In the heat of action and excitement ten minutes are as nothing.
The time seems longer, however, when one sits waiting in a motionless carriage, enveloped in the gloom of night, with grim distrust and uncertainty acting like spurs in the sides of one's impatience.
Before five minutes had fairly passed, after Nick's departure, Spotty Dalton had suffered his misgivings to the very limit of his endurance.
Chick sat mentally counting the passing seconds, then scoring each departed minute with his fingers, of which he had exhausted four and a thumb, the entire complement of one hand; and all the while his eyes were riveted with intense vigilance upon the growling ruffian on the seat above him.
Had Dalton ventured so much as a move to leave his perch, Chick would have been after him like a terrier after a rat.
At the end of five minutes, however, Dalton made a preliminary move. He hitched the reins around the whipstock, then stared for a second or two toward Venner's house, fifty yards away through the surrounding park.
Then he suddenly swung round on his seat, and growled ferociously at Chick, at the same time signifying with gestures the communication he imagined would not be verbally understood:
"See here, you swarthy-faced snake fiend, I'm bound up yonder, to see what's going on! You sit where you are, d'ye hear, and I'll be back in a jiffy, if things are all right! If they're not, —— you, I'll be back just the same—with a gun!"
As if moved by a wish to understand him, Chick arose in the body of the carriage while Dalton was thus declaring himself. He heard and understood, all right, and it necessitated his getting in his work a little earlier than was planned. For Chick would take no such chances as this that Nick's operations in the house would be interfered with.
As the last word left Dalton's lips, the arm of the detective shot out through the darkness, and closed with the grip of a vise around the ruffian's neck, throttling him to silence.
"With a gun, eh?" Chick fiercely muttered, yanking Dalton backward into the body of the carriage. "You open your lips again for so much as a whisper, and I'll close them with six inches of cold steel."
In the glare of a distant lightning flash, Dalton, though struggling furiously, caught the gleam of a polished blade at his throat, and a glimpse of the flaming eyes in the face above him.
He shrank, gasping for breath, as the truth dawned upon him; and then the voice of another sounded close beside the open carriage.
"Want any help, Chick?"
Nick's youthful assistant, to whom a wire had been sent from the house of the snake charmer, had appeared like an apparition out of the roadside gloom.
"Ah! you're here, Patsy!" muttered Chick. "Yes. Clap a gag into this cur's mouth. We'll choke off his pipes first of all."
Dalton uttered a vicious growl, then felt the point of the knife pierce the skin at his throat, and he wisely relapsed into silence.
For Patsy to fish out a gag, and bind it securely in the scoundrel's mouth, was the work of a few moments only.
Then Chick jerked Dalton up from the rear cushion and out into the road, in far less time than is taken to record it.
"Off with his coat and hat, Patsy," he hurriedly commanded. "Now the false beard, my lad. Now get into them yourself, as quickly as you can."
"I'm all in, Chick," chuckled Patsy, working like a trooper.
"Got all the traps with you?"
"Sure!"
"Clap the bracelets on him, then. Now give me a second pair, and a strip of line. That's the stuff."
"Oh, I brought the whole shooting match," laughed Patsy.
"Good for you! Now mount to the box, and leave this dog to me. I'll return in half a minute."
Patsy climbed up to the seat from which Dalton had been so speedily snatched and overcome, and Chick now ran the rascal a rod or more into the woodland on the opposite side of the road.
There he threw him to the ground beside a small oak, around the trunk of which he quickly twined Dalton's legs, and then fastened them at the ankles with a pair of irons.
"I reckon you'll stay there quietly until I want you, barring that you pull up the tree," he grimly remarked, as he turned to hasten back to the carriage, in which he quickly resumed his seat.
A moment later Venner peered from the distant window—and was satisfied with what he saw.
Five minutes later he came striding down the walk and approached the carriage. Without a word to the driver, whom he supposed to be Dalton, he opened the carriage door and laid his hand on Chick's arm, at the same time pointing toward the house.
Chick signified that he understood, and held out both hands, as if he wished to be helped to the sidewalk.
Venner promptly raised both of his—only to suddenly hear a quick, metallic snap, and feel links of cold steel confining his wrists. Their icy chill went through him like a knife, and he reeled as if stricken a blow.
"Good God!" he gasped, hoarsely. "What's this?"
Chick and Patsy were already beside him.
"This," said Chick, sternly, "is your wind-up!"
"My—"
"Stop! Not a loud word, Mr. Venner, or worse will be yours! Now tell me in whispers—where is Nick Carter?"
The sight of a revolver thrust under his nose had a potent effect upon the dismayed man, yet even while he saw that he was cornered, he seized upon the hope that Kilgore and the gang might discover and release him.
"Find him yourself, if you want him!" he hissed through his teeth, with an ugly frown. "I'm cursed if I'll inform you!"
Chick did not delay for arguments or persuasion. With Patsy's help he speedily put Venner in the same helpless condition in which he had left Dalton, stretched upon the ground, within a rod of one another.
Then he threw off his disguise, and shifted his revolvers to his side pockets.
"Now for yonder house, Patsy, and to see what the remainder of this gang are at," said he. "Come with me, and have your guns ready."
"I'm with you," cried Patsy, coolly. "Guns and all."
A dash up the gravel walk brought them to the front door, which Venner had left partly open.
There they paused and listened.
Not a sound came from within the house; but overhead the tempest now was breaking, with frequent crashing peals of thunder, and flashes of lightning that illumined all the landscape. Rain, too, now began pelting down on the veranda roof.
"We'll steal in and see what we can find," whispered Chick, drawing one of his revolvers.
"Go it, then."
He led the way, and Patsy followed. The silence in the house mystified them at first. It appeared to have been entirely deserted.
When they reached the door of the dining room, however, Chick discovered on the floor the disguise which Nick had discarded.
"I have it, Patsy," he cried, softly. "They have nailed Nick, just as he expected, and have taken him somewhere to confine him."
"Perhaps in the cellar," suggested Patsy.
"I hardly think so, yet we'll have a look."
Moving as quietly as shadows, they entered the kitchen and easily located the cellar door. It was closed and locked, with the key remaining.
"Evidently they're not down there," whispered Chick.
"Let's try the upper floors," suggested Patsy. "They may be laying for us up there, but I reckon we're good for them."
"We'll take the chance, surely. Come on."
They crept through the hall again, and then mounted the broad stairway, which led to the next floor.
There the utter silence and the semidarkness quickly convinced them that they were on the wrong track.
"The stable," muttered Chick, suddenly. "We'll try the stable."
"They certainly have vamosed this ranch," remarked Patsy.
"Plainly. Come on, then, and we'll try the stable."
Together they started downstairs.
A moment later Kilgore, Pylotte and Matt Stall came flurrying into the house by the rear door.
In the bright light of the broad hall each party discovered the other at precisely the same moment, and Kilgore instantly guessed the truth.
With a cry of rage, he whipped out his revolver and fired point-blank at the two men on the stairs.
"Down 'em, boys!" he yelled furiously. "Down 'em, or our game is done for!"
His bullet glanced from the baluster rail near Chick, and buried itself in the wall behind him.
"Drop them, Patsy!" he shouted, instantly. "Shoot to kill! It's them or us!"
"Let her go, Gallagher!" roared Patsy, pulling both guns.
Then, amid the tumult of the breaking tempest outside, there began a fusillade the thunder of which rivaled that of the night, and which, though comparatively brief, was as fast and furious as any man there had ever experienced.
Pylotte went down at the first shot from Chick, however, with a bullet in his brain.
Then shot followed shot with lightning rapidity.
Both detectives sprang down several stairs to evade the rain of lead, for both Kilgore and Stall were rapidly emptying two revolvers.
A bullet singed Patsy's ear.
Another dislodged Chick's hat.
Then Kilgore reeled with a slight wound in his left arm.
A score of shots were fired and wasted, meantime, for all hands were dodging about the hall and stairs in an utterly indescribable fashion.
It was the warmest kind of a fight for fully three minutes.
Then Chick got a line on Matt Stall from behind the baluster post, and dropped him with a ragged wound in his hip.
Stall fell with a yell of rage and pain, and Kilgore found himself alone, and against odds.
He turned like a flash, and darted out of the rear door of the house.
He knew that the game was up, his confederates done for, and his own chances of escape but small; and the situation stirred to their very depths the worst elements of this lifelong criminal.
But one thought possessed him—that of revenge, that of destroying the chief cause of his downfall—Nick Carter.
With this end in view, Kilgore tore like a madman through the blinding rain of that tempestuous night, and shaped his course back to the diamond plant.
Despite the corner in which he had placed himself, a situation far more desperate than he at first imagined, Nick Carter was congratulating himself upon the success of his ruse by which he had so quickly located the secret plant of the diamond swindlers, even at the sacrifice of his personal freedom.
The fact that he now sat bound in a chair in the hidden stronghold of the gang, watched only by Cervera, did not seriously disturb the fearless detective.
Nick had been in many a worse corner than this, or in corners believed to be worse, and he felt confident of pulling out of the scrape with a whole skin, and with most of the gang in custody.
He had surveyed his surroundings with more than cursory interest, therefore, while Kilgore and his confederates were binding his arms to the rounds of the chair back, and his ankles to the legs of the same.
The rough foundation walls of the house, the massive stone wall built across the cellar to mask the secret chamber, the elaborate electric furnace, the huge hydraulic press, the workbench and tools, the powerful arc light pendent from the ceiling—half an eye would have convinced Nick that he occupied the workroom of that master craftsman whose chemical knowledge and inventive genius had given birth to a most marvelous production, long, earnestly, yet vainly, sought by others—
The production of an artificial diamond!
Not until Nick heard the stone door forcibly closed, and its iron bolts shot violently into their sockets, did he pay serious attention to Cervera, the venomous Spanish vixen left to guard him.
Then, as she swung round toward him, he took a sharper look at her darkly magnificent face, and was thrilled despite him by the extraordinary changes it had undergone.
It had lost its beauty. Its olive flush had given place to a chalky whiteness. The radiance of her eyes had become a merciless glitter, like the glint cast from the eyes of a serpent. The reflection of a consuming passion for vengeance had transfigured her countenance, till it had become like the face of a fiend.
Though Nick saw at a glance that his situation had taken on an unexpected and desperate phase, he suppressed any betrayal of it. He met the woman eye to eye, while she briefly paused and faced him, with a cruel smile curling her gray lips.
"So I have you now, Nick Carter," she cried, with mocking significance.
"Well, yes, in a way," admitted Nick, coolly.
"I have you in my power," hissed Cervera, with a vicious display of satisfaction.
"Ah! that's different," said Nick.
"How different?"
"That you have me in your power remains to be demonstrated."
"Are we not alone here, you fool?"
"Yes, very much alone."
"And you helpless?"
"Apparently."
"If I wish, Nick Carter, I can kill you."
"Then pray don't wish it," said Nick. "I am still too young to be heartlessly slain, even by so beautiful and accomplished a woman."
"Caramba!you mock me!" cried Cervera, darting toward him with eyes ablaze and her lithe figure quivering with passion. "You mock me!—you shall repent it! Perdition! you shall repent it!"
"Is that so?"
"You shall repent it, I say!"
"In this world, or in the next?" inquired Nick, bent upon prolonging the scene as much as possible, with a hope that Chick might suddenly turn up.
Cervera did not answer him immediately. She wheeled again and darted to the door, once more to make sure that she had secured its bolts.
She was clad in the black dress in which she had escaped from Nick the previous night, the somber hue of which was relieved only by occasional flashes of her dainty white lace underskirts, as she swept quickly from place to place, with her lithe figure crouching at times, and her every movement as swift and impulsive as that of a startled leopard.
As he sat watching her, Nick was reminded of her matchless work upon the stage, thrilling men and women alike with her wild grace and the fiery passion of her indescribable dances.
She returned to confront him after a moment, crouching before him, with her glowing eyes fixed on his.
"In the next world—not in this!" she now replied, with a voice that cut the air like the snap of a whip. "You'd have brief time for repentance in this."
"So you've decided to do the job, have you?" Nick coolly demanded.
"Yes."
"Well, I'm sorry to hear it."
"Here is where we even up accounts."
"Even them up, eh?"
"You heard what I said."
"But I wasn't aware that I have so very much the best of you."
"You have."
"How so?"
"Caramba!you know too much!"
"Ah! you mean about that girl."
"Yes."
"I see," nodded Nick, secretly working in vain to loose the ropes confining his arms. "Well, señora, as a matter of fact, I am rather likely to make things unpleasant for you one of these days."
"It will be this day, or never. You'll not live to see another."
"Possibly not."
"Caramba!do you doubt it?"
She darted nearer to him, with her hand tearing open the waist of her dress, and then the gleam of a poniard met Nick's gaze. She swept it before his eyes with a wild gesture, and gave vent to a mocking laugh.
"Do you doubt that I can slay you?"
"Not at all," answered Nick. "It's very evident."
"Or that I will?"
"That appears equally manifest."
"So it is!" hissed Cervera, with vicious intensity. "I intend to do it! Do you hear, Nick Carter? I intend to do it!"
"Oh, yes, I hear you."
"Why don't you shrink? Why don't you plead for mercy?"
"What's the use?"
She answered him with a laugh that made the room ring.
"Besides," added Nick, "it's not my style to show the white feather."
"We'll see!Caramba!we will see!"
She came nearer to him, crouching before him, so near that her breath fell hot upon his cheeks. Then, with a quick movement, she pressed the point of the blade through his clothing, till it pricked the flesh above his heart.
With his arms bound, with his ankles secured to the legs of the chair, Nick appeared utterly at her mercy—of which she had none.
Despite himself, Nick shrank slightly from the wound, and for the first time shuddered at the peril by which he was menaced, and from which there seemed to be no avenue of escape.
Cervera laughed again, a laugh freighted with the terrible ring of madness.
"Did it hurt you?" she screamed, with her glittering eyes raised to search his. "Perdition! I hope so! You have tortured me with a thousand fears. I'd like to repay you with a thousand pangs!"
Nick's eyes took on an ugly gleam.
"Why don't you do so, then?" he growled.
"I would, if I had the time," cried Cervera, through her teeth.
"You have all there is."
"Ten thousand times I'd thrust it into you—thus! thus!"
Nick set his jaws and met the blade without flinching.
Twice the vicious demon thrust it through his clothing, and now two crimson stains of blood on his shirt front followed the withdrawal of the weapon.
"See! see!" screamed Cervera, triumphantly, with her terrible face upturned to his gaze. "You're beginning to bleed! Did you know that the sight of blood affects me as it does a leopard? I thirst for more—if that of one I hate! When next I strike you, I shall strike deeper!"
That she fully intended to murder him, Nick now, had not a doubt. The homicidal madness was in her eyes, in her every feature, her every motion, and it rang in every word that fell from her bloodless lips.
Yet the inflexible nerve of the detective did not for a moment desert him.
"Send the blade home at once, if you like," he said, with a scornful frown.
"Not yet—not yet!" she cried, shrilly. "There'll be time for that."
"Time and to spare," sneered Nick.
"I first wish to torture you, as you've tortured me!"
"Go ahead, then."
"Once more! Are you ready?"
"Let it come."
Again she drew back the glittering blade, only to mock him with several pretended thrusts, hoping thus to create and prolong an agony of fear and suspense.
A more viciously cruel and vindictive creature never drew the breath of life.
She laughed again, and slowly pressed the weapon closer—and then, with a sudden startled cry, she drew back and leaped to her feet.
A noise like that of a mighty cannonade seemed to shake even the solid walls of this buried chamber.
It was the crash of thunder in the heavens overhead.
It was Cervera's first intimation of the terrible tempest that had been gathering outside.
At first she thought the sound was that of revolvers, and she darted to the door and listened, pressing her ear to the wall.
The instant her back was turned, Nick made a desperate attempt to free himself, straining cords and muscles under the determined effort. It proved vain, however. The ropes held him as if made of twisted steel.
Yet in his brief but desperate struggle his right arm came in contact with an object in the side pocket of his sack coat.
The object was a box nearly filled with parlor matches—one of the most dangerous and treacherous creations of man's inventive genius.
Like a sudden revelation, or a bolt out of the blue, there leaped up in Nick's mind a possible way of escape.
He thought of Cervera's garments, of the fluffy lace skirts beneath her gown, to which a single flash of fire would instantly prove fatal.
The resort to such means seemed horrible—yet Nick well knew it was the one and only resource left him.
He glanced sharply at Cervera. She was still listening at the door, with her evil face a picture of intense suspense.
With a quick turn of his wrist, Nick succeeded in extracting the box from his pocket. Then he forced it open, and with a move of his hand he scattered its entire contents over the floor around his chair. The tiny matches fell with scarce a sound, and Cervera, ten feet away, failed to hear them.
Then Nick quietly worked his chair back a foot or two, in order to bring some of the fateful things upon the floor directly in front of him.
A moment later Cervera turned from the door.
"Thunder—it was thunder," she muttered, under her breath. "There's a storm outside."
"Somebody coming?" queried Nick, with taunting accents.
He now aimed to provoke her, to force the situation to a climax, lest any mischance should have befallen Chick, or perverted in any way his own designs upon Kilgore and the gang. His taunting remark proved effective, moreover.
With a snarl of rage Cervera darted toward him, with eyes for him alone, never for the floor.
"You dog!" she cried, through her white teeth.
"Do you mock me again?"
"Oh! no, of course not," sneered Nick.
"You lie! You do! You think some one will come—that you will then escape me," screamed Cervera, quivering through and through with venomous passion.
Nick watched her as a cat watches a mouse.
Her face was ghastly and distorted, her breast heaving, her every nerve quivering, and her eyes were like balls of fire under their knitted brows.
Still clutching the poniard, her jeweled fingers worked convulsively around its haft, like those of one who fain would strike a death blow, yet whose hand was briefly held by consuming horror.
Suddenly she darted nearer, with a vicious snarl.
"You think you'll escape me," she screamed, with bitter ferocity. "It shows in your eyes. I'll make sure that you don't. Let come who may, you shall be found—dead! Dead!—do you hear?"
"Oh! yes, I hear."
"Yet you do not fear? We'll see—we'll see!"
She darted closer to him, with the weapon raised, above her head, and her knee touched Nick's knee. He swung quickly around toward her, and scraped his feet over the floor below her skirts.
Then came a quick, furious snapping, like the noise of a miniature fusillade. A score of the matches had been ignited by Nick's swift move.
Almost instantly a shriek of terror broke from Cervera's lips, and she reeled back, clutching wildly at her skirts.
"My God! I'm on fire!—on fire!" she screamed, with a voice so intense in its agony as to have chilled a man of stone.
A roar came from Nick as he sighted the flames under her gown.
"Release me! Release me!" he thundered, furiously, with a voice that drowned her frightful screams. "Cut me loose—loose! It's your only hope—your only hope!"
She heard him like one in a nightmare of agony and terror, and her instinct rather than her reason responded to his thundering commands.
Still with the poniard in her jeweled hand, still shrieking wildly, she leaped to his side, and with a single sweep of the keen weapon severed the rope binding his arms.
Then Nick snatched the poniard from her hand. With several swift cuts and slashes he released his limbs, and sprang quickly to his feet.
He had already shaped his course. He had observed on the sulphur barrels, near the wall, a strip of matting, used as a cover for them. Nick snatched it from the barrels, and rushed to wrap it around the skirts and limbs of the terror-stricken woman.
For several moments the result seemed doubtful, so doubtful that Nick finally threw Cervera heavily to the floor, the better to press the matting closely around her and so smother the flames. In this he presently succeeded, but not before she was so severely burned as to be rendered utterly helpless.
When Nick arose to his feet Cervera remained lying prostrate on the floor, moaning with pain, yet in a state of semi-consciousness only. A glance told Nick that she could make no move to escape, and he now had other work than that of looking to her comfort.
He ran to the stone door, threw the bolts, and quickly dragged it open.
Even as he did so, from out of the gloom of the adjoining cellar, a man came into view, as if suddenly arisen from the ground.
The man was Dave Kilgore.
"Carter!"
"Kilgore!"
Each man uttered the name of the other, as if with the same breath. The meeting came so suddenly that, for the bare fraction of a second, both men were nonplused.
Then both whipped out a weapon.
Crack!
Bang!
They fired together, and both missed, Nick's usually accurate aim being spoiled by the gloom of the cellar.
Kilgore instantly sprang further away in the darkness, and aimed again.
The hammer of his weapon fell as usual, but there was no report. In his recent fight at the Venner house he had emptied both of his revolvers, save the one bullet that had just missed Nick Carter.
Then Kilgore, failing to have found Nick at his mercy, thought only of making his own escape. He turned and ran toward the open door by which he had entered.
At that moment Chick's ringing voice sounded from outside.
"This way! this way, Patsy!" he cried, louder than the rolling thunder overhead. "I've found the rat hole!"
"I'm with you," yelled Patsy.
They were already at the door.
By the frequent flashes of lightning they had, after the fight at Venner's, succeeded in following Kilgore across the meadows, and they well knew that he was headed to get even with Nick.
Now Nick's voice rang through the cellar.
"Look out for him, Chick," he commanded. "He's coming that way. Look out for his gun."
"Hurrah!" roared Chick, the moment he heard Nick's voice. "Let him come, gun and all!"
Kilgore saw his flight cut off in that direction, but he knew every inch of the house. He turned like a rat in the darkness, and made for the stairs leading to the floor above. Up these he hurriedly scrambled.
Nick heard him through the gloom, and followed him, pitching headlong at the foot of the stairs just as Kilgore opened the door leading to the hall above.
There the dim rays from a hall lamp revealed the man for an instant, and showed Nick the way. He was up again and after Kilgore like a hound after a fox.
Kilgore dashed through the hall, but dared not take time to unlock and open the front door of the house. He had a profound respect for the revolver in the hand of his pursuer, who already had reached the hall.
It was a flight for life, and Kilgore knew it.
He turned like a flash and darted up the stairs, making for the second floor. Three at a stride he covered, and succeeded in reaching the corridor above before Nick could get a line on him.
Nick followed, gun in hand.
On the second floor Kilgore darted into a dark chamber, and then through that to one adjoining it, where he waited till he heard Nick plunging into the one first mentioned.
Then Kilgore slipped out into the hall again, hoping to retrace his steps downstairs and escape by the front door.
In the way of that, however, Chick and Patsy were now in the lower hall, the former shouting lustily up the stairs:
"Run him down, Nick! Run him down! We'll cover this way of escape!"
An involuntary oath broke from Kilgore's lips, and at the same moment a vivid flash of lightning from the inky heavens illumined all the house.
From the chamber in which he stood, Nick again caught sight of his man, and was after him in an instant.
Kilgore heard him coming, and again fled through the hall and up another flight of stairs.
"You'd better throw up your hands," roared Nick, as he followed.
The answer came back with a yell of defiance:
"Not on your life!"
"You're a lost dog," cried Nick, hoping to keep him replying.
"You'll not get me alive!"
"Then I'll get you dead!" cried Nick, as he mounted the stairs.
"You haven't got me yet!"
"Next door to it, my man."
This brought no answer.
In a moment Nick reached the second hall, where he briefly paused to listen. Save the rain beating on the roof of the house, only one sound reached his strained ears. It was like that of some one hammering against the side of the house with some heavy object. For a moment the detective was puzzled. He could not fathom the meaning of such a sound.
Then a gust of damp night air rushed through the hall and swept Nick's cheek.
"Ah! an open window!" he muttered. "That's easily located."
He groped his way into one of the rear chambers. There the night air was sweeping in through an open window, to the sill of which Nick quickly sprang.
Now the noise he had heard was instantly explained.
Cornered like a rat, yet viciously resolute to the last, Kilgore had, in order to make his escape, resorted to a means from which a less cool and nervy scoundrel would have shrunk on such a night as that.
He had, by reaching far out of the window, been able to grasp an old-fashioned lightning rod with which the ancient wooden mansion was provided, and by which he proposed to descend to the ground. Under the swindler's weight, the beating of this swaying rod against the side of the house was the sound Nick had heard.
Kilgore, whose courage was worthy a far better cause, already was halfway to the ground.
Yet Nick had no idea of letting the knave escape thus, and he raised his weapon to fire.
There was no need for a bullet, however, for the hand of the Almighty did the work.
From the black vault of the heavens a bolt of liquid fire suddenly shot earthward, with a crash of thunder that seemed to rend the entire firmament.
The fiery bolt reached the earth—but it reached it through the rod to which Dave Kilgore was desperately clinging.
Not a sound came from the doomed man as he went down—or if there was a sound, it was drowned by the deafening crash and successive reverberations of thunder.
Before Nick had fairly recovered from the blinding light and terrific concussion, he heard the voice of Chick yelling loudly from below:
"Nick, Nick, come down here! The house is afire. The whole house is afire!"
Nick heard and darted for the stairs, at once realizing how well the lightning had done its terrific work. Before he could reach the lower hall, dense volumes of smoke were pouring through the house, and one entire side of the fated dwelling was in flames.
Nick thought of the woman in the cellar below, and, with Chick and Patsy at his heels, he led the way to the diamond plant. The electric light had been extinguished by the lightning stroke, but Nick soon located the body of Cervera, and together the detectives brought her out and laid her upon the ground some rods away from the burning dwelling.
"She's done for, poor wretch!" muttered Nick, as he looked at her bloodless face.
He was right.
Señora Cervera had danced her last dance—a terrible one it was! She had lapsed into a merciful unconsciousness, from which she never emerged.
Next came Kilgore, and they easily found him. He lay stretched upon the ground, dead and scorched almost beyond recognition, at the base of the metallic rod through which he had met his fate.
"Lend a hand here," said Nick. "We'll place him with his confederate until we can have them properly removed."
"So be it," said Chick, gravely. "It's about the last we can do for them, and this nearly ends our work on this job."
"You've got the others?"
"Every man of them."
"Well done!" nodded Nick, as they raised the lifeless form between them. "Behold the way of the transgressor."
"Hark!" exclaimed Patsy. "There goes the fire alarm. In three minutes there'll be a mob about here."
"Much good the firemen will do," rejoined Nick. "That house is doomed, and all that's in it."
He was right. With the passing of the tempest, and the first sign of a star in the eastern sky, all that remained of the house above the diamond plant was a heap of red, smoldering embers, filling the cellar and the secret chamber—and blotting out, though perhaps not forever, the secret art of that misguided genius, Jean Pylotte, dead with a bullet in his brain, on the floor of Rufus Venner's hall.
There remains but little to complete the record of this strange and stirring case.
Before morning Nick had lodged Venner and Spotty Dalton in the Tombs, and had Garside arrested at his residence. The lifeless bodies of their three confederates,—Cervera having died at dawn—were taken to the Morgue.
Early the following day, Harry Boyden, the young man arrested for the murder of Mary Barton, was discharged from custody, and hastened to the home of Violet Page, to make her happy with the news of his release and his story of Nick Carter's extraordinary work. Both called upon Nick a day or two later, and expressed their gratitude and affection in terms which here need no recital. Incidentally it may be added that they were married, as planned, the following summer.
How strangely the circumstances and experiences of life are knit and bound together. But for the vicious crime of a jealous woman, Nick might have labored long, and possibly vainly, to run down the Kilgore gang and their extraordinary criminal project, in which Cervera so strongly figured. It was as Nick said, the two crimes seemed bound together as if with links of steel.
In the trial which preceded the conviction and punishment of the three living members of the gang, Nick learned all of the facts of the case.
Venner & Co., it appeared, were on their last legs, and went into the game to square themselves, the design being to market vast quantities of the artificial diamonds. With this project in view, Venner had purchased the house at the rear of his own, under the name of Dr. Magruder, and there had established the plant. How well the scheme would have succeeded, but for Nick Carter, will never be known.
At all events, in the stock of Venner & Co. were found numerous stones which only the most proficient experts could prove to be artificial; and even to this day it is intimated that, among the bejeweled women of New York there are some unconsciously wearing the manufactured diamonds of Jean Pylotte. What matters, however, since where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise?
Jean Pylotte: His art died with him, alas! For in the ruins of the diamond plant there could be found no evidence sufficient to reveal his great secret.
Surely it had opened the way to a great swindle, the possibilities of which can hardly be conceived. But, fortunately, in the way of it had come—
Nick Carter.
Nick Carter stands for an interesting detective story. The fact that the books in this line are so uniformly good is entirely due to the work of a specialist. The man who wrote these stories produced no other type of fiction. His mind was concentrated upon the creation of new plots and situations in which his hero emerged triumphantly from all sorts of trouble, and landed the criminal just where he should be—behind the bars.
The author of these stories knew more about writing detective stories than any other single person.
Following is a list of the best Nick Carter stories. They have been selected with extreme care, and we unhesitatingly recommend each of them as being fully as interesting as any detective story between cloth covers which sells at ten times the price.
If you do not know Nick Carter, buy a copy of any of the New Magnet Library books, and get acquainted. He will surprise and delight you.