“Considering they have me locked in, I don’t see that they can expect me to open the door to see who is there,” he said to himself, with a smile. Then, aloud, he called: “Come in!”
There was the faint grating of a lock, and the door opened. It was Don Solado who entered.
“Well, Marcos! I thought I’d come in and see how you are after your swim in the river,” began Solado.
“Hadn’t you better lock the door?” suggested Nick, with a mocking smile. “You shouldn’t tempt me.”
“There’s no fear of your getting away, if that’s what you mean,” was the comfortable rejoinder. “You wouldn’t want to swim again, I’m sure, and you couldn’t leave us even that way, for we have men watching the whole deck.”
“Yet, to get to Joyalita by the eighteenth is so important to me, that I don’t know that I should hesitate to swim if it would get me there by that time.”
“Why do you want to get to Joyalita by the eighteenth?” suddenly demanded Solado, in a different tone, as he leaned forward to look closely into the detective’s face. “What is Joyalita to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?” broke out Don Solado, so savagely that his tone became almost a shriek. “What do I mean? Why, I mean that you are a fraud!”
“A fraud?” asked Nick Carter composedly. “In what way am I one?”