Meanwhile, as Flint left Brent Rock, his fear of the Automaton returned
to him with redoubled force. He had been false to his mission. Nor had
he even succeeded in his treachery. A few minutes he had been certain
that Eva would come to Baker's dock at the time set, but now doubts
began to assail him. With her obvious faith in Locke, she might decide
on the chemist's antidote, and there was always a possibility that it
might restore Brent, in which case Flint realized that his life would be
forfeit to the Automaton.
Nor were his fears unfounded. He had barely passed the fountain where,
half an hour before, he had been set free, when an emissary came out
from behind a neighboring tree and took up his trail.
De Luxe Dora also had waited only long enough to see Eva and Locke enter
Brent Rock, when she turned her runabout around and drove rapidly back
to Professor Hadwell's. She arrived there just in time to meet an
automobile coming from the opposite direction and containing three
emissaries of the Automaton.
In answer to an inquiry, Dora pointed out the chemist's house to them.
They piled out, and their leader knocked at the door, while Dora drove
off.
The chemist answered, and the leader produced a vial, glibly lying as he
handed it over.
"The Williams Drug Company sent me to have this stuff analyzed," said
the leader. "I'll wait."
As the professor admitted him he did not see the other two men pressed
close to the wall on either side of the door. The moment the professor's
back was turned they slinked after their leader into the house. In a
dark corner of the hallway they crouched as their leader went into the
laboratory with the chemist.
The professor sniffed at the vial, which contained nothing but pure
water, and in surprise turned to the emissary for an explanation. But it
was too late. The emissary dealt him a blow with a blunt instrument that
stunned him and, as he reeled back and grasped at a table, the other
thugs rushed from the hall and rained blow after blow on his venerable
head and beat him to the floor. A convulsive shudder--a long-drawn-out
sigh--and he lay still.
With barely a glance at him the emissaries set to work to smash all the
paraphernalia of the place, sparing nothing in order to make sure that
the antidote would be destroyed. Glass tubes, retorts, bottles, even
furniture were smashed to bits in their orgy of ruin--and there, in the
midst of the debris, his life's work finished, lay the old chemist,
dead.
Tiring of their own efforts, the murderers at last desisted. One of them
went to the street door and peered out, but in a moment was back with
the others.
"Quick--that fellow Locke is coming."
He was right. Locke had immediately quit Brent Rock and had come
directly to the chemist's in the hope of forestalling any further
attempt by Flint to inveigle Eva into dealing with him.
The door had been left ajar and, although he thought it strange, Locke
was without suspicion and entered the hallway. He called to his old
friend, but the dead lips could not answer and the emissaries would not.
Greatly alarmed now, Locke strode to the laboratory. For a moment he
stood as though petrified as the horrid scene burst upon his vision. He
ran to the chemist and knelt beside his battered body.
With a rush the emissaries darted from their hiding-place and were upon
him.
Although taken unawares, Locke was, in a measure, ready for them. One he
grabbed in a clever jiu-jitsu hold and sent him hurtling through the air
to crash in a heap in a far corner of the room. Leaping to his feet, he
beat another to the floor. The third villain was of tougher fiber. Up
and down the laboratory they battled, stumbling over broken furniture,
now falling to the floor, where they rolled over and over, first one,
then the other gaining the mastery, while the broken glass with which
the floor was littered cut their clothing to ribbons and bit into their
flesh.
Locke was slowly gaining the upper hand when the thug whom he had thrown
over his head recovered. The brute took the situation in at a glance,
saw his pal in trouble, and, sneaking treacherously behind Locke, dealt
him a terrific blow with the butt of a revolver. Locke dropped to the
floor as if pole-axed and lay still.
One of the thugs kicked him as he lay defenseless, and then, spying a
row of coat-hooks in an inner hallway, with fiendish ingenuity directed
the others who had joined him. They strung Locke up by his thumbs so
that he hung, half suspended, with his toes just off the floor.
As one of them searched him Locke was still unconscious. They found
nothing but a few bank-notes and the automatic revolver that Locke
always carried.
Slowly Locke regained his senses. The agony of his strained thumbs was
almost unbearable. But he was not the man to give up.
By this time two of the emissaries had gone, leaving one, who seated
himself quite close to Locke, where he was examining the revolver. With
the stoicism of an Indian, Locke manfully tried to evolve a plan by
which he might escape. Like a flash it came to him, but it was a plan so
fraught with the possibility of failure that he would not have decided
on it except for the agony of the strain on his thumbs.
Directly opposite him and at a distance of four or five feet was a door
leading to a back alley. This door the emissary now guarding him had
locked as a precaution against surprise and had carefully placed the key
in his vest pocket.
Locke weighed each detail of his plan and then, bracing his feet firmly
against the wall, he suddenly shot his lower limbs forward and, like the
closing of a pair of giant shears, he wrapped his legs about the neck of
the emissary and immediately exerted enormous pressure with his knees.
The emissary, taken totally by surprise, struggled to break the hold,
and Locke's thumbs were almost wrenched from their sockets. But he held
on grimly. Soon the thug's struggles subsided, Locke released him, and
he slipped to the floor.
Locke was wearing a low-cut shoe. Strange that a man's life may hinge on
such a slight detail, but this fact enabled him to work off his right
shoe and his sock. He extended his bare foot, and with his toes searched
the pocket of the emissary for the key to the door. Finally he found it.
Locke held the key as firmly as he might between his toes and,
projecting his body by a muscular effort far away from the wall, he
managed to insert the key in the lock. He turned it. The door was
unlocked now. A swift downward movement of his foot against the knob and
the door swung open.
He braced himself against its edge and, with his back firmly pressed
against the wall, relieved the strain on his thumbs. He rested a moment
and then, as it were, walked up the edge of the door until his feet
reached the top. Swinging one leg over the door, by patient effort he
was enabled to release one swollen thumb, then the other. An instant
later he dropped down and leaned exhaustedly against the wall.
While Locke was held in the room things had happened which would have
set him nearly crazy with anxiety. Eva, having heard nothing from him,
had become alarmed and had telephoned to the chemist. This was at
quarter to five, and she had supposed that it was the chemist who
answered her. In reality it had been an emissary, and he had told her
that the final experiment to find an antidote for her father's malady
had been really a failure and that Locke had left some time before.
After all that she had endured, this was almost the final blow to Eva.
She thought of Flint and Baker's dock and five o'clock. There was no
time to lose if she were to save her father. So she pulled herself
together, seized her hat and cloak, and started for the door.
Here Zita stopped her and offered to accompany her, but she declined.
She hastily asked the direction of Baker's dock from the butler, and
then ran out of the house and sprang to the steering-wheel of her
waiting car. With a whir of the starter she was away.
Flint had arrived at the dock long before and was now slinking in and
out among the crates and boxes as he sought diligently for a safe
hiding-place. But his nerves, none too strong at the best, were now
running riot, and nowhere could he feel a sense of security so that he
could remain quiet.
It was while he was sneaking from one pile of bales to another that an
emissary hailed him.
"Are you Flint?" he demanded.
"Y-e-s," came quaveringly from Flint.
"Well, there's a lady in the office asking for you."
Such was the fascination of any of the emissaries of the Automaton over
Flint by this time that he followed the man without question,
particularly as he felt that he would be spared, since the lady in the
office could be none other than Eva.
Together they walked toward the entrance and, with an order to wait, the
emissary halted Flint close to a pile of crates and left him. Flint
dared not move. A premonition of impending disaster must have come over
him, for his knees shook and a clammy sweat broke out on his forehead.
Without sound a gigantic iron hand and arm protruded from behind a crate
and, for a moment, hung suspended over Flint's head. Then, with a swift
encircling movement, that hooklike arm wrapped itself around Flint's
neck and drew him into the shadow. The mighty form drew the victim
close--and it was over.
The Automaton picked up the body as though it had been a mere
feather-weight and stalked out to the waiting emissaries. A trap-door
was opened and Flint's body was dashed into the river. Thus it was that
all his scheming came to an end and his secret from Madagascar, which he
had told Brent, but which now lay locked in that mad-man's mind, was
stilled with Flint's dead lips.
At the chemist's shop Locke was by this time recovering from the
terrible ordeal through which he had passed. He bathed his swollen
thumbs, and by rubbing them was able somewhat to restore the
circulation. Then he stepped to the telephone and gave the Brent Rock
number.
It was Zita who answered him.
"Eva has gone alone to Baker's dock," she answered to his inquiry, in
half-triumphant jealousy.
Locke did not wait to hear more. There was not a moment to be lost. He
rushed out, disheveled as he was, into the street, slamming the door
after him. It seemed hours before he could find a taxicab.
"Baker's dock!" he yelled. "And twenty dollars if you make it in ten
minutes."
He did not know that the emissaries had robbed him of everything, nor
would it have made any difference, for he could easily have fixed it
with the driver through his police and Secret Service connections.
In the mean time Eva's car had met with misfortune, and she had been
compelled to stop. She jumped out and busied herself with a missing
cylinder.
Locke's taxi was running smoothly and arrived at the dock well within
the time he had ordered. Locke jumped out and started to pay. It was
then that he discovered that he was without money. The driver became
angry and hard to pacify with the story of the robbery, but Locke
finally convinced him that all was right with the Department of Justice.
Locke walked through the gates to the dock and for a moment stood
nonplussed. This dock had none of the turmoil and bustle naturally
associated with docks when a steamer is about to leave.
He cautiously proceeded between the piles of merchandise toward the end
of the wharf. Of one thing he was now certain and a prayer of relief
came to his lips. He was there before Eva and able to guard her from any
danger that might arise.
His eyes were keen, but he failed to notice the emissaries who, from
behind crates and bales, were watching his every move. Nor did he see
that fiend of iron, the Automaton, which, standing rigid, glared at him
from behind an enormous packing-case.
He continued down the wharf as, slinking like coyotes, those sinister
forms glided from hiding-place to hiding-place and were never far from
his heels. He reached the end of the wharf and gazed up and down the
dark river. Here and there he could distinguish the colored lights that
marked a tugboat or some other small craft, but of a large steamer there
was no sign. It is rarely that a boat warps into a dock just a few
moments before leaving for foreign parts, and it flashed upon Locke's
mind that Flint had deceived them about his leaving for Madagascar that
night.
He was still wondering what it could all mean when the emissaries leaped
upon him. Although weakened by his previous battle, Locke proved no easy
customer for them. Time after time he struggled free from them and with
arms working like piston-rods for a while he kept them at a distance.
But, like a pack of wolves, they were not to be denied, and they finally
succeeded in holding him firmly.
One of them brought leg-irons which he snapped around Locke's ankles.
Once again Locke managed to get one of his arms free and, before they
could prevent him, two emissaries lay prostrate on the wharf. But that
effort marked his last, for the Automaton, stalking up behind him,
pinioned his arms as though he was a baby.
An emissary now placed a pair of handcuffs on his wrists and, to bind
him more securely, fastened a chain that extended from the handcuffs to
the leg-irons.
Two of the thugs now carried him to the edge of the wharf, while a third
attached a heavy weight to Locke's feet. Locke realized his
helplessness, realized that his death was imminent. But he determined to
rid the world of at least one murderer. By a mighty effort he shook off
his captors and, as one rushed forward, he grabbed him in his manacled
hands and leaped with him into the river as they grappled.
At the shore end of the wharf an emissary was leading Eva, as she
thought, to Flint.
Locke and the thug sank immediately to the bottom of the river and,
under water, there ensued a terrific battle. Locke, semi-helpless
because of his shakles, had the greatest difficulty in preventing the
thug from breaking loose. But he was determined that the fellow at least
would pay for his crimes with his life.
The thug's struggles gradually became more feeble. Air bubbles rose from
his bestial lips and he became limp in Locke's grasp. Locke released him
and, feet first, he floated upward, dead.
Locke's lungs were almost bursting now as he struggled at his chains;
his senses reeled; he thought of Eva, and redoubled his efforts. If he
could only get rid of that great weight that was holding him down. A
singing came in his ears.