Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/23

Rh much they knew; and the murder of Jeffrey Anson, they inferred.

New York had the news in ten minutes. The rest of the world knew of Dane Cabot's capture in an hour. Newsreel cameramen and radio announcers bustled in the street before the towering red structure which housed Central Detention when the patrol car stopped before it. Curious thousands fought with policemen to get a look at the rebel as they hustled him up the steps. Ropes fenced off the grim red building. The clamor of thousands of shouting voices beat against Dane's ears.

But Dane did not hear them. His whole being was paralyzed. He was tasting the bitter gall of defeat. A single voice whispered to him, taunted him over and over until he was half mad: "We are counting on you—we are counting on you!"

They threw him into one of the big, frosted-glass cells. Reporters milled about him, deviling him for a story. Then policemen began to cuff him about and shout at him: "Where's Anson?" Dane kept a stolid silence, even while blood trickled from a split lip and his head hummed from a black-jack blow.

A few minutes later the crowd was driven from his cell and twelve grim, hard-faced men in civilian clothes stalked in. Dane saw the twelve-pointed gold stars on their sleeves, and his jaw went hard.

"The Vedette!" he groaned.

Marcus Baring, acting secret police head, stepped before Dane. He was an undersized, hatchet-faced man, with gaunt cheeks and small eyes as hard and black as obsidian.

"Ready to talk, Cabot?" he barked.

"I've got nothing to confess," Dane replied stubbornly. And all the time he was thinking: ''Don't let them pry it out of you! Don't open your mouth even if they cut you into a thousand pieces!''

Baring's mouth twitched. He jerked a thumb.

"Take him upstairs."

At the end of the hall an elevator swallowed the thirteen of them, and they shot up forty or fifty stories. Baring led them down the hall to a plain door. He threw it open, and Mapes, a blond husky, shoved Dane inside. The prisoner took one look at the man who stood in the center of the room. Then his heart sank within him, and he knew too well what was ahead.

The man who awaited him, smiling cocksuredly, dangled a leather belt in his hand, the buckle swinging free. It was East Bayard.

T LOOKS like the game's up, Cabot," the big Leader said cheerfully. His lips were still puffed from the beating he had taken at Dane's hands. One eye was slightly discolored behind those thick, pinkish glasses of his. "Suppose you talk and save us all some trouble," he suggested.

"I told Baring I had nothing to say," Dane muttered. "That still stands."

Someone shrilled suddenly: "Strip him to the waist! This is time wasted."

From the corner came the old fox himself—Loren Bayard, Leader of Leaders, Master of The Hundred.

"I'm flattered!" said the rebel with a grin. "I've never rated more than a couple of Vedettes before."

Bayard stared at him without smiling. He was a man to whom humor was Quantity X. He had a sickly, twisted body that was not more than a rack of crooked bones inside his uniform. Wrinkled, white flesh covered his skull thinly. He had not a hair on his body. In the mask of lines and ugly features, his mouth was a small red hole, his eyes two burning green stones.

"Be at it!" Bayard whirled on his big son. "Why do you stand there, you