“Then we’ll take him out there at once, if he wishes,” said Badger, quickly reverting to Nick. “What do you say, Carter? There’s a seat in my auto, if you care to go.” Nick had foreseen what was coming, and had decided what course to take. “Yes, I’ll go,” he said briefly. “Good enough!” cried Badger. “Get into your wraps, Vic, and we’ll start at once.” Nick had seen, in fact, no wise alternative to accepting the offer. To have declined it, after the request he had made Vic Clayton, might have aroused suspicions which he had no reason to believe already existed. He would take no chance of that before positive evidence against these knaves had been secured. That he had been betrayed from police headquarters, that his suspicions and designs were already partly known, that he was now up against a plot hurriedly arranged by telephone, that he was the victim of an admirably played game, that his life itself was in jeopardy from that moment—only a clairvoyant could have seen all this. Nick Carter was not a clairvoyant, however, nor had he any reasonable cause for suspecting the real gravity of his situation. Yet with caution that was habitual to him when in the company of persons known to be crooks, Nick became more wary from the moment he took his seat in Badger’s automobile. It was a Packard four-cylinder motor-car, and Badger was running the machine. With Nick beside him on the front seat, and his wife and Vic Clayton behind, the party of four were soon speeding through Brookline toward the woodland roads of the famous Blue Hills. Though the animated conversation that was sustained meantime is not material here, it soon led Nick to form, in conjunction with the polite attentions bestowed upon him, a new theory in explanation of the seemingly natural situation. “These crafty rascals are merely aiming to make a favorable impression upon me with their courtesies,” he said to himself, during a lull in the conversation. “They are doing so in the hope of averting suspicion, with a view to convincing me that they are as honest and fashionable as they appear. They look and seem all right. I’ll give them credit for that, and if I knew less about them, I’m blessed if they wouldn’t fool me with their pretensions.” This soliloquy ran through Nick’s mind more than an hour after they had started, but it was given the lie most violently less than five minutes later. The car was then speeding along a woodland road in the Blue Hills, and Badger was bent forward over his steering-wheel, apparently intent upon the road ahead. As far as the eye could reach, the road was deserted. One hundred yards ahead it divided, a branch road turning off to the left. The junction of the two was in the very midst of a belt of woods, with no sign of a house or clearing in sight. After one swift, backward glance over her shoulder, Vic Clayton suddenly leaned forward and cried, above the noise of the machine: