CHAPTER VIII.

IN THE OLD HOUSE.

Ten minutes’ skillful work in front of the mirror in his bedroom was enough for Chick in which to transform himself into the character he desired to assume.

He put on a shabby sack coat, a pair of overalls, with holes in them here and there, showing old trousers underneath, a cap that came far over his eyes. Also, he wore shoes which were patched, but which had no holes in them, and were more comfortable than they looked. Chick was always particular to wear shoes in which he could move easily.

He did not put anything on his face to change its appearance. It was not necessary. The cap covered so much of his visage that it would not be easy for anybody to recognize him at a casual glance. Around his neck a dark-colored silk handkerchief did away with the need for a collar and necktie.

He took the subway to Jersey City. Then he walked swiftly toward his destination, on the outskirts of the city.

Salisbury Street is one of the darkest and most unfrequented thoroughfares within sound of the trains on the Erie. There are boarding houses and rooming houses in Salisbury Street, as on most of the streets and avenues in that neighborhood. Tall, gloomy, narrow-fronted houses abound—houses built long before the present generation, when ornamentation was not so generally demanded in residential architecture.

Each of these edifices has a deep basement, far underground, a vaultlike yard, reached by iron steps, and the whole surrounded by a rusty iron fence, giving the place a general resemblance to a wild beast’s den.

Besides boarding and rooming, there are other businesses carried on in Salisbury Street. A Chinese laundry occupies one basement, and a cobbler another. Also, there are tinsmiths, plumbers, a delicatessen store of uninviting aspect, and other commercial callings of a more or less poverty-stricken look.

At one time this part of Jersey City was a favorite residence quarter for families who sought to be exclusive, and, therefore, fashionable. But the street has fallen from its high estate, as so many like it have done in New York.

The house in which Chick was interested had a sign on the doorpost, to the effect that it was an “Artistic Agency,” whatever that might mean. There was nothing to explain it, except the sign, for most of the windows, from top to bottom, were concealed by green-slatted sun blinds. One or two, where the slats were broken away in places, revealed dingy, yellowed window shades, pulled to the bottom of the sash.

It was a double house, with an alleyway down one side. The building jammed against it on the other side looked as if it had not been tenanted for years.

Chick slipped down the steep, iron steps into the basement yard of the empty house. It was not his first visit. That had been made several days previously.

Under the high flight of steps leading to the front door was a door, hidden in gloom even in the daytime. Now, at night, it was absolutely black.

Through the keyhole of this door Chick blew two peculiar notes, suggesting a cat courtship, only not so loud as one generally hears during such meetings.

Hardly had the last of the second note ceased when a bolt was noiselessly drawn back on the other side, and the door opened a little way.

“How is it, Patsy?” whispered Chick.

“That you, Chick?”

“Of course. Still there?”

“You mean the guy who——”

“Hush!” interrupted Chick. “Never mind about details. We know who we mean without mentioning names.”

“I wasn’t goin’ to mention names, Chick. Jumping Christopher! Don’t you think I know my biz? He’s here, all right. I made sure of that as soon as I got back, and he couldn’t have got away unless he went up a chimney or by aëroplane. You can bet he’s still stowed away in the crib, like a worm in last year’s hickory nut.”

“Well, you can take a walk around the block now, Patsy. There is no reason why you should stay in this moldy hole while I’m investigating. Go and get a breath of fog down by the river. There’s lots of it to-night. But be back in half an hour, in case I hit on something that I can’t handle altogether by myself. Besides, I may want you to telephone the chief or something. Get me?”

“Sure I get you, but I don’t like it,” protested Patsy Garvan. “Why can’t I stay here and lend a hand?”

“Because this part of the work can better be done by one than two. You needn’t be afraid you won’t get your share of the fun. We are going to have a hot time to-night, or I miss my guess.”

“I’ll be here in less than half an hour—a great deal less,” were Patsy’s last words, as he went soundlessly up the steps, in obedience to the orders of his superior officer. “Guess I’ll do a little picket work on my own account,” he added to himself, when he reached the foggy gloom of the street.

As soon as Chick was alone, he stood perfectly still for a few moments, to get his bearings.

First, he closed and bolted the door. Then he reached about in the darkness of the narrow hall until he fumbled against the banister of a flight of stairs leading to the upper part of the house.

“I should like to have a light,” he muttered. “But it wouldn’t be safe. I could snap on my pocket flash easily enough if I dared to do it. Ah! Here’s a door open. This is the back parlor, looking over the yard. Let’s see what chance there would be for the gang to get away if we should decide to have a raid.”

He found the window so grimed that he could not make anything through it, although the light of a street electric lamp shone across several of the yards, including that of the empty house into which he had made his way.

He rubbed one of the panes with the cuff of his coat, until he was able to see through it in a fashion.

The view he obtained—such as it was, through the foggy darkness, with the pale illumination of the high arc light—comprised that of four or five small back yards, each divided from the other by a fairly high board fence. At the back was a higher fence, extending the whole length of the street, so far as he could discern. On the other side of this rear fence could be made out the black stems and branches of some jagged old elms, whose vitality had been destroyed by the sulphurous fumes from the railroad and adjacent factories long ago.

“Hello!” he exclaimed in a low, threatening tone, as he took a small blackjack from his coat pocket. “Who’s that? What are you snooping about here for? Want to bring the cops down on us?”

To his astonishment, the response of the person he knew was in the room came in the shape of a chuckle of decided amusement. This was followed by the well-known tones of Patsy Garvan, in a whisper:

“It’s all right, Chick. This is Patsy!”

“It is?” exclaimed Chick, angry, but careful not to speak aloud. “And what the blazes are you doing here? I told you to take a walk.”

“I know you did, and I’ve taken it. You didn’t say how far I was to walk, and I don’t care for that kind of exercise, anyway. Why, Chick,” he added, in more serious accents, “I _couldn’t_ stay out there while you were nosin’ about in here, liable to get a crack on your bean at any moment. I just _couldn’t_. I s’pose you’re mad, but I had to do it.”

“Come here!”

Patsy shuffled over to the other side of the room, where Chick’s voice sounded. He did not know what he was going to get, but he expected it would be a harsh rebuke. Instead, Chick felt for his hand and gave it a hearty squeeze, as he whispered:

“Patsy, you’re the limit. But, as you’re here, keep quiet, and do what I tell you.”

“I’ll do anything you tell me, unless you say I’m to get out,” replied Patsy. “That’s where I’m liable to disobey orders, if it gets me a licking.”

“Stay here on guard,” returned Chick quickly. “I’m going to see whether those fellows in there suspect we are around.”

“I’d bet a pumpkin to a peanut they don’t,” rejoined Patsy confidently.

Without replying Chick opened a closet in a corner of the room, near the window, and through which shone enough of the glow of the street lamp to show him where it was.

Going inside, after a final warning to Patsy to keep his eyes open, he closed the door, to exclude even the faint, murky glimmer from the window, and felt against the wall at the back.

He had been told so clearly what he would find there, that he had his fingers on a certain wad of paper on the wall almost at once.

This wad of paper was stuffed into a very small hole in the wall—which, between the two houses, was only lath and plaster on the outside, with the thickness of a single brick between, before it again became lath and plaster in the other house.

To make the peephole properly, Patsy had selected a spot where the bricks joined, with rotting mortar between them. The house was very old, and mortar wears out in the course of years. He had used a long file, as well as a knife, and had cut a hole between the brick and the plastering on the other side, which, while small, was still large enough to suit the purpose of Chick.

“By Jupiter!” was Chick’s breathless ejaculation, as he obtained a good focus on the interior of the other room. “Here’s evidence—all we want!”

It was an interesting scene at which he gazed now. A workmen’s bench was before him, with a powerful lamp, shaded, so that it threw a very strong light upon the workbench.

Two men were seated at it, working on polished plates of copper that Chick recognized at a glance as intended for the printing of bank notes. The workmen were so absorbed in their work, that even if he had made a slight noise—which he didn’t—when he pulled out the plug of crumpled paper, they would not have heard it.

These two busy engravers were not the only persons in the room. There were other men in plain view of Chick.

One was sorting and examining a large pile of bank notes—counterfeits—holding each one against the light, and scrutinizing it narrowly, before he would pronounce it “safe.”

The fourth man—a burly fellow, who must have weighed more than two hundred pounds—was working a roller press at the farther side of the room. Chick could not see the denomination of the bills, of course, but he heard the big man growl that “these centuries don’t look as good as some we’ve done.”

“Hundred-dollar bills, eh?” muttered Chick. “The scoundrels!”

These four were all industriously working. If their occupation had been legitimate, he might have admired them for the way they kept everlastingly at it.

But there was another person, making the fifth, in the place, who did not show even the doubtful virtue of exerting himself like the others. He was the personification of laziness and worthlessness, for he was lolling in a rickety rocking-chair, and yawning as if he were too tired to live.

Chick found himself wondering why some of the others did not lift him out of the rocker and bestow a good, swift kick where it would do the most good.

He was not at all a bad-looking fellow. His features were clean cut and rather aristocratic, and he seemed to be intelligent, so far as Chick could judge. His clothes were of a fashionable cut, and he wore them as if used to expensive raiment. Certainly, there was nothing of the laborer. It would have been difficult to imagine him laboring at anything—except, perhaps, scheming.

“There you are, Mr. T. Burton Potter,” remarked Chick, apostrophizing the elegant idler. “I guess you’re not likely to do it, either, now that we have got thus far on the case.”

He pushed the wad of paper back into the peephole, and let himself out of the closet to the room where Patsy was still on guard.

“Seen anybody, Patsy?”

“Not a soul. Have you?”

Chick chuckled softly, as he laid a hand on Patsy to keep him quiet.

“I’ve seen several persons, Patsy. Among them is the man the chief is so anxious to take, T. Burton Potter.”

“I wonder why the chief is so bent on getting him,” remarked Patsy as, with Chick, they tiptoed to the door of the parlor, and stood for a moment in the dark hall.

“He has a good reason, you may be sure of that.”

“I don’t doubt it, but it puzzles me, all the same. This Potter is only the ‘shover’ for the gang. He can put over phony money easier than any of the others, because he has the front. But that doesn’t explain why the chief should think he is of so much more importance than any of the others. It looks as if there must be something behind it that we don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

Patsy snorted defiantly.

“The chief wants T. Burton Potter for other reasons than because he is passing fake bills. That’s what I think. And I believe down in your heart you think so, too.”

“Well, if I do, I have sense enough to keep quiet about it,” was Chick’s rejoinder. “And you’d better do the same. When Nick Carter is working out a case on his own plan and in accordance with theories of his own, it isn’t for us, his assistants, to interfere with him. When he is ready to spring his trap, we shall know what his real purpose is. One thing we do know, and that is that we are to make sure the trap holds T. Burton Potter when it is sprung.”

“Well, we’ll do that, all right,” returned Patsy confidently.