“I know all about that,” said Nick.
“All the better if you do. The father of the young lady is a multi-millionaire. There is a brother, also, who is what the boys call a smart fool. You know what that means. He is money blind. He has abilities and won’t use them. He is smart, but too lazy to use his head. Gritty, but too easy to fight. A good fellow, but too much taken up with killing time to do anything else. A young chap, I imagine, who hasn’t been woke up yet, so to speak—a sort of an electric motor without any current to speak of.”
Nick laughed aloud.
“That is a first-class description of a person whom you never saw,” he said.
“Well, it is the impression I received from what I heard about him. That boy—he’s about twenty-four, I think—is very much in the way of Paul Rogers, and Paul Rogers proposes to put him out of it. The old man is still more so, and Paul Rogers has sworn away his life. The old lady—the mother—is a sort of supernumerary, but when the time comes she is billed to shuffle off in some way or other—I don’t know what.”
“And the young lady?” asked Nick.
“I was getting down to her. I couldn’t find out much about the plot against her, save that the woman Isabel is to take her place, somehow and somewhere, and the thing is to be done so slick that nobody will suspect that it is done.”
“Do you mean that you do not know the particulars, or that you are keeping them back?”
“I mean that I don’t know them, only to the extent that if you don’t keep a mighty close watch over her she will disappear off the face of the earth in such a way that you won’t have any idea that she is gone until it is too late to help her; and that because you are the only factor in the plan which can interfere with their success, you are to be gotten rid of in the most approved fashion—and that, Mr. Carter, is what I came here to tell you about. Paul Rogers was set free this afternoon, and I happen to know that there is a bet on, with the odds against you, that you will be a dead one inside of forty-eight hours after he is at liberty.”
“In that case, Morgan,” said Nick coolly, “you won’t mind answering me a few questions, will you?”