“Trust me for that, chief,” said Patsy, hastening to make ready.
“In the meantime, Chick, you begin an espionage on the Esterveldt place,” Nick directed. “I suspect that Margate knows of Dillon’s intimacy with them, and if he knows the occasion of it, he may attempt to covertly communicate with them. The Baron Esterveldt undoubtedly is the big finger in the service of the foreign power guilty of this conspiracy. He is the one who is providing the money, a fact that Margate may have discovered.”
“I agree with you,” said Chick. “That would be the natural quarter for the rascal to turn. I’ll have an eye on the place within half an hour.”
“Very good.”
“What are your own plans?”
“I’m going after Captain Casper Dillon,” said Nick, with ominous intonation. “I have opened the way to that, also. I propose to clinch my suspicions without further delay. I want that miscreant traitor at the outset, and I’m going to get him.”
“That’s the stuff, chief,” cried Patsy. “He ought to be nailed right off the reel.”
“He’ll be nailed, Patsy, all right,” Nick grimly answered.[{28}]
There was the usual gathering of spectators in the municipal court that morning. Some persons have a morbid interest in watching the wheels of justice revolve, in viewing culprits vainly squirming to slip through the meshes of the legal net, and to witness their condemnation to righteous punishment.
Among them that morning was a sinister-looking fellow in a baggy brown suit and woolen shirt, who would really have looked more in place in the prisoner’s dock than in one of the chairs allotted to spectators.