In an instant he had pressed his ear against the keyhole. Now he could heard the sounds quite clearly, but the soblike effect was gone, and instead they made him think of someone gasping and spluttering. Mystified, he tried the lock and pushed the door open. The room was dark, and he ran his hand along the wall until he found the electric switch. As the light flashed on, a mutter of amazement fell from his lips.
On a bed at the farther end of the room, with hands and feet bound and a gag firmly adjusted to his mouth, lay Haiuto. The servant, a look of mute pleading in his bulging eyes, was tugging impotently at the ropes around his ankles and wrists.
“What’s happened?” sharply inquired The Phantom, but renewed splutterings called his attention to the fact that the gag prevented Haiuto from speaking. He removed the cloth while repeating the question. Haiuto, breathing hard, licked the bruised portion of his mouth.
“Don’t know,” he finally managed to say. “I sleep. Then noise at door. Before I can get up, somebody walk in. All is dark, like tomb of Iyeyasu. I get awful crack on head. Then sleep again. Don’t know anything else.”
With a moan Haiuto sank back against the pillow. A startling suspicion flashed through The Phantom’s mind. Without troubling to release the servant’s limbs, he ran from the room and opened a door at the farther end of the hall. He had thought it led into Fairspeckle’s bedroom, but his sense of direction had become somewhat confused, and he found himself in the library instead. Faintly through the darkness he glimpsed the bright nickel trimmings of the typewriter at which the ex-financier had been at work earlier in the day. He groped his way across the floor, turning in the direction where he thought Fairspeckle’s bedroom was. A soft tinkle brought him to a dead stop.
The telephone was ringing! Acting on impulse, he fumbled about in the dark till he found the instrument, then lifted the receiver to his ear and spoke a low response into the transmitter. The answering voice sent a quiver through his being. He recognized it at once, for he had heard it before.
“Mr. Shei speaking,” it was saying, and the cold, precise tones were edged with a taunt. “I perceive you have chosen to disregard the warning I gave you a few hours ago. Unless you abandon your plans at once, Miss Hardwick will die. That is absolutely final.”
A faint click signified that the connection was broken. For a few moments The Phantom stood rigid, scarcely able to comprehend the import of the message. It had been spoken in tones so emphatic and sinister that he was left in no doubt regarding the speaker’s sincerity. But how had the man at the other end of the wire learned that The Phantom was in Fairspeckle’s apartment? The telephone call, coming a few minutes after The Phantom’s arrival, had been so accurately timed as to indicate that he had been followed to the Whipple. Yet that did not seem quite possible, for he had been particularly alert against that very thing.
Finally he put the telephone down. He tried to stifle the new and poignant misgivings with which the voice had inspired him. He remembered the other message he had received from the person purporting to be Mr. Shei. He had been deceived then, unless his own and Culligore’s deductions were all wrong, and he would not be so easily imposed upon again. Doubtless the second message, like the first, was only a clever hoax on Fairspeckle’s part. Well, in a few moments he would probably know the truth.
His fears and doubts were only partly quieted when he stepped softly from the room. Time and again there flashed through his mind a suspicion that something was wrong with the theory Culligore had implanted in his mind, but his thoughts in this direction were hazy. The binding and gagging of Haiuto was a disquieting and perplexing circumstance that did not seem to fit into the woof of the lieutenant’s ideas in regard to Fairspeckle.