Chapter 8: The Mute Plungers

It would be difficult to comprehend the nervous strain under which Manhattan had been laboring during the past thirty-six hours. The story of the kidnaping of Harold Hervey had not been given to the newspapers, for an excellent reason. If Hervey’s financial enemies knew of his kidnaping and death they would hammer away at his stocks until they fell to nothing and his family, accustomed to fabulous wealth, would have been reduced to beggary.

The Mind Master himself, up to a late hour, had given no word to the newspapers in his “manifestoes.” The Hervey family held its breath fearing that he would--for the newspapers would have played the story for all the sensationalism it would carry. Bentley, when this matter was called to his attention, wondered. Barter had kept his own counsel for a purpose, but what was it? There was no way of asking him.

The story of the mad race down Broadway in pursuit of the limousine which had returned the lifeless body of Hervey to his residence had been a sensational one, and the tabloids had given it their best treatment. The chauffeur who had crawled out like a monkey atop his careening car, to lose his life when catapulted into the entrance to the Twenty-third Street subway station: the three policemen whose lives had been lost because the chauffeur hadn’t stopped as they had expected him to, the kidnaping of Saret Balisle by a great ape hadn’t yet broken as a story, nor the murder of Balisle’s chauffeur.

But everybody knew something of the story of the naked man of the day before. Many were the speculations as to what had ripped and torn his flesh from his body, along with his clothes. What manner of claws had it been which had sliced him in scores of places as though with many razors?

Men and women walked the streets apprehensively, and many of them turned at intervals to look behind them. No telling what they would do when the story of Balisle’s kidnaping by an anthropoid ape and a queer mute chauffeur got abroad. To top it all the police pursuers lost the Balisle limousine and Saret Balisle had taken his place among the lost.

Bentley knew as soon as the disgruntled and rather frightened police officers returned to the Clinton Building with the news that Balisle had got away from them in the stolen Balisle car, that already the ill-fated young man was probably under the anesthetic which Caleb Barter used on his victims.

“Tyler, do you know a surgeon who can do any surgical job short of brain transplantation?”

“Yeah. There’s a chap has offices in the Fifth Avenue Building. He’s probably the very best in the racket. Maybe it’s because of his name. It’s Tyler.”

“Some relative of yours?”

“Not much. He’s just my dad--and one of the world’s finest and cleverest.”

“Will he listen to reason? Can he perform delicate operations?”

“He’s my dad, Bentley, and he’d do almost anything I asked him so long as it was honest ... and he could switch the noses of a mosquito and a humming bird so skillfully that the humming bird would go looking for a sleeping cop and the mosquito would start building a nest in a tree.”

“Get him here. No--has he an operating room where all sound can be shut out? I’ve got a hunch I’d like somehow to try and drop a screen around us as we work. Maybe your dad would know what to do. You see, I’m positive that Barter sees everything we do and if he sees me turning into an ape he would just chuckle and pass up the trap.”

“He’s got a lead armored room where he keeps a bit of radium.”

“That’s it. Talk to him. No, not on the phone. You’ll have to figure out some way to do it so that you can be sure Barter isn’t listening.”

“I’ll manage. I’ll send him a note.”

“Your messenger will be killed on the way to him.”

“Then I’ll go myself.”

“And Barter will watch everybody that goes into his office or comes out, and mark down each person as possibly being connected with the police. However, you figure it out.”

When Tyler had gone and the dead “ape” had been stretched out in one corner of Balisle’s office, and covered with something to cloak its hideousness, Bentley telephoned Ellen Estabrook.

“Have I been making any appointments with you this morning?” he asked her cheerily.

“Please don’t jest when things are so terrible. Have you seen the latest papers?”

“No. What do they say?”

“There’s a lot of the story I’m thinking about. You’d better read it right away. It’s an extra, anyhow. The newsies ought to be calling it around you somewhere--and where are you, anyway?”

Bentley informed her, and told her, too, that he would be with her as soon as he possibly could. Taking the usual masculine advantage he decided to tell her now what he wouldn’t have had the heart to tell her to her face, that he was planning a rather desperate stunt to reach Barter, and would consequently be away from her for an indefinite period.

“But I’ll see you first?” she said after a long hesitation. Bentley could hear her voice tremble, though he knew she was fighting desperately to keep him from noting the catch in her voice.

“Yes, nothing will happen until--well, not until I’ve seen you again.”

Just as Bentley hung up the receiver the extra was being cried. Some two hours had now elapsed since Balisle had been taken away, and now the newsboys were shouting the headlines.

“Extra! Extra! All about the big Wall Street crash! Hervey fortune entirely swept away!”

Bentley sent an office boy out for the paper and spread it out on the desk to digest it as quickly as possible.

“One million shares of Hervey Incorporated,” read the black words in a box on the first page--a story in mourning, “were dumped on the market at eleven o’clock this morning. Four men seem to have been behind the queer coup. One of them had a power of attorney from Harold Hervey himself, and he had the shares to sell. So many shares were dumped that the bottom fell out of the stock. Others holding the Hervey shares, fearful that they would get nothing at all, also began to dump, and every share thus dumped was bought up quickly by three other men about whom nobody knew anything, except that they paid with cash. The strangest thing about it all was that the three men who bought Hervey Incorporated, seemed to be dumb-mutes, for they didn’t say anything. They acted through a broker, and indicated their purchases with their fingers in the conventional manner and tendered cards as identification! They were Harry Stanley, Clarence Morton, and Willard Cleve--addresses unknown, history unknown.