Nick glanced through three of the letters hurriedly, one after another.
“From lumbermen and miners, addressed to different places. Howard has traveled about considerably in the past two years, poor fellow! The significance of these letters is not in the letters themselves, for they are not important. But the way they are tossed about shows that Andrew Lampton knew there were some papers in this trunk worth taking—or he believed there were. I don’t like Lampton being mixed up in Milmarsh’s affairs at all—that is, unless we capture the blackguard. Then it won’t matter.”
“Well, we will capture him,” declared Chick, with sublime confidence in the infallibility of his chief. “We’ll have them both long before we are ready to go to bed.”
But he was mistaken. They searched every part of the grounds of the Savoy Hotel, and hunted all over Maple. But not a vestige could they find either of Andrew Lampton or Howard Milmarsh! They had got clean away!
In the end, the chief and Chick had to leave Maple without their men.
It was a mystery, but Nick only smiled when his assistant said that to him.
Solving mysteries of this kind—and even much harder ones—was the life amusement of Nick Carter.