Her smile was answer enough. “Poor Larry,” she answered. “He did his best that night. But the taxi stopped in the Park and two men yanked open the doors before I even knew what was going on. Your man got his revolver out and fired at one of them a couple of times, but the man on the other side knocked it out of his hand and they climbed into the taxi and dragged him out. I tried to get out and run away, but another man caught me, picked me up and bundled me into another car. Then they tied me up and gagged me and took me to that awful place. I saw your sister almost at once, but of course I did not know she was your sister until afterwards. Oh, Jack——”
But at this point the nurse came up and kindly but firmly informed them that they must go. Margaret stooped over and kissed me, and, in spite of a stifled giggle from Margaret, Natalie did the same. A moment later they were gone.
I was not allowed to see any one the rest of that day, nor the next, owing to a rise in temperature, induced, according to the doctor, by my first visitors.
But on the third day I was much better, and the doctor informed me that arrangements had been made to move me to my own apartment, where I was to be put in charge of a trained nurse. Mrs. Furneau took charge of the moving, accompanied by Natalie, Margaret and Moore, but I had no chance to talk to them till later, as I was pretty tired after the trip.
The day after the move, however, Moore came in to see me and we shook hands with expressions of mutual esteem. I guess we were pretty glad to see each other again.
After the first few remarks, Moore plunged into an account of his adventures after he had been captured that day. It seemed that he, too, was taken straight to the house on Long Island and put through a sort of Third Degree in the room of the voices. It must have been pretty bad, for he did not want to talk about it much. But I found out that the Emperor would ask him a question, and when Moore refused to answer, they turned on some other sort of gas and put him to sleep, waking him up, violently sick, and questioning him again.
When they realized at last that they could get nothing out of him, they told Moore, who was pretty well all in by that time, that the next time the gas was turned on he would not wake up at all. But just before they turned it on, and while Moore was bracing himself for the end, his tormentors asked him casually whether he knew anything about mechanics and electricity.
Grasping at a straw, Moore admitted that he was an electrical engineer. Whereupon he was put to sleep by the kind of gas used on me, but woke up again to find himself in a cell in the same building in which they had locked me up. Later, they let him see part of the apparatus which worked the cylinder, although he was never allowed to study the thing sufficiently to get a clear understanding of the nature of the fierce rays.
However, he was able to make certain adjustments that were needed, and he was retained as the house electrician after that. A few days later he was allowed, under supervision, to make the electrical preparations for a Japanese fête. He was loose in the building with his guard the night we attacked. His guard was killed at the start and Moore lay low until things quieted down. Then he came out to try to find me, saw us start for the room of the cylinder and ran after us to warn us, for he had discovered the electrical arrangement for blowing up the little stone house in case of an attack. It had been a bar from one of the windows of that house that had crushed in my ribs.
But, Moore said, no one had been able to find any trace of the man Clark, who had disappeared early in the search, of the young man about town who had given Moore his first clew that night on Riverside Drive, nor, finally, of Pride. Nor has anything ever been learned of these three.