It was empty, and the heaps of moldy sawdust that he had observed the first time were still undisturbed, showing that nobody had been moving about since he had left the place.
“Ah!” he muttered. “There’s the trapdoor in the corner. We’ll go down there.”
He pointed his flash at the corner, and Patsy understood, even though he had not caught Nick’s whispered observations.
Once in the room below, Nick Carter was able to look down the staircase with the broken banister into the office he had been surveying when he had his unfortunate tumble.
“They are not here,” he remarked, in a low tone, to Patsy. “There is some other office close by. I feel sure. Come on!”
Once in the office where Nick, from the staircase above, had heard the plotting of Solado and Miguel, he became very busy, searching every corner and looking behind two other desks he found in the room. He wanted to make sure no one else was there.
Nick Carter knew the cunning of Solado as well as the vindictiveness of Miguel, and it would not have surprised him had there been a sudden attack from ambush.
Even if they had killed him, and it had been brought home to them afterward, they could plead self-defense, setting up the argument that even a detective had no right to break into a warehouse that did not belong to him.
Besides, they would say, naturally, that they did not know he was a detective.
“But I’ll beat their game, or know the reason why,” he muttered.