He did not have long to speculate, for Nick Carter rowed swiftly around the warehouse until he was under the end of the chute by which he had gained entrance before. “Make the boat fast and come after me, Patsy!” Patsy deftly hitched the painter rope around the bottom of the chute and knotted it in such a way that there was no fear of its slipping. Then he looked at his chief for further commands. “Good knot, Patsy!” commended Nick Carter, whose quick eyes took in all details, even when he seemed to be occupied with something else. “Where did you learn it?” “Went across to Liverpool on an old windjammer when I was a kid. I was too small to go aloft, except in good weather, but you can bet I learned a lot about bending ropes, and I can make ’most any knot that was known in those days.” Patsy said this without anything suggesting bragging. He was merely telling a commonplace truth, as he looked up at Nick Carter to see what he was to do next. “Come up this chute, after me. Have your gun ready. I mean your pistol; not your duck gun. Keep close to me, but don’t do anything till I give the word. And, above all, don’t make a noise.” Patsy nodded his comprehension of all this, and crawled up the long chute just behind Nick as softly as a kitten walking across a short-cropped lawn. With his knife, it took the detective only about half a minute to negotiate the bolted door. Once in the room where Nick Carter had been before, Nick took out his flash lamp and threw its white glow all about the room. It was empty, and the heaps of moldy sawdust that he had observed the first time were still undisturbed, showing that nobody had been moving about since he had left the place. “Ah!” he muttered. “There’s the trapdoor in the corner. We’ll go down there.” He pointed his flash at the corner, and Patsy understood, even though he had not caught Nick’s whispered observations. Once in the room below, Nick Carter was able to look down the staircase with the broken banister into the office he had been surveying when he had his unfortunate tumble. “They are not here,” he remarked, in a low tone, to Patsy. “There is some other office close by. I feel sure. Come on!” Once in the office where Nick, from the staircase above, had heard the plotting of Solado and Miguel, he became very busy, searching every corner and looking behind two other desks he found in the room. He wanted to make sure no one else was there. Nick Carter knew the cunning of Solado as well as the vindictiveness of Miguel, and it would not have surprised him had there been a sudden attack from ambush. Even if they had killed him, and it had been brought home to them afterward, they could plead self-defense, setting up the argument that even a detective had no right to break into a warehouse that did not belong to him. Besides, they would say, naturally, that they did not know he was a detective. “But I’ll beat their game, or know the reason why,” he muttered.