“Lee,” said Ellen, “understand this: that if I have no word from you within seventy-two, no, forty-eight hours after you get started on this scheme you have in mind, I’m going to get through to Barter somehow. If I put an ad in the paper and tell him where I’m to be found he’ll surely make another attempt to take me in. If he’s captured you, or uncovered 243 the trap you’re laying, then I’ll at least be with you. If he kills you he kills me. If we can’t live together we can die together.”
Bentley kissed her fervently, trying not to think what it would mean to him now if she were in the hands of Caleb Barter. Secretly he intended having Tyler keep her so closely guarded that she couldn’t possibly do anything as foolish as she had suggested.
The late evening papers carried another manifesto of the Mind Master to the effect that the remaining eighteen men named on the original list were to be taken before noon of the next day.
Oddly enough eighteen kidnapings were reported from various places in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
“So,” thought Bentley, “he’s afraid to send out normal apes to capture his eighteen key men. Maybe his control over them is not perfect. That’s it. I suppose––he needs human brains before he can exercise perfect control. I suppose Stanley, Morton and Cleve did the kidnapings.”
Late that night Bentley kissed Ellen good-by, told her to keep up her courage, and repaired to the rendezvous arranged for by Thomas Tyler and his surgeon father. In the operating room was the cold body of the anthropoid that had successfully abducted Saret Balisle.
“Young man,” said Dr. Tyler, “just what is it you want me to do? I’m not asking for your reasons. Tommy tells me you know what you’re doing. I must say though, I don’t believe that story of brain transplantation. No doctor would believe it for a minute.”
Bentley looked at the dead ape.
“You’ll take Tommy’s word for it that that ape kidnaped Saret Balisle to-day and took him down the face of a building, sixteen stories to the ground?”