The next issue of the Nick Carter Stories, No. 136, out April 17th, will contain “The Man They Held Back; or, Nick Carter’s Other Self.” The plot of the story revolves around the machinations of a gang of counterfeiters, whose ramifications reach far and wide. The great detective, however, matches wits with the makers of “the queer,” and the methods he pursues in breaking up the gang, and in bringing its members to justice makes a story that you will thoroughly enjoy.
Dared for Los Angeles.
By ROLAND ASHFORD PHILLIPS.
(This interesting story was commenced in No. 134 of Nick Carter Stories. Back numbers can always be obtained from your news dealer or the publishers.)
CHAPTER VI.
AN ADDED DISCOVERY.
After supper in the main shack with the others of the constructing force, Nash sought the seclusion of his own little cabin. His trunks had been brought up from San Fernando several days earlier, but until now he had not had time to unpack them. The cabin had but one room, and this he decorated with some photographs, magazine prints, and some articles of a personal interest.
He made an old box into a bookcase, and upon the shelves arrayed his treasured volumes. These were principally books on engineering and travel, although scattered among them might be found a favorite adventure story or two, several bound collections of verse, and a bulky dictionary. To the books of poetry he added the copy belonging to the vagrant he had met that memorable day in Los Angeles.
“A down-and-outer with a batch of Kipling’s ballads,” he muttered to himself, as he picked the book from his trunk. “That’s a contrast for you.” He sat down before the improvised bookcase and read through some of the swinging verse. “Better than a tonic,” he murmured later, looking at the clock and discovering he had been lost for nearly two hours. “I don’t think that vag ever owned this book. Probably found it in the park, or lifted it from a pocket. I wonder if he——”
He stopped so abruptly that an observer might have thought a hand had gripped his throat. A strange, unpleasant thrill raced up his spine; his eyes remained glued to the half-blank page he had inadvertently turned.
There, across the white space, in a thin, angular hand, was written: “To Walter Trask, from his Sister Ethel. Christmas, 1911.”
For a minute Nash stared at the writing, his thoughts galloping far away—far beyond the miles of mountain ranges, beyond the limitless stretch of prairie, where, for the moment, he lived over again that black hour in the bunk house. Mentally he recalled the shouts, the questioning voices, the sharp crack of a revolver fired in the closed room. Then the mêlée of fists—the still, deathlike face of the man on the floor——
Nash drew in a deep breath and passed a quick hand across his eyes. “What a small world it is, after all!” he reflected. This little volume, picked from the pocket of an unfortunate, had belonged to Walter Trask. What strange trick of Destiny had willed it here, in Nash’s hands?
He closed the book and placed it among the others. “I wonder,” he said aloud, staring ahead of him with unseeing eyes, “how it is all to end? There’s a little rhyme somewhere—Kipling’s, too—that reads: ‘The sins men do, two by two, come back to them one by one.’”
He got into bed that night with a solemn resolution to banish forever the past from his thoughts. The things that had happened were buried, and all the post-mortem examinations ever devised would not help matters.
Here he was to-day, with a shoulder to the wheel, his quota of strength helping, with the thousand others, to push to completion this wonderful aqueduct that the City of Angels might be supplied with cold, crystal-clear water from the realms of eternal snow. The immensity and daring of the project thrilled him; day by day it grew; day by day he gloried in the thought that he was to contribute a mite toward the great achievement.