I WAS out only for a second. Yet the single blow paralyzed my nerve centers, making it impossible for me to move. Things happened with kaleidoscopic rapidity. As in a trance, I saw the big black leap forward and claw with feverish rapidity at the bindings which held Betty to the couch.
"Jarbo's... she is Jarbo's!" he snarled. "No give to ape-man this time."
Bixby's saturnine face was flushed with anger.
"Leave her alone, damn you!" he roared. "She is the first that he really seemed to care for. Do you think, you fool, that you are going to spoil my great experiment... now?"
He leaped forward, his talon-like fingers grasped around the butt of the gun.
The crazed black pushed him back with a sweep of his huge arm. The old man crashed against the table, upsetting it; the apparatus tumbled over the floor in wild disarray. He dropped to a crouching position, the gun raised, his thin lips drawn back over his teeth in a snarl of anger.
"Leave her alone!" he snapped. The big black took a step forward, his huge fists doubled.
"Jarbo's!" he growled. Bixby fired. The black staggered back as the leaden slug sunk into his vitals. Then he gathered his huge body together and hurled himself forward. His fist crashed against the old man's jaw, bringing the head back with a sudden jerk. Then his great fingers closed around the scrawny throat. There was a snap of breaking bones.
Raising the form of his victim above his head, the burly black threw the old man across the room. Then, turning, he leaped back to Betty.
The ape-man gave vent to a wild, insane roar. He lunged forward, maddened at the sight of blood and the death of his master. Its terrific lunge broke the rope. Jarbo turned to meet the mad rush. They went down together, the ape and the black, clawing, biting, in a battle to the death. The sinewy fingers of the gorilla sought the other's throat— found it. I saw the black's eyes bulge from their sockets under the terrific pressure.
All this, I say, transpired in less time than it takes for me to tell it. Dazed though I was, Betty's frightened scream brought me to my senses. The revolver had fallen almost beside me. I seized it and, jamming it against the hairy head of the horrific monstrosity, pulled the trigger. The apeman's death grip on the black's throat relaxed. He kicked spasmodically, then rolled over... dead.
There was a crash as the front door was forced open. Then a squad of state policemen charged into the room, guns drawn. With them was the attendant at the oil station.
"One of my men found your abandoned car an hour ago," the sergeant in command told me as he assisted me to my feet. "When the attendant at the filling station identified it, we lost no time in getting here. There have been several women missing of late and all clews have centered on this locality. We were just outside when we heard the shots..."
I picked up the surgeons' knife from the floor and cut Betty's bonds. Then, wrapping a cover about her trembling form, I assisted her to a chair. It took me but a moment to tell the officer what had happened.
"That explains the disappearance of the women—up to a certain point," he said thoughtfully. "On the other hand, there are a lot of things I don't understand."
"The black's still alive, sergeant," one of the men who had been prowling through the room, interrupted.
The sergeant bent over the wounded Algerian and called for a first aid kit. As it was brought, he poured a bit of liquor between the thick mutilated lips. Jarbo stirred... opened his eyes.
"Master dead... ape dead," he gasped, his eyes turning on me. "Pretty soon Jarbo die. You keep woman..."
DYING, the big black wheezed out his story to the officers while Betty and I sat in the background shuddering at our narrow escape.
Bixby, a scientist of renown, had been dismissed from his post at one of the great universities because of his fantastic theories and radical experiments.
An anthropologist and biological chemist, Bixby had been obsessed by the idea of fusing blood of powerful lower animals with that of white women—to build up the racial stamina, weakened by the artificialities of modern life.
If there'd been any basis of fact for this obsession, the secret had died with him. But it was known that if the transfusions had proved successful, Bixby had intended selling the discovery to one of Europe's madmen, so that the blood of the jungle would aid the mothers of a dictator nation to produce more cannon fodder.
Finding the old house in the foothills, he had purchased it and, by means of advertisements in metropolitan newspapers, had attracted several girls to the isolated spot under the guise of housekeepers. Once they were in his power, he had gone ahead with his diabolical schemes. All had died under his experiments save one—a half-witted creature little above the animals herself. It was she the gorilla had killed; then escaped from the enclosure with the body, throwing it in the woods where Betty and I had found it.
Bixby had given up all hope of recapturing the ape when our sudden arrival and its unholy desire for Betty had drawn the creature back to the house, where Bixby had trapped it Our wine had been drugged and Bixby, fired by the thought that we might be trailed, had decided to rush the experiment that very night.
Only the sudden lust for Betty on the part of the black himself had halted the diabolical crime.
SEVERAL years have passed. Betty and I are very happy. But the horror of what we went through on our wedding night is still implanted in our minds. At night, when the wind howls, I note that my wife draws a bit closer to me, although she says that she is not frightened. Her uncle writes us that people still talk in whispers of the insane scientist who lived in the old mansion in the foothills. Betty and I never discuss our adventure. We want to forget.