NICK CARTER STORIES _Issued Weekly. Entered as Second-class Matter at the New York Post Office, by_ STREET & SMITH, _79-89 Seventh Ave., New York. Copyright, 1915, by_ STREET & SMITH. _O. G. Smith and G. C. Smithy Proprietors._ Terms to NICK CARTER STORIES Mail Subscribers. (_Postage Free._) Single Copies or Back Numbers, 5c. Each. 3 months 65c. 4 months 85c. 6 months $1.25 One year 2.50 2 copies one year 4.00 1 copy two years 4.00 =How to Send Money=--By post-office or express money order, registered letter, bank check or draft, at our risk. At your own risk if sent by currency, coin, or postage stamps in ordinary letter. =Receipts=--Receipt of your remittance is acknowledged by proper change of number on your label. If not correct you have not been properly credited, and should let us know at once. =No. 147.= NEW YORK, July 3, 1915. =Price Five Cents.= ON DEATH’S TRAIL; Or, NICK CARTER’S STRANGEST CASE. Edited by CHICKERING CARTER. CHAPTER I. AN OPEN QUESTION. The solitary ray of light that found its way into the dismal room seemed to shrink from entering. Silence reigned supreme within. Outside, even the stillness of the night was hardly broken. It was a ray of moonlight, as feeble through the misty air as “the glowworm’s ineffectual fire.” It found its way in, nevertheless, under one broken slat of a closed blind, and then it seemed to hesitate, losing life and shrinking from going farther. Was there a lost life within? The ray of light came farther and fell upon only one object in the room. All else was gloom and silence. It stood near the partly open window and the closed blinds. It was as motionless as a block of stone, as white as a figure of marble, as cold as a form of clay. Its covering of white hid it entirely from view, had there been eyes to see. It hung in flimsy folds on either side of the narrow, unpillowed bed. Now and then a breath of the night air stirred it, but only as if in mockery, and an observer would have shrunk and shuddered--lest its motion had been imparted by what it covered. It was the only sign of life amid the gloom and silence. Suddenly the stillness was broken, but only faintly. It was as if a bell tolled too soon the funeral knell. In some quarter remote from the dismal room, a clock struck the hour--three slow, mellow strokes of the bell. Three o’clock in the morning. Five hours afterward, when the November sun had risen into the heavens and dispelled the night mists that had hung over the slow-winding Potomac and the nation’s Capitol, a telephone communication sped from the office of the Washington chief of police to a suite in the Willard, in which three persons then were completing their toilets for breakfast.