(It was some time before Erickson could continue; he was in a pitiful agitation, walking over and across the room with a most distressful expression on his face. At length he pulled himself together and resumed his story.)
Well, they kept me in that room some five days. I was fed and attended by my captors—I think now partially drugged by them. But my will remained stubborn. I had faced death before, I could face it now, though it seemed more terrifying in this wretched shape than meeting it undisguised beneath the open skies. This obstinacy drove Huerta frantic. I calculated that it would lead to an outbreak or issue soon. It did.
The sixth night the room was entered by the three men to whom, now weakened, dazed, nervous with disgust, I could offer no resistance. I was really sick. They tied my arms and legs and gagged my mouth, and put me in a sack. It was then, before they completed their task, that I managed to secrete a few scribbled words on a slip of paper, which I had kept by me, and later succeeded in forcing through an aperture in the bag. This paper your boy Riddles found. I was whisked off in an automobile, unloaded like a sack of potatoes at the door of—east Fifty-eighth Street, and taken to the attic floor where you and the police found me.
Before you came I was confronted with Angelica and Diaz, and the proposition was very attractively made that nothing should be said in any public way about Krocker Land, but that my gold specimen should be sold as bullion, and that we four should form a transmutation plant with the radium that I had brought back. Accede to this, they explained (they were somehow convinced that I was withholding the secret technique I had learned of the process of transmutation), and combine with them, and my life and freedom would be assured.
I saw through the ruse, feeble as I had mentally become. My life, at least its short continuance, depended upon my resisting their demands. Once granted, the paper signed, what I knew of the transmutation revealed—and I now sedulously encouraged their belief in a more or less recondite process which demanded physical apparatus and silver bullion—and my life would be but a flash in the pan—out—like that. (And Erickson snapped his fingers.) If I could delay the upshot—inevitable in any case unless relief came—until some lucky chance brought me deliverance and I hoped the paper scribble would—I might yet survive.
Therefore I pleaded, I argued, I promised everything if they would liberate me, and then upon their savage refusal, I grew dogged and silent. It was then or a little afterwards that the conversation occurred that you and the police overheard and then, when these ruthless, bloodless imps of Hell were about to inflict their brutal torture—the door was burst open, and all was over.
I recall distinctly the evening on which Mr. Erickson concluded his stupendous narrative. It had been agreed that, apart from some brief announcements before the various proper scientific bodies of the world, no details should precede the publication in book form of Erickson’s personal account and the serial report in the Truth Getter. All this is now a part of history, and a part which fairly challenges comparison with those thunderstruck days when Columbus and Cabot, Vespucius, Hudson, and Verrazani rolled up the curtain that hid the western world.
I say I remember the evening. It was a sombre dying twilight in March. The servant had just lit the lamp of the library, and a hoarse wind rose petulantly outside, like the distant drone of a fog whistle. A vision stood at the door. It was my daughter, Sibyl. She was resplendent. I noticed Erickson’s awed rapture. She held an evening paper in her hand. Her voice was as beautiful as her person. Its music conveyed this message:
“Father, this paper has a telegram from St. John’s, Newfoundland, saying that Donald McMillan has reached Krocker Land, and below it is one from Point Barrow, saying Stefansson has reached Krocker Land. Isn’t that a surprising coincidence?”