Nick glanced at his assistant with a tired smile.
“Their name is Silvius. The father is Roscoe Silvius, and his daughter is known as Bessie. I suppose her full name is Elizabeth. But ‘Bessie’ will do for our purpose. We’ll go down to the restaurant and see if they will give us a cup of coffee and a sandwich. Then we can stroll over to the garden, where the vaudeville show is. That was a long, tiresome ride on the stage, and I dare say you are as hungry as I am.”
“I don’t know just how hungry you are,” returned Chick. “But I know I am about starved. I could eat the china handle off a door.”
The two detectives had, in fact, been in the Savoy Hotel only half an hour. They had arrived on the stage from the terminus of the little railroad that ran out of Edmonton, in Alberta, in company with a party of three tourists, and had passed as such themselves. There was nothing distinctive about their appearance to tell the world what their profession was.
They had come direct to the room to which they had been assigned, and, having had a wash and brush up, were ready for the meal that was always furnished for the stage passengers in the evening.
Nick Carter opened the door to go downstairs, but quickly stepped back. He left the door open wide enough to enable him to peer through the crack, and held up his hand to Chick to keep silent.
For about two minutes Carter stood still looking out. The room behind him was dark, and so was the hall. But there was light in the hallways below, and it chanced to shine feebly on the face of a man who was fumbling at a door lock about a dozen yards from where the detective watched.
“It’s our man, Chick,” whispered the chief. “He’s getting into that room with a picklock. We are sure of him now, and I guess we’ll see what he’s after in that room. We can take him back to New York to answer to that counterfeiting charge, and the other things against him. But I should like to know what game he has here.”
“It was lucky that both Milmarsh and Lampton came to this place. We can kill two birds with one stone. It isn’t often things break as well as that.”
“They didn’t ‘break’ particularly,” whispered back Nick. “I knew Lampton would be likely to be here, and I had definite information before we left New York that Howard Milmarsh was working as a lumberman near Maple, in Alberta. It is all perfectly simple.”