“The sun! The sun is coming out again!”
With a grim smile on his lips, the Agent tore his helmet off and stuffed it in his pocket. It was true! His own eyes, unaffected previously by the strange rays, could see perfectly now without the glass goggles. The rays were no longer radiating. The mechanism in the truck had been put out of commission by the fire. The crowds in the street were slowly regaining their normal sight as temporarily paralyzed optic nerves began again to function.
And it was the Agent, by his swift attack, who had forced the raiders to destroy their own dark-producing device. The burning had been done, of course, as part of a prearranged plan, thought out by the Chairman, to prevent the secret of the blinding rays from falling into the hands of the law. Normally, before the effect of the rays wore off, the raiders would have time to escape — as they had done on two previous occasions. But here again the Secret Agent’s action had changed things.
For the helmeted raiders were now in the big store of S. Carleton Company, detectives guarded every exit, and neither of the two men in charge of the truck had been able to warn their companions what had happened.
Agent “X” turned and made his way quickly to the store. By the action of the people around them, the raiders had now learned that something was radically wrong with their plans. But for them it was too late. Their lashing, metal-tipped whips could beat blinding humans into cowering fear, but they were of little use against grim detectives, armed, and already partially able to see. The Agent watched the scene tensely. He had done his work well, given the guardians of the law more than an even break — and they were making good use of it.
When two of the helmeted raiders discarded their whips, drew guns and started to fire, they were met with a volley of bullets. But a fierce fight was raging by another exit. Four of the raiders had concentrated their frenzied attack to escape here. Two were grabbed by wounded detectives and made prisoners. Two others managed to break through.
Grimly the Secret Agent crouched with his gun in hand again. He fired as the helmeted running figures appeared, sent bullets smashing into the bandits’ legs, and saw them sprawl cursing and screaming to the sidewalk.
Inside the store, the terrific battle had been won. A dozen detectives lay dead and wounded on the main floor. Victims of the first slashing onslaught of the terrible whips cowered in whimpering terror against the walls and counters. But the raiders — those still alive — were in the hands of the police, guns pressed against their sides, steel handcuffs clamped over wrists.
Not a single member of the raiding gang had escaped. They had been caught red-handed with all their hideous paraphernalia — their cruel scourging whips tarnished with the blood of a hundred victims, their guns, canvas sacks to hold the loot, and their strange helmets.
Detectives, coldly angry at the death of some of their comrades, were jerking the helmets off the heads of their prisoners, smashing down with blackjacks and gun muzzles when open rebellion flared. And the raiders were a bruised and vicious group when their faces were finally bared to the gaping crowds. The Agent recognized a few; Doeg, LaFarge and Blass among them. The others were obviously men of education also; ruined bankers and financiers, unable to stand the gaff of failure, and slyly engaged in desperate crime.
Agent “X,” the man who had engineered this tremendous victory for the law, the man in down-and-outer’s clothes, stood on the sidelines and watched.
He was at the curb when the members of the devil-dark gang were shoved into Black Marias. Later, in the disguise of A. J. Martin, he went to police headquarters, and was there when the commissioner himself made a statement to the press. The police, the commissioner said, were satisfied. The most fiendishly vicious group of criminals in the city’s history had been rounded up. True, the mechanism by which they created their blinding darkness had been destroyed by fire, its hideous secret kept a mystery, and millions in loot from previous raids were still to be salvaged. But the commissioner was confident that information leading to the recovery of the money could be sweated out of the prisoners. He was confident that not one man of the group had escaped; confident that the menace of the strange darkness would never fall on any city again.
In half-uttered confessions, several of the raiders had indicated that Vivian de Graf had been connected with the band before her death. It was the commissioner’s private belief, he stated, that her murdered husband might have been the originator of the darkness, since it was known that he was a profound worker in science. The commissioner’s smile was complacent as he assured the gentlemen from the press that the whole mystery of how such a group came to organize would be unraveled as soon as his prisoners had confessed.
All this the Secret Agent heard, and a smile twitched at the corners of his lips also; but it was humorless, sardonic. The police commissioner and the whole police department might be satisfied. He was not! And he never would be satisfied, or consider the case closed, until the unknown man behind it all, the mysterious Chairman, who had given the orders at the meeting that others carried out, had been exposed and caught.
Chapter XVIII
MONTHS after the capture and imprisonment of the devil-dark gang, Secret Agent “X” moved through the exhibition rooms of a flower show in a large mid-western city. He was in the disguise of a white-haired, benign looking old man now. There was a silver-headed cane in his hand which seemed a necessary re-enforcement to his faltering steps. Under his left arm was a portfolio containing notes on flowers and copies of horticultural journals.
On both sides of the corridor through which he walked, flowers were banked in a riotous profusion of color. Roses, chrysanthemums, carnations, dahlias, geraniums — all the well-known garden blooms, together with fuchsias, gardenias, and other delicate hothouse blossoms.
The humid air of the big building was heavy with their scent. Flower lovers and horticulturists of all sorts and ages strolled close by. Pretty girls at gaily decorated booths passed out advertising pamphlets, and free sample bouquets. A red-lipped, coquettish miss beckoned to the Agent and laughed up into his face as she drew a red carnation through his buttonhole. He smilingly submitted, then moved on toward the west end of the room where an elaborate arch of blue silk, stretched on a wire framework, had the word “Orchids” emblazoned across it in letters formed of the flowers themselves.
In a moment he was in a chamber filled with thousands of the strangely shaped plants, rarest and most expensive of cultivated blooms. Many looked like bright-colored insects; like butterflies and moths poised for flight. Most of these the Agent, a student of many sciences, knew by name. There were the Habenaria, the Spiranthes and the Oncidium types.
He paused at last before a group of blossoms yellow as saffron and marked with the startling spots of a leopard’s coat or some poisonous reptile’s skin. The flowers were beautiful and exotic; but somehow unwholesome, as though nature had been tortured and tormented for their cultivation. There were no other blooms like them in the whole building.
The eyes of the Secret Agent gleamed as they fastened on these blooms. A faint, humorless smile curved his lips. He seemed a gentle old man bending forward to study the loveliness of rare flowers.
Those who saw him did not guess that the benign and aged face masked the features of the most masterly crime hunter in existence. They did not know that he was on the trail of a criminal at this very moment; that, having sworn never to give up till he had his man, he had waited months to track down and capture one of the most elusive criminals he had ever encountered in his whole career. They did not know that in his pocket at the moment was a telegram in code, written by one of his own trained operatives, which concerned those saffron flowers before him.