All this paled to utter insignificance, however, in view of Patsy Garvan’s overwhelming amazement when his gaze fell upon the third person in the room. He was utterly nonplused. He could, as he afterward said, have been knocked toes up with a feather.
There was no mistaking the man, no possibility of error. The error had been made more than twelve months before.
The man was Garside—and not Garside.
His neatly plastered hair was lying on the table, also his flowing mustache and carefully trimmed beard—as artistic and effective a disguise as ever adorned the face of a stage star, or blinded the searching scrutiny of a detective to the sinister features of a crook.
He was seated directly opposite the couple described. He evidently had removed his disguise because of the heat in the room. With his thin, clean-cut features and his own close-cut hair, a more pronounced change could scarce be imagined.
For this man now had become, and in reality was—a veritable personal counterfeit of the man for whom he had been acting as a private secretary for more than three months, and in whose home he had been dwelling unsuspected—a living likeness of Chester Clayton himself.
One glance convinced Patsy Garvan of his identity, though it was like seeing a ghost, the dead alive—the man who was supposed to have been killed by a bullet from Chick Carter’s revolver, or to have been drowned in the swirling current of a stream in the Berkshire Hills.
This was the man who twice had conspired against Chester Clayton, who twice had been thwarted by Nick Carter and his assistants, the man whose true history and twin kinship with Clayton was known only by Nick and the mother then lying bereft of memory and speech in the banker’s mansion.
“Great guns!” gasped Patsy, staggered beyond description. “Have my lamps gone wrong? Is my bean twisted? That’s Chester Clayton’s double, Dave Margate, alive, too, as sure as I’m a foot high. He wasn’t drowned, then, as we supposed, nor did Chick’s bullet kill him. But it hit him, all right, and left its mark. Gee whiz! that’s what Madame Clayton meant by those two words—the[Pg 24] scar! the scar! Holy smoke! this sure sheds new light on the case.”
It was plainly visible, in the bright light that fell upon his head—a scar running like a clean-cut white mark through his dark hair, and extending nearly over the top of his head.