He darted on with the last, quickly reaching the spot where he last had seen her. The woman had vanished as if the earth had swallowed her. Chick gazed sharply around and discovered the black entrance of an alley between two gloomy buildings. “Hang it, she could not have gone in there,” he said to himself, irritated by the threatening mishap. “She did not go as far as that, as well as I could tell. It may be all off, by thunder, unless I can trace her. I wish, now, that I had arrested both her and that yellow-haired girl. It now looks bad, for fair.” Chick was looking in vain all the while for the vanished woman. It did not appear that she could have entered either of the buildings near which he last had seen her. Both were shrouded in darkness. The only refuge to which she could have resorted appeared to be the alley mentioned, and Chick felt reasonably sure that she had not gone as far as that. He now turned in that direction, nevertheless, and crept into the gloomy hole. It was so dark he scarce could see his hand before his face. He reached into his pocket to get his searchlight. As he did so, he stumbled against something lying on the ground. He stooped and felt of it with his hand, suppressing a cry of surprise. He had stumbled against--the body of a man! CHAPTER VI. DOWN AND OUT. Patsy Garvan, while Chick was engaged as described, was working out another string of the bow by which Nick Carter was hoping not only to save the Waldmere plate from the melting pot, but also to round up the crooks who had stolen it. Patsy’s first move was to perfect a disguise that would have caused his own wife not only to turn him down, but even to have fired him out of the house, if he had dared venture into it. No more tough and sinister-looking a chap ever stood in leather, than was Patsy Garvan when he appeared in a lower section of the Bowery about four o’clock that afternoon. Patsy was not looking for Bug Bannon at that time. Though he knew the notorious young gangster by sight, and many of the haunts in which he might possibly be found, Patsy was bent upon working out a scheme of his own by which to accomplish his chief’s object. The nature of it appeared soon after he entered an inferior saloon in one of the side streets, a haunt of the disreputable, and where he finally found the person he had been seeking. This was an infamous character by the name of John Flynn, though he was much better known to his select circle of friends, and to the police, as Pilot Flynn. He had obtained this sobriquet from the fact that his chief vocation, if not his only one, was that of a steerer for stuss games and other gambling joints, or, in other words, a pilot for such strangers as could be artfully lured to their own undoing.