NICK LIES IN WAIT.
It may be explained at once that Nick Carter was not in his bedroom in
the Hotel Amsterdam when the baroness saw the light through the transom.
The detective did not want anybody to speculate on his whereabouts that
night, and he argued that if a light was seen in the room of Colonel
Pearson, it would be assumed that the colonel was inside.
He had determined to find out what the mysterious abductors had done
with Harvey L. Drago, who had vanished into thin air, in broad daylight.
After playing a sane and deliberate game of golf, it was not to be
credited that Mr. Drago had made away with himself. Nick brushed that
aside as soon as it came to his mind.
The wealthy young American had been kidnaped by somebody, no doubt, and
the object of that somebody could hardly be anything else than to exact
a large ransom.
It had occurred to Nick Carter, when told that Mrs. van Dietrich had
melted away from her bedroom in the night, that perhaps an aëroplane had
been employed. But all the conditions were against that.
Neither could an automobile have been used without its being seen.
After turning everything over in his mind, including the possibility of
Drago having been hidden in the woods, he could not make that theory
apply to his own satisfaction in the case of Mrs. van Dietrich.
The dear lady was rather large, and she would surely be hysterical when
she came to herself.
No, it would be too risky to keep that eminent leader of society among a
lot of trees and expect to keep her quiet.
He thought of the wireless telephone he had seen used by the baroness
from the window of her room, and though he had not been convinced that
she had any deeper purpose than to amuse herself--as a wealthy young
woman of lively fancy might conceivably do in this manner--he remembered
the yacht at anchor out in the bay, and wondered whether or not the
baroness was signaling to that vessel.
He had never noticed anybody coming from the yacht to the hotel. But
that did not carry any significance. There were many handsome homes
along the coast in this vicinity, and the yacht might be owned by any
one of the dozen or so of millionaires who were accustomed to spend part
of their summer in Delaware.
That he was suspicious of the baroness was natural to a man of his
quick, deductive mind. The discovery of the burned match in Mrs. van
Dietrich’s room would have been sufficient to make him so, after he had
satisfied himself that the baroness used the same kind of thick wax
matches.
Another touch of evidence in connection with the matches was that he had
found a scrap of gilt and colored paper on the floor of Mrs. van
Dietrich’s bedroom--part of a label which he found had come from the
original box containing them.
In the restaurant he had caught a glimpse of nearly the whole label in
the baroness’ chatelaine bag when she had taken out her cigarette box.
The paper had been pulled out accidentally, and pushed back again.
Nick decided that, as the design was unusual, as well as artistic, the
baroness was keeping it as a curiosity.
The label was not all there. The part missing would have fitted in with
the scrap Nick had in his pocket.
Going further in his speculations, Nick recalled that, although Mrs. van
Dietrich had disappeared in the night, when it would be comparatively
easy to get her out of the hotel unobserved and take her to any desired
place at a distance, Harvey L. Drago had been spirited away in broad
daylight.
The only theory Nick could apply to Drago’s disappearance was that he
was somewhere near the hotel, and would not be taken away to his final
destination till nightfall.
Acting on this hypothesis, the detective, with the head porter, were
out now, at night, looking for the abductors of Mr. Drago, in the
expectation that when they got a clew to the one case, they would find
it leading them to the other.
They had for two or three hours been moving about in the dense woods
that surrounded the Hotel Amsterdam, and hid the sea beach from the
highroad, when Nick Carter took a seat on a rock overlooking the water,
with the porter by his side, and remarked that it was time to rest a
while.
“I’m not tired,” protested the porter, Mike Corrigan. “I wouldn’t mind
betting you are not, either, colonel. You are stopping here because you
think it a good place to look around.”
The head porter grinned as he said this, and in the faint light that
came from the cloud-veiled moon Nick returned the grin. He was pleased
to note that Mike Corrigan was of an observant kind.
“You’re not far off, Mike. I see there is a place here where a boat has
landed, and it is just possible another one may come. See those furrows
in the sand above tide line on the beach, and do you notice that those
soft shells have been ground by something, and left, all broken, where
they have been pressed into the sand?”
“That’s right,” agreed Mike. “I see it, just where the moon strikes. But
I’ll confess I wouldn’t have noticed them if you hadn’t spoke--not in
this poor light. Think that was done by a boat?”
“I am sure of it,” was Nick’s quick reply. “It was the keel of a boat
that ground these shells, and the round bottom made the wide mark on
either side. It isn’t hard to see where a boat has been before the signs
are washed away.”
“I don’t see any other place where a boat could be run up on the shore,
either,” observed Mike.
“That’s why I am expecting we shall see another boat--or perhaps the
same one--come up here, if we stay for a while. But get back into the
woods. We can watch there without being seen.”
“The moon is in its last quarter,” remarked Corrigan. “So there isn’t
much light. If it wasn’t for the stars, I don’t think we could make out
anything at all.”
“We’ll get to the other side of this point,” went on Nick. “We can see
all over the bay from there, and still not be too conspicuous.”
“‘Conspicuous’ is good!” muttered Mike. “I wonder what in thunder it
means.”
Nick Carter led the way to the spot he had selected. It was a thick mass
of shrubbery only a few yards above high tide. Here he told Corrigan to
sit down.
The porter obeyed--so heavily that he broke several twigs, which
crackled with much more noise than Nick cared for. He gave Mike a sharp
touch with the toe of his shoe.
The detective had seen some signs which had escaped his companion, and
he did not want any noise. Nick subsided.
Nick took out a pair of powerful night glasses and trained them on the
light-studded yacht far out in the bay.
It was something about this yacht which had attracted his attention in
the first place, and which had caused him to shut off the porter so
peremptorily when he had begun to protest against being gently kicked.
Nick Carter lay flat upon the ground, examining the shadowy form of the
yacht, and trying to satisfy himself as to the meaning of certain
movements he observed.
It was a full hour before he moved to any noticeable degree, although he
had shifted his position now and then, as he sought to relieve his
cramped limbs.
But his night glasses had been always fixed on the yacht, and his eyes
had become accustomed to the gloom so much that he could tell fairly
well what the general state of affairs was on her deck.
Corrigan was about to whisper a question as a sigh of satisfaction
escaped his companion. But Nick shook him off impatiently and told him
to keep quite quiet.
The detective had seen a bustle on the deck of the yacht which he
believed signified that a boat was being lowered. But if it was, they
were dropping it on the other side, and he could not make out enough of
their movements to be sure what was going on.
“If it isn’t a boat, then I don’t know what they’re after,” he murmured,
under his breath. “Hello! What’s that?”
Far out, some little distance from the yacht, his glasses had enabled
him to distinguish a phosphorescent flash, repeated again and again on
the dark surface of the bay.
Nick Carter had seen phosphorescent gleams of this kind too many times
not to be able to interpret the meaning of any particular kind or
number.
A single one, or even many, might have been caused by the jumping of
fish. That would flash up the bright glow so often seen in mid-ocean at
night.
But regular gleams, such as Nick saw now, and which developed into
shining patches one by one, could have been caused only by the regular
dipping of oars. The space between the patches represented the width of
a rowboat.
“They are rowing two pairs,” he murmured. “And the boat is rather heavy,
too. What are they after?”
As they came nearer, he could see that there were five black patches in
the boat, and it did not take him long to resolve these patches into
men, two were rowing and one was steering. The other two sat still.
“This looks like a fight, if we want to save Drago,” muttered Nick,
rather louder than his musings had been so far.
“What?” asked Corrigan.
The porter’s view had been obscured by the shrubbery. Moreover, he had
no night glass to help his vision.
His curiosity would not be denied any longer, however, and he squeezed
his way around.
Nick Carter placed the night glass in his hand.
“There you are, Corrigan! Take a squint through these!”
The porter obeyed, and after some moments of adjusting the glasses, he
got the boatload of men into focus, and uttered a low grunt of wonder.
“Five of ’em, eh? Well, colonel, that will be two each for us, and
whichever of us gets through first, let him have the odd one.”
Nick smiled at this businesslike proposition--which also had an
agreeable sporting flavor--and nodded in acquiescence.
“All right, Mike! That goes! But--one thing, mind!--I take the first
man! You can have the second. Then I’ll tackle the third, and the fourth
is yours. By that time we’ll know who gets the fifth.”
“Fine!” chuckled the porter. “You’ve been in scraps like this before, I
can see.”
The boat was gliding straight toward the point where Nick Carter and his
companion were hiding in the shrubbery. Then, suddenly, when it had come
within fifty yards of the shore, it swerved abruptly, and shot toward
that part of the Hotel Amsterdam where the windows of the baroness
overlooked the bay.
As the boat got nearer to the hotel, Nick’s night glass, plus his keen
eyes, enabled him to make out a feminine figure at one of the darkened
windows.