THE LOOTING GAME.
The situation in which Chick Carter suddenly found himself with Lady
Waldmere was not an enviable one. Without knowing just how it had come
about, Chick realized on the instant that he was caught like a rat in a
corner, the interior room having no window, nor any way of egress save
through the door, then barred by the tall figure and threatening weapon
of Morris Garland, to say nothing of the burly cabman behind him.
Chick was not blind, however, to one offsetting advantage the room
afforded, or might possibly be made to afford. If he could escape only
through the door, he also could be attacked only from that direction.
Chick took that in on the instant, also, and he was in no mood to yield
submissively to the two threatening miscreants in the hall.
He threw up his hands, nevertheless, while a shriek of terror came from
Lady Waldmere--both sufficient to throw Garland off his guard for the
fraction of a second.
Instantly Chick took advantage of it.
Without dropping his hands, lest the knave might shoot, Chick raised his
right foot under one of the rounds of the chair on which he had been
seated, then kicked it with all his strength straight at the open door.
It went direct and went like a flash.
It struck Garland squarely on the arm and breast, diverting his aim, and
then fell to the floor.
Garland fired on the instant, nevertheless, and the bullet went into the
ceiling.
Lady Waldmere uttered another shriek and fainted dead away on the bed.
The deafening report of the weapon was instantly followed by the bang of
Chick’s revolver, whipped like a flash from his hip pocket.
In his haste, however, he had fired almost at random. The bullet clipped
a lock of hair from Garland’s head, then passed within an inch of the
cabman’s ear.
Both uttered a yell. Both leaped instinctively, as it were, to one side
of the open door, bringing the wall between them and the detective.
That was all that Chick wanted at that moment, and he had accomplished
it by taking his life in his hand.
He now laughed aloud, however, and cried:
“Two can play at that game, you see. If either of you rats shows his
head at the door, I’ll not miss it with my next bullet.”
This brought no response for a moment.
Chick heard the two men whispering in the hall, and also the rustle of
skirts.
“By Jove, there may have been another woman in the house when I stole
in,” he said to himself, constantly alert. “She may have heard me, or
saw me, and afterward sent word to Garland. That may be how they caught
me in this fashion.”
Chick’s theory was quite nearly correct. As a matter of fact, a sister
of Vera Vantoon, who had figured in the episode in the taxicab, had been
left in the hurriedly rented furnished house, rented expressly after the
abduction had been accomplished, in order that the identity of none of
the culprits should afterward be discovered.
This sister, Leah Vantoon, had seen Chick stealing into the house. She
later had stolen out and got word to Garland, happening to meet Vera and
the chauffeur, then on their way to the house. All of them had stolen in
and up the stairs, unheard by the detective, while Chick was talking
with Lady Waldmere.
Morris Garland had, of course, then realized how craftily he had been
duped by Nick Carter himself.
He did not realize it all, however, for Stuart Floyd and Moses Hart were
at that moment under arrest by the famous detective.
Chick’s taunting remark was answered in a few seconds by Garland.
At the same moment, too, Chick saw that Lady Waldmere had revived and
was sitting on the edge of the bed. He held up his finger, warning her
to be silent, then signed for her to seek a remote corner of the room,
where a bullet from the hall could not possibly hit her.
He, in the meantime, remained crouching some six feet from the open
door, revolver in hand.
“I say!” called Garland, from the hall.
“Say ahead,” called Chick coolly. “Come on with it.”
“You’d better quit and throw up your hands again,” Garland advised.
“May they wither, Garland, if I do,” replied Chick. “If you cannot think
of anything better to say, you’d better keep quiet.”
“Oh, we’ll get you finally.”
“Is that so?”
“You bet it’s so. There is no way for you to get out.”
“Nor for you to get in,” Chick retorted.
“We can starve you out.”
“Not much.”
“Think not, eh?”
“I know it,” Chick declared confidently. “Before you could do that,
Garland, the entire police force will be in search of me. They’ll find
me, too.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Because your running mate in the game you have been playing will throw
up his hands and squeal,” Chick asserted. “He probably is under arrest
by this time.”
“By whom?” Garland demanded incredulously.
“By Nick Carter.”
“I guess not. What do you mean by the game we’ve been playing?”
“Nick knows. He suspected it from the first.”
“Knows what?”
Chick laughed and clicked the revolver suggestively.
“Don’t come any nearer that door, Garland, or there’ll be something
doing,” he advised. “I wouldn’t shrink an instant from sending a bullet
into your block of solid ivory. We’ve got your game down pat, now, and
we’re going to get you.”
“What game?” Garland again demanded. “What do you mean?”
“Your looting game,” said Chick. “That’s a good name for it, too. You
two rascals, evidently with others to help you, have taken advantage of
the fact that the head of the business you only manage, Mr. Isaac Meyer,
is a helpless paralytic and confined to his home.”
“How taken advantage?”
“You have been looting his business of all that it would stand without
immediate detection,” said Chick. “You have been loaning small amounts
on gems and jewels and the like, and then pawning the collateral
elsewhere for a much larger sum, and whacking up the difference. When a
customer shows up to redeem a pledge, if it happens to be one that you
have put elsewhere, you stave him off until you can raise the dust to
redeem it yourselves, in case you don’t have it on hand, that you may
turn it over to the proper owner and thus avert exposure. But it’s bound
to come, Garland; it’s bound to come. In fact, it already is here.”
“That’s what Nick Carter suspects, is it?”
Garland spoke with a sneer, but his voice had a quaking uncertainty that
told of utter dismay, of a realization that he had played a losing game
and must pay the price.
“Sure that’s what he suspects,” Chick replied complacently. “You’re a
bunch of star looters, that’s what you are. When the books and vaults of
the Imperial Loan Company are examined, you’ll be found to be a hundred
thousand short, at least.”
“Confound you Carters, anyway!” Garland cried, with a snarl. “You know
too much.”
“Too much for most crooks whom we get after,” Chick dryly admitted.
“It may cost you something one of these days.”
“It already has cost you something,” Chick retorted. “Nick tumbled to it
almost off the reel. You were in pressing peril when the woman
unexpectedly showed up to redeem her ten-thousand-dollar pledge. You
have shoved up the jewels somewhere else, and probably for fifteen or
twenty thousand. You did not have the jewels when she called yesterday,
nor the money with which to redeem them this morning. Nick suspected it,
Garland, and we got right at you to drive you to the wall. We have done
it, all right.”
Chick heard a growl from the cabman, one Buck Morgan, who had driven the
taxicab the previous afternoon, and Chick also heard the remark that
followed it.
“The cursed dick is right, Morris. We’d better make a quick get-away.”
“Not on your life,” snarled Garland. “I’ll get him first, or--hark! What
was that?”
There was little need to ask, nor had Morgan any time in which to answer
the question.
The hurried tread of several men sounded in the lower hall and then on
the near stairway. They came rushing up at top speed, Patsy Garvan in
the lead.
“It’s all off, Mr. Garland; all off!” he shouted, while he came, at the
same time brandishing a ready revolver. “Don’t attempt any funny
business, or there’ll be a dead pawnbroker here. Shut up, you two women,
or we’ll put you in irons with these two gazabos.”
The raid, quietly made, indeed, as Nick had directed, was already a
success. Both Garland and Morgan collapsed the moment they saw Patsy and
the other detectives. They were capable of thieving and abduction, but
not of murder and bloodshed.
Within five minutes Patsy had all four of the culprits in irons, and in
five more they were on their way to the Tombs, to which Stuart Floyd and
Hart already had preceded them.
Half an hour later Lady Waldmere was restored to the arms of her anxious
husband, who, it seems needless to say, was jolly well pleased.
It later appeared that all of Nick Carter’s suspicions, as set forth in
brief by Chick, were entirely correct. Nick had felt reasonably sure of
it from the first, but knew that he must secure absolute proof of it,
which he set about doing in the manner described.
He knew that Garland and Hart would have to work lively to raise the
money to recover the Waldmere jewels, that they might be turned over to
her that morning, and that that was Garland’s mission when he left his
office with Vera Vantoon, afterward meeting Floyd.
That the latter then had undertaken the mission, and that he was in
league with the others, became obvious to Nick when Floyd visited the
jewelry firm. He rightly reasoned that Garland had provided him with a
parcel of diamonds, or other costly gems, from those in pawn with the
loan company, upon which Floyd could obtain a loan from the jeweler. It
afterward was shown to be eighteen thousand dollars.
That Floyd then went and redeemed the jewels from the Crosstown
Collateral Trust Company. Nick had not had a doubt, and he shaped his
course accordingly, meeting with complete success and later showing that
Mr. Isaac Meyer had, indeed, been almost utterly ruined by his
treacherous managers.
“They now will get theirs,” Nick observed, speaking of the case that
evening. “I have no doubt that Floyd was the genius back of the whole
job, but we may not be able to prove even that. However, be that as it
may, it was very quick work, cleaned up within twenty-four hours.”
“Yes, chief,” supplemented Patsy. “And as his blooming English nobs
would say, and has said--deucedly keen and clevah work, bah Jove,
deucedly keen and clevah!”
THE END.
Some men are never beaten, regardless how great may be the odds against
them. Such was the case of Stuart Floyd, notwithstanding the fact that
Nicholas Carter had succeeded in bringing him to justice, the clever
rogue was to give the famous detective another battle of wits, which you
will read about in “The Melting Pot; or, Nick Carter and the Waldmere
Plate,” which will appear in the next issue, No. 140, of the NICK CARTER
STORIES, out May 15th.
Dared for Los Angeles.
By ROLAND ASHFORD PHILLIPS.
(This interesting story was commenced in No. 134 of NICK CARTER
STORIES. Back numbers can always be obtained from your news dealer
or the publishers.)