“No doubt there are letters in the box, too,” muttered the detective. Turning to Chick, he ordered him, in an offhand way, to open the front door. There was a lock on the door, and a good one. But Nick Carter knew his assistant would make little of that if he were told to get in. It took Chick about five minutes to get the door open. He had used a piece of thin wire to pick the lock, and had done it as skillfully as would have been possible to a professional burglar. The two detectives and the girl entered, followed by Captain. Chick closed the door behind them. The hall, spacious and lofty, ran straight through the house from the front door to the back, and by it the girl led her companions to the kitchen. “Nobody here!” she remarked, in a low, awe-stricken tone, such as comes natural to many people when going through an empty house. “I thought I might find one of the maids in the kitchen. Though that was not likely, either, or they would have come to the front door.” “They must have got out in a hurry,” remarked Nick. He nodded toward the table--on which were the remains of a half-consumed meal--and then at a coffeepot on the stove. After visiting the servants’ bedchambers, in which they saw other indications of a hasty packing and departure, Claudia showed them the door of the large bedroom in which Prince Marcos usually slept. Adjoining it was his mother’s chamber. It was large, like her son’s, and more luxuriously appointed. The latter apartment was in an orderly condition, with the bed neatly made and decorated with pillow shams. But the bedroom belonging to Marcos showed that it had been disturbed by some rather turbulent proceedings. “Seems to have been a fuss of some kind in here,” observed Chick. “A regular rough-house, from the look of things.” It did look like a “rough-house,” as that term is used in its slang sense. The window curtains were hanging in disorder from a broken pole, and the mirror of the dresser was cracked in a star, as if something had been hurled into the middle of it. The drawers were open, and their contents strewn about the floor. Nick Carter carefully studied the room, and his brain worked rapidly in piecing together the evidence before him. It did not take him long to arrive at a definite conclusion. “The bed has not been slept in,” he remarked. “But you can see where a person has been thrown down on it. The condition of the window shows that somebody--perhaps the man who had been thrown down on the bed, tried to escape by the window, but was overcome before he could raise the shade.” “They attacked Marcos in his own home,” murmured Claudia. “It was Marcos who was thrown on the bed, no doubt. The question is, where is he now?” “That’s what we are going to try to find out,” returned Nick. “Come here, Captain.” The detective had picked up a pair of bedroom slippers that were partly under the bed. He held them close to the broad nostrils of the bloodhound. “Seek, Captain!”