discovered, would startle the countryside. Two men with the savagery of anthropoid apes! He shuddered as he carefully refrained from disturbing those balls.
At last Bentley was quite securely bound, only his lower limbs remaining free so that he could walk, though the length of his steps was strictly limited. His hands were entirely and securely bound, and the significance of this fact did not escape him. Barter knew that he did not need his hands to aid him in walking! Of course the newspaper story released by Doctor Jackson had reported the Colombian ape as being able to walk exactly like a man.
But that didn’t prevent Bentley from nursing the suspicion that Barter already knew. Even if he did, it could in no wise alter the determination of Bentley. His task was to penetrate the hideout of Barter—and he was on the way there now.
With little attempt at concealment the two men led Bentley to a long black closed car outside the park. They met no one. The two men avoided discovery with uncanny ease. Bentley thrilled with excitement. He felt he knew approximately where Barter’s hideout was.
It was useless, to speculate, however; time would show it to him.
Bentley was tossed into the tonneau of the car. His two captors, moving with the precision of men in a trance, took their places in the front seat. Bentley struggled for a time against his bonds. He wanted to sit up and peer out, to see what way they took so that he would know where he was when he reached Barter’s hideout. But of course, even if he shook his bonds free he did not dare rise to a sitting position, for to control the intricate handling of his two puppets, Barter’s attention must have been pretty carefully fixed upon this car.
So Bentley contented himself with waiting.
Lying on his back on the floor of the car he tried to see what he could through the car windows. He knew when he was carried under an elevated system by the crashing roar of trains over his head. He knew he was being carried downtown, but he wasn’t sure that this was the Sixth Avenue elevated.
How could he find out the road they were traveling without sitting up and looking at street signs?
He felt he didn’t dare do that. He’d be as careful as possible on the off-chance that Barter really believed him a Colombian ape, when the benefit of surprise would be with Bentley.
The car progressed downtown at a normal speed. It stopped for red lights and obeyed all other traffic regulations. Barter was taking no chance on losing more of his puppets.
Bentley suddenly gasped with horror as he remembered something. Eighteen important men of Manhattan had been kidnaped that day by Caleb Barter. Would Bentley be forced to watch the mad professor perform the eighteen inevitable operations?
Perspiration poured from every pore as he visualized the horror he might be compelled to witness when he was finally taken into Barter’s hideout. The ape skin clung to him as though it were actually his own. There were even moments when Bentley feared that it might grow to him.
But he put the feeling of horror from him with the thought that if Ellen were in Barter’s power, Barter might even be forcing her to anesthetize for him while he performed his grisly slaughter.
Bentley’s courage returned and now it seemed to him that the journey would never end, so eager was he to discover whether or not Ellen had eluded the hands of the Mind Master.
CHAPTER XII
A Woman of Courage
Caleb Barter smiled warmly at the woman who had come to him almost as though in answer to a prayer. He admired her flashing eyes and the lifted chin which spoke of pride and courage.
“I had thought of improving the feminine strain of the race also,” he told her, but almost as though he spoke to himself, “but I realized that it mattered little the stature of the mothers of the race as long as the fathers were made virile. But if all women were like yourself, Miss Estabrook, the race would not require the improvement it is now my duty to bestow upon it.”
Ellen stared directly into the eyes of the white-haired old man. As she looked at him she found it hard to believe that one so gentle from outward appearances had such a vast, grim power for evil. In repose his face was kindly, though there was something out of character in the fact that it was so apple rosy. And his lips were far too red.
“Where,” she said quietly, fearlessly, “is Lee Bentley?”
Barter raised his eyebrows as he stared back at her. So far she had not looked around at this great room into which he had had her conducted; she had seemed interested only in her mission, whatever that might be.
“You mean that delightfully rude young man?” he asked sardonically.
“You know well enough whom I mean! Where is he?”
“Then he is not to be found in his usual haunts?”
“He has disappeared.”
“And you come out seeking Professor Barter because Bentley his disappeared! It is almost as though you had previously arranged with him to come seeking me if, at a certain time he failed to return from some mysterious rendezvous….”
Barter’s face was now a mask of uncanny shrewdness. In a few words he had pierced through Ellen’s secret of why she had deliberately placed herself in the way of Barter’s minions in order to be taken, and now he had used the words of her own questions to form a weapon against her. Ellen gasped in terror.
Had she made a hideous mistake? Had she, by failing to wait for word from Bentley, ruined all his well laid plans?
Barter now stood before her, his eyes almost shooting fire.
“Tell me quickly,” he began, and for a second she thought he would put his hands on her, “what sort of plan is he making to betray me into the hands of my enemies, who are the enemies of super-civilization because they are my enemies?”
“I know of nothing,” said Ellen stoutly, hoping that she had not, after all, betrayed the fact that she knew Bentley had started to work out an unusual scheme. The details she didn’t know, for Lee hadn’t told her. “But I do know, what all the world knows, that he was helping the police against you. Naturally, then, when he vanished I thought of you. Besides you had already warned him that you would remove him in your own good time. He caused you the loss of two of your puppets and I thought, naturally enough, that you would try to remove him to some place where he could not operate so successfully against you.”
“That’s all?” queried Barter eagerly. “You don’t know of some special scheme that has been worked out to trap me?”
“I know of no scheme. Now that I am in your hands, Professor, what do you intend doing with me?”
Barter stared at Ellen for several minutes.
“I haven’t captured Bentley… yet,” he said at last, slowly, “but I shall—no doubt about that. It is inevitable —as inevitable as Caleb Barter. I can use him in my labors for humanity. How I treat him after he is taken depends somewhat on you. You may therefore consider yourself a sort of hostage. I have much medical work to perform. Have you ever been a nurse?”
Ellen recoiled in horror. “You don’t mean you would ask me to help you perform those horrible—” She stopped abruptly before her sudden tendency to hysterics should make her say things to anger Barter too far.
“So,” he said quickly, “you think my brain operations are horrible, eh? Well, you shall see that they are not horrible; that Professor Barter, the greatest scientist the world has ever produced, is really preparing to prevent civilization from utterly decaying.”
“And afterward?” asked Ellen. “I know that eventually you will be taken and that the people will destroy you, tear you limb from limb. But you will never believe that. Tell me, then, what you plan to do with me.”
For a brief time he considered the matter.
“I am an old man,” he said at last, musingly, “but I am young in spirit and in body. It would be amusing to
