He seemed in a lenient mood, and tossed the photograph back. He remembered that he, too, had met with a bitter failure some days before, when he thought he had Frank Merriwell completely under his hypnotic control, only to discover, when too late and after he himself had been hypnotized by Frank, that Merriwell had been playing with him all along for the purpose of getting him in his power and unmasking him. The recollection was quite as irritating as that which so stung Dade Morgan.
Dade gave the photograph a savage kick, which landed it in the fire. Santenel watched it leap into flame and crisp and curl to ashes. A cynical smile sat on his cold lips, and the leaping flame seemed to light up kindred fires in the depth of his black eyes. They were peculiar eyes; and, as he sat staring into the grate, the pupils appeared to contract and expand somewhat like those of a cat.
“You are wondering why I am here again?” he said, at length, to Dade, who had gone back to his hot towels. Dade affected a show of indifference.
“I knew you would tell me after a while—when you got ready!”
“I’m back here because I never give up. I never yet was defeated at anything which I seriously undertook, and I never will be. You know my purpose?”
He spoke in a low, droning tone, seeming to direct his words to the dim face of a girl which he fancied he could still see in the ashes of the photograph—spoke in so low a monotone that, though the words were clearly heard by Dade, they could not have been overheard by any one with less alert ears or beyond the room.
“You have told that to me scores of times!”
“You’re no more likely to forget it than I am. But you thought I failed and abandoned the field. You were mistaken. You don’t know me yet as you ought. I can still crush Merriwell and his father, and I shall do it. That’s what I’m here to talk about—to plan for.”
Dade did not answer, though he stood with a hot cloth to his face, staring at Santenel in a fascinated way. There was so strong a bond between them, and the capabilities of the greater villain were of so sublime and audacious a character that Dade felt drawn to him, as an inferior mind to a superior.
Santenel was thinking, as he looked at the face in the ashes of the photograph—thinking first of a face somewhat like that, which he had known and loved so many years ago, then of his life since those distant days, and particularly of his connection with the elder Merriwell, whom he had deeply wronged—Merriwell, who had hounded him throughout the world, and whom he was now determined to crush at once and forever in the most humiliating way that his fiendish inventiveness could suggest.