“I don’t like to muss you up,” he said softly, “so please put out your hands and make no trouble.”
Starr chuckled amusedly. “You are really surprisingly simple, Culligore. Your pistol doesn’t frighten me, for I know you won’t use it. And arresting me won’t do you any good. If you put me in jail, the antidote will never be found, and then seven of the biggest men in the country will die. Don’t you see, Culligore, that there isn’t a thing you can do?”
His tones were soft and teasing, and his words expressed the same idea that Culligore himself had voiced in Inspector Stapleton’s presence. Slowly the lieutenant ran his eyes over the walls. The underground chamber, and especially the steel chests stacked along the side, would serve excellently as a hiding place. What more natural than the antidote should be concealed in one of the chests? It seemed——
He got no farther in his reasoning. Too swiftly for Culligore to interfere, Starr’s hand moved to the wall at his side. A faint click sounded, and then blackness fell. Culligore sprang forward, but already a loud slam signified that the door had closed. He hurled himself against it, but he might as well have been pitting his strength against a brick wall.
“Trapped!” he muttered.
[CHAPTER XXI—MR. SHEI’S STRATAGEM]
A swarm of jumbled thoughts and emotions crowded each fraction of a second as The Gray Phantom, standing with his back against the door, heard Slade’s slow and precise voice pronounce the numerals. At each distinctly spoken word he started as if a rapier had prodded his flesh. His gaze was fixed on Helen, who from her position in the stairway stared down on the scene with eyes that appeared to see nothing, and the blank look in her face told him that she was mercifully oblivious of the meaning of it all.
With the speed of lightning, stray thoughts and impressions flashed through The Phantom’s mind. Slade had warned him that Helen would die when he had counted ten, unless The Phantom surrendered in the meantime. At Helen’s back, shielded by her body against a possible bullet from The Phantom’s revolver, stood the executioner, ready to press the trigger.
Things swam in confusion before The Phantom’s eyes. He would gladly have given his life if thereby he could save Helen from her predicament. But Slade dared not kill him just yet, not until he had learned where Doctor Tagala was hidden, and so he hoped to force The Phantom into submission by threatening Helen. The plan was subtle and fiendishly clever, and more than once, as the seconds dragged by, The Phantom had been on the point of yielding. The only thing that had restrained him was the belief that his surrender would only make the situation worse. It would deprive him of his precarious advantage, and then Helen’s position would be doubly desperate.
Once he glanced at the automatic in his hand, wishing that he could fire a bullet into the figure crouching behind Helen. It was a forlorn hope, for the coward knew better than to expose himself. Again Slade’s voice, pronouncing each syllable with excessive precision, broke in upon his thoughts: