The Traitors of the Tropics

A BOLD PROPOSAL.

“You say he cannot travel to-day, doctor?”

“Impossible, Mr. Carter!”

“He would be in a drawing-room on the Pullman, and every care would be taken to make the journey easy for him.”

The surgeon shook his head.

“He would have his own servant, Phillips, to attend him,” persisted Nick Carter. “This is Prince Marcos, you know, Doctor Sloane. You’ve heard of him, and I’ve explained that it is essential for him to be in the country of which he is the ruler by the eighteenth of this month. He has only five days now.”

“I am sorry, but——”

“He could make it in the five days, by continuous traveling,” still pressed the detective. “I realize that he would be taking some risk. But when it is considered that the very existence of his country depends on his getting there by a certain date, I doubt whether any one has the moral right to stop him.”

Doctor Sloane shrugged his shoulders. He was one of the distinguished surgeons in New York, and he was accustomed to being obeyed. Even a prince was not important enough in his eyes to dispute his professional commands.

“As to the moral right, Mr. Carter,” intoned the doctor, in his most impressive manner, “that, it seems to me, is beside the matter. I tell you, as a surgeon, that a man who has just been shot in the chest, and has narrowly escaped a puncture of the pericardium, must lie still for a more or less protracted period, if he intends ever to get up at all.”

“I feel quite well,” suddenly interposed the man in the bed. “I can travel easily, Mr. Carter. Make the doctor understand that.”

“Very well, Mr. Marcos,” answered Nick Carter, as he held up a hand of warning to the patient not to talk. “I think the doctor does understand our position.”

“I understand that if you let this Mr. Marcos get up to-day, or this week, or next, I will not be responsible for his life,” interrupted Doctor Sloane. “His temperature is nearly a hundred and rising, and he is too weak to talk, to say nothing of his getting up.”

There could be no doubt that the surgeon spoke the truth. Prince Marcos, ruler of Joyalita, the Caribbean principality, was in bad physical condition.

He had been preparing to go home, to take part in an important gathering of the officers of his government, when somebody had fired a shot at him from ambush as he strolled in the grounds of his temporary home, Crownledge, on the Hudson River, and had brought him down.

If there had been anybody with Prince Marcos when his hidden enemy tried to kill him, the miscreant might have been captured. But the prince was alone. Naturally, nothing could be found of the would-be assassin when the grounds were searched, for it was then half an hour after the shooting, and Marcos was in bed.

Phillips, his valet, had heard the shot, and knowing that the prince’s cousin, Prince Miguel, with Don Solado, prime minister of Joyalita, had made attempts on his life before, in New York, he had suspected these men again.

Nicholas Carter, the famous detective, had been telephoned for. He had come racing up in his high-powered motor car soon after the eminent surgeon—with the aid of one of much less note, as well as a trained nurse—had extracted the bullet.

Doctor Sloane had just given his decision now that the patient must stay in bed for two weeks at least—perhaps much longer.

To the surgeon’s disgust, the patient insisted that he must get up at once. He had to take a long journey into Central America, he said.

[2]
Strangely enough, Nicholas Carter, the famous detective—whose knowledge of medicine and surgery was great enough to have made him a successful practitioner if he had cared to follow a doctor’s career—had backed up Prince Marcos in his wild purpose.

“I’ve no doubt that, according to all precedent, a man in my condition should stay in bed,” conceded Marcos. “But I shall have to go down to Joyalita at once, nevertheless.”

The surgeon turned away, with his favorite shrug.

“Well, I can say no more,” he declared, in an offended tone. “I’ve given you my honest professional opinion. It is more than an opinion—it is a conviction. If you choose to commit suicide, it is no affair of mine.”

Doctor Sloane was not accustomed to people flying in his face. So he vouchsafed Prince Marcos merely a curt nod of farewell, and stalked out of the bedchamber.

Nick Carter followed him to the hall and closed the door.

“Really, doctor, I know it is important for Mr. Marcos to go down to Central America at once. He should have started already, and would have done so but for this unfortunate accident.”

“Accident?” ejaculated Doctor Sloane, with a smile.

“We will call it that for the present,” returned Nick Carter. “Anyhow, the fact that he has enemies who would shoot him down in cold blood in his own home indicates that it is imperative for him to go. If it were not, men would not be trying to kill him to keep him back.”

“That may all be,” conceded the doctor. “No doubt it is, when you say so, Mr. Carter. But that is entirely outside of my province. I came here to save his life, and I have told you what will happen if he gets up now.”

“He has a strong constitution,” pleaded Nick Carter.

“Of course he has, or he wouldn’t be alive now,” snapped Sloane. “But if he moves before next week, at the earliest—well, the consequences be on his own head.”

Without waiting for a reply, Doctor Sloane marched out of the house to his motor car, and was gone.

Nick Carter went back to the sick room and gazed thoughtfully at the flushed face and tossing head on the pillow. As he looked, a thought revolved in his mind which he admitted to be audacious, but which would not be banished, no matter how outrageous it might seem.

“What do doctors know about affairs of state?” suddenly burst from the injured man’s impatient lips, as he turned his eyes, bright with fever, upon the detective. “If I start on that nine-o’clock train to-night, I can make good connections, and get down to Joyalita in time to beat those wretches. You will help me, Carter, won’t you?”

“I will certainly try to bring to justice the men who tried to murder you,” replied Nick Carter. “Don Solado, your prime minister of state——”

“A treacherous old rascal!” put in Marcos.

“Of course he is,” assented Nick. “And your cousin, Prince Miguel, who would like to step into your shoes as ruler of your country. He and Solado are both interested in preventing your reaching Joyalita. Whether they would kill you to keep you away remains to be seen.”

“I am convinced they would. I feel sure that one of them fired that shot at me. Or, if he did not actually do it himself, he hired one of those thugs, who can be procured in any large city, to do it for him.”

“It comes to the same thing,” remarked Nick Carter.

“But that is nothing, after all,” went on Marcos hurriedly. “The thing is that the revolutionary party in Joyalita are to hold a meeting on the eighteenth of this month, at which they will practically give the country into the hands of our neighbor, Carita. That is the scheme. If I am there, I must sign the reply to Carita’s proposition, and, of course, it will be in the negative.”

“And if you are not there?”

“Then the president of the council, who is a secret enemy of mine—as I have just found out—will sign it for me, and he will accept the other side’s proposal.”

“It is a difficult situation,” murmured Nick.

“Difficult or not, it must be solved,” broke in Marcos. “I intend to go. The capital of Joyalita is Penza, and I must be there at twelve noon on the eighteenth.”

He forced himself to a sitting posture and threw aside the bedclothes.

“Mr. Marcos!” protested Nick.

“Don’t try to stop me, Carter! My mind is made up!”

But Marcos’ body was not as strong as his will.

As he swung himself out of bed and put his feet to the floor, the pallor of faintness came over his face, and he would have pitched forward in a heap had not the detective caught him.

Lifting the insensible man upon the bed again, and pulling the clothes over him, Nick Carter applied remedies which soon brought him back to consciousness, although his disappointment was pitiful.

“What shall I do?” he wailed. “What shall I do? The scoundrels have beaten me, after all.”

Nick gave him a spoonful of stimulant, and, as the color came back increasingly into his face, Marcos continued:

“I don’t care for myself. But it breaks my heart to see my little country sold into bondage for the benefit of a handful of rascals who would sell their own mothers if they got their price. What can I do, Carter?”

He held out his hot hand appealingly to the strong, cool detective at the side of his bed, and Nick Carter, taking the hand in his, resolved to carry out the audacious purpose already referred to, let the result be what it might.

Nick strode up and down the room for some minutes, turning over in his mind the scheme that had come to him. Once he stopped before the mirror on the dresser and contemplated his own face steadily for several seconds.

As he turned away, there was a confident smile softening his resolute lips, and he nodded as if inwardly assenting to some suggestion unheard by anybody but himself.

“Listen to me, your highness!” he said, stopping at the side of Prince Marcos’ bed.

“Drop ‘your highness,’ Carter,” begged Marcos impatiently. “Call me ‘Mr. Marcos,’ if you like, but leave out the royalty. We are in New York, and I am quite content to be a plain ‘Mr.’ while here. But what were you going to say?”

“Just this,” replied the detective, bending over the bed, so that the trained nurse, who had just come into the room, should not overhear. “There is one way in which we can save your country. It will mean trickery—a fraud, if you will.”

[3]
The trained nurse left the room, and Nick Carter quietly turned the key in the lock.

“What is it?” asked Marcos.

“Look at me. Don’t you think many people would say I was Prince Marcos if I declared that to be my name?”

“Of course they would. No one could tell the difference, and——”

Marcos stopped, and a wild expression of hope came into his fever-brightened eyes.

“You mean that you would——” he went on, and stopped again.

“I would go in your place to Penza, in Joyalita, and do for Prince Marcos what his enemies have prevented his doing for himself,” declared Nick Carter firmly.