CHAPTER XII.

THE ROAD TO CANTON.

It was precisely two o’clock when Nick Carter arrived at Vic Clayton’s rooms in Tremont Street.

Naturally, Nick did not so much as dream that she had been informed of his designs against her. That treachery existed at police headquarters was farthest from his thoughts.

In asking Vic Clayton to take him to the place where she and Claudia Badger claimed to have been robbed, Nick had several motives.

To begin with, he wished to see if she would willingly consent to do so.

Nick reasoned that, in case she readily consented, it would indicate a bare possibility that he in some way had misinterpreted the curious features that he had detected in the photograph, and that the picture might not be as incriminating in its significance as he had inferred.

While even this remote doubt existed, Nick felt that he could not wisely make any very aggressive move in the case, and he took this method to remove the doubt.

As a matter of fact, he hardly believed that Vic would consent to comply with this request, but would evade it with some plausible excuse.

Providing that she complied and went with him, however, Nick believed that he could so corner her with questions, while alone with her in a carriage, that he could finally force from her a confession of the whole business.

In any event, moreover, he felt sure that he could so artfully take these steps that he would in no way sacrifice any of his present advantages.

He found Vic Clayton alone in the handsomely furnished waiting-room, engaged in writing at an open desk in one corner.

She had rearranged her hair and rouged her cheeks since Sandy Hyde’s departure, and she looked, as a matter of fact as well as of design, remarkably handsome and attractive.

“Dear me!” she exclaimed, quickly dropping her pen upon seeing Nick enter. “Is it you, Detective Carter?”

“None other,” bowed Nick, smiling.

“I’m delighted!” cried Vic, rising to offer her hand. “I do hope you bring some encouraging news, or possibly my lost gems themselves—despite that I predicted only failure for you.”

The last was added with a fascinating laugh, in which Nick was willing enough to join, though he found nothing inviting in her seductive eyes and alluring airs.

“Well, hardly anything as favorable as that, Madame Victoria,” he began.

“No, no, pardon me!” she interrupted, playfully tapping him on the arm. “You surely do not call again to consult me professionally?”

“No, I do not.”

“Then drop the Madame Victoria, my dear Mr. Carter, which is much too strained for friendly intercourse,” she softly cried, with an arch glance at him. “Let me be to you plain Miss Clayton—or even plain Victoria, so be it that suits you even better.”

Nick experienced a vague feeling of distrust stealing through him as he looked and listened, but in his ignorance of what herein has been disclosed, he could find no definite grounds for the feeling. Yet, instinctively, as one sometimes dreads dangers still remote and visionary, he did not fancy this woman’s bantering remarks nor her playful attempts to captivate him.

Nick laughed again, nevertheless, and agreeably rejoined:

“As I told you the other day, Miss Clayton, it matters little to me what I call you, providing you consent to comply with my wishes.”

“Your wishes?”

“Yes.”

“Dear me! I really think I should enjoy making them my own, Detective Carter,” murmured Vic, with a pretty cant of her head and a shrug of her shoulders.

“I trust so.”

“Have a chair.”

“Thanks.”

“Now what do you want of me this time, Detective Carter?”

She had taken a seat near-by, still smiling archly at him, and Nick more gravely answered:

“I want you to do me a little service.”

“You have only to name it.”

“I find you willing,” smiled Nick, a bit puzzled.

“The pleasure is all mine,” laughed Vic. “Yet I’m really curious to know what you want of me.”

“I’ll tell you. On what road was it, Miss Clayton, that you and Mrs. Badger were held up by these rascally highwaymen?”

“The road to Canton.”

“Are you familiar with it?”

“I’m familiar with that part of it,” cried Vic, with a very significant smile and grimace. “Dear me! I shall never forget it!”

“Quite vividly impressed upon your memory, eh?”

“Decidedly so, Detective Carter?”

“I suppose you could locate the precise spot, if there was any occasion?”

“Indeed, I could. I know exactly where it is.”

“Ah, that is very fortunate,” said Nick agreeably. “I wish to go out there and view the spot.”

“For what?”

“I think I may discover some clue or sign, Miss Clayton, either in the general appearance of the immediate scene or the surrounding country, which might put me on the track of the thieves,” Nick artfully rejoined, now feeling that even this lame explanation could be made to serve his purpose. “Of course,” he smilingly added, “we detectives see much more in such cases than the untrained eyes of a layman.”

“Naturally.”

“You see the point, do you not?”

“Oh, yes,” nodded Vic, with a demure stare at him.

“What do you think of it?”

“I’ll admit there might be something in it.”

“I thought you would,” Nick heartily replied. “Now the question is, to get back to the service I require of you. Will you go out there with me and show me the spot?”

Vic burst out laughing, as if much amused.

“Is that all you want of me?” she cried.

“That is all just now,” said Nick, a bit dryly.

“Why, of course, Detective Carter, I’ll go with you,” exclaimed Vic, as if a refusal was the last thing to have been expected, or any occasion for one. “How shall we go? It’s much too far to walk.”

“Oh, I should not think of asking you to walk,” laughed Nick, somehow feeling again that he was on deucedly thin ice, for which he could not account.

“I hope not, my dear Mr. Carter.”

“I will provide a carriage.”

“What time do you wish to go?”

“The sooner the better, Miss Clayton. At once will suit me best of all.”

Now Vic bridled a little, never other than crafty, and her smiling face took on a look of regret.

“Dear me! That makes it a little bad,” she said, as if weighing the situation. “I already had planned to go to——Stay! here is a note to verify my making any excuse, Detective Carter, after offering so volubly to serve you.”

She reached over to the desk while speaking, taking from it the note she had been writing, which she now handed to Nick to be read.

It was merely a note to her maid, informing her that she would be absent for a few hours, and that the girl might close the rooms and take an outing until the morrow.

“I had already planned to go riding, and was about to leave that note for Delia, my maid,” she explained, while Nick glanced at the craftily prepared missive.

“Well, that does interfere, Miss Clayton, as you say,” he replied, eying her a bit sharply, yet failing to detect any sign of duplicity, so artful was the jade. “If you cannot go with me to-day, however, possibly to-morrow you——”

“Stop a moment!” exclaimed Vic, as if struck with a second thought. “I was going only with Amos and his wife, merely for a run of an hour or two, and——Hark! that should be they!”

The toot of an automobile-horn had sounded from the street below, and Vic sprang up while speaking, and ran to look from the window.

“Yes, they are at the curb,” she added, with manifest satisfaction. “Amos is coming up here. Now, if he has no definite plans, Mr. Carter, I see no reason why we cannot prevail upon you to——”

She was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Amos Badger.

He bolted into the room like a man in a hurry, his face flushed, his eyes bright, his voice resonant when impulsively inquiring:

“All ready, Vic?”

Then he checked himself and exclaimed quickly, as if unexpectedly beholding Nick in the room:

“Why, hello, Carter! You here? Glad to see you again.”

“The pleasure is mutual, Mr. Badger,” replied Nick, rising to accept the other’s proffered hand.

“Thanks,” nodded Badger. “Have you got a line on those infernal crooks yet?”

“No, not as yet.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“But I’m hoping to do so.”

“I join you in the hope, Carter,” declared Badger; then he laughingly added: “You’ll observe that I’m out of those red flannel bandages.”

“Yes, so I see.”

“A nasty thing, a cold in the early summer.”

“So it is,” assented Nick. “I congratulate you upon being rid of it.”

He had eyed the man intently while they were speaking, and he saw what he had not seen, heard what he had not heard, when they met at his place in Brookline; for Badger now knew that he was suspected; knew what desperate work must be done that afternoon, and he had dropped those little artifices with which he had aimed to blind Nick during their previous meeting.

In his clear and cutting voice, in every subtle, sinister inflection, in the glowing glint of his dark eyes, in the poise of his supple, muscular figure—in one and all of these Nick now saw or heard again the man of the hold-up—as plainly as when he saw the knave standing with leveled weapons in that sunlit suburban road.

Yet the face of the detective did not change by so much as a shadow, and Vic Clayton now interposed, with a fine display of solicitude:

“We can do Mr. Carter a service, Amos, if you have no plans for the afternoon.”

“How?” demanded Badger, turning quickly to her.

“He wishes to visit the place where Claudia and I were held up and robbed, and he came here to ask me to go with him. Now, if you have no particular trip you wish to make to-day——”

“None whatever!” cried Badger, quickly interrupting. “We are out for an airing only, and I’d as soon go that way as any. The road to Canton—can you locate the precise place, Vic?”

“Surely.”

“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:

“You must take that road to the east, Amos. The other leads to——”

“No, no, you’re wrong about that,” Badger quickly called back over his shoulder.

“No, I’m not!”

“The west road leads to Canton.”

“You’re mistaken, Amos,” insisted Vic, in apparent excitement, as the car rapidly approached the junction. “We must take the east road. Mustn’t we, Claudia?”

Badger slowed down, as if in some uncertainty, then brought the car to a stop just at the junction.

“Well, I am not really sure,” cried his wife, doubtfully looking about—yet only to make sure that no other car was in sight in any direction. “It’s all right, Amos——”

Badger was already upon his feet, interrupting her.

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed, while Nick glanced up with a feeling of distrust. “If we take that road, Vic, it will——Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Carter!”

Apparently by accident, while gesticulating about the road, he had knocked Nick’s derby hat from his head.

Then, with a lightning like move, made as if to catch the hat before it could fall to the ground, he threw himself across the detective’s body, confining his arms to his sides.

At that moment Vic Clayton had risen up in the car, standing directly behind Nick.

“Now!” yelled Badger, with terrible ferocity.

There was no need for the command.

Already the uplifted hand of the fortune-teller was descending; a hand fiercely gripping a clubbed revolver, and thrice the butt of the heavy weapon fell squarely upon Nick Carter’s unprotected head.

The tragic episode had been enacted in the fraction of a second, before Nick could realize the design, much less prevent it, and a single blow delivered as the three had been would well-nigh have felled an ox.

Without so much as a groan, with every muscle suddenly relaxing, Nick dropped inert and senseless upon the floor of the car, his hair and brow turned crimson by a swift gush of blood.

In an instant Badger was out upon the ground.

“Take my seat, Claudia,” he hurriedly cried to his wife. “Lend me a hand here, Vic, and we’ll throw him in behind. I’ll bind him hand and foot after we start again. There, there, that will do! Now around with the car, Claudia, and drive for home as if the devil followed us!”

The transfer had been made in half a minute.

In another half the car was speeding back over the woodland road at thirty miles an hour—heading for Badger’s place near Brookline.

Senseless, between the seats, out of view of any persons whom the speeding car might pass along the road, lay the man for whom failure only had been predicted by the desperate woman who had struck him down.