For a moment the detective remained where he was, thinking over what had happened, and endeavoring to account for it as best he could, and then he walked slowly away, going directly to the street.
He looked at his watch as he passed outside, and it told him that the hour was half-past ten o’clock—and then an idea occurred to him which, because of the very boldness and strangeness of it, he determined on the impulse to carry out at once.
He glanced at his watch again, to make sure of the time, and saw that it was ten-thirty-two.
“They will not leave the opera house for another three-quarters of an hour, at least,� was the thought that went through his mind. “After that they will all go to Sherry’s, or Delmonico’s, or Louis Martin’s, for supper. Good! It will be one or two o’clock before she can return to her apartment. I’ll do it.�
The layman who reads these words will regard the thing that he so impulsively decided to do as unprecedented—and even a harsher term may be applied to it.
But, if there are those who would criticize the detective for what he had decided to do, and did do, remember that Nick Carter was certain of the real guilt of the woman in the matter of the murder of Edythe Lynne, and remember, also, that he was thoroughly convinced in his own mind that the man who was now in possession of the Lynne millions was an impostor.
Nick Carter was never one to quibble about trivial things, or to hesitate to perform an act because others might criticize it, if he regarded it as his duty.
And in this matter of the inheritance of the vast property left by J. Cephas Lynne he believed he had a bounden duty to perform.
He could never forget the moment when he had discovered the dead body of the beautiful heiress, at Pleasantglades.
She had been ruthlessly and wantonly cut off in the very prime of her young womanhood, in order that a scoundrelly cousin of her father’s, and this unsexed woman back there in the opera house, now smiling and talking and laughing, might possess themselves of the fortune.