Rosa shut her eyes and sank back as the car trundled off. This was just a bad dream. Soon she would shudder into wakefulness and laugh at the whole preposterous thing. She’d find David and tell him about it, and they would laugh together... Then she felt Kummer’s rigid right arm next to hers, and she shivered. Poor David! It was brutal for him, unnecessary, a cruel caprice of fate. And as for her... Her skin crawled. She was too sick to encompass all the possibilities.
When she opened her eyes they had left behind them the narrow strip of parkland beyond the neck of the Cape, and were turning left into the main highway. Across the road, directly opposite the entrance to the park-road, were the lights of a filling-station. She could see the white-overalled figure of old Harry Stebbins stooped over the gasoline tank of a car, gas-hose in hand. Good old Harry! If she only dared scream, once... And then she felt the hot sour breath of the monster on her neck and heard his warning rumble in her ear and sank back, nauseated.
Kummer drove quietly, almost humbly. But she knew David. Under his black thatch there was a keen brain, and she knew that it must be working furiously. She prayed silently that he would concoct a plan. It would take gray matter to defeat this ogrish creature. Brawn, even Kummer’s, would be futile against the man’s negligent power.
They skimmed along the concrete highway. There was a good deal of traffic; cars headed for Wayland Amusement Park ten miles up the road. Saturday night... Rosa wondered what the others were doing at the house. Mother. John Marco— Was David right? About John? Had she made a hideous mistake after all? But then— It was quite possible, she reflected bitterly, that it would be hours before she and David were missed. People were always wandering off at Spanish Cape, especially David; and of late she herself had been moody...
“Turn left here,” said the giant.
They both started. Surely something was wrong? They had travelled barely a mile since turning off the Spanish Cape road. Kummer muttered something beneath his breath, but Rosa could not hear. Turn left— That must be the private road that led down to the Waring shack off the public beach — in sight, almost within reach, of the cliffs of Spanish Cape!
Again they swept through deserted parkland, and all too soon were out on the road in open country. The bathing beach... They began to skim along beside a high fence, and the ground turned to sand beside the road. Kummer switched on the headlights; directly in their path stood a little cluster of rather decrepit buildings. He slowed the car.
“Where to, Cyclops?” he said quietly.
“Lay off. Smack up to them there buildings.” Then the giant chuckled at Rosa’s gasp. “Don’t bank on anything, girlie; ain’t nobody here. This here Waring owns the place ain’t been here pretty near all summer. Shut down tight, she is. Go on, Marco.”
“I’m not Marco, you know,” said Kummer in the same quiet voice; but he drove on, slowly.
“You, too?” growled the giant in disgust. Rosa sank back in despair.
The car rolled to a stop beside a cottage, unilluminated and obviously deserted. Beyond it lay a small building which looked like a boathouse; and nearby another which might have been a garage. The buildings were quite near the beach. As they got stiffly out of the car they could see the towering black cliffs of Spanish Cape across the moon-flecked water, only a few hundred yards away. But it might have been a few hundred miles away, for all the good it could do them. For the cliffs were perpendicular, and at least fifty feet high, and at their base lay sharp tumbled rocks against which the lashing tides raged. Even here, on Waring’s beach, there was no approach to the Cape. The cliff stopped high above the little structures, and there was scarcely a handhold in its entire side, which was only slightly less high than the cliffs in the sea.
Off to the other side, where the public bathing beach lay, there was nothing but paper-littered sand. The sand glistened under the moon.
Rosa saw her uncle casting quick secret glances all about, with what seemed to her desperation. The giant stood slightly behind them, his one eye tolerantly watchful. He acted as if he were in no hurry at all, but permitted them to inspect the deserted premises to their hearts’ content. A ramp-like structure led from the boathouse to the water’s edge, and half in the surf lay a small powerful-looking cabin cruiser. Several rollers lay scattered about in the sand, and the doors of the boathouse stood open. Apparently, then, the giant had broken into the place, rolled the boat out himself, in readiness for... what?
“That’s Mr. Waring’s boat!” exclaimed the dark girl, staring at it. “You’re stealing it, you — you monster?”
“Never mind about the names, lady,” said the giant gruffly, almost as if he were offended. “I’ll do what I damn want to. Now, Mr. Marco—”
Kummer had turned and was walking slowly toward his captor. Rosa, catching sight of his blue eyes glinting in the moonlight, saw that he had determined to act upon some last desperate plan. Resolution was written all over his hard, clean face. There was no fear in it at all as he stalked the immense figure of the man in sailor’s costume, who stood watching him quite expressionlessly.
“I can give you more money than you ever saw in—” began David Kummer in a smooth conversational voice, as without haste he strolled toward the giant.
He never finished; Rosa never learned what he had intended to do. Struck dumb with horror, she could only feel her legs go weak beneath her and marvel dully at the extraordinary monster who had kidnaped them. For, so swiftly that her dazed eye barely followed, the giant lunged forward with upheld fist. The huge club of bone and skin thumped soggily against something, and the next thing she saw was Kummer’s face sinking below the fixed level of her stricken eves. And then he was sprawled on the sand, very still.
Something snapped in the girl’s brain and with a scream she flung herself with clawing fingers at the vast back of the giant. He was kneeling calmly by the unconscious man, listening to his breathing. When he felt the weight of her body he merely rose and twitched his shoulders, and she fell off to land in a sobbing heap on the sand. Without a word he picked her up and carried her, weeping and kicking, toward the dark cottage.
The door was locked, or bolted. He tucked her under one arm and with the other heaved against the panels. They gave with a splintering crash; he kicked the broken door open and strode in.
The last thing Rosa saw as her captor toed the door shut behind her was David Kummer’s face on the sand before the silent cruiser under the moon.
It was a living-room, quite habitable, as she noted with glazed surprise in the ray of the giant’s flashlight. She did not know Hollis Waring, had never met him; he was a New York business-man who occasionally spent a week or a few days there. She had often seen him cruising about beyond the Cape (as she told Mr. Ellery Queen later) in the very boat beached outside — a tiny fragile gray man in a linen cap, always alone. She had known vaguely that he had not visited his cottage since the beginning of the summer, long before John Marco had appeared in his yellow roadster with multitudinous luggage; and some one — her father, she vaguely recalled — had mentioned that he had gone to Europe. She had never known that her father and Waring were acquainted; certainly they had never met here at the shore; for that matter they may merely have known of each other through a business connection; her father had so many...
The giant set her on the rug before the fireplace. “Sit down in that there chair,” he directed in the gentlest of voices. He set the flashlight on a divan nearby so that its powerful beam concentrated on the chair.