“Hanged if I see how, unless we give him a dose of solitary confinement, in a dark cell, and have the men blindfold themselves when they poke his food in through the grating.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Nick assured the warden as he prepared to leave. “We can get around it easier than that.”
Half an hour later Nick was on his way back to New York City.
He was not as light-hearted or confident as he had allowed Warden Kennedy to suppose, however.
The fact that Grantley had turned to that mysterious and terrifying agency, hypnotism, with all of its many evil possibilities, caused him profound disquiet.
Already the fugitive had used his mastery of the uncanny force in two widely different ways. He had escaped from prison with startling ease by means of it, and then, not content with that, he had hypnotized a famous actress in the midst of one of her greatest triumphs—for Nick had known all along that Helga Lund had yielded to hypnotic influence.
If the escaped convict kept on in the way he had begun, there was no means of foretelling the character or extent of his future crimes, in case he was not speedily brought to bay.
CHAPTER V.
THE TRAIL VANISHES.
Grantley’s trail vanished into thin air—or seemed to—very quickly.
Nick Carter and his assistants had comparatively little trouble in finding the hotel which the fugitive had patronized the night before, but their success amounted to little.