“I feel quite well,” suddenly interposed the man in the bed. “I can travel easily, Mr. Carter. Make the doctor understand that.”
“Very well, Mr. Marcos,” answered Nick Carter, as he held up a hand of warning to the patient not to talk. “I think the doctor does understand our position.”
“I understand that if you let this Mr. Marcos get up to-day, or this week, or next, I will not be responsible for his life,” interrupted Doctor Sloane. “His temperature is nearly a hundred and rising, and he is too weak to talk, to say nothing of his getting up.”
There could be no doubt that the surgeon spoke the truth. Prince Marcos, ruler of Joyalita, the Caribbean principality, was in bad physical condition.
He had been preparing to go home, to take part in an important gathering of the officers of his government, when somebody had fired a shot at him from ambush as he strolled in the grounds of his temporary home, Crownledge, on the Hudson River, and had brought him down.
If there had been anybody with Prince Marcos when his hidden enemy tried to kill him, the miscreant might have been captured. But the prince was alone. Naturally, nothing could be found of the would-be assassin when the grounds were searched, for it was then half an hour after the shooting, and Marcos was in bed.
Phillips, his valet, had heard the shot, and knowing that the prince’s cousin, Prince Miguel, with Don Solado, prime minister of Joyalita, had made attempts on his life before, in New York, he had suspected these men again.
Nicholas Carter, the famous detective, had been telephoned for. He had come racing up in his high-powered motor car soon after the eminent surgeon—with the aid of one of much less note, as well as a trained nurse—had extracted the bullet.
Doctor Sloane had just given his decision now that the patient must stay in bed for two weeks at least—perhaps much longer.
To the surgeon’s disgust, the patient insisted that he must get up at once. He had to take a long journey into Central America, he said.