“I do not know anything about that,” returned Jai Singh. “Only once have I been carried along by the smoke and fire, and that was with you. It has been the custom of my fathers to go where they would in their boat. I did the same as they,” returned Jai Singh simply. “But I will go in the train with you.”
“All right! There is no time to lose.”
Nick Carter turned to Captain Southern.
“Can you run right in to the wharf without trouble, captain?”
“Yes. I only waited to see what those fellows in the boat were after. Calcutta is a white man’s city—not the sort of place where lawlessness is likely to be found. But you never know. Not so many scores of miles in the back country the people are as wild as those in Calcutta are quiet and commonplace.”
“That’s true,” agreed Jefferson Arnold. “Every time I come to India I am struck by the fact that it is a land of amazing contrasts. It never could surprise me to meet a tiger walking along the streets, arm in arm with a cobra de capello, right there in Calcutta. It isn’t New York by a long chalk. Yet you will find white women, in European clothing, shopping in that city, over there, just as you will in Thirty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue.”
Jai Singh was instructed to get his boat, as well as the crew, on board the ship, and the captain immediately gave orders to steam up to the regular wharf belonging to Jefferson Arnold.
Nick Carter got Jai Singh in a retired place on deck, and the two talked earnestly for nearly half an hour. At the end of that time the great detective had a plan of action laid out which he followed as soon as the Marathon was warped up to her regular landing place.
Telling Chick and Patsy to keep somewhere near the wharf, so that they could be found when he returned, Nick Carter strolled off with Jefferson Arnold and Jai Singh to the office of the Arnold corporation on one of the several business streets of the ancient city.
There were white and Indian employees about the place. But in the office was only one young man, an American, who had been brought up in his native city, New York, until he had taken the position of assistant manager in the Calcutta branch of the importing and steamship house of the Arnold Company, a year before.