There was a round table in the center of it, and four chairs at the table; but that was not what attracted the immediate attention of the detective so much as the very evident fact that only a very short time had elapsed since some person or persons had been seated there.
The place still smelled of tobacco smoke from handmade cigarettes, indicating that Red Mike had at least been one of those persons. A single black kid glove on the floor near one of the chairs suggested that Madge had also been one of those who were present.
The fact that two incandescent lights were burning directly over the table suggested that the occupants had departed in haste.
The detective—Patsy and Thomas had both followed him—looked around him with closer attention.
He had at once reached the conclusion that Red Mike and Madge, with Lynne, had stopped in this wine cellar to wait there for a more propitious opportunity for leaving the house—doubtless with the idea of waiting there until night, so that they might escape from the neighborhood with little or no danger of being observed.
He assumed that after taking Lynne to the wine cellar Mike had returned to the space behind the portrait and had waited there, listening to all that had happened in the room from which they had taken their prisoner, and that he had heard enough to make him understand that Nick Carter suspected the presence of a secret entrance to that room.
Thus forewarned, Red Mike had doubtless hastened down the spiral staircase and given the alarm, which would account for the evidence of hasty departure.
But, of a surety, Lynne had been detained in that cellar long enough to have recovered from the effects of that first administering of the chloroform.
Nick Carter had known Lynne only a comparatively short time, but he had found the heir to the Lynne millions to be a cool, self-centered, well-poised man, one of the kind who, trained to life in the great West, never lost his head under any circumstances.
Such being the case, Lynne would, if there happened a possible opportunity, leave some indication or sign of his presence, wherever he might stop.