He thought of the wireless telephone he had seen used by the baroness from the window of her room, and though he had not been convinced that she had any deeper purpose than to amuse herself—as a wealthy young woman of lively fancy might conceivably do in this manner—he remembered the yacht at anchor out in the bay, and wondered whether or not the baroness was signaling to that vessel.
He had never noticed anybody coming from the yacht to the hotel. But that did not carry any significance. There were many handsome homes along the coast in this vicinity, and the yacht might be owned by any one of the dozen or so of millionaires who were accustomed to spend part of their summer in Delaware.
That he was suspicious of the baroness was natural to a man of his quick, deductive mind. The discovery of the burned match in Mrs. van Dietrich’s room would have been sufficient to make him so, after he had satisfied himself that the baroness used the same kind of thick wax matches.
Another touch of evidence in connection with the matches was that he had found a scrap of gilt and colored paper on the floor of Mrs. van Dietrich’s bedroom—part of a label which he found had come from the original box containing them.
In the restaurant he had caught a glimpse of nearly the whole label in the baroness’ chatelaine bag when she had taken out her cigarette box. The paper had been pulled out accidentally, and pushed back again.
Nick decided that, as the design was unusual, as well as artistic, the baroness was keeping it as a curiosity.
The label was not all there. The part missing would have fitted in with the scrap Nick had in his pocket.
Going further in his speculations, Nick recalled that, although Mrs. van Dietrich had disappeared in the night, when it would be comparatively easy to get her out of the hotel unobserved and take her to any desired place at a distance, Harvey L. Drago had been spirited away in broad daylight.
The only theory Nick could apply to Drago’s disappearance was that he was somewhere near the hotel, and would not be taken away to his final destination till nightfall.
Acting on this hypothesis, the detective, with the head[Pg 26] porter, were out now, at night, looking for the abductors of Mr. Drago, in the expectation that when they got a clew to the one case, they would find it leading them to the other.