“Clyde Burke, reporter of the New York Classic,” said the sleuth. “This man is Joel Neswick, who was rescued from the old house. This is Cuthbert Challick, whom I brought from New York to testify that he had been asked to visit Mox—”
“All right,” nodded the prosecutor.
“These men will be admitted.”
The group broke up. As they were leaving the cell room so that Scudder could take the prisoner alone, they heard Hoyt Wyngarth babble wildly.
“Guard me!” were his words. “I’m being watched! There will be danger when I’m outside! Please be careful. Mox is a fiend!” It was the first time that Wyngarth had uttered the monster’s name. “Mox has creatures who do his bidding! I know that one of them must be near!”
Scudder and the jailer took charge of Wyngarth. They did not bring the prisoner through the front. They whisked him out by a side entrance, into a back door of the building which contained Tharbel’s offices and up the stairs.
SULTRY dusk was settling around the buildings. Joe Cardona, strolling alone beside the jail, saw the lights come on in Tharbel’s offices. The detective hurried up the stairs. When he arrived in the rear office, he found Scudder and the jailer with Wyngarth in charge.
“You can go back,” said Scudder to the jailer. “This man and I will guard the prisoner.”
There were no handcuffs on Wyngarth’s wrists, but Scudder had a revolver in his hand, and Cardona drew one also. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Clyde Burke arrived, followed by Joel Neswick.
Cuthbert Challick was the next to appear. He stood with Neswick, in a corner by the door. The windows were open; Cardona was lounging beside one. Burke was in another corner. Scudder had placed Wyngarth by the desk, which was vacant, awaiting the arrival of the prosecutor.
Barry Davies appeared, with a court stenographer. The prosecutor took the seat behind the desk. The stenographer sat on his right, by the rear window where Cardona was stationed.
Hoyt Wyngarth, face buried in hands, was seated at the left of the desk, close to the side window. Scudder, holding his revolver, blocked the door.
Wyngarth raised his head. He seemed very pale. He looked about him; then stared at the prosecutor.
“Where is the dog?” questioned Wyngarth.
“In the front room,” broke in Scudder.
“We shall produce the dog later,” asserted the prosecutor, in a businesslike tone. “Proceed with your statement. We are ready.”
Wyngarth gripped the edge of the desk. Half rising from his chair, he began his story, as he stared steadily at the prosecutor.
“I knew a man named Harlew,” he said. “Schuyler Harlew. He was an agent of Mox. He — he knew of things that I had done, and he threatened me — threatened me unless I came to see Mox. I–I did not know where Mox lived. I was brought by Harlew — to do what Mox commanded—”
THE stenographer was taking the jerky remarks in shorthand. Wyngarth’s facial muscles began to twitch. He gripped the edge of the desk more fiercely. He rose to his feet and clung, stoop-shouldered.
“Mox is a fiend!” gasped Wyngarth. “He is not an old man, as he pretends to be. I have never seen his real face, but I know that his hair and beard are false, because—”
“Look out!” The warning came in a quick, firm voice from Cuthbert Challick, who was facing the window. As he uttered the words, the tall inventor sprang forward and shot out his long arms to wrest Hoyt Wyngarth from a point of danger.
The prisoner was paralyzed. Had he been responsive to Challick’s instantaneous warning, had he acted with any of the quick instinctiveness that the inventor displayed, Wyngarth might have been saved. His bewildered senses, however, failed him in the crisis.
Just as Cuthbert Challick clutched the prisoner’s motionless arm, something whirred through the window and flashed as it struck Wyngarth’s back, directly between the shoulders. With a shriek, Wyngarth lost his hold, and twisted sidewise. Challick, with a display of unusual strength, caught the man’s body with his right arm, and eased Wyngarth’s horror-stricken face forward on the table.
Startled gasps came from every person in the room. Men were on their feet, staring in horror. Cuthbert Challick was gazing downward at the man whose life he had been unable to save.
Hoyt Wyngarth was coughing blood upon the desk. His breath was choking. He was dying. Straight upward from his pitifully bent shoulders projected the weapon that had brought his doom; the quivering rounded handle of a knife that was buried to the hilt in the victim’s body.
Death had interrupted the testimony of Hoyt Wyngarth. The doom that Wyngarth feared had been delivered!
CHAPTER XVIII
DEATH RETURNED
JOE CARDONA was at the window, peering through the dusk. He was boldly facing the death that had struck down Hoyt Wyngarth.
Like Cuthbert Challick, however, the sleuth was warned. His quick eyes had spotted the object which the inventor had spied just before the knife arrived. A distorted figure was clambering from a tree on the other side of the vacant lot. Challick had seen it motionless; Cardona spotted the creature more quickly, now that escape had become its lone desire.
Cardona fired. He knew that he had missed. Another burst came from his revolver; a second miss, just as the creature dropped to the ground, with sprawling, spidery limbs. A third shot blazed from the detective’s gun.
This was a hit. Cardona had caught the dwarfish figure on the rise. The creature staggered, then began to bound away in long, limping leaps, running parallel to the row of trees.
Cardona swung his revolver as he fired. He loosed all his bullets rapidly but vainly. The range was too difficult for the detective to hit the moving target.
An automobile had pulled up beside the jail. Cardona saw a man leaping from it. Framed in light, Cardona shouted out an order:
“Get the murderer! Capture him! He can’t go far! He’s wounded!”
Peering through the dusk, Cardona realized that the man from the car was Junius Tharbel. Instead of pursuing the bounding dwarf, the county detective stood stock still, while Cardona shouted in rage. The limping creature was about to get away!
Cardona saw other men dashing from the jail. He shouted for them to take up the pursuit.
It was then that Tharbel acted. He raised a rifle that he was carrying. As the running creature, almost faded in the dusk, leaped a fence a hundred yards away, the county detective quickly fired.
Simultaneously, the long-limbed fugitive collapsed. Tharbel, lowering his rifle, strode toward the office building, gesturing to the men from the jail to indicate that they should bring in the quarry that he had bagged.
Two figures came running from the car to join Tharbel. Less than three minutes later, the county detective stamped into his office, with Hollis Harman and Wade Hosth behind him. Tharbel glowered in rage as he saw the body of Hoyt Wyngarth upon the desk.
“Is this your doing?” he demanded of Cardona. “Why was the prisoner brought from his cell before I arrived? I am in charge of this case — not you, Cardona!”
“I am the one who acted,” interposed Barry Davies, as Cardona scowled back his challenge to Tharbel. “Wyngarth wanted to make a confession. If you had been here, it would have been in your hands.”
“A fine botch!” snorted Tharbel, his hatchetlike countenance flushing crimson. “You’re over me, Prosecutor Davies, and you had a right to do this. But you made a great mistake. It was my job to get this man’s statement.”
He swung to the court stenographer and pointed to the notebook which the man had dropped upon the desk.
“Read what you’ve got!” he ordered.
In a quavering voice, the stenographer obeyed. When he had finished his reading, Tharbel roared like an enraged bull.