TAKEN aback, I hesitated. What could she mean? I didn"t understand it at all.
She added, "Henry, you remember I said that my mother and father were estranged, and that I lived with my mother? And then, after my mother"s death, my father kept me in schools in California and elsewhere-up until a few months ago?"
"Obviously he wanted you to have a fine education-"
Lila gripped her handkerchief tightly.
"I hardly knew my father!" she exclaimed wildly.
I could see that she was genuinely in need of comfort. "My dear," I said-it took courage to say my dear, and it didn"t come out very firmly-"your father is a fine man with your interests at heart. Mr.
Savage and I went back to talk to him earlier tonight, after you had gone to a hotel, and he expressed the greatest love and concern for you."
Lila looked at me thoughtfully. "He is my father," she said.
"Yes indeed."
"And parental ties are very strong, I suppose."
"None are stronger," I agreed. "And rightly so, for none should be stronger. The parent fights its fiercest for its young, even in the animal kingdom."
This seemed to touch Lila deeply, for she nodded. She said thoughtfully, "It doesn"t follow that the young always fight as strongly for their parents, but they should, shouldn"t they?"
"Oh, indeed!"
"That"s really the right way, isn"t it?"
"Of course," I said. "It certainly is." I didn"t know exactly-in fact I had no idea-what we were talking about. But this was sound philosophical wisdom, and one is always safe in mouthing philosophical cliches. I liked the way I sounded, too; weighty and solemn, the fatherly advisor, although my feelings about her certainly weren"t fatherly.In glancing about distractedly, Lila"s eyes fell on the cardboard box containing Dido Alstrong"s monkey suit. She pointed, demanded, "is that-"
"The ape suit belonging to that rascal Dido Alstrong," I agreed.
"What is it doing here?"
"Why, I have it in my custody, naturally," I replied. "I insisted on that."
"I"m surprised Savage let you keep it," she said.
"I was quite firm," I said.
"I see," she replied, but her thoughts and manner were self-involved.
The young lady was distressed. This touched me deeply; the young lady herself touched me more deeply than anything else, though. So intensely, in fact, that I was moved to walk over to her.
"Lila," I said hoa.r.s.ely. "Lila, you"re worried."
She nodded bitterly. "Yes, Henry, I"m terribly worried."
"Darling," I said. "Darling, don"t be."
And I put my arm around her in a manner rather more than comforting, and took hold of her chin with my other hand, and endeavored to kiss her.
She kissed me back. It was wonderful. It was skyrockets and whizz-bangs; it was fountains of honey and clouds of flying sparks. I wished I had more experience kissing, because I hadn"t done very well. I decided to try again. She moved a little, squirmed.
The lights went out.
SOME time later I got around to figuring out which lights had gone out. The conclusion was shocking. It was my own lights. Not those in the room.
As this dawned on me, I further realized that I was lying on the hard wooden lab floor, and my head felt awful. It felt worse when I tried to move it.
I groaned loudly. Even that hurt.
Finally, exercising some caution, I managed to get to all fours, then erect, and into the washroom where I drank some water, and examined my head. The knot on my head was not visible to the eye, but it certainly felt the size of a young mountain to my fingers.
Back at the scene of disaster, I found a large and heavy gla.s.s chemical bottle with the neck broken off, the two parts lying on the floor. This, obviously, was what had turned out my lights. And Miss Lila Farrar had wielded it, after lifting it from the table while being kissed.
Miss Farrar, naturally, was gone.
So was Dido Alstrong"s monkey suit.
Both had vanished, and it was logical to suppose they had gone together. But beyond that it did not makesense. Not the slightest sense. Logic just didn"t have any horse to its cart.
Naturally I began thinking of Doc Savage, and didn"t feel good at all. Not that I felt well to begin the thought, but Savage"s possible reactions depressed me.
I had tried to take things into my own hands with Miss Farrar. I was supposed to have custody of the baboon suit. Now I had neither, a headache, and a deflated ego.
There was a knock on the door. I wheeled, instinctively grasping my head with both hands.
"Mr. Savage?" I called.
"That"s right," a voice said.
I shouldn"t have opened the door. It wasn"t Savage"s voice at all. It was the voice of the possessor of an extremely hideous automatic pistol, and he at once inserted the worse end of the thing in my right eye.
"Now start somethin"," he said.
He had a companion. After horror stopped hitting me like lightning, recollection furnished me with their ident.i.ty. The two hold-ups. The banditti who had raided the c.o.c.ktail bar with the idea of eliminating me.
Short bandit swore another terrible oath. He had much the same manner he"d displayed in the genteel rum hole.
The longer one said, "Hold "im still. I"ll frisk "im." He searched me. Meantime my eye was glued to the gun muzzle. The one doing the frisking said, "Clean. No hardware." He examined my billfold, added with considerable disgust, "And only eleven bucks!"
"Only eleven bucks!" yelled short bandit. "We oughta shoot him just for that!"
"Where"s tha monkey suit?" long one demanded.
"I-uh-Miss Farrar got it!" I gasped.
"So ya know that, do ya?" he said. "Well, well, that makes you a member of the lodge. So come along, brother."
"But I-"
"Would you rather stay here?" he asked ominously.
I am not obtuse. I got his meaning.
"I guess not," I said weakly.
Chapter XI.
IT was past midnight when we crossed George Washington Bridge and, after rolling swiftly for a time, turned north. Eleven o"clock. The storm was on us with awful splintering streaks of lightning, and the face of the dashboard clock was visible in the convulsive blazes of red glare.
"Get a move on," the tall man said to the short one, who was driving. "Maybe we can outrun this d.a.m.n storm.""Yeah," said the other. "And have a highway cop lookin" in at Henry, here."
"Henry wouldn"t tell tha cop nothin". Wouldja, Henry?"
"The police," I said grimly, "are already looking for you gentlemen for the holdup in the c.o.c.ktail establishment."
The short one sneered. "Whose afraida cops? Ask Henry if he described us to tha cops, Slim."
"Henry wouldn"t do that. Would you, Henry?"
"No."
"You hear that, Pokey? Henry"s our pal. Henry"s our lodge brother."
"I don"t belong to any lodge," I said miserably.
Tall bandit whooped. "Sure you do, Henry. You joined one tonight. When you figured that babe got the monkey suit, that"s when you paid your initiation fee."
"Sure," said the other. "You"re a paid-up member."
"What kind of a lodge is this?" I asked nervously.
"Biggest there is, boy."
"Sure," said Pokey. "More belong than don"t. Ain"t that right, Slim."
"I"m not sure I wish to belong."
"He don"t wanta belong, Slim," said Pokey.
"Who does," said Slim. "But everybody joins, don"t they."
"Yeah, everybody. Some sooner"n others, though." Pokey turned his head, leered. "Henry ain"t got tha lodge badge yet, though. How you reckon the badge will look on him?"
"It"ll look fine." Slim studied me critically. "A lily will go well with Henry"s coloring."
The sky had deafening noise. The car noise was tiny, almost unnoticeable, in the storm"s uproar. A bolt of lightning split a tree up ahead; there was a kind of smoke puff, whitish; it was an evergreen tree, and little flames spread all through it. Big drops of water like half-dollars began hitting the car.
"Get a move on," Slim said uneasily to his comrade. "You wanta hang around here and get lightning-struck?"
The car traveled for a long time while I waited for them to kill me.
THE thunderstorm had followed us, or we had followed it, and now it should have been daylight, but it wasn"t. At least all the light seemed the slashing scarlet of lightning, and the rain came down in solid wires and sheets; the wind was lions; at times it seemed the car would be swept from the highway.
Finally the car was turned on to a lane, and Pokey said, "Well, we made it." The machine crawled along the winding gravel for a time, then stopped. Pokey turned his head, demanded, "How"s lodge-member?"Slim turned a flashlight on my face. "He don"t look so good. Color"s kind of a mortified blue."
"Yeah," said Pokey. "That ain"t a bad color. But he should be feeling better than that. He"s got a lot to feel grateful over. He ain"t dead."
This was true. But the future was not a thing that intrigued me.
They sat there a while. Pokey had turned off the headlights; now he blinked them twice, left them off again. And from ahead, through trees, there was a replying couple of light blinks.
"Hot dog!" said Pokey. "This is home sweet home. I was beginning to wonder if I"d took the wrong road somewhere."
Slim was surprised. "You mean you didn"t know where you was going?"
"I never been here before. You know that. All I had was directions. . . . Hey, I wish we had raincoats."
"That"s great, riding around all night with a guy who don"t know where he"s going," Slim complained. He suddenly gave me a shove. "What you sitting there for? Get out."
I alighted. My legs would hardly remain rigid enough to support my weight. We climbed a steep path. A house appeared, a rambling place, one-story, low, with wide porches and the air of being a summer home. They shoved me inside. I was in a large room where there were other people.
"Lila!" I cried.
MISS FARRAR did not reply; her expression was cold, grave, and desperate. She showed, almost as much as I, the effects of a harrowing night.
A man who answered the description of the fellow who had attacked polite-man and taken the monkey suit from him stood with a gun in his hand, guarding Miss Farrar. This chap-he was certainly the one who had been a prisoner at the Farrar apartment on the occasion of my ill-omened visit there-sneered at sight of me.
He said, "You guys better not be too careless."
"With Henry?" said Slim scoffingly. "Why, Henry is the soul of gentleness with his fellow man."
"Yeah?" said the other. "Well, I seen him different." He frowned, then added, "Maybe he"ll be all right if you don"t scare him."