Nick Carter Stories No. 124, January 23, 1915: The girl kidnaper; or, Nick Carter's up-to-date clew.Carter, Nicholas (House name)
General
Nick Carter Stories No. 124, January 23, 1915: The girl kidnaper; or, Nick Carter's up-to-date clew.
Carter, Nicholas (House name)
Detective and mystery stories, American -- Periodicals; Popular literature -- Periodicals
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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