Excerpt.....“There goes another, chief. That makes five so far. There surely is something going on to-night,” the young man at the window declared excitedly.

It was Patsy Garvan, Nick Carter’s second assistant, and he who was addressed was the great New York detective himself.

The closest friends would have known neither of them, however, unless they had been in the secret, for both were cleverly disguised.

Moreover, the room in which they seemed to be so much at home was not one of those in Nick’s handsome Madison Avenue residence in New York.

It was, in fact, a room in a house miles away from there, to the northward, in the Bronx section of the great city, a short distance from the New York Zoölogical Park.

On the first of the month, about ten days before, a family, which went by the name of Webb, had moved in there. The family consisted of three persons: The father, Charles Webb; a grown son, William, and the latter’s young wife, Mildred.

Such, at least, was the understanding of the neighbors. As a matter of fact, Charles Webb was Nick Carter, his “son” was better known as Patsy Garvan, the famous detective’s clever assistant, and “Mildred” was Adelina Garvan, Patsy’s pretty Chilean-Spanish wife, whose woman’s intuitions had materially assisted in solving more than one difficult problem in the mathematics of crime.

It was a peculiar case which had brought them to that out-of-the-way neighborhood, and required delicate handling.....