“I have it! They took me down the river a little. Then they crossed. The choppy waves are at the sides of the river, and the long ones in the middle. That’s how I know they took me across. Yes, by George! There’s another thing! We got in the way of a ferryboat and might have been run down. I’d forgotten that.”
How Chick became aware of that incident, with a bag tied over his head and shoulders, lying in the bottom of the boat, can be logically explained.
He had heard the screeching of the ferryboat’s siren, responded to by the toot of the power boat. Then there had been a great deal of hoarse language—profane, probably—followed by a jolting of the motor boat as it was swung around so sharply that it might have upset, followed by comparative quiet and the steady coughing of the motor as they went along.
“If we hadn’t been in the middle of the river we should not have been likely to get in the way of a ferry,” was the way Chick figured it out. “Well, that means that we came over to Hoboken, or somewhere along the Jersey side of the river, where a small boat could land. Of course! I get it now! It’s all an open book!”
He slapped one hand on his knee and actually grinned. He was in a bad fix, and he knew it. But the thought that he had unraveled a problem, perhaps as well as it could have been done by Nick Carter himself, gave him such satisfaction that, for the moment, he cared for nothing else.
“I was yanked out of the boat and put in a motor car,” he continued half audibly. “Very well! Before I got into the automobile I had to climb up a hill. That makes it all the more binding. I know the roads at the top of the hill, and I would bet a hundred dollars that I’m in the Hackensack meadows somewhere.”
A few minutes more of cogitation, and Chick had decided in what part of the meadows he was.
“I know a big ice house about halfway between Hoboken and Carlstadt,” he muttered. “It’s out in the marshes, but you can see it from the road. Of course! That’s it! I was taken in a boat from the motor car. They rowed me along some of the creeks between the grass swamps, maybe through some of them. Anyhow, I can guess where I am. Now, let me see about getting out.”
Chick uttered this last sentence with perfect coolness and confidence. He had no fear of being kept a prisoner for long, especially with his hands and feet free.
That Prince Marcos had been kidnapped at the same time as himself he had no idea.