WHERE THEY FOUND HIM.
Nick Carter jumped out of the car, leaving to Chick the congenial task
of helping out Bessie Silvius, and bolted into the house.
“Where is he?”
“In the dining room, locked in with the others,” reported Billings
coolly. “As soon as he came snooping up, I shoved him in with Louden
Powers and Lampton, and let them have it out between them. Then I came
out, to see who it was coming up the road in an automobile. It was you.
The other guy came only just a little while ago.”
“You mean the man you have in the dining room?”
“Yes. He said he walked up from the station, talking to another fellow
who was with him, when suddenly he missed him.”
“Who?”
“The other guy he was talking to.”
“Do you mean to say that he allowed a man to get away from him while
they were actually talking, and didn’t see where he’d gone?”
“That’s what he told us.”
“I don’t believe it, for one,” put in Chick.
“Unless this mug in the dining room is daffy. Then it might have
happened,” suggested Patsy. “Who is he, anyhow?”
Nick did not stop to answer, although he could have done it. He went
over to Bessie Silvius, and asked her to wait in the drawing-room with
her father, for a little time, while he straightened out a little
misunderstanding that had occurred.
“But, Mr. Carter, is that Mr. Gordon in the dining room? I mean, the
man they say came walking up the road with somebody else? Or was it he
who suddenly left the other?”
“I shall have to go into the dining room to see the man before I can
answer that question.”
He directed Chick to stay in the drawing-room with Bessie and her
father. It was a mission that Chick undertook with cheerfulness. Carter
saw him leading Bessie and Roscoe Silvius to the drawing-room with
Chesterfieldian politeness, and did not trouble any further about him.
Billings opened the door of the dining room with the key he had in his
pocket, and Nick went in.
He saw just about what he expected. Louden Powers and Andrew Lampton
each had a cigar going, and between them, still slumped down in his
chair, as if he never had moved, was the individual who had been put
forward as the real heir of the stupendous Milmarsh estate.
Nick went to this man and shook him until he looked up vacantly.
“Where is he?” demanded Nick.
“I don’t know. I was bringing him here, because you wanted him. But he
wouldn’t come the whole distance, and it was no fault of mine. I guess
he is somewhere about the grounds.”
“Why didn’t you search for him, instead of coming up to the house?”
“Because I believed he’d come here. It is what anybody would have
believed. But as soon as I came up to the porch, some of these fellows
of yours saw me and dragged me into this room.”
The speaker was not exactly stupid. He seemed to be rather dazed by
a rapid surge of events. That was the way Nick regarded him, and
doubtless he was right. He bent over and whispered in the man’s ear.
The result was a brightening up, and a much firmer tone of voice, as he
said aloud:
“Of course, I’ll go with you, and I reckon I can find him, too. But
you will have to keep these two men off me,” pointing to Powers and
Lampton. “They feel that things are slipping away from them, and they
will kill me if they have a chance.”
“That is quite probable,” muttered the detective inaudibly.
He led the cowed man out of the room, and saw that Patsy followed. He
turned to his young assistant and told him not to let anybody out of
the house till they returned.
Once in the open air, Nick’s companion seemed to become a different
man. His step was springy, and when they came to a fence separating
them from a part of the ground that was full of high grass and tangled
shrubbery, he vaulted over it as lightly and cleanly as Nick himself.
His voice was almost firm, as he said:
“I saw him looking over here as we came up the road, and once I heard
him mutter something about the west meadow. He seemed to know that part
of the estate, although I did not hear him say anything else.”
“The west meadow,” repeated Nick. “Yes, I think I know where that is.”
They walked for some little distance through the bushes and grass,
until the detective stopped and pointed to what was evidently a recent
trail.
“See! Somebody has walked through this high grass and made a deep, wide
furrow. We shan’t have much trouble in finding him now, I think.”
Perhaps Nick was surprised to find that the trail ended at the stone
foundation wall of the house, at the back, where the cover of the
tunnel that used to be part of the “underground railway” was made to
look like the surrounding stones. The tunnel has already been described.
“Get in there!” commanded Carter.
The man was not inclined to obey. He seemed to fear it meant getting
him at a disadvantage—perhaps locking him up in some dungeon from
which he might never emerge save to go into a regular prison.
But Nick was not in a mood to be held back by anybody—least of all by
one whom he felt had no right to consideration.
So the man went down the chute, just as Chick had, not so long before,
and the detective followed him.
There is no necessity to tell bit by bit how they went along the secret
corridor which finally brought them to the back of the large picture
in the dining room, where Nick and his assistant had listened to the
conversation of the conspirators—one of whom was now actually in the
corridor himself.
Suddenly a man sprang out of the blackness and seized Nick by the
throat, forcing him backward and almost to his knees.
It was only for an instant that the detective was held at a
disadvantage. He hurled his assailant away, and, bringing out his
pocket flash, saw the man who had come with him lying on the floor in
the narrow space, while facing him, with wild, vengeful eyes, was the
sick man from the Universal Hospital!
It was evident that the escaped patient did not recognize either Nick
or the other man, and equally certain that he regarded them both as
enemies.
Even as the detective watched, he could see the long fingers, lean and
clawlike from long illness, twitching to get at his throat, while the
madman’s feet shuffled slightly, as if preparing for a sudden spring.
Nick took the initiative. Telling the man on the floor to get up and
lend a hand, he threw one arm around the strange creature who had found
his way in some mysterious way to this secret corridor, and seized his
wrist from behind. By this wrestling trick, the detective had both the
hands of his captive firmly held.
“Hold him for a moment!” he commanded the other man, who had arisen by
this time. “Poor fellow! He is too weak to resist much. Had you any
notion where he was?”
“How could I have?” was the rejoinder, in an injured tone. “I never was
in this hole before. Where are we, anyhow?”
“I’ll show you,” replied Nick.
He felt along the wall until his linger touched a small knob.
The next moment a panel turned open silently, and they were looking
through a doorway some four feet wide, down into the dining room, where
sat the men they had left there half an hour before.
A shriek of horror burst from Andrew Lampton. But Louden Powers only
smiled derisively. He had an iron nerve, and nothing could surprise him
very much. He had always known there were secret passages about this
strange old house, although he never had found them for himself.
The appearance of the two ghostly personages in the bedchamber on that
night had confirmed what he had heard about the hidden places in the
house. So it did not seem so very extraordinary that Nick Carter should
suddenly show himself in the wall, by two of the large pictures.
At first only Nick was visible to the people in the dining room. But,
as he stepped forth upon a chair, and thus to the door, he led the
escaped sick man from the hospital, while following him was the person
the two conspirators had declared to be Howard Milmarsh.
“What, chief?” shouted Patsy Garvan, in delight. “Did you get him?”
“By hooky,” roared Bonesy Billings. “There’s two of ’em! They look just
alike! Now I know how you told the truth, Mr. Carter, while it looked
like—like the other thing.”
The detective only nodded, as he put a large chair for the pale-faced
invalid, and forced him into it gently.
The belligerence had gone from the face of the newcomer. He seemed to
be wondering—that was all.
The most peculiar thing in the whole affair was that the man who had
been set forth as the real owner of the Milmarsh estate, and who had
appeared so dazed and in such terror of Powers and Lampton, now held up
his head and actually smiled, as if a great weight had been lifted from
his shoulders.
Louden Powers scowled at him, but he replied only by a stare of
defiance.
“That mug is going to give the whole snap away,” muttered Andrew
Lampton, in the ear of his fellow conspirator.
“I’ll kill him if he does,” whispered back Louden Powers.