Chapter XXIII: A Serious Predicament

Nick Carter would have given a good deal to have been absent from that particular locality at that precise moment.

It had been no part of his plan to remain there until the possible return of Madge Babbington, but it had not occurred to him that she would leave her friends before two o’clock.

He looked about him for a means of escape from that small room--a thing that he had somehow neglected to attend to before the necessity arose for it; and he remembered, as he did so, that the unusually large Navaho blanket that hung suspended from ceiling to floor close at his right hand, next to the easel, concealed a door; and as he recalled the plan of the apartment when he had searched through it, he believed that the door must communicate with the private hallway of the apartment.

But even so, would it be possible for him to open it and to pass through and close it again without attracting the attention of the occupants of the adjoining room? He doubted it.

Unused doors are apt to stick or creak on their hinges; nevertheless, it offered the only means out of the present dilemma, and he determined to attempt it.

He went about it methodically, realizing that haste would be fatal, and hoping almost against hope that no impulse on the part of Madge would send her into that small room before he could make his escape from it.

He stepped from behind the easel, knowing from the direction of the voices in the next room that neither of the women would be able to see him as he did so; and he pulled aside the Navaho blanket.

His luck favored him.

The key to the door was in the lock--quite naturally, one might say, on the inside of the door--and he opened the blade of his pocketknife, passing it up and down between the door and the casing, to discover if the bolt of the lock had been shot.

It had; and so he brought out his little case of miniature tools, with the tiny oil can that is half the diameter of an ordinary lead pencil, and shot a drop of oil against the bolt of the lock and upon the hinges of the door, and then, withdrawing the key, administered to that in the same manner--and believed that now, by exercising great care, he would be able to open the door without making a sound.

In the meantime the conversation in the adjoining room had been continued, and the detective had necessarily overheard every word of it, although he would not have remained a moment to do so had he been able to make his escape on the instant.

The reply that Madge Babbington made to the statement of Miss McQueen was characteristic. Nick could imagine just how she shrugged her shoulders when she made it.

“Wire Chris Morgan, the first thing you do in the morning, to get rid of him. I don’t care how it is done, Nora, only we can’t afford to take any chances. Still, I don’t see how Patsy Garvan has been able to dig up anything that would be of service to him.”

“He might do that if only he knew where to dig,” was the significant reply; and it was responded to by a light peal of laughter from Madge. Then she added, perhaps irrelevantly:

“Nick Carter was at the opera to-night.”

“Watching you, Madge?”

“Surely.”

“But I thought----”

“My dear Nora, he has never abandoned his ideas for a moment. He, or somebody working in his employ, has been on my trail and yours, too, ever since my acquittal.”

“And on Car--Carleton’s, too, I suppose.”

“Surest thing you know, Nora. I wish I could shoot a drop of prussic acid upon his tongue. That would keep him still for a while.”

“But you cannot, my dear.”

“No; at least, not at the present time.”

“I had thought that perhaps you would try----”

“Try what, Nora?”

“Your wiles, your fascinations, your witchery----”

“What! On Nick Carter? My dear, you don’t know the man.”

“Possibly not; but I have never known you to fail yet in such an undertaking. Look at the things you have done more than once. Look at----”

“Hush! No names!”

“Why? We are alone, aren’t we?”

“I suppose so. One never knows. One of my maids might even now be hiding behind the easel in my little den. I’ll look, presently, to see.”

Nick Carter was at that instant engaged in silently turning the key in the lock of the door, and he smiled to himself, being thankful that it had not occurred to her to make the investigation sooner.

“Well, Madge, you know the name that I would use. He hates you--there is no doubt of that--and at the same time he is so madly in love with you that he can scarcely contain himself.”

“But that is only when he is near me, Nora. Whenever he is away from me he hates me, as you say; and, do you know, he is so cold and snakelike, and so utterly fearless, that sometimes I am actually afraid of him.”

“You have reason to fear him; there is no doubt of that.”

“Oh!”--with a light laugh--“he will kill me some day, without a doubt, unless”--with deep significance--“he happens to die first.”

Nick Carter, in the adjoining room, which Madge had called her “den,” was at that moment in the act of passing through the doorway which he had succeeded in opening before him, and, as he paused an instant to hear that last remark of Madge’s, his glance fell upon the small safe, or, rather, upon the curtained blanket that concealed it from view.

He wanted very much, indeed, to inspect the interior of that safe. He had been interrupted at the very moment when he was attempting to do so, and now, without a second thought concerning what he would do with it, he turned about, raised it from the floor, lifted it through the doorway, put it down, turned and closed the door after him, and so stood in the hallway of the apartment, with only one more door between him and escape from the rather compromising position.

Again he picked up the safe. You or I would have found it difficult to carry away, but, although it was heavy, and a clumsy thing to bear, the detective’s great strength handled it easily, and he went along the hallway rapidly to the outer door which communicated with the corridor of the building.

What would he do with it? He had not decided that point yet.

He realized, of course, that he would not be able to take it with him out of the building, for there would be no sort of excuse that he could make to the clerk at the desk in the office.

Outside the apartment, he did not pause, even for an instant, but moved rapidly forward until he had turned a corner of the corridor, and so was hidden from the woman he had just left, in case Madge should discover her loss and rush into the halls to give the alarm.

But no such thing happened, and just then Nick came to the stairway, and he recalled the fact that the building was exactly twelve stories high.

He was on the ninth floor at the moment. Three flights of stairs would carry him to the top floor, and from there, another one, if he could find it, would take him to the roof.

Nick began mounting the stairs, going as rapidly as possible, carrying the weight he had to bear--hoping all the time that he would not meet one of the night watchmen, or any of the residents of the apartment house.

He found the stairs that led to the roof, and he found a locked door at the top of them, but we have already discovered that locked doors offered but little impediment to the onward march of the detective, and in a trice he had it open and had passed out with the safe in his arms, upon the roof.

“Wow!” he half exclaimed, wiping the perspiration from his face and seating himself for a moment upon the safe, to rest. “I have had a good many strange experiences, but this is certainly a new one on me. Anyhow, I’ve got the safe, and I have found rather a secluded place for opening it. There isn’t much likelihood of disturbance up here.”

Nor was there.

He began, as soon as he was rested, to turn the dial, with his ear close to it, and, although he was engaged in that manner upward of half an hour before success came to him, his patience was at last rewarded, and he turned the handle of the lock and opened the door.

The night was clear and there was the half of a moon in the sky, so there was light enough.

The safe being open, he turned it over on its back, so that such light as there was would shine into it--and then he uttered a sharp exclamation of utter amazement.

The safe that he had taken so much trouble to carry to the roof was absolutely empty, save for a pasteboard card, which had fallen to the back of it when he upturned it.

He reached inside and drew forth the card, wondering what it could be; and then for a moment he sat quite still, staring at it in silence; but only to break into a hearty laugh immediately thereafter.

What was it that caused his amazement, and then his laughter? This:

There was writing upon the card, which was the only thing the safe contained, and the message it contained was addressed to him. It said:

“MY DEAR MR. CARTER: So sorry to disappoint you, you know; but I
have a notion that some day you will pay me a call, and, finding me
absent, will venture to investigate the surroundings. Naturally,
this safe would be the first thing to attract you; and so--this
slight message of my regard and esteem.

“MADGE HURD-BABBINGTON.”

“Well, now what do you think about that?” he muttered to himself, with a grim smile on his face.

He wished at that moment that he had not taken it at all; he wished, also, that he could have returned it, so that Madge would not know that he had visited her apartment during her absence; he wished a lot of impossible things, in fact, but what he did was quite to the point.

He closed and locked the safe again, put it in an upright position, as if it had not been opened--for, of course, he replaced the card inside of it--and then he passed from the roof to the top floor of the building and walked down the stairs to the tenth floor, where he sought the elevator.

At least, he would return to the office from the floor to which he had been taken in the first place.

It was a little past three o’clock when he left the building, nodding to the clerk as he passed the office.

“I don’t think I could call this a very brilliant night’s work,” he told himself, as he sought the nearest subway station. “Still, that scrap of a conversation told me considerable, although I did not hear a word that would convey the slightest proof of what I desire to know.”

But he did not go directly to his home even then. He went, instead, to one of the night offices of the Western Union and wrote a telegraph letter of fifty words to Patsy.