Adventure Magazine Cover — page 144: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

708 The words buzzed about in Blondie’s throbbing head like a lonely bee in a barrel, leaving him just where he had been before— half suffocated by the binding weight about his chest and wholly stupefied by the total- ity of his surroundings. He saw the old man skim up the narrow stairs and appear directly over him on the gallery. He heard the clink of glass. Then his captor was peering over at him. “Duck your head, my stubborn beauty!” he shrilled angrily. ‘If this stuff goes in your eyes, you will never again behoid the light in this mortal existence! Duck— duc z Blondie had just sense enough to tip his head as far forward as the strain of his posi- tion. would allow, and next moment some- thing splashed against the exposed back of his neck. Instantly there seemed to be a superheated iron searing and corroding the tissues. Blondie threw his free hand back and another drop splashed upon that. When he brought it around with a wild sweep of his arm a purple blotch had ap- peared. It puffed up as the garroter looked, and stabbing pains shot through his arm and shoulder. He seemed to be in some infernal machine, with two white-hot poles scorching him. Reason was quickened by his extremity, and he realized that he must do something to appease the wrath of his mad captor, or he would be consumed alive by this terrible caustic. “T beg!” he cried. ‘‘Come down and Ill talk—I didn’t mean to keep mum, but you got me hoodooed!”’ He heard the old man chuckling with satisfaction as he sped back along the gal- lery and down the steps, and desperately his mind went groping about for a means of still further pacifying him. If only he could entice him near enough to lay his one free hand on him! Blondie’s jaws ground with sudden rage, and he felt the trammeled blood boiling up into his head. For a mo- ment things turned red; then the old man was peering curiously into his face. ‘““Now then,” he said briskly, ‘‘before I ask you to talk, let me warn you that you got off easily this time. The next—” he held up a long, slim, needle-like piece of steel which glistened in the blue light—“‘the next time we have any trouble, I will make just one thrust into you with this, my pip- kin, and the haunts that have known you will know you no more forever. ‘This needle Adventure is inoculated with the virus of anthrax, my infant—anthrax, malignant pustule, my beauty. You'll die a beautiful death—and one false answer will bring all this beatitude into your life!” He paused, apparently to let the full terror of this statement sink into Blondie’s consciousness. The strangler watched him fearfully, eying the infected needle for brief intervals, then letting his glance wander back—which it did of its own free will—to the white, lean, forbidding face of the mad scientist. He noticed that there was a patch of rust near the end of the needle, as if it had been dipped into some thick liquid and allowed to dry slowly. Blondie was densely ignorant on the subject of bacteri- ology, but something grimly assuring in the old man’s presence convinced him that life for Blondie Doyle now hung by a veritable spider-web. If only he could lay hold of that long, lean neck ‘What did you come in here for?” the old man demanded. ‘I came in for money or jewelry or what- ever I could find,” Blondie told him. He felt the other’s eyes drilling into the recesses of his being, but as he was merely lying now, not openly defying his captor, he felt that he was safe. “Jewelry!” the old man scoffed. ‘Do I look like the kind to wear jewelry?” ‘““T never saw you afore,” Blondie assured him earnestly. “You c’n believe me, boss, I wouldn’t have set foot in this blasted house if I’d ha’ kncwed you was here. Let me down; I1’ll go away now—fer Gawd’s sake let me down, afore I smothers with the weight of this noose!” Most of this speech seemed to have passed over his companion’s head. The old man stood with his lean chin in his hand, his elbow resting against the pit of his stomach. He was studying Blondie as he might have studied a strange crystal. Gradually a film seemed to gather over his eyes and he swayed a little as he stood peering at his prisoner. Blondie felt his flesh quivering—a little more and he would topple within reach. Evidently the old man was going into some kind of fit. The strangler’s arm knotted spasmodically and he stared straight at his captor. Again the old man swayed toward him. Blondie hardly realized that his own body jerked to meet the other, as his free arm shot out. There was a scream as of some COMICLOOCKKS. EGO