Chapter XXV.The EmperorDuring the next few seconds we put in the hottest bit of work of the entire evening.They came very close to rushing us at the start. I have a confused recollection of a mass of murderous-looking ruffians bearing down on us, firing as they came, while the table behind which we were sheltered cracked incessantly with the smack of their bullets.My own revolver was full again fortunately, and the Chief’s seemed to be also, for we shot into the crowd of them again and again, bringing a man down with almost every shot.But they kept on, and when they reached the table my revolver was empty. I jumped to my feet and dashed the butt of it between the eyes of a big Russian. His face streamed blood at the blow and he leapt back with a yell of pain, bearing back the men behind him. At the same moment the Chief got his second gun into action and fired past me as fast as he could work the trigger, his shots seeming to follow one another in a steady stream.For a moment they fell back and I crouched down behind the table again, fumbling in my pocket for fresh cartridges and cursing my clumsy fingers. Then there was a yell from behind me as the two guards from the banquet room rushed up, and four revolvers began to stream death over our shoulders into the huddled mass of men ahead of us. A moment later other revolvers began to crack from the different doorways, as the Chief’s forces came running back to the hall in response to his whistle.And suddenly the men ahead of us broke and dashed, yelling, from the open doorway into the corridor which led to the room of the voices, leaving eight or ten of their numbers silent and motionless, or still convulsed with agony, on the floor in front of us.Revolvers were still cracking near at hand, however, and I looked beyond our fallen foes and realized suddenly that I was gazing out into the night. The two sections of the wall that had opened inward like folding doors disclosed a short wide hallway beyond them. And beyond that was what looked like the original wide front door of the house. Two or three of the enemy were still sheltering behind the edges of this doorway, and firing, not at us but out into the night. Beyond them I could see the dark outlines of trees. And in among these trees I could make out the occasional spitting flash of a revolver. Evidently our reënforcements had arrived, had met with resistance and had driven the Emperor’s forces in upon us.This time the Chief was mad clear through. “Get back to that room, you two, and guard those girls,” he shouted. Then he raised his revolvers, which he had managed to reload somehow, and began calmly picking off the men in the doorway.At the same moment our fellows outside, who had heard the Chief’s whistle, decided to rush the place. For there came a crescendo of shots from closer at hand, and suddenly the last of the defenders of the doorway pitched forward on his face and the little hallway was full of our men.“Come on, you men, clean this place up!” yelled the Chief. “Shoot them down and shoot to kill. We’ve lost enough men over this business!” He pointed into the corridor. “After them!” he shouted.As I remarked once before, I think, the Chief was a good man to have on one’s side, but a bad opponent. He certainly looked dangerous enough at this moment, for his gray hair was streaked with blood from a scalp wound, his coat was torn and bloody in two places on the shoulders, where bullets had grazed him above the edge of the table, and his eyes blazed with energy and anger, while his mouth was a mere slit in a grim and formidable jaw.I stepped over to him. “The gas!” I shouted. “Don’t let our men——”Instantly he jumped for the corridor, blowing his whistle as he went. I followed at his heels.But there was little need. We met the Chief’s forces returning, awe writ large on their faces. And down the hall beyond them, the open door into the room of the voices disclosed a number of our late enemies lying huddled on the floor of that deadly room in the same attitudes in which they had fallen as the gas overcame them. It seemed that the first one of our men who had followed them into the room to investigate, had been overcome by the gas himself and had been hauled out again by a couple of venturesome companions, holding their noses by way of a safeguard. By the time we reached him he had fully recovered again. For once the Emperor had played into our hands, it seemed.As soon as the Chief had assured himself that the men in the room of the voices were not playing ’possum, he directed six or eight of his now numerous forces to dash into the room, haul out the enemy one by one and tie them up. That done he turned back to me again.“Come on, Clayton, we’ll tackle that staircase now—and we’ll take a couple of others with us, while the rest of them finish cleaning up the place.”He blew his whistle then, and the men, some of whom had scattered again, gathered around him. “Now, you men, finish the job and capture every one else you find alive, unless they put up a fight. We’ve broken the back of this business and there’s no need for any more bloodshed. Keep an eye out for prisoners too. They may have some of our friends still locked up here. I want a couple of you to join those fellows in the dining-room there and take those men into custody. Tie them up if necessary. And tell the girls that they can go and get dressed if they want to. Burke and Tallman, I want you to follow me. That’s all. The rest of you go to it.”With that we started back across the hall again, followed by two of the Chief’s men, and made our way to the foot of the little staircase leading to the floor above. Looking up that little staircase, there was nothing but a velvety blackness to be seen, and I confess that the effect was not inviting.However, we did not stop to talk about it, but, with the Chief and me in the lead, started up the stairs into the silence and darkness above. The men with us had torches, and they took these out and flashed them ahead of us, showing up the walls of a narrow corridor at the top of the staircase. As we mounted higher we could see that many closed doors led off this corridor, doors heavily built and with a certain forbidding quality, although the latter may have been only my imagination.At any rate we passed into the corridor without incident, and the Chief set the two men with us to breaking down the doors as we came to them.On this floor too, rooms, intersecting passages and unexpected entrances formed a positive maze, leading a man sometimes far afield and sometimes back to his starting-place, none the wiser. However, if one of the men with us was away exploring for more than a moment or two, the Chief blew his whistle and guided him back again. But for the first few moments it seemed as though we were the only living things on that floor.However, we had a stroke of luck at last. One of the Chief’s men was struggling with a small, heavy and heavily secured door a little way along a side passage, when I heard a commotion in that direction which set my blood racing. For there was no mistaking the rich brogue of that bitterly denunciatory voice.“Do but let me out av ut, ye divils,” I heard in tones almost tearful with rage, “and I’ll tache ye. Do but lave me get my hands on ye——”I jumped forward and joined the man at the door. “Larry,” I called, “is that you?”There came a distinctly audible gasp from behind the door. “Shur, sor, is that yersilf? I thought it was thim dirty knav—— But did they get ye, too, sor? Can ye let me out to ye and we’ll go after thim together.”“Hold on, Larry,” I answered, stifling a strong desire to burst out laughing, partly with relief to find him alive and partly at his simple philosophy, “hold on and we’ll get you out of it in a minute. We’ve taken the place and all’s well.”A moment or two later the lock snapped and the door swung open, and a wild-eyed, wildly disheveled and almost naked Larry burst out upon us.In a rushing spate of words he told us that they had as good as tortured him to glean the facts about myself and my connection with the Secret Service. But there was little that he did know and he had not told that. However, he had been locked up ever since they took him, and he had seen no one of our friends in the place. He was painfully apologetic about Natalie, but I deferred that explanation until our work was over. And with Larry in our wake we took up our search again. I had a warm glow in my heart, though, to find that nothing had happened to the beggar, for I was fonder of Larry than I had realized until after his capture.At the end of the original corridor we found a heavy door, and beneath the edge of it a steady light was shining. We came upon it suddenly, as the corridor took a sharp turn at this point.When the Chief saw the light he held us back by putting out his arms. One of the men flashed his torch on to the lock, and we saw that the key was in the door and on our side. But the sight of the light made us hesitate for a moment.Then, suddenly, I leaned over to the Chief and whispered in his ear. “Chief, this must be just about over the room of the voices. We turned to the left once, you know, and then to the right again. And we’ve gone just about that far.”“By Jove, you’re right,” the Chief whispered back. “Well, here goes, anyway!” And he stepped forward, tried the handle gently and then abruptly flung open the door.Our eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and the bright light revealed by the open door blinded us for a moment. But as we grew accustomed to the glare we realized that we were staring into a regular laboratory. Glass jars, retorts, burners, queer-looking glass vessels and huge metal tanks something like those used for compressed air lined the walls on all four sides. And there were other types of apparatus with which I was totally unfamiliar.But we had no time and no inclination for studying the inert contents of the room. For in the center of the floor stood a figure, impassively facing us, that struck a distinct chill to my heart at least. And by the way the others stopped in their tracks, I imagine they felt the same.It was the figure of a man, tightly bandaged from neck to foot in black silk, so that only the face showed. But such a face!Without the eyes, the thin, pallid countenance, hairless and deeply lined, seemed to express an abysmal melancholy, but a melancholy that held no human warmth. The mouth was thin and wide, the nose high arched and almost hooked, and the cheekbones unusually high. The face shadowed forth, to me at least, standing, staring in the doorway, inhuman composure, inhuman cruelty out of sheer indifference rather than sensuality, and an inhuman weariness.But beneath heavy brows looked out eyes that caused the rest of the strange countenance to pale into insignificance. They were pale blue eyes, I think, and they had the flat quality of unglazed china. But in their depths leapt and glowed a strength, a force and a relentless ambition and conscious power that kept us standing there like a pack of children.The pale eyes swept over us slowly, lingering on my face and then slowly swerving to the Chief. In that moment eye to eye I confess I felt an absurd desire to find a hole somewhere, crawl into it and pull it in after me. For the man’s gaze was positively hypnotic. But the moment his eyes left mine for the Chief, I tore my own eyes away from his face to his body and so broke the spell.Each limb was wrapped tightly in spiral turns of soft black silk, and the same individual material and arrangement swathed his body. But limbs and body were slight enough and this style of dress enhanced this smallness. A moment after his eyes left mine he spoke—and we stood silent like children and listened.“Ah, ——,” he said slowly, addressing the Chief by name, “so you have found me. Clayton was a good man for you because he is—fortunate. If it had not been for his good fortune and the fact that I was—badly served, the positions would certainly have been reversed—and before long. However, you have broken into my poor house and—I must leave it. Have you anything to say to me before I go?”The Chief took a step forward, and I saw him shake himself roughly as though to throw off the effect of the man’s personality. “We’ll talk about that presently,” he said roughly. “Do you surrender?”A slow smile crept over the face of the man before us, a smile so utterly mirthless and inhuman that I instinctively drew back at the sight of it. “Surrender?” he answered slowly. “I shall never do that, to you or any man. But I have been badly served here, and I am fatigued with the dense stupidity of man. To-night I am—going elsewhere—but not with you. Have you anything further to say?”The Chief drew his revolver and pointed it at the still figure. “Throw up your hands!” he shouted hoarsely, “or I’ll shoot you down like a dog!” And it seemed to me that the Chief’s voice shook a little in spite of him But no words could ever fully describe the inhuman quality and the amazing sense of power which emanated from this black figure, standing quietly before us. It was no wonder that Ivanovitch and Vining, two such dissimilar types, had been willing to serve this so-called Emperor of theirs. I do not blame the Chief in the least, for I felt just the same, only probably more so.The man in black slowly folded his arms, smiling slightly. “Shoot, then,” he laughed. “It will be amusing!”The muscles tightened all over my body in anticipation of the coming shot. But for some reason the Chief stood there, staring at the figure, and pointing his revolver still, but making no apparent attempt to pull the trigger.The Chief told me afterwards that he had hesitated out of sheer curiosity and a desire to take the man alive and learn more about his plans. Perhaps that is true, or perhaps this Emperor succeeded in hypnotizing his enemy and rendering him powerless to shoot. I know that I would have hesitated to shoot, in his place, out of sheer respect for power.But there was one member of our party who had suffered at this man’s hands and who was actuated by no such scruples. There was a little pause, as I have said, and then suddenly Larry leapt forward, slipped the revolver out of the Chief’s hand and sent three shots in quick succession into the figure before us.The banging of the revolver echoed in the room, to the accompaniment of a crash of falling glass, and the figure disappeared as though it had dissolved into thin air. We had been staring into a rimless, skillfully arranged mirror. The man with whom we had been talking had been close beside us in the room on the other side of a screen and had projected his voice in some way to come from the vicinity of the mirror.All this we realized far quicker than it takes to tell it. And with a roar of rage the Chief dashed into the room, with us at his heels. At the same moment there came a hollow, contemptuous laugh from the side of the room and a door opened and closed again quickly.Without waiting to call directions to his men this time, the Chief dashed for this door and attempted to snatch it open. It resisted his efforts, and I stepped back a little so that he could open it with his jemmy. But the Chief was too much in earnest to stop even for that. He too stepped back. And then he flung himself at that door like a full-back two yards from the goal.One of the panels gave way with a loud crack and the Chief stuck his hand through the hole left by the panel and unlocked the door from the other side.“Come on,” he shouted, and he jerked open the door and flung himself through it, with me close behind him. Then he cried out and I heard the thud of a heavy fall. The next moment I realized that there was no floor in the darkness beneath my feet.I began to tumble head over heels down a flight of stairs in the darkness, bringing up against a door at the bottom with a bang that shook the breath out of me. And it seemed to me, during that fall, that every time I touched a step it was either on my head where the bullet had creased me, or on my wounded shoulder. I know that it was the shoulder that hit the door at the bottom first.The Chief had come to a stop just before me. Indeed he partly broke my fall. He jumped to his feet at once and started fumbling with this second door, but in spite of his haste I could hear him chuckling to himself over my few well-chosen remarks about those stairs and that door.A moment later there came another crack and this second door flew open like the first. I rolled out into the open air, beneath the open sky, and jumped to my feet.The Chief caught my arm. “There he goes,” he shouted. Then he started to run into the night.Sure enough, in the starlight I could make out a figure walking quickly away from us. At the Chief’s shout it began to run. And taking a long breath I began to run also.The man ahead ran on for perhaps a hundred feet or so and then suddenly darted into the doorway of a low stone building. As the Chief and I drew closer, I gave a sudden shout, for I remembered that low building only too well. It was the place in which I had been imprisoned and in which I had killed Ivanovitch and his satellite.We had gained rapidly on the figure ahead during that run, and the latter had had to pause to get the door open, so that we were close behind him when he finally disappeared into the building. He slammed the door in our faces, but it did not lock. We got it open almost at once, and as it swung outward, a dazzling glare sprang up from the middle of the room beyond. The cylinder there had suddenly flashed into dazzling fire.I shaded my eyes as well as I could from the glare, and presently I realized that a man was crouching in a corner by the big machine which operated the cylinder. But the glare held us stationary on the threshold for a moment, and while we hesitated, the man by the machine darted forward and flung open the side of the cylinder which opened toward us. In the bright light I could see the swathed black silk about the slender limbs.Before the searing heat that sprang out at us the Chief and I shrank back a step or two. At the same moment the man we pursued sent forth a wailing shriek that I shall remember as long as I live and suddenly leapt through the opening into the heart of the cylinder.For an instant our straining eyes saw him glow suddenly red and almost transparent, in a bower of leaping, licking flames. Then we turned hastily away. When we looked back again, only the glowing cylinder and the searing heat remained.As the miserable man leapt into the cylinder there had come a rush of feet from behind us. And I recovered from the shock of such a terrible death to the consciousness that some one was plucking at my arm.“Clayton! Clayton! And you, Chief! For God’s sake come away! Come out! Quick!” It was Moore’s voice.We turned and stumbled out of the building in response to the urgency in Moore’s tone. But we had taken hardly three steps from the door when there came a tremendous flash of light, followed by a roar that seemed to shake the world. With it, something crashed against my chest and I fell to the ground.“Chief,” I called faintly, “get Natalie——” and then darkness swooped down upon me.I have a vague recollection of regaining at least partial consciousness some time later. I seemed to be lying full length on a couch in a brightly lighted room, and I was struggling in some way with a racking, searing agony in my chest. It seemed to me, too, that Natalie was kneeling beside me, her lovely face pressed close to mine.But it was only a vague impression before I plunged back and down again into terrible, endless darkness.
During the next few seconds we put in the hottest bit of work of the entire evening.
They came very close to rushing us at the start. I have a confused recollection of a mass of murderous-looking ruffians bearing down on us, firing as they came, while the table behind which we were sheltered cracked incessantly with the smack of their bullets.
My own revolver was full again fortunately, and the Chief’s seemed to be also, for we shot into the crowd of them again and again, bringing a man down with almost every shot.
But they kept on, and when they reached the table my revolver was empty. I jumped to my feet and dashed the butt of it between the eyes of a big Russian. His face streamed blood at the blow and he leapt back with a yell of pain, bearing back the men behind him. At the same moment the Chief got his second gun into action and fired past me as fast as he could work the trigger, his shots seeming to follow one another in a steady stream.
For a moment they fell back and I crouched down behind the table again, fumbling in my pocket for fresh cartridges and cursing my clumsy fingers. Then there was a yell from behind me as the two guards from the banquet room rushed up, and four revolvers began to stream death over our shoulders into the huddled mass of men ahead of us. A moment later other revolvers began to crack from the different doorways, as the Chief’s forces came running back to the hall in response to his whistle.
And suddenly the men ahead of us broke and dashed, yelling, from the open doorway into the corridor which led to the room of the voices, leaving eight or ten of their numbers silent and motionless, or still convulsed with agony, on the floor in front of us.
Revolvers were still cracking near at hand, however, and I looked beyond our fallen foes and realized suddenly that I was gazing out into the night. The two sections of the wall that had opened inward like folding doors disclosed a short wide hallway beyond them. And beyond that was what looked like the original wide front door of the house. Two or three of the enemy were still sheltering behind the edges of this doorway, and firing, not at us but out into the night. Beyond them I could see the dark outlines of trees. And in among these trees I could make out the occasional spitting flash of a revolver. Evidently our reënforcements had arrived, had met with resistance and had driven the Emperor’s forces in upon us.
This time the Chief was mad clear through. “Get back to that room, you two, and guard those girls,” he shouted. Then he raised his revolvers, which he had managed to reload somehow, and began calmly picking off the men in the doorway.
At the same moment our fellows outside, who had heard the Chief’s whistle, decided to rush the place. For there came a crescendo of shots from closer at hand, and suddenly the last of the defenders of the doorway pitched forward on his face and the little hallway was full of our men.
“Come on, you men, clean this place up!” yelled the Chief. “Shoot them down and shoot to kill. We’ve lost enough men over this business!” He pointed into the corridor. “After them!” he shouted.
As I remarked once before, I think, the Chief was a good man to have on one’s side, but a bad opponent. He certainly looked dangerous enough at this moment, for his gray hair was streaked with blood from a scalp wound, his coat was torn and bloody in two places on the shoulders, where bullets had grazed him above the edge of the table, and his eyes blazed with energy and anger, while his mouth was a mere slit in a grim and formidable jaw.
I stepped over to him. “The gas!” I shouted. “Don’t let our men——”
Instantly he jumped for the corridor, blowing his whistle as he went. I followed at his heels.
But there was little need. We met the Chief’s forces returning, awe writ large on their faces. And down the hall beyond them, the open door into the room of the voices disclosed a number of our late enemies lying huddled on the floor of that deadly room in the same attitudes in which they had fallen as the gas overcame them. It seemed that the first one of our men who had followed them into the room to investigate, had been overcome by the gas himself and had been hauled out again by a couple of venturesome companions, holding their noses by way of a safeguard. By the time we reached him he had fully recovered again. For once the Emperor had played into our hands, it seemed.
As soon as the Chief had assured himself that the men in the room of the voices were not playing ’possum, he directed six or eight of his now numerous forces to dash into the room, haul out the enemy one by one and tie them up. That done he turned back to me again.
“Come on, Clayton, we’ll tackle that staircase now—and we’ll take a couple of others with us, while the rest of them finish cleaning up the place.”
He blew his whistle then, and the men, some of whom had scattered again, gathered around him. “Now, you men, finish the job and capture every one else you find alive, unless they put up a fight. We’ve broken the back of this business and there’s no need for any more bloodshed. Keep an eye out for prisoners too. They may have some of our friends still locked up here. I want a couple of you to join those fellows in the dining-room there and take those men into custody. Tie them up if necessary. And tell the girls that they can go and get dressed if they want to. Burke and Tallman, I want you to follow me. That’s all. The rest of you go to it.”
With that we started back across the hall again, followed by two of the Chief’s men, and made our way to the foot of the little staircase leading to the floor above. Looking up that little staircase, there was nothing but a velvety blackness to be seen, and I confess that the effect was not inviting.
However, we did not stop to talk about it, but, with the Chief and me in the lead, started up the stairs into the silence and darkness above. The men with us had torches, and they took these out and flashed them ahead of us, showing up the walls of a narrow corridor at the top of the staircase. As we mounted higher we could see that many closed doors led off this corridor, doors heavily built and with a certain forbidding quality, although the latter may have been only my imagination.
At any rate we passed into the corridor without incident, and the Chief set the two men with us to breaking down the doors as we came to them.
On this floor too, rooms, intersecting passages and unexpected entrances formed a positive maze, leading a man sometimes far afield and sometimes back to his starting-place, none the wiser. However, if one of the men with us was away exploring for more than a moment or two, the Chief blew his whistle and guided him back again. But for the first few moments it seemed as though we were the only living things on that floor.
However, we had a stroke of luck at last. One of the Chief’s men was struggling with a small, heavy and heavily secured door a little way along a side passage, when I heard a commotion in that direction which set my blood racing. For there was no mistaking the rich brogue of that bitterly denunciatory voice.
“Do but let me out av ut, ye divils,” I heard in tones almost tearful with rage, “and I’ll tache ye. Do but lave me get my hands on ye——”
I jumped forward and joined the man at the door. “Larry,” I called, “is that you?”
There came a distinctly audible gasp from behind the door. “Shur, sor, is that yersilf? I thought it was thim dirty knav—— But did they get ye, too, sor? Can ye let me out to ye and we’ll go after thim together.”
“Hold on, Larry,” I answered, stifling a strong desire to burst out laughing, partly with relief to find him alive and partly at his simple philosophy, “hold on and we’ll get you out of it in a minute. We’ve taken the place and all’s well.”
A moment or two later the lock snapped and the door swung open, and a wild-eyed, wildly disheveled and almost naked Larry burst out upon us.
In a rushing spate of words he told us that they had as good as tortured him to glean the facts about myself and my connection with the Secret Service. But there was little that he did know and he had not told that. However, he had been locked up ever since they took him, and he had seen no one of our friends in the place. He was painfully apologetic about Natalie, but I deferred that explanation until our work was over. And with Larry in our wake we took up our search again. I had a warm glow in my heart, though, to find that nothing had happened to the beggar, for I was fonder of Larry than I had realized until after his capture.
At the end of the original corridor we found a heavy door, and beneath the edge of it a steady light was shining. We came upon it suddenly, as the corridor took a sharp turn at this point.
When the Chief saw the light he held us back by putting out his arms. One of the men flashed his torch on to the lock, and we saw that the key was in the door and on our side. But the sight of the light made us hesitate for a moment.
Then, suddenly, I leaned over to the Chief and whispered in his ear. “Chief, this must be just about over the room of the voices. We turned to the left once, you know, and then to the right again. And we’ve gone just about that far.”
“By Jove, you’re right,” the Chief whispered back. “Well, here goes, anyway!” And he stepped forward, tried the handle gently and then abruptly flung open the door.
Our eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and the bright light revealed by the open door blinded us for a moment. But as we grew accustomed to the glare we realized that we were staring into a regular laboratory. Glass jars, retorts, burners, queer-looking glass vessels and huge metal tanks something like those used for compressed air lined the walls on all four sides. And there were other types of apparatus with which I was totally unfamiliar.
But we had no time and no inclination for studying the inert contents of the room. For in the center of the floor stood a figure, impassively facing us, that struck a distinct chill to my heart at least. And by the way the others stopped in their tracks, I imagine they felt the same.
It was the figure of a man, tightly bandaged from neck to foot in black silk, so that only the face showed. But such a face!
Without the eyes, the thin, pallid countenance, hairless and deeply lined, seemed to express an abysmal melancholy, but a melancholy that held no human warmth. The mouth was thin and wide, the nose high arched and almost hooked, and the cheekbones unusually high. The face shadowed forth, to me at least, standing, staring in the doorway, inhuman composure, inhuman cruelty out of sheer indifference rather than sensuality, and an inhuman weariness.
But beneath heavy brows looked out eyes that caused the rest of the strange countenance to pale into insignificance. They were pale blue eyes, I think, and they had the flat quality of unglazed china. But in their depths leapt and glowed a strength, a force and a relentless ambition and conscious power that kept us standing there like a pack of children.
The pale eyes swept over us slowly, lingering on my face and then slowly swerving to the Chief. In that moment eye to eye I confess I felt an absurd desire to find a hole somewhere, crawl into it and pull it in after me. For the man’s gaze was positively hypnotic. But the moment his eyes left mine for the Chief, I tore my own eyes away from his face to his body and so broke the spell.
Each limb was wrapped tightly in spiral turns of soft black silk, and the same individual material and arrangement swathed his body. But limbs and body were slight enough and this style of dress enhanced this smallness. A moment after his eyes left mine he spoke—and we stood silent like children and listened.
“Ah, ——,” he said slowly, addressing the Chief by name, “so you have found me. Clayton was a good man for you because he is—fortunate. If it had not been for his good fortune and the fact that I was—badly served, the positions would certainly have been reversed—and before long. However, you have broken into my poor house and—I must leave it. Have you anything to say to me before I go?”
The Chief took a step forward, and I saw him shake himself roughly as though to throw off the effect of the man’s personality. “We’ll talk about that presently,” he said roughly. “Do you surrender?”
A slow smile crept over the face of the man before us, a smile so utterly mirthless and inhuman that I instinctively drew back at the sight of it. “Surrender?” he answered slowly. “I shall never do that, to you or any man. But I have been badly served here, and I am fatigued with the dense stupidity of man. To-night I am—going elsewhere—but not with you. Have you anything further to say?”
The Chief drew his revolver and pointed it at the still figure. “Throw up your hands!” he shouted hoarsely, “or I’ll shoot you down like a dog!” And it seemed to me that the Chief’s voice shook a little in spite of him But no words could ever fully describe the inhuman quality and the amazing sense of power which emanated from this black figure, standing quietly before us. It was no wonder that Ivanovitch and Vining, two such dissimilar types, had been willing to serve this so-called Emperor of theirs. I do not blame the Chief in the least, for I felt just the same, only probably more so.
The man in black slowly folded his arms, smiling slightly. “Shoot, then,” he laughed. “It will be amusing!”
The muscles tightened all over my body in anticipation of the coming shot. But for some reason the Chief stood there, staring at the figure, and pointing his revolver still, but making no apparent attempt to pull the trigger.
The Chief told me afterwards that he had hesitated out of sheer curiosity and a desire to take the man alive and learn more about his plans. Perhaps that is true, or perhaps this Emperor succeeded in hypnotizing his enemy and rendering him powerless to shoot. I know that I would have hesitated to shoot, in his place, out of sheer respect for power.
But there was one member of our party who had suffered at this man’s hands and who was actuated by no such scruples. There was a little pause, as I have said, and then suddenly Larry leapt forward, slipped the revolver out of the Chief’s hand and sent three shots in quick succession into the figure before us.
The banging of the revolver echoed in the room, to the accompaniment of a crash of falling glass, and the figure disappeared as though it had dissolved into thin air. We had been staring into a rimless, skillfully arranged mirror. The man with whom we had been talking had been close beside us in the room on the other side of a screen and had projected his voice in some way to come from the vicinity of the mirror.
All this we realized far quicker than it takes to tell it. And with a roar of rage the Chief dashed into the room, with us at his heels. At the same moment there came a hollow, contemptuous laugh from the side of the room and a door opened and closed again quickly.
Without waiting to call directions to his men this time, the Chief dashed for this door and attempted to snatch it open. It resisted his efforts, and I stepped back a little so that he could open it with his jemmy. But the Chief was too much in earnest to stop even for that. He too stepped back. And then he flung himself at that door like a full-back two yards from the goal.
One of the panels gave way with a loud crack and the Chief stuck his hand through the hole left by the panel and unlocked the door from the other side.
“Come on,” he shouted, and he jerked open the door and flung himself through it, with me close behind him. Then he cried out and I heard the thud of a heavy fall. The next moment I realized that there was no floor in the darkness beneath my feet.
I began to tumble head over heels down a flight of stairs in the darkness, bringing up against a door at the bottom with a bang that shook the breath out of me. And it seemed to me, during that fall, that every time I touched a step it was either on my head where the bullet had creased me, or on my wounded shoulder. I know that it was the shoulder that hit the door at the bottom first.
The Chief had come to a stop just before me. Indeed he partly broke my fall. He jumped to his feet at once and started fumbling with this second door, but in spite of his haste I could hear him chuckling to himself over my few well-chosen remarks about those stairs and that door.
A moment later there came another crack and this second door flew open like the first. I rolled out into the open air, beneath the open sky, and jumped to my feet.
The Chief caught my arm. “There he goes,” he shouted. Then he started to run into the night.
Sure enough, in the starlight I could make out a figure walking quickly away from us. At the Chief’s shout it began to run. And taking a long breath I began to run also.
The man ahead ran on for perhaps a hundred feet or so and then suddenly darted into the doorway of a low stone building. As the Chief and I drew closer, I gave a sudden shout, for I remembered that low building only too well. It was the place in which I had been imprisoned and in which I had killed Ivanovitch and his satellite.
We had gained rapidly on the figure ahead during that run, and the latter had had to pause to get the door open, so that we were close behind him when he finally disappeared into the building. He slammed the door in our faces, but it did not lock. We got it open almost at once, and as it swung outward, a dazzling glare sprang up from the middle of the room beyond. The cylinder there had suddenly flashed into dazzling fire.
I shaded my eyes as well as I could from the glare, and presently I realized that a man was crouching in a corner by the big machine which operated the cylinder. But the glare held us stationary on the threshold for a moment, and while we hesitated, the man by the machine darted forward and flung open the side of the cylinder which opened toward us. In the bright light I could see the swathed black silk about the slender limbs.
Before the searing heat that sprang out at us the Chief and I shrank back a step or two. At the same moment the man we pursued sent forth a wailing shriek that I shall remember as long as I live and suddenly leapt through the opening into the heart of the cylinder.
For an instant our straining eyes saw him glow suddenly red and almost transparent, in a bower of leaping, licking flames. Then we turned hastily away. When we looked back again, only the glowing cylinder and the searing heat remained.
As the miserable man leapt into the cylinder there had come a rush of feet from behind us. And I recovered from the shock of such a terrible death to the consciousness that some one was plucking at my arm.
“Clayton! Clayton! And you, Chief! For God’s sake come away! Come out! Quick!” It was Moore’s voice.
We turned and stumbled out of the building in response to the urgency in Moore’s tone. But we had taken hardly three steps from the door when there came a tremendous flash of light, followed by a roar that seemed to shake the world. With it, something crashed against my chest and I fell to the ground.
“Chief,” I called faintly, “get Natalie——” and then darkness swooped down upon me.
I have a vague recollection of regaining at least partial consciousness some time later. I seemed to be lying full length on a couch in a brightly lighted room, and I was struggling in some way with a racking, searing agony in my chest. It seemed to me, too, that Natalie was kneeling beside me, her lovely face pressed close to mine.
But it was only a vague impression before I plunged back and down again into terrible, endless darkness.