Chapter XIX: A Dashing Rescue

It was after midnight before Nick and Chick reached the streets of Philadelphia.

Before they drew into the station, Nick had said:

“We’ll waste no time, but go directly to the neighborhood in which Ida was to do her work.”

“If it’s not in the main streets, the people will have been asleep these two hours,” said Chick.

“All the same,” said Nick, “if Ida is in trouble, as we believe, I don’t know the girl if she won’t find some way of letting us know where she is, if we get into our neighborhood.”

So it was that when they left the station, they followed the route that had been taken by her earlier in the afternoon, getting off the car at exactly the same corner that she had done.

Here Nick stopped a moment, to think of the memorandum he had given Ida as his guide to their further movements.

“Chief,” said Chick, “if we are now on the ground where Ida has been working, we ought to be careful how we move around, for fear some one will drop to us.”

“You are right about that, Chick,” said Nick, leading the way down the street—the same one Ida had gone.

As he got opposite a house, about the middle of the block, he stopped short, and said, in a low tone, to Chick: “That’s the house Ethel Romney left to go to New York, where she met her death.”

“The old home of Blanche Constant, then?” asked Chick.

“Yes,” replied Nick. “I only know it by the fact that this is the street and that is the number.”

At that moment there was a noise, as if the door of the house was being opened, made distinct by the silence which reigned in the street.

The two detectives immediately slipped into concealment of the first doorway, and watched.

The man came out, carefully closing the door after him, and, coming down the steps, stopped a moment on the sidewalk, where the light from the arc lamp fell full on his face.

“Brown-bearded and brown-haired,” remarked Nick, in a whisper.

The man under watch finally turned and walked off toward the lower corner. Chick slipped out and across the street, directly in his rear. He did not attempt to follow the man, but watched him walk away. Then he slipped back to Nick on his tiptoes, saying, eagerly:

“By thunder, chief, that man walks with a hitch and jerk of his right shoulder.”

“I thought I saw that myself,” replied Nick. “Under other circumstances we’d follow that man, but now our business is to find Ida.”

As a matter of fact, they did follow the man, but only because their ways were the same.

At the corner below they saw this man pass through a door, which Nick and Chick sized up to be the back door of a drinking saloon.

They let him go, and Nick led the way to the house of the woman on whom Ida had first called.

This was not guesswork. He recalled that he had advised Ida to see that woman immediately on arriving in Philadelphia.

It was with some difficulty that the woman was aroused, and when she was, her means of communication with them was through the window of her bedroom. It did not take long for Nick to learn that Ida had called on her, and that she did not know whither Ida had gone on leaving her.

“The first point is made,” said Nick to Chick, “for we have found that Ida reached here and began work. Now we will follow her up.”

Taking a position under the arc light near by, Nick took from his pocket some papers, and, after examining them, said:

“I fancy we can travel Ida’s course pretty straight for a while. Come along.”

Thus, without delay, they called at each of the next three places Ida had gone to, and in the order that she had, compelled in each instance to arouse people from their beds to answer their questions.

But at the end of this journey they were, to use the words of Chick, “up against it.”

What line Ida had traveled, and to what address she had gone, they had no way of judging.

Although Nick had given her the name of a person to call on, he was unable to tell where that person lived, and had advised Ida that she would have to find out on her arrival in the city. He could only tell that it was in a certain neighborhood, information which he had obtained from Blanche Constant after the murder.

However, assuming that this was her next direction, they went thither in what Chick felt to be a rather hopeless search.

Reaching that part of the town, they traveled the streets in all directions without hitting upon any indications of Ida’s tracks.

Coming to one corner, which they had passed several times. Nick said:

“Here’s a street that we have not been over yet; let’s try it.”

“I am afraid,” said Chick, as he followed his chief down the street indicated, “that we will find other streets that we will travel until daylight.”

He had hardly gotten the words out of his mouth than he stopped short and dropped down on his knees, looking at something intently on the pavement.

Nick halted, looking with great interest at what his aid was doing. He saw him take from his pocket a small lantern he always carried with him, and turn the light on a particular spot of the pavement.

“What is it, Chick?” said Nick.

“Red chalk marks,” said Chick.

“Signs?” asked Nick.

“Not our signs,” said Chick, “though they seem to look as if there had been an attempt to make one. But, chief, I’ll bet my life that this is the same chalk we use.”

Nick bent down over the spot, and saw that the pavement was made of red brick; that it would have been difficult to have made one of the signs that they used between them, and that in this case the marks only seemed to have been hastily made without any form whatever.

He stood up erect, looking at Chick.

“Could those marks have been made by Ida?” asked Nick.

“I am guessing that they were,” said Chick. “Anyhow, I gave Ida a piece of that chalk, and told her she ought to always carry it with her, for she could not know how useful it might become.”

“Let’s look a little farther,” said Nick.

“Wait a minute,” said Chick. “If any one comes, play drunk.”

Backing up against a tree, Chick suddenly lifted that fine, manly voice his friends knew he had, in a popular song of the day, that rang out on the night air as clear as a bell.

He had sung but a verse, when two men suddenly appeared at the corner beyond them, say a hundred feet away, and Nick began to urge him to come home and not make a holy show of himself in the street, saying that they’d have the cops down on them if he didn’t stop it.

He could hear one man say to the other that it was only a couple of drunks, and saw them turn back and go out of sight.

Chick sang another verse, and then both listened.

There was an answer, indistinctly, yet clear enough for them to hear every note. They heard the third verse of the song sung through.

“Ida’s here,” said Chick.

“Are you sure?” asked Nick.

“Sure!” replied Chick. “I’d know her way of singing in the wilds of Africa.”

“Then you have found her,” said Nick. “And the next thing is to get to her.”

On looking up, he saw nearly opposite where the marks on the pavement were, a door in the fence opposite to where they were standing.

Both he and Chick carefully examined this door and the fence for further marks without finding any.

Then Nick followed up the pavement, until he came opposite the door of the first house to be reached, and there beckoned to Chick, pointing with as much excitement as the great detective ever showed, to long red marks on the brickwork of the door.

“That’s the house she is in,” said Chick.

Nick tried the door, and found it was locked. It took him but a minute to pick the lock, but this did not open the door, for it was soon apparent that it was barred from within as well as bolted.

Chick was preparing to put his strength against it, when Nick checked him, and said:

“Let’s try if there is an entrance from that yard.”

Hurrying to the door in the fence and through it, they closed it after them and began an examination of the yard in which they found themselves.

The brick wall of the house, on the door of which were the red marks, made one side of the yard, and at the rear of this side was a door to which they went. This door opened to them on the first trial, and Chick’s lantern came into play again to show a hallway with stairs leading up.

They mounted these stairs revolvers in hand, and on reaching the landing, found an open door opposite them.

Turning into this room, the first thing that they saw was a large black cloth bag on the floor, the next a woman’s handkerchief, which Chick said belonged to Ida.

It was the handkerchief which Ida had wound around her hand with which to break the pane of glass, through which she had talked to the boy who had helped her.

A hasty examination of the adjoining rooms satisfied the two shrewd detectives that the house was not occupied regularly.

Out into the hall they went again, to follow it to an angle, where it turned sharply to the rear, examining each door that they came to.

Finally, at the extreme end of the hall, they found a door which was not only bolted, but barred as well. Chick went to this door, and tapped on it lightly, but in a peculiar manner.

The signal was so light as to be almost unheard, but it was immediately responded to.

“She’s here,” said Chick. “Cover me while I take these fastenings off.”

In a twinkling the bar was wrenched off and the bolts withdrawn and the door flung open.

Nick and Chick sprang through, with revolvers up and were met with a merry laugh.

“There’s no one to fight here but me,” said Ida.

She soon satisfied the anxious inquiries of the two that she was unharmed and uninjured in any way, and then Nick said:

“Not another word now until we get Ida out of this place.”

“Give me a gun,” said Ida. “I lost mine early in the evening.”

Chick handed her one, saying that she’d find it a little heavier than the one she was used to having.

“Now,” said Nick, “I will lead, Ida follow and Chick behind. Come on.”

They passed through the hall and to the stairs, and down them without anybody interfering. But, as they reached the door, it was opened and a man made his appearance.

Ida immediately recognized him, even in the dim light, as the tough who had misdirected her into the dark hallway where she had been seized.

“That is one of them,” she said.

The tough, with an oath, called on some one behind him and sprang at Nick.

Possibly if he had known the ready use the famous detective could make of his fists, he would have thought twice over his action.

As it was, he received a blow straight between the eyes which sent him out of the door and on his back to the pavement.

Nick sprang forward through the door at once to meet the second coming up. He did not wait for any action on the part of that fellow, but sent him to keep company with the other, who was endeavoring to get on his feet.

Chick caught Ida and swiftly carried her out of harm’s way, through the door and into the street, through which now she had passed for the second time that night.

Nick followed them closely, and in a moment they were out on the corner.

“Take notice of the place, Chick,” said Nick. “We may want to come back here again.”

The two rascals who had been so severely dealt with by Nick made no attempt to follow them, and it was not long before they were in the street where they could take the cars that would take them to the hotel where they usually stopped when in that city.

It was not until then that Ida told the story of her experience of the night, and of the information she had gained.

After he had listened to it intently, Nick said:

“What you tell us puts an entirely new look upon our case. Chick has picked up a point to add to it, and together they give us some work that will keep us in Philadelphia to-morrow. That brown-bearded man has got to be investigated.”

“Yes,” said Chick, “and we have got to know where he spent the last three days.”

“But what was the meaning of their peculiar treatment of me?” asked Ida.

“They meant to keep you a prisoner,” said Nick, “to prevent you from doing work which they had already found was getting too close to them.”

Nick got up from his chair, and turning to Chick, said:

“Come, Chick, Ida wants rest after her rough experience, and you and I have got to size up something. Come with me.”