_The Mute Plungers_
It would be difficult to comprehend the nervous strain under which
Manhattan had been laboring during the past thirty-six hours. The
story of the kidnaping of Harold Hervey had not been given to the
newspapers, for an excellent reason. If Hervey's financial enemies
knew of his kidnaping and death they would hammer away at his stocks
until they fell to nothing and his family, accustomed to fabulous
wealth, would have been reduced to beggary.
The Mind Master himself, up to a late hour, had given no word to the
newspapers in his "manifestoes." The Hervey family held its breath
fearing that he would--for the newspapers would have played the story
for all the sensationalism it would carry. Bentley, when this matter
was called to his attention, wondered. Barter had kept his own counsel
for a purpose, but what was it? There was no way of asking him.
The story of the mad race down Broadway in pursuit of the limousine
which had returned the lifeless body of Hervey to his residence had
been a sensational one, and the tabloids had given it their best
treatment. The chauffeur who had crawled out like a monkey atop his
careening car, to lose his life when catapulted into the entrance to
the Twenty-third Street subway station: the three policemen whose
lives had been lost because the chauffeur hadn't stopped as they had
expected him to, the kidnaping of Saret Balisle by a great ape hadn't
yet broken as a story, nor the murder of Balisle's chauffeur.
But everybody knew something of the story of the naked man of the day
before. Many were the speculations as to what had ripped and torn his
flesh from his body, along with his clothes. What manner of claws had
it been which had sliced him in scores of places as though with many
razors?
Men and women walked the streets apprehensively, and many of them
turned at intervals to look behind them. No telling what they would do
when the story of Balisle's kidnaping by an anthropoid ape and a
queer mute chauffeur got abroad. To top it all the police pursuers
lost the Balisle limousine and Saret Balisle had taken his place among
the lost.
- - -
Bentley knew as soon as the disgruntled and rather frightened police
officers returned to the Clinton Building with the news that Balisle
had got away from them in the stolen Balisle car, that already the
ill-fated young man was probably under the anesthetic which Caleb
Barter used on his victims.
"Tyler, do you know a surgeon who can do any surgical job short of
brain transplantation?"
"Yeah. There's a chap has offices in the Fifth Avenue Building. He's
probably the very best in the racket. Maybe it's because of his name.
It's Tyler."
"Some relative of yours?"
"Not much. He's just my dad--and one of the world's finest and
cleverest."
"Will he listen to reason? Can he perform delicate operations?"
"He's my dad, Bentley, and he'd do almost anything I asked him so long
as it was honest ... and he could switch the noses of a mosquito and a
humming bird so skillfully that the humming bird would go looking for
a sleeping cop and the mosquito would start building a nest in a
tree."
"Get him here. No--has he an operating room where all sound can be
shut out? I've got a hunch I'd like somehow to try and drop a screen
around us as we work. Maybe your dad would know what to do. You see,
I'm positive that Barter sees everything we do and if he sees me
turning into an ape he would just chuckle and pass up the trap."
"He's got a lead armored room where he keeps a bit of radium."
"That's it. Talk to him. No, not on the phone. You'll have to
figure out some way to do it so that you can be sure Barter isn't
listening."
"I'll manage. I'll send him a note."
"Your messenger will be killed on the way to him."
"Then I'll go myself."
"And Barter will watch everybody that goes into his office or comes
out, and mark down each person as possibly being connected with the
police. However, you figure it out."
- - -
When Tyler had gone and the dead "ape" had been stretched out in one
corner of Balisle's office, and covered with something to cloak its
hideousness, Bentley telephoned Ellen Estabrook.
"Have I been making any appointments with you this morning?" he asked
her cheerily.
"Please don't jest when things are so terrible. Have you seen the
latest papers?"
"No. What do they say?"
"There's a lot of the story I'm thinking about. You'd better read it
right away. It's an extra, anyhow. The newsies ought to be calling it
around you somewhere--and where are you, anyway?"
Bentley informed her, and told her, too, that he would be with her as
soon as he possibly could. Taking the usual masculine advantage he
decided to tell her now what he wouldn't have had the heart to tell
her to her face, that he was planning a rather desperate stunt to
reach Barter, and would consequently be away from her for an
indefinite period.
"But I'll see you first?" she said after a long hesitation. Bentley
could hear her voice tremble, though he knew she was fighting
desperately to keep him from noting the catch in her voice.
"Yes, nothing will happen until--well, not until I've seen you
again."
Just as Bentley hung up the receiver the extra was being cried. Some
two hours had now elapsed since Balisle had been taken away, and now
the newsboys were shouting the headlines.
"Extra! Extra! All about the big Wall Street crash! Hervey fortune
entirely swept away!"
- - -
Bentley sent an office boy out for the paper and spread it out on the
desk to digest it as quickly as possible.
"One million shares of Hervey Incorporated," read the black words in a
box on the first page--a story in mourning, "were dumped on the market
at eleven o'clock this morning. Four men seem to have been behind the
queer coup. One of them had a power of attorney from Harold Hervey
himself, and he had the shares to sell. So many shares were dumped
that the bottom fell out of the stock. Others holding the Hervey
shares, fearful that they would get nothing at all, also began to
dump, and every share thus dumped was bought up quickly by three other
men about whom nobody knew anything, except that they paid with cash.
The strangest thing about it all was that the three men who bought
Hervey Incorporated, seemed to be dumb-mutes, for they didn't say
anything. They acted through a broker, and indicated their purchases
with their fingers in the conventional manner and tendered cards as
identification! They were Harry Stanley, Clarence Morton, and Willard
Cleve--addresses unknown, history unknown.
"Nothing, in fact, is known about any of the three or the little
white-haired, apple-cheeked man who sold so heavily in Hervey
Incorporated. That the three mutes did not buy the shares sold by the
little white-haired man would seem to indicate that all four of them
worked together ... but it is only a supposition as they were not seen
together and apparently did not know one another. But the three mutes
constantly ate walnuts. All four men, who among them knocked the
bottom out of Wall Street, and wiped away the Hervey fortune, slipped
out in the excitement inspired by their rapid buying and selling, and
seemed to vanish into thin air."
Bentley didn't know much about the stock market, but it seemed to him
that Barter had managed a theft of mighty proportions. With a power of
attorney, which he had wrung from Hervey after his capture, he had
managed to possess himself of Hervey's shares. In themselves they were
worth millions. Even at a fraction of their price Barter would realize
heavily on them. Selling quickly he would force the price far down.
Then his puppets--and Bentley had no doubt that Stanley, Morton and
Cleve were his puppets--bought all other shares offered by panicky
investors in Hervey Incorporated at a tiny fraction of their value.
Far less, naturally, than Barter had made by selling his loot.
The purchased shares Barter could hold for an increase. Hervey
Incorporated was good and its price would go up again, and Barter
would sell and gain millions.
- - -
That is how Bentley saw it, and his lips drew into a firmer,
straighter line as, half an hour later, he explained it all to Ellen.
"It's desperate, dear," he whispered in her ear. "Manhattan's
financial structure has been shaken to its foundations. But that isn't
all by any means. Barter has performed his horrible operation on two
of New York's most brilliant men. It was a Barter gesture to send
'Harold Hervey' to capture Balisle, and the horror of it staggered
me."
"Lee," said Ellen, "understand this: that if I have no word from you
within seventy-two, no, forty-eight hours after you get started on
this scheme you have in mind, I'm going to get through to Barter
somehow. If I put an ad in the paper and tell him where I'm to be
found he'll surely make another attempt to take me in. If he's
captured you, or uncovered the trap you're laying, then I'll at least
be with you. If he kills you he kills me. If we can't live together we
can die together."
Bentley kissed her fervently, trying not to think what it would mean
to him now if she were in the hands of Caleb Barter. Secretly he
intended having Tyler keep her so closely guarded that she couldn't
possibly do anything as foolish as she had suggested.
The late evening papers carried another manifesto of the Mind Master
to the effect that the remaining eighteen men named on the original
list were to be taken before noon of the next day.
Oddly enough eighteen kidnapings were reported from various places in
Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
"So," thought Bentley, "he's afraid to send out normal apes to capture
his eighteen key men. Maybe his control over them is not perfect.
That's it. I suppose--he needs human brains before he can exercise
perfect control. I suppose Stanley, Morton and Cleve did the
kidnapings."
- - -
Late that night Bentley kissed Ellen good-by, told her to keep up her
courage, and repaired to the rendezvous arranged for by Thomas Tyler
and his surgeon father. In the operating room was the cold body of the
anthropoid that had successfully abducted Saret Balisle.
"Young man," said Dr. Tyler, "just what is it you want me to do? I'm
not asking for your reasons. Tommy tells me you know what you're
doing. I must say though, I don't believe that story of brain
transplantation. No doctor would believe it for a minute."
Bentley looked at the dead ape.
"You'll take Tommy's word for it that that ape kidnaped Saret Balisle
to-day and took him down the face of a building, sixteen stories to
the ground?"
"Of course. Tommy wouldn't string his father."
"Well, part of your surgical work to-night will make it necessary for
you to look at that creature's brain. You'll recognize a human brain
in that ape's skull. After you've made that discovery, here's what I
want you to do: I'll strip to the skin; then I want you to place the
skin of that ape on me, so that from top to toes I am an ape. You'll
have to do the job so perfectly that I'll _be_ an ape--as soon as,
under your watchful eye and Tom's, I have mastered all the ape
mannerisms the three of us can remember. Can you do it?"
Tyler senior shrugged.
He motioned his son and Bentley to help him lift the huge ape body to
the operating table, and under the glaring light above he set to work
with instruments which gleamed like molten silver, then became a
sullen red....