THE MASTER MYSTERY. Arthur B. Reeve
intently as he heard a silvery laugh over the wire.
"Oh, I didn't know you were busy. I thought these flowers—Well, never mind. I'll leave them, anyway."
It was Eva Brent, daughter of the head of the firm, who had danced in from the conservatory like a June zephyr in December.
"My dear," Locke could hear the patent magnate welcome, "it is all right. Stay a moment and talk to this gentleman while I go down to the museum."
Locke listened eagerly, glancing now and then at a photograph of Eva Brent on his own desk, while she chatted gaily with the inventor. It was evident that Eva had not the faintest idea of the hard nature of the business of her father.
Meanwhile, Brent himself had left the library and passed through the portièred door into the hall. He did not turn up the grand staircase in the center of the wide hall, but hurried, preoccupied, to a door under the stairs that opened down to the cellar.
He started to open it to pass down. As he did so he did not hear a light footstep on the stairs as his secretary, Zita Dane, came down. But he did not escape her watchful eye.
"Mr. Brent," she called, "is there anything I can do?"
Brent paused. "Wait a moment for me in the library," he directed, as he turned again to enter the cellar.
He closed the door and Zita watched him with an almost uncanny interest, then turned to the library to join Eva and the new-comer.
Down the cellar steps Brent made his way, and across the cellar floor, pausing at the rocky wall of the foundation of the house blasted and hewn out of the cliff on which it towered above the river. A heavy steel door in the rock wall barred the way.
Brent whirled the combination and shot the bolts, and the door swung ponderously open, disclosing a rock-hewn cavern. Three walls of the cavern were lined with shelves containing inventions of all kinds—telegraph and telephone instruments, engine models, railroad-signaling and safety devices, racks of bottles containing dangerous chemicals and their antidotes—all conceivable manner of mechanical and scientific paraphernalia. It was literally a Graveyard of Genius—harboring the ghosts of a thousand inventors' dead hopes.
Brent entered hastily and went directly to a shelf. There he picked up a model of a motor. He blew the dust from it and examined it approvingly.
Suddenly he saw something that caused him to start. He looked down at his feet. There was a piece of paper on the floor.
He picked it up and read it, and as he did so he started back, frightened—then angry. He looked about at the rock-hewn cavern walls—then read again:
Brent—This is my last warning. If you persist in your course you will be struck down by the Madagascar madness.
Q.
Under his breath, Brent swore. Again he looked about the cavern, then turned hurriedly, picked up the motor, passed out the steel door, clanged it shut, and locked it.
No sooner had Brent shut the door, however, than it seemed as if the very face of the outer rocky wall of the cavern began to move—to tilt, as if on hinges.
If a human eye had been in the Graveyard of Genius at that instant it would have sworn that it perceived in the inky blackness of the tilting rock a passage, and in the shadows of that passage a huge, weird, grotesque figure peering in.
Then the tilting rock door closed again, as the figure disappeared down the rocky passage on the opposite side—a menace and a threat to the owner of Brent Rock, insecure even in his millions.
Chapter II
When Brent arrived back at the library he had quite recovered his poise, at least to the eyes of those in the library. Zita had joined Eva with the old inventor, Davis.
As Brent entered, Davis uttered an exclamation of joy at the sight of his motor. For the moment Brent almost glowed.
"Along with your invention," he beamed, as he handed the model to the old man, "I am going to release many others to the world."
All this not only Locke was noting, but Zita, too, appeared to be an almost too interested listener.
The others were chatting when Zita heard a noise in the hall and hurried out. She was just in time to see a rather hard-visaged man, with cruel, penetrating eyes. It was Herbert Balcom, vice-president of the company.
Zita whispered to him a moment and Balcom's hard face grew harder.
"Go up-stairs—watch him," he ordered, passing down the hall.
Balcom entered the library just as Davis was about to leave, hugging close to him his brain child. Davis clutched it a bit closer at sight of the other partner.
A glance would have been sufficient to show that Brent was secretly afraid of his partner, Balcom, and that Balcom dominated him.
"Go to the gate with him, my dear," whispered Brent to his daughter, who was clinging to his arm, convinced of the goodness of her father, ignorant of the very basis on which the Brent and Balcom fortune rested.
Balcom's mouth tightened as he came closer to Brent, menacing, the moment they were alone.
"How long has this double crossing been going on?" sneered Balcom, jerking his head toward the door through which Eva had just gone with the inventor, and shoving his face close to Brent's.
"It's not double crossing, Balcom," Brent attempted to conciliate, "but—"
"No 'buts,'" interrupted Balcom, with deadly coldness. "Keep on, and you'll have the government down on us for violating the anti-trust law. What's the matter? Have you lost your nerve?"
As Balcom almost hissed the question, up in the laboratory Locke was now writing furiously in his note-book, when he was interrupted by a knock at the door. He whipped the dictagraph receiver off his head and jumped to his feet, hiding all traces of the dictagraph in the desk drawer. Then he moved over to the door, unlocked it, and flung it open.
"Oh, I hope I haven't interrupted you in any important experiment," apologized Zita, innocently enough.
"Nothing important," camouflaged Locke.
Though Locke did not seem to notice it, another would have seen that Zita cared a great deal for him.
"May I come in?" she asked, wheedling.
"Certainly. I am charmed, I assure you."
While Zita was gushingly effusive, Locke was correct and formally polite as he bowed his acquiescence. Zita felt it.
For a moment she stood looking at a half-finished experiment on the laboratory table, then finally she turned to Locke with a calculated impulsiveness.
"Why do you treat me so coldly," she asked, "when you know I admire your wonderful work?"
"Really, Miss Dane," he apologized, "I didn't mean to be rude."
Yet there was an air of constraint in his very tone.
"Do you know," she flashed, "I can't help feeling that you are so brilliant—you must be something more than you seem."
Locke suppressed a quick look of surprise. Was she trying to worm some secret from him? He masked his face cleverly.
"Indeed, you must be imagining things," he replied, quietly, turning and strolling toward the window of his laboratory.
The moment his back was turned Zita picked up the photograph of Eva on the desk. For a moment she stood glaring at it jealously.
Out of the window Locke smiled. For, down on the gravel path, walking slowly toward the gate to the Brent Rock grounds, he could see Eva and Davis.
The smile faded into a scowl. He had seen a young man enter the gate. It was Paul Balcom, son of Herbert