“I ought to,” smiled Patsy. “I was tutored by the best in the business.”
“I guess not,” said the motorman incredulously. “There’s only one best—Nick Carter.”
“So I have heard.”
“Now’s your chance. So long, and good luck.”
Patsy slipped through the folding door and sprang down in the road, then darted to the shelter of a wall, while the trolley car again sped on and presently crossed the diverging road and approached the settlement beyond it.
A hundred yards to the right the lights of the road house could be seen through the trees, also the brighter glare from the motor car, then slowly approaching it.
Patsy leaped over the wall; then hurried across a strip of meadowland, quickly reaching a point from which, sheltered by some shrubbery, he could plainly see the broad driveway and front veranda of the old and somewhat weather-beaten house.
The automobile had stopped near the rise of steps. The chauffeur was springing down to open the door. Patsy could see him distinctly in the light from the deserted veranda.
“This bald-headed doctor may have legitimate business out here,” he muttered, frowning grimly at the mere thought of it and the possibility that his own desperate efforts might prove futile. “If the chief’s suspicions have feet to stand on, however, it’s a thousand to one that Doctor Devoll’s mission is a very different and probably a very lawless one. It’s up to me to clinch it and find out just what’s doing. If he’s here to confer with others, or frame up a job, I’ll find some way to overhear him——Thundering guns! Am I in wrong, in dead wrong, after all?”
Patsy felt a chill of disappointment and his heart sank like lead. The door of the motor car had been opened. The solitary occupant, and Patsy could plainly see there was no other, was stepping down upon the driveway. He was an elderly man with gray hair and beard, with a compact, apparently muscular figure, clad in a plaid woolen suit and soft felt hat—utterly unlike the long frock coat and tall black hat of the suspected physician.