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 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 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 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 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.
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Man Without a Conscience, by Nicholas Carter