Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Action and Adventure
“You can’t come in,” he said. “Nobody can come in to-day. It’s special orders from Mr. Manning.”
“Whose
orders?” asked Gordon Manning. Instantly he saw through the infernal chicanery of the Griffin. A plot ludicrously simple but efficient. Foolproof. His face showed no sign, though his eyes narrowed.
“Manning,” the youth went on. “The guy who came out from headquarters yesterday morning to take charge until to-morrow. You’re acting under him, ain’t you? You talked with him?”
Manning concealed his impatience. Even now a deadly fuse was sputtering, at any second an explosion might take place, if the mock Manning knew of this move of his.
“I’m not exactly under his orders,” he answered. “But I’ve got to see him again, right away. Something has happened. Where is he?”
The Griffin’s cunning had forestalled Manning, knowing his habits too, knowing Manning always spent the hours of danger with the threatened man. He had simply sent a man on ahead with forged credentials, the telephones controlled by his method of synchronization in case they were used to check up on identity.
And this agent, this murderer of the Griffin’s employ, had been close to Belmont all day, was with him now, would strike at his own convenience!
“Where is he?” he repeated. “Jump to it, my lad. This is serious.”
His will beat down the youth’s opposition.
“I’ll find out,” he said.
“You needn’t call him,” said Manning. “Just find out where he and Mr. Belmont are, right now. That’s all.”
The lad went to a house phone, put the question.
“Know where Mr. Manning is? I’ve got a message for him. It’s important, see?”
Manning waited. His men were on the porch, idling there but ready to follow him on signal.
“They’re both in the culture room,” said the lad, at last. “Where they breed germs.”
Manning opened the front door, called in his four men.
“Show us where that is,” he said.
A man came hurrying in, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, excited and distressed.
“What’s all this?” he demanded with some show of authority. “I’m Mr. Henderson, Mr. Belmont’s personal secretary.”
Manning jerked his head impatiently at him.
“Well,
I’m
Gordon Manning,” he said. “The
real
Gordon Manning. The man you’ve admitted is a fake. He’s here to kill Mr. Belmont, not protect him. These men and my others outside are all Manhattan detectives. The two officers that first arrived are fakes also. All agents of the Griffin. Now, get out of my way before murder’s done, if it hasn’t happened already.”
They stood back, aghast. There was no challenging Manning’s force, his real authority. Henderson gasped like a landed fish.
“My God?” he faltered. “What have I done?”
“Nothing,” snapped Manning. “You’ve been fooled, like the rest of us. Here, my lad,” he added, addressing the youth, “take us to where they are.”
They passed through various offices where clerks and stenographers were at work, staring at them as they passed, but not alarmed. Henderson had practically collapsed at the thought that he had, however unwittingly, betrayed Belmont. There was a covered walk from the house to the culture room so that Belmont could visit it at any hour. At the end of the walk there was one of the uniformed guards. He challenged them with an imperative order to halt, his hand on his gun.
There was not time to argue. Manning respected the man’s attitude, but he had to get through.
“I’ve got a pass,” he said, fumbling in his vest pocket as if to produce it.
“Why didn’t you say so? Let’s see it.”
What he got to see was Manning’s fist, shot out in a sizzling uppercut. The man went down and out. Manning took possession of his gun.
They were not through yet. The culture room was the heart of Belmont’s citadel. There, of all places, he must not be disturbed. There he performed his miracles, nursed or destroyed the strange germ forms that were the enemies of humanity, but might be made to serve it.
There was a narrow corridor ahead of them with a steel door at its end. This had a narrow observation slit in it, closed from the inside with a slide. It gave Manning an idea. The false Manning would hardly have had time to acquaint himself with the features of the guards. The man just knocked out, still unconscious, was about the same build as one of the men with Manning. He could treat the Griffin with some of his own medicine.
VIII
“PUT on that chap’s coat, belt, and hat, Sloane,” Manning ordered. “Keep the visor of the cap well down. Doherty, you stay and watch this man when he comes to. Hold him. Ready, Sloane. Come on then, all but Doherty. Knock on that door, Sloane, and if any one answers don’t let him get too good a look at you. Tell him there’s trouble outside. It may work.”
Manning and the others crouched while Sloane played his part.
The slit opened. Only the eyes and nose of the man inside showed, but these were the unmistakable features of the one who had represented himself as Gordon Manning.
“What is it?”he demanded sharply. “Why have you left your post?”
“There’s trouble—more than I can handle,” said Sloane. “You’re in charge. You better tackle it.”
“I’ll come. Go back and wait for me.”
Manning prodded Sloane and the quick witted Irishman played up.
“Very good, sir,” he answered with a salute. He swung on his heels and marched away as the slit closed.
The door of heavy steel opened slowly inward. Through the widening gap Manning distinctly heard a groan. The three flung themselves at the door, forcing it back. Manning was the first to leap through.
He glimpsed shelves and benches that bore a gleaming array of glass jars filled with strange contents. He saw a body lying on the floor at the far end, looking like a rag-stuffed dummy. Then he saw the killer, coming out from behind the door, a glass container in his hand. His eyes gleamed.
“You came too late, Manning,” he said. “I am not such a fool as you think. Keep back. If I break this jar all of you will die within the hour.”
It might be a bluff, it might well be truth. Manning temporized.
“You too,” he said.
The other laughed. “I would much rather die now than wait until you send me to the electric chair.”
He held the container aloft, dramatically, at full length of his arm, ready to hurl it.
His back was toward the open door. Sloane had returned. And the killer had overlooked that incident. Sloane caught Manning’s eye and gave a slight nod, unseen by the murderer. Then he sprang and caught the wrist of the hand that held the jar and now essayed to throw it.
All he could do under Sloane’s viselike grip was to toss it. Manning was waiting for it like a crack first baseman hoping to retire the other team. He caught the container with its deadly contents deftly, and set it down on a shelf while the rest secured the killer, who fought furiously.
Manning looked down on the face of Raymond Belmont. Not only did it bear the seal of death, but on the forehead was the scarlet cartouche, the oval of heavy paper embossed with the seal of the Griffin.
Belmont had been stabbed in the heart with a poniard, the silver hilt of which protruded from his breast, driven home between his ribs by an expert’s hand.
“I could take no chances of interference, Manning,” said the captive. “What do you propose to do with me?”
“A great many things you won’t like before you go to that chair,” said Manning grimly. “I want to find out all you know about the Griffin.”
“You mean torture, I suppose. Why not try a bribe? Suppose I told you all you want to know, could I escape the chair? Go free?”
“I can promise nothing,” said Manning sternly.
The other laughed, lightly at first, and then with a growing hysteria.
“Too late, again,” he gasped when he had managed to somewhat control himself, his eyes streaming. “I couldn’t tell you where the Griffin lives if I wanted to. I don’t know. None of us do. We leave blindfolded, through winding tunnels, and the bandages are not removed until we travel a long way in a car. The same method prevails when we report back—if we
do
report. It looks as if you will have to send me to the chair after all. Let us go. Have you no handcuffs ready? I trust you do not mind if I straighten my clothes somewhat. At least my tie?”
The two who had been holding him had released him, watchful and alert. His hand went to his disheveled pocket. They had handled him vigorously and cloth was torn and buttons gone. He wore a pearl stickpin, which had a safety catch on its point.
This he coolly released and then, his hands well down in front of him, he suddenly jabbed the pin deeply into his wrist before Manning could prevent. Blood spurted from a vein, the poisoned pin fell to the floor. The action of the venom was fast, a faster poison than the poison of a king cobra.
He seemed to shrivel, a faint rattle in his throat before he was gone, beyond all earthly reprisal.
There was a telephone in the culture room and Manning picked it up. He had to communicate with the authorities concerning Belmont’s death, the death of the Griffin’s agent, his own failure. It was not a pleasant thing to do, but it had to be faced. Once more the Griffin had triumphed.
And then he head the Griffin’s own booming voice speaking. Mocking, with a faint strain of music over in the background.
“My dear Manning. I have been expecting to hear from you. The pitch of your voice is easily picked up by my own private televox apparatus. Telephones these days are really quite unsatisfactory in some ways, but very satisfactory in others, to those who know how to handle them.
“I have told you how carefully I study the ways of those I wish to eliminate. I have also studied
yours,
Manning. It was really absurdly easy to impersonate you, to synchronize the Belmont telephones, to represent Commissioner Netley and establish my men ahead of you. The advantage, you see, of making the first move in our game. Quite laughable, Manning. You still amuse me—and you will hear from me again.”
“One of these days,” Manning muttered, “I shall amuse you no longer.”
He gave an order to Sloane.
“You and Doherty get that fake officer at the gate. There’s another one somewhere round. Get them.”
But he knew, even as Sloane and Doherty hurried off, that the two would have gone. They were minor actors. But their escape was the final straw that brought something like a groan from Gordon Manning. He stiffened, straightened.
After all, the Griffin was not supernatural. Some day, he would slip.
Manning’s mouth was like a closed trap, his eyes glinted, his fists closed as if he felt himself at last at handgrips with the Griffin. Those grips, once made, would not be loosed.
The Men Who Make The Argosy
J. ALLAN DUNN has adventure in his blood. He has wandered across the globe, led on by restless curiosity; he has poked into the world’s strangest corners, he has sailed into unknown ports. He is always looking for the new and the mysterious.
He’s been an artist and a rancher, a miner and a horse wrangler, a pearler, a windjammer’s skipper, a war correspondent, a sugar planter, a prospector and an author. In the course of his travels he has been pretty well shot through with lead and steel; and he’s enjoyed bubonic plague, cholera, and some of the other choice fevers that come out of the tropics.
Mr. Dunn was born in London, England, of Irish parents. That’s probably where he got his magical gift for story telling. He went to Oxford University, and then spent several years traveling through Europe and along the African fringe of the Mediterranean. One day he sailed to India, and, returning, went back across the Equator to South Africa.
He felt the lure of western horizons about that time, and took a steamer for the United States. He finally hit Colorado and tried his hand there at mining and ranching. Hard luck trailed him, however; probably it was fortunate, because Dunn pulled stakes and looked for new worlds. Down, in New Mexico he lived through enough thrilling experiences to satisfy any ordinary man for a lifetime.
He decided to withdraw momentarily from an adventurer’s career, and joined the Salt Lake
Herald
as a reporter. But the Spanish-American war broke out about then, and J. Allan Dunn couldn’t resist the lure of danger. They sent him to Cuba to cover the war.
In tropical Cuba he discovered that a war can be more hard work than glamour. He had to hike twenty-two miles every day between the battle front and the cable office in Siboney, where he sent out dispatches to the papers. There was only one cable going out of Siboney, he relates, and the war correspondents used to toss for turns. Unlucky ones had to sit up until three in the morning to get their stories through.
When the war was over, wanderlust took Dunn to California and to Honolulu. Tall tales of fortunes in pearls in the South Seas sent him down there. Pearling, he discovered, was a lottery. “I lost,” he admits, “but I had a good time.”
He explored New Guinea, that strange land north of Australia where head hunters still roam and death waits for the white man who is bold enough to pierce into the cannibal-inhabited interior. Dunn came out with his head, and his life, happily. He bought a barkentine and sailed up the Yangtze-kiang, and about then another war broke out and gave him an excuse to wander in another strange country.
That was the Russo-Jap war. He covered it for the duration. His side-kick was Jack London. J. Allan Dunn traveled with another man the world well remembers, when he was in the tropics—the famous Richard Harding Davis.
Dunn has made many unique business adventures. Among other things, he has prospected for gold in the Klondike and tried to run a sugar plantation in Hawaii. The only thing that ever paid him, he says, is writing. He has written almost two thousand short stories, numberless novelettes, and between twenty and thirty serials.
Table of Contents
The Crime Master: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & the Griffin, Volume 1