The light truck went north and then west. When it had come to a wooded spot twenty miles out, the man in the rear got an automatic from under his white jacket. He waited. In a few minutes a single toot from the horn showed that the driver had looked up and down the road and no other machine was in sight.
The man shot the little fellow through the head.
The car turned into a woods road a few miles farther on. There was a sedan there. The men got out of their whites and left them in the white car. They got into regular clothes, climbed into the sedan, and drove off.
Not for nearly ten hours was the car, stolen from the Belgrade Sanitorium, discovered with the dead man in it. One key that might have unlocked the riddle of the noise in the empty sky was destroyed.
CHAPTER III
Death Masks a Secret!
The house was huge, old-fashioned, of frame. It was set in a woodlot, the trees of which cut off sight and sound from the nearest habitation. The men who moved furtively among the trees knew all about that. They had studied this place, north and west of Chicago, before coming out. When you plan to murder somebody, you look over the spot beforehand if you are good at your trade as killer. And these men were good!
They slid in the midnight darkness among the trees as silently as Indians. Each had a gun in his hand!
A man’s shape suddenly loomed in front of one of the four killers as the house was neared. The man was in overalls, was gardener here. He started to let out a startled shout. The man nearest him brought his gun barrel down on the gardener’s head. The gardener fell, killed instantly by the heavy blow. The four men went on.
In the house, there was worried silence. There were three people in there. One was a very tall, very thin colored man in a white housecoat. Another was a slenderly rounded Negress with intelligent, liquid eyes — his wife. The third was master of the house.
This third man looked a great deal like the little fellow with the thick glasses who had been taken away from police headquarters in the fake asylum car. He was taller and heavier, but he had the same nearsighted black eyes and the same lank gray hair. He was the murdered little man’s brother, Robert Gant. And the thing he was worrying about now was the continued absence of that brother.
“He should have been back, or at least have phoned, long before now, Joshua,” he said to the colored man.
“Yes, sir, he should,” nodded the colored man. There was no accent or Southern slurring of his words. He spoke like an educated person — as, indeed, he was. Joshua Elijah Newton had graduated with high honors from Tuskegee Institute. So had Rosabel, his wife.
“He said he was going straight to police headquarters, and would come straight back,” worried Robert Gant.
Joshua only nodded again. Normally Josh moved so slowly, and kept his eyelids dropping over his eyes so somnolently that he was nicknamed Sleepy. Normally, too, he talked with the “suhs” and the “Ahs” instead of “ers” that most colored people use.
But now his speech was crisp and correct, and his dark face was alert and shrewd with the worry he shared with his master.
Rosabel, the pretty Negress who, with Josh, took care of the two childlike brothers who spent their lives inventing things, broke in.
“Don’t you think you’d better phone the police, Mr. Gant?”
Gant bit his lip. His face was a study in indecision.
“Well, Rosabel, you know how we feel about the police,” he said at last. “We haven’t wanted anyone — not even the police — to get a hint of what we’re working on. So we’ve left them severely alone. Even after that outrageous theft of a month ago, we didn’t notify the police. We’ve been trying on our own to get the things back. I hate to break that policy now.”
“But Mr. Max Gant went to headquarters intending to tell all about it,” Rosabel pointed out. “So why wouldn’t it be all right for you to phone them now?”
Gant shook his head uneasily.
“I suppose it would. But if the world should learn— What was that?”
He was listening intently. Joshua and Rosabel listened, too.
“What was what, sir?” Josh said, after a moment.
“I thought I heard someone at the door.”
“We have Peter, the gardener, stationed outside on the grounds,” Josh said. “If anyone were trying to get at the door, Pete would have sounded an alarm.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Gant murmured. “When you own a secret such as we do, the least sound is suspicious.”
He had been pacing up and down the living room on the first floor. He went to the hall door.
“I’m going up to the laboratory. You watch down here. If you hear anything, call for help. I’ll phone Chicago headquarters promptly at twelve o’clock — in fifteen minutes, that is — if Max isn’t back.”
He went out, and they heard his steps on the stairs.
Josh’s long dark hand went out to cover Rosabel’s lighter one. There was a very close bond between these two.
“We’re in danger,” Josh said to his wife. “I can positively smell it. We’ve been in danger since somebody broke into the house and took what Mr. Robert and Mr. Max were working on, a month ago. But it’s worse tonight.”
“Why would it be worse tonight?” said Rosabel, trim and competent-looking in her maid’s white apron with a small white cap on her black hair.
“I believe they’ve been watching this house — whoever they are,” said Josh. “I believe they knew when Mr. Max went out to go to the police. If that’s true, they might decide to shut Mr. Max and Mr. Robert up, forever, tonight.”
“Then Mr. Robert should have phoned the police hours ago!”
“I think he should have, honey,” Josh said. “But we can’t try to tell him his business—”
He stopped, and the two stared at each other with the whites of their eyes showing, and then stared toward the hall.
There had been a hard, brisk knock at the front door.
“Josh— Don’t go to it!”
“It may be Mr. Max coming back. I’ve got to go.”
“He has a key.”
“You know how he is,” said Josh, almost like a parent speaking of a child. “He’s always forgetting his keys. I’ll just call through the door. I won’t open it.”
He went to the hall, thin and spindling and six feet two, with pretty Rosabel after him.
“Who’s deah?” he called through the door.
When Joshua Elijah Newton was uncertain of the person he was talking to, he instinctively dropped into the kind of talk you expected from a colored man, and looked rather slow-witted and stupid. So did Rosabel. It was good protective coloration. It threw others off their guard.
“Josh! It’s me. Open up.”
“It’s Mr. Max,” said Josh with a sigh of relief. His long thin hand went toward the door bolt.
Rosabel caught it almost fiercely.
“That’s not Mr. Max’s voice!” she whispered.
“It sounded like him—”
From the living room they had just left came a thin snap of breaking glass, where a windowpane had been cut and then tapped out. But the two did not hear, with their attention distracted by the man at the door.
“Josh! Open up, I said,” came the call through the door. “I forgot my keys.”
“You’re right,” Josh whispered to Rosabel. “It’s not Mr. Max’s voice. Run and phone the police, honey. I’ll try to hold him out there till they come.” He raised his voice, “Yas, suh, Mr. Max. But I haven’t the key, myself. Mr. Robert has it. I’ll go up and get it.”
Rosabel was racing for the phone. Her path lay past the living-room doorway.