ame to my hotel purposely to get acquainted
with me. Then he drugged me, and got me out to this place, where he
kept me a prisoner. What was to be the outcome I don't know. But I am
surprised to hear you say that the other man who came into the room was
one of the swindlers who robbed you."

"I am sure of it. I would never forget his face. Wakely, too, seems
familiar, but I can't place him."

"Maybe Wakely is a member of their gang, and perhaps Annister, too, is
in with them."

"I shouldn't be surprised. What do you think we had better do?"

Neither of them yet recognized Wakely as Tupper.

"I think we'd better get out of this place before they come back with
reinforcements," said Roy with a laugh. He was cool, despite what he
had gone through, for he was somewhat used to meeting danger and doing
his best to escape.

"I'll slide down my rope again," he went on, "come up the stairs, and
open the door. Then we can talk it over. I must get my baggage away
from here."

It did not take the boy long to repeat his feat with the lariat, and
soon, having found a key, he opened the door from without, releasing
Mortimer De Royster.

CHAPTER XXIII

A LAWYER'S ADVICE

"Now, what's the first thing to be done, my dear chap?" asked De
Royster, as Roy loosed the lasso from the bed and coiled it up.

"Arrange to get my stuff away from here. I reckon, and back to my
hotel. Then I want to hear how you traced me."

"I'll tell you. But I agree with you that we had better leave this
place. Let's go down to the street and engage an expressman."

They found one who agreed to take Roy's baggage back to the hotel.
After seeing it safely in the wagon, during which time a few of the
tenants in the house looked on curiously, but said nothing, the two
friends started for the hotel, where Roy had been stopping.

"As soon as I called at your hotel that night, and found you had been
taken away, sick, by a man who had only recently come to the place, I
suspected something was wrong," explained Mr. De Royster, on the way.
"The clerk told me about you going away in a cab, and gave me a fairly
good description of the driver, whom he had a glimpse of. It was a cab
seldom seen in this part of the city.

"I knew my best plan, don't you know, would be to find that driver, and
learn where he had taken you and your baggage. My idea was that some
sharpers had gotten you into their power to rob you. I never suspected
there