A sudden snarl came to his lips as he saw the faces about him. He rose unsteadily to his feet, but two cops stepped forward and held him.
“We’ve got you, Roeber,” said Chief Baxter harshly. “Caught you with the goods. You’re the devil who stole the apes so you could bleed the people of Branford. But we’ve got you now. Commissioner Traub landed you nicely.”
“Traub!”
The name came from Roeber’s lips like a cry. He turned, saw Agent “X,” and his mouth dropped. Then the blazing light of fury came into his eyes. He raised his hand, spoke with seething venom.
“Traub! He’s the man who worked with me all the time! He’s just trying to save his own dirty skin. He’s in the same boat as I am.”
Eyes turned toward Agent “X.” He waited tensely.
“I can prove it,” said Roeber. “I’ve got letters from him; I know his past! We went into this thing together. He’s the one who found out at the institute what Hornaday was doing.”
Roeber came closer, dragging the cops after him. His sneering, mocking face was close to the Agent’s.
“Deny it if you can, Traub!” he snarled. “You can’t get out of it this way. You thought you could double-cross me, but you can’t. You know about me, but I know about you, too. When you helped me practice in Branford under a fake name after I’d stopped doctoring gangsters; when you introduced me to all the swells and said I was a big society doctor, you didn’t do it for love. I forced you to do it by finding out you were a crooked politician and threatening to expose you. I’ve got pals to prove that. You’re in it up to your neck just as I am.”
The Agent did not attempt to reply. He could not even afford to submit to police investigation. He could see that Roeber’s words had already half convinced Baxter. He was hemmed in on all sides, trapped. And the germs of the sleeping sickness were becoming more and more apparent.
His quick eye roved over the room. Behind Roeber he saw the hidden exit by which Traub and Roeber had been in the habit of entering this room.
As Baxter and Roeber waited breathlessly for him to speak, he suddenly leaped forward, shoving Roeber and the cops who held him out of his way.
He made the exit in two bounds, thrust the door open and went through. Behind him came shouts, the stamping of feet. He fled along a narrow passage, passed through another door and another. The sheer abruptness of his action had given him a start on his pursuers.
THE passage seemed to go on endlessly. It went downward at a slant. Agent “X” knew he was below the level of the earth. Then he climbed a flight of stairs, came at last to a door that opened into a little old shed. The door to this in turn gave into a side street, far from the premises of the old gas works. But the Agent’s pursuers were still on his trail.
He could hear quick-footed cops pounding along the passages that he had traversed. The bacilli of the sleeping sickness made him feel weak. He couldn’t run far. They would overtake him.
He crept away, skirted the gas house, saw an empty police cruiser parked in the street. The cops who had come in it were inside, taking part in the raid.
The Agent leaped into this. Its transmission was not even locked. The law did not suspect that anyone would be bold enough to take a police car.
The first of the pursuing cops came around the corner of the building just in time to see the Agent’s actions. A cry went up. Shots pierced the night. Traub was a marked man now. In the sight of the police, his flight had stamped him as the criminal Roeber claimed him to be.
Agent “X” swung the car away from the curb, headed across the city. Behind him sirens began to wail in the night as the chase was taken up. There had been other cruisers on the block, parked also. The pursuing cops jumped into these.
Clinging to the wheel of the small, jouncing car, half faint with the germs in his body, Agent “X” drove like a fiend. There was the light of purpose in his eye, battling with the glassiness of the disease.
He knew where he was going; knew where he must lead this chase to make it appear right. But at the last he turned and saw two cops on motorcycles catching up. Even the fleet cruiser could not outdistance these two-wheeled speedsters.
He slammed brakes on in front of Commissioner Traub’s house, leaped from the cruiser just as the motorcycles slid to a stop. He bounded toward the house, ran around it. The rear door was still unlocked as he had left it. He thrust it open, stepped back into the shadows, thence to the shrubbery on the lawn.
From this vantage point he saw the cops enter the house — and he wondered with grim humor what they would think when they found Traub unconscious. Suicide would probably be the explanation, until the man awoke from the effects of the harmless drug and faced his accusers.
Agent “X” slipped off into the night, his task done. And in his pocket was the precious syringe of serum that was destined for Betty Dale.
Six hours later the newspapers in a dozen cities were screaming the news that the sleeping sickness epidemic in Branford was being checked. A gigantic extortion racket had been bared. A society doctor, a former gangster surgeon, and the commissioner of health himself were implicated. But now the staff of Drexel Institute, under the direction of a scientist named Hornaday, was rapidly producing the serum that Hornaday had worked out. There would be enough for all in a few days. It was as though a holiday had been declared. Parents with sick children rejoiced. A black pall of horror had been lifted from Branford.
There were two mysteries which the people of Branford could never understand. Why had the guilty Commissioner Traub fled straight back to his home when the police chased him, and why had he apparently anesthetized himself with a harmless drug?
A third mystery, even more puzzling to the newspaper editors of Branford, was how a reporter for an outside paper, the Herald, had gotten hold of the story of the criminals’ capture so long before they were even faintly aware of it. Chief Baxter claimed he had not released the story to anyone. The raid on the gas works had been made in absolute secrecy.
Yet a man, who said he was speaking at the request of Betty Dale, had telephoned the news into the Herald in time to make the early morning edition. He also told them that the eminent Englishman, Doctor Vaughton could be found at a certain address. This created another sensation. It constituted one of the greatest “scoops” in the history of that paper. Their circulation jumped a good fifty-thousand copies and Betty Dale was rewarded with a substantial increase in salary.
Betty, almost well after the injection of serum Agent “X” had given her, could have explained it, but refused to. To do so would have been to go against a promise she had given Secret Agent “X”—a promise not to reveal the amazing, desperate battle he had waged in Branford — now no longer a city of sleeping death.
Hand of Horror
Chapter I
BROODING darkness lay over the pretentious mansion. No lights showed anywhere on the spacious grounds, except for a splash of incandescence thrown from the partly opened door of the cement garage that was built into the side of the house. Off to the left, the white stonework of a private mausoleum rose, wraith-like in the night, barely discernible in the gloom.
In the house itself, the servants’ quarters were darkened. The dim bulb in the hall at the entrance left the rest of the corridor in shadowy obscurity. In one room only was there a sign of subdued life. This was a library on the second floor, at the rear. The house was built on a sharp slope, so that this second floor room became, in fact, a ground floor room.