CHAPTER XIVTHE BLOW OF THE HYPNOTIST.
While the polo-teams were battling at New London, Dion Santenel was not idle. Charles Conrad Merriwell, sitting up-stairs in his pleasant front room at the New Haven House, looking over a paper, heard a knock on the door, and a colored boy came in bearing a card.
“Fisher Stokes, stock-broker and mining-agent, Denver, Colorado,” was what Mr. Merriwell read on the card.
“Been waiting for you,” said Merriwell, smiling pleasantly, when “Stokes” was shown into the room.
“Detained by a little business down-town,” the man explained suavely, giving the apartment a comprehensive, sweeping glance out of the corners of his dark eyes before sinking into the chair which Merriwell politely placed for him.
The furnishing was substantial and old-fashioned. In the center of the room was a round-topped table covered with a heavy slab of marble. Between the two windows which looked out on Chapel Street and the green was a long pier-glass. A green velvet carpet covered the floor, and the room was furnished with an abundance of comfortable chairs and a sofa. An alcove bedroom opened off from this main room, its doorway half-concealed by curtains. In addition to this there was a bathroom. The apartments were the best and most expensive in the house, and the house the best that New Haven afforded.
As Fisher Stokes took all this in, he came to the quick conclusion that the white-haired man who had been waiting for him, seated at the round marble-topped center-table, was comfortably situated, to say the least.
“As I had to come on to New York, I wired you that I would call here this afternoon to see you about the shares in the Anaconda group in the Cripple Creek district,” he continued, beginning to open a case which the colored boy had brought into the room. He looked now with his keen, dark eyes at Merriwell pretty much as he had looked at the room and its furnishings.
“I knew you were Merriwell as soon as I saw you. I think I should have known you, even if I had met you by chance in the street, though we have never met before. You see, I had a man in my office who once worked for you in Arizona in a minor capacity. When he found out that I was handling stocks for you, he became so interested that he gave me a complete description of your personal appearance and told so many things concerning you that I have felt for months as if we were personally acquainted. Some of this business might have been conducted by mail and wire, but I thought, as I was so near in New York, that it was a duty I owed to myself and you to run up and see you.”
There was nothing in the man’s appearance to indicate to Merriwell that he was Brandon Drood, alias Dion Santenel, his old and bitter enemy, from whose power he had escaped so short a time before, through the aid of Frank. “Fisher Stokes,” who was evidently past middle age, was almost Frenchy in appearance, with well-waxed mustache and imperial that hid the lines of his thin lips and cold, cruel mouth. His thin, straight form was encased in a dark-gray business suit. A diamond blazed on the middle finger of his left hand and another shone in his scarp-pin. The fiery gleam of the eyes had been subdued and almost banished; and, as he talked, Merriwell noticed that his voice was soft and well modulated. It held nothing of the real accents of Brandon Drood, nor of the droning tones of the pretended Hindu. In all things “Fisher Stokes” seemed to be what he professed to be, a prosperous, alert, rather self-important mining-broker of the West. And, as Mr. Merriwell had never seen the real Fisher Stokes, who was handling Western mining-shares for him, he was the more easily deceived.
“What was the name of the man?” Merriwell asked, at once interested in Drood’s statement; for, like many men who have made themselves immensely wealthy by a lucky turn of fortune, Merriwell was sometimes garrulously fond of recalling and dilating on the past and on the days of his hardships and misfortune.
“Byron Macomber.”
“Ah, yes!”
Mr. Merriwell’s face lighted.
“Macomber was one of my most trusted clerks while I was in Arizona. So he is with you now? I am afraid that I failed to reward him properly for his services to me. Tell him so, please, and that at any time if he needs aid I shall be glad to extend it.”
Santenel had taken the papers from the leathern case and placed them on the table.
Then the fiery gleam came into Santenel’s eyes—those terrible, fascinating, serpentlike eyes—and they glowed and burned, contracting and expanding their pupils, as they eagerly studied the face of Charles Conrad Merriwell.
“So soon!” Santenel mentally croaked. “So soon I have him in my power! And I feared it might be the work of hours. Yes, he is already under my influence and does not know it. I have him again. Ah! Charles Conrad Merriwell! You, who hounded me over the earth until at length I turned at bay, determined to crush you instead of permitting you to crush me, I have you again in my power, and you shall not escape!”
The reflective light began to fade out of the eyes of Mr. Merriwell, to be replaced by a look of vacancy. Then he made a struggle to arouse himself, but the struggle was weak and ineffective. Santenel’s mysterious power was already over him, holding his will in subjection.
And Frank, who had saved him before, was far off in New London, battling with the New London polo-team!
In a little while Santenel began to talk in a low, soothing monotone, still stabbing Merriwell’s face and eyes with his terrible eyes.
“In those days I was not known as Dion Santenel,” he droned, as if seeking to strengthen a memory that he sought to stir in the mind of the man he was subjugating. “Then I was called Brandon Drood. You struck me, you know—struck me like a dog, for cheating you at cards, and I planned a revenge, a sweet revenge. I discovered, as I lay on my bed where your blow had placed me, that I was able to hypnotize you—made the first discovery of the fact that I have that mysterious power over other men. I used it. I made you imprison yourself in that tunnel in the Ragged Queen Mine, where I supposed you would die. But you found a way out. You regained possession of what I thought a used-out mine, which you named the Lost Man, and from which you dug a fortune. Then, with that wealth at your back, you began to hound me, pursuing me everywhere, dragging me down when I climbed to affluence and striking at me without mercy. But now my time has come! The worm has turned. I have studied and plotted and planned for this hour. For this hour I have made myself all men—coming and going with the silence of night and like the changing characters on the theater boards. All for this hour! What have I not suffered, endured? For this hour! For this hour!”
The dilating and contracting pupils seemed miniature furnaces with their shooting flames, and the words lulled Merriwell as the crooning lullaby of a mother lulls to sleep the babe.
“You are in my power, and you will do as I wish!” Santenel said at length, ceasing that low droning.
He arose and locked the door, turning the key in the lock and hanging a cloth over it to keep out any penetrating gaze, though the position of the door made it most unlikely that any one could see where Merriwell sat, bolt upright now in the chair.
Coming back, Santenel made a pass with his hands over Merriwell’s face, commanded him to rouse up, and Merriwell sat up yawning as if he had been aroused from a nap. He looked at Santenel with vacant curiosity.
“Now as to that business,” said Santenel, spreading out some blank paper on the marble-topped table and producing pen and ink.
“Oh, yes,” said Merriwell. “Let me see, I forgot what it was?”
“This is the last day of your life, you know! When the sun rises to-morrow, Charles Conrad Merriwell will have ceased to exist. Aye! before the sun goes down in the west to-night—goes down where the Ragged Queen was and the Lost Man Mine now is—you will be gone from this world!”
“Yes, yes!” Merriwell assented, without a note of fear or regret in his voice. “That was what brought you here? I had forgotten, but that was it.”
“But before you go I want you to write a statement, which will show the world why you go and what is to become of some of your property—a great deal of your property.”
“Yes, yes!” Merriwell again assented.
Santenel produced a book of bank-checks which he had previously filled in. There were many of them, all for large amounts, and bearing various dates, some as much as six months before.
“You are not so wealthy as the world thinks you, when your debts are paid! My commissions for kiting the Blue Bird mining-stock for you were one hundred thousand dollars. It was no fault of mine that the Blue Bird was a worthless hole in the ground. You knew that, and I was only pushing your ventures. You lost, but you gave me two notes of fifty thousand each for my commission.”
He pushed out two notes, which Merriwell merely stared at.
“Then I took up and developed the Golden Nugget, at a cost to you of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, every cent of which I paid out of my own pocket, though for business reasons we permitted the world to think you advanced the money yourself. The Golden Nugget had no golden nuggets in it, and you lost; but, of course, I must have my money, and you gave me two more notes for that, each of seventy-five thousand dollars.”
He pushed them over, properly filled out, bearing interest, and a date of five months previous.
“Then there was that big deal in Rocky Mountain coal land, and all those other deals which you so readily remember. The whole of it amounts to eight hundred thousand dollars, and I should make it two millions if I wasn’t afraid of the courts. Sometimes a man’s desire to suddenly enrich himself bumps him up against the courts, and he loses all that he hoped to gain and more, too. Your son Frank is a fighter!”
These last remarks seemed to be directed to himself and not to Merriwell, and Merriwell appeared not to hear them.
Santenel slowly pushed the prepared notes across the table and reached out the pen to Merriwell, the latter taking it without hesitation.
“You will sign these notes; after which you will prepare a written statement of the reasons which led you to take a sudden departure from this earthly sphere!”
Merriwell drew the notes to him, not noticing that they were drawn payable to another name than that of “Fisher Stokes,” and, dipping the pen in the ink-well, he proceeded to append his name.
Santenel dried the ink of the signatures with a blotter and placed the notes in a little heap on the marble table. Then he shoved a sheet of paper to Merriwell and commanded him to write.
“This is what you are to say,” commanded Santenel, and Charles Conrad Merriwell set his pen to the paper:
“To my son Frank.
“Dear Frank: The only regret I have is in leaving you, for I know that you love me and that you will be shocked and grieved at my death, the death of a suicide. But life has become unbearable to me. I can stand it no longer. I have studiously concealed this from you, though I fear sometimes that you have read it in my face. I am in good mental health; but I have ceased to have any desire to live. You have sometimes noticed idiosyncrasies in me. The attempt to hide from you my real feelings and my heart-sickness of the world will go far toward explaining them. I hope that my body will not be cast up by the waves, and that if it should be, it may lie unburied, though this last I know you will not permit. Pay all my debts. I have some notes outstanding, among others some heavy ones occasioned by wildcat mining speculation. These I must ask you to meet. The rest of my fortune is yours. So good-by; don’t think too hard of me, and do not grieve, for I am not worthy of it.
“Your unfortunate father,
“Charles Conrad Merriwell.”
This was properly dated.
“We will leave that here on the table—or, rather, you will; and then you will do what I tell you. Just a plunge, and it will all be over. Any man might crave so easy an exit from the world!”
He was again fixing his terrible eyes on the now almost vacant face of Frank’s father, thinking at the same time of the steps he must now take to carry out his plan to its conclusion and secure his own safety.
“You will do all that I tell you?”
“Yes,” Merriwell answered. “Everything!”