Panther Eye Part 24

"Now then, git out. Scatter. I never saw any of you before. See!"

There was a roar of understanding from the men. Then they "faded."

Leaping to the back stairway, Johnny picked Mazie up in his arms and carried her down to the garden. Here he cut the bands that held her hands and feet.

"Can you walk?"

"Yes."

"C'mon then. Gotta beat it."

They were away like a shot.

A half-hour later they were joking over a cup of chocolate and a plate of sweet biscuits in the Red Cross canteen. Mazie was still dressed as a Russian peasant girl.

"I say, Mazie!" exclaimed Johnny. "You make a jolly fine-looking peasant!"

"Thanks!" said Mazie. "But if that's the way they treat peasant girls, I prefer to be an American."

"What did they do to you?"

"Nothing, only tried to frighten me into telling where the gold was. It's not so much what they did as what they would have done." She s.h.i.+vered.

"Did they get any of the gold?"

"Not an ounce. It's all stowed away here at the Red Cross."

"Good! Then we'll have our haven of refuge yet."

"If we live."

"And we will."

They lapsed into a long silence, each thinking many thoughts.

CHAPTER XX

SOME MYSTERIES UNCOVERED

The days that followed were busy ones for Johnny Thompson and Mazie. The tumult in the city had died away. There was a chance for work. Feed must be bought for the cattle from Mongolia; the hotel was to be rented.

Through the good services of the Red Cross, the most needy of the refugees were to be a.s.sembled, and, when the s.h.i.+p from China arrived, the work of unloading was to be directed.

Several busy days had pa.s.sed before Johnny had time to think of looking up his gang. At this moment he was seated at the head of a seemingly endless table on each side of which was an array of pinch-faced but happy children.

When he started out to find the men the first one he came upon was Dave Tower. Dave began telling him of the strange case of the professor who had been with the Orientals at the mines, and had drifted north with them in the balloon.

"His mind seems all right now and he is well as any man could be, but he either cannot or will not tell us a thing of his life with the Orientals up there at the mines," said Dave. "There are some things we would all like to know. Strange case, I'd call it."

"Yes, but there have been stranger. Say!" Johnny slapped him on the shoulder. "You bring him around to headquarters to-night. I've got an idea."

"Righto. We'll be there. So long till then."

When Dave arrived with the professor, he found that the stage had been set for a moving-picture show. He was glad of that; it had been months since he had seen one. He was hardly prepared, however, for the type of show it was to be.

The room was darkened. Beside him, sat the professor. There came the peculiar snap-snap of the carbons as the power came on. The next instant a dazzling light fell upon the screen, and out into that light there moved a half-score of little yellow men. Some were working industriously at a machine which cut cubes of earth from the bank before them. Others were carrying the cubes away and piling them.

Professor Todd moved uneasily. He put his hands to his eyes, as if to shut out the scene. Then unexpectedly he cried out, as if in pain:

"My head! My head! He struck me."

"Who struck you?"

Dave looked about. There was no one near them.

"The yellow man; he struck me," cried the professor. Then he covered his face with his hands and his body swayed back and forth with suppressed emotion.

Johnny moved silently toward them.

"It's coming back to him. When he regains control of himself, he will know everything. It was the flash of light and the familiar scene that did it.

Of course, you know that is the film he sent out to us when he was a prisoner in the mine."

What Johnny said was quite true. When the man was again in the cool out-of-doors, he was able to give a full account of his life with the Orientals. They had made him prisoner because they feared to have him at large. Other white men might appear, as indeed they had, and he might reveal their plans. He had known in a vague sort of way that some mysterious deathtrap had been set in Mine No. 1, and when, through a crack in the wall to his prison, he saw the white men arrive, he determined to attempt to warn them. This he did by singing songs to the Orientals and, at the same time, making phonographic records to be sent rolling down the hill later.

"But you don't actually know how Frank Langlois was killed?" There was disappointment in Dave's tone.

"No, I do not," said the professor.

"Oh, as to that," said Johnny. "Didn't Pant tell you?"

"Pant? I haven't seen Pant since the fight to save Mazie."

"Isn't he with the bunch?"

"No--nor hasn't been. Jarvis says his goggles were smashed in the fight.

Says he saw him without them. No one's seen him since."

"You don't think they got him?"

"Not Pant. He can't be got, not by a mere band of Orientals. But what's this he told you about Langlois?"

"Oh! He stayed up there, you know. He went into Mine No. 1 and prowled round a bit. Found where the yellow bunch had run a high-tension insulated wire through a crevice in the rock to the head of that pool into which Langlois drove his pick. They ran a second wire to the base of the pool and connected the two to a heavy battery circuit. They had discovered that the pool rested upon a chalk rock which was good insulation. There was, therefore, no ground to it. But the damp spot on which Langlois was standing when he swung the pick was grounded. The minute he struck the pool the whole current pa.s.sed through his body."

"Electrocuted!"

"Yes."