CHAPTER I.
REMARKABLE TRICKERY.
Nick Carter listened without interrupting.
The man addressing the famous detective was not one to be wisely interrupted. His strong face, his broad, thin-lipped mouth and square jaw, the glint of his steel-blue eyes, his portly and imposing figure—all denoted that he was the type of man that insists upon having his way, his inning at the bat, as it were, but who then would graciously accord the same privilege to another.
“The danger, Mr. Carter, cannot be overestimated,” he was forcibly saying. “It really is very terrible. We are living in constant peril. That man is a perpetual menace. Unless he can be wiped out of existence, or put behind prison bars, there is no telling what he might accomplish, no possible way to anticipate it and guard against it. I cannot for the life of me understand how he got by a detective as marvelously keen and discerning as you. I cannot, Carter, on my word.”
Nick smiled and knocked the ashes from his cigar.
“It is not very difficult to understand,” he replied, with patience unruffled. “There were two reasons for it, Mr. Langham.”
“Two reasons?”
“Yes. One, because the likeness between Chester Clayton and David Margate, or Doctor David Guelpa, in which character this exceedingly clever rascal then was posing, is a most extraordinary one. I doubt that two other persons could be found, not excluding the most perfect of twins, who look so precisely alike.”
“But you already knew of that extraordinary resemblance, Mr. Carter, when Margate eluded you and made his escape.”
“Very true,” Nick admitted. “But there were other facts which I did not know, and which I had had no way of learning. That is why there was a second reason for Margate’s escape. Any detective, even one as ‘keen and discerning’ as myself, if I may quote you, would be deceived by a seeming impossibility.”
“Impossibility?”
“Seeming impossibility,” corrected Nick.
“What do you mean?”
“Bear in mind, Mr. Langham, that Margate rushed from the house in which we secured his confederates and ran to his suite in the Hotel Westgate, of which Clayton still is manager.”
“I know about that.”
“I then did not know that a secret electric communication existed between the very room in which we made the arrest and the apartments to which Margate had gone, nor that a signal informing him of the arrest and warning him to flee could be communicated to him by stepping on a concealed button under the carpet. I since have learned all about that. That was done by Scoville, one of the arrested crooks, unknown to me and my assistants.”
“But, Mr. Carter——”
“One moment, please,” Nick now interrupted. “I want you to see how impossible Margate’s exploit must have appeared.”
“Go on, then.”
“Only ten minutes elapsed from the time Margate left his confederates, until I entered the Westgate in pursuit of him. The first person I saw in the hotel office was, I supposed, Manager Clayton.”
“Well?”
“How could I believe anything else?” Nick went on more earnestly. “He was in the office inclosure and wearing an entirely different suit from what Margate was wearing ten minutes before. Ten minutes is an incredibly short time in which to have covered the distance between the two houses, to have gone to his suite and changed his outside garments and got down to the hotel office.”
“I admit that, Carter, of course.”
“I called to the supposed Clayton, therefore, and we went up to Margate’s suite, in company with my junior assistant, Patsy Garvan,” continued Nick. “We found the supposed Margate unconscious on his bed, clad in the same suit in which I had seen him, as I have said, only ten minutes before. Who on earth would have suspected, despite the extraordinary resemblance and all that previously had occurred, that such a lightninglike change of character could be accomplished; that the man on the bed was Clayton, and the man at my elbow was the crook himself? It would have seemed incredible, utterly impossible. That is why I did not give it a thought.”
“How was it accomplished, Mr. Carter?”
“I since have learned, of course,” said Nick. “Margate received the warning signal the moment he entered his suite. He instantly telephoned down to the hotel office and requested Clayton to come up there immediately on important business.”
“He did so?”
“Certainly. Clayton had no occasion to suspect Margate, whom he knew only as Doctor Guelpa. He complied, of course, and Margate invited him to his suite. Then, passing back of him, he threw one arm around his head and over his mouth, at the same time injecting into his neck a quantity of the same swiftly acting drug with which he had overcome Patsy Garvan earlier in the evening.”
“Clayton has told me about that.”
“It was done in a couple of minutes,” Nick went on. “Margate then stripped Clayton of his outside garments, exchanging them for his own, and placed his senseless form on the bed.”
“But what motive had he?” questioned Langham. “Why did he not flee at once after receiving the warning?”
Nick laughed a bit derisively.
“You don’t know this rascal, Mr. Langham,” he replied. “I now know more about him than I then did. He turned that trick only because he was short of funds. He then went down to the hotel office, a human counterfeit of Clayton, with the intention of stealing the money from the hotel vault.”
“Ah, I see,” Mr. Langham nodded. “A rascal, Carter, indeed.”
“My timely arrival with Patsy at just that moment prevented his design,” said the detective. “He had no sane alternative, when I called to him, but to accompany us to the suite. My assistant then made a hurried examination of the man on the bed, and he at once inferred that Margate had committed suicide.”
“I suppose it appeared so,” Mr. Langham allowed.
“In the meantime,” Nick added; “the supposed Clayton cried that he must telephone the good news to his mother and to Mademoiselle Falloni, whose stolen jewels we had just recovered. He hurried from the room, as if to do so. We now know that he hurried from the house, and that is the last we saw of him. But the whole business from beginning to end occurred in less than fifteen minutes, Mr. Langham, and no detective on earth, unless gifted with clairvoyance, would have suspected the trick.”
“I admit, of course, that it would have seemed impossible,” bowed Langham.
“Now, sir, let me tell you what I since have learned about this crook,” said Nick. “I have looked up his record abroad. He twice had been convicted and sent to prison. He at one time was associated in Paris with the notorious Doctor Leon Deverge, who was executed two years ago for wholesale murder by means of drugs and poisons, of which he had made so profound a study that he knew much more of their subtle and deadly qualities than has been learned by any of his contemporaries.”
“I remember having read of the man.”
“This notorious physician and chemist imparted to David Margate much of his dangerous knowledge, and the career of the latter has always been one of vice and crime. It has been accomplished with such exceeding craft and cunning, moreover, that he most of the time has completely baffled the police. I admit that Margate is a terrible menace to society and to——”
“To us, Mr. Carter, in particular,” said Mr. Langham, interrupting. “For he threatened Clayton by letter many months ago that he would wreak vengeance upon him for having put you on his track, and that your life would be the price for having foiled him and imprisoned his confederates. In view of all this, Carter, and particularly his extraordinary likeness to Clayton, his very existence is a constant menace.”
“Those are the only reasons, Mr. Langham, why I consented to drive up here into the Berkshire Hills with my assistants to attend these festivities,” Nick again interposed.
“That was very good of you, Mr. Carter, to be sure,” bowed the other.
“I was pleased, of course, to be present at the marriage of Clayton and your daughter, and both assured me that they would feel easier if I was here,” Nick added. “Clayton apprehended that Margate, despite that he has not been seen or heard from save once since his jewel robbery, might attempt knavery at this time. I attribute that, however, to Clayton’s somewhat nervous temperament. I don’t take very much stock in the threats of crooks, you know, for I long have been accustomed to them. Very few of them ever make good. I doubt that David Margate ever will.”
“Well, I hope not, I’m sure.”
“It is nearly time, I think, for Clayton and his bride to depart,” Nick now said, glancing at his watch. “You will wish to see them leave, I suppose.”
It then was ten o’clock in the evening, that of a bright day in June—a fit day, indeed, for the marriage of as beautiful a girl as charming Clara Langham, the only daughter of the multimillionaire president of the Century Trust Company, with whom Nick Carter had been talking.
More than six months had passed since the extraordinary case they had been discussing, that involving the theft and recovery of the world-famous jewels of Mademoiselle Falloni, the celebrated prima donna, a case resulting also in the arrest and conviction of all of the crooks save their ringleader, whose unparalleled elusion of Nick Carter at the last moment they had been reviewing.
Nick never had confided, not even to his trusty assistants, the terrible secret intrusted to his keeping by Clayton’s cultured and attractive mother; that his extraordinary personal resemblance to the notorious crook was due to his twin relationship; that he bore his mother’s maiden name, and David Margate that of the criminal father of both, who had deserted his wife in England while the children were infants, taking with him this son, who afterward fell naturally into the evil footsteps of his vicious father, who since had died under sentence in a German prison.
Nick would not have thought of betraying such a secret, of which Clayton was entirely ignorant, and the disclosure of which would serve only to mar his happiness and in a measure wreck his subsequent life.
The secret then was known, in fact, only by Nick and the sad-hearted mother, Mrs. Julia Clayton, who had confided it to him only in order that the detective might prove Clayton innocent of the great jewel robbery mentioned. It was a secret that could be safely trusted to a man of Nick Carter’s sterling integrity.
The room in which he then was seated was the private library of Mr. Gustavus Langham, in the money magnate’s great stone mansion, occupied only as a summer residence. It had been built several years before at an enormous expense, before the death of his gay and fashionable wife.
It was like an old feudal castle, with its massive walls and parapets, its broad halls and winding stairways, its stately rooms and attractive surroundings, covering a vast wooded estate in one of the most picturesque and secluded sections of the beautiful Berkshire Hills.
From the room in which Nick was seated could be heard, though the door was closed, the strains of the orchestral music, also the vivacious conversation and gay laughter of a multitude of guests, gathered at the wedding reception by a special train from New York, or with motor cars from select summer colonies from a radius of fifty miles.
The driveways and roads through the vast estate of nearly a square mile were alive with moving conveyances of one kind or another, some of the guests residing at a distance already having made their departure.
For the wedding ceremony had been performed two hours before, the reception was nearing its end, and the bride and groom were making final preparations for a precipitous departure to avoid the customary good-luck shower on such occasions.
Mr. Langham also drew out his watch and glanced at it.
“Nearly ten,” he remarked, replying to the detective. “Why, yes, I certainly wish to see them leave. I also want a last word in private with Clara. I will go and see her before she leaves her room. I told her I would do so about this time. She is expecting me, no doubt, and——”
But Mr. Langham, who had arisen while speaking, got no further with his remarks.
He was interrupted by the unceremonious opening of the door and by the hurried entrance of Clayton’s best man, George Vandyke, a New York lawyer with whom Nick Carter was very well acquainted.
One glance at the young man’s white face and dilated eyes was enough to convince the detective that something both alarming and extraordinary had occurred.
“Out with it, Vandyke,” he exclaimed, starting up and dropping his cigar into the cuspidor. “What’s the matter with you? What has happened?”