Chapter VII: 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.