"Now, what's the first thing to be done, my dear chap?" asked De Royster, as Roy loosed the lasso from the bed and coiled it up.
"Arrange to get my stuff away from here. I reckon, and back to my hotel. Then I want to hear how you traced me."
"I'll tell you. But I agree with you that we had better leave this place. Let's go down to the street and engage an expressman."
They found one who agreed to take Roy's baggage back to the hotel. After seeing it safely in the wagon, during which time a few of the tenants in the house looked on curiously, but said nothing, the two friends started for the hotel, where Roy had been stopping.
"As soon as I called at your hotel that night, and found you had been taken away, sick, by a man who had only recently come to the place, I suspected something was wrong," explained Mr. De Royster, on the way. "The clerk told me about you going away in a cab, and gave me a fairly good description of the driver, whom he had a glimpse of. It was a cab seldom seen in this part of the city.
"I knew my best plan, don't you know, would be to find that driver, and learn where he had taken you and your baggage. My idea was that some sharpers had gotten you into their power to rob you. I never suspected there was such a deep plot."
"Neither did I," replied Roy, "and I don't believe we have seen the last of it."
"Well," went on De Royster, "I had quite a time tracing that cabman. I must have interviewed nearly fifty drivers before I found one who knew a fellow that answered the description of the one who had taken you away. But at last I located him, and, though he was reluctant at first, to tell me what I wanted to know, he did, after I threatened to call in the police."
"Would you have done so?"
"Certainly. I felt that you were in danger, for you know little of New York."