“It was the work of the same gang, but other members of it than you saw at the road house,” Carter added. “Their chief, or the director of these various steps, is certainly an infernally keen and farsighted knave. He not only discovered my identity and presence in Madison, but also has contrived to anticipate and balk my every important move. But I’ll finally get him and every mother’s son of them. We’ll not rest until we have run down the entire gang and——Ah, by Jove, that was Chick’s voice.”
They had been briefly talking in the bedroom, from which both hastened upon hearing the familiar voice, and they found Chick propped up against a chair, with his eyes open. He was responding rapidly to the stimulants given him, and he soon was able to clearly describe his encounter with the masked man.
Not until the following morning, however, being averse to discussing his suspicions in the presence of Vernon and the physician, and knowing that no further steps could be taken that night, did Carter express his views on the subject. He then was at breakfast with Patsy and Chick, the latter having entirely recovered from the effects of the drug.
“Your sudden collapse, Chick, and the sensations preceding it admit of only one explanation,” said Carter. “Your assailant was provided with a powerful storage battery, so ingeniously contrived and carried on his person that he could impart an overwhelming shock to an antagonist without incurring danger from the electric current.”
“That’s how I size it up,” Chick agreed. “The sensations were very convincing.”
“It could be accomplished with an ingenious arrangement of wires,” Carter added. “Having knocked you out, so to speak, and knowing you soon would throw off the effects of the brief shock, he immediately drugged you with a hypodermic injection, and then proceeded to deliberately do what I had sent you there to accomplish.”
“He got the best of me, all right,” Chick admitted.
“All this is very significant, however,” Carter said more earnestly. “The ingenuity displayed, this use of electricity, of drugs, of strange poisonous gas, with a knowledge how it can be administered so as to mysteriously cause death, as in Todd’s case, together with the similar circumstances in the remarkable robberies committed here, also in the cases of the four girls found unconscious in the hospital grounds—all evince a profound knowledge of such things, that of the one man by whom all of these crimes were devised and directed.”
“I agree with you,” Chick nodded, laying aside his napkin. “Only one man would probably be so well informed and knavishly original.”
“He is either a criminal genius or a madman whose perverted mind has turned to crime for profit and excitement. That man must be found, though we turn heaven and earth to discover his identity.”