“Something that instantly caused a condition resembling death, but from which he revived later?”
“Such tricks have been turned.”
“But——”
“There is nothing in speculation,” Nick again interposed. “We’ll defer breakfast until we have looked into the matter. There may be evidence that will definitely settle it.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“You had better both go with me,” Nick added. “If the body has, indeed, been stolen, we must find a way to trace it and make absolutely sure that there was no monkey business in the death of Andy Margate. I shall not rest easy while any doubts exist concerning the fate of that designing rascal.”
It then was eight o’clock, precisely ten hours since Nick Carter and his assistants had rounded up Margate and his three confederates for the murder of Father Cleary, a Roman Catholic priest, and the abduction of Lottie Trent, the girl employed in the war department who had confided to the priest the details of a plot to blackmail Harold Garland, an engineer in the same department, as well as the father of his fiancée, Senator Barclay, both of whom had previously been seriously involved in the theft of secret fortification plans by Margate and a gang of foreign spies, all of whom had been run down by the three detectives.
Cornered by Nick and his assistants the previous night, one of the crooks had been fatally wounded, two of them arrested, and their ringleader, Margate, had committed[{5}] suicide by swallowing poison from a vial seized from his pocket.
There had appeared to be no reasonable doubt of it. The district medical examiner who viewed the body pronounced the man dead, and ordered the removal of the corpse to the rooms of an undertaker until morning, it then being too late to have it placed in the city morgue, pending the necessary legal steps in such cases.
Thus it occurred that the corpse of Andy Margate, or the supposed corpse, if Nick Carter’s present misgivings were warranted, rested that night in the back room of Herman Fink’s undertaking establishment, to which Nick and his assistants repaired as quickly as possible after the astounding telephone communication from Captain Hadley that morning.