this way,” he glibly announced, with much more deference.
At the same time he opened the way for Nick to pass into the enclosure, and through the passage mentioned.
“Thank you,” said Nick, with half a growl.
“Don’t mention it,” grinned the clerk. “Straight ahead, sir. Chief Weston is at his desk.”
Nick heard, meantime, the tramp of men through a corridor adjoining the opposite side of the outer office, and he knew that Chief Weston had immediately dismissed them, to receive him in private.
“So, so; the business is important,” he rightly conjectured.
The door closed behind Nick of itself, but the snap of the catch-lock hung fire until after the hearty voice of the Boston chief of detectives, as he arose and gripped Nick by the hand, had sounded through the room.
“How are you, Nick?” he cried cordially. “I’m a thousand times more than glad to see you, Carter, on my word.”
“Same to you, Weston,” laughed Nick. “Some time has passed since we met.”
“Too long a time, eh?”
“That’s right, too.”
“Have a chair.”
Now the catch-lock snapped lightly.
A finger between the door and the jamb had been withdrawn.
A reddish head drew away from the panel, a pair of ears ceased their strained attention, a light step retreated through the passage, and two narrow gray eyes like those of a cat indicated that their owner had now satisfied[10] his inquisitive yearning, and learned the name of the visitor who so peremptorily had issued his commands.
As Nick accepted a chair near that taken by Weston at his desk, he carelessly jerked his thumb toward the door by which he had entered.
“Where’d you get him, Weston?” he asked dryly.
“Get whom?” queried the chief, with inquiring eyes.
“The clerk.”
“Hyde—the one who announced you?”
“The same.”
“Oh, he’s been at work on the books out there for about a year. He’s only an assistant clerk.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Why did you ask?”
“For no reason.”
“Nonsense! You must have had some reason, Nick.”
“None of consequence,” smiled Nick. “I asked about him, in fact, only because I had to fairly drive him in here when I declined to send in a card or mention my name.”
Chief Weston threw back his head and laughed.
“That’s easily explained,” said he, still chuckling. “I growl at him roundly at regular intervals, Nick, for annoying[11] me with visitors whom I neither know nor wish to see. I am getting him by degrees, however, so that he requires the whole pedigree of a caller before announcing him, which is about as bad a fault, I imagine. Sandy is all right, though, in his own peculiar way.”
“Sandy, eh? That’s a nickname, I take it, because of his red hair?”
“No, not exactly. His name is Sanderson Hyde.”
“Ah, just so.”
“I took him in to oblige a journalist friend,” added Weston, smiling. “It’s always well to stand ace-high with the press, you know.”
“That’s right, too,” nodded Nick, now willing to digress. “You sent for me to come over here from New York, Weston. What do you want of me?”
“You got my wire?”
“Certainly.”
“Did Chick come with you?”
“No,” replied Nick, at this reference to his chief assistant. “I came over alone.”
“Are you busy in New York just now?”
“I’m always busy, Weston.”
“Too busy to undertake a little work for me?”
“Where?”
“In and about Boston.”
“What’s the nature of it?”
“There is nothing in giving you all of the details, Nick, unless you are in a position to accept an offer and help me out,” Chief Weston gravely rejoined. “First of all, Nick, may I count on you?”
The brows of the celebrated New York detective knit a little closer over his keen gray eyes. He drew up a bit in his chair, remarking gravely:
“Your business is important, Weston, or you would not have sent for me.”
“Very important.”
“A serious matter?”
“Decidedly.”
“Have your own men tackled it?”
“Yes, the very best of them.”
“With no results?”
“None but absolute failure.”
“Are they now at work on the case?”
“Some of them.”
“And you wish me to take a hand in the work?”
“I certainly do.”
“If I consent to do so, Weston, I shall impose one condition,” said Nick decidedly.
“I expect it.”
“You do?”
“Certainly,” nodded the chief. “Am I not familiar with your methods? You will require me to order all of my men off the case and give it entirely to you.”
“That’s the condition,” said Nick bluntly.
“I will accept it.”
“And leave the matter to me alone?”
“Precisely. In no way whatever shall you be interfered with.”
“Very good.”
“You will undertake the work for me?”
“I will hear of what it consists,” replied Nick, with his curiosity stirred. “If it is all that your remarks imply—well, Weston, you may then count on me to give it an argument.”
“Capital.”
“Now, cut loose and give me the facts of the case.”
Chief Weston opened a drawer of his desk and took out a batch of papers and documents, among which was a neatly mounted photograph about five inches square, such as may be taken with a small portable camera, or a kodak.
While he placed the papers on his desk, he handed the photograph to Nick Carter, saying impressively:
“First examine this, Nick, and tell me what you make of it.”
CHAPTER II.
MODERN HIGHWAYMEN.
While the Boston chief sat silently regarding him, Nick Carter studied the photograph attentively for several moments.
“H’m!” he presently grunted. “The picture is quite plain. Two automobiles appear to have met in a lonely woodland road.”
“Precisely.”
“Only part of one of them is visible in the picture,” continued Nick, commenting upon the various details. “The picture was evidently taken by an occupant of one of the cars.”
“Correct.”
“In the road near the other machine stands a very tall woman, closely veiled, who is pointing a revolver, evidently at the occupants of the other car.”
“Exactly.”
“They are not visible in the picture, however, except the extended hand of one of them, obviously the hand of a woman. She is passing a purse, two watches, and what appears to be several pieces of jewelry, to a masked[15] man, who is standing near the woman holding the leveled revolver.”
“Those are the main features of the picture, Nick,” nodded Weston. “Now, what do you make of it?”
Nick glanced up and replied:
“It looks to me like a hold-up.”
“That’s just what it was.”
“When and where?”
“Near the Brookline suburb, about a week ago.”
“Is this the case on which you wish to employ me?”
“One of them.”
“There are others?”
“Fifty, Nick, within the past two months.”
“Whew!” whistled Nick, with brows lifting. “I have read in the newspapers that you have had numerous highway robberies about here, but I did not imagine them to be so frequent as you state.”
“Because only a small part of them have been given publicity,” replied Weston. “I have suppressed many, Nick, in the hope of thereby getting some traceable clue to the crooks.”
“Yet you are all still in the dark?”
“Never more so, Nick,” was the grave rejoinder. “In the past two months there have been, as I have stated, upward of fifty of these highway robberies.”
“Early and often, eh?”
“Decidedly so. These hold-ups have been committed, moreover, with a boldness and daring that invests them with a peculiarly mysterious character. Whether they are the work of two or three professional crooks, or that of a larger organized gang of them, is hard to say. At all events, Nick, we have been absolutely unable to get any traceable clue to the identity, haunts, or headquarters of the rascals.”
“Have two of these hold-ups ever been committed at precisely the same time?”
“Not that have been reported.”
“If that had occurred,” explained Nick, “it would indicate that a considerable gang is at work.”
“Two hold-ups in one evening is the nearest approach to it,” said Weston.
“In the same locality?”
“Within a mile of one another.”
“Were the crooks in an automobile?”
“Yes, in both cases.”
“Then both jobs may have been done by the same persons.”
“I feel quite sure of that, Nick, for the same description of the thieves and their automobile was given me by the victims of both outrages.”
“Do these crooks always work from an automobile?”
“In the majority of the cases reported,” bowed Weston. “Yet at times they have appeared on horseback, and on several occasions afoot. The work, Nick, is that of two or more men and a woman, as nearly as I can judge, and all of them are possessed of extraordinary nerve, boldness, and sagacity. They have committed these crimes at all hours of the day and night, frequently in quite public places, yet they have thus far completely evaded detection and pursuit. They invariably do their rascally job with a decisiveness and despatch that completely awe their victims, who are usually so alarmed——”
“Stop a moment,” said Nick quite abruptly. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, Weston.”
“Very well.”
“If I decide to look into this case, I shall then have some few points already settled, and will need to waste no time in seeking the information myself.”
“Exactly,” nodded the chief. “What do you wish to know?”
“First, about the crooks themselves,” said Nick. “What have you in the way of descriptions of them?”
Chief Weston laughed.
“A variety, Nick, to fit any type of man except a humpback or one dismembered,” he replied.
“The descriptions vary, eh?”
“I should say so.”
“Possibly the robbers use a different disguise for each job.”
“Very likely.”
“Or, as nearly always is the case,” said Nick, “the victims of the robbers were so frightened or excited at the time that they retain only vague and exaggerated impressions of their assailants.”
“Precisely.”
“To illustrate that,” added Nick, “I know of a case of a noted prize-fighter, who was held up and robbed of his watch and money in broad daylight, and within fifty yards of Central Park. He declared that the thief was six feet tall, weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, and was backed by two confederates, whom he could not quite recall. We got the crook next day.”
“Yes?”
“He was under five feet, weighed one hundred and thirty pounds, and did the job entirely alone.”
“Quite a difference!” exclaimed Weston, laughing heartily.
“Rather,” smiled Nick. “As a matter of fact, the[19] prize-fighter was so scared when he saw a revolver thrust under his nose that the crook loomed as big as a house. Probably thinking that such a job would not be attempted single-handed, he afterward got it into his head that he saw the two confederates, and was so thoroughly convinced of the imaginary fact that he really believed it. I could cite numerous similar cases.”
“So could I, Nick.”
“Descriptions are not at all reliable, as you imply, yet they sometimes help one a little.”
“That’s true.”
“In a general way, then, you think there are at least two men and one woman in this gang?”
“The cases reported convince me of that,” bowed Weston. “That picture shows the woman, moreover, though two men are mentioned in the majority of robberies reported.”
“Are the men always masked?”
“No, not always. The woman is invariably veiled, however, and the descriptions of the men indicate a frequent change of disguise.”
“That is to be expected,” said Nick. “Now, about the automobile used by the knaves. Have any attempts been made to follow it or to trace it?”
“Repeated attempts, Nick, all of which have proved futile.”
“Has none of the victims been able to report its registered number?”
“We have had a dozen different numbers reported,” replied Chief Weston; “but investigation showed that all of them were fictitious.”
“Yet the crooks might be located, chief, if the make of the automobile were known,” suggested Nick. “That should have been easily learned by some of these people.”
Chief Weston shook his head.
“That would be true, Nick, providing the scamps always used the same machine,” said he. “Half a score of different automobiles have been reported as having been used by these knaves at the time of the numerous hold-ups.”
“H’m!” grunted Nick, with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Evidently, then, these crooks have considerable money invested in their rascally enterprise.”
“It certainly appears so.”
“How about the horses ridden by them?” Nick next inquired. “Can the owner of none of them be discovered?”
“In the few cases in which persons have been held up[21] by a horseman,” replied Weston, “the highwayman has usually been alone. According to the description given, moreover, he has as many horses as automobiles, for he has appeared on grays, bays, blacks, and sorrels.”
Nick laughed at the glibness with which the last was said.
“It seems a bit odd to me, Weston, that none of your men have been able to get on the track of these desperadoes,” he presently rejoined. “It is not often that a gang of highwaymen can long escape detection and arrest, when at work in and about a city like Boston.”
“They are not ordinary knaves, Nick,” emphatically declared Chief Weston. “If they were, we should have landed them long ago.”
“Where do these robberies usually occur?”
“Generally in some lonely part of a suburban road, though several have taken place in the evening, right in the heart of Brookline, Cambridge, and Newton,” replied Weston. “It is evident that the crooks select their victims from the more wealthy suburbs, presumably with a view to obtaining the more plunder.”
“How do they usually proceed?”
“In various ways, Nick, according to my reports. At times they block the road with their car and hold up the first automobile-party that appears, which, of course,[22] is obliged to stop. Having relieved the travelers of their property, the crooks then forced them to turn their machine about, under the muzzles of leveled revolvers, and depart at full speed. If the frightened victims return in a few moments, as once or twice has been the case, they reach the scene, only to find that the knaves have fled.”
“Naturally,” said Nick smilingly.
“They have adopted, in fact, innumerable methods for holding up an automobile-party,” added Weston, “and they invariably intimidate their quarry and get away with the goods.”
“Of what does their plunder usually consist?” inquired Nick.
“Money and jewelry. They take all that their victims have, and the most of them give up readily rather than take any chances of being shot in cold blood.”
“Have you been able to locate any of the stolen property in the pawn-shops?”
“Not a piece of it.”
“Judging from your reports, Weston, what is the value of the property thus far secured by these highwaymen?”
“Thousands of dollars, Nick. Close upon fifty thousand, at least.”
“Have there been house burglaries about here of late?”
“Very few.”
“It looks, then, as if these knaves were confining themselves to this road work.”
“I think so,” bowed Weston.
Nick glanced again at the photograph, which he still retained in his hand.
“This was one of these hold-ups, was it?” said he.
“Yes.”
“It occurred in Brookline?”
“In a lonely road leading into Brookline,” replied Weston. “The victims were Brookline people, and were robbed of some five hundred dollars’ worth of diamonds and jewelry, including what money they had with them. The victims were two ladies, taking an afternoon ride in a Stanley machine.”
“Did they have a chauffeur?”
“No.”
“How was that?”
“One of the women, Mrs. Badger, is an expert driver, and frequently rides without a chauffeur.”
Nick glanced again at the photograph—little dreaming at that moment, however, how important a clue he then held in his hand.
CHAPTER III.
NICK CARTER HELD UP.
Despite that he then attached no special significance to the photograph, the fact that Nick Carter was of a peculiarly impressionable nature, and that any unusual circumstance quickly stirred his rare detective instinct, appeared in his next question and the abruptness with which it was asked.
“How did it happen, Weston, that this picture of the scene was taken during the robbery?”
“I’ll tell you,” replied the Boston chief.
“One moment,” interposed Nick. “First, tell me something about the victims of the robbery.”
“The Mrs. Badger mentioned,” replied Weston, “is the wife of one Amos G. Badger, a wealthy Boston stock-broker. He owns a fine old place on one of the most desirable outskirts of Brookline, inherited from his father some years ago, and the couple move in the most exclusive circles of the local fashionable society. Badger’s place is on Laurel Road, and covers several acres.”
“Go on,” nodded Nick; “I follow you.”
“Mrs. Badger’s companion that afternoon was her[25] sister,” continued Weston, “a woman locally famous under the name of Madame Victoria.”
“Famous for what?” inquired Nick.
“Well, she claims to be an astrologer, a spiritual medium, and a sort of fortune-teller, I believe,” explained Chief Weston.
“H’m!”
“At all events, Nick, she does a tremendous business, and has a magnificent suite in an office building on Tremont Street, directly opposite the Common. No end of wealthy and fashionable people consult her, either for advice in business or love-affairs—or to get messages alleged to come from dead friends,” added Weston, laughing a bit derisively.
“I don’t take any stock in that stuff,” said Nick bluntly.
“Nor do I, Nick,” was the reply. “Yet the woman is certainly a character, and, if reports are true, has made very many remarkable predictions, and displays a most mysterious faculty for communicating with the unseen world.”
“Bosh!”
“Like you, Nick, I have no faith in any of that rot!” laughed Weston. “Yet I know half a dozen brokers who consult her regularly as to the course of the stock-market,[26] as well as many other business men, all of whom claim to derive great advantages thereby. Her rooms are always occupied by some patron, either male or female, and her fees are very high. So there may be a little more in it, Nick, than you imagine.”
Nick shook his head incredulously.
“Come back to Hecuba,” he growled. “You say that this woman is sister to Badger’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“What is her right name?”
“Victoria Clayton.”
“A euphonious name, at least.”
“Badger’s wife was a Claudia Clayton, and at one time was on the stage,” continued Weston. “She, too, is a remarkably clever and capable woman, an accomplished linguist, a votary of physical culture, an expert tennis and golf-player, and one of the best cross-country riders among the cultured sporting set who lean to such pastimes. Both women, in fact, are over the average, and out of the ordinary.”
“Did Badger marry his wife from the stage?”
“I think not, Nick. She had retired some time before. They have been married about five years, I believe.”
“Come back to the picture,” said Nick. “It must have been taken just as the hold-up occurred.”
“Yes, it was.”
“Were the crooks aware of it?”
“No, indeed.”
“How was the trick pulled off?” demanded Nick curiously. “It’s not often that such a clever dodge is played upon professional crooks.”
“The woman who did it is clever, just as I tell you.”
“Tell me how it happened.”
“I will give you the facts as they were given to me.”
“By whom?”
“By Amos Badger and his wife,” replied Chief Weston. “He notified me by telephone of the robbery, and called here with his wife the next morning to report the details of the hold-up. Two days later, as soon as it could be finished and mounted, Badger brought me the photograph.”
“What about the hold-up?”
“It was committed about a week ago, at three o’clock in the afternoon,” said Weston. “Mrs. Badger and her sister, Madame Victoria, were returning from Canton to Brookline. When in a lonely section of a road that leads through a considerable belt of woods, they rounded a sharp curve and came suddenly upon a large automobile standing at an angle across the road. A man appeared to be fixing some break in the works, and was[28] crouching beside it, while a woman stood near-by in the road, apparently watching him.”
“Were they the only occupants of that car?”
“Yes, as the picture indicates. They were, too, the only persons in sight in either direction.”
“The machine appears to be a Winton.”
“That’s what it was, Nick, for Mrs. Badger noticed it.”
“Go on,” nodded Nick. “What more?”
“Naturally Mrs. Badger slowed down, nearly stopping, for the road was almost completely blocked by the other car,” continued Weston. “Then the veiled woman seen in the picture suddenly stepped forward, leveled a revolver, and commanded Mrs. Badger not to start her auto without permission.”
“H’m!” exclaimed Nick. “That was bold, indeed.”
“At the same moment the man, who was seen to be masked, sprang up and approached the two startled women, and commanded them to hand over their jewelry and money, and to be very lively about it.”
“Which they did?”
“Yes, Nick, for the women naturally were much alarmed. Both hastened to obey, though Madame Victoria did, I believe, undertake to make some argument[29] or protest. She was cut short, however, with a threat that quickly silenced her.”
“I see.”
“She had on the seat of the car, however, a small camera, which she frequently carries, one of her fads being that of securing pretty views, of which she has several large volumes. Looking down, she observed it, and had the presence of mind to conceal it with her hand, at the same time snapping it and luckily catching the picture you have there. I told her it was a clever piece of work, Nick, yet it is much to be regretted that the faces of the crooks were covered. Otherwise, we should possess a clue well worth having.”
“I believe your story,” assented Nick.
“The crooks, having secured their plunder, ordered the women to drive on, which they were very willing to do,” concluded Weston. “They were too frightened to venture back in pursuit of the rascals, but hurried home, to notify me by telephone.”
For some moments Nick had worn a decidedly thoughtful expression, as if he already had some project in his mind. Before the chief had fairly ceased speaking, moreover, Nick said bluntly:
“I’d like to talk with Mrs. Badger.”
“By telephone?” inquired Weston, wondering at the wish.
“No, personally.”
“You may easily do so by going out to Brookline.”
“I’ll go!” exclaimed Nick, abruptly rising. “I suppose I may keep this photograph for a short time?”
“Certainly.”
“As regards my undertaking to round up the rascals guilty of these robberies—well, I will give you my answer a little later,” Nick went on to say, as he opened the door by which he had entered. “I have no doubt, old friend, that it will be a favorable answer.”
“I hope so, Nick, I’m sure,” declared Weston, as he followed the former into the outer office, where Nick briefly halted.
Sanderson Hyde, perched upon a stool in the enclosure, appeared busy over his books, not so much as looking up at the intruders.
“Are you going out at once?” inquired Weston.
“Yes,” replied Nick, slipping the photograph into his pocket. “There are a few questions I wish to ask Mrs. Amos Badger. If I can find a public automobile, Weston, I think I will go out there in it. It’s the quickest conveyance, and this is a fine morning for a ride.”
“You’ll find what you want at the corner below,” replied[31] Weston. “The machine is all right, and so is the man. Grady is his name. Mention mine, Nick, and there’ll be no charges.”
“Oh, I’ll see that Grady gets his fee, all right,” laughed Nick, as he turned to leave the office. “I’ll see you later, Weston, probably early this afternoon.”
“Do so,” nodded the latter.
Then he turned to the busy clerk and added, a bit sharply:
“What did you say to that man, Hyde, when he came in here this morning?”
Young Sanderson Hyde looked up with raised brows.
“Nothing of consequence, chief,” he respectfully answered. “Only a few words about sending in his card.”
“Do you know the man?”
“No, sir. I don’t recall ever having seen him.”
“Well, the next time you see him take a good look at him, for that man is Nick Carter, the greatest detective that ever stood in leather.”
“The dickens!” gasped Hyde, with manifest astonishment. “You don’t mean it, chief! Not Nick Carter himself?”
“I always say what I mean,” growled Weston. “Hereafter, show him into my office without delay.”
The catlike eyes followed the burly figure of the[32] speaker as he returned through the passage, and presently the snap of the catch-lock sounded through the office.
Then Mr. Hyde laid down his pen and came out of the enclosure. His tread was more light and cautious than ordinary business should have required. He glanced sharply into both of the adjoining corridors, listened intently for a moment, then darted into a telephone-closet near-by and tightly closed the door.
Nick Carter found Grady on the corner mentioned, a shrewd-looking young Irishman, seated in an excellent runabout, reading the morning newspaper.
“Do you know Laurel Road, Brookline, Mr. Grady?” asked Nick, halting beside the machine.
“I know pretty near where it is, sir,” said Grady, alert for business. “I can find it for you, all right.”
“Take me out there,” said Nick, mounting to the seat. “To the house of Mr. Amos Badger.”
“The broker, sir,” nodded Grady. “I know the man, sir. I’ll land you out there in thirty minutes, sir, or less, if you say the word.”
“I’m in no special hurry,” said Nick. “Keep down to the speed limit.”
He did not tell Grady his name, nor that he came from the police headquarters. Neither did he enter into[33] much conversation with the man, for Nick was absorbed in thought about the disclosures made him, and the various possibilities of the work he was invited to undertake.
Grady, on his part, was not quite as good as his word. He ran a mile or two out of the direct course to Laurel Road, and then he had to round the great Chestnut Hill reservoir in order to hit the right track.
There are numerous wooded roads on the outskirts of fashionable Brookline, along which the attractive dwellings are much scattered, or divided by extensive estates; and through one of these roads Grady was sending his machine at a faster clip, to make up for lost time.
Suddenly, from out a little piece of woods some fifty yards away, a drunken fellow came staggering into the road, much as if he had just awakened from a nap in the shrubbery; and Nick Carter, being the first to see him, said quickly to his driver:
“Look out for that chap, Grady.”
“I see him, sir,” nodded Grady.
“He has a load aboard.”
“I should say so.”
The intoxicated man now heard the automobile approaching him from behind. He turned around, halting unsteadily in the middle of the road, where he stood[34] swaying and staring as if too fuddled to know which side of the road to seek to avoid being run over.
Grady naturally slowed down when scarcely twenty feet from the fellow.
“Get out of the road!” he impatiently yelled. “Take one side or the other, blast you!”
The auto had come to a dead stop.
The man in the road reeled a little to one side—and a little nearer.
Then, with movements as quick and decisive as a lightning stroke, he sprang forward, whipped out a brace of revolvers, leveled them straight at the heads of the two men in the auto, and sharply cried:
“Hands up! If you start that machine, driver, I’ll blow your head off!”
The voice was as firm and cold as ice, yet it had a ring as threatening as when blades of steel cross in deadly combat.
Nick Carter fairly caught his breath.
“Held up, by thunder!” was his first thought.
CHAPTER IV.
THE ESCAPE.
How to get the best of the highwayman was Nick Carter’s second thought.
This did not look to be easy, yet Nick’s hand instinctively went toward his hip pocket.
“Stop! Hands up!”
The reiterated command fairly cut the air with its threatening intensity.
Grady’s hands were already reaching after clouds.
Nick Carter’s now followed suit, and went into the air.
In the voice, eyes, and attitude of the ruffian in the road, there was that which convinced Nick that disobedience and defiance would certainly invite a bullet.
He saw, moreover, that the aim of the scoundrel was true to the mark, and that the finger on the trigger of the weapon covering his own breast was already beginning to contract, during the moment that he showed signs of giving fight.
“If one of you move before I command it,” said the highwayman, “I will instantly open fire upon you. And I never miss my aim!”
The threat was as calmly made as if the speaker had merely inquired the time of day, yet the voice did not for a moment lose its terribly convincing ring.
Nick seized the opportunity to look him over, and he felt comparatively sure that he was up against the same man that appeared in the Badger photograph.
The fellow was roughly clad at this time, however, with a soft felt hat drawn over his brows.
He was a well-built, athletic man, apparently somewhere in the forties; yet he was as quick as a cat in his movements, and evidently was endowed with supple muscles and nerves of steel.
The rascal was heavily bearded, yet this did not figure for much with Nick Carter. He rightly judged that the man was carefully disguised, yet the make-up was so cleverly prepared and adjusted that Nick, despite his experience in such artifices, could not detect it.
What Nick chiefly noted, in fact, was that the eyes of the man had in them the piercing gleam of deadly resolution, a fixed and vicious determination to execute the desperate deed that he had undertaken. There was no sign of intoxication now, which plainly had been assumed only for the purpose of holding up the travelers.
Though not lacking in courage, Nick Carter had his share of wisdom and discretion. He saw at a glance[37] that he was entirely helpless for the moment, at least, and he had no idea of deliberately inviting a bullet.
Such stirring episodes occur in a very few moments, and not thirty seconds had passed since the hold-up, when the voice of the highwayman again cut sharply upon the morning air.
“Chauffeur, you do what I command, or worse will be yours,” he cried sternly. “Lower one of your hands and remove your employer’s watch.”
Grady hesitated for the bare fraction of a second.
Nick saw the hand clutching one of the weapons begin to contract.
“Obey him, Grady,” said he, with ominous curtness.
“Bedad, I don’t like——”
“One more second, and I’ll——”
“Obey him!” hissed Nick, with suppressed vehemence. “Obey him, you idiot!”
Nick saw at a glance that that one more second would have ended with Grady’s receiving an ounce of lead.
Grady had the true grit and pugnacious characteristics of an Irishman, but he now dropped one hand and removed Nick’s watch and chain.
The highwayman came a step nearer, until he stood barely six feet away in the dusty road.
“Toss them to the ground at my feet,” he commanded, with his evil eye fixed upon the chauffeur.
“Do so, Grady,” said Nick.
Grady obeyed with an ugly scowl, and the watch and chain landed in the dust at the ruffian’s feet.
“Now, your employer’s purse.”
“In the breast pocket of my vest, Grady.”
“Look lively.”
Grady dove into Nick’s vest and drew out his pocketbook.
Nick still sat with his hands in the air, but not for a moment did his eyes leave those of the highwayman.
Though at first inclined to send Grady into his hip pocket after his revolver, Nick realized that the Irishman might not be quick and accurate in using it, and also that the crook was alert to their every move. The hazard was too great to be taken, and Nick decided to submit to the situation for the time being, and watch for an opportunity to turn the tables on the rascal.
Grady drew out the pocketbook, which contained about a hundred dollars and a few unimportant papers.
“Toss it into the road,” commanded the highwayman.
“Let it go, Grady,” said Nick.
“Your employer has more wisdom than you, Grady,”[39] said the crook, with a threatening sneer. “Obey at once, or I’ll let daylight into you.”
Grady tossed the pocketbook after the watch and chain.
“Now, up with your hands again!”
“Bedad, mister, some day the boot’ll be on the other leg,” snarled Grady, as he obeyed.
“It’ll not be to-day, Grady, take my word for that,” retorted the ruffian.
“The day will come, nevertheless,” Nick Carter now said, with ominous quietude.
“Do you think so?”
“I certainly do.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“That is because you do not know who I am,” said Nick pointedly.
“I don’t care who you are.”
“You don’t, eh?”
“I certainly don’t.”
“You will change your mind later.”
The scene was a curious one, the two men in the runabout seated with their hands high above their heads, while the man in the road stood as coolly intimidating them as if not the slightest danger existed for him, either from them or the sudden approach of some intruders upon the scene.
Nick had begun the conversation with the scamp in the hope of catching him napping for an instant, or that some person or another automobile might appear; but neither of them seemed probable, for the woodland road was deserted, and the highwayman did not for a second relax his vigilance or lower his leveled weapons.
With Nick Carter’s last remark, however, the rascal’s eyes took on an uglier gleam, and he evidently decided that he had better not defer making his escape. That he was clever in so doing, and foresaw that his victims might possibly be armed, appeared in the way he accomplished it.
With both men constantly under his eyes, he said sternly:
“The slightest move by either of you will cost him his life. I warn you that I shall instantly fire, not caution you again; so keep that in mind, and be wise.”
Then he slipped one of his revolvers into his coat pocket.
With the other weapon constantly covering his victims, with his gaze never leaving them, he slowly crouched down and groped over the ground till he had secured the plunder lying there, which he also dropped into his pocket.
Then he rose erect again, and drew his other weapon.
Nick was mentally praying for an opportunity to get just one shot at the knave when he resorted to flight.
The flight of the rascal, however, was as original and unexpected as his every other move had been.
“Now, Grady,” said he, with threatening austerity, “you do just what I tell you, neither more nor less.”
“Begorra! it looks as if I’d have to.”
“You bet you will!”
“What is it?”
“You start that machine of yours slowly, and turn it into the shrubbery at that side of the road.”
“How am I going to start it with me hands in the air,” snarled Grady, who had really seen Nick’s desire to delay matters.
The voice of the highwayman again took on that vicious ring which had warned Nick not to oppose him then and there.
“Don’t you speak again, Grady, or this gun will drown the sound of your voice,” he cried quickly. “You start that machine and turn it into the shrubbery—and don’t forget, either of you, that I shall keep you constantly covered. Start her up, Grady, and turn sharp out of the road!”
With the ugliest kind of a scowl, Grady gripped the steering-bar and slowly started the runabout, turning[42] toward the shrubbery that lined the road in that locality.
Just as the Irishman did so, however, there suddenly sounded from up the road the warning toot of an automobile-horn.
“Steady!—not a move!” yelled the robber warningly. “If you drop your hands, mister, I’ll fire!”
Nick could not then see the scoundrel, for he had darted back of the runabout when Grady turned it from the road.
Glancing quickly in the direction from which the horn had sounded, however, Nick now beheld a large touring-car come sweeping around a sharp curve of the road, some thirty yards away.
It was driven by a man with a beard, who was the one occupant of the car, and whose eyes and features were almost entirely masked with a pair of huge dust-glasses.
Nick now thought he could see a favorable finish to this unexpected hold-up, for the touring-car was approaching at a high rate of speed, and the escape of the thief appeared next to impossible.
Yet the latter, while reiterating his threatening commands, only backed a few paces toward the middle of the road.
The man in the approaching car evidently saw what was going on, and he began to slow down.
The rear of the runabout was now toward the road, with the machine half-hidden in the shrubbery.
“Stop her!” whispered Nick, not yet venturing to turn about on the seat. “Stop her at once!”
He did not wish to go too far in from the road.
Grady felt that he was taking his life in his hand—yet he promptly obeyed.
Instantly two sharp reports of a revolver rang out on the morning air.
The reports were followed by others, nearly as loud, occasioned by the bursting of the two rear tires of the runabout.
The highwayman had sent a bullet through each rubber tire, obviously bent upon partly disabling the runabout and thus preventing pursuit.
Then, just as the huge touring-car arrived upon the scene, the daring rascal darted back through the veil of smoke from his weapons and leaped aboard the car.
“Let her go!” he yelled commandingly.
The driver instantly gave her full speed, and the car swept on down the road with the velocity of an express-train.
Already upon his feet in the runabout, Nick Carter[44] whipped out his revolver and fired twice at the occupants of the departing car. His aim was ruined by Grady, however, who excitedly began backing the runabout into the road, and Nick’s bullets went wide of their mark.
In ten seconds the touring-car was vanishing in a cloud of dust around a distant curve of the road.
“Hold on!” roared Grady, thinking Nick was about to alight in the road. “I’ll follow them divils, sir, tires or no tires!”
“Follow nothing!” growled Nick, thrusting his revolver back into his pocket. “You might as well try to follow a streak of lightning.”
“Will you let that blackguard escape?”
“Let him escape!” exclaimed Nick derisively. “I should say, Grady, that he has already escaped. You could not overtake him with this machine if your life depended upon it.”
“Bedad, that’s right, sir,” Grady now admitted, more calmly. “Yet the man in that car may try to do the rascal——”
“Bosh!” interrupted Nick, with a growl. “The driver of that car was the robber’s confederate.”
“D’ye think so?”
“I know so, Grady,” declared Nick, now plainly seeing[45] how the entire job, which had taken less than five minutes, had been planned and executed.
“I suspected as much when the man slowed down only enough to let the crook aboard,” added Nick. “His approach was timed to a nicety. It’s odds that he was watching the hold-up from beyond the curve of the road, and that he knew just when the other wanted him to approach.”
“Bedad, sir, I reckon you’re right.”
“Oh, we have much the worse of it for the present, Grady, and have been held up by two of the gang of crooks now at work in these parts,” added Nick. “But I will yet break even with them, I give you my word for that.”
“Me tires——”
“I will see that you are paid for them,” interrupted Nick, much to Grady’s satisfaction. “Can you run the machine back to town as it is?”
“Sure, sir, I can.”
“Well, I don’t wish to return quite yet.”
“All right, sir.”
“Keep on, Grady, and take me to Badger’s house,” Nick bruskly commanded. “Look lively, too! This does settle it, Grady, as far as I am concerned.”
“What d’ye mean, sir?”
“I mean that I will land this gang of highway robbers, every man and woman of them, or lose a leg in the attempt,” cried Nick, with Chief Weston’s request then in his mind. “That’s what I mean, Grady. Let her go lively, my man, and head straight for Amos Badger’s house.”
CHAPTER V.
THE HOUSE IN LAUREL ROAD.
The direction taken by Nick Carter and Grady to reach Laurel Road and the house of Amos Badger was the same as that in which the highwayman had fled with his confederate in the touring-car.
Nick felt some little chagrin over thus having been successfully held up and robbed, yet this feeling was somewhat assuaged by the fact that he had obtained a good look at the thief, and had a clear impression of his general features.
Nick felt quite sure, despite the rascal’s disguise, that he could identify him if they again met, or, at least, recognize his peculiarly keen eyes and cutting voice.
Though it then gave him no surprise, the distance to Laurel Road from, the scene of the hold-up was less than[47] a quarter of a mile, and then about the same distance to the place owned and occupied by Mr. Amos Badger.
The surroundings were about as stated by Chief Weston.
The road ran through an extreme outskirt of the town, and was for the most part shut in by woods, cleared only here and there for building.
There were but three dwellings on this secluded road, none of which was within view of Badger’s place, which was less modern and much more extensive than the others, as if it had been a family homestead for several generations.
Nick surveyed the place with some interest as he approached it.
The house was a large, wooden mansion, standing fully fifty yards from the road. It had a broad veranda in front and on one side, the latter terminating with a porte-cochère at the side entrance of the house.
A gravel driveway between a double row of elms and beeches led in from the road, passing the front and one side of the house, then leading out to a large stable well to the rear of the dwelling.
In addition to these there were several wooden outbuildings, one of which was a long carriage-house adjoining the stable.
The features mentioned, together with the broad estate covered with garden plots and shade trees, with a background of woods in the near distance, gave the entire place a rural aspect not often seen so near a large and thickly settled town.
As the runabout sped up the long driveway, Nick saw a man cleaning a large automobile just beyond the porte-cochère; but the vehicle bore no resemblance to the one in which the crooks had fled, and the circumstance did not then appeal to him with any special significance.
“Run round to the side entrance, Grady,” said he. “I’ll ask that workman who’s at home.”
Grady nodded, and presently brought the runabout to a stop under the porte-cochère.
Nick quickly sprang down and approached the man at work near-by. Instead of making any inquiry concerning the inmates of the house, however, Nick abruptly demanded:
“Have you seen an automobile pass along Laurel Road, my man?”
My man was one Jerry Conley, chauffeur, hostler, and all-round workman out of doors for Mr. Amos Badger. He was a short, stocky man, of about thirty years, with a head nearly as round as a bullet. His face was smoothly[49] shaven, and was lighted by a pair of as shifty, crafty eyes as ever lighted a human countenance.
They came round with half a leer to meet those of the detective, while the man arose from his work on the car. Wiping his hands on his overalls, he indulged in a series of jerky nods, steadily eying Nick all the while, then deliberately inquired:
“What’s that you say?”
“I asked if you had seen an automobile pass along Laurel Road,” replied Nick, not half-liking the fellow’s looks.
“Aye, I have,” said Conley.
“Which way did it go?”
“Which one d’ye mean?”
“Which one?” echoed Nick, sharply eying the fellow. “I mean one that may have passed within five or ten minutes.”
It was then less than ten minutes since the robbery.
“Oh, if that’s what you mean, mister, I haven’t seen any,” Conley now vouchsafed, with a less steadfast scrutiny of Nick’s countenance.
“You haven’t, eh?”
“Not to-day.”
“Did you think I meant last week?”
“I didn’t think at all, mister,” said Conley, stooping[50] to pick up a bit of cotton waste from the ground. “I only heard what you asked, and that was whether I’d seen an automobile pass along Laurel Road. I’ve seen hundreds of ’em, mister, but none this morning.”
“You should have known that I meant this morning.”
“So I would, mister, if you’d said this morning,” Conley replied, with a leer. “I never know more’n I’m paid for knowing.”
“See here, my man,” said Nick quite sternly. “If the master you serve carries the same cut of jib as yourself, it’s long odds that he——”
What more Nick would have said was abruptly withheld, however, for his quick ear heard the side door of the house opened, and then the fall of a man’s feet on the veranda, followed by the inquiry:
“What’s the trouble, Jerry?”
“None at all, sir,” replied Conley, turning with a grin to his questioner. “Not unless this gentleman is looking for trouble, which I reckon he isn’t.”
Nick had already turned to survey the first speaker, whom he rightly conjectured might be Mr. Amos Badger, despite that it was then an hour when a stock-broker should have been busy at the market.
He stood near the rail of the veranda, an erect, well-built man of forty, cleanly shaven, with dark hair and[51] eyes, the latter lighting a rather attractive yet noticeably strong and determined face.
He was in slippers, and wore a house-jacket of figured woolen, while his neck was bandaged with several thicknesses of red flannel, as if he was afflicted with a sore throat or with a cold. This was further evinced by his hoarse voice when addressing Conley, yet his gaze all the while was fixed upon the detective.
Nick promptly took up the remark of the chauffeur, saying, with a quiet laugh:
“No, I’m not specially looking for trouble. I have had enough of it for one day.”
“Enough of trouble?” inquired Badger, with an air of wonderment at Nick’s meaning.
“Quite enough, sir, and at considerable expense. I’m out a valuable watch and chain also what money I had on my person.”
“Not robbed?”
“That’s what,” nodded Nick. “Held up by the crooks who are doing such rascally work in these parts. But there’ll come a day of reckoning, sir, you may safely wager your whole fortune on that.”
There stole into Badger’s dark eyes, which were still fixed upon Nick’s face, a momentary gleam of resentment.
“What sent you here so quickly after being robbed?” he asked, with sinister inflection. “Did you expect to find the thieves in my house?”
“Oh, no, not at all.”
“Or did you come to condole with me over a like mishap, since misery likes company? The headquarters of the police is, I should say, the proper place for you to have hurriedly visited.”
“I have just come from there,” replied Nick, a bit dryly.
“Ah, that is different.”
“I merely asked that man if he had seen an automobile pass,” added Nick, now approaching the veranda-steps. “As a matter of fact, sir, I was on my way to this house when I was held up by the crooks. Is Mrs. Badger at home this morning, or her husband?”
“Both are at home.”
“Ah, very good!” exclaimed Nick.
“I am Mr. Badger.”
“I would like a brief interview with you and your wife.”
“Regarding what?”
“The recent robbery of which your wife was a victim.”
“Are you a reporter?”
“I am a detective.”
“From Pemberton Square?”
“From New York,” replied Nick. “Yet I have just come from Chief Weston’s office, in Boston, and at his request I shall undertake to run down the gang of thieves who are at work in this section.”
Though a doubtful smile curled Badger’s thin, firm lips at this confident announcement, he at once displayed more cordiality when Nick stated his vocation.
“I hope that you may succeed, officer,” said he, with the same husky voice. “Come into the house. From New York, did you say?”
“Yes,” replied Nick, entering. “You may wait for me, Grady.”
“All right, sir,” cried Grady, from his seat in the runabout.
“What name, officer?” inquired Badger.
“My name is Carter.”
“Not Nick Carter?”
“The same.”
Badger appeared surprised, Nick observed, and his eyes lighted. He quickly extended his hand, saying heartily, in wheezy tones:
“Well, well, I’m glad to meet you, Detective Carter, and to hear that you think of getting after these highwaymen. I know you by reputation, sir, and I have[54] no doubt that you will accomplish more than is being done by Weston’s pack of mongrels. Forsooth, if you do not, you will accomplish very little.”
The last was said with a covert sneer that fell unpleasantly on Nick’s ears. He decided, however, that Badger was probably nettled by the failure of the Boston detectives to recover the property of which his wife had been robbed, and Nick thought no more of the matter at that time.
As he followed the man into the attractively furnished library, from the windows of which could be seen the stable and driveway, Nick agreeably rejoined:
“I am told that not much progress is being made against these road robbers?”
“None at all, Mr. Carter, that I can discover,” replied Badger, with a scornful shrug of his shoulders. “Here is my wife, sir. Claudia, this is Detective Carter, of New York, sent out here by Chief Weston to inquire about the robbery. My wife, Mr. Carter.”
In the light of what Chief Weston had told him about her, Nick surveyed the woman with more than cursory interest.
Though now but thirty, she still retained in face and figure most of the beauty and freshness of youth. She was dark, like her husband, and rather above medium[55] height, with a figure at once noticeable for its grace and suppleness. She had clean-cut features, a firm mouth and chin, with a square jaw that plainly indicated more than ordinary womanly strength.
She met Nick with a lively flash of her dark eyes, and said agreeably, as they shook hands:
“I am pleased to see you, Detective Carter. I do hope you’ll excuse my husband’s appearance, however, for he looks dreadfully with those red flannels around his neck. A sore throat has confined him to the house several days, and he insists that nothing but red flannel bandages will cure——”
“Oh, never mind my looks, Claudia,” interrupted Badger petulantly. “Mr. Carter can put up with my looks, I’m sure, and probably he has more important business than that of discussing the curative virtues of red flannel bandages.”
“No apology is necessary, Mrs. Badger, I assure you,” smiled Nick, as he accepted a chair. “I did have a little business with you when I started for here this morning, but I do not now regard it as important.”
“How is that?” inquired Badger, with a furtive gleam of distrust in his watchful eyes.
“It has lost the element of importance,” laughed Nick. “I did intend to question you closely as to the personal[56] appearance of the rascals by whom you were robbed, Mrs. Badger, but since I have now seen one of them myself, I need make no inquiries. I have no doubt that the rascal I encountered was the same by whom you were robbed.”
“You don’t mean that you, too, have been robbed?” exclaimed Claudia, with countenance reflecting profound amazement.
“Exactly,” nodded Nick.
“When?”
“This morning.”
“On your way here?”
“Yes.”
“Well, well! What are these suburban roads coming to, Amos?” cried the woman, quite aghast. “It soon will not be safe to venture even into one’s front yard.”
“I believe you,” said Badger, with a wheezy growl. “I do hope, Mr. Carter, that you’ll accomplish something. What do you intend doing toward rounding up these scoundrels?”
Nick laughed and shook his head.
“That is a difficult question for me to answer at present,” said he. “I must first discover some clue with which to start, some thread that is strong enough to follow,[57] and which possibly may lead to the identification of the knaves and where they are located.”
“Have you any such clue at present?” inquired Mrs. Badger, with a smile and glance well calculated to invite a frank rejoinder.
“Not the slightest.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Stay,” added Nick, as if with an afterthought. “I believe I have something that may prove of advantage.”
“Good enough!” exclaimed Badger, with eyes dilating curiously. “Of what does it consist, Mr. Carter?”
Nick was then reaching into his breast pocket, and did not observe the speaker’s quickened interest, which had not been betrayed in his husky voice.
“A photograph,” he replied, producing it. “The one taken by you, Mrs. Badger, at the time you were robbed.”
“Oh, you are mistaken about that, Detective Carter,” Claudia quickly exclaimed.
“Mistaken?”
“I took no photograph, sir.”
“Yet——”
“It was taken by my sister, Miss Clayton,” interrupted Mrs. Badger. “Dear me, I couldn’t have done it for my life. I was so unnerved by the terrible episode and[58] sight of the robber’s revolver that I had no power to see or do anything except what he commanded.”
“Yet one of them was a woman,” smiled Nick.
“I admit that, sir, but she had a revolver, and the mere sight of a weapon has always terrified me,” explained Claudia, with a shudder.
“You were quite sure that she was a woman?” inquired Nick.
“Sure.”
“That it was not a man clad in woman’s apparel?”
“Oh, absolutely. Her voice would have convinced me of her sex.”
“A voice may be assumed.”
“Yet I am positive that I am right.”
“She was thickly veiled, I understand?”
“True.”
“Then you did not see her face?”
“I did not.”
“Her figure, as seen in the photograph, appears very tall—too tall for a woman,” persisted Nick.
“Nevertheless, Detective Carter, I am positive that she was a woman, and not a man in female apparel,” declared Mrs. Badger, with emphasis. “Not only her garments and voice plainly prove it, but I also noticed her[59] hands. They were too slender, white, and well formed for the hands of a man.”
Nick now laughed lightly, remarking, in bantering tones, not then attributing any serious weight to his words:
“That last, Mrs. Badger, is capital. Yet I must observe that, for one too terrified at the time to say or do anything but obey the commands of that brace of crooks, you did note some quite delicate details. Small hands, eh? Well, well, I think quite likely you are right.”
A wave of crimson had risen over Mrs. Badger’s face, while on that of her husband a darker frown was settling.
“I only happened to notice the woman’s hands, Detective Carter, merely because she held in one of them the revolver by which I was so frightened, and from which I scarcely could take my eyes. Naturally, then, I noticed the hand that held it.”
Nick vaguely wondered why she had gone to the trouble to make this explanation, for there seemed to him to be no special occasion for it; and before he could frame any reply, Badger huskily demanded, with sinister curiosity:
“Why are you pressing such questions as these, Detective[60] Carter? I fail to see that they signify anything very important.”
“It signifies considerable to me, Mr. Badger, this question of sex,” replied Nick, with a quiet laugh.
“Why so?”
“Because I shall be able to proceed much more intelligently, sooner or later, if I know positively that this gang of crooks consists only of men, one or more of whom is masquerading at times as a woman.”
“There is something in that,” admitted Badger.
“Female highwaymen are not common in these days,” added Nick pointedly; “and I find it hard to credit the evidence presented in this photograph, despite your wife’s very natural confidence in the reliability of her own eyes.”
“I don’t much wonder at it,” Badger now laughed indifferently.
“It is not at all material who took the photograph,” Nick went on. “I understand that Miss Clayton has an office in town. I think I will call upon her this morning, in the hope that she may have seen something worthy of note at the time of the robbery. Am I likely to find her at this hour?”
“Yes, surely,” exclaimed Mrs. Badger, rising. “If you will wait just one moment, Detective Carter, I will give you her business-card.”
“If you please.”
“You will then have no trouble in finding her rooms.”
Nick bowed, then arose and took his hat from the table.
Both Badger and his wife accompanied him to the door, the latter giving him the card mentioned, and the former remarking, as Nick descended the steps and entered the runabout:
“I hope you’ll inform me, Mr. Carter, if you get any reliable clue to the identity of these rascals. If I can aid you in any way, moreover, I beg that you will command me.”
“Thank you,” returned Nick, nodding for Grady to start the machine. “I will bear it in mind, Mr. Badger.”
As he rode down the driveway he read the card which he still retained in his hand, but the name of Miss Clayton did not appear upon it.
It was the card of—Madame Victoria.
It gave the street and number of her suite of rooms, and announced that she was an astrologer, an impressionist, and a spiritualist medium. It further stated that she could tell one’s fortune from the cradle to the grave, that she could be profitably consulted for information concerning dead friends, lost articles, missing relatives[62] and heirs, or for advice in business matters, love-affairs, and all things pertaining to one’s personal welfare.
Nick read the card twice with considerable interest.
“Quite a round of accomplishments!” he grimly said to himself. “I wonder why she doesn’t locate the property of which she was robbed. The woman is evidently a charlatan, a pretender, who imposes upon credulous and weak-minded fools to get their money.
“Madame Victoria, eh? Well, I will now give you a call, madame, and possibly a call-down! I’ll wager I take means to fool and expose you!”
Such was the trend of Nick’s thoughts after reading Madame Victoria’s card, to whose rooms he next proceeded.
Without the slightest faith in this woman’s alleged powers, however, Nick was approaching one of the most strange and startling experiences of his checkered career.
CHAPTER VI.
MADAME VICTORIA.
It was nearly noon when Nick Carter, after dismissing Grady, entered the handsome granite building on Tremont Street in which the rooms of Madame Victoria were located.
In so far as her pretentions to foretelling the future were concerned, as well as her other alleged powers, Nick felt morally sure that the woman was a fraud. Yet he decided to take no chances that she possibly had seen him before, and would remember his face, and in the corridor of the building he carefully adjusted a simple but effective disguise.
In so doing, he had a double object, however; that of first getting an insight into Madame Victoria’s business and her alleged occult endowments, merely to satisfy his own curiosity; and, second, that of afterward being able to return and question her about the robbery without her suspecting his first visit.
“I’ll have this much the best of her, at all events,” he said to himself, while adjusting his disguise. “If she is as clever as she claims to be, however, she should be able to see right through it. Yet I wager that she does nothing of the kind.”
In the corridor of the second floor was a door bearing Madame Victoria’s name in gilt letters, and Nick unceremoniously entered.
He found himself in an elaborately furnished waiting-room, with windows overlooking the Boston Common. The carpet was velvet. The furniture was upholstered with richly figured plush. There were fine lace draperies[64] at the windows, and the walls were hung with choice paintings, while various ornaments of one kind or another added to the adornment of the place.
Nick decided that Chief Weston was correct in stating that this woman did a lucrative business.
From a chair near the window a young girl quickly arose, laying aside a novel, and Nick inquired if Madame Victoria was in.
“Yes, sir, but she is engaged just now,” said the girl. “She will be at liberty in a few minutes, however.”
“I’ll wait,” said Nick tersely.
“Take a chair, sir. If you will give me your card, sir, I will take it to Madame Victoria as soon as her visitor leaves, and will learn whether she will give you a sitting at this time. It is nearly her hour for lunch.”
Nick did not discuss the matter. He gave the girl a card bearing a fictitious name, with several of which he was always provided.
Presently a richly dressed, middle-aged woman emerged from an inner room, drying her eyes with her handkerchief. She hurriedly departed, however, after viewing her hat and hair in the mirror.
“She must have heard from some dead one,” thought Nick, with grim derisiveness. “Either that, or some infernal calamity has been predicted for her. I’m blessed[65] if I’m not a good bit curious to know what I shall get in there. Maybe I shall get it in the neck.”
He had not long to wait, for the servant presently announced that Madame Victoria would receive him in the inner room.
Nick left his hat on the table, and entered.
At first sight the view within was startling.
The single window of the inner room was heavily curtained with black, excluding every ray of daylight. Above a small square table in the middle of the floor, however, there burned two electric lights enveloped in green globes, the rays from which shed a weird and uncanny light throughout the room.
On the walls were hung numerous astrological charts, a number of horoscopes of celebrated men, more accurately cast after death than before; and along with these were various devices and insignia, of the meaning and object of which Nick was entirely ignorant.
On a stand near the table were several packs of playing-cards, presumably for fortune-telling, if no other amusement.
In other respects the room was well furnished, with a book-case against one wall, a couch opposite, and several small but expensive chairs.
What chiefly startled Nick, however, was less this curious appearance of the room than that of its solitary inmate.
Madame Victoria was seated at the table, a woman under thirty, large of figure, without being corpulent, an attractive, self-reliant face, and an abundance of brownish-red hair done up in picturesque disorder. She was clad in a long purple robe, figured with small silver stars, along with a crescent moon here and there among them, the whole conveying a vague suggestion of a midnight sky. The garment was voluminous, entirely covering her waist and skirts.
From the large, loose sleeves, and in vivid contrast with the rich dark-purple, protruded a pair of shapely bare arms and hands; yet both these and the woman’s face, uplifted when Nick entered, were lent a disagreeable, deathlike pallor by the green light of the room.
Her first glance was at Nick’s left hand, at a valuable carbuncle ring on the third finger, and then her eyes rose up to his face while she abruptly exclaimed, with a curious mingling of vivacity and surprise:
“Dear me! Oh, dear me, what a strange feeling, Mr. Sibley. I feel just as if two men had entered this room.”
Nick was a bit startled.
Sibley was the name on the card he had sent in, and[67] the woman’s immediate remark, in the light of Nick’s disguise, was at least a little peculiar.
“Two men, eh?” said Nick inquiringly. “Well, I am quite alone, madame, I assure you.”
Madame Victoria struck her brow violently with her palm several times, then shook her head, as if bent upon shaking out some of its ideas, and finally cried, with obvious perplexity:
“Well, well, this is quite extraordinary. I never had such a strange feeling. I am impressed exactly as if two men had entered the room.”
“Impressed?”
“Take a chair, sir,” smiled Madame Victoria quite graciously. “You must understand, Mr. Sibley, that I am what I call an impressionist.”
“I hear and know the meaning of the word,” laughed Nick, with curiosity still further piqued, “yet I cannot say that I fully understand.”
Madame Victoria shrugged her fine shoulders, and regarded him archly from under her lifted brows.
“Ah, well, that is not to be wondered at, Mr. Sibley,” she replied agreeably. “Very few people understand the true nature and source of their own impressions, to say nothing of those of another.”
“That is quite true, madame,” assented Nick, bowing.
“In fact, sir, I cannot say that I understand even my own,” added the woman, with a pretty display of frankness. “They are so vivid at times, yet frequently seem so utterly improbable, that I often shrink from expressing them. I should have felt so in this case, Mr. Sibley, and I doubt if I should have said what I did, sir, had it not come from me quite involuntarily, and before I could repress it. Of course, sir, I see that you are entirely alone.”
“You interest me,” smiled Nick, bent upon leading her on. “May I ask of what your present impressions consist?”
Madame Victoria drew forward in her chair, and rested her pretty arms upon the table. Her face became grave again, and once more her eyes briefly lingered upon the ring on Nick’s finger, yet in an absent way that did not attract his attention.
After a few moments, during which she appeared to be yielding to some outside influence, she looked up at him and said:
“There is something about you, sir, that I really cannot explain. I cannot get rid of this impression of a double personality here. I will try to fathom it, Mr. Sibley, if you will be patient.”
“Take your time, madame,” said Nick, smiling at her across the table.
Madame Victoria nodded and laughed, displaying her white teeth and calling up a charming dimple in each velvety cheek.
“As you probably know, Mr. Sibley,” said she, “people come here for various objects. Some call to have their horoscopes cast, others to have a mediumistic sitting with me in the hope of receiving communications from dead friends, while others call to consult me about business and love-affairs, or to have their fortunes told by the cards.”
“So I imagined,” bowed Nick.
“But you came for nothing of the kind, that’s my impression,” exclaimed Madame Victoria, with an abrupt exhibition of earnestness.
“It is quite correct.”
“You have no faith in any of those things.”
“That also is true.”
“Dear me, I am awfully perplexed,” laughed the woman, apparently with vain efforts to straighten out something in her mind. “You seem to me just like two men, which I, of course, know is absurd. Yet I cannot rid myself of the effects of that impression. I shall try[70] to do all that I can for you, however, and will give you what comes to me.”
“If you please, madame,” said Nick, not a little impressed and puzzled by her curious statements and apparently genuine endeavors.
Again Madame Victoria beat her brow with her palm, so violently that Nick did not wonder that her hair was somewhat disordered.
As she suddenly fixed her eyes upon him, he noticed that they began to dilate and glow with almost preternatural brilliancy, while she abruptly exclaimed, as if under the impulse of another of her vivid impressions:
“You have recently been in danger, Mr. Sibley, in great danger!”
“Is that your present impression?” inquired Nick.
“Yes, sir. It must be correct, too, or I could not feel it so strongly.”
“Go on, madame.”
“You are a man who encounters many dangers,” Madame Victoria continued, now speaking much more rapidly and earnestly. “Your life is made up of stirring adventures and frequent perils.”
“That is very true,” admitted Nick.
“I see you hunting—hunting—hunting!” cried the woman, with suppressed vehemence. “I don’t know what[71] it means, sir, but you seem to be constantly hunting, searching after persons and things, and delving into all kinds of complicated mysteries.”
“Well, well! that hits pretty near the mark,” laughed Nick.
“Oh, dear! and I see you all surrounded with a red atmosphere, as if you were not a stranger to violent combats and the sight of blood.”
“I have seen my share of both.”
“Yes, yes, that is plain to me, very plain,” she rapidly went on. “You are a busy man, and you—wait! I am now carried away from here. I feel as if I were riding in a railway-train. I don’t quite interpret the impression as yet, but I feel—oh, now I have it! You don’t belong here, sir, not in this city. You are a stranger here.”
“Well, not exactly that,” replied Nick, more and more puzzled by the accuracy with which she was hitting the mark.
“I don’t mean that you never were here, and are not familiar with this city,” cried Madame Victoria quickly. “I mean only that your business is not here, that your interests are in some distant place. Isn’t that right?”
“Nearly so.”
“I knew it was.”
“How did you know it?”
“Because of my impression, that of being carried away in the cars,” explained the woman. “I presumably get it from you, sir, for I am susceptible to all of the conditions surrounding those who come here to consult me.”
“That is quite mysterious.”
“So many think.”
“How do you explain it?”
“I don’t explain it. I know only that it is so.”
“Yet——”
“One moment, please!” exclaimed Madame Victoria, again leaning nearer. “You have recently lost something, Mr. Sibley.”
Nick laughed.
“Can you direct me how to find it?” he asked.
“Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“I cannot tell what it is, yet—yet I feel that you miss something usually carried on your person.”
“That is true.”
“No, I cannot direct you how to find it—at least, not at present. It is not still, not located yet. It is moving—moving—moving. I see smoke and hear guns. I feel the same impression as a moment ago—that you have lately been in danger.”
Again she was speaking with that rapid, vehement[73] earnestness as before, as if every sensitive string of her delicate organism had been suddenly struck, thrilling her with new and strangely correct impressions.
Nick Carter sat watching her as a cat watches a mouse, but he could detect no sign of simulation or treachery. Her voice, looks, actions, and constantly changing moods all appeared to be perfectly genuine.
“I admit that I recently have been in danger,” said he, in reply to her last remark.
Madame Victoria bowed over the table, again fixing her eyes upon him with that strangely intensified stare.
“There are greater dangers before you,” she rapidly declared.
“Is that so?” inquired Nick, wondering what was now coming.
“Much greater dangers.”
“Of what kind?”
“Many kinds.”
“A general assortment, eh?”
“You regard them lightly, but I judge that to be like you.”
“Rather.”
“If you do so at this time, Mr. Sibley, you will do wrong.”
“Why so?”
“The perils threatening you cannot be wisely ignored. I am impressed with a conviction that your life is imperiled by——Stop a moment!”
“Well?”
Again Madame Victoria beat her brow, shaking her head violently, apparently striving to get a clear interpretation of her impressions.
“Ah, I have it!” she suddenly cried. “You are in Boston on business—perilous business.”
“Well?” queried Nick, determined to tell her nothing.
“You came to me for advice?”
“Yes.”
“Then I advise you to drop it.”
“Drop what?”
“This perilous business.”
“Do you know of what it consists?”
“I do not get any impression of that,” replied Madame Victoria, with curious nervous efforts to make her mind receptive to the information desired, efforts that brought the perspiration to her neck and brow in tiny drops.
“No, no. I do not get it—cannot get it,” she presently added, with a gasp. “I have no idea of what it consists. Yet I advise you to drop it.”
“Because of the dangers it involves?”
“Yes.”
“They will not deter me,” said Nick, with a headshake. “I never run from danger.”
“There is yet another reason.”
“For dropping the business?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“You will fail.”
“Fail in my undertaking?”
“That is my impression. Ah, I see you smile!” cried the woman, wiping her damp cheeks and brow. “You do wrong to deride and ignore my predictions. Ask others to whom I have given advice. I have never yet erred in one of these predictions. Take my advice, Mr. Sibley, and avoid the impending perils.”
Nick had smiled incredulously, and arose to go. He saw that the woman had no more to tell him, nor had he any inclination to hear more in the same line.
Having paid her fee in money obtained by cashing a check in order to settle with Grady for the damage to his runabout, Nick bade Madame Victoria good morning, and departed.
At the door of the inner room the woman tendered him her hand, which he gravely accepted, noting at the same time that it was damp with perspiration, yet as cold as a hand of clay.
CHAPTER VII.
THE DEEPER MYSTERY.
Nick Carter was puzzled.
His interview with Madame Victoria had, in a way, left him on the rocks.
He could not account for the knowledge which, in indirect and equivocal terms, she had displayed. It plainly indicated that she had from some source received information concerning him and his business designs, as well as about the losses he had suffered in his encounter with the highwayman.
Had this information really been derived through the occult powers of which the woman claimed to be possessed?
Nick Carter was not ready to believe that it had, for he had but little faith in the supernatural.
On the other hand, any natural explanation seemed equally difficult.
“My intended visit to her rooms was known to only three persons by whom she could have been informed, and they were Badger and his wife, and Grady,” Nick perplexedly reasoned. “I know positively that Grady did not inform her. Assuming even that the Badgers[77] did so by communicating with her by telephone, they cannot possibly have guessed that I would call upon her in disguise. My make-up, together with the fictitious name I gave, certainly should have blinded her to my identity. Yet I do not believe she could have guessed, merely by chance, all of the facts that she imparted, and I’m blessed if I can quite fathom the mystery.”
The more Nick thought about it the more positive he became that there existed some crooked work under the surface, and this made him even the more determined to ferret out what it was.
“I’ll telegraph to Chick and Patsy to come here,” he abruptly decided, as he returned to the Adams House, at which he had registered. “I shall need them to assist me in locating these road robbers, whom I am now fully resolved to run down. After sending a message to Chick I will have another bout with the fortune-teller. I’m blessed if I’ll let her throw me down in this fashion—not and keep me down!”
It was but a short walk to the hotel, and there Nick sent a telegram to Chick Carter, his chief assistant, ordering him and Patsy, one of his younger detectives, to come to Boston by the first train and join him at the Adams House.
Nick knew that both would arrive late that evening,[78] and before then he hoped to have solved that portion of the mystery relating to the Tremont Street fortune-teller.
After spending half an hour at lunch, Nick went up to his room and examined his disguise, which he had not removed.
“It is perfect in every detail,” he mentally declared, while surveying himself in the mirror. “She cannot possibly have detected the make-up, and there must be some other explanation of her insinuations. I’ll take it off and visit her this time in proper person.”
While removing the disguise, Nick noticed the carbuncle ring on his finger, and he immediately took it off and slipped it into the pocket of another suit he was then about putting on.
“I’ll have nothing about me that she may have seen this morning,” he said to himself. “There’s a deal of crafty keenness in those bright eyes of hers, and I’ll make sure that she discovers nothing to identify me with her visitor by the name of Sibley. If she succeeds in doing that, the witch, there will be something more than natural in it—or some sort of rascally cunning at work under the surface. I’ll wager that she will have no impression of two men entering her room this time, nor that I was there this morning.”
Fashionably clad, with his strong, attractive face inviting observation, Nick appeared for the second time at the rooms of Madame Victoria, just about an hour after leaving them.
The girl in the waiting-room did not recognize him, and Nick took even the precaution to vary his voice several degrees from that he had previously used.
“Is Madame Victoria disengaged?” he inquired.
“She is, sir, just at present,” said the girl.
“My card,” said Nick tersely. “I would like a business interview with her.”
“One moment, sir.”
The girl vanished into the inner room, then returned without the card.
“Madame will receive you, Mr. Carter,” she said, bowing.
Nick left his hat as before, and approached the inner room.
His recollections of it were not agreeable. The close atmosphere, the green light, the walls hung with mystical insignia, the purple-robed woman who had so baffled his usual keen reasoning, and the touch of whose hand lingered with him as when a person has touched the hand of a corpse—all had left upon him a disagreeable[80] impression, as when one has meddled with things pertaining to the black arts.
He found Madame Victoria seated at the table, as before, looking more like a sorceress to him than ever, as he stepped gravely over the threshold.
The woman looked up from the card between her thumb and fingers, and Nick thought he detected a subtle light leap up from the depths of her brilliant eyes. It vanished so quickly that he could not feel sure of it, however, despite that he was now alert for the slightest betrayal that might be of significance to him.
Madame Victoria was the first to speak.
“Take a chair, sir,” said she, smiling a bit oddly. “Your card informs me that you are Detective Carter, of New York.”
“Yes, madame.”
“My maid said you desire a business interview with me.”
“If you please.”
“Business from my standpoint, or your own?” inquired Madame Victoria, still smiling. “In other words, Detective Carter, does your visit relate to your business or to mine?”
“The business is ours,” said Nick pointedly.
“Ah, sort of a mutual interest,” laughed the woman, with a captivating glance at him.
“Precisely.”
“Then, since you have not called to consult me professionally,” said the madame, “I shall feel free to drop my usual mental attitude, that of holding myself susceptible to outward impressions, and receive you more conventionally. About what do you wish to see me, Detective Carter?”
Nick instinctively felt that he was already being headed off by the woman, and he saw, with half an eye, if he had not seen it before, that he was up against a remarkably shrewd and clever character, one who was nearly his equal in diplomacy and cunning.
Nick briefly set aside the motive with which he had called, therefore, and reverted to the business which primarily had sent him to Madame Victoria’s rooms.
“I wish to ask you a few questions,” said he.
“About what?”
“About the recent robbery of yourself and Mrs. Badger, of Brookline.”
“Ah, indeed!”
“I am engaged by Chief Weston, of the local police department, to investigate some of these highway robberies[82] committed about here, and to undertake the arrest of the culprits.”
“Dear me! I am delighted to hear it, Detective Carter, and I do hope you’ll succeed,” exclaimed Madame Victoria, now displaying a very vivacious interest.
“I hope so, too.”
“I have lost some valuable jewels, and so has Claudia—that’s Mrs. Badger, sir—and I should be more than glad to recover them.”
“No doubt.”
“Or to aid you in hastening the arrest and conviction of the thieves,” added the woman. “In what way can I assist you, Detective Carter?”
“By answering a few questions for me, madame——”
“Pardon!” she interposed.
“Well?”
“You may call me Miss Clayton when not consulting me professionally, Detective Carter,” she explained, with a fascinating little laugh. “Like persons in other fields of art, I practise under an assumed name. If you ever meet my sister, Mrs. Badger, or her husband, they will probably refer to me by my real name. So I take this occasion to tell it to you. It is only here, or when discussing my professional work, that I make use of my business name.”
Nick wondered if all this had been thrown at him to convey an impression that she had not been informed of his call upon Badger and his wife, and a gleam of new suspicion showed briefly in the eyes of the great detective. Yet he said quietly, with a nod, that he understood her.
“It matters little to me what name you use, providing you answer my questions,” he added.
“I shall gladly do so, Detective Carter.”
“I have here a snap-shot photograph said to have been taken by you at the time of the robbery.”
“Yes, that is true. I had my kodak with me, and it so happened that I could——”
“I have been told by Chief Weston how you obtained the photograph,” interposed Nick, wishing to expedite matters.
“Ah, I see.”
“What I chiefly wish to know is whether you got a good look at the thieves, or were too frightened to notice them closely.”
“Oh, I was not greatly alarmed,” smiled Madame Victoria, with a shrug of her fine shoulders. “I saw that the loss of our valuables was inevitable, but I did not fear for my life.”
“Did you specially notice the woman who appears in this photograph?”
“I saw all that was to be seen of both miscreants, Detective Carter,” the woman declared, with a nod of emphasis.
“Did you detect any peculiarity about the woman?”
“Only her unusual height.”
“She was taller than the man?”
“Yes, indeed; several inches taller.”
“Yet in the picture he appears to be nearly six feet.”
“I should judge that he was, as I now recall him.”
“A woman taller than that is very rare,” said Nick, “and one who should be quite easily traced.”
“That is true, sir.”
“Do you feel quite sure that it was a woman?”
“Sure? Why, certainly!” exclaimed Madame Victoria, laughing.
“For what reasons?”
“Because, Detective Carter, I saw the point of her chin under her black veil, and it was as smooth and white as my own.”
“Anything more?”
“Her hand and arm, too, what little I could see of the latter in the sleeve of her automobile coat, were as fair and plump as my own.”
Nick glanced at the pretty hand and arm she held out, and decided that there could be no mistaking them.
“My first impression, Detective Carter,” she quickly added, “was the same as yours—that her height might warrant a suspicion that it was a man in woman’s clothing. For that reason, sir, I particularly observed her.”
“I am glad of that,” bowed Nick. “I called here chiefly to settle this question of sex, and I have already asked Mrs. Badger about it.”
“Oh, indeed! Then you have seen her?”
“I called upon her in Brookline this morning.”
“Does what I say corroborate her statements?”
“Yes.”
Nick had mentioned the call only to see if Madame Victoria would say that she had since heard from the Badgers, but she did nothing of the kind, leaving Nick to believe that she had not. This served only to increase his growing suspicions, when recalling what she had said that morning; and he now gravely added, with his gaze indifferently fixed upon her face:
“I think there is only one more question that I would like to have you answer for me, Madame Victoria.”
“Only one?”
“That is all.”
“Ask it, Detective Carter.”
Nick’s voice fell a little lower, and became more impressive.
“I wish to know what you would have said to me, Madame Victoria, if I had called to consult you professionally.”
The smile still lingered about the woman’s red lips, and her eyes met his without flinching.
“I should have said, Detective Carter, what my first impression impelled me to say, yet which I decided to repress.”
“What was that?”
“I should have told you that I felt, when you entered, as if I were meeting a person who had recently called here.”
“Did you feel so?”
“I did.”
“How do you now feel about it?”
“I am now sure.”
“Of what?”
“That you were here this morning under the name of Sibley,” replied Madame Victoria, now frowning slightly. “I cannot possibly imagine why you came here in disguise and under an assumed name, Detective Carter, yet I am convinced that you did so.”
“How did you acquire that knowledge?” Nick now demanded, ignoring her quiet rebuke.
“I answered that question for Mr. Sibley,” was the reply, with a covert sneer. “Hence there is no need for me to answer it for you.”
“You acquired it through your impressions?”
“Yes.”
“In no other way?”
“None.”
“Then, as Mr. Sibley said this morning, it is very mysterious,” Nick dryly declared, rising to go.
“So many think, as I said this morning.”
“I will say, Madame Victoria, that I had no more malicious design in coming here in disguise than that of proving the validity of some of your claims to occult powers. I might add, too, that you have given me one of the most curious problems of my life.”
“Indeed!”
“I shall, however, make it a point to—solve the problem.”
Madame Victoria laughed, and eyed him oddly from under her drooping lids.
“If you do solve it, which involves learning how I get these impressions, Detective Carter, you will do more than I can,” she said, rising to bid him adieu.
“Then I certainly shall, Madame Victoria, do more than you can,” Nick quietly declared, as he accepted her proffered hand.
“You think so, eh?”
“I do, madame! I have one very pronounced trait of character, which may be of some interest to you.”
“What is that?”
“I never drop a mystery, Madame Victoria, until it has—ceased to be a mystery!”
The last was said pleasantly enough, yet very emphatically, as Nick bowed and withdrew from the room, with the smiling eyes of the woman steadily meeting his till the door closed between the two.
Then there came over her one of those swift changes seen only when suppressed passions, intensified by restraint, are abruptly given free rein.
Her smile vanished like a flash, displaced by a frown that transfigured her every feature and lent to her usually attractive face the threatening and vengeful visage of a fury. With eyes gleaming, with lips drawn, with breast heaving under the sudden swell of her pent feelings, she shook both clenched hands after the departing detective, while muttering fiercely through her white teeth:
“Yon will solve the problem, will you? You will tear[89] away the veil of mystery, will you? Not if I know it—not if I can prevent it, Mr. Nick Carter!
“Beware what you do—what you attempt! Let the cost be what it may, my prediction shall be fulfilled, and only failure shall be yours! Beware lest you fail, for the inevitable price of failure will be—death!”
Then she turned and hurried across the room, with every movement of her lithe and supple figure as quick and graceful as those of a leopard. With a quick sweep of her arm, she threw aside the curtain of a door of a small closet, into which she entered, to seize the receiver from a telephone attached to the wall.
“Give me 22 ring 2, Brookline!” she commanded.
It was the number of the telephone in the house of Mr. Amos Badger.
CHAPTER VIII.
UNDER THE SURFACE.
As Nick Carter had rightly conjectured, when weighing the mystifying knowledge displayed by Madame Victoria, there was something under the surface.
What the something was, moreover, plainly appeared in what followed the visit of Nick to the suburban house of Mr. Amos Badger.
The moment the detective departed, in company with Grady, there came over both Badger and his wife a very decided change.
With an ugly gleam in his dark eyes, which were still following the runabout as it sped down the long driveway, Badger ripped off the red flannel bandages from around his neck, exclaiming vehemently:
“Whew! these infernal things have set me reeking at every pore! Thank Heaven he remained no longer, or I should have run down into my boots. There’s not a dry rag on me.”
His wife indulged in a laugh, a vicious little laugh, most unpleasant to honest ears.
“Yet the ruse worked well, Amos,” she cried exultantly.
“Yes, apparently.”
“Apparently?”
“That’s what I said,” growled Badger, as the runabout passed out of view.
“What do you mean?” demanded Claudia, with quickened apprehension.
“I mean that there never is any knowing what Nick Carter thinks and suspects, however he may carry himself,” Badger petulantly replied. “He is one thing on the surface, another under it. There is no telling anything[91] about him, and I’m infernally sorry that Weston has brought him over here.”
“Bah!” cried his wife contemptuously. “He can accomplish no more than the Boston detectives have done.”
“I’m not so sure of it.”
“We can fool him as we have fooled the others.”
“Yet he asked some deucedly ugly questions,” declared Badger, with a doubtful shake of his head. “And I more than half-fear that he already suspects our trick.”
“Suspects that you were only feigning illness?”
“Possibly.”
“Nonsense! He cannot have got wise to that, nor to anything else that seriously affects us.”
Badger turned quickly away, and hailed the man in the driveway.
“Come in here, Jerry,” he commanded. “I want to speak to you.”
Conley dropped his work and hastened into the house, following Badger and his wife into the library.
“What d’ye want, Amos?” he inquired, with a familiarity plainly indicating that he was something more than a menial about the place.
“I want to I know just what Carter said to you,” replied Badger, throwing himself into a chair.
“He only asked if I’d seen an auto go along the road below here.”
“Nothing more?”
“Not a thing.”
“I thought I heard him say something about me, Conley, and the cut of my jib.”
“Oh, that was only because he couldn’t learn anything from me, and he didn’t fancy the jolly I was giving him,” replied Conley, with a grin. “Devil a thing did I tell him, Amos, and I was only keeping him on a string till I was dead sure that you and Claudy were out of your auto rigs and into the togs in which he found you.”
“Are you sure he didn’t get sight of the other machine?” demanded Badger apprehensively.
“The one you used when you held him up?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Oh, I’m dead sure that he didn’t see that,” cried Conley confidently. “I had that in the secret cover a good five minutes before he showed up in the runabout.”
“And you were at work on the other when he arrived?”
“Yes, long before he arrived.”
“Pshaw! he couldn’t have seen the Peerless when he got here, Amos,” supplemented Claudia decidedly. “We[93] left that runabout behind us as if it had been tied to a stake.”
“I know all that,” growled Badger; “but I want to feel sure that the infernal detective got no line on us after he reached here. I’ll tell you both, he’s a man to be feared, and we cannot be too careful in case he undertakes to round us up.”
“Faugh!” snarled Conley, with a scowl rising about his crafty eyes. “If he gets wise, and presses us too hard, there’s one thing we can do.”
“Put him out of the way?”
“Sure.”
“It will have to be done,” said Badger, with a nod. “Yet I don’t fancy running my neck into a noose if it can be avoided.”
“It can be done without that,” said Conley, with grim significance.
“It strikes me,” put in Claudia, “that we ought to give Vic a tip that Carter is coming to call upon her, also that he has been out here.”
“That’s right, too.”
“If he is as clever as you say he is, Amos, he must be handled with gloves,” added the woman. “Vic ought to be warned of his visit, and of what his business consists,[94] so that she may be ready for him, and head him off from any suspicion.”
“I can inform her by telephone.”
“It must be done.”
“There’s no great rush,” replied Badger. “Carter will not arrive there for an hour.”
“You must tell her just what we have done, and why we did it.”
“Tell her that we held him up this morning?”
“Yes, certainly; also that we got away with his watch and money.”
“Why tell her all that?”
“So she may know just how to handle him,” declared Claudia, with knit brows. “Vic is clever, all right, but she may queer us in some way when pitted against Nick Carter’s cleverness, unless she knows just what his game is, and what has happened out here.”
“I’ll go and talk with her at once,” said Badger, now rising.
“A good idea,” said Conley approvingly. “Let Vic alone to queer any game that he may have.”
“Stop a moment, Amos,” cried his wife, with an afterthought.
“Well?”
“If Carter has formed any suspicion of us, as you appear[95] to fear, he may start in at once with some of his underhand work.”
“What do you mean?”
“He may not tell Vic who he is.”
“Possibly not.”
“And he may lead her into some self-betrayal, in case he questions her closely while she is ignorant of his identity.”
“What the deuce can we do to prevent that?” demanded Badger, with a frown.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Claudia, who plainly possessed many of the crafty qualities of her sister.
“Well, out with it.”
“First, Amos, describe him to her so she cannot mistake him, and then——”
“Hold on a bit,” interrupted Conley, who was an interested listener. “He may take it into his head to go there in disguise, since that’s a clever trick of his.”
“That’s just what I was coming to, Jerry, if you had let me finish,” snapped Mrs. Badger. “We can easily head off any disguise he may adopt.”
“How so?”
“Merely by telling Vic that he wears a red carbuncle ring on the third finger of his left hand,” said Claudia.[96] “He’ll not think it necessary to remove that, Amos, even if he does put on a disguise.”
“By Jove! that’s so.”
“Go, now, and tell her the whole business.”
Badger hastened into the hall, where he was presently heard imparting in cautious terms, yet which he evidently knew would be readily understood, the information concerning Nick which had so puzzled him.
It was because of what she now was told over the wire that Madame Victoria glanced first at Nick’s left hand when he entered her rooms, and at once recognized him in the disguise of Sibley.
At the time of his second visit, moreover, when he presented his own card, the fortune-teller at once noticed that he had removed the ring, and that alone was enough to convince her that he was beginning to play a double game, and that he must have formed some suspicions regarding herself and the Badgers.
After Nick’s first departure she telephoned Badger that he had been there, and the latter then held a second consultation with his wife and Conley.
Being ignorant of Nick’s primary object in visiting Madame Victoria in disguise, which was merely to test her peculiar powers, Badger’s apprehensions naturally were increased.
“He’s wise to something, and already up to some game against us, or he wouldn’t have gone there in disguise,” he gravely reasoned. “I’m ruined, utterly ruined, unless we can continue this road work a few weeks longer. I shall be swamped completely unless I can thus raise the funds to tide me along until there’s a rise in the stock-market.”
“We’ll keep up the road-work, Amos, never you fear,” his wife curtly declared, with an evil brightness in her expressive eyes. “It was I who suggested it to you, and I have done my part to help you along with it.”
“That’s true enough.”
“And we’ll not quit it now, Amos, Carter or no Carter.”
“That we’ll not,” growled Conley, with a headshake. “There’s too much good stuff in it for us to have it queered at this stage by this man Carter. If it comes to the worst, Amos, a knife between his ribs will put him out of our way.”
“That is more easily said than done.”
“Not if it comes to that kind of a play.”
“I don’t fear Weston and his second-rate detectives,” added Badger moodily; “but this man Carter is superior to that entire bunch.”
“Bah!” cried Claudia. “You are needlessly alarmed. To begin with, Amos, he cannot possibly have learned anything definite about us as quickly as this.”
“Possibly not.”
“He could not have identified us as the couple who held him up and robbed him this morning, and he certainly must think that was only a chance job, not one planned by us the moment we heard he was coming out here in a runabout.”
“No, he could not have guessed that,” admitted Badger.
“Furthermore,” argued his wife, “my face was entirely covered with my dust-glasses and the false beard, and in my big auto coat it certainly could not have been suspected that I was a woman who suddenly showed up in the Peerless in which you escaped after robbing him.”
“Sure it couldn’t,” put in Conley. “I’d have sworn you were a man myself.”
“Oh, I don’t think he has any idea of the truth about that,” replied Badger.
“There is still another thing in our favor,” continued Claudia.
“What is that?”
“The alleged robbery of Vic and myself, Amos, and[99] the photograph which Vic took by which to convince Weston of the truth of our story.”
“That was one of the shrewdest moves ever made,” declared Conley, laughing.
“Certainly it was, Jerry, and you may let Vic alone to think of such schemes as that,” said Mrs. Badger, with an evil display of sisterly pride.
“She’s a keen one, all right,” grinned Conley.
“The picture is as good as a positive proof that we were robbed,” added Claudia; “and Weston never for a moment has doubted our story. The very fact, if it were a fact, that we were robbed, moreover, plainly shows that we cannot have been both the thieves and the victims, also. That would be absurd, you see, and as long as Carter credits the photograph, just so long we may be sure that he does not suspect us of being crooks.”
“That is an ugly word to apply to us, Claudia,” growled Badger disapprovingly.
“One might as well call things by their right names,” laughed his wife. “I told you I was an adventuress, and a woman of nerve, Amos, when you wanted to marry me, and you knew just what you bargained for.”
“I’m finding no fault on that score.”
“You’d better not,” was the pointed rejoinder. “I[100] fancy the life I now lead, this moving in good society, for it lays away over the stage, or riding bareback in the circus-ring, to which Vic and I were bred in old England.”
“What need to refer to those days?” muttered Badger, frowning darkly.
“Only that you may keep in mind the stuff I am made of,” replied his wife, with a shrug of her shoulders. “When you told me you were in hot water financially, Amos, it was I who suggested this scheme of road robbery to tide you along. In becoming your assistant, along with Jerry, here, my old life of adventure has served me well. I can ride the most vicious horse, and no auto can go too fast for me, Amos; so you couldn’t have a better helper, whether I wear skirts or trousers, in holding up an auto-party.”
“That’s true enough.”
“As for the wickedness of it—well, most of the world is wicked in one way or another,” laughed the woman. “We must contrive to get our living, Amos, in some way; and this life of danger and adventure just suits me, to say nothing of the profits derived. Just think!—last month we cleaned up close to twenty thousand, providing those Gaylord jewels bring as much as we expect.”
“Oh, there’s money enough in it, I’ll admit that,” nodded Badger.
“And with Vic to help us, with the aid of the friend she has so completely under her thumb, we are sure to be informed of any move contemplated by Weston or by Nick Carter. So your fears are groundless, Amos, as I said in the beginning.”
“It’s dead lucky, I’ll admit, that we have that anchor to the windward,” said Badger, with features now relaxing.
“So it is, Amos, and with him to inform us of—— Hark! there goes the telephone-bell again. I’ll wager that Vic has something more to report.”
Claudia Badger was right in the last.
Madame Victoria now reported the second visit of Nick Carter, and all that had passed between them; also explained Nick’s simple object in first calling upon her in disguise, and stated that he came last only to ask about the woman in the photograph.
“I have him well muddled, Amos,” was Madame Victoria’s last declaration over the wire. “There is nothing to be feared from him at present.”
Badger’s dark countenance lighted while he listened, and he hastened to report the communication to his wife and Conley.
“There! what did I tell you?” cried Claudia triumphantly. “I knew that Vic would prove more than a match even for Nick Carter. Now, there is just one thing to be done in order to avert suspicion from us.”
“What is that?”
“These road robberies must continue to occur,” declared the woman. “If they suddenly end at this time, after Carter’s visit here, he very possibly may infer that we are alarmed, providing he has any suspicion at all concerning us. Another robbery committed this very night would clinch matters in our favor.”
“That’s right, too,” said Conley, quickly seeing the point.
It was done, moreover, and one of the boldest yet committed, and the reports of it filled the morning papers, along with no end of editorials decrying the inferior work of the police in being unable to prevent such depredations.
But the end was not yet, for that very day Chief Weston removed his own men from the case, and placed it entirely in charge of Nick Carter.
CHAPTER IX.
BODY AND LIMBS.
“Chick, I’m hit with an idea!”
This exclamation came from Nick Carter about ten o’clock one morning, two days after the highway robbery last reported, and the talk that followed showed with what remarkable insight this great detective arrived at the subtle deductions which contributed largely to his success.
Chick and Patsy had arrived in Boston two days before, and both were now present with Nick in his room at the Adams House.
Both had been fully informed of the facts thus far learned by him, moreover, as well as of his interview with the Badgers, and his visits to Madame Victoria.
When he uttered the above exclamation Nick was seated at one of the windows of his room.
In one hand he held the photograph that figured so curiously in the case, and which would have convinced any ordinary detective that Madame Victoria and Mrs. Amos Badger had been robbed precisely as alleged, for the camera, at least, would not have lied.
Yet this bit of convincing evidence was so out of the[104] ordinary, as well as the circumstances under which it had been obtained, that Nick from the very first had been inclined to distrust the picture.
In his other hand he now held a large magnifying-glass, through which he was carefully studying the photograph, holding it in the full glare of the morning sunlight.
“What’s that, Nick?” inquired Chick, starting up from his chair and dropping a morning paper reporting the last robbery. “Hit with an idea, did you say?”
“Exactly.”
“What is it, Mr. Carter?” asked Patsy, at once displaying a lively interest. “Have you discovered something lame in that picture?”
Nick laughed.
“That about hits the nail on the head, Patsy,” said he, with a glance in the lad’s direction. “I think I begin to see a ray of light in the darkness.”
“What have you discovered?” asked Chick.
And both he and Patsy came to lean over the back of Nick’s chair.
Nick held the large glass and the photograph so that all three could plainly view the magnified picture.
“I’ll explain what I find, and I wonder that I have[105] not noticed it before,” said he quite earnestly. “It relates to this tall woman who appears in the picture.”
“Gee! but she is a tall one,” remarked Patsy, with a laugh. “She’s tall enough to fit in a dime museum.”
“That’s right, Patsy,” assented Nick, smiling.
“What’s peculiar about it, Nick?”
“As you probably know, Chick, there is a general uniformity in the proportions of the human body—a regular length of arms and limbs when compared with the trunk. In all normal subjects the proportions are nearly the same.”
“Sure,” nodded Chick. “A man’s reach, from the tips of his extended arms and fingers, is usually the same as his height.”
“Correct.”
“But what has that to do with the picture, Mr. Carter?” asked Patsy.
“It has to do with this woman,” Nick rejoined, drawing out his pencil to be used for a pointer. “I want you to notice her extended arm and hand, the one in which she held the leveled revolver.”
“That’s plain enough, sir.”
“It’s good fortune that it is, Patsy,” nodded Nick. “It also is plain, now that I study it closely, that the arm is a little out of proportion with her exceeding height.”
“By Jove! it does appear so!” exclaimed Chick, bending nearer to view the pictured figure.
“Notice the distance from her shoulder to her hand, then the distance from her shoulder to her hip, which is plainly outlined by this curve of her long auto coat. Her hip is here, Chick, where I have the point of my pencil.”
“Exactly.”
“Notice, now, that her extended hand, if it were to be dropped to her side, would reach only to this point, measuring the same distance, a point only a trifle below her hip.”
“That’s clear,” cried Chick. “Yet the camera may——”
“The camera never lies,” interposed Nick.
“Then the woman must be out of proportion,” declared Chick.
“Not necessarily.”
“But her arm should be longer than it appears there,” Chick insisted. “I’m well-proportioned, I’ll swear to that, and my hand, when lowered, reaches half-way down my thigh.”
“Which is about right, Chick.”
“Yet you say the woman is not out of proportion——”
“I said not necessarily,” interposed Nick. “If she was as tall as she appears in the picture, however, I’ll admit that her arm would be too short for her body.”
“Oho, I see!” exclaimed Patsy, starting up. “You think, Mr. Carter, that she is not as tall as the picture indicates.”
“That’s exactly it, Patsy,” nodded Nick.
“How do you make it out?” asked Chick.
“Notice this fold of her skirt, where the skirt shows below the edge of her auto coat?”
“Well, what of it?”
“Plainly enough, Chick, the fold does not hang quite naturally,” Nick went on to explain, still pointing with his pencil. “It appears drawn a little to one side and back of her, with the edge of the skirt carefully arranged to touch the ground, precisely as if to conceal something beneath it.”
“Something on which she was standing!” exclaimed Chick, quickly seeing the point.
“That’s just it,” declared Nick impressively. “No skirt ever hung quite like that, if it hung naturally.”
“Surely not.”
“Notice also the distance from her hip to the edge of the skirt, where her feet should be,” added Nick. “Her limbs would be as much above the regular proportions as her arm is below them.”
“I see what you mean.”
“In a nutshell, Chick, such an anomaly could not be,” continued Nick decisively. “A person with abnormally long legs and disproportionately short arms is out of the question.”
“And in your opinion——”
“In my opinion, Chick, the woman was standing on something, possibly a rock, with her skirts lengthened to conceal it. Obviously the whole was done to give her the appearance of being very tall.”
“And with what object?”
“With a design to thus blind the police to the real looks of the woman operating with this gang of crooks.”
“You think they aimed to send the police searching after some very tall woman?”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll wager you are right.”
“Furthermore,” added Nick, “these discoveries conclusively prove that the picture was deliberately taken, with the several persons calmly posing to make it effective, and that the two women said to have been held up and robbed were not robbed at all.”
“And the design of the photograph?”
“It was taken purposely to be offered as evidence to corroborate the story told to the police.”
“With a view to averting suspicion and throwing them off the right track,” added Chick.
“Precisely.”
“By thunder, that was a crafty scheme!” declared Patsy, rather pleased with the originality of it.
“Yes, it was crafty enough,” assented Nick. “But the rascals overleaped their mount, Patsy, in not anticipating the deductions I have mentioned. All this sheds a new and very bright light upon the case,” the speaker added, as he tossed the photograph upon the table.
“I should say so,” nodded Chick, resuming his chair and lighting a cigar. “It indicates that those two women, who claim to have been robbed, may be in league with this gang of thieves.”
“Even more than that, Chick.”
“What more, Nick?”
“It suggests that Badger himself may be one of the gang, if not the chief figure in it, and that their headquarters may be at that isolated suburban place of his.”
“By Jove, that may be so!”
“Let’s look a little deeper, Chick, and see how far some of the other facts sustain this theory. I was held up when on my way out there Tuesday morning,” continued Nick. “That may have been merely a coincidence,[110] the scamps possibly having been laying in wait for some victim, though there still remains a chance of something even more than that under the surface.”
“Decidedly so,” replied Chick. “Such things don’t often happen by chance.”
“We’ll investigate that a little later.”
“Sure.”
“After the hold-up, Chick, I hastened to Badger’s house, arriving there within ten minutes after the robbery,” Nick went on.
“Then it must have occurred pretty near his place.”
“Within half a mile.”
“That, too, is significant.”
“In a measure,” assented Nick. “I found his chauffeur cleaning a Stanley machine in the driveway, where I could not help observing him. Ordinarily such a job would be done in the stable or garage, and I am now inclined to think that it was done outside only intentionally to make me believe, in case of any distrust, that Badger uses a Stanley machine, and not such a car as that in which I saw the thieves escape.”
“Do you know how many machines he owns?”
“I do not, Chick. In fact, I know very little about him or his place.”
“We’ll make it a point to learn.”
“I did not fancy the looks nor air of his chauffeur,” continued Nick. “He appeared to avoid my questions, and I now suspect that may have been done to give Badger time to get out of his rig as a highwayman and into the house suit and red flannel bandages in which he received me.”
“You think that whole business was designed only to blind you, in case you had any suspicions?”
“That certainly would have been the design, Chick, providing that we are justified in suspecting him at all.”
“There are too many of these significant little circumstances, Nick, for us to doubt that we are hitting somewhere near the mark,” Chick shrewdly reasoned.
“That’s the way I now regard them,” said Nick. “After my talk with Badger, in which I stated I should call upon Madame Victoria, he may have telephoned the fact to the fortune-teller. I noticed that he had a telephone in the hall.”
“That would explain her knowledge of you, Nick,” said Chick. “But bear in mind that you were in disguise when you first called upon her.”
“I remember that, Chick.”
“How can she have known you?”
“Badger may have been alarmed by my visit,” argued Nick, “and he possibly suspected that I might adopt[112] some disguise. Very likely he mentioned some distinctive feature about my person, one which I would not ordinarily remove, by which Madame Victoria may have identified me.”
“That may have been the case,” admitted Chick.
“The knowledge she displayed certainly points to some such move on Badger’s part, and adds to our grounds for suspicion,” continued Nick. “She had me well marked in some way, there is no denying that. Furthermore, the fact that she warned me to drop the perilous business I was about to undertake, predicting that I should meet only with failure, points plainly to a possibility that they were taking that method to influence me to drop the case.”
“Gee whiz!” exclaimed Patsy. “That now looks dead open and shut, Mr. Carter.”
“It certainly is significant.”
“I’ll bet you landed right in the midst of this gang of road thieves. In that case, Nick, the rest of our work should be easy,” Chick quickly remarked. “It should be child’s play for us to round them up.”
Nick thoughtfully shook his head.
“I’m not so sure of that, Chick,” said he. “We as yet have no tangible evidence against them, and nothing less will serve us in a court of law,” replied Nick.
“That’s true.”
“Our theory is built chiefly upon trivial circumstances, all of which are significant enough, I’ll admit, and sufficiently numerous to warrant considerable suspicion. But we must secure more positive evidence before we can take any decisive action against these suspects.”
“I guess that is right, Nick.”
“We ought to get the evidence easily enough, if we really have located the crooks,” declared Patsy.
Nick Carter laughed again, with a glance at the eager eyes of the youthful detective.
“That one word, really, is quite important, Patsy,” said he. “It is barely possible that we are mistaken, at least in part, if not entirely so. Circumstantial evidence is never wholly trustworthy.”
“I’ll bet you are right, sir, for all that,” insisted Patsy, with abiding faith in Nick’s shrewdness.
“I shall first make sure that I am,” said Nick, “by taking some step to confirm my theory. As for securing the evidence with which to convict these rascals, Patsy, that may not be done as easily as you think. If they become wary, fearing that we suspect them, they not only may drop the business entirely for a time, but may also cover their past tracks so cleverly as to conceal the evidence that we require.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, sir.”
“It’s too true for a joke, Nick, and we cannot be too careful and crafty at the outset,” Chick gravely put in, now taking the measure of the case quite as clearly as Nick himself. “What do you intend doing?”
“Personally, Chick, I am going down to State Street this morning, and see what I can learn about Badger. Then I am going up to police headquarters and return these documents to Chief Weston. He loaned them to me that I might learn what lines of investigation his men have followed.”
“Do they appear to have accomplished anything?”
“Nothing more than to note in detail the facts of the various robberies,” smiled Nick. “Not one of them has hit upon a rational clue.”
“Is there anything you want us to do while you are thus engaged?”
“Yes. I want you and Patsy to go out to Brookline and see what you can discover at Badger’s place,” replied Nick. “I don’t want you to be seen about there, however.”
“H’m! Let us alone to be discreet.”
“His estate is backed by quite an extensive woodland, through which you can easily approach after locating the place.”
“That will be an advantage.”
“Take what time you require,” added Nick, “and learn how many men are employed in and about the house and stable. Also learn how many automobiles and horses he keeps. Several of these hold-ups have been committed by horsemen, and I wish to learn what Badger owns in both lines.”
“Automobiles and horses?”
“Exactly.”
“We’ll ferret out the whole business, Mr. Carter, trust us for that,” cried Patsy, impatient to be at work.
“Meantime,” said Nick, rising, “I’ll employ myself as stated. It is now half-past ten. You may require three or four hours to learn what I would like to know, so we will plan to meet here again about an hour or two before dinner, say at four o’clock.”
“That will give us ample time,” declared Chick. “We’ll be here at four sharp.”
“You’ll find me here,” said Nick, with no thought that anything would occur to prevent him.
The three left the house together, parting at the Washington Street door, both Chick and Patsy heading for the subway to take a Brookline trolley car. Neither so much as dreamed, however, that many an anxious[116] hour would pass before they again saw Nick’s familiar face or heard his genial voice.
CHAPTER X.
THE ANCHOR TO WINDWARD.
As he had stated to his assistants before leaving the Adams House that morning, Nick Carter hastened down to State Street to see what he could learn about Amos Badger.
With his wide acquaintance and friendly relations with the bankers and brokers, both in New York and Boston, it was an easy matter for Nick to ascertain, without disclosing his motives, the facts which he aimed to discover.
He learned from perfectly reliable sources that Badger, who had no partner in business, was heavily long of stocks in the market, a market that had been steadily declining for months; also, that his loan-account on this class of collateral had been repeatedly subjected to calls for additional margins, which were known to have been met only with considerable difficulty and delay.
In a nutshell, Nick easily discovered that Badger had for months been in financial hot water, yet had succeeded in tiding himself along up to date.
Nick now thought he could guess by what desperate means this man was raising the funds required to meet his increasing obligations from day to day.
Incidentally, however, Nick learned other facts for which he was not specially seeking, yet which further confirmed the theory he had so shrewdly formed.
These facts related to Badger’s wife and her sister, the Tremont Street fortune-teller, and were imparted to Nick a bit maliciously by a broker who had suffered in one way or another through Madame Victoria, and who was informed of the history of the two women.
Briefly stated, as it was given to Nick, both were born in England, the daughters of a second-rate actor and manager of various itinerant amusement enterprises, in none of which he had achieved any great success.
The two girls had some little talent in one way or another, however, and both had spent their earlier years in the show business, filling such positions as the various enterprises of their father, since dead, required.
Now as an alleged gipsy fortune-teller, now as a palmist, at other times an astrologer, or some like attraction under a different name, but always as a sideshow to some other amusement, the younger of the two had acquired that experience which, after the marriage of her sister and her coming to America, had enabled her[118] to establish in Boston the business now conducted under the name of Madame Victoria.
The elder of the two, now Badger’s wife, had sung on the stage, done turns in the concert-halls, and in earlier years had been an accomplished equestrienne in the circus-ring, from the first of which Badger had married her in Manchester, about five years before.
That both women were little more than adventuresses of a rather disreputable type, Nick’s informant positively assured him, and this further confirmed his theory and convinced him that he was on the right track.
It was early afternoon when he arrived at police headquarters, in Pemberton Square, and entered the general office previously described.
It so happened that Chief Weston was in this office at the time, though all of the detectives not then assigned to outside work were either out at lunch or in the officers’ lounging-room.
It so happened, also, since Satan sometimes serves his own, that the only other occupant of the general office was the clerk whom Nick had encountered there several days before—Mr. Sandy Hyde.
The brick-hued head of the latter was raised from over his books upon hearing the detective’s name mentioned[119] in greeting, and his catlike eyes lighted with quickened interest.
“Ah, good morning, Nick!” was Chief Weston’s greeting. “Anything doing?”
“I wish to return these reports, chief, which I took from you a few days ago,” replied Nick, producing them from his pocket.
“No further use for them?”
“Not at present.”
“Very well.”
“I will retain this photograph, however, which I may use to advantage a little later.”
“You’ve not hit upon a clue from that, have you?”
“Well, I’m not prepared to say,” demurred Nick, a bit evasively.
“Come inside,” Chief Weston abruptly said, quick to notice Nick’s hesitation. “We shall not be interrupted in my office. Bear that in mind, Sandy.”
“All right, chief.”
“This way, Nick.”
Nick entered the enclosure, and passed through the passage leading to the chief’s, private office.
He did not so much as glance at the clerk, however, whose head had again dropped over his books.
Snap!
The catch-lock announced that the door of the private office had securely closed.
Now Mr. Sandy Hyde dropped his pen, and came down from his stool.
For a moment he peered sharply through the brass lattice along the top of the desks, toward the two open doors leading into the adjoining corridors.
Next he darted out of the enclosure, and quickly closed both of these doors.
No cat’s eyes aglow from a dark corner ever burned more greenishly bright and intense than those of this watchful miscreant at that moment.
It was for him a moment of peril, and well he knew it; yet, in the event of an intruder into the outer office, he relied upon hearing one of the closed doors opened in time to evade detection.
With both closed, he next hurried back into the enclosure, from outside of which the interior of the narrow passage could only partly be seen.
Into this passage Hyde quickly entered, with the stealthy quietude of a shadow, and stood listening at the chief’s door, his ear touching the panel, his eyes still bright with a satanic glow evincing his evil impulse.
His several precautions had required but a very few seconds, moreover, and he lost hardly a word of Nick[121] Carter’s brief interview with Chief Weston, who was about repeating his question just as the eavesdropper arrived at the door.
“You’ve not struck a clue from that photograph, Nick, have you?”
Nick was never much inclined to reveal his discoveries before they culminated in some decisive move, and he again evaded the question by saying:
“Well, I’m not quite sure about that, Weston.”
“What do you suspect?”
“Nothing at all definite as yet,” laughed Nick indifferently. “I wish to retain the photograph a while longer, however, if you have no objection.”
“None whatever, Nick, yet you pique my curiosity.”
“I will explain later.”
“Very well.”
“I presume that Madame Victoria could easily show me the exact spot where this hold-up occurred,” remarked Nick, who had remained standing beside the chiefs desk.
“I imagine so, Nick.”
“I’m going to have her take me out there.”
“For what purpose?”
“I want to see what sort of a place these crooks usually select for their rascally work.”
“I should say that you already had seen that,” laughed Weston, who had been informed of Nick’s encounter with them.
Nick shrugged his broad shoulders, smiling meaningly, and said:
“I wish to see how the two localities correspond. As for my lost property, Weston, I’ll make an even bet that I recover it sooner or later.”
The last was said a bit resentfully, and with a significance that brought a quick change over Weston’s face.
“You’ve got wise to something, Nick!” he abruptly exclaimed.
Nick laughed again.
“What is it?”
“I’d rather inform you a little later, Weston.”
“Just as you like, of course, but I’m really curious to know what you have learned.”
“I’m not quite sure of it yet, chief, and I’d prefer making sure before I indulge in any revelations,” said Nick, with a shake of his head. “It’s not my way, you know, to make disclosures which later may prove to be groundless.”
“I’m well aware of that, Nick.”
“If it will afford you any satisfaction, however, I will make one definite statement.”
“What is that?”
“Merely this, Weston,” Nick forcibly declared. “I will land these crooks for you, every man and woman of them, or I’ll throw up my commission.”
The ear at the panel was strained at that moment, and the glow in the eyes of the listener became a threatening flame.
“Well, well, that ought to be good enough for anybody,” cried Weston, with much satisfaction. “I felt sure that you had run upon something worth knowing.”
Nick nodded significantly, yet replied quite indifferently:
“I think that I have, Weston, and, when I am dead sure of it, I will tell you of what it consists.”
“All right, Nick,” was the reply, with a genial laugh. “I said in the beginning that you should not be interfered with in this case, and that goes at any stage of it. Run it in your own way, Nick, and you’ll suit me.”
“I’m only a bit curious to go out to the scene of this robbery,” Nick now added, with a glance at the photograph which he was replacing in his pocket. “If I can catch Madame Victoria at her rooms after I have lunched, I think I can get her to ride out there with me.”
“No doubt of it, Nick. She’ll be glad enough to do[124] anything that gives promise of the recovery of her property.”
Nick smiled a bit oddly, and prepared to depart.
“I shall drop in to see her about two o’clock,” said Nick. “I reckon I can bring her to my way of thinking.”
“When shall I see you again?” asked Weston, rising.
“Within a day or two.”
“I wish you luck meantime.”
Nick laughed and shook his head, saying with considerable dryness:
“I depend less upon luck, Weston, than upon labor and head-work. If I can make nothing out of this case with my brains, I have no faith that luck will do it for me. As I said before, Weston, I’ll see you within a day or two.”
The listening ear had left the panel of the door.
The catlike tread had pattered quickly through the passage and out of the enclosure, and again the corridor doors stood open.
There had been no intruder during the brief interview, and a look of evil exultation had risen in the eyes of Mr. Sandy Hyde.
As Amos Badger had declared to his confederates one[125] recent morning, it was, indeed, dead lucky that they had—this anchor to the windward.
For it was this miscreant who had warned Badger of Nick Carter’s arrival in Boston, and of his acceptance of this case.
It was this miscreant who had informed Badger of Nick’s intended visit the same morning, and who had made possible the hold-up which to Nick had appeared so like a coincidence.
It was this miscreant, too, whose treachery now bid fair to cost Nick Carter his life, yet whom the latter, with all his keenness, was far from suspecting.
For who looks for treachery in high places, or in those from whom only loyalty is most naturally expected?
The catlike eyes had lost their greenish glow, and the brick-hued head was again bowed above the books, when Nick and Chief Weston came striding through the passage and out of the enclosure.
Nick did not delay his departure any longer, and without a word to the clerk, Chief Weston returned to his private office.
It was then one o’clock.
Five minutes later the head clerk came in from lunch,[126] and Sandy Hyde at once laid down his pen and began putting on his street coat.
The next hour was his own—and he thought he knew how he could best use it.
CHAPTER XI.
THE INCENTIVE TO TREACHERY.
Ten minutes after leaving police headquarters Sandy Hyde might have been seen slinking across the Tremont Street mall of Boston Common.
Yet only a close observer would have recognized the treacherous little rascal.
He had his coat-collar turned well up about his ears, his soft felt hat drawn forward over his brow, and with his handkerchief held to his face his crafty countenance was for the most part concealed.
Presently he glided across the street, then hurriedly bolted into the corridor of one of the buildings—that in which the rooms of the fortune-teller and long-time adventuress were located.
Quickly mounting the stairs, Hyde unceremoniously entered her rooms.
He found Vic Clayton, by which name he best knew[127] her, seated alone in the reception-parlor, the maid employed there having just gone out to lunch.
“Why, hello, Sandy!” she cried, starting up from her chair when he entered.
When he eagerly advanced to clasp both her hands, moreover, she drew him into her arms and kissed him, as only lovers kiss.
“Break away!” he quickly protested, however.
“Well, well, what’s this?”
“As much as I like it, Vic, there’s no time for that.”
The woman’s eyes took on a startled look.
“No time!” she echoed, sharply regarding him.
“I should say not. There’s the devil to pay.”
“What do you mean?”
“Or worse than the devil—that’s Nick Carter!”
“What of him?”
“He’s coming here again.”
“For what?”
The last came with vicious asperity from the lips of the surprised woman.
The color had left her cheeks. The light of sensuous affection, the bestowal of which had turned this man into a knave, a traitor to his trust at police headquarters, and made him her dupe and tool—this light of passion had suddenly died from her eyes, displaced by the vengeful[128] fire with which she had last parted from the man he had just mentioned.
Darting to the door, Vic hurriedly turned the key, then swept around, as quick and lithe as a panther in her movements, and grasped Hyde by the shoulder.
“Not coming here now, not at once, is he?” she demanded, in rapid whispers.
“Do you think I’m daffy, to be here, in that case?” growled Sandy.
“Yet——”
“No, no; there’s time enough, Vic,” he interrupted. “He’s not coming till two o’clock.”
“For what?”
“To ask you to go with him to the scene of the fake hold-up.”
“That of the photograph?” gasped Vic, with hands pressed to her breast and her white face drawn with increasing apprehension.
“That’s what he said.”
“Has he detected something queer in that picture?”
“I reckon he has, Vic.”
“Do you know what he suspects?”
“He didn’t say,” replied Hyde. “Weston asked him, but Carter only said that he’d keep the photograph for a time.”
“Do you know for what?”
“I don’t.”
“Were there any names mentioned?”
“Only yours.”
“In the way you stated?”
“Yes.”
“Anything more?”
“One thing—and a mighty significant one!” growled Hyde, with a nod.
“What was that?”
“He added that he would land our gang, every man and woman of us, or throw up his job.”
“He said that, did he?”
“That’s what.”
“The infernal meddler!”
“He has struck some clue, that’s dead sure!” declared the spy. “It’s a condition that means we must get him, Vic, or he’ll get us.”
“Oh, we’ll get him, all right!” Vic Clayton now cried, with a venomous sneer. “If he’s coming for that, for what you say, you let me alone to get him!”
Though her flood of questions had been asked with passionate impatience, she now appeared more calm, yet not less viciously determined.
With a seductive smile, she now said warmly:
“You’re all right, Sandy. I’ll not forget this little service, and you shall have your reward when——”
“I’ll get mine, all right, Vic, if the chief ever gets wise to the game I’m playing,” interrupted Hyde, with a mingled laugh and grimace.
“He will never learn of it.”
“If he does, Vic, I can see myself put through the third degree in a way that will leave mighty little of me.”
“Bosh!”
“I’m taking mighty long chances in doing this for you, and for——”
“Are you getting no reward for doing it, Sandy?”
The woman’s arm had stolen around his neck, while her breath fell warm on his cheek with the interruption. She drew him closer till her lips met his, then hurriedly released him, saying quickly:
“Go, now, Sandy, and leave the rest to me.”
“You can handle the matter?” he lingered to inquire anxiously.
“You bet I can handle it!”
“What will you do?”
“You leave that to me, I say.”
“You have no time to waste, Vic.”
“Is time not wasted in talk of this kind?” Vic impatiently rejoined. “Go at once, I repeat, and leave the rest to me.”
Hyde started for the door, only to have the woman again dart across his path and clasp him by the arm.
“Stop a moment!” she cried, under her breath.
“Well?”
The query came with a startled gasp, as Hyde, naturally a nervous and cowardly cur, instinctively shrank from the expression now risen over Vic Clayton’s face.
For there was murder in her dilated eyes, in her deathly white features, in the vicious firmness of her drawn, gray lips.
“There is something more!” she hissed, with suppressed ferocity. “Have you been constantly watchful at headquarters?”
“Have I? That’s a fat question for you to ask me,” said Hyde. “You should know that I have.”
“So I do—so I do, Sandy, dear!” Vic hurriedly exclaimed, in assuasive tones. “But there is one thing more. Is Nick Carter alone in this case?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure of it—dead sure of it?” demanded Vic, with a voice and aspect that plainly betrayed the[132] murderous design that inspired this precautionary question.
“Certainly I’m sure of it.”
“It will do us no good to down him, mind you, if others at work with him are to rise up out of his ashes and confound us with the same evidence that he may possess.”
“There are no others,” protested Hyde confidently. “If there were, Vic, I’d have told you.”
“Providing you knew it.”
“Oh, I’d have known it, all right,” declared Sandy. “I’m never out of the office except to eat and sleep, and I’d have been wise to it by this time if Carter had brought on any of his assistants from New York.”
“You have heard none mentioned?”
“Not one.”
“This shows me the way, then—the one and only way,” muttered the woman, staring for a moment at the floor. “If it must be him or us—it shall not be us!”
“Carter has been at the chief’s office only twice, both times alone,” added Hyde assuringly. “You may safely gamble on it, Vic, that he’s still alone on the case.”
Again, with her vengeful countenance lighting for a moment, she slipped her arm about the spy’s neck and kissed him.
“Go, now, Sandy, and leave the rest to me,” she repeated. “But come out to Badger’s place after dark to-night.”
“To-night, Vic?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I find you there?” queried Hyde, with wistful gaze.
“Yes, you’ll find me there—and another with me!”
“Not Nick Carter?”
The woman’s brows knit again and her eyes gleamed venomously.
“Nick Carter—yes!” she rejoined, with suppressed ferocity. “Nick Carter—or what there is left of him!”
CHAPTER XII.
THE ROAD TO CANTON.
It was precisely two o’clock when Nick Carter arrived at Vic Clayton’s rooms in Tremont Street.
Naturally, Nick did not so much as dream that she had been informed of his designs against her. That treachery existed at police headquarters was farthest from his thoughts.
In asking Vic Clayton to take him to the place where[134] she and Claudia Badger claimed to have been robbed, Nick had several motives.
To begin with, he wished to see if she would willingly consent to do so.
Nick reasoned that, in case she readily consented, it would indicate a bare possibility that he in some way had misinterpreted the curious features that he had detected in the photograph, and that the picture might not be as incriminating in its significance as he had inferred.
While even this remote doubt existed, Nick felt that he could not wisely make any very aggressive move in the case, and he took this method to remove the doubt.
As a matter of fact, he hardly believed that Vic would consent to comply with this request, but would evade it with some plausible excuse.
Providing that she complied and went with him, however, Nick believed that he could so corner her with questions, while alone with her in a carriage, that he could finally force from her a confession of the whole business.
In any event, moreover, he felt sure that he could so artfully take these steps that he would in no way sacrifice any of his present advantages.
He found Vic Clayton alone in the handsomely furnished[135] waiting-room, engaged in writing at an open desk in one corner.
She had rearranged her hair and rouged her cheeks since Sandy Hyde’s departure, and she looked, as a matter of fact as well as of design, remarkably handsome and attractive.
“Dear me!” she exclaimed, quickly dropping her pen upon seeing Nick enter. “Is it you, Detective Carter?”
“None other,” bowed Nick, smiling.
“I’m delighted!” cried Vic, rising to offer her hand. “I do hope you bring some encouraging news, or possibly my lost gems themselves—despite that I predicted only failure for you.”
The last was added with a fascinating laugh, in which Nick was willing enough to join, though he found nothing inviting in her seductive eyes and alluring airs.
“Well, hardly anything as favorable as that, Madame Victoria,” he began.
“No, no, pardon me!” she interrupted, playfully tapping him on the arm. “You surely do not call again to consult me professionally?”
“No, I do not.”
“Then drop the Madame Victoria, my dear Mr. Carter, which is much too strained for friendly intercourse,” she softly cried, with an arch glance at him. “Let me be to[136] you plain Miss Clayton—or even plain Victoria, so be it that suits you even better.”
Nick experienced a vague feeling of distrust stealing through him as he looked and listened, but in his ignorance of what herein has been disclosed, he could find no definite grounds for the feeling. Yet, instinctively, as one sometimes dreads dangers still remote and visionary, he did not fancy this woman’s bantering remarks nor her playful attempts to captivate him.
Nick laughed again, nevertheless, and agreeably rejoined:
“As I told you the other day, Miss Clayton, it matters little to me what I call you, providing you consent to comply with my wishes.”
“Your wishes?”
“Yes.”
“Dear me! I really think I should enjoy making them my own, Detective Carter,” murmured Vic, with a pretty cant of her head and a shrug of her shoulders.
“I trust so.”
“Have a chair.”
“Thanks.”
“Now what do you want of me this time, Detective Carter?”
She had taken a seat near-by, still smiling archly at him, and Nick more gravely answered:
“I want you to do me a little service.”
“You have only to name it.”
“I find you willing,” smiled Nick, a bit puzzled.
“The pleasure is all mine,” laughed Vic. “Yet I’m really curious to know what you want of me.”
“I’ll tell you. On what road was it, Miss Clayton, that you and Mrs. Badger were held up by these rascally highwaymen?”
“The road to Canton.”
“Are you familiar with it?”
“I’m familiar with that part of it,” cried Vic, with a very significant smile and grimace. “Dear me! I shall never forget it!”
“Quite vividly impressed upon your memory, eh?”
“Decidedly so, Detective Carter?”
“I suppose you could locate the precise spot, if there was any occasion?”
“Indeed, I could. I know exactly where it is.”
“Ah, that is very fortunate,” said Nick agreeably. “I wish to go out there and view the spot.”
“For what?”
“I think I may discover some clue or sign, Miss Clayton, either in the general appearance of the immediate[138] scene or the surrounding country, which might put me on the track of the thieves,” Nick artfully rejoined, now feeling that even this lame explanation could be made to serve his purpose. “Of course,” he smilingly added, “we detectives see much more in such cases than the untrained eyes of a layman.”
“Naturally.”
“You see the point, do you not?”
“Oh, yes,” nodded Vic, with a demure stare at him.
“What do you think of it?”
“I’ll admit there might be something in it.”
“I thought you would,” Nick heartily replied. “Now the question is, to get back to the service I require of you. Will you go out there with me and show me the spot?”
Vic burst out laughing, as if much amused.
“Is that all you want of me?” she cried.
“That is all just now,” said Nick, a bit dryly.
“Why, of course, Detective Carter, I’ll go with you,” exclaimed Vic, as if a refusal was the last thing to have been expected, or any occasion for one. “How shall we go? It’s much too far to walk.”
“Oh, I should not think of asking you to walk,” laughed Nick, somehow feeling again that he was on deucedly thin ice, for which he could not account.
“I hope not, my dear Mr. Carter.”
“I will provide a carriage.”
“What time do you wish to go?”
“The sooner the better, Miss Clayton. At once will suit me best of all.”
Now Vic bridled a little, never other than crafty, and her smiling face took on a look of regret.
“Dear me! That makes it a little bad,” she said, as if weighing the situation. “I already had planned to go to——Stay! here is a note to verify my making any excuse, Detective Carter, after offering so volubly to serve you.”
She reached over to the desk while speaking, taking from it the note she had been writing, which she now handed to Nick to be read.
It was merely a note to her maid, informing her that she would be absent for a few hours, and that the girl might close the rooms and take an outing until the morrow.
“I had already planned to go riding, and was about to leave that note for Delia, my maid,” she explained, while Nick glanced at the craftily prepared missive.
“Well, that does interfere, Miss Clayton, as you say,” he replied, eying her a bit sharply, yet failing to detect any sign of duplicity, so artful was the jade. “If you[140] cannot go with me to-day, however, possibly to-morrow you——”
“Stop a moment!” exclaimed Vic, as if struck with a second thought. “I was going only with Amos and his wife, merely for a run of an hour or two, and——Hark! that should be they!”
The toot of an automobile-horn had sounded from the street below, and Vic sprang up while speaking, and ran to look from the window.
“Yes, they are at the curb,” she added, with manifest satisfaction. “Amos is coming up here. Now, if he has no definite plans, Mr. Carter, I see no reason why we cannot prevail upon you to——”
She was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Amos Badger.
He bolted into the room like a man in a hurry, his face flushed, his eyes bright, his voice resonant when impulsively inquiring:
“All ready, Vic?”
Then he checked himself and exclaimed quickly, as if unexpectedly beholding Nick in the room:
“Why, hello, Carter! You here? Glad to see you again.”
“The pleasure is mutual, Mr. Badger,” replied Nick, rising to accept the other’s proffered hand.
“Thanks,” nodded Badger. “Have you got a line on those infernal crooks yet?”
“No, not as yet.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“But I’m hoping to do so.”
“I join you in the hope, Carter,” declared Badger; then he laughingly added: “You’ll observe that I’m out of those red flannel bandages.”
“Yes, so I see.”
“A nasty thing, a cold in the early summer.”
“So it is,” assented Nick. “I congratulate you upon being rid of it.”
He had eyed the man intently while they were speaking, and he saw what he had not seen, heard what he had not heard, when they met at his place in Brookline; for Badger now knew that he was suspected; knew what desperate work must be done that afternoon, and he had dropped those little artifices with which he had aimed to blind Nick during their previous meeting.
In his clear and cutting voice, in every subtle, sinister inflection, in the glowing glint of his dark eyes, in the poise of his supple, muscular figure—in one and all of these Nick now saw or heard again the man of the hold-up—as plainly as when he saw the knave standing with leveled weapons in that sunlit suburban road.
Yet the face of the detective did not change by so much as a shadow, and Vic Clayton now interposed, with a fine display of solicitude:
“We can do Mr. Carter a service, Amos, if you have no plans for the afternoon.”
“How?” demanded Badger, turning quickly to her.
“He wishes to visit the place where Claudia and I were held up and robbed, and he came here to ask me to go with him. Now, if you have no particular trip you wish to make to-day——”
“None whatever!” cried Badger, quickly interrupting. “We are out for an airing only, and I’d as soon go that way as any. The road to Canton—can you locate the precise place, Vic?”
“Surely.”
“Then we’ll take him out there at once, if he wishes,” said Badger, quickly reverting to Nick. “What do you say, Carter? There’s a seat in my auto, if you care to go.”
Nick had foreseen what was coming, and had decided what course to take.
“Yes, I’ll go,” he said briefly.
“Good enough!” cried Badger. “Get into your wraps, Vic, and we’ll start at once.”
Nick had seen, in fact, no wise alternative to accepting[143] the offer. To have declined it, after the request he had made Vic Clayton, might have aroused suspicions which he had no reason to believe already existed. He would take no chance of that before positive evidence against these knaves had been secured.
That he had been betrayed from police headquarters, that his suspicions and designs were already partly known, that he was now up against a plot hurriedly arranged by telephone, that he was the victim of an admirably played game, that his life itself was in jeopardy from that moment—only a clairvoyant could have seen all this.
Nick Carter was not a clairvoyant, however, nor had he any reasonable cause for suspecting the real gravity of his situation.
Yet with caution that was habitual to him when in the company of persons known to be crooks, Nick became more wary from the moment he took his seat in Badger’s automobile.
It was a Packard four-cylinder motor-car, and Badger was running the machine. With Nick beside him on the front seat, and his wife and Vic Clayton behind, the party of four were soon speeding through Brookline toward the woodland roads of the famous Blue Hills.
Though the animated conversation that was sustained meantime is not material here, it soon led Nick to form,[144] in conjunction with the polite attentions bestowed upon him, a new theory in explanation of the seemingly natural situation.
“These crafty rascals are merely aiming to make a favorable impression upon me with their courtesies,” he said to himself, during a lull in the conversation.
“They are doing so in the hope of averting suspicion, with a view to convincing me that they are as honest and fashionable as they appear. They look and seem all right. I’ll give them credit for that, and if I knew less about them, I’m blessed if they wouldn’t fool me with their pretensions.”
This soliloquy ran through Nick’s mind more than an hour after they had started, but it was given the lie most violently less than five minutes later.
The car was then speeding along a woodland road in the Blue Hills, and Badger was bent forward over his steering-wheel, apparently intent upon the road ahead.
As far as the eye could reach, the road was deserted. One hundred yards ahead it divided, a branch road turning off to the left.
The junction of the two was in the very midst of a belt of woods, with no sign of a house or clearing in sight.
After one swift, backward glance over her shoulder,[145] Vic Clayton suddenly leaned forward and cried, above the noise of the machine:
“You must take that road to the east, Amos. The other leads to——”
“No, no, you’re wrong about that,” Badger quickly called back over his shoulder.
“No, I’m not!”
“The west road leads to Canton.”
“You’re mistaken, Amos,” insisted Vic, in apparent excitement, as the car rapidly approached the junction. “We must take the east road. Mustn’t we, Claudia?”
Badger slowed down, as if in some uncertainty, then brought the car to a stop just at the junction.
“Well, I am not really sure,” cried his wife, doubtfully looking about—yet only to make sure that no other car was in sight in any direction. “It’s all right, Amos——”
Badger was already upon his feet, interrupting her.
“Nonsense!” he exclaimed, while Nick glanced up with a feeling of distrust. “If we take that road, Vic, it will——Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Carter!”
Apparently by accident, while gesticulating about the road, he had knocked Nick’s derby hat from his head.
Then, with a lightning like move, made as if to catch the hat before it could fall to the ground, he threw himself[146] across the detective’s body, confining his arms to his sides.
At that moment Vic Clayton had risen up in the car, standing directly behind Nick.
“Now!” yelled Badger, with terrible ferocity.
There was no need for the command.
Already the uplifted hand of the fortune-teller was descending; a hand fiercely gripping a clubbed revolver, and thrice the butt of the heavy weapon fell squarely upon Nick Carter’s unprotected head.
The tragic episode had been enacted in the fraction of a second, before Nick could realize the design, much less prevent it, and a single blow delivered as the three had been would well-nigh have felled an ox.
Without so much as a groan, with every muscle suddenly relaxing, Nick dropped inert and senseless upon the floor of the car, his hair and brow turned crimson by a swift gush of blood.
In an instant Badger was out upon the ground.
“Take my seat, Claudia,” he hurriedly cried to his wife. “Lend me a hand here, Vic, and we’ll throw him in behind. I’ll bind him hand and foot after we start again. There, there, that will do! Now around with the car, Claudia, and drive for home as if the devil followed us!”
The transfer had been made in half a minute.
In another half the car was speeding back over the woodland road at thirty miles an hour—heading for Badger’s place near Brookline.
Senseless, between the seats, out of view of any persons whom the speeding car might pass along the road, lay the man for whom failure only had been predicted by the desperate woman who had struck him down.
CHAPTER XIII.
CLOSE QUARTERS.
“It’s not for me to say what you’ll do or not do, since you now appear to hold the ribbons. It’s up to you, Badger, and not for me to say.”
The above came from Nick Carter several hours after the tragic episode enacted in the woodland road.
Bound hand and foot, with his head rudely bandaged, Nick sat propped against one of four stone walls, evidently those of a small cellar, or possibly a wine-vault, with but one heavy door through which the place was accessible.
Only the bare earth was under him, damp and cold,[148] while a small pool of stagnant water in one corner of the place evinced the depressed location of the ground.
Two empty beer-kegs stood on end near-by.
On one of them a lantern was burning, the rays from which shed only a dismal light over the more dismal scene.
On the other keg sat Amos Badger, with his hands on his knees, his lowering gaze fixed upon the helpless detective, and his dark features wearing a look of mingled satisfaction and sinister scorn.
It was then well into the evening, and Nick Carter had with some difficulty been doctored back to consciousness, and to a keen realization of his aching head and a most unenviable situation.
The restoration had been accomplished by Conley, who was somewhat of a veterinary physician, and it was no sooner done than Badger hastened to interview his captive, an interview only just begun when Nick made the remark which opens this chapter.
“Up to me, is it?” returned Badger, with stern complacency. “Up to me to say what shall be done with you?”
“I cannot see that anything I say would be of weight,” said Nick coolly.
“That’s right—it wouldn’t!”
“Not at present.”
“No, nor later!” sneered Badger sharply. “You’ve had your last say, Carter, now that we have you in our clutches.”
“A very rascally game you played to accomplish it!”
“When you go hunting rascals, Carter, you must expect to be turned down by their own methods, if at all.”
“That’s right, too, and I was imprudent in not being ready for you.”
“You were up against more craft and cunning than you bargained for.”
“I don’t need to be informed of it,” retorted Nick, now wondering when, how, and for what reason they had planned the trick.
For he knew the assault must have been planned previous to his talk with Vic Clayton that afternoon, or it could not have been so quickly executed, nor the trap itself so definitely arranged.
“One fact is now very obvious, however,” he presently added, hoping to lead Badger into some inadvertent disclosure.
“What fact?” growled Badger, frowning at him.
“Some person informed you of the request I designed to make the Clayton woman.”
“Think so?”
“Or informed her.”
“You’re getting wise fast.”
“Otherwise, Badger, you couldn’t have planned the job among you,” continued Nick.
“Perhaps not.”
“I can come pretty near guessing who it was, too, since Chief Weston is the only man I informed of my intention.”
“Most likely he sent a messenger out here and warned us,” sneered Badger, with a grin.
“Not he,” retorted Nick. “But there’s a red-headed sketch and outline of a man in his office, Badger, whom I’ll come pretty near rounding up along with the rest of you, when I get out of this hole.”
“There will be no immediate rounding up, Carter, since it depends upon you alone,” replied Badger, with a searching stare at Nick’s face.
“Ah, then you were also told that I’m alone on the case,” said Nick, willing enough to have him think so.
“Aren’t you alone on it?”
“If I’m not, Badger, you’ll hear from others soon enough.”
“There are no others.”
“All right.”
“And you are now helpless.”
“Not quite.”
“As good as down and out.”
“But I’m still in the ring,” insisted Nick.
“You’re in hands from which you’ll never escape alive, I give you my word on that,” cried Badger, with menacing austerity.
“Your word, Badger, is a poor voucher.”
“You now know far too much about us for us to let you escape and disclose it,” added the latter decisively. “I now want to know of just what your knowledge consists, and what action you have taken against us.”
Nick laughed a bit derisively.
“I guess, Badger, you’ll have to take it out in wanting,” said he.
“You’ll not inform me?”
“Not by a long chalk.”
“I shall find a way to compel you.”
“Possibly,” said Nick. “But you’ll have a long hunt before you find the way.”
“You’ll let me alone to find that,” cried Badger, with confident asperity. “I can devise tortures so acute that even you will reveal what you have done toward——”
His rascally threat was interrupted at that point by the sound of approaching steps from beyond the partly closed door. In a moment it was thrown open, and[152] Jerry Conley, followed by Vic Clayton and Badger’s wife, entered the dismal place.
That the two women were as low-bred and disreputable as had been reported to Nick appeared in their utter disregard of his wretched condition, and the malicious satisfaction with which they stared at him, as they might have stared at a caged beast which they had had occasion to fear.
“You’ve got him back to earth, have you?” asked Claudia, with a glance at Badger’s grim face. “Jerry just came and told us, so we thought we’d have a look at him.”
Vic Clayton, however, came and bent above Nick, peering down at his stern features, now white from loss of blood; while her own evil eyes, with the mocking smile that curled her cruel lips, plainly evinced her despicable and malignant nature.
“Well, you’ve got as many lives as a cat, haven’t you?” she demanded, in taunting tones.
Nick returned her evil stare with hardly a change of countenance, yet there was in his lifted eyes an ominous, fiery gleam, from which those who knew him best had learned to shrink with fear.
“I shall live long enough to repay with interest the[153] blows you dealt me, and to land you where you belong?” he sternly rejoined.
“You will, eh?” sneered Vic, with a derisive laugh.
“Without the slightest doubt.”
“Evidently you’ve forgotten what I predicted for you.”
“The predictions of a charlatan are seldom fulfilled.”
“Charlatan?”
“And crook,” added Nick.
“Don’t be saucy, Mr. Carter, not to a lady,” said the frowning jade. “You’ll meet with just what I predicted for you—failure.”
“I’ll risk that.”
“And you’re in a very fair way to it,” added Vic, with a sinister nod, as she terminated her malicious scrutiny and turned to Amos Badger.
The latter had drawn aside with his wife and Conley, and the three stood talking in subdued tones, apparently with no interest in the recent amusement of their confederate.
“Well, what do you say?” demanded Vic, as she approached them. “We’ve got him, all right. Now, what’s to be done with him?”
“That’s what we are discussing,” growled Conley, who had much of the ruffian in him. “I say ’twas a mistake[154] not to have let him croak, if he’d have been accommodating enough to do so.”
“Bah!” muttered Claudia. “Men with as hard heads as his don’t die so easily.”
“To my way of thinking,” added Conley, “it’s safest for us to put out his light at once, and be done with it.”
Badger, however, quickly shook his head.
“Not yet,” said he grimly. “Not before to-morrow.”
“But why the delay?” protested Conley. “I cannot see anything in that.”
“Then I’ll tell you why.”
“Well, out with it.”
Nick pricked up his ears, yet he could catch only a word now and then louder than others.
“To begin with,” argued Badger, “I’m not going to run my neck into a noose before I know just how we stand. We have no blood on our hands as yet, and before I take chances of that kind, Conley, I’m going to be dead sure that Carter has not reported his suspicions to Weston. What good will it do to put him out of the way, only to find that we have half a score of Boston detectives on our heels, to whom Carter’s discoveries have been imparted.”
“But Sandy declares that Weston knows nothing about that,” whispered Vic.
“I hope he doesn’t, but I’m going to be sure of it before I wipe out Nick Carter,” said Badger.
“How can you make sure?” growled Conley.
“We shall know by to-morrow at this time.”
“How so?”
“Because we shall have others after us, Jerry, just as soon as the discovery is made that Carter is missing,” reasoned Badger. “If none show up, we may then safely assume that Sandy Hyde is right, and that Carter has disclosed nothing definite. We shall then know that he’s the only one we need fear, and it will then be time enough to put him down and out.”
“Well, there’s something in that,” Conley now muttered.
“We know he cannot escape.”
“H’m! I should say not.”
“So there’s no need of haste, since we have him in our clutches,” added Badger. “Besides, there is another thing to be considered.”
“What’s that?”
“Carter may have some of his New York assistants here, for all we positively know to the contrary.”
“Sandy says not,” interposed Vic.
“He may not be absolutely sure,” Badger argued. “And until we are dead certain of it, which should be[156] by to-morrow at this time, I am resolved to take no chance of some day being tried for murder.”
“That does have an ugly sound,” said Vic, with a dismal grimace.
“And there’s an ugly penalty,” added her sister.
“So that settles it, Jerry,” said Badger. “We’ll keep Carter right here till we know just what we’re up against.”
“Well, that’s good enough for me if ’tis for you,” said Conley indifferently.
“Are you sure his bonds are secure?”
“If he loosens any of those knots, Amos, I’ll eat the ropes,” was the confident rejoinder.
“To-morrow we’ll take steps to make him open his mouth, and tell all he knows.”
“What steps?”
“I’ll find a way, let me alone for that.”
“Meantime——” began Vic.
“No more here,” interposed Badger. “It’s too infernally damp and cold. Go back to the house, you two women, and I’ll presently join you there. I’ll first make sure that things here are all safe.”
“All right, Amos.”
The two women withdrew from the vault, Nick following them with his gaze.
The two men remained, and both now proceeded to make doubly sure that the ropes binding Nick’s arms and limbs were securely knotted.
Not a word was spoken.
The work required less than a minute, and Badger then took up the lantern and signed for Conley to go out ahead.
At the door of the vault, however, Badger turned back for a moment, to say, with vicious assurance:
“If it is to be one of us who must go down and out, Carter, it will be you! Take my word for that!”
For a moment Nick gazed sternly at him across the dismal place, then coldly retorted:
“Since I have only your word for it, Badger, I feel perfectly safe!”
Badger vented a half-smothered growl, then closed the heavy door with a resounding bang.
Nick heard the shooting of bolts and the sound of a bar dropped into place.
Then all was silence for a time—silence and darkness!
CHAPTER XIV.
SHADOWS AND SHADOWED.
“Thundering guns!” muttered Patsy. “He’d be an ugly cur to meet in the dark.”
Chick Carter gazed in the direction indicated.
The two detectives were comfortably seated on a log in the midst of a cluster of shrubbery.
The shrubbery formed a part of the scrub and bushes skirting the woodland back of the extensive Badger estate.
Nearly a hundred yards away was the stable, a side view, with the long carriage-house adjoining, as previously described.
Fifty yards beyond was the Badger dwelling, rear elevation, with the back door and windows in plain sight, as well as part of one of the side verandas.
The intervening ground was clear of trees, and nothing obstructed the view of the two watching detectives.
They were executing Nick’s command given them that morning, that of learning what they could about the Badger place without being seen.
They had already measured it from in front, and had arrived at their present vantage-point about half an hour[159] before, bent upon watching till they were reasonably assured as to the number of servants in the house and stable.
Matters always moved lively with the Carters after a trail was once fairly struck, and in this case they were no exception.
That which had occasioned Patsy’s muttered exclamation was now observed by Chick, who parted the shrubbery concealing them to view the object a little better.
It was a huge Cuban bloodhound, a wicked-looking beast. The animal had evidently just come out of the stable, the front of which was only partly visible to the detectives, and he was now trotting across the lawn toward the rear door of the house.
“I believe you are right,” rejoined Chick. “He looks as if he might bolt a man with a single mouthful.”
“Dead easy,” nodded Patsy.
“If we have work to do here after dark,” said Chick, “we’d best keep that fellow in mind.”
“Rather.”
“He’d put up an uglier fight than the entire bunch we’ve seen so far.”
“That’s right, Chick.”
“We’ve seen only four as yet.”
“Badger and his wife, whom we saw from the front,”[160] counted Patsy. “The middle-aged woman at work in the kitchen yonder, and the covey we’ve seen about the stable. That makes four, Chick; sure as you’re a foot high.”
“I begin to think there are no others.”
“Four are not many to be carrying on the game Nick suspects,” suggested Patsy, a bit doubtfully.
“There is still the Clayton woman,” replied Chick; “and she and Badger’s wife may be as bold and capable as men would be.”
“Very likely.”
“There are enough of them to have played this hold-up game successfully, that’s plain enough; and the smaller the number, Patsy, the less liability of betrayal.”
“That’s true, Chick.”
“I think that the paucity of servants here is a point in our favor.”
“A point that Nick is right?”
“Exactly.”
“Perhaps so.”
“I doubt if there are others,” repeated Chick, “or if we can remain here much longer to advantage. We are to rejoin Nick at four o’clock, you remember.”
“What time is it now?”
“Half-past one,” replied Chick, consulting his watch.
It was at that moment that Vic Clayton was receiving her very important communication from the spy from police headquarters, half an hour before the arrival of Nick.
At the same moment, while Chick and Patsy were crouched, gazing toward the house, Conley came out of the rear door and sauntered toward the stable, lighting his pipe while he walked.
“There’s that stable covey again,” murmured Patsy. “I don’t half-fancy his looks.”
“Evidently he is just out from dinner.”
“Sure thing! See, the woman is now feeding the dog at the back steps. That’s what the ugly cur trotted over there for.”
“He knows when meal-time comes,” laughed Chick.
“Mebbe his meal-ticket is only good at this hour,” grinned Patsy. “I wonder if that covey is the only man in the stable. If he is, Chick, he must have a good bit of work, or else Nick is away off on some points.”
“Why so?”
“Nick thinks they have three or four horses out here.”
“We know of one, Patsy.”
“And he thinks these hold-up crooks have several automobiles.”
“They don’t require much labor, particularly when only seldom used.”
“Well, they haven’t the autos in that stable, nor in the carriage-house,” declared Patsy. “That’s a cinch, Chick, for we’ve had a look into both.”
“True.”
“And there’s only one horse in the stable.”
“They may have some secret place of concealment for the whole business,” said Chick.
“Perhaps so, yet——”
“Stop a bit!” Chick suddenly interrupted, rising to peer through the shrubbery. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“Gee!” muttered Patsy, also starting to his feet. “Something’s up!”
Though they had no way of learning the occasion for the excitement at this time, both being out of hearing and unable to approach without being detected, it was at just this time that Badger received from Vic Clayton a telephone communication concerning Nick Carter’s designs, and which had been quickly followed by the laying of the plot that later resulted in Nick’s downfall.
Badger had come plunging out of the back door of the house, without coat or hat, throwing away his cigar as[163] he ran across the lawn, all the while shouting lustily to Conley.
It was his sudden appearance and obvious excitement that had so startled both Chick and Patsy.
Conley turned back upon hearing the shouts, and the two crooks met about twenty feet in front of the stable, within plain view of the detectives.
There Badger talked rapidly for several moments, with occasional fierce gestures in the direction of the city, and all the while both men exhibited in their faces and movements a consternation and excitement not easily to be accounted for by one out of hearing.
“Gee! I’d give something to know what they are saying,” muttered Patsy, staring with distended eyes.
“There is something in the wind,” nodded Chick.
At the end of about a minute, Badger turned and rushed back to the house, entering it at the top of his speed.
Conley, meantime, bolted out of sight toward the stable door, yet not into it, which was out of view of the detectives.
“Where the dickens did he go?” said Chick curiously.
“It looked as if he went into the stable,” said Patsy.
“I’m not so sure of that.”
“No?”
“I thought he turned to one side just before he approached the door.”
“He may have run around the farthest corner,” suggested Patsy. “We might change our positions, Chick, so as to see that door.”
“Wait a bit,” replied Chick. “There’s a big hurry here over something, and we shall see all there is to be seen in short order.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Badger pointed toward town several times,” added Chick, with grave countenance. “I’d wager a little that Nick is in some way back of this, if not involved in some bother.”
“You don’t imagine——”
“Easy! Here comes Badger again.”
Once more the latter had bolted out of the house, and this time he was followed by his wife.
Now both had on their outside garments, and evidently were prepared for a ride.
At the same moment an automobile, with a furious rumble and whir, came into view in front of the stable, and sped across the lawn to meet the couple.
It was driven by Conley, who tumbled out of it the instant it stopped, while Badger and his wife clambered in almost as quickly.
In another moment, with Badger running it, the car was speeding down the long gravel driveway toward Laurel Road.
The departure was made so excitedly and hurriedly that Patsy, who had been holding his breath all the while, now exhaled it with a sharp gasp.
“Whew; that beats the record,” he exclaimed.
“What puzzles me,” replied Chick perplexedly, “is where that auto came from.”
“Gee! that’s just what I was thinking.”
“It did not come out of the stable, I’ll swear to that.”
“It looked to me as if it came around the farther corner.”
“It was a Packard,” said Chick. “I know the machine.”
“Perhaps——”
“Break off and follow me,” now interrupted Chick, who had been watching Conley walk leisurely back toward the stable.
“Where now?” asked Patsy, as they drew back through the woods.
“Back to town,” said Chick decidedly. “There’s nothing more for us here at present.”
“It’s a good bet that Badger has headed for town, since he pointed that way so often.”
“That’s just my idea, Patsy.”
“What do you think about it?”
“I think that something has happened to alarm these rascals,” replied Chick.
“And that nobody but Nick could have brought that about?”
“Exactly.”
“In that case, Chick, he may have made some move since we left him.”
“Sure.”
“And possibly these guys have got wise to it.”
“That appears to be about the size of it,” nodded Chick. “Furthermore, it looks as if Badger, in making this lightning trip, had got something up his sleeve for Nick.”
“A counter-move?”
“Precisely.”
“What shall we do about it?”
“We’ll first make sure about Nick,” replied Chick. “He was to rejoin us at four o’clock. If he doesn’t show up at that hour, or a little later, we must get a move on.”
“To trace him?”
“Sure.”
“And if we fail to strike his trail?”
“Back out here we’ll come, Patsy, dog or no dog, to[167] learn what this sudden journey really meant,” declared Chick, with grave determination.
He had reasoned shrewdly in that he had attributed Badger’s excited departure to some unexpected cause for alarm, and also that Nick was the person most likely to have occasioned it.
In the light of these deductions, moreover, Badger’s immediate and decisive action plainly indicated that he had some definite project in view, presumably one to avert the impending danger.
The conclusions alone were sufficient to point to some peril threatening Nick, and his chief assistant was quick to arrive at them, and act accordingly.
As a matter of fact, however, the celerity and astuteness with which the Carters invariably cooperated in their work went far toward insuring their success.
Chick’s talk with Patsy had occurred while they picked their way through the belt of woods, from which they presently emerged, then hastened to the nearest trolley line and back to the city.
It was nearly three o’clock when they arrived at the Adams House, and went to Nick’s room.
There was no sign of Nick, however.
The magnifying-glass with which he had examined[168] the incriminating photograph was still lying on the table where he had left it. But there was neither note nor token to show that he had been there since the three departed in company that morning.
“He has not returned since he left with us, Patsy,” said Chick, after looking about. “We’ll wait till the appointed hour.”
“Four o’clock?”
“Or a little later.”
“He may show up by that time.”
“I haven’t much hope of it,” replied Chick, a bit anxiously. “I’ve got it on me good and hard, a genuine hunch, Patsy, that something has gone wrong with him.”
“You’re most generally right, Chick, when you feel like that.”
Chick made no reply, but began pacing the floor.
An hour passed, and brought no sign of Nick.
At half-past four Chick could restrain his impatience no longer.
“Come on!” he abruptly exclaimed, catching up his hat. “We’ll get a move on.”
Patsy started up from the couch, on which he was having a pull at his pipe.
“I’m with you!” he cried, with alacrity. “Going to try to trace him?”
“Yes.”
“Where first, Chick? To State Street?”
“It’s too late to go there,” replied Chick, as they left the room and hastened toward the elevator.
“Yet we might strike his trail there.”
“I can do so more quickly, I think.”
“Where?”
“At police headquarters—Chief Weston’s office, in Pemberton Square.”
CHAPTER XV.
ON NICK’S TRAIL.
It was five o’clock when Chick and Patsy entered Pemberton Square.
It was about half an hour before that when Nick Carter was lodged in his place of confinement.
“You wait here, Patsy,” said Chick, at the corner on which Nick engaged Grady’s runabout a few mornings before. “There is no need of both of us going into the chief’s office. I’ll return inside of five minutes.”
“Go ahead.”
Chick hastened down the basement stairs and into the[170] chief’s office—only to encounter Sandy Hyde just entering from the opposite corridor.
“Where’s the chief?” Chick cried bruskly.
Hyde didn’t know Chick from a side of sole leather, but, knowing at least that he was not Nick Carter, he answered quite promptly:
“The chief is in his office.”
“I must see him.”
“What name?”
“Chick Carter. Come, come, I’m in a rush!”
Hyde’s catlike eyes at once began to dilate upon hearing the name, taking on their greenish glow of internal excitement.
He now realized that he had given Vic Clayton a wrong tip, that one of Nick’s assistants was in Boston and on the case with him, and the servile little rascal at once began to figure how he could square himself and discover Chick’s mission.
He did not dare hazard playing the eavesdropper again, and also feared that he might not overhear all that was said by so doing, and he at once adopted the first resort that appealed to him.
He hastened through the enclosure, and into Weston’s private office, saying quickly:
“There’s a man out here to see you, chief.”
“What man?”
“I didn’t catch his name, sir. But he’s in an awful rush, and I reckon something has happened.”
Just as Hyde had expected, Chief Weston started up from his chair and strode into the general office.
Hyde was cunning enough to foresee that, if Chick was in such great haste, their conversation would probably be carried on in the outer office.
So it was, moreover, despite that Weston at once cried, as he shook his visitor by the hand:
“Why, hello, Chick Carter! How are you? Come inside.”
“No, no, chief,” Chick quickly declined. “I’m going to stay but a moment. Has Nick been here to-day?”
“Yes—about one o’clock.”
“Do you know where he has gone?”
“I know where he said he was going.”
“Where was that?”
“To Madame Victoria’s rooms, in Tremont Street,” replied Weston.
“Do you know for what?” inquired Chick, beginning to see light ahead.
Chief Weston briefly told him of what Nick’s mission[172] at Vic Clayton’s rooms consisted, as stated by Nick, and then he inquired curiously:
“Why are you asking about him, Chick? Is there anything wrong?”
Having learned all that he could then and there, however, Chick decided to impart nothing at this time.
“No, nothing wrong, chief, I think,” he quickly rejoined, turning to go. “I am merely in a hurry to locate him, that’s all. He may have returned to the hotel by this time.”
“I think likely you’ll find him there,” nodded Weston, a bit suspicious of Chick’s evasion.
Chick did not wait longer, but bolted out as he had bolted in.
Weston walked toward his private office.
Hyde’s greenish eyes, now glowing more brightly than ever, drifted toward the telephone-closet.
Before he could make a move to convey the desired warning to Badger, however, Chief Weston turned back and said curtly:
“You come in here with me, Sandy. I want you to help me on my quarterly report for an hour or so. Look lively, too, or you’ll be tied up here till after six o’clock.”
The sallow features of the treacherous miscreant quivered and twitched with disappointment for a moment,[173] but immediate obedience was imperative—and the telephone had to wait!
Chick Carter rejoined Patsy on the corner.
“Come on!” he exclaimed.
“Where now?” inquired Patsy, as they headed for Tremont Street.
“To the fortune-teller’s rooms.”
“Has Nick been there?”
“Yes, about two o’clock.”
“Did you learn for what?”
“All that Weston could tell me,” replied Chick, hurriedly informing him what he had learned.
Both were quick to see the possibilities which their various observations and discoveries presented, and Patsy now forcibly declared, as Chick concluded:
“I’ll bet that some kind of a scurvy trick has been turned.”
“I fear so, Patsy.”
“Badger wouldn’t have been on such a rush with that auto unless he had some scheme in view.”
“That’s right,” assented Chick. “Madame Victoria may have telephoned to him what Nick was about doing, and possibly planned with Badger to get him into their hands.”
“That appears about the size of it. If we get no trace[174] of him here,” growled Patsy, “we’ll go out there again to-night and investigate.”
“That’s what we’ll do.”
“Do you know just where the fortune-teller’s rooms are located?”
“Yonder,” nodded Chick, as they hastened up Tremont Street. “In that block on the next corner.”
“What are you going to ask her, in case she is there?”
“Oh, I can give her some kind of a plausible story to explain my inquiries,” replied Chick confidently. “She’s not clairvoyant enough to see through me, I’ll go my pile on that.”
“Mine goes the same way,” vouchsafed Patsy, with a grin.
“I’ll assuredly not let her know that I’m on the case with Nick,” added Chick. “If these rascals think he is working it alone, we may derive some advantage by keeping them in the dark.”
“Surely.”
“Nick also may not wish us to expose that we, too, are investigating the case——Stop a bit! Wait here!”
Chick had suddenly caught Patsy by the arm and drawn him to the shelter of a doorway, less than twenty yards from that leading into the building occupied by Vic Clayton.
The occasion for this move was obvious.
Just turning the corner of Boylston Street, and approaching the building mentioned, was a huge touring-car of the latest type, occupied by two women only.
“By thunder!” muttered Patsy excitedly. “That’s Badger’s wife running that car.”
“I see it is,” said Chick more coolly.
“With the fortune-teller?”
“No doubt of it. She answers Nick’s description of her.”
“Gee whiz!”
“Well?”
“That’s not the car that Badger and his wife used this afternoon,” cried Patsy.
“So I see,” said Chick, still watching the couple. “There is something back of all this.”
“You bet there is!”
“Hold your horses, however, till I see what the two women are about to do.”
With skillful hands Claudia Badger had turned the huge car in Tremont Street, then brought it to a stop at the curb opposite the doorway giving ingress to Vic Clayton’s rooms.
Then both women deliberately alighted and entered the building, leaving the automobile unattended.
Chick Carter’s eyes took on a sudden bright gleam.
They had lighted upon a large willow hamper, or covered basket, attached to the rear of the car for the purpose of stowing away articles to be carried on a long tour. The hamper was nearly as large as a small trunk, and the top was secured only with two brass clasps.
“By Jove, Patsy, here’s the chance of a lifetime!” Chick hurriedly exclaimed.
“What do you mean?” came the eager inquiry.
“Do you see that hamper?”
“Sure!”
“Do you think you can get into it?”
Patsy needed no further hint to the design in Chick’s mind, nor to the possibility it presented. With eyes quickly glowing with eagerness and excitement, he hurriedly replied:
“Get into it? Sure I can! The scheme is a corker! It’ll take me right into the midst of these rascals. Come on, Chick, and——”
“Stop a moment,” cautioned Chick. “Get that policeman to help you, explaining who you are, and have him take away any stuff that may be in the hamper.”
“And you?”
“I’ll rush up-stairs, and keep those two women engaged till I’m sure you are well under cover.”
“Good enough!”
“And to-night you can count on me to lend a hand,” added Chick, “in case I am needed.”
“That’s the idea!” cried Patsy.
“Away with you, then, while I tackle the two women.”
Patsy hastened toward the deserted automobile, near which a policeman happened to be standing, and whose aid the former quickly obtained in the way Chick had suggested.
Chick, meantime, hastened into the building and up to the rooms of Madame Victoria.
He found the two women in the reception-parlor, Vic Clayton engaged in changing her automobile coat for a long cloak.
They had driven into town again, after securing Nick, only in order that they might be seen by the occupants of the stores near-by, with a view to subsequently obtaining the testimony of these observers, if the need arose, in support of some plausible story to the effect that they had brought Nick back to town and left him in some locality.
Upon hearing Chick enter the room, both women turned toward him with looks of surprise.
“I beg pardon, ladies,” said he, bowing. “I am looking for Madame Victoria.”
“I am she,” replied Vic, sharply regarding him.
“My name is Henderson, madame.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Henderson?”
“I am looking for a gentleman who is said to have been here this afternoon, and with whom I have important business,” explained Chick, with a deliberation well calculated to give Patsy what time he would require below.
He was quick to see, however, the suspicious gleam that instantly arose in Vic Clayton’s eyes upon learning his business, and he added, with some suavity:
“I am unable to find the gentleman at his hotel, madame, and I thought he might still be here.”
“Who is the gentleman?” asked Vic, with affected indifference.
“His name is Nick Carter.”
“Is he a friend of yours?”
“An acquaintance only.”
“How did you learn that he had been here, Mr. Henderson?” inquired Vic, now bestowing a gracious smile upon her questioner.
“I was so informed by the clerk at the hotel, to whom Mr. Carter had mentioned his intention of coming here.”
“Ah. I see.”
“I inferred that Mr. Carter came here to consult you professionally, madame, and I thought his interview might possibly have lasted till now.”
Chick easily detected the relief which his artful explanation had occasioned both women, and it convinced him that he was on the right track, yet he in no way betrayed his convictions.
Neither woman had approached the window to look out, and Vic Clayton had now buttoned her cloak and appeared anxious to depart.
Chick knew that Patsy must have accomplished his design by this time, however, and he did not care how soon the interview terminated.
“Well, Mr. Henderson, I cannot say where Mr. Carter has gone,” Vic carelessly rejoined. “We dropped him at the corner of Arlington Street, however, only a short time ago.”
“From your automobile?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Possibly, then, I shall now find him at the hotel.”
“I think it quite probable, sir, for he walked toward Washington Street after he left us,” smiled Vic, edging toward the door which Claudia Badger already had opened.
“I will return there and see,” said Chick, bowing[180] himself from the room. “Thank you very much for your information.”
“Don’t mention it, sir,” replied Vic, with a little laugh, as she and her companion also stepped into the corridor, closing the door behind them.
Chick politely stepped aside, and let them precede him down the stairs.
Without so much as a glance at him again, both women fell into a conventional talk as they descended toward the street.
Chick reached the sidewalk close upon their heels, however.
The touring-car still stood at the curb—but there was no sign of Patsy in any direction.
The policeman was lingering near-by, with an air of indifference and a vacant stare across the opposite Common.
From some little distance away a few curious observers were gazing toward the car, wondering at what they had seen, but the officer had made sure that they were too remote to attract attention.
Neither woman noticed them as she crossed the sidewalk and quickly entered the car.
In another moment it was under way, with Claudia[181] Badger at the wheel, and presently was speeding up Boylston Street.
Chick now turned to the policeman, who received him with a significant grin.
“What do you say, officer?” demanded Chick.
“He’s in it, all right, sir,” was the reply.
“In the hamper?”
“That’s what.”
“Was it empty?”
“Not a thing in it, sir.”
“Close quarters for him, weren’t they?”
“Rather,” laughed the officer. “But he fixed the clasps so he can get out whenever he likes, and he’ll not fare so badly. What’s the job, Mr. Carter?”
“If all works well, officer, you may learn by reading to-morrow morning’s newspapers,” Chick pointedly rejoined, as he turned to go. “I cannot wait to inform you, for I now have work of my own elsewhere.”
He was thinking of Badger’s place, and of what might befall the dauntless young detective then speeding out there in the hazardous manner described.
Ten minutes later, however, with a revolver in each hip pocket, Chick also was on his way to Brookline.
CHAPTER XVI.
A TERRIBLE PREDICAMENT.
Patsy held his breath.
It was a novel and, at times, a thrilling sensation, that of riding at thirty miles an hour enclosed in a wicker hamper on the rear of an automobile.
At times the car ran smoothly and swiftly; at others it jolted heavily over a rougher road.
It was not dark in the basketlike receptacle into which Patsy had fairly crammed himself, yet the wickerwork was so compact that he could not see out unless he raised the cover, and that he did not venture to do.
Neither could he hear anything that was said by the two women on the front seat of the car, owing to the constant noise of the vehicle.
He knew, however, that he was on the road to Badger’s place, and speeding to the assistance of Nick Carter, and that was good enough for Patsy up to that time.
After half an hour’s run, as nearly as he could judge, the cramped and twisted young detective felt the car sweep in a swift curve out of the direct road it had been following, and speed along a much less smooth and even way.
“We have entered Laurel Road,” he rightly conjectured. “In five more minutes we should arrive at Badger’s house. Providing that I am not discovered in this infernally tight box, I there may hear something to serve my purpose. If I can learn definitely that Nick is out here, and then discover just where he is located, the rest of the job should be fairly easy.”
For his own peril, let it be what it might, the brave youngster had not even a passing thought.
Presently the car turned again, and began to slow down, and a moment later, when the noise of the motor abated, Patsy could plainly hear Vic Clayton addressing her companion.
“There is Amos on the side veranda, Claudia,” she cried, in satisfied tones.
“So I see, Vic,” was the reply.
“Things must still be all right out here, old girl, since he appears to be taking it easy, and is smoking a cigar.”
“I will round that side of the house before running the car to the stable,” said Claudia.
“You can drop me there, too.”
“We’ll both stop there, and let Amos put the car under cover. Yes, I judge that things are all right out here, as you say.”
“They’ll soon take a turn for the worse, I’ll wager my life on that,” thought Patsy, with grim anticipations.
It was then nearly seven o’clock, and the dusk of the early evening had begun to fall.
As the car approached the side veranda and came to a stop, Badger rose out of a chair in which he was seated, and strode to the steps leading down to the driveway.
Though his dark features wore a look of evil complacency, he at once addressed his wife in rather uneasy tones.
“Well, what’s the verdict?” he asked.
“Nothing wrong, Amos,” she cried, as both women came down from the car.
“Did you stop at your rooms, Vic?”
“Certainly,” laughed the latter. “Don’t you notice that I have changed my coat?”
“Ah, yes, I see.”
“I did that only to indicate that we had some motive for visiting the rooms,” she glibly added. “We had a visitor, too, while we were there.”
“Who was that?”
“A chap named Henderson.”
“Henderson?”
“That’s what he said, Amos, and whom do you think he inquired after?”
“Not Nick Carter!” cried Badger, with brows quickly knitting.
“None other.”
“The devil you say! There may be something back of that.”
“Nothing that involves us, I reckon,” declared Vic confidently.
“Why do you feel so sure of it?”
“Because he was sent to my rooms by the clerk in the hotel where Carter was stopping, and to whom he had mentioned coming to my place. He merely wanted to see him on business, Amos, and couldn’t locate him.”
The last was said with much significance and a loud, derisive laugh, in which Amos Badger now joined.
“Not locate him, eh?” he cried, with a shrug. “Well, if anybody locates him after to-morrow, Vic, I’ll take a permanent seat in the back row.”
As may be inferred, this conversation took place some little time before the interview with Nick himself, as related in a previous chapter.
“You’ll take a seat in that stone hotel in Charles Street, you mean, along with all the rest of us,” Vic bluntly rejoined.
“You’ll soon be there!” thought Patsy, who was listening intently to all that was being said.
Not so much as a glance had been bestowed upon the hamper, which externally presented no unusual appearance, and Patsy felt tolerably safe in his concealment.
The end was not yet, however.
“What have you done with him, Amos?” Claudia now asked, as Badger came down the steps to run the car to cover.
“With Carter?”
“Yes, of course. We started for town, you know, the moment we had him safely landed here.”
“Conley now has charge of him,” said Badger.
“Where?”
“In the old wine-vault.”
“Are you going to confine him there?”
“Yes, till I do worse to him.”
“Has he come to himself?”
“Not yet,” Badger promptly replied. “Those were three ugly blows that Vic gave him.”
“I was taking no chances by falling short of my duty,” put in Vic, with a cruel laugh.
“They’d have killed him for sure, Vic, if his head were not as tough and hard as a darky’s.”
“He would then have been out of our way, at all events.”
“Conley will soon have him revived, I think, and then[187] we will have a talk with him, and force him to confess what is being done against us,” added Badger, approaching the automobile. “I’ll stow the machine while you two go in and eat your dinner. It’s already on the table.”
“Had yours?”
“Yes.”
“Send Jerry in here to tell us when his patient revives,” called Vic Clayton, as she mounted the steps. “I want to go out there and have a look at him.”
“All right,” growled Badger, as he sprang into the car.
Then the two women entered the house.
In another moment the car started again with a whir and rumble, and Patsy mentally sized up the situation as he saw it.
“We have hit the nail on the head, all right,” he said to himself. “These crooks are all that we have suspected, and they have Nick imprisoned out here, after knocking him on the head. They shall be paid with interest for the blows given him, however, as surely as the sun sets in the west.
“Confined in the old wine-vault, eh? I wonder where that is located. Evidently it is not connected with the[188] cellar of the house, since that she devil of a fortune-teller wants to go ‘out’ somewhere to see Nick.
“Conley, plainly enough, is the stableman we saw to-day, and, since he has Nick in charge, it’s a good bet that the vault mentioned is either in the basement of the stable or that long carriage-house which adjoins it. I’ll wager that I speedily find it, give me half a chance.”
“Hello! what’s the meaning of this?”
Patsy had suddenly felt the car lurch heavily, and sway to one side, then plunge forward as if it were going down a steep incline.
“We cannot be going directly into the stable,” he quickly reasoned. “The run into that is on the level, but we’re descending some short, steep place.”
“By Jove! I have it. Badger is taking the car into some place from which Conley brought that one this noon, which Chick felt sure had not come out of the stable. These crooks must have some secret hiding-place for their several cars and horses, and Badger is about taking this one into it. Fortunately, I shall now know all about it.”
Patsy was correct in these conjectures.
Badger had run the car around a corner of the stable, then down to a short fence enclosing the space below the building, which stood on a slope of the land.
In this fence was a door about wide enough to admit the car, and Badger quickly sprang down to open it.
As the latter did so, there fell upon Patsy’s ears a sound that chilled his blood, despite the strong nerves and invincible courage of the young detective.
The sound was the sudden threatening barking of a dog, then confined in this basement garage.
“By thunder! it’s that Cuban bloodhound!” was Patsy’s mental exclamation.
He felt a thrill of dismay when he now recalled the huge beast, which he had not once thought of since undertaking the hazardous venture in which he was at present helplessly launched.
“If I escape detection by his ugly nostrils I shall be lucky,” he said to himself. “If he scents me before I can make some kind of a move to escape from this basket, I shall be a gone goose for sure.”
These thoughts passed quickly through Patsy’s mind while Badger was opening the door mentioned.
Then out came the dog, nearly as large as a small calf, leaping about his rascally master, and barking furiously.
“Gee whiz! that’s a pleasant sound,” murmured Patsy, with an irrepressible shudder.
“Down, Pluto!” roared Badger angrily. “Keep down,[190] I say! Close that trap of yours, you brute, or I’ll break every bone in your ugly body. Get out, you cur!”
With the last of these exclamations, the huge dog was dealt a resounding kick in the ribs, which sent him yelping out across the lawn, at which Patsy breathed a sigh of relief.
“I’m safe for a few minutes, at least,” he decided.
Then he heard Badger shout commandingly:
“Here you, Conley! Come here with the lantern, so I can see to run in this car. Look lively, old pal!”
Patsy wondered why he had shouted so lustily, and now he ventured to raise the wicker lid about half an inch and peer out.
A dimly lighted basement met his gaze. It was not more than twenty feet square, with the stone foundation walls of the stable on two sides, the open door on a third, while the fourth and interior side appeared to be a solid wooden bulkhead.
The floor was the bare ground, and the place was evidently designed for stowing away an automobile.
“This is where that car came from this noon, that’s plain enough,” thought Patsy. “Yet Nick must be wrong in thinking the rascals own so many cars, for I’ve seen only two. There’s not room in there for more than that number.”
The last thought had barely crossed his mind, however, when Patsy discovered his mistake, and also why Badger had shouted so loudly.
A secret sliding door in the interior bulkhead wall suddenly flew open, revealing a long extension of the basement, running even under the carriage-house adjoining the stable above.
In this secret extension, which was so cleverly constructed as to defy detection either from within or without, Patsy now caught sight of half a score of motors lined up against one of the side walls, each of a different make from the others, and all apparently in first-class condition.
“By thunder! this does settle it, and Nick was right,” he mused. “Those are the different cars these knaves have used for their night hold-ups. This exterior basement is only a blind for concealing the other.”
The chief figure that at once claimed Patsy’s attention, however, was that of Jerry Conley.
He had appeared in the secret doorway in response to Badger’s shout, and he carried in one hand a lighted lantern, and in the other a flask of brandy.
“Well, what do you say, Jerry?” demanded Badger, as the other strode out to join him.
“He’s all right now,” growled Conley, setting down the lantern.
“Got him back to earth?”
“Pretty nearly. He’ll be himself in a few minutes.”
“Thank God!” thought Patsy fervently. “That refers to Nick.”
“Then he’ll not croak?” inquired Badger, as if somewhat disappointed.
“Not this time; though I reckon ’twould be a good thing for us if he did,” snarled Conley.
“Help me run this car in, then I’ll go and have a talk with him.”
Patsy ducked his head and dropped the hamper lid.
Then he sensed that the two men had seized the sides of the car and drawn it well into the exterior basement.
“Things all right in town?” queried Conley.
“Yes.”
“Did both women come out?”
“Sure.”
“I’m thinking ’twould be a good scheme to hold up some party to-night,” Conley now declared.
“Why so?” inquired Badger.
“It would go to show the police that the unknown road robbers have not been interfered with by any move[193] of Nick Carter, and when he is found to be missing, no suspicion, naturally, would fall upon us.”
“There’s something in that.”
“Sure there is.”
But Badger presently shook his head.
“Not to-night, Jerry,” said he decisively. “We already have enough on for to-night with this infernal detective. Besides, I’m about all in, with what I’ve had to do to-day.”
“I don’t much wonder,” grinned Conley.
“We’ll cut out the hold-up until to-morrow,” added Badger. “You go over to the house and tell Vic that Carter has revived. She wants to come out and see him. Meantime, I’ll take the lantern, and go and have a talk with him.”
“What’s the matter with lighting this wall lamp?”
“No harm in it, Jerry. Light it, if you like.”
Badger took up the lantern while speaking, and strode into the interior basement, closing the sliding door after him.
Conley struck a match and lighted an oil-lamp in a bracket on the wall, then hastened out of doors and across the lawn.
“Now is my time!” thought Patsy. “If I can get into[194] that inner cellar, and down Amos Badger, the rest will be dead easy!”
He raised his head a little to lift the lid of the hamper.
Then he suddenly stopped, holding his breath.
The patter of soft feet on the ground near-by had reached his ears.
Then came a furious sniffing about the wickerwork of the hamper.
It was followed immediately by a long, low, threatening growl, enough to have sent a chill through a brass image.
“That infernal bloodhound again!” thought Patsy, with an ugly creeping of his every nerve. “By thunder! this is worse than being headed off by a man—or by half a dozen men! What’s the cursed brute about to do?”
CHAPTER XVII.
A CRISIS.
The bloodhound continued to sniff and growl.
Patsy continued to lie low and hold his breath.
He knew that if he showed himself in the open there would be trouble from that moment—and the worst kind of trouble.
He hoped that the fierce brute would presently have satisfied his curiosity, and then take it into his ugly head to return out of doors.
But the dog did nothing of the kind.
Plainly enough, he knew that there was something wrong, and his watch-dog instinct impelled him to hang about the suspected spot.
He fell to trotting to and fro near the back of the touring-car, over a space of some six feet, like an irritated lion in a cage.
With every turn he made he looked up at the hamper with his rolling red eyes, and indulged in a low, threatening growl.
It was as much as to say: “Don’t come out, or I’ll make a meal of you!”
His huge jaws hung apart and were froth-flecked, and Patsy, venturing once to peer out at him, did not like his looks.
“He’d make mince-meat of me in less than ten seconds if I undertook to leap out there,” he said to himself, with gruesome misgivings. “Yet if I remain here and he there, I am as good as discovered by these crooks. I’m blessed if this hasn’t developed into a mighty ugly situation.”
As a matter of fact, he could see no immediate way out of it.
He was so cramped and twisted in his close quarters that he could not draw his revolver without rising up in the hamper, and he knew that the dog would instantly attack him if he ventured doing that.
His muscles were so cramped, moreover, that he knew he could not move to advantage for several moments after his release.
He realized, furthermore, that the report of his revolver, in case he attempted to shoot the dog, would speedily bring Badger and his confederates to the spot, and that the result might possibly be fatal to himself, or, at least, to Nick’s designs, to corner and arrest the entire gang.
So for upward of five minutes the situation hung fire, Patsy waiting and wondering, and the bloodhound still growling and trotting to and fro some six feet away.
It was at this time that Badger had his talk with Nick, as already related.
Presently Patsy heard Conley returning, accompanied by the two women.
Though all three observed the dog, they paid no immediate attention to his movements, but at once hastened[197] into the inner basement and to the vault in which Nick was confined.
Patsy inwardly prayed that the dog would follow them, but his prayer proved vain.
The bloodhound knew his business.
He continued to trot and growl, occasionally snapping his huge jaws by diversion or anticipation, and all the while with his red eyes fixed upon the wicker hamper.
Patsy gritted his own teeth in impotent rage.
At the end of another five minutes, however, he had decided what to do.
He resolved to shoot the dog, taking chances of killing him with a single shot, and then leap out of the hamper and attack, single-handed, the gang in the interior basement.
Conley had left the sliding door open after entering with the women, and Patsy thought he could see a tolerably fair prospect of bringing to a successful issue even as desperate a move as that which he now contemplated.
Having grimly settled upon the task, he now wormed about a bit in the hamper, striving to free his revolver from his hip pocket.
The bloodhound instantly redoubled his growling.
“You be hanged!” muttered Patsy resentfully. “I’ll presently silence you with a chunk of lead.”
He had succeeded in getting hold of the butt of his revolver.
Before he could free the weapon from his pocket, however, the shrill voice of Vic Clayton sounded through the basement, as she and Claudia Badger came hurrying from the inner extension.
“What’s the matter with Pluto?” she cried, as she approached.
“There’s something wrong out here,” declared Claudia.
The instant the dog heard his name mentioned, all the restrained passions and fierce instincts of the brute leaped violently into play.
With a tremendous snarling and barking he bounded up at the hamper, clawing at it with might and main, as if bent upon devouring all that it contained.
Patsy was taking no chances of losing half of his face in one fierce bite of the brute, and he instantly ducked his head and crouched lower.
“It’s all off!” was the thought that flashed through his mind. “I am now obliged to put up a game of bluff.”
The screams of the two women were now mingled with the furious barking of the bloodhound, and Vic Clayton was shouting affrightedly:
“Come out here! Come out here, Amos! There’s[199] something the matter with this dog. I think he has gone mad.”
Before the last was uttered, both Badger and Conley came rushing out of the inner cellar.
The two men instantly guessed the meaning of the brute’s actions, and both rushed toward the car.
“Gone mad be hanged!” shouted Badger. “There’s something wrong with that hamper, not with the dog.”
“That’s right, Amos,” yelled Conley.
“Ah, I thought so! Get out, you brute, or I’ll brain you! What the devil have we here?”
Badger had given the excited brute a second kick in the ribs, that once more sent him yelping out of doors, much to Patsy’s relief, despite the sudden change in the situation.
At the same time Conley had thrown open the lid of the hamper, plainly disclosing the cramped detective to the view of all.
In an instant both ruffians had him by the throat and wrists.
“Hold on!” gasped Patsy, struggling to rise out of his cramped position, and at once assuming to be the injured, rather than the offender.
“Come out here!”
“Sure, I’ll come out,” whined Patsy, as he was yanked[200] out upon the ground, yet still in the clutches of both men. “Say, this ain’t no way to use a fellow. Let go me throat, will you? I ain’t going to eat nobody up. Holy smoke! but I’m glad you drove that dog off. I thought I was a dead one, for sure.”
“You’ll be a dead one, all right, young fellow, unless you stand up and give an account of yourself,” Badger fiercely cried. “Hang onto his arms, there, Conley, in case he means mischief. Hand me that strip of rope, Vic, and I’ll make him fast in a jiffy. Look lively, I say!”
While this exchange of conversation was in progress, Patsy had been jerked rudely to his feet, only to find for several moments that he could hardly stand erect, so strained and cramped were his muscles.
Conley, meantime, had twisted the captive’s arms back of him, and was holding them there with the grip of a vise.
Badger had released Patsy’s throat, however, and, with the piece of rope Vic Clayton had hurriedly brought him, he quickly secured the detective’s arms and wrists behind him.
“Now, you give an account of yourself,” he fiercely commanded, shaking his clenched hand under Patsy’s nose.
“Sure I will, mister, since I’m caught in my own box,” Patsy now said, surveying with a ludicrous grin the frowning faces around him. “But I’d have been out and away long before this, mister, if it had not been for that infernal dog.”
“Out and away, would you?” cried Badger, catching up this one significant remark.
“That’s what, mister.”
“What were you doing in that hamper?”
“Only stealing a ride.”
“Stealing a ride?” echoed Badger incredulously.
“That was all, mister, the whole business.”
“You’re a liar!” snarled Conley, fiercely suspicious.
“Say, you leave me to settle with the boss of this joint, will you?” growled Patsy, now turning upon the Irishman. “I haven’t trod on any of your corns, have I? So you leave me to do the talking with the boss.”
“I’ll not leave you a leg to stand on, if you——”
“Shut up, Jerry!” commanded Badger sharply. “How long had you been in the hamper, youngster?”
“All the way from town, mister.”
“Nonsense!” cried Vic Clayton, now pressing nearer. “I know better than that.”
“Sure, ma’am, I don’t like to contradict a lady like[202] yourself, but you’ll find I’m right,” insisted Patsy, bowing to her with a ludicrous display of humility.
“Do you mean to say that you rode out from town in that hamper?” demanded Vic.
“That’s what I did, ma’am.”
“What put you up to that?” cried Badger, in threatening tones.
Patsy indulged in another grin.
“Well, ’twas like this, mister, d’ye see,” he proceeded to explain, with an air of humble frankness. “I was walking along Tremont Street with a comrade of mine—Jones his name is, mister, and mine is Green.”
“Come to the point, you rascal,” Badger impatiently growled.
“Sure I will, mister, if you give me time.”
“If you don’t, I’ll give you something besides time.”
“’Twas like this, d’ye see?” continued Patsy coolly. “We saw this big car alongside the curb on Tremont Street, and Nosey, the which we call Jones because his beak is so big—Nosey bet me a five I didn’t dare get into the hamper and steal a ride.”
“He did, eh?” sneered Badger, with an ugly gleam in his searching eyes.
“That’s what he did, sir,” nodded Patsy. “I’d seen these two ladies go into the building near-by, so I said[203] to myself I’d have time to duck into the hamper before they came out. I thought it a cinch to win a five in that easy way. So when I found it was empty, mister, in I jumped, and here I am—the which I wouldn’t be, only for that dog, I give you my blooming word.”
“Your blooming word doesn’t cut any ice with me,” Conley now declared, with an angry snarl. “I’ll not swallow this story, Badger, not on your life. It’s much more likely that he’s working with his nobs in yonder, and mebbe there are more of the same kind about here at this moment.”
This possibility suggested by Conley was not without immediate effect upon Badger, who turned quickly to the waiting women and cried sharply:
“Go over to the house, you two, and we’ll bring this rascal there and question him further. You, Jerry, close that sliding door. We’ll leave the other where we have him. He cannot get out, that’s sure, and I’ll take no chance that there are others to see us in this place. We’ll go over to the house and settle with this young cub.”
“That will be safest,” nodded Conley, as he hastened to obey.
“You may leave this oil-lamp burning, Jerry,” added Badger, as he seized Patsy by the collar and marched[204] him toward the door. “We may have to come out here again.”
“I’ll not put it out.”
“But secure this door after you.”
“Sure! D’ye think I’m daffy enough to leave it open?”
With the last remark, Conley came out of the basement and closed the heavy door, leaving the entire place only dimly lighted by the oil-lamp on the wall.
Seen from outside, the whole stable appeared shrouded in darkness.
As the three started across the lawn toward the house, with Patsy in the grip of both men, the huge bloodhound came bounding over the grass as if to accompany them—or to make a finish of Patsy.
Badger quickly checked him, however, sternly commanding:
“Be off, Pluto! Away with you, and watch out, you brute! Watch out, I say!”
The dog appeared to understand. He dropped his black nose to the ground, vented one short, sharp yelp, then coursed away with the speed of a deer, hither and thither, and finally toward the belt of woods darkly outlined against the starry sky at the rear of the broad estate.
“He’ll notify us, Jerry!” growled Badger, with his grip unconsciously tightening on the detective’s collar. “Let Pluto alone for that. He’ll notify us all right, and promptly, too, if there are other strangers prowling near here to-night.”
That Patsy was possessed of that true detective genius which instinctively anticipates coming events, appears in the thought that quickly arose in his mind:
“He will, eh? I can see his finish if he encounters Chick Carter this night!”
CHAPTER XVIII.
A LAST RESORT.
“Search him!” sternly commanded Badger. “We’ll see what that will bring forth. Search him, Conley, and see what you can find!”
The scene was the kitchen of the Badger dwelling.
Fifteen minutes had passed since Patsy was rounded up and brought in there, and the quarter-hour had been devoted to plying him with questions to break down the crafty story he had told, and to which he clung with a tenacity born of conscious desperation.
He now stood with his back to one of the kitchen walls, in the full glare of the lamplight.
His arms were still secured behind him, and his collar and cravat were awry from the throttling he had received.
His face was composed, however, not even pale, and his eyes were keen and bright with that inherent courage and invincible determination which rendered him superior to any threatening situation, and eminently worthy to have become Nick Carter’s trusted associate and assistant.
The gang by which he had been so curiously cornered were seated about the room.
Both Badger and Conley appeared stern and ugly, evincing that state of mind when dread and suspicion battle with uncertainty.
The two women, Mrs. Badger and Vic Clayton, appeared pale and anxious, as if fearful that their adventurous career was likely to be seriously interrupted.
Yet all four, including also a dark, middle-aged woman who worked in the house, were regarding Patsy with eyes and aspects so threatening as to have awed one less cool, collected, and defiant of personal peril.
Fifteen minutes had passed, as mentioned, and from this time matters moved decisively and swiftly, with all[207] the energies of these masterful detectives instinctively strained for what each knew must be a final move, and all operating to produce the one desirable culmination of their joint endeavors.
In response to Badger’s command, Conley sprang up and began to search Patsy, fiercely thrusting his hand into one pocket and then another.
“Leave the linings,” suggested Patsy, with a defiant grin.
He knew that he had on his person only one article that would point to his vocation, which he was prepared to deny in the face even of that.
It came to light in a moment—his trusty revolver.
“Aha! what’s this?” cried Conley, as he yanked the weapon from Patsy’s hip pocket. “So you carry a gun, do you?”
“Sure I do,” asserted Patsy coolly. “You’d carry a gun, too, if there were as many rats in your cellar as there are in mine.”
“It’s you who are the rat,” Badger angrily growled, as his confederate displayed the weapon.
“You’re wrong, mister,” insisted Patsy. “I’m a ratter, but no rat.”
“What d’ye mean by that?” snarled Conley fiercely.
“I mean that I’m a hunter of rats,” said Patsy, with dry significance.
“You’re a detective,” cried Badger.
“That’s what he is, Amos,” supplemented Vic Clayton, white with increased apprehensions. “He must be one of the Boston force.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Not one of the force?”
“Nothing of the kind.”
“If you are lying, youngster, the lie will as surely cost you your life——”
What more Badger would have uttered can only be conjectured, for, while he was speaking, fiercely shaking his fist at Patsy’s helpless head, there sounded from the gravel driveway outside and over the hollow planking of the veranda the heavy fall of hurrying feet.
“Who’s this?” cried Claudia, starting affrightedly from her chair.
“The door, Conley!” hissed Badger. “Have the gun ready!”
Before Conley could reach the doorway, however, toward which he hastened with Patsy’s revolver in his hand, it was hurriedly opened and a sallow-featured, green-eyed rascal bounded breathlessly into the kitchen.
“Oh, it’s Sandy Hyde!” exclaimed Vic, with a little scream of satisfaction.
“Who the devil is he?” thought Patsy, sharply regarding the panting scamp.
Though this advent of Hyde brought a look of relief to the face of each, Badger kept a taut rein on the threatening business then on hand, and he almost immediately demanded:
“What brings you out here, Sandy?”
“Wait till I get my breath, and I’ll tell you,” panted Hyde. “I’ve run all the way from the trolley. The chief kept me at work till half an hour ago.”
“Is there something wrong at headquarters?” snarled Badger quickly.
“What’s that?” muttered Patsy mentally. “A spy from the chief’s office, or I’ll eat my boots! By thunder! it’s no wonder that this case has baffled the efforts of the Boston force.”
Patsy was quick enough to see all it meant, in case he was correct in his immediate conjecture.
Sandy Hyde, who had paused a moment to get a drink of water at the kitchen sink, now hastened to reply to Badger’s question.
“Wrong at headquarters? I should say so!” he cried.[210] “I have just got wise to something, less than an hour ago. Who’s that chap?”
“Never mind him at present,” cried Badger, with terrific impatience. “What have you learned?”
“Nick Carter has an assistant here on this case,” replied Hyde.
“Not Chick Carter!”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Sure! He was at headquarters about five o’clock.”
“For what?”
“He was trying to locate Nick.”
“We’ve got Nick, all right,” sneered Badger, with a chuckle of derision. “But this other, this Chick Carter, of whom I have frequently heard, I don’t know him by sight.”
“Nor do I,” put in Conley, frowning near-by.
“You’re sure this is not he?”
“Dead sure,” cried Hyde, with a glance at Patsy. “I don’t know this chap.”
“Then he is not one of the Boston force,” declared Vic, more hopefully. “He did not lie about that.”
Badger turned again to Patsy, lowering and dark, and Patsy gained a point by saying quickly:
“Sure I didn’t lie about it. I wouldn’t lie to ladies and gents like you.”
“No, this fellow is not a Boston detective, I’ll swear to that,” Hyde now declared. “I know them all.”
“But Chick Carter——” began Badger.
“Oh, he doesn’t look like this chap,” interrupted Hyde.
“He doesn’t, eh?”
“Not a bit! Chick Carter is older, a sturdy, well-built young man, with smooth, clean-cut features and——”
“Stop!” screamed Vic Clayton, suddenly leaping out of her chair.
“Well?”
“How was he dressed when you saw him at five o’clock?”
“Why, he said he was going to your office,” cried Hyde, now getting back to the business that had brought him out there. “He had on a plaid suit, a polka-dotted cravat——”
“Henderson!” screamed Vic, all of a quiver with excitement. “That man Henderson, Amos, was Chick Carter!”
“Not a doubt of it!” gasped Claudia Badger, as white as the knot of lace at her throat.
“And that’s why he inquired after Nick Carter,” declared[212] Badger, now beginning to see that a network might already be closing around him.
“That’s what, Amos.”
“Do you know where Chick Carter went after leaving your rooms, Vic?”
“Of course not. How should I?”
“He might have said.”
“He said he was going to Carter’s hotel.”
“Bosh!”
“I’ll tell you what I do know, however,” cried Vic, hit with an afterthought.
“What’s that?”
“I know that this young devil must have got into that hamper while Chick Carter was in my rooms, Amos, and it’s a hundred to one that the two were at work on this case together.”
“Gee! she’s hit me good and hard this time,” thought Patsy, wishing he might have throttled her to silence. “Now there will be something doing, I’ll go the limit on that.”
He read aright the faces of those around him.
The significance of Vic Clayton’s declaration was utterly irresistible.
“What do you say to that?” thundered Badger, striding[213] closer to Patsy, with his features livid and convulsed with rage.
“I dunno what she’s talking about,” protested Patsy coolly.
“You lie!” roared Conley. “You are one of Nick Carter’s helpers, or——”
“Stop a bit!” interrupted Badger, with frightful austerity. “We’ll soon know whether he is or not!”
“What d’ye mean?”
“I’ll get the truth out of him!” snorted Badger. “Bring him after me, back to the garage. I’ll make him confess the truth and tell us where we stand. We’ll string him up by the neck to one of the beams—and there he shall hang unless he tells the whole truth! Bring him along, you two, and look lively! I’ll go on ahead and open the doors.”
“Yes, there’s something doing!” thought Patsy, contemplating his imminent peril. “They are going to try hanging me—but they’ll try in vain! Yet I rather hope Chick may show up in time to save my precious neck.”
These thoughts passed through Patsy’s mind while he was being rudely hustled out of doors by Conley and Hyde, while Amos Badger hurried on in advance.
Both women followed, too alarmed by the impending peril to endure the suspense of remaining behind.
“They care nothing for me, or my neck,” thought Patsy. “Like the she devils of ancient Rome, once having tasted blood, they thirst for more.”
As he was hurried into the basement by Conley, he saw that the sliding door had been opened and that Badger was again lighting the lantern.
This no sooner was done than the dastardly knave, blind to all except the impulses of his utter desperation, quickly threw a rope over a beam near the ceiling, then knotted a slip-noose around Patsy’s neck.
Patsy stood directly under the beam, as cool as if he was only about to be weighed.
“Get hold of that rope, you two!” cried Badger fiercely.
Conley and Hyde sprang to the lax strip of line.
The two women, bred though they were to evil, drew back with awed white faces and dilated eyes.
“Now, youngster, what do you say?” thundered Badger, confronting Patsy with face livid and eyes ablaze.
Patsy met him eye to eye.
“Only what I’ve said already,” he curtly replied.
“Nothing more?”
“Nothing more, mister!”
“Nor less?”
“Nor less!”
“Up with him!” roared Badger, turning fiercely to his confederates.
Patsy felt the rope draw taut around his neck.
Just then, however, from some quarter outside, there rang out upon the still evening air the sharp, spiteful crack of a revolver.
It was mingled with a single agonized yelp—and a bloodhound lay stretched upon the greensward, shot squarely between his eyes!
CHAPTER XIX.
NICK CARTER’S ESCAPE.
Silence and darkness.
It was in these that Nick Carter was left confined at an earlier hour that eventful evening, bound hand and foot, and with his back propped against the cold stone wall of the disused wine-vault.
It would be an injustice to him, however, to those inherent qualities and rare abilities which had made him what he was, to neglect depicting his movements during the time his captors were so pressingly engaged with Patsy.
Of Chick and Patsy’s discoveries and designs since he parted from them at the Adams House that morning, Nick, of course, was entirely ignorant.
That they had so quickly suspected something wrong because of his absence, or that he could depend upon them for any immediate assistance, he did not for a moment imagine. For it was then only a few hours after the time they had agreed to meet, and any ordinary incident might have detained him that long.
Yet Amos Badger had no sooner closed the door of the wine-vault than Nick Carter began to think about making his escape.
“Whatever I accomplish,” he said to himself, “I must accomplish alone. There is not much chance that Chick and Patsy have yet discovered any clue to my whereabouts, even if they now suspect that I have met with some beastly mishap, so I must figure upon playing a lone hand in getting out of this place. I’ll make the attempt, at least, and if——Hello! what’s the meaning of that, I wonder?”
From some quarter outside, borne faintly to his ears, had come the furious barking of a dog, mingled with the shouts of men and the screams of women.
For half a minute Nick listened intently, but the startling[217] sounds were not prolonged, and presently only silence reigned in the wine-vault.
Stop a bit—not quite silence only!
From one corner came a faint noise which Nick’s ear was quick to detect.
It was the steady drip, drip, drip of water, from some point higher than the floor.
Nick recalled seeing a stagnant pool in the corner from which the dripping sounded, and he rightly inferred that there must be some water-supply above, possibly in the stable, and that a considerable leak existed.
“My first work must be that of getting my hands at liberty,” he soliloquized, after a few moments.
They were tied behind him, but that mattered little to Nick Carter.
While the lantern was in the vault, during his talk with Badger, Nick had visually examined the surrounding stone walls, and had discovered several places where the rough corners of the stones protruded a little, forming tolerably sharp edges.
Against one of these he backed, after rising to his feet with some difficulty, until he could bring the rope about his wrists to bear against the edge of the stone.
Then he began sawing it up and down, at an expense of some little skin from his knuckles, and at the end of five minutes he felt one of the strands give and break. Then, with a mighty effort, he succeeded in breaking the entire rope, and the liberation of his hands at once became easy.
“Now, if you come down here, Badger, you’ll meet with a warmer reception than before,” he determinedly muttered, while he set to work at the ropes around his ankles.
In three minutes his limbs also were free, and Nick coolly tossed the ropes aside.
“Next, to find a way out of here,” was his mental comment.
He had observed that no window existed, and he had but little hope of being able to force the heavy door, having been deprived of his knife and revolver.
After examining the door, to which he groped through the darkness, he decided that he could accomplish nothing there.
The constant dripping of the water could still be heard, however, and Nick now shrewdly reasoned:
“That water must have some avenue of escape, and it[219] may run under the foundation wall in that corner. If it does, the soil should be soft and muddy, and I may be able to dig my way out, or, at least, to work under the wall and learn what lies beyond it. I’ll give it a try, at all events.”
As he groped toward the corner, he stumbled over one of the empty beer-kegs previously mentioned.
“Ha! here’s just the thing, providing I can smash it,” he said to himself. “One of these oak staves will serve admirably for a spade.”
Gripping the keg by the chimes, he hurled it with all of his strength against one of the walls.
There was a double effect.
First, the keg snapped and cracked loudly, as several of the staves yielded under the terrific blow.
Second, an instant later, a bit of rock from the wall fell with a splash into the pool of water.
Nick then examined the wall.
He found that the constant leakage from above had softened the old cement and mortar, and that the stones in this locality might be removed with almost any stout implement.
In half a minute he had the beer-keg demolished and one of the stout staves in his hand.
With this he next attacked the stonework near the pool, and for ten minutes he worked as vigorously and rapidly as the darkness permitted.
Then he had two of the lower stones hauled out of the wall, and a space made large enough to crawl through.
Listening at this opening, he could now detect another sound quite near-by. It was the occasional stamping of horses, evidently in their stalls.
“H’m!” grunted Nick. “I’m not sure that I’m out of the place, after all. This hole will evidently lead me into a basement under the stable, or the carriage-house. By Jove! it may be that Badger has a place of concealment down here for his horses, those occasionally used for a hold-up. I’ll speedily ascertain.”
Crawling with some little difficulty through the hole in the wall, Nick rose to his feet on the outer side, and groped carefully through the gloom.
Suddenly his extended hands came in contact with—an automobile!
He was in the interior garage, the secret hiding-place of Badger’s several cars.
It had taken Nick half an hour to accomplish all this, however, and before he could fix upon anything definite[221] as to his present location, he heard voices outside, and a door hurriedly opened.
“H’m!” he mentally grunted. “Are my captors returning? They’ll find me ready for them this time!”
Then he crouched quickly back of the car with which he had come in contact.
The sliding door had suddenly opened, and the light from the wall lamp outside shot into the extension cellar.
The instant Nick’s eyes fell upon the row of automobiles, he guessed the whole truth concerning the place.
His interest, however, chiefly centered in two men who were hurriedly rushing a third into the place, closely followed by two women, while Badger was hastening to light a lantern.
“Good Heaven!” mentally exclaimed Nick. “Their captive is Patsy!”
He watched and waited, deducing more and more from the little he heard, and all the while his stern white features, still swathed with bandages, grew hard as flint.
Patsy felt the rope tighten about his neck.
Then sounded the revolver-shot from outside.
Next a dark form bounded out from back of the touring-car—bounded out with the leap of an angry lion.
Two clenched hands rose and fell, and two men dragging upon a rope cast over a beam were sent senseless[222] to the earth, quivering in every muscle, as an ox quivers when felled in the shambles.
Then two hands closed around Amos Badger’s throat, and in the miscreant’s ears rang a voice and words that took all the strength and manhood, if any of the latter was there, completely out of him.
“It will be you, Badger, not I!”
“Whoop la!” shrieked Patsy. “It’s Nick himself!”
Two women, frightened for their miserable lives, turned and ran toward the open door—only to rush into the ready arms of Chick Carter.
Chick had arrived at the edge of the woods only a short time before, and had seen Patsy brought out of the house and into the basement of the garage. Hastening to cross the lawn and lend a hand, as he had promised, Chick had encountered the bloodhound, killing him with a single well-directed shot, and then had rushed on and into the garage, just in time to head off Vic Clayton and Claudia Badger when they turned to flee.
The rest may be briefly told, for a more complete and successful round-up could hardly be imagined. In less than ten minutes the entire gang were in irons, and thirty minutes later they were taking a ride in the local patrol-wagon, instead of a Packard car.
The exposure of their rascally scheme also was complete when the case came to trial, a little later, for Nick Carter found in and about the house and stable ample evidence to prove that his deductions had from the very first been entirely correct.
Fortunately, too, he found letters and clues enabling him to trace much of the stolen property upon which Badger had realized thousands of dollars, and which ultimately was restored to its rightful owners.
In Badger’s safe Nick found his own watch and chain, but the money of which he had been robbed was missing. He had in his success with the case, however, a reward that far more than offset his trivial loss.
Dumfounded when informed by what means the Boston detectives had been baffled in their efforts to discover these road robbers, Chief Weston’s gratitude to Nick was equaled only by his bitterness for Sandy Hyde, and he made sure that the treacherous scamp should receive a sentence as long as the others of the Badger gang—and that was one of years.
Long before the release of any of them, the Badger place near Brookline had passed into other hands, sold under a heavy mortgage, and from that time Tremont Street knew the notorious Madame Victoria no more.
One and all of them passed, as they deserved, out of the public mind and out of the hearts and lives of friendly acquaintances—from the moment that Nick Carter showed them in their true colors and closed upon them the door of a prison cell.
THE END.
Order your copy now of the next brilliant story by Nicholas Carter to appear under the title of “A Master of Deviltry,” in the New Magnet Library, No. 1174.
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