The cab started again and Bentley folded the paper, falling easily into the habit of New Yorkers who are accustomed to reading on subways where there isn’t room for elbows, to say nothing of broad newspapers.
His eyes caught a headline. He started, frowning, but was instantly mindful of Ellen. He mustn’t show any signs that would excite her, especially when he didn’t yet understand what had caused his own instant perturbation.
Had Ellen looked at him she might have seen merely the calm face of a man mildly interested in the news of the day, but she was looking out at the Fifth Avenue shops.
Bentley was staring again at the newspaper story:
“An evil genius signing his ‘manifestoes’ with the strange cognomen of ‘Mind Master’ gives the authorities of New York City twelve hours in which to take precautions. To prove that he is able to make good his mad threats he states that at noon exactly, to-day, he will cause the death of the chief executive of a great insurance company whose offices are in the Flatiron Building. After that, at regular stated periods, warnings to be issued in each case ten hours in advance, he will steal the brains of the 31 twenty men whose names are hereto appended:” (There followed then a list of names, all of which were known to Bentley.)
He understood why the story had startled him, too. “Mind Master!” Anything that had to do with the human brain interested him mightily now, for he knew to what grim uses it could be put at the hands of a master scientist. Around his own head, safely covered by his hair unless someone looked closely, and even then they must needs know what they sought, was a thin white line. It marked the line of Caleb Barter’s operation on him that terrible night in the African jungles, when his brain had been transferred to the skull-pan of an ape, and the ape’s brain to his own cranium. Any mention of the brain, therefore, recalled to him a very harrowing experience.
It was little wonder that he shuddered.
Ellen noticed his agitation.
“What is it, dearest?” she asked softly, placing her hand in the crook of his arm.