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THE MASTER MYSTERY
Novelized by
ARTHUR B. REEVE and JOHN W. GREY
From Scenarios by Arthur B. Reeve in Collaboration with John W. Grey
and C.A. Logue
Profusely Illustrated with Photographic Reproductions Taken from the
Houdini Super-Serial of the Same Name. A B. A. Rolfe Production.
New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers
Published May, 1919
THE MASTER MYSTERY
CHAPTER I
Peter Brent sat nervously smoking in the library of his great house,
Brent Rock.
He was a man of about forty-five or -six--a typical, shrewd business man.
Something, however, was evidently on his mind, for, though he tried to
conceal it, he lacked the self-assurance that was habitually his before
the world.
A scowl clouded his face as the door of the library was flung open and
he heard voices in the hall. A tall, spare, long-haired man forced his
way in, crushing his soft black hat in his hands.
"I _will_ see Mr. Brent," insisted the new-comer, as he pushed past the
butler. "Mr. Brent!" he cried, advancing with a wild light in his eyes.
"I'm tired of excuses. I want justice regarding that water-motor of
mine." He paused, then added, shaking his finger threateningly, "Put it
on the market--or I will call in the Department of Justice!"
Brent scowled again. For years he had been amassing a fortune by a
process that was scarcely within the law.
For, when inventions threaten to render useless already existing
patents, necessitating the scrapping of millions of dollars' worth of
machinery, vested interests must be protected.
Thus, Brent and his partner, Herbert Balcom, had evolved a simple method
of protecting corporations against troublesome inventors and inventions.
They had formed their own corporation, International Patents,
Incorporated.
Their method was effective--though desperate. It was to suppress the
inventor and his labor. They bought the sole rights from the inventor,
promising him glittering royalties. The joker was that the invention was
suppressed. None were ever manufactured. Hence there were no royalties
and the corporations went on undisturbed while Brent and Balcom
collected huge retainers for the protection they afforded them.
Thus Brent Rock had come to be hated by scores of inventors defrauded in
this unequal conflict with big business.
The inventor looked about at the library, richly paneled in oak and
luxuriously furnished. Through a pair of folding-doors he could see the
dining-room and a conservatory beyond. All this had been paid for by
himself and such as he.
"Sit down, sir," nodded Brent, suavely.
The man continued to stand, growing more and more excited. Had he been a
keener observer he would have seen that under Brent's suavity there was
a scarcely hidden nervousness.
Finally Brent leaned over and spoke in a whisper, looking about as
though the very walls might have ears.
"My dear fellow," he confided, "for some time I have been considering
your water-motor. I will return the model to you--release the patent to
the world."
He drew back to watch the effect on the aged inventor. Could it be that
Brent was lying? Or was it fear? Could it be that at last his seared
conscience was troubling him?
At that exact moment, up-stairs, in a private laboratory in the house,
sat a young man at a desk--a handsome, strong-faced, clean-cut chap. All
about him were the scientific instruments which he used to test
inventions offered to Brent.
A look of intent eagerness passed over his face. For Quentin Locke was
not testing any of Brent's patents just now. Over his head he had the
receivers of a dictagraph.
It was a strange act for one so recently employed as manager of Brent's
private laboratory. Yet such a man must have had his reasons.
One who was interested might have followed the wire from the
dictagraph-box in the top drawer of the desk down the leg of the desk,
through the very walls to the huge chandelier in the library below,
where, in the ornamented brass-work, reposed a small black disk about
the size of a watch. It was the receiving-end of the dictagraph.
Suddenly the young man's face broke out into a smile and without
thinking he stopped writing what the little mechanical eavesdropper was
conveying him from below. He listened intently as he heard a silvery
laugh over the wire.
"Oh, I didn't know you were busy. I thought these flowers--Well, never
mind. I'll leave them, anyway."
It was Eva Brent, daughter of the head of the firm, who had danced in
from the conservatory like a June zephyr in December.
"My dear," Locke could hear the patent magnate welcome, "it is all
right. Stay a moment and talk to this gentleman while I go down to the
museum."
Locke listened eagerly, glancing now and then at a photograph of Eva
Brent on his own desk, while she chatted gaily with the inventor. It was
evident that Eva had not the faintest idea of the hard nature of the
business of her father.
Meanwhile, Brent himself had left the library and passed through the
portièred door into the hall. He did not turn up the grand staircase in
the center of the wide hall, but hurried, preoccupied, to a door under
the stairs that opened down to the cellar.
He started to open it to pass down. As he did so he did not hear a light
footstep on the stairs as his secretary, Zita Dane, came down. But he
did not escape her watchful eye.
"Mr. Brent," she called, "is there anything I can do?"
Brent paused. "Wait a moment for me in the library," he directed, as he
turned again to enter the cellar.
He closed the door and Zita watched him with an almost uncanny interest,
then turned to the library to join Eva and the new-comer.
Down the cellar steps Brent made his way, and across the cellar floor,
pausing at the rocky wall of the foundation of the house blasted and
hewn out of the cliff on which it towered above the river. A heavy steel
door in the rock wall barred the way.
Brent whirled the combination and shot the bolts, and the door swung
ponderously open, disclosing a rock-hewn cavern. Three walls of the
cavern were lined with shelves containing inventions of all
kinds--telegraph and telephone instruments, engine models,
railroad-signaling and safety devices, racks of bottles containing
dangerous chemicals and their antidotes--all conceivable manner of
mechanical and scientific paraphernalia. It was literally a Graveyard of
Genius--harboring the ghosts of a thousand inventors' dead hopes.
Brent entered hastily and went directly to a shelf. There he picked up a
model of a motor. He blew the dust from it and examined it approvingly.
Suddenly he saw something that caused him to start. He looked down at
his feet. There was a piece of paper on the floor.
He picked it up and read it, and as he did so he started back,
frightened--then angry. He looked about at the rock-hewn cavern
walls--then read again:
BRENT--This is my last warning. If you persist in your course you
will be struck down by the Madagascar madness.
Q.
Under his breath, Brent swore. Again he looked about the cavern, then
turned hurriedly, picked up the motor, passed out the steel door,
clanged it shut, and locked it.
No sooner had Brent shut the door, however, than it seemed as if the
very face of the outer rocky wall of the cavern began to move--to tilt,
as if on hinges.
If a human eye had been in the Graveyard of Genius at that instant it
would have sworn that it perceived in the inky blackness of the tilting
rock a passage, and in the shadows of that passage a huge, weird,
grotesque figure peering in.
Then the tilting rock door closed again, as the figure disappeared down
the rocky passage on the opposite side--a menace and a threat to the
owner of Brent Rock, insecure even in his millions.