The plane had taken off so expertly that they knew who was at the controls — Nellie! In no time at all it was a speck in the air; then it was gone.
“She’s gone crazy,” sobbed Rosabel. “She and that Lini Waller! They threw me out the door. I was just leaning out to see you back on the tail, and they pushed me out.”
“The rudder controls!” gasped Smitty. “If they’re out of order she’ll crash—” He stopped suddenly, remembering how Nellie had been at the control cables. “Say! Maybe she has gone crazy!” he said. “If it had been anybody else, I’d have said there was a little sabotage going on. But surely Nellie wouldn’t jam the controls to force us down, then release them and go on and leave us stranded a thousand miles from nowhere! Not when we’re in such a hurry to see if we can do anything for Josh and Mac!”
Benson didn’t say anything. He swam for shore. Smitty and he had released Rosabel after her first shock of finding herself so unexpectedly in the lake instead of the plane. She was an excellent swimmer. She and Smitty followed The Avenger toward the nearest shore. The giant sputtered and exclaimed during his powerful, if noisy, progress.
“What the dickens will we do now? We may be days from a human habitation, here in the wilderness. And we haven’t got days to waste. We’re in an awful mess!”
Then he floundered and almost choked again. He was remembering something that he should have thought of before. Something dreadful! Something that could explain the utterly lunatic way in which Nellie had ditched them here. “Chief!” he yelled. “In Conroy’s library!”
“Well?” said Benson quietly.
“When we got Nellie, there was a hammer there — but no needle!” The giant began to thresh toward shore at a terrific rate, as though the simple act of getting on dry land might help him somehow to get to Nellie’s side. “No needle in sight, chief! You know what that means? Those damned devils, they made a robot out of Nellie, like they did out of Lini Waller! That needle’s in her brain! She’s an automaton, doing just what the guy behind all this hell’s mess wants her to do!”
CHAPTER XV
Master and Slave
Nellie sat wooden-faced at the controls. Lini had the plane’s radio going again. She kept calling a number and letter into it. Finally there was an answer. “L. W. talking,” she said, voice dull and lifeless.
A small voice came out of the receiver. “Go ahead, L. W.”
“Everything has happened as you wished. I got to Mr. Benson’s headquarters just before they started—”
“No names! No names!”
“I got to his place in time to join them. A fast plane, straight for the spot. The girl he has with him has done as I told her — which was what you told me to tell her in the first place.”
“Then my man succeeded with her.”
“Yes. She does everything she is told. She made him bring the plane down in a forced landing. Then the girl fixed things up again and took off, leaving him and the big one and the Negro girl behind.”
“Very good, L. W. Tell her how to get here.”
Lini looked down. Far off she could see the Pacific. She could also see a faint white streak to the north, and a double row of low hills walling the white streak on each side. “To the north,” said Lini, dull-voiced.
And Nellie, expressionless, swung the ship north, more on a line with the white streak. The glacier appeared almost underneath. At the foot of the glacier was a toy ship. But as Nellie angled the plane down, the toy became a fair-sized tramp steamer, anchored in the deep water near the ice cliff. There was a seaplane painted black moored near the steamer. “Down there,” said Lini. And Nellie nodded and cut the motors.
She might have acted like an automation, but she still could handle a plane. She came down on the Pacific’s slowly heaving surface like a gull.
“The ship,” said Lini.
Nellie taxied the plane to the ship, and men came from the rusting tramp in a boat. They moored the plane and grinning, motioned for Lini and Nellie to get into the small boat.
They were the same type as the crew of thugs and murderers back in New York, men who looked like rats and acted like professional killers. They took the two girls to the tramp. On the bridge, they left the two alone with a figure as weird as if it had stepped from a bad dream.
A man with a long, loose overcoat that swathed his body almost to the ankles and made it unidentifiable. The collar of the coat was high, and the brim of a drooping hat was pulled low so that only his nose and eyes could be seen. And the eyes were covered with dark glasses so that even they were partially concealed.
Lini gasped a little, and a rare shadow of emotion touched her wooden face. The emotion was fear — a horror penetrating the devilishly induced veil of forgetfulness that had been thrown over her conscious mind. This was the man who had stood over her with an odd hammer and a sinister needle in the room whose temperature and walls made it seem like an ice cave.
Nellie gave a similar faint show of emotion. This man had not held hammer and needle before her, but he had marked her scalp for another. The man’s nose moved just a little, so that you could tell that his lips, though hidden in the encircling coat collar, were smiling. Almost hidden eyes peered at Nellie through the dark glasses. “Very good,” came a muffled voice from the unseen lips. “I had been afraid that the man to whom I detailed the delicate job of operating on you had either been killed before he concluded the job, or had missed the precise spot. I see now that I needn’t have worried on either score.”
Nellie said nothing. She stood and stared without expression at the disguised body and face. It was certain that she was looking at the head and brain behind all this murder; but if the knowledge penetrated her dulled senses, it didn’t show in her empty eyes.
“However,” said the man, “just to make sure—” He raised his right hand toward Nellie’s head. The hand was nut-brown, almost like that of a person belonging to a race other than the white race. A scrap of his hair could be seen, and that was pure white, indicating that he was very old. But the hand seemed not to tell of age. It was as if he were very old — and yet, somehow, ageless.
The hand stirred in Nellie’s thick, silky hair. Felt for a spot over the left ear, not quite halfway to a point in the exact center of the head. The man nodded as his finger lightly touched a tiny protuberance there, like the head of a pin — with the body of the pin down under the bone.
“Right!” came the muffled voice. “The wedge is there. I am the master and you the slave. You will do everything I tell you and answer every question I ask you.”
“I will do everything you tell me and answer every question you ask,” Nellie repeated, parrotlike.
The man who seemed very old, yet ageless, nodded his head. “First, where did you leave this man Benson? And who was with him?”
“We left him at a lake, about seven hundred and fifty miles east. With him were the Negro girl called Rosabel and the large man called Smitty.”
“They will be stranded there indefinitely, no doubt?” said the man.
Nellie shook her head. “Mr. Benson had the radio on just before crashing. I believe he was in touch with Vancouver, giving his location from moment to moment, with orders for a plane to leave for the last location if his radio stopped.”
“Then he suspected—” snarled the man.
“I don’t think he suspected anything,” said Nellie, voice machinelike. “I believe he was just playing safe, so that in case anything happened to the plane, such as a normal accident, he would be able to arrive here with little delay to aid the Negro and the Scotchman you hold prisoner.”