CHAPTER XVI.

A SECRET OFFER.

The house to which Patsy tracked T. Burton Potter was one of those old-fashioned residences of the kind in which the wealthy and exclusive members of New York’s society lived half a century ago, and which are plentiful in some of those quiet streets in the neighborhood of Washington Square.

There are gardens in front of some of them, just as there were fifty years ago, and at the back there are still other gardens, with flower beds and trees, in which people who have their homes in these pleasant localities stroll about on summer evenings.

Many of the houses are now devoted to boarders and lodgers, but a few are, to this day, occupied by private families who can afford the luxury of a whole house.

It was into a private house that T. Burton Potter injected himself by way of the kitchen door under the high stone steps leading to the main entrance above. He had a key to this door.

“Hello!” he whispered to himself. “Things look different. By Jove! Suppose I don’t find Lampton here! He is the only one of the crowd that would know me. Well, I can explain. But what have they changed things for? It is only three weeks since I was here before.”

Cautiously, he went out of the kitchen in which he had first found himself, and up the stairs to the main hall.

At every step he realized that there had been changes since his last visit. The carpet was not the same, and when he got to the hall, where a dim gas jet burned, he saw that the hall rack was one he never had seen before, and that there were pictures on the walls which were strange to him.

He turned into a room which had been used as a sort of sitting room by the assemblage of shady characters who had made this house a sort of private clubhouse when he had known it before, although it passed to outsiders as the home of two wealthy families.

“Why, this room is altogether different,” muttered Potter. “There is a handsome sideboard over there, and I see silver enough to tempt anybody. I’ll bet the gang has moved out, and that somebody else has moved in. Now, what is this all about?”

Puzzled, he went into the front room, which was separated only by portières, and found that it was a luxuriously furnished apartment, with a piano and many pictures on the walls, which he was connoisseur enough to know were valuable.

He went out to the hall in a state of bewilderment and somewhat frightened, too—for he knew he was in a house in which the police might say he had no right to be. Why hadn’t they changed the lock on the lower door? Then he couldn’t have let himself in, and he might have been saved all this.

He would get out as quickly as he could. This was the only safe move for him!

He stole along the hall, intending to make his exit by the door which had admitted him, when, suddenly he perceived his own shadow on the wall.

You can’t have a shadow without a light, and involuntarily Potter looked up the stairs.

What he saw was a great deal like what had scared him in the house in Jersey City. A man, with a lamp in one hand and a revolver in the other, was coming down the stairs!

There were points of difference between this man and the one in Jersey City, however. This man was dressed in a well-fitting business suit, and he did not look at all frightened. The hand that held the revolver was ominously steady.

“Ha!” growled the man with the revolver.

T. Burton Potter did not say anything. It seemed to him that there was nothing to be said.

The man who had said “Ha!” had a hard face, as well as hard voice. The eyes that were transfixing T. Burton Potter were fierce and sparkling. Potter thought they looked like the heads of polished steel rivets. Under the heavy, iron-gray brows, they were enough to take the nerve out of even as daring a man as Potter really was.

“Don’t reach for a gun,” continued the man on the stairs. “This one in my hand has a mighty easy trigger, and I may remind you that I have you covered.”

“I haven’t got a gun!” grumbled Potter. “If I had, I’m sensible enough to know when I’m beaten. What I want to say——”

“Don’t say it,” ordered the other. “And don’t try to get away down those kitchen stairs. Throw up your hands and step into that room at the side—the dining room. Then I’ll telephone for the police.”

“What for? I haven’t done anything. If you’ll let me explain——”

But again the man with the gun shut him off, as he came down to the hall, making Potter precede him into the dining room.

“Go through this room into that other room at the back. I use it for a library.”

Potter obeyed. He knew the room well enough. It had been used for card playing when the house was occupied by its former tenants. It overlooked the back garden, and had always been a favorite lounge of his when he had had time to loaf a little.

With his hands up in the air, and looking very much like a cornered desperado in the moving pictures, Potter took his stand against the opposite wall, as his captor commanded, and waited for what might come.

The man took up a telephone from the heavy table in the middle of the room, at the same time switching on a bunch of electric lights depending from the ceiling, and which illuminated the room brilliantly. As he did so, he looked into Potter’s face and started violently.

“Good heavens! Howard Milmarsh!” he blurted out, putting the telephone down, but keeping the revolver in a firm grip. “What does this mean? Why have you come here? You know me, don’t you? I was head waiter at the Old Pike Inn, and I was there the night you—you——”

“What are you handing me?” demanded T. Burton Potter, his surprise getting the better of his fear. “I don’t know anybody named Howard Milmarsh. My name is Potter, and I used to live here.”

“Live here? Why did you live here? Why did you hide yourself when you could have a fortune by asking for it—by just showing yourself?”

“I know all about these fortunes!” returned Potter. “I seem to remember you as a waiter at the Old Pike Inn, however.”

“Head waiter!” corrected the other. “I was studying law all the time I was there, and now I have a pretty fair business in New York, although I don’t have to depend on fees for my living. I have other means.”

T. Burton Potter, still with his hands up, stared at this man thoughtfully. What passed in his mind was Potter’s own secret. He may have had no deeper purpose than to get out of the house—or he may have had other ideas.

“Stand still there for a minute. If you are willing to listen to a proposition, I think I can show you how you can make some money—more than you’ve ever had in your life, and without having to work for it.”

“That would suit me,” declared Potter earnestly.

“No doubt. It would suit most men of your stripe. Let me find out for myself whether you have any weapons about you. Turn your face to the wall.”

In a minute or two the man of the house had been through Potter’s pockets and found that he had told the truth. Potter knew that there was a law making it a criminal offense to carry deadly weapons, and he was too cautious to take a chance of being caught with anything of the kind. Besides, he did not believe in murder.

“Put your hands down, and have a drink,” said the stern man, when he was satisfied that Potter was not armed. “You will notice that my gun is ready for action, at my finger ends. There’s a bottle on that table at your side, and glasses. Drink! I don’t care for any myself.”

T. Burton Potter had had a hard night, and he was willing to refresh himself with a little liquor.

“Now listen to me,” said the strange host. “I have something to say.”

For an hour the two men were in close confab. What they were talking about may be revealed later. For the present, it is enough to say that the man told his unexpected guest to call him Louden Powers, and that henceforth T. Burton Potter must remember his own name was—something else.

It would have surprised both the gentlemen in that back room if they had known that they had for all that time been under the eye of one who never did a thing, no matter how strange it might appear, save with a set purpose—Nick Carter, the world-renowned detective.

Yet it was true. Nick had “broken in,” as he had told Patsy Garvan he might. He had not had much trouble, for T. Burton Potter had forgotten to lock the door after letting himself in.

The detective had come in that way, about the time Louden Powers was absorbed in the business of keeping Potter under his pistol while he parleyed with him in the library.

If Powers had not been so much taken up with his prisoner, he might have been more careful. In that case, he might have looked into the dining room, to make sure neither of his two servants—who slept at the top of the house—were spying on him. That would have meant that Nick must have dodged.

As it was, there was nothing of the kind, and he merely stood behind a big chair and looked over the top of it until the conference between the two persons in the back room came to an end.

“You will sleep in this house till we get things going,” were the closing words of Louden Powers. “I live here entirely alone, except for my two maidservants and a man who drives my car and does heavy work about the house. The maids and the man are all Scandinavians, and they can’t speak English. They say they can’t, at least, but I watch them, anyhow. Now, let’s go up to bed. I’ll show you your room.”

Nick stayed in the dining room until the house was quite quiet, and he figured Louden Powers and his man were both asleep.

Then he went down to the back door to let himself out, with a satisfied smile on his face.

As he reached the front gate of the little garden in front of the house, Patsy came rushing up to him out of the darkness, panting from a hard run.

“Chief!” he gasped.

“Well?”

“He’s beat it!”

“Beat it? Who?”

“I don’t know. He got out of a third-story window, on that old iron balcony. He let himself down to the other, and then got to the ground. Chick and I were waiting for him. But he got over a side fence and was gone before we were on to his game.”

“And you let him get away?”

The sternness in Nick’s voice made Patsy wilt.

“Chick is after him. But it’s awfully dark, and I don’t figure that he will ever catch up. I feel mighty bad over it. But it was all done so quickly that we didn’t have a chance. I thought I’d better be here in case you came out.”

“Louden Powers locked him in his room, and, of course, he got away by the window,” said the chief, more to himself than to Patsy. “I should have been out here sooner, I suppose. Come on, Patsy! We’ll go home.”