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Roy Glashan's Library
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The Phantom Detective, January 1942, with "Murder Moon Over Miami"
The Phantom battles a menacer of death and destruction that stalks Corpse Cay! Greed turns a playground city into the grim scene of a vast murder game!
FEAR covered the waterfront. A sinister, indefinable terror was expressed by whispered voices. The gaiety of the winter season on America's most beautiful and most crowded bay was replaced by mystery and furtive speech.
Scores of Gulf Stream fishing cruisers, the most popular of all craft, rocked idly at their wharves. Hundreds of Northern anglers, seekers of records with sailfish and marlin, were canceling charters previously made.
Biscayne Bay, Miami, was visited by thousands of tourists each day. But they came but to ask one question. The lack of an answer to that question was keeping fishermen ashore, and the boats collecting barnacles in the docks.
The moon was at three-quarters, just rising. It was reddish, a bloody color against a thin gray fog. The man on the raft was in the vicinity of Dark River where the superstitions natives of the swamps called such a reddish orb of the night a "murder moon."
The raft appeared to be propelled by some invisible hand upon the calm sea. This was because of a treacherous drift formed here by the meeting of cross currents off the flooded mouth of Dark River.
It was drifting toward a shadowy island, or cay, queerly shaped like a huge coffin.
Someone had named the island Corpse Cay, not because of its shape, but because the constant, treacherous current had been known to send drowned men upon the half-moon beach of the island.
Miami fishing cruisers seldom sailed this far south.
Surrounded by shoals, and a poor place for game-fishing, Corpse Cay was invariably shunned. So it was that although Biscayne Bay fishermen and boatmen were deeply concerned with the mystery of three missing cruisers, and fourteen persons, the vicinity of Corpse Cay was not considered as likely grounds for the wide search conducted by the Coast Guard and other craft.
The lone Hindu, strangely afloat on a rubber raft, sat quietly, holding a small box of carved, inlaid wood to his bony chest. His glowing eyes alone moved, as if he were trying to pierce the thin mist, as his raft moved steadily toward the shadowy outline of Corpse Cay.
"Have they heard from the boats?"
No one around Biscayne Bay had an answer. Veteran fishing captains could only shake their heads and mutter over their loss of business. Officials of the Coast Guard could give but the one reply.
"No trace of the boats has been found."
Three fishing cruisers, carrying a total of fourteen persons had failed to return from the Gulf Stream, the world's most popular game-fishing waters.
The three boats had vanished on different days during the past month. Not one boat had radioed an SOS. No one of the three had been reported by any other cruiser as having been in trouble.
Three fishing cruisers had sailed out of Biscayne Bay. That had been the last seen of them. Within the period there had been no storm.
The three boats might have been headed for any spot in the hundreds of square miles of the Gulf Stream. Their courses might have been set east or north or south, anywhere among countless cays from Key West on the south, to the scattered Bahamas on the east.
On this warm January night, many were on the waterfront. They were still asking that same question.
"Have they heard from the boats?"
The only answer was still, "No trace of the boats has been found."
FAR to the southward in the Gulf Stream on this same night, a lone man, wearing only a turban and a loin-cloth, and evidently a Hindu, was floating on a rubber raft.
As the reddish moon lifted higher, it showed a small fishing cruiser lying not far from the raft.
It was of the same type as hundreds of others now lying idle in Biscayne Bay, because of the mystery of the missing boats.
Contrary to the law of the sea, this cruiser displayed no riding lights. Its motor was slowed, and almost unnoticeable. The name, Tempest, showed at the stern of the boat. Three or four shadowy men moved about its decks.
From the small, blacked-out cabin came the deep, low voice of a man singing.
The Tempest should have been flying a triangular blue flag between its whiplike trolling poles, signifying that a sailfish had been caught. But no flag was flying, although a sixty-pound sailfish lay in the rear cockpit.
The low-voiced singer in the darkened cruiser cabin was a short, squat man.
The general impression he gave was that of a toad about to jump. His heavy voice hummed "Moon Over Miami." Biscayne Bay fishermen and Miamians knew him as "Singer" Durkin, captain of the Tempest, and of several other Gulf Stream rental craft.
With his goggling, fish-belly eyes, the singer glanced at his companion in the cabin, the windows of which were covered by heavy drapes. This other man was distinguished by a long, thin nose, and sharp close-set eyes which shifted constantly.
He spoke as if clipping the words with his thin lips.
"We're in the drift, Singer. That Hindu, Laka, ought to be close to Corpse Cay by now. Hope Tommy Crane hasn't got lost in the fog. We must get things shaped up before someone gets a smart idea about the missing boats. And we have to keep Tommy Crane and the girl from suspecting too much before we're ready to make the big strike."
Singer continued to strum his guitar.
"It's a smart play, Lance," he said to the long-nosed man. "But we'll be shavin' the wind close if anything slips up. We should have picked up this Hindu, Laka, before Tommy Crane and the girl had a chance to run onto him. It would be bad if—"
THE cabin door opened. A hard face was poked in.
"Trouble, Skipper!" The voice of the man on the dark deck was low but imperative. "We've sighted that Indian on the raft. But there's another boat just showin' in the fog! If they haven't picked up the raft, it's because they haven't an eye out." Captain Singer Durkin laid down his guitar quickly. The man he had called Lance uttered a quick, sharp oath.
Lance did not appear to be a member of any of Singer Durkin's fishing craft crews. His clothes were immaculate. His shirt was white. And Lance Grover was not a professional fisherman. Instead, he was widely known as the wealthy owner of a Dade County night spot just outside the Miami city limits on the famous Tamiami Trail. His presence here tonight would have been surprising to his friends and to others who frequented his club.
"You think the other boat is close enough to have sighted that raft?" Singer Durkin said to the man in the door.
"Not only that, but she's changed her course," was the answer. "They'll be pickin' up that blasted East Indian in a few minutes."
Singer Durkin's pale, goggling eyes did not change expression. Only his thick lips curled into a sad sort of smile.
"Too bad," he said softly. "We can't have anyone finding out that other things beside dead men drift ashore on the Corpse Cay beach. Too dangerous. Bring one of the fish."
At first glance the shiny, pointed metal cylinder that was placed in Singer Durkin's hands looked to be a toy submarine with a tiny propeller. Singer's fat hand turned a key that wound up a strong spring.
Through one of the opened windows when the single light in the cabin was turned off, the slowly moving night lights and the illuminated portholes of another fishing boat could be seen.
A shiver ran along Lance Grover's tall figure. His narrow shoulders shrugged.
"I don't like being here, Singer!" he said huskily. "I should always be in town on this kind of a night!"
Singer Durkin laughed scornfully.
"Never get over wantin' an alibi when there's blood spilled, eh, Lance? Don't fret. Where there's barracuda an' crabs, there ain't any bodies, so there ain't any murders."
Suddenly he set the propeller of the tiny metal cylinder whirling. He sent the "fish" splashing through the window into the sea.
"The spring shoots it more than halfway there," said Singer. "From then on its nose smells its way. They never miss."
The small cylinder flashed away like some tiny, silvery fish...
On the after deck of the fishing cruiser toward which it sped, stood two men.
One of them, Howard Templeton, a lawyer from up north, was a big, red-faced man, who plainly enjoyed outdoor sports. The young man beside him was so thin as to appear emaciated.
This man was here because he had appeared near the fishing boat suddenly in a canoe and asked to be taken aboard.
He had long, black hair. His face was as dried and yellowed by the swamp sun as old parchment. He had not had time to explain his presence in a canoe there in the night, when a raft had been sighted. The fishing cruiser was headed toward it now—or toward what appeared to be a raft floating in the reddish moonlight.
THE man at the small wheel of the boat spoke.
"Might be somethin' or nothin'," he said. "Hope we don't run onto anything unpleasant, seein' you're one in a thousand, Mr. Templeton, to take a chance on comin' out, what with all the trouble over the missing boats."
"I come aboard to warn you about the Dark River currents, when I noticed you were getting close," the thin young man said then. "The tide has a bad set, an' many a man has been drowned and gone ashore on that island. That's why it's called Corpse Cay."
The red-faced Templeton laughed nervously.
"Thanks," he said. "Sounds spooky, with that red moon and all."
"Hey, there!" the man at the wheel suddenly cried out. "Looks like there is another boat runnin' without lights! I don't like it, an' this tide—" But, though he could not guess it then, danger was not from the treacherous tide. Neither Howard Templeton nor any on his hired cruiser saw the silvery flash alongside their craft. But abruptly foggy sky and sea seemed to crash together in one smashing blast that obliterated the blood-tinged moon. Bright flames divided the cruiser that had been turned toward the queerly floating raft, with a passenger who resembled Mahatma Ghandi.
The running blaze of the explosion appeared to consume all of the craft as wholly as some dissolving acid. It vanished so swiftly that it was gone before the slapping waves of the blast rocked the small rubber raft upon which the dark-skinned man sat clutching the little box.
But as quickly as annihilation had come, one man's eyes and instinct had been faster. The thin, black-haired young man appeared to have had some uncanny forewarning of the swiftly striking death. Or it might have been an instinct born of the deep and deadly swamps that sent him diving, and sinking deep into the swirling sea at almost the exact second of the blast.
Or could it be that he had been otherwise prepared for what was coming?
Aboard the fishing cruiser Tempest, the toad-like, fish-eyed Singer Durkin spoke mournfully.
"No survivors there to tell what they've seen, so it's too bad about Laka and his rubies," he said. "We couldn't have the Hindu remembering what happened to that cruiser, not even for more rubies he might bring. We'll have to take what we can."
The long-nosed Lance Grover looked a little white around his tight-lipped mouth.
"I don't like it, Singer!" he complained. "But it makes sense! It's just as well Tommy Crane didn't get here in time to see too much! But if you rub out the Hindu, how will we explain to the others who are coming from Cuba?"
"Accident, Boss," said the pale-eyed Singer Durkin softly. "Look! The Hindu has sighted us. He's standing up."
The cruiser glided slowly toward the raft. The dark-skinned passenger clutched his precious box under one arm and waved.
As the cruiser touched the bobbing raft, Singer Durkin held one hand low. He reached as if to assist the Hindu aboard the boat. His hidden hand shot upward.
As a fishing boat captain, Singer Durkin had well learned the art of shooting the bright, curved point of a gaff hook into the spine of a shark. The flashing hook went true, and its point split the spine of the Hindu at the back of his neck.
THE scream in the Hindu's throat was ended on its first note. Singer freed the gaff hook, casually wiping blood from its point on his trousers' leg. He balanced a small, carved box in one hand.
"Sink the raft," he ordered. "We'll feed the sailfish now. It will be ready for Tommy Crane. Maybe the next time we'll be ready for the push-over, if he has the girl with him."
Rubies cascaded from the dead Hindu's little box, redder than the murder moon over Corpse Cay, which revealed their shimmering brightness. Lance Grover's close-set eyes were pinpoints as he peered at the gems.
"Sometimes I think we should take the easy picking we have and forget the big gamble," said Singer Durkin.
Lance Grover's thin lips tightened. "Don't be dumb, Singer," he spat out. "The dope and the ice and the paying guests are only chicken feed. We've a big score to settle with the Iron Judge, and that will be a lifetime pay-off. If we win, the law never can touch us."
Singer Durkin's thick lips twisted. He hummed mournfully, then said: "It will be too bad if it fails, but you're the skipper in this."
No more mention was made of what great gamble might be connected with Corpse Cay. The cruiser moved slowly away from the scene of bloody murder. Singer Durkin went back beside the dead sailfish lying in the cockpit. He was busy there for a few minutes.
"The fish has been fed," he announced as he returned to Grover.
The lightly fogged sea appeared to have been swept clear of all witnesses. The mystery of death, of rare jewels snatched from a murdered Hindu, of the blasted fishing boat seemed a secret with those aboard the Tempest.
But a small, shadowy blot was on the sea within sight and hearing of the departing murder cruiser. It was the head of a man, of the thin young man who had been on the exploded vessel.
In the swamps of Dark River this man had long been known as "Blacky" Burch. Not much more than that was known about him, for he led a hermit-like existence.
BLACKY BURCH'S escape from the ill-fated Howard Templeton fishing cruiser had been by the narrowest margin. And now, as he swam easily in the warm sea—the canoe in which he had appeared out of the night from Dark River had been smashed in the explosion—he realized that he alone, of those aboard the fishing boat had not been annihilated. He had gone aboard to warn them to stay clear of the dangerous currents around Corpse Cay. Now they were all dead, from something far more devastating than the treacherous sea.
Swamp inhabitants would have understood that night canoe trip of the queer hermit of Dark River. They knew how much he had the good of others at heart, and Blacky Burch was greatly liked by the native "swamp angels." It was said he "doctored" their ills and saved many lives.
It was also rumored that Blacky Burch was a fugitive from justice. He lived to himself, and kept the natives at a distance by his many strange experiments, but whatever was the truth about this man who had taken up his home in the swamp country, he alone knew it.
Singer Durkin's cruiser glided slowly away as Blacky swam the dark sea. But with his remarkable knowledge of the swinging tide rips, Burch managed to stay near the boat, unseen. He was still keeping an eye on the death cruiser when a clear whistle that might have been given by a swamp night bird sounded across the water. A flashlight winked three times on the cruiser. Another boat seemed to float out of the mist, its motor was so quiet.
A girl's oval face, framed by clustering hair, showed in the light from the silent boat's instrument panel. In that moon-lighted mist the illusion of a bright angel's face was created.
Blacky Burch pulled in a long breath and lay motionless on the surface of the dark water. Could his face have been seen, and the shocked surprise on it, it would have been plain that he knew the girl and was deeply affected by her appearance here on the murder sea.
"Marna Macklin!" he whispered huskily. "And Tommy Crane! If the Iron Judge knew of this—"
The fair-haired girl in the small cruiser stood erect in the dim light, a silhouette of curved loveliness.
"Keep down, Marna, please!"
The voice of command was anxious, and had a boyish ring. Blacky Burch saw the tall figure of the girl's companion as he put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her into the seat. Even that dim light outlined the young man to the watcher in the sea. Burch could see Tommy Crane's dark hair and eyes, and his well modeled face that might have been called weak had it not been for his stubborn chin.
Young Crane was bringing his boat alongside the Tempest. Neither Singer Durkin nor Lance Grover were in evidence on the larger craft now. Two of the Tempest crew caught and held Tommy Crane's boat, while a third man lifted the dead sailfish from the cockpit.
"'Lo, Crane!" greeted the man hefting the long-billed sailfish. "Have to get this one to Janyx in a hurry or it won't be fit for mounting. We're out of ice. Your box okay?"
"I've plenty of ice for it," said Tommy Crane, permitting the silvery body of the fish to slide through his hands and into the boat. "Janyx will get it early tomorrow, unless I have motor trouble."
FLOATING as motionless as drifting kelp, Blacky Burch's glowing eyes were the only sign of life about him. They were fixed intently upon the little scene. His lips moved and shaped words.
"So this is how Tommy Crane is being made to pay off. The young fool! He should know it can't stop with that. But how is he explaining to Marna Macklin?"
The boats separated. Singer Durkin and Lance Grover remained under cover. Blacky Burch heard the girl's clear voice, as she spoke low, insistently.
"Tommy! This is the last time! Promise!"
Before Tommy Crane could reply, the man who had passed over the sailfish to be rushed to Miami for mounting, gave a shout.
"Crane! Friday night! Same time. South of Corpse Cay. Be there, the skipper says!"
Blacky Burch heard Tommy Crane utter an oath. "I'll be on hand!" he shouted then, but added, "This is the last time though!"
A short, evil laugh came from the Tempest. The fog curtained off both boats.
"Friday night," repeated Blacky Burch. "South of the Cay? Yes, Tommy Crane, it may be your last time."
Blacky heard the motors of both boats pick up speed. Tommy Crane's small fishing cruiser was headed toward Miami. The man in the water judged that Singer Durkin's Tempest was circling Corpse Cay, probably for a landing away from the tide-run beach that marked its westward and more dangerous side.
Once more Blacky Burch spoke softly to himself.
"If there were only some way to make Corpse Cay pay off for my freedom," Blacky Burch muttered, "and yet save Marna Macklin and the Iron Judge from suffering! But how can I strike a bargain without bringing out all the truth?"
Interested as he had been in the mysterious meeting of the boats, Blacky Burch had failed to be his usual alert self. He had not noticed the swifter movement of the current until the abruptly swirling tidal rip caught his long body and turned him. He realized his danger then, and struck out.
No living man, he knew, could buck the sweeping tidal currents that converged upon Corpse Cay, once he was within half a mile of the island. The half-moon beach there, under a wall of white coral rock, was a graveyard of the sea.
Flotsam of every description littered the curving, flour-like sand. For years Corpse Cay had been the receiving beach for anything that chanced to float within a ten-mile radius of its extraordinary tidal sweep. Knowing that, somebody might have set the mysterious Hindu afloat on his rubber raft from some boat miles off, with the certainty that he must drift straight to Corpse Cay's graveyard beach. Though Blacky Burch was unaware of any of that.
Blacky permitted his long, thin body to be carried along. He had been too long in the vicinity of Dark River to waste his strength fighting the invisible hands that held him, and knew that drifting easily was his best chance.
THERE was grimness in his thought. He had heard much of the conversation between Singer Durkin and Lance Grover on board their murder cruise, after he had escaped from the exploded fishing cruiser, and some of it was giving him a secret musing satisfaction.
"There's no doubt but that Tommy Crane is hooked up with the Corpse Cay killers," he thought. "Being the godson of Judge Macklin, he is favored by the judge's daughter, Marna. It reads a clean ticket for Blacky Burch, and a chance to pay off the old score with Lance Grover, if I make use of what I already know of the secret of Corpse Cay."
What more he might have been thinking was suddenly forgotten. The increasing tide rip across the outer reef near Corpse Cay compelled him to swim more strongly. He jammed into a corner of the reef and held there a moment.
"I'll be a gone gosling if those killers run onto me," he muttered. "Three boats and fourteen men missing from Miami in the past month. This one tonight makes four boats—and more men. And the city has sent for the detective they call the Phantom. Somewhere I have to fit into all this, but if the Phantom lives up to his reputation, he's my big danger."
Blacky Burch let go of the reef and in a moment more he was in a calm lagoon inside. And as he relaxed, one more important thought came to him: "There's one thing, though—if Durkin and Grover have ideas about the Iron Judge's girl, I may have to change my own plans."
Whatever his plans, or his ideas of employing what he knew to bargain with the man known as the Iron Judge, Blacky Burch had to put it aside, for there was more immediate trouble at the moment.
In the smooth lagoon behind the barrier reef, the current bore him steadily toward the half-moon beach. He could hear the low moaning of the sea against the breakwater he had crossed.
He was about halfway to the beach when a woman screamed with piercing shrillness from the island back of the beach. Blacky heard men shouting. The woman screamed again.
Instinctively Blacky swam in the direction of the cry. Then a searchlight beam cut the night. And into this leaped an incredible figure—a woman, scarcely more than a girl, with long, flowing hair that fell below her knees. Her dress was of bright-colored pieces, as foreign in its design as the incoherently screamed words with their Spanish accent.
Blacky floated quietly, watching. Men rushed onto the beach. Back of the searchlight a man cursed and rapped out a command.
Blacky Burch doubtless had witnessed death by violence in many forms, for his very appearance was that of a man who had seen and known brutality. But his soul was sickened at what he saw now, and his muttered oaths fervent.
A tall man sprang into the light with a three-pronged eel spear. He let it fly, and the girl doubled backward as if a strong wind had bent her spine. She fell and lay there, still screaming, but with pain now.
A man walked down the beach and put a gun to the head of the critically wounded girl. The shot ended her screaming.
A voice floated out to the cursing Blacky, whose hands beat the water.
"See that the others are put back inside the wire! The Skipper will raise the devil about this one! She was ticketed for five grand!"
THE gleam in Blacky Burch's dark eyes might have been a reflection of the horror inside him—or it might have been speculation. But he got no further time for any thought, because instants later he paid for the reckless anger that had caused him to beat the water. The searchlight cut across the lagoon. Its brilliance was in Blacky's eyes.
He had no strength to resist when a motorboat came out with two men. He was pulled on board. Harsh voices spoke.
"Maybe he's off the same boat as the Hindu."
"Yeah, another Spaniard with dough. He floated in like they all do." Toughened by his life in the Dark River swamps, Blacky had quickly regained the strength that had been sapped in his battle with the tides. As one of his captors sought his inside pocket, Blacky's feet shot upward. The man cried out and went overboard.
Blacky rolled, sweeping the feet of the other man from under him. Blacky's fists beat a tattoo.
Two men were cursing and struggling in the lagoon when Blacky sent their motorboat through a gap in the reef into the open sea.
THE hearty-voiced man idling on the fishing pier called himself Starke, Cyrus Starke. He looked and spoke like a middle-Westerner. Miami was full of just such tourists.
Cyrus Starke was red-faced from the sun, and with the typical friendliness of his kind was eager to strike up a conversation with any and all comers. Particularly he liked to gossip with the captains and the crews of the scores of high-poled, Gulf Stream fishing cruisers.
These day-or-week fishing boats lined the wharves of Bayfront Park.
Usually the fishing fleet was engaged days in advance at this season, when the magic city of winter was filled to overflowing, as it was now.
But though fighting sailfish and mighty marlin were running, few fishing enthusiasts showed much desire to spend a day on the world's best fishing waters, the Gulf Stream. The exhibits of sailfish, marlin, tuna and other game varieties hung up about the wharves failed to lure much business.
"There was another one yesterday," one tourist was saying to another. "They're trying to keep it quiet, but a big lawyer from Philadelphia named Templeton hasn't been heard from, and neither has Captain Peters' boat Templeton engaged. It's been missing twenty-four hours now."
"More than a dozen boats have disappeared altogether," exaggerated another visitor. "I hear they've sent for a naval cruiser to help in the search, and make an investigation."
"I hear a frightful sea monster has been seen!" exclaimed a woman tourist.
"That's screwy," said a wise city man. "It's nothing but a racket—to show these other boat owners what they can expect if they don't pony up for protection."
The red-faced Cyrus Starke heard these comments and others. But one ghastly truth was certain. Four fishing boats now had disappeared. A total of eighteen persons were unaccounted for. And Gulf Stream fishing boats had suddenly become as unpopular as a plague.
Cyrus Starke spent most of his day on the fishing pier talking with his newly-made friends, the fishermen. At the end of the day he hired a Gulf Stream cruiser for the following morning. The captain's name was Conners.
"Fine, Mr. Starke," said Conners, a brisk, black-haired Irishman. "An' I suppose you'll be wantin' to fish the usual run of the stream. You an' your buddies?"
Starke's blue eyes that always seemed slightly bewildered looked steadily at Conners.
"I was thinking we might make it a week's trip, Captain Conners," he said quietly. "My friends and I would like to do some fishing south among the keys, say near Dark River, around Corpse Cay."
"Dark River? Corpse Cay?" Captain Conners added an oath to his sharp questions. "You wantin' to fish, or you just full of morbid curiosity, Mr. Starke? Who've you been talkin' with?"
"I'm wanting to fish, and I have some curiosity," Starke said quietly. "And I've been talking with many persons. Here and there I have gathered that someone on each of the four boats now missing had expressed a desire to fish near Corpse Cay."
"Nope!" Conners said flatly. "I'd go to Corpse Cay alone, but I'm not satisfyin' anybody's gruesome idea—"
"My interest is far from morbid, Captain Conners," interrupted Starke. "I know where I wish to go, and why. I am known as the Phantom."
CAPTAIN CONNERS squinted his eyes, inspecting this Mr. Starke. Looking at his broad red face he shook his head as though what he saw was unbelievable.
"Yup, it's all true about the thousand faces, I guess," he said. "So you are the Phantom? That being true, you can have my Pelican, and it won't cost a thin dime."
As the genial, talkative middle-Westerner he had dubbed Cyrus Starke, the Phantom had appeared in what was but one of hundreds of roles he might have assumed. And none of them that could give the faintest inkling of the Phantom's real identity. For only one man in the world knew that the famous Nemesis of crime in his right identity was Richard Curtis Van Loan, free spending, cynical playboy. Nor could it be guessed that the Phantom had any interest in Dick Van Loan's private yacht which now lay in Flamingo Basin, above the Biscayne Bay causeway.
In company with Frank Havens, publisher of the New York Clarion and a nation-wide chain of newspapers—the only man who knew that the Phantom and Richard Curtis Van Loan were one and the same—Dick Van Loan had made a winter's cruising jaunt to Miami, and so had been on hand when his services had been called on. But the authorities who had been so anxious for him to inquire into the increasing mystery of the lost Gulf Stream fishing boats had not the faintest idea that the noted Phantom had been within a thousand miles when the desperate call had gone out to him.
Van had wasted no time, once he had answered, and now, where others had failed to discover a definite angle, the Phantom had quickly ascertained that all of the missing boats might have fished southward near Corpse Cay—and possibly with a particular reason.
Just as the Phantom concluded his deal with Captain Conners, he saw a sturdy man with bushy iron-gray hair alight from a car. He was struck by the man's upstanding appearance and the seamed face with fine lines radiating from deep gray eyes.
Despite apparent age, the man strode briskly, erect as a ramrod. His keen eyes missed no one as he passed. His face lighted and he smiled and nodded a greeting when he saw Captain Conners.
"Judge William Macklin," Conners said to the Phantom. "You've heard of the Iron Judge, of course. He has a beautiful winter home on Venetian Way."
"Most men who respect the law have heard of the Iron Judge," Van told the captain. "But just for the present I would prefer not to be known to him."
Van's never ceasing watchfulness had picked up something that Captain Conners had missed.
As the sturdy old judge had come onto the pier, Van had seen a thin young man with a yellowed, swamp-dried face slip cautiously along the shrubbery near the judge's parked car.
The thin man was wearing rumpled clothing that had recently been wet with sea water. And his eyes were glowing as they were fixed intently upon the Iron Judge.
Judge Macklin stopped and spoke to Captain Conners.
"I wonder if you've seen Marna and Tommy Crane, Captain," he said. "Their boat's been gone since yesterday."
"Sure, Judge Macklin," Conners said heartily. "They came in an hour or so ago. Brought another sailfish. Guess they took it up to Janyx for mounting. With their luck they must be filling up your place with sails and marlins."
Van did not appear to be noticing the Iron Judge, but he saw one set of worry lines vanish to be replaced by others.
"Thanks, Captain Conners," said the judge. "Must have missed them, driving over. Another sail, huh? Tommy's study is pretty well cluttered up with them. Still, it's a good hobby."
VAN was observing the thin, dark man in the shrubbery as Judge Macklin returned to his car. The fellow had been watching the judge closely, but he did not attempt to follow the judge's car as it moved away.
Captain Conners scowled heavily. "The Iron Judge has reason to worry about his scatterbrained godson, Tommy Crane, seeing that he expects him to marry his daughter next month," he observed. "Tommy plays the ponies and the dogs too much, and he's too popular around the night spots."
"That often happens to a youngster, without meaning much," the Phantom said tolerantly. "Though with Judge Macklin having a national reputation for being implacable with criminals, I suppose it goes against the grain to have his godson associating with men who frequent the places young Crane does."
The thin man had not moved. Thinking of the unnumbered enemies the Iron Judge must have made among crooks, Van decided it might be well to learn more of that thin man.
Captain Conners smiled. "Well, there's one thing about Tommy Crane," he said. "He has all of us old-timers guessing, Phantom. He's the only angler who never seems to miss bringing in a sail or a marlin. He must sneak up on them in the night. And he has all of them mounted."
Much of the Phantom's amazing success had been brought about by his quick association of ideas and circumstance. It had struck him forcibly that the stern but kindly Iron Judge had some deeper anxiety with respect to his daughter and Tommy Crane than he had voiced. Could it have involved Tommy Crane's fishing luck?
"You wouldn't know if Tommy Crane is one of the few who fish in the vicinity of Corpse Cay, would you?" he asked.
"Lord, no!" exclaimed Captain Conners. "He wouldn't go there! He always takes Marna Macklin with him, and... Say!" There was question in Conners' exclamation. "Come to think of it, Phantom, Tommy Crane nearly always makes long trips and comes back in the morning. He would have time to fish Corpse Cay waters, but that takes nerve."
The Phantom nodded. It might be well, he thought, to have an interview with Judge Macklin's godson, Tommy Crane. But that could wait until he had investigated Corpse Cay.
Van completed his arrangement with Captain Conners to leave in the morning for Corpse Cay waters. With him he was taking Steve Huston, ace reporter of the New York Clarion, Chip Dorlan, his protege and assistant, and Frank Havens, publisher of the New York Clarion.
Not only was Frank Havens the man who alone knew that the Phantom was Richard Curtis Van Loan, but the publisher was responsible for the existence of the Phantom. Havens had discovered that Dick Van Loan, the son of a lifelong friend—now dead—was bored with too much money that had been left him, and with too much idle time. Havens had suggested that the young man try to solve a difficult murder case that had been too much for the police and newspapermen. Young Van Loan had been successful, and from that one case of detective investigation an enthusiastic taste had been acquired. He had gone on and on with more investigations.
In the few years since that time, Dick Van Loan had become the Phantom, trained mentally and physically to cope with the cleverest and the most dangerous criminals. He had gone into the work with such enthusiasm that nothing had been overlooked to perfect himself in his chosen profession.
NOW the Phantom's laboratory of criminology equalled the world's best. He had himself perfected many devices with which to combat crooks. He had studied make-up to the point that he had become adept at disguise, but also capable of portraying the mannerisms and speaking in the voice of almost any other man for whom he chose to double when circumstances so required.
Physically fit at all times, Van was trained in every art of self-defense. He drove always for the protection of victims of injustice, and was frequently compelled to administer justice personally, so physical prowess was a necessity. And he had an uncanny feeling right now that shortly he would have need for his best.
When Van left the fishing pier, he had not appeared to notice the thin, dark man who had been watching Judge Macklin, but had kept him under observation every minute.
He had the feeling that the thin man might be a criminal, perhaps an ex-convict with a grievance against the Iron Judge.
Van planned to come upon the thin man suddenly and discover his reaction. But to Van's amazement, as he started across the Bayfront Park, it was the thin man who suddenly moved as if to trail him.
Van chuckled softly and gave the man an opportunity to shadow him.
The Phantom followed a winding pathway across Bayfront Park to Biscayne Boulevard, with the thin man keeping pace with him on another pathway.
It was now verging on darkness. Already lights were popping out among the royal palms lining the traffic lanes.
Van usually drove a coupé that appeared to be of ancient vintage and with little power. He had it parked now in one of the middle lanes of the boulevard. Van crossed to the car and waited.
As the thin man stepped from the park shrubbery it struck Van that the man feared for his own safety. He glanced both ways along the boulevard, then back into the park.
Van was convinced now that the thin man had been interested in more than shadowing Judge Macklin. He had been not far away when Captain Conners had walked to the end of the pier with the Phantom, talking about the next day's proposed trip, and it was possible the fellow had heard Corpse Cay mentioned.
As the thin man seemed undecided about crossing to the coupé, Van decided to give him a surprise. No one was near the thin man. But a voice spoke to him as if it might have come from one of the Dead Man trees which showed their soft, white bark along the sidewalk.
"You want to talk about Corpse Cay?"
The thin man jumped as if he had been stung. He glanced at the tree from which the voice had seemed to come. But he seemed to be highly intelligent, for he turned at once. He smiled a little and his lips moved.
"Yes, about Corpse Cay," he said with his lips alone. "I heard you talking to Captain Conners, and I know now that you are the Phantom. If you were not, you could not be reading my lips, as you are. You would not have employed ventriloquism, for I can also read your lips."
Van smiled at his shadower's cleverness. He had flicked his hand for the thin man to join him when the red light went off, and cars flowed between them. The thin man started, stepped back, then one of the cars that had either been parked or waiting for the light to change, swung in.
There was a screaming of brakes. The thin man apparently was picked off his feet and hurled through the air. The car that had stopped was a sport model, and the thin man's body landed in the rear seat.
Before Van could reach it, the driver had twisted from traffic, jumped the car to the wide sidewalk, and turned it on squealing tires. There were two sharp cracks such as could have been made by silenced pistols.
A slug spatted mushily into a palm close to Van's head.
The thin man apparently was struggling as his abductors' car whirled the corner, traveling the wrong way of Biscayne Boulevard, but shooting across traffic into the proper lane.
A hand holding a rod arose and fell, and the Phantom lost sight of the thin man as the fellow disappeared.
VAN jumped his coupé away in fast second speed. He was quicker than the driver of the kidnap car in turning on a clear space of sidewalk. The other car had a clean block to start, but the powerful motor in the battered coupé was a whirlwind on the getaway.
Van saw the other car turn from Biscayne Boulevard into Bayfront Drive, which would cross the Little Miami River two blocks away. From there, the abductors had a choice of many routes.
They could make for Coconut Grove and the Pan-American Airport, take the highway to Coral Gables, or twist into the street leading to the Tamiami Trail.
The driver jumped a red light, but in spite of its headway, Van's coupé gained fast. Scarcely fifty yards separated the two cars when the abductors started onto the bridge over the river. And at that moment, the gates dropped against all cars, and the bridge started to open, its two sides beginning to rise like opening leaves of a book, to let the tourist scenic boat returning from the Everglades pass through.
It seemed certain the car was trapped. Van saw four men in it. He estimated the distance and planned to smash into the other car as it came to a stop. His hand whipped to his automatic.
To his amazement, the fleeing driver shot the car on up the incline of the rising leaf of the bridge. Van saw the bridge-tender running out, waving wildly, but the driver of the runaway car sent it on up and across the separating gap, a distance then of possibly two feet.
Yards behind, Van did not hesitate. When his foot jammed all the way down, his own super-powered motor took hold and he went on up the rising leaf of the bridge.
Van was not sure even the greater speed of his motor could send his car over the jump, and he was thinking less of himself than of what might happen to passengers on the scenic boat beneath in case his car crashed down on it.
The bridge-tender was totally incapable of checking the rise of the bridge. It seemed to Van that in the final five yards his coupé was liable to stall over backward like a plane being forced to climb too steeply.
Van had time for but one glance to assure himself that the scenic boat with its gaping, gasping passengers was still in the clear. Then his coupé left the lip of the first bridge leaf.
Only a few times has a car ever run onto a rising bridge. Never before in Miami history had a car ever gone up at high speed, then jumped what must have been a clean ten feet of space.
For what seemed many long seconds to Van, he could see the edge of the opposite bridge wing. He was prepared to jump only if the coupé should drop into the river.
Then Van's coupé seemed like some desperate animal, with its forefeet caught over the opposite wing. As the coupé hung there momentarily, the Phantom performed a feat of speed and strength that could have made top booking in any circus.
The coupé was actually falling as Van whipped out of the door, sprang across the fender, threw himself sideward, then caught the bridge floor with his hands. He swung up and to his feet.
He heard his coupé splash heavily into the river. Cheers of the scenic boat passengers rang in Van's ears as he rolled down the steep bridge wing.
HE HAD a glimpse of the kidnap car. Evidently believing he had escaped, the driver had slowed to a normal speed. But as the driver saw the Phantom hit in the street below the bridge, he speeded up again. His move was just too late. Van had his heavy automatic in his hand and a clear street. He took the rear tires of the fugitive car with his first two shots. The rear of the fleeing car slewed sharply around. The front wheels jumped a curb. A coconut palm took the full impact of the resultant crash. Van saw the car's occupants flying through a hedge that bordered the sidewalk.
Bayfront Drive was clear of pedestrians, and only one car, a block distant. As Van raced toward the crash, two quick shots were smashed at him through the hedge.
His automatic was aimed at the blue blaze as he fired once. The gunman went down. As he reached the smashed car, Van saw vague figures scattering through the trees of the shore park.
He might have overtaken one or more of the men, but his quick eyes spotted something of perhaps more importance. A small, gleaming object of metal, perhaps eighteen inches long, that had been hurled from the wrecked car. It appeared to be a narrow, pointed cylinder. It had landed in some grass at the base of a palm tree. Just as Van first glimpsed it, the cylinder seemed to come to life, twisting from the grass.
The amazement of the Phantom was quickly dissipated. For he noticed that the cylinder was being attracted toward the steel of the wrecked car by a heavily charged magnet. He grabbed up the thing, and quickly discovered that the nose of the cylinder was of soft metal, electrically charged to convert it into a magnet.
The cylinder was much like a toy submarine, with a propeller operated by a strong spring. Back of the nose, Van found a vacant space, evidently intended for some form of high explosive, for there was a detonating cap in the nose that would have been exploded by contact.
Almost as soon as he had ascertained the remarkable properties of the metal cylinder, he saw the body of the thin man lying under a hedge.
Van thrust the queer cylinder into his clothes. He heard a slight sound. A man was limping away furtively among the trees. The others from the car had disappeared.
Van bent over the thin man. He saw a bloody gouge over one ear where the thin man probably had been hit when he had been seized. But he was alive. Black eyes that were like burning coals opened. The man's brain was perhaps confused, for his murmured words failed to make much sense. Yet he recognized the Phantom.
"Phantom—" Van was compelled to bend close to catch the faint speech. "Must save—Tommy Crane—Marna—Corpse Cay—Friday night—I will go—"
A smear of red appeared on the man's lips. The blood put a period to immediate speech. Van heard a police car's siren. Not far away, he could see several persons running toward the wreck.
The thin man's eyes had closed. Van whipped a small pad from a pocket. No more than two seconds were required to press the man's fingers to the pad, which preserved the prints.
VAN had acted so quickly that the one wounded man limping away, was still visible among the trees. He must reach that man, if he could. The police would take care of the thin man.
Van went through the hedge, gliding among the trees with the silence of a ghost, one of his tricks which were responsible for his name, Phantom.
"It would be as well to stay away from the police just now," he considered. "Whatever this is, it involves the godson of the Iron Judge, and it may be best to learn more before I talk to the police."
Behind him the wrecked car was being quickly surrounded. Ahead of him the limping fugitive, the gunman he had wounded by shooting low, suddenly went over the sea wall.
It seemed to Van that the man must have gone directly into the bay. Before he could reach the wall, there was the staccato explosion of a boat's motor. A fast, small speedboat laid a white wake out into the darkness.
Van could see two figures in the boat. He could have picked off either one or both with his deadly automatic, but he never had shot a man except in self-defense, or where the circumstances were clear and convicting. And he had no direct evidence that the fleeing men were killers.
Back of him he could hear excited voices.
"They went that way!"
"They were shooting!"
"The crazy driver who jumped the bridge was after them!"
Police and others were coming through the trees. The Phantom faded silently, swiftly, to one side and made his way back toward the street.
He was making a quick transformation of himself from the identity of Mr. Starke, tourist, when he heard an ambulance arrive. The thin man would soon be cared for at the city emergency hospital.
Fast work with materials from a flat make-up case that fitted his body under his clothes, and a much younger man than Mr. Starke had appeared to be, hailed a cruising taxi cab a block from Bayfront Drive on South Miami Avenue.
"The City Hall block on Flagler Street," directed Van.
The city emergency hospital was in the Police Headquarters Building directly across Flagler Street from the City Hall. Van hoped the thin man might be revived enough to talk by the time he arrived.
As the Phantom's taxi sped up Flagler Street, two ambulance attendants were carrying a stretcher toward Headquarters, and the young interne with them fully believed they were carrying a dead man.
The interne could see that the eyes of the thin, emaciated figure on the stretcher were slightly open, just enough to give a shine of the eyeballs. But there seemed not the slightest flutter of breath.
Because of the dried blood, the shallow, gouged wound over one ear appeared more serious than it really was. The interne intended to make further examination inside in the city emergency hospital.
A small crowd had collected, watching the ambulance. The yellow face of the thin man was ghastly. His bony features were like those of a skeleton with tightly drawn skin. But had the ambulance men known more of the mysterious hermit of Dark River, Blacky Burch, they might not have been so sure that this was his final journey.
Blacky Burch had passed out cold when the Phantom had been beside him, but those shining slits of eyes were now very much alive. And as one attendant raised the head end of the stretcher to ascend the steps to the hospital doorway, the thin man came to life all over. The surprise favored him. He rolled, twisting and landing upon his feet.
Before the first shout reached the small crowd, the onlookers separated before the apparition of a leaping "dead man."
Blacky Burch was fast, so fast that he was through the crowd, then darting into shadows alongside the building before the stupefied ambulance men could move quickly enough to stop him.
"He went that way!"
"No! He turned across the tracks!" The shouted directions of the confused onlookers were wrong. Blacky Burch passed between two buildings. No one saw him after that.
A police captain swore roundly. Orders snapped out and a search was taken up. But Blacky Burch was gone.
QUICKLY the Phantom walked over from his taxicab at the moment when the police and the crowd were still shouting, and getting nowhere. There was a queer, grim smile on Van's lips as he learned that the thin man, shadower of the Iron Judge and himself, had come to life and escaped.
The Phantom did not make himself known. For first he wanted to know more of the queer connection of all of this with Judge William Macklin, the Iron Judge.
"Probably this thin man's warning of trouble for Tommy Crane and the judge's daughter, and something to happen at Corpse Cay on Friday night will affect the Iron Judge directly," Van thought. "It will perhaps be best to learn from the Iron Judge himself what he may know, and what he may fear in connection with Tommy Crane's fishing trips."
Van's quick, analytical brain was considering all angles of the strange situation.
Captain Conners had said one thing that stuck in his mind. It was that Tommy Crane was uncannily lucky, that he brought in sailfish and marlin on every trip, and that he always was gone during the night.
"And Tommy Crane's the first angler I've ever heard of who has all of his fishing trophies mounted," mused Van. "Conners said he took his fish to Janyx. Young Crane came in only a short time ago. His latest sailfish must then be at Janyx' place now, if Captain Conners was correct."
In a corner drug store, as an inquiring tourist, the Phantom learned that Janyx, believed to be a Cuban, was a taxidermist whose place of business was not far from the waterfront on one of the Northeast section streets. The Phantom took another taxi and alighted from it at the Alcazar Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard. He had taken a suite of rooms there, for this investigation. And before visiting this Janyx, who seemed to be favored by the mounting of all of Tommy Crane's almost miraculous catches of sailfish and marlin, he had a long-distance call to make.
A red-headed, freckle-faced young man with a snub nose greeted the Phantom as he entered his suite. Steve Huston, ace New York reporter often had been one of the Phantom's best aids in dangerous cases, and would have been the most surprised young man in the country to have known that the Phantom in reality was the well known New York playboy, Richard Curtis Van Loan.
The Phantom was still in the guise of a youthful tourist. He had identified himself to Huston as he entered, by a tug at the lobe of his left ear. This was a signal used by Van for his closest friends.
"You're on something hot, Phantom," said Steve Huston. "I have been listening to the radio. The police have just dragged a coupé from the Little Miami River. Bulletins are flashing about a crazy driver who tried to jump his car across the opening bridge, saved himself, then raced after and wrecked another car by shooting at the tires. A man who was taken from the wreck later took a powder and ran out on the police after they had believed he was dead."
Van smiled and nodded. "I've a call to make to Washington," he said. "You might get in touch with Chip Dorlan and Frank Havens, Steve. You and I have a little visit to make after I complete this call, then all four of us sail on the fishing boat Pelican."
"I was sure you were the crazy driver of that coupé." Steve grinned. "What's cooking? Is it connected with the missing boats?"
"Perhaps," Van said laconically. "Yes, I was the 'crazy driver.' You might be digging up all the news data you may have on Judge William Macklin, known as the Iron Judge, Steve. The Miami Herald will let you use their morgue, without asking questions, and you can long-distance your own paper."
"The Iron Judge," exclaimed Huston. "You mean he is mixed up in the missing boats thing? What a yarn!"
"He may or may not be, Steve," said Van. "And while you're about it, find out all you can concerning Tommy Crane, the judge's godson."
THE Phantom was on the phone for several minutes. Connected with the department he called at Washington, he opened the pad on which he had taken the fingerprints of the mysterious thin man. Holding the pad under a powerful microscope Van accurately described whorls and line formations of the prints before him.
"I am sending them by telephoto to confirm," he said. "But I want a record immediately if there is one." Probably no other living detective could have thus accurately described prints. He waited but a few minutes before receiving a reply.
Van whistled softly. He had been given the name of an escaped convict. The name was James Layton. The prints checked with those of this strange Blacky Burch.
"Escaped a year ago from Atlanta?" repeated Van. "Known to be dangerous? Weight a hundred and ninety? Right."
He replaced the phone.
"If those who used to know him could see him now, they would not know him," he thought grimly. "He doesn't weigh much over half that. The swamp sun has done a better job than if he had tried face lifting. He is a scientist, a toxicologist, and clever. But why did he try to reach me, knowing me to be the Phantom, and why did he warn me to save Tommy Crane from trouble?"
Steve Huston came back from another phone.
"Looks as if you've got something, Phantom, in this Tommy Crane," he said. "The newspaper boys here have been expecting Tommy Crane's wild gambling and playing the night spots to mix up the Iron Judge in a scandal almost any time. Crane is supposed to marry Marna Macklin, but the newspapers are expecting the Iron Judge to break that up and toss him out on his ear if he doesn't pull up short."
The Phantom nodded.
"You got Chip Dorlan and Mr. Havens, Steve?" he asked.
"They will be waiting for us aboard the Pelican."
"It may be interesting to call upon Janyx whose specialty is mounting fish, before we leave," the Phantom said. "Come on, Steve."
The Phantom was at the wheel of Steve Huston's small car when they turned into poorly lighted Northeast Street. Business buildings gave way to one-story shacks in one dark block, of which there were many in the mushroom city of Miami.
"Guess this Janyx has to keep the fishy smell of his business out of a good neighborhood," commented Steve.
Van smiled. "Perhaps his business is fishy in more than the smell," he said.
The small shop of the taxidermist, Janyx, was at the end of the block. And it was not necessary to look for the number—for the little car was halfway along the block when the Janyx shop became the one bright spot of the dark neighborhood. It erupted into a fierce, white explosion that shot tongues of fire across the width of the street.
"The Janyx place!" rapped Van. "Steve, this is getting bigger every minute! It can be no less than killers who are playing for big stakes who will do things like this—and others we know about!"
The wooden shape of a winged sailfish, a sign swinging over the sidewalk, was outlined for a moment in the shooting blaze, then it vanished in the flame. The small building was being consumed in a manner that indicated the origin of the fire must be chemical. Van ran the car to the curb and sprang out. He saw another car going away on the other side of the blaze. Then he saw something else that clenched his teeth and sent him forward at a speed which Steve Huston could not match.
The thin man again! He appeared as a tall shadow, silhouetted between Van and the fire. And the thin man was running away from the shop that had just burst into flames. For a man who had seemed to be dying less than an hour ago, and who appeared to be wasted to the point of exhaustion, he was about as tough as they came, flashed into Van's mind as he darted in pursuit of the shadowy fugitive.
But once more the man Dark River knew as Blacky Burch became a vanishing ghost. Van quickly decided it was useless to pursue him among the cluttered, small shacks among which he had disappeared.
Fire sirens were screaming. Police cars were coming into the block.
"One point is established, Steve," said Van. "That thin man, James Layton, a fugitive from the Atlanta pen, Tommy Crane, the mounting of sailfish and marlin, and possibly the mystery of the missing Gulf Stream boats are all mixed up. What's more, I have an idea that we are not to have an opportunity to question Janyx, the taxidermist."
Streams hissing upon the subsiding blaze quickly confirmed the Phantom's conjecture. Firemen carried a partly burned body from the ruins of the destroyed fish mounting shop.
"It's Janyx, the Cuban," a fireman announced. "That big emerald ring will identify him, if nothing else. He mounted a sailfish for me once, and I noticed that ring then."
The Phantom, on the fringe of the crowd, heard firemen saying there was no explosive used in the Janyx shop. The explosion could not be explained, yet the Phantom was sure that nothing except a chemically-set fire could have so quickly obliterated the shop and its contents.
Van was thinking of a sailfish that had undoubtedly been brought to the shop shortly before by Tommy Crane. Of the thin man who had run away from the scene of the fire. Of the car he had seen leaving hastily.
"There may or may not be evidence on the burned body to show that Janyx met with foul play before the explosion," said Van. "Anyhow, there is nothing to be done here until perhaps the ruins have cooled. They may be worth investigating later. Steve, you go on and join the others on the fishing cruiser. I have a quick call to make, and I'll take your car."
Minutes later, the Phantom was sending Steve Huston's small car at high speed over the Venetian Causeway, headed for the winter home of the nationally famous Iron Judge.
"If Tommy Crane is there, and he can be made to talk there may be a quick answer to all of this," mused Van. "Now he may not be keeping any appointment at Corpse Cay on Friday night."
JUDGE WILLIAM MACKLIN'S winter residence was a mammoth white place surrounded by a wall with high iron gates. In the most exclusive section of Miami Beach, the home of the Iron Judge occupied a place in what had long been known as "Millionaires' Row," on the Indian Creek Driveway.
"No man has better earned the right to this peaceful place for his retiring age," mused the Phantom, as he slowed for the gates.
There was a sudden grinding of a motor inside the grounds. A car shot out into the main driveway and turned, almost grazing Van's coupé. His lights sliced into the windshield.
"It's impossible!" Van exclaimed. "And yet—"
The passing car flashed away too fast to permit Van to turn and follow, if he had so desired. And having seen the driver's face, he was more keenly anxious than ever to get to the Iron Judge.
For the driver of the car speeding from Judge Macklin's residence was none other than the thin man! His bony, yellow features, his skull-like head had showed too plainly for the Phantom to be mistaken.
"And less than half an hour ago he was running away from the scene of the Janyx explosion and possible murder!" muttered Van. "When I saw him first, he was shadowing the Iron Judge. Then he gave that warning to save Tommy Crane from something, and after that fire—he's here!"
Van sprang from the coupé as it stopped. He had the feeling that again tragedy might be just ahead. It was. But it was not the tragedy of death, although it might have been better for the man known as the Iron Judge if it had been.
As Van reached the wide doorway, he saw the sturdy figure of Judge Macklin with the light of the hallway behind him. The same erect figure Van had seen on the fishing pier.
Now the Iron Judge seemed to be bowed by some great weight. His shoulders sagged and he was peering into the night, as if he did not see the Phantom coming.
Then Van saw the girl. The oval face of Marna Macklin was framed by bright hair. She was small, trim, her head barely level with her father's chin.
"But you can't do that, Father!" Van heard her cry. "You can't! It's Tommy, our Tommy you're talking about! He isn't a prisoner to be sentenced! He—he's your son as much as I am your daughter!"
The Phantom had never heard a deeper note of despairing determination in any man's voice.
"I know only my duty to my fellow man!" rang out the voice of the Iron Judge. "I will call the police! I have long feared this would happen! He must pay the penalty! He may not be guilty of the murder of Janyx, but he is an accessory! If he were brought before me, I would be compelled to impose the same sentence I would give any other murderer!"
Marna Macklin's slim figure seemed to grow taller. Her bright head was poised defiantly. "I'll go to Tommy, and I'll warn him never to come home!" she cried. "They have called you the Iron Judge! You deserve the name! You have no heart! I—"
The light struck upon the face of Judge Macklin. Van could see the finely wrinkled face, the deep eyes. The Iron Judge flinched as if he had been struck a physical blow.
THE next instant the girl sobbed wildly, and her voice was contrite. "Forgive me! I didn't mean that! But I love Tommy! You can't do this to us!"
Her arms were around her father's shoulders. The Iron Judge stroked her hair gently, but he put her away.
"I cannot forego my oath, my own sense of moral values," he said. "You must not see Tommy again. He is responsible for murder! Do you understand?"
"No—no! I'll never understand!" The girl's voice was desperate. "That terrible yellow swamp angel lied! You listened! You never saw him before, and you believed him! He only came to warn you to get Tommy away before the truth came out!"
"I have seen the man before," said the Iron Judge. "He is a convict, a criminal, and he will be apprehended. I cannot allow him to use his knowledge of what Tommy has done to escape the law he has so long evaded." The Phantom knew that the thin, yellow man was a hunted criminal. And he had known that Tommy Crane had some connection with that explosion and the death of Janyx, the taxidermist. But the thin man had tried to warn the Phantom to save Tommy Crane from some mysterious danger he believed threatened him at Corpse Cay on Friday night.
It was possible that the thin man was using his knowledge for his own ends. It was also possible that he himself was responsible for the explosion and the death of Janyx, and that he was connecting Tommy Crane with it to influence the Iron Judge for his own purpose.
Yet there was something about the thin man as he had first seen him that caused Van to reserve final judgment. He stepped into the light and spoke. "Judge Macklin, I am the Phantom Detective. Perhaps I can aid you, or at least attempt to get at the truth of what you appear to have been told." Judge Macklin's face was a hard, set mask. His broad mouth was an uncompromising line.
"The Phantom?" he said. "Yes, I have heard of you and your great work. But this is something where it would seem that all of the truth is at hand, merely confirming what I have already suspected of my godson. I do not want to seem ungracious, but my own daughter's attitude has proved to me that Tommy Crane has been guilty of acts that contributed tonight to the murder of a man."
Van smiled a little. He realized that he was greatly in the dark concerning the startling events of tonight that had revolved around the thin man's incredible actions. And he wished to avoid adding to the Iron Judge's burden of grief by bringing up the angle of the missing fishing cruisers, and the probable tragedies connected with them. But he saw the moist, blue eyes of the girl turned upon him, and he spoke.
"In my work I have often had to judge harshly," he said. "I have many times been in doubt as to the rightfulness of such judgment. Perhaps I can discover mitigating circumstances, something that may clear both Tommy Crane and your conscience."
"If you could do that—"
The Iron Judge seemed to soften, but then he was stern again.
"No, Phantom," he said sternly. "The right of my judgment now cannot be disputed, for my daughter has virtually admitted that Tommy Crane has been associating with criminals. And he must pay—"
Marna cried out then with the deepness of her hurt. She ran from the doorway and disappeared in the darkness. Her words floated back with sobbed wildness.
"You'll never see Tommy again! I'm going to him and—"
The Iron Judge stared bleakly at the Phantom. He made no move. Never had Van been more greatly surprised than then, for the Iron Judge said quietly:
"Phantom, I wanted my girl to do just what she is doing—go to Tommy Crane. I would turn him over to the law as quickly as I would any other man, but I hope my daughter keeps him out of the way until every means of clearing him is exhausted. May the Lord forgive me for doing this my way." There was a hard little smile upon his lips. "Phantom, I want your help," he said. "I have known for some time that Tommy Crane has been engaging in some mysterious enterprise, and that he has been deeply in debt. I must know the truth about what he has been doing."
Ten minutes later, the Phantom drove from the Iron Judge's grounds. He knew no more of the Corpse Cay mystery than when he had arrived, but he had given his word to save Tommy Crane from the still unexplained circumstances that appeared to have enmeshed him in a net of crime. But he knew that the Iron Judge would be a broken man if the Phantom's mission to Corpse Cay failed to save Tommy Crane. And as the Phantom neared the fishing wharves of Biscayne Bay, he wondered where he would again encounter the thin man.
Brisk Captain Conners greeted him as he went aboard the Pelican.
"I'm ready to start any time, Phantom," said Conners. "Perhaps you would be interested in knowing that Tommy Crane fanned his cruiser out of here a short time ago like the devil was on his tail, and Marna Macklin was with him."
The Phantom merely nodded, but he was certain he would see those two before long.
For the night and day that followed the Phantom, again in the guise of Cyrus Starke, the red-faced middle-Westerner, made no mention of the pair, nor of his mission aboard the Pelican. To all appearances, he might have been any angler intent on landing a sailfish or a marlin.
So might the others, who did not question the Phantom, knowing he had already divulged to them as much of his purpose as he saw fit. He had told Frank Havens, Steve Huston and Chip Dorlan of what he hoped to accomplish on this strange fishing trip, though he had reserved some of the features that pertained directly to the Iron Judge.
Now it was Friday. And on this early evening Chip Dorlan, for one, was having the time of his life. He was a lightly-built, peaked-faced young fellow, with sharp blue eyes. Since becoming the protege of the Phantom two years before, when Van had saved the boy's brother from prison on a framed charge, Chip had developed into a smaller fighting edition of the noted detective.
At this moment, Chip was fighting a desperate battle. But this was not against killers with guns or desperate criminals. His fighting was with a fifty-or sixty-pound sailfish that ran with the speed of flashing silver, or threw itself bodily high above the calm sea reddened slightly by the sunset across the Gulf Stream.
Steve Huston, and Frank Havens, the rugged publisher of the Clarion string of newspapers, were intent upon Chip's battle with a fish that was of the gamest piscatorial type of its weight that ever combated the skill of an angler.
Brisk, dark Captain Conners stood to one side with the Phantom. Another man was beside Chip Dorlan directing his first battle with the king of the Gulf Stream.
At times the fierce rushes of the sailfish half lifted Chip from his chair, whipping the heavy rod double in his hands. The Phantom smiled a little as he watched, but his keen eyes were sweeping the sunset horizon.
No other craft visible was on the quiet sea. But in the distance, the Phantom could make out what appeared to be a cloud lying low upon the water.
"So that is Corpse Cay," he said to Captain Conners.
"Yes, Phantom," said Conners, a bitter twist to his mouth. "Notice that the blue of the Gulf Stream is deeper over that way. It is the fresh water current always running from Dark River. Its steady flow across the tide creates the dangerous tidal run for miles around Corpse Cay. Any object coming within ten miles or so of the Cay eventually goes ashore on its half-moon beach. Many bodies have been found there."
The Phantom studied the horizon. "A box or a raft, or anything that would float might be put off of a boat within that ten miles, and it would be sure to reach Corpse Cay?" he asked. "Is that true?"
Captain Conners nodded.
At that moment Chip Dorlan cried out. His sailfish had been brought close alongside. The man helping him leaned over the side and made a sudden grab.
Any novice would have thought that the pointed, sword-like snout of the sailfish threatened to run the man through. Yet it was by a quick seizure of this menacing snout that the man whirled Chip Dorlan's first sailfish to the cockpit of the Pelican.
As Steve Huston and Frank Havens cheered the success of the amazed Chip, the Phantom spoke quickly to Captain Conners.
"The tidal current could make it possible that any boat running something to be smuggled, all the way from living aliens to jewels and narcotics, would not have to make direct contact with some other boat to transfer the stuff?" he asked. "Anything that floated might be picked up from Corpse Cay by—well, say some fishing boat?"
"I hadn't thought of that," admitted Captain Conners. "But it's true. And these waters are avoided because of their danger."
A speck appeared suddenly in the sunset. It increased quickly in size. Looking through his glasses, Captain Conners said:
"It's the cruiser Tempest, one of the boats owned by Singer Durkin. His boats are good, but he doesn't have much luck with the fish."
RAPIDLY the trim-lined Tempest drew nearer. Conners' man had run up the little flag indicating that the Pelican had taken a sailfish. The Tempest was trolling, but carried no flag indicating a catch.
Across the quiet sea, a megaphoned voice carried far.
"Ahoy there, Captain Conners!" The hail was from the Tempest. "See you've picked up one! We haven't had luck! Seen any wreckage or sign of the lost boats?"
Conners replied through a loudspeaker attachment.
"Nary sign of wreckage or the missing boats, Durkin! You're running close to Corpse Cay!"
"Yeah!" replied the Singer Durkin boat. "Our charter wanted a look down this way! Saw a Coast Guard cutter cruising around! They haven't picked up any sign of the lost boats!"
The Phantom was swiftly adjusting a pair of special glasses to his eyes. They operated on a principle he himself had evolved. They gave unusual distance and clearness, by reason of electronic impulse transmitted to the lenses.
He picked out a fat man seated in the angler's chair at the stern of the Tempest, and described this man quickly to Captain Conners.
"Would you know him, Captain?" he asked. "He is wearing an immense seal ring on the middle finger of his left hand. He has a double chin, weighs around two-fifty and his ears are small."
Captain Conners stared at the Phantom, amazed by the description Van had given from use of his glasses, when all Conners could see was merely the bulk of a man in the trolling chair.
"I'd like to own glasses like those, Phantom," said Conners. "Yes, your description seems to fit Thad Burton, a criminal lawyer from the North who has been around Miami for a few weeks. Say! I've heard he's come down here to see the Iron Judge several times—practices in the judge's court a lot, they say—but I didn't know he was interested in fishing. Singer Durkin's Tempest was at its wharf when we left night before last, and Burton must have chartered it."
Van smiled a little and passed his remarkable glasses over to Captain Conners. Once the boatman had tested the amazing results of the lenses, Conners whistled softly.
"Leapin' tuna!" he exclaimed. "I'd give my right eye for a set of these!"
"You may keep your eye, Captain." Van smiled. "They're your glasses when this trip is ended."
"You know," said Captain Conners, "every time I see Singer Durkin, I get a feeling I don't like to have about any man. I'm not one to judge by a man's looks, for I'm about as handsome as a catfish myself, but still Singer Durkin always reminds me of something that might have come out of the swamps."
The Phantom took back the glasses and steadied them for a few seconds on the man who had used the megaphone aboard the Tempest. He saw a toad-like body that was suggestive of "something from the swamps."
The cruisers were drifting apart again. The Pelican still had its trolling lines out as the sea widened between the craft.
Darkness was coming slowly across the calm sea. A light mist appeared to crawl out of the Dark River swamps, spreading over the water. The moon would not appear until well after midnight.
There had been no sign of the small fishing cruiser in which Tommy Crane and Marna Macklin had sailed from Biscayne Bay. But the Phantom had sharply in mind the warning issued by the thin man, that something might happen to Tommy Crane near Corpse Cay on Friday night—tonight.
THE Pelican had been hailed several times by Coast Guard and other boats cruising the Gulf Stream in the hope of raising wreckage or some sign of the four lost cruisers and their eighteen missing persons. Now Singer Durkin had just said there was a Coast Guard cutter in the vicinity of Corpse Cay.
Chip Dorlan having made his catch, the Pelican lines were in. At Van's direction, Captain Conners was permitting the Pelican to hold headway, letting the tidal drift carry the boat toward the shadowy Corpse Cay.
The light fog spread thinly over the surface of the sea. It quickly obscured the shadow that was Corpse Cay. The Singer Durkin cruiser disappeared in it.
Captain Conners touched the Phantom's arm.
"I didn't mention it, Phantom," he said. "But through your glasses I'm sure I saw a sailfish on Durkin's Tempest. And he had not run up a flag, besides saying they hadn't had any luck."
Van nodded, with a grim smile. "I also noticed the sailfish, Captain," he said. "Would you recall if Singer Durkin's boat has always been out when Tommy Crane has caught his unusual fish?"
Captain Conners shook his head. "I don't notice other boats much. And Durkin has some six cruisers for charter."
"It might be one solution to Tommy Crane's luck," said Van. "As for this Dark River, Captain. The swamps in there are where the thin man you told me is known as Blacky Burch has been living for several months, aren't they?"
"Yes, Phantom. As I've told you, this strange fellow Blacky Burch appeared there some time ago. I understand he has been a godsend to his swamp angel friends when they get swamp poison, or the dengue fever. Seems to know quite a bit about doctoring."
Since the Phantom had seen the thin, mysterious Blacky Burch driving away from the Indian Creek residence of the Iron Judge, he had not seen or heard of the man again. Contact with the Miami police had informed him that no alarm was out for the apprehension of the man, except for him to account for his strange disappearance after having been picked up near the wreck of the kidnap car. Other information that the Phantom had collected concerning Blacky Burch, he was keeping to himself.
The Phantom knew that Burch was an escaped convict known as James Layton. Yet Blacky Burch had become a valuable friend to the "swamp angels" about Dark River. The Phantom had been further favorably impressed by Blacky when it had seemed that the man had attempted to warn the Iron Judge that Tommy Crane might be connected with the supposed murder of Janyx, the taxidermist.
Blacky Burch seemed to be a remarkably contradictory person. For he had tried to warn the Phantom himself that Tommy Crane would be in some danger near Corpse Cay this Friday night.
Still there was a selfish motive to be considered.
"This Blacky Burch may desire to save Tommy Crane because Tommy Crane would be more valuable to him alive," Van mused. "Burch may believe young Crane can influence the Iron Judge to help Blacky Burch, or James Layton, escape being returned to prison."
Yet there must be something deeper than this. Something that perhaps concerned Corpse Cay which Blacky Burch must know. Why had the men who abducted Blacky been so anxious to prevent him from talking? Was it because of something the thin man might know concerning his abductors or of crimes that were being committed in the vicinity of Corpse Cay?
FRANK HAVENS came up to the Phantom on the small rear deck of the Pelican as Captain Conners moved away.
"It would appear, Dick," said Havens, "that finding anything on all of this water is pretty hopeless. Now that it is night, and we have not sighted this Tommy Crane or the Macklin girl, anything might happen to them without us knowing it."
Van's eyes were troubled, and he nodded agreement.
"I had hoped that our presence might have drawn more attention than it has," he said. "Now that it seems impossible to sight another boat in the night, I am going to have Captain Conners run close to Corpse Cay and let me take the small boat."
"You intend to go ashore there alone, Dick?"
"I'm sure the origin of all of the tragedy is on the island," said Van. "I'm equally sure that our cruiser is now being watched, and that only one man can make it to Corpse Cay unnoticed."
Havens' eyes clouded.
"I don't like it, Dick," he said, in a troubled voice. "You wouldn't think that the boat which hailed us earlier has something to do with the mystery of the Cay?"
The Phantom's keen eyes, which never seemed to rest, were sweeping the misted sea. There was a sudden rift in the light fog where a breeze swept the water clear. And the pathway of water abruptly took on a phosphorescent gleam wherever there was motion.
Frank Havens had long been accustomed to unexpected action on the part of the Phantom. Even so, he was startled now.
Van's strong hands sent Havens reeling toward a seat where life preservers were fastened.
"Grab a preserver, Frank!" he grated. "Captain Conners! Everybody overboard, quickly! Get preservers if you can!"
It was all the warning that the Phantom was able to utter. For as he shouted his inexplicable words, he himself was going overside with a long, clean dive.
He struck the warm sea, his plunge shallow, and his powerful arms driving him away from the Pelican with sweeping strokes. Luckily, Havens and the others had often been involved in similar swift, and unexplained action on the part of the Phantom.
Havens repeated Van's shout to the others, even as he was seizing a life preserver and jumping. Steve Huston and Chip Dorlan likewise were quick to heed any command the Phantom might give.
But Captain Conners and his one-man crew stared in amazement at the froglike action of their passengers, and they delayed too long.
In the warm sea, the Phantom was driving toward a small, bright object that had danced into view in the suddenly fog-cleared space of the sea. It might have been a mullet or any other small fish skipping along the surface. And had not the Phantom known of another similar shining object, it is possible he might have mistaken this for a fish.
But his keen eyes had seen the silvery thing traveling as if propelled by a whirling tail. Then the tail had ceased to turn. Yet the gleaming object had still moved directly toward the fishing cruiser. And the Phantom was sure that the fishing boat was doomed!
ALTHOUGH its fanlike tail had ceased to spin, the silvery fish of destruction continued to move. It was but a few yards from the Pelican when Van seized it.
Like the other he had seen in Miami, this thing looked like a toy submarine. Its propeller operated on a strong spring that had run down. But Van knew well enough why it had kept on toward the Pelican. For he was aware that in the nose of the toy submarine was a powerful magnet. Just such a toy, with its powerfully magnetized nose, had been drawn toward a wrecked car in Miami.
"Only that one in Miami was harmless, and it's a safe bet that this one contains a powerful explosive," Van was quickly thinking, relieved that he now held the death instrument in his hands. "And doubtless this is the answer to the disappearance of the other fishing boats. It would not require much of the kind of explosive that wrecked the Janyx shop in Miami to wipe out a small cruiser."
Holding the deadly toylike torpedo, he lifted his head high, eyes searching the surface of the sea. He knew now the strength of the Dark River currents that ran in tidal rips around Corpse Cay, for already the Pelican he had just left was only a shadowy bulk.
Then he heard voices, spaced as though they came from men swimming, and he smiled. Frank Havens and the others were having a swim in the warm sea as a result of his warning. He called out, keeping his voice down so that it might not carry too far. For Van was convinced that the boat from which the toylike torpedo had been set afloat was nearby.
"Frank! Steve! Chip! Swim this way! Stay off the boat!"
Van was convinced that as soon as the murderers realized their deadly attack had failed, they would make another try. And he realized why they might find their target if they knew its general location, even if it were invisible.
The spring propeller would project the tiny torpedo from the sending boat. If carried near to the craft it was intended to destroy, the metal in the target would draw the toylike destroyer onward by the pull upon its magnet.
Van's fingers found the little pin in the toy's nose that he was convinced would detonate the probably terrific explosive at the slightest touch. He loosened the pin, but placed the dangerous miniature torpedo inside his clothes.
His low hail to the others received a reply from Steve Huston, and Van gritted his teeth. For Steve let out a yell that could have been heard a mile or more over the quiet sea.
"Over here! What's the idea of the bath?"
The breeze had died. The swamp fog shifted like some waving, gray blanket and closed about the Phantom. He could see only a few yards. Without replying he started swimming strongly in the direction of Steve's voice.
Suddenly the sea about Van seemed to lift as if the deep bottom here had heaved upward. And the invisible sky appeared to crash down to meet the water. Through this a rising knife of white fire shot up.
Van was driven below the surface by the impact of a wave that crested and broke high above him. Yet in that split second brilliance of the fiery explosion he had seen the Pelican. And on Van's brain in a flashing interval of time as he went deep in the salty water was the picture of the fishing cruiser divided into two parts. Against the bright blaze a small, human figure was outlined, all sprawling arms and legs.
EVEN as he fought his way back to surface, Van had an empty sickness under his heart because of the figure he had seen blown from the blasted cruiser.
"Captain Conners, most likely," he panted, as he emerged. "Either those devils shot two of the toy torpedoes at once, or they heard the sound of our voices and sent the second destroyer."
The disturbed sea had quickly subsided. Van felt himself being pulled along as though invisible hands gripped his body. Few swimmers had his strength and skill, but he realized immediately that he was trapped in tidal currents against which it was useless to fight.
His concern now was all for his companions.
Frank Havens, who had been like a father to him. Steve Huston, the Clarion reporter whose work with the Phantom had often carried him close to death. Chip Dorlan who had followed him through countless dangers.
He feared to call out again. Any sound might bring the Corpse Cay killers. And from the swift pull of many cross-tide rips, Van knew that he must have been carried away from the others if they had survived.
Seeing the explosion, the killers would believe they had destroyed the Pelican and annihilated all on board. But if they came upon the others swimming, they would finish the job. If Havens, Steve and Chip were alive, they might have a chance in the fog and the warm sea. They were certain to go ashore somewhere or be picked up.
The Phantom decided that the best thing he could do for them right then was to divert the attention of the murderers from them. Besides, if he survived he could carry out his investigation of Corpse Cay as planned, if he played the role of a rescued tourist who might be valuable if held for ransom.
It was a long gamble against death, for there was a big possibility that his quick death would interest the killers more greatly than any amount of ransom. The possibility of being held for ransom was not a new thought with the Phantom, for already with the slight information he had, he was sure that the Corpse Cay killers must have a huge criminal business in which kidnapping for ransom probably had its share. Otherwise the apparent wholesale murders to prevent its discovery could not be justified.
Now the sea had subsided, and only the smooth, dark water marked the grave of the exploded fishing cruiser—and probably of Captain Conners. The fog was not heavy, but visibility was short. Van rolled on his back, floating with his ears under the surface. He caught the slight vibration of a slowly turning propeller. The murder boat was not far away.
Van still had the small toy destroyer concealed inside his clothes. But he regarded it as unlikely that he would be searched for weapons, if he played his cards openly.
Listening intently, he could not catch the sound of voices or other movement which might indicate that his companions were still swimming nearby. They must have been separated by the crossed tidal rips. He hoped that what he planned to do would not reach their ears. He was glad, too, that his disguise as Cyrus Starke, the mid-Western tourist, fitted his desperate plan.
He lifted himself suddenly in the water, crying out, and beating the sea as might a drowning man.
"Help! I'm drowning! Help!"
His cry was loud, but had the choked effect of a man strangling. He waited after the first cry, fearful that Havens or Steve or Chip might be within hearing and reply. To his relief he heard no answering sound.
"If only they got preservers!" he thought fervently.
He cried out again, this time as if going down for the last time. Voices spoke then, seeming to be magnified by the fog.
"Hey, Singer! It is one of 'em! Maybe one of the sharks'll get 'im, but we'd better make sure!"
Van could hear a motor pick up. A dark shape loomed over him in the fog. A blinding light jumped out and bathed his face. He struggled, went under, and repressed a cry of pain when the point of a fishing gaff hook went through his coat and into his flesh. He was hauled over the side of a boat as ruthlessly as if he had been a gaffed marlin.
Flat on the deck of the cruiser, the Phantom's slitted eyes took in the face above him. It was the same ugly countenance he had seen through his powerful glasses, that of Singer Durkin.
Durkin spoke, his voice deep and soothing. But its import was deadly.
"Yeah, he's one of 'em," said Singer Durkin. "But they don't usually get kicked overboard in one piece. Well, now we've got him, you can put him back. But make sure of it."
Van opened his eyes, staring as if bewildered. But he was desperately thinking of a way to make it appear to these men that he was a wealthy tourist whose life might be worth a great deal.
Singer Durkin raised a pointed gaff hook in one stubby hand, was swinging the gaff. Never had the Phantom seen more joy of the kill in human features than he saw at that moment. He jerked convulsively, and his head moved just enough for the sharp hook of the gaff to drive into the plank close to his throat.
"Don't—no!" Van got out the words as if they were forced from him by extreme fear. "Don't kill me! I can pay—don't—What d'you want? I'm Cyrus Starke! I've a million—"
If he had really been a millionaire in fear of imminent death there could not have been more terror in his voice. He knew it was a desperate plan, a slim chance. And he was set for its refusal, prepared to hand Singer Durkin a fighting surprise if the killer again tried to use the gaff hook.
From the darkness near the cabin in the boat's cockpit a man spoke abruptly, his voice sharp, commanding.
"Don't be a fool, Durkin! He's the biggest fish we've ever taken! I knew Frank Havens was on Conners' boat, and there could be but one reason for it cruising around Corpse Cay! Durkin, that man there is the Phantom! Now we'll find out how much—"
Singer Durkin's ugly toad-like body had half turned, even as he was wresting the point of the gaff hook from the plank. The Phantom's kicking heel caught Durkin under the chin and lifted the man bodily into the air. Van rolled, seizing the wooden haft of the gaff hook. He landed on his feet, the weapon swinging.
A HUGE, bearded man to one side of Van had a fish-killing club in his hand. Two other men seemed to materialize from the cockpit directly in front of him.
Remembering Captain Conners, Van took some satisfaction in feeling the crunch of bone under his driving gaff hook. But he was still in a desperate position. Other men were about, out of his range of vision in the darkness. Any of them might cut loose with a gun at any moment. And there was the man who had unmasked the identity of the Phantom, undoubtedly the real leader. His original plan having failed, Van had no further business aboard this craft.
Singer Durkin was struggling to his feet. As Van swung, he became conscious of two things—that a dead sailfish lay in the light, and that Thad Burton, the criminal lawyer, who evidently had chartered the boat was a prisoner. The tremendously fat lawyer, on whose middle finger a big seal ring was glittering, was tied securely to the boat rail near the cabin. Some cloth had been forced into the lawyer's mouth. His eyes were rolling, as if he were trying desperately to speak.
With the Phantom's one idea of escape from the Durkin boat, for now that he had been identified by the invisible man as the Phantom his death was certain, Van was suddenly favored by circumstance. The man with the fish-killing club let go of it with a neat aim at Van's head. It smashed upon the back of his skull with a force that staggered him forward to the rail.
Van's legs appeared to collapse. He went over and splashed heavily into the sea. The cursing Singer Durkin, rushing to the side, saw only air bubbles arising on the fogged water.
"IT'S the only way, Marna! If I hadn't come here tonight, I would never have another chance! You know, I never believed there would be murder! I thought that if I took only what already had been stolen, I could free myself!"
There was desperation in Tommy Crane's voice as he uttered the plea to the girl who sat beside him on the seat of the little fishing cruiser. His eyes were sunken and there were dissipated lines at the corners of his mouth, but that stubborn chin of his kept his too good-looking face from seeming dissolute.
"Tommy!" the girl said firmly. "Let's not have any lies about what you did! Until this last sailfish you were taking to Janyx to be mounted, I had no idea that it wasn't what you had told me—just a slick way of furnishing mounted trophies for unlucky tourists! But then you took the rubies—"
Tommy Crane's slender hand went over the girl's mouth.
"Shut up, Marna!" he cautioned hoarsely. "They may be close now in the fog! If they hear you, they'll know I have the stones! Now you know why I have to come here tonight! Whoever that Blacky Burch may be, he has made it unsafe for me in Miami! I've got to make them hide me out on Corpse Cay!"
Marna Macklin looked like a sheltered child. Yet in her face now there seemed more strength than in the face of Tommy Crane.
"I love you, Tommy," she said tensely. "Or I wouldn't have come with you. I defied my father. He will give you up to the law. Tommy, darling! Wouldn't that be best? You didn't kill anyone. You could say you took the rubies from that last sailfish, and Janyx was killed because the smugglers believed he got them. You could prove where you were when Janyx was murdered."
Tommy Crane's dark eyes were furtive, avoiding Marna's gaze.
"I was there when Janyx was burned to death," he said. "Don't you understand? I had been drinking, and was snatched from the Lance Grover night-club. I must have been thrown out of a car, for I came to my senses in a vacant lot close to Janyx' shop when it was burning. I haven't—a chance."
Marna Macklin's lips were white and she spoke stiffly.
"Poor Father! All of his life he has been proud of his clean record as a judge. Yes, I know he has been called the Iron Judge. But, Tommy, don't you see how it is? This will ruin him, kill him! Tommy, let's go back."
Young Crane's face was white and set. One hand slipped into his shirt. It came out gripping a small automatic.
"We're going back," he said tensely. "But whoever brings the fish tonight is going with us. I'll take back at least one witness, dead or alive. I'll—"
The girl caught his shoulders and shook him as if he were a child.
"Tommy! You fool! They'll kill you! Don't you see? Then they will have to kill me, too! Please, Tommy! It's not too late! You thought you could pay off your gambling debts by playing the game of these killers. You didn't know they were murderers, but now you do. Tommy, I'll stick by you, if you'll go back now and tell the truth!"
Somehow the spiritual strength of the frail girl seemed to enter Tommy Crane. The weakness disappeared from his face and his stubborn chin became dominant. That might have been clever acting, but it was sufficient to bring a quick sob from Marna Macklin, then a smile.
"I've been a fool, darling," Tommy Crane whispered. "I'll go back. We'll ease out of here now before the moon comes up. They can't spot us until then. No matter what happens, I'll face it."
"Tommy!"
Marna's arms went tightly around him. The daughter of the Iron Judge was sure that everything would be all right now.
The late three-quarters moon, as scarlet as if the sky had been colored by a red paint brush, swam up from the sea. The Dark River mist was suddenly dissipated, and a shining pathway like bright blood crossed over the small cruiser.
The boat was drifting slowly on a dead tide. Out of the dangerous Dark River current farther northward, Tommy Crane had brought the cruiser, obeying directions, into a protected bight of Corpse Cay.
Marna cried out as the abruptly appearing moon outlined the coffin-shaped Cay and their own boat. Because of the deadness of the sluggish water south of Corpse Cay, many little rafts of kelp floated here and there.
Tommy swore sharply as the moon appeared.
"We'll be too late if we don't hurry," he said. "At least, our boat is faster than anything they have on Corpse Cay."
He opened the throttle of the quietly idling engine. His reason for being here was plain now. He could easily be accused of the explosion murder of Janyx. He had been carrying sailfish and marlin to the Miami taxidermist as his own catches. He had known they contained jewels or other smuggled stuff. And that last sailfish had tempted him too much. He had investigated the fish out of curiosity. But the fortune in rubies inside it had been more than he could resist.
Possibly he did have the idea that the fortune in rubies might enable him to buy his freedom from those who had compelled his cooperation. But even now, there was something more furtive about Tommy Crane than there should have been. He cried out with fear as the reddish moonlight bathed the cruiser.
Eyes darting about, scanning the sea, Crane started to gun the cruiser motor. As he did, the shrill cry of a woman rang out.
"Help! Please! Oh, help me!"
The cry came from what appeared to be a floating island of kelp a short distance away. The long-rooted kelp was thick, and as Crane turned the cruiser into it, Marna Macklin cried out in warning.
"Tommy! The propeller! We can't go through that!"
Instantly he threw out the motor clutch. He knew that to have sent the cruiser into the thick kelp would have wrapped the propeller in weeds as stringy and almost as stiff as wire.
THE cry of the girl and the splashing came again, from the kelp patch. Crane did not hesitate. He went over the side, swimming heavily through the weeds.
And because Tommy Crane and Marna were held by the plight of the apparently drowning girl, they did not observe the other boat that was gliding toward their cruiser, keeping out of the pathway of the moon.
Whatever may have been Tommy Crane's past or present misdeeds, he fought heroically through the massed kelp. Marna Macklin, trained to the sea and quick thinking, handled the searchlight. The beam of the cruiser sliced out, following Crane. Its circle of luminance traveled ahead. Into it came a small, elfin face surrounded by long, black hair that seemed to float on the sea.
The girl who had been calling for help lifted her hands.
"Keep quiet!" called Crane. "Don't move! You'll tangle up with the weeds!"
With a quick overhand stroke, he topped the weeds. He had almost reached the girl, was clutching for her floating hair, when she moved quickly.
At that same instant the spotlight from the cruiser winked out. But Crane could still see the girl's face in the moonlight.
"Keep quiet!" he admonished again. "I'll get you okay?"
He was some little distance from his cruiser now.
"Marna!" he called. "Turn on the light again!"
There was no reply. The light did not come on. Crane touched the girl's shoulder. As quickly as a flitting shadow, she dived.
It seemed to Tommy Crane that she must have become entangled and been pulled under the weeds. He was also remembering the dangerous barracuda that infested the lower cays. He went under, his hands groping.
He missed the girl and came up. As his face emerged, he was struck violently across the mouth. The girl was there, her hands beating at his face.
"Quit it, you fool!" ordered Crane. "You want to drown both of us?"
The response was a mocking laugh that chilled and maddened him.
"Drown? Me? Angel Smith? Look!"
The enraged Crane saw the girl's slim body turn, and it seemed that she was wearing nothing over her coppery skin. Then Crane saw that she wore a single garment of fur, probably pieced together from the hides of swamp cats.
Her small bare feet slapped water into his face as she disappeared. Tommy Crane swore angrily. The girl who had called herself "Angel" Smith bobbed up again several yards away.
"Don't you come nigh enough to put your hands on me," she taunted. "You're as deep in sin as them others on the Cay, an' if it wasn't for them havin' Pappy, I wouldn't be here."
It dawned upon Tommy Crane at last that the girl who was without doubt a native of the Dark River swamps had been luring him on. But why?
"Marna?" he called out. "You all right?"
Then he heard the quick pulse of a fast motor that he knew was not that of his own cruiser. He flailed desperately at the impeding kelp, swimming toward where he had left his cruiser.
WHEN he was clear of the weeds, all he could see was a shadow moving away. It might have been one or two boats. Its size was magnified by the moonlight that was now changing from the bloody tinge to a clearer white.
Forgetting all caution, Crane shouted until he was hoarse. From somewhere in the kelp came the voice of the swamp girl.
"I didn't want to do this, but I had to save Pappy! But I ain't carin' much either! Your high an' mighty gal always wears shoes! I ain't never had shoes! No use wastin' your lungs! She's gone, an' they left a boat for me to take you to the swamps! You'd best come, or you won't never see your gal again!"
Tommy Crane climbed awkwardly into the canoe that had been hidden in the floating kelp. The queer swamp girl was already in it, holding a paddle.
"You come nigh me," she promised, "an' I'll crack it over your head. An' here's some writin' that was left for you to read."
Tommy Crane found a flashlight in the canoe and took the message written on a piece of wrapping paper. It read:
Mister Krane—We tuk the jedges gal like yuh sed to do. Yore bote will be flotin in Dark River as agrede. We put in grub and swamp fishin lines. If the gal's pappy pays like yuh sed, we will fix all okay. Stay unner kuver.
Tommy Crane was stunned by the frame note.
By this clever device he was being involved in what would appear to be inexcusable crime.
He restrained a mad impulse to seize the paddle from Angel Smith, and drive the canoe madly for Corpse Cay.
Perhaps within those few minutes Tommy Crane became a man. Bitterness churned through his heart and mind.
He did not move as the girl sent the canoe over the white, moonlit sea toward the forbidding mangrove thickets bordering the Dark River swamps.
His mad thoughts reviewed all of the circumstances that now trapped and held him. He had plunged wildly at gambling.
Tommy Crane had been induced to believe he could pay off staggering debts by helping criminals whose leaders he did not know, by simply carrying sailfish and marlin, supposedly angling trophies from the vicinity of Corpse Cay, to Janyx, the Miami taxidermist.
Until recently he had managed to keep the truth from Marna. Then when he had found his criminal masters did not intend to permit him to pay off, in desperation he had stolen that small fortune in rubies from the last sailfish he had carried to Janyx.
And then Janyx had been burned out and murdered in such a manner as to throw the suspicion of the crime heavily upon him.
Still he had thought he could compel some of the crooks to clear him. And here he was, being carried deep into the Dark River swamps by a half-wild girl.
The devilish ingenuity of the crude note that had been left for him! To produce that note in any attempt to disclose the truth would only involve him more deeply.
Unconsciously he spoke aloud. "Why, it would be believed that I helped frame the kidnapping of Marna Macklin for a share of the ransom and to clear myself!"
Angel Smith was paddling as silently as might some Seminole.
"That's what you done, wasn't it?" she asked. "Them devils that took my pappy said you killed a man in Miami an' stole a heap of money, an' that you was helpin' 'em kidnap your gal to buy your way out of trouble."
Crane swore bitterly. He came to his feet, lunging the length of the canoe to seize the paddle from the girl's hands.
But Angel Smith was very quick and also strong.
The hardwood paddle struck Tommy Crane squarely between the eyes.
He fell forward, lunging over the side into the black water.
WHEN the Phantom plunged overside from Singer Durkin's fishing cruiser, he was half stunned by the smashing blow of the club that had struck his skull. But he was conscious enough to swim instinctively.
Instead of rising immediately to the surface, Van drove himself deeper. A deep-sea pearl diver might remain under longer than the Phantom, but possibly only a few of them.
"To come up means a quick finish," was his thought. "And if I live I may get at the bottom of the whole Corpse Cay mystery now."
Strangely enough, he had a slight advantage over those who were waiting above to finish him off when he appeared. Against the sky shine above the thinly fogged water, he could see the bulking shadow of the fishing cruiser.
His breath exhausted at last, he swam upward, directly under the cruiser. The propeller was churning slowly, holding the boat against the run of the tidal current. The Phantom was compelled to employ all of his strength to combat that same current.
The barnacled bottom of the cruiser itself afforded no hold, but a live bait box showed near the middle of the hull. This box was fed by fresh sea water through a screen grating, and its high sides arose inside the forward hold of the fishing boat.
The light screen tore away under the grip of Van's strong fingers. He came to the surface inside the live bait box, taking infinite caution against making noise.
Here he was able to rest for several minutes. His surprise escape over the cruiser's rail had enabled him to keep all of his weapons. These included a pair of waterproof automatics. But there was another weapon concealed in his clothes that had much greater possibilities for wide destruction—the toylike torpedo submarine he had trapped in the sea before its companion had exploded the Pelican.
The tiny torpedo was loaded with some TNT, Van knew, and a mixture of aluminum powder and acid, providing at once a blast sufficient to wreck a small boat, and to destroy most of it by the intense heat of thermite, formed by the aluminum powder and the acid.
Van had seen the fire strike Captain Conners' boat. He had seen the same kind of incendiary explosion destroy the Janyx taxidermy shop in Miami.
With the death he had seen, and with his fear for the safety of Frank Havens, Chip Dorlan and Steve Huston, the Phantom was in a mood to have obliterated the Singer Durkin cruiser and all on it.
But this Thad Burton, the criminal lawyer, was a prisoner, bound and gagged. Van could only guess what circumstance had caused the lawyer to be thus confined.
"Burton chartered the boat," Van thought, "then when Singer Durkin and his killers saw the necessity for destroying Captain Conners' boat, they were compelled to restrain Burton. That means they will not dare permit Thad Burton to live."
The covering of the live bait box in which he was floating opened just under the deck hatchway. Van debated if it might be possible to make his way up through this and capture Singer Durkin and his crew single-handed.
He decided it was worth chancing. He was working at the lid when he heard the sound of another boat approaching. He stopped, from his efforts, listening.
He heard the two boats making scraping contact. Muttering voices sounded. With some difficulty, Van produced a small pair of what appeared to be rubber ear-plugs from the flat make-up case he carried next to his body. They were really tiny microphones of his own devising. With these in place he could hear clearly some of the conversation outside.
He heard the harsh voice that had given orders when he had first been taken aboard the Tempest. The man apparently was talking to someone on the other boat.
"It isn't certain that the Phantom is dead," he said. "And some of the others on Conners' Pelican may also have survived. They will remember having seen the Tempest just before the Pelican was blown up. So the best alibi is to have the Tempest blasted, too, and in such a way that Singer Durkin and his crew will appear to have died, and some piece of wreckage will be found."
Van could not hear the reply from the other boat, but the voice of Singer Durkin broke in.
"Too bad, Burton! You shouldn't have horned in at the wrong time! You thought when you chartered my boat that I was just another dumb fishing skipper! Well, you found out different, but you found out too blasted much! So when the old Tempest goes up, it will be remembered in Miami you was the charterer!"
"Okay, boys!" said the other harsh voice. "Set the stuff! We'll transfer! And that other stuff you brought up—just load the sailfish and turn it loose! It'll make the landing as usual and be picked up! Let's go!"
Unable to guess the number of men on the other boat, or the immediate set-up, Van worked furiously at the cover of the bait box, loosening it. Feet were tramping the deck overhead, as though some of the stuff that Singer Durkin might desire to save was being transferred from his Tempest.
Van knew that his smartest move would be to get out of the live bait box to the open sea the way he had entered. But there was Thad Burton, bound and gagged at the rail of the cruiser. He could not leave the fat lawyer to die like a trapped rat in the explosion intended to sink the Tempest.
The Phantom was out of the live bait box now. But the heavy cover of the deck hatchway was closed tight overhead. He braced his feet, put his shoulders against the planking and applied his strength.
The cover lifted a little.
Heavy feet still tramped across the deck. If he were seen, emerging from the hatchway, it would be impossible to get his guns into play quickly enough to overcome the odds of numbers.
Some killer must have decided to enjoy the reaction of the doomed lawyer, Thad Burton, by removing his gag. Or perhaps the lawyer had worked it loose. For at that moment came a hoarse scream of fear.
"You can't do this, Durkin! Listen! You don't know what you're doing! You've been working for peanuts! I know how you can rake in a fortune! There won't be any comeback! The Iron Judge—"
There was a resounding blow. Singer Durkin's voice rang out mockingly.
"You're telling us, Burton! I knew when you wanted to go to Corpse Cay you had something up your sleeve! So you've been thinking about the Iron Judge angle, too!"
NOW, the Phantom realized, was the psychological moment for him to go into action. Every eye probably was on Singer Durkin and Burton.
Van put all of his strength under the hatch cover and heaved. As it lifted, the Phantom saw Singer Durkin, with three of his men, at the rail where Burton was secured with ropes. A long, low-built sea cruiser was alongside.
From its size and storm screening, it was evident this larger boat must be employed in open ocean runs farther than the Gulf Stream fishing. It was a speedy, twin-screw vessel. Among the numerous members of the crew aboard the sea-going craft the Phantom tried to pick out the man who might be in command of the Corpse Cay criminals, or smugglers, as he now was sure they were.
A loud-speaker on the pilot's cabin of the larger cruiser brought the voice of that man in command. And that voice was a warning.
"Look out, Singer! Behind you! The Phantom!"
But Van was already diving directly upon the toad-like form of Singer Durkin. An automatic in his hand cracked down on Singer's skull.
Van held the sagging killer captain upright with one arm, while his free hand whipped in and out viciously. Two seamen felt the impact of the automatic in Van's hand.
The third member of Singer's crew yelled hoarsely and went over the rail in a long dive.
"Open up on him! Drill Burton!" the megaphoned command was rapped from the big cruiser. "But don't hit Singer!"
"You fool!" another, quieter voice broke in. "Let Singer go! We're risking too much!"
By this time the after-midnight moon was white and bright. But Van was unable to distinguish the man who last had spoken.
"Cast off!" came the order to the sea-going cruiser's crew. "Get underway! That bomb's timed to go within the next two minutes!"
Without a shot having been fired, the larger cruiser started to move. Its twin propellers spewed out a white wake. And the Phantom had no guess as to where a bomb had been planted on the Tempest, which the killers meant to destroy.
The megaphoned voice spoke again.
"We wanted evidence that Singer Durkin and his crew had disappeared with his fishing boat! This will do it! Too bad, Phantom—you were so clever!"
The sea cruiser was beginning to recede. But it was clearly outlined, some of the fog having lifted. Then on the Tempest Van's quick eyes saw what might have been a thread of smoke coming from a ventilator. But if a bomb were set somewhere down below, it would be suicide to hunt for it.
"Get us off! Hurry! I'll make it worth your while, even if you are the Phantom!"
The choking voice of fat Thad Burton made the desperate plea. Van worked fast. A knife severed Burton's bindings.
"Over the side away from the cruiser!" rapped Van. "If you can swim at all, get away as far as possible!"
ALTHOUGH he expected the planted bomb to let go at any second, the Phantom could not leave even killer enemies to be blown to bits. He heaved the two fallen seamen into the water. Then he crossed the deck with the bulky figure of Singer Durkin in his arms. The sea cruiser was far off now, speeding, its commander evidently desiring to get as far as possible from the Tempest.
When the Phantom hit the sea, supporting Singer Durkin, the two seamen had disappeared. Thad Burton seemed unable to swim much, but his fat kept him afloat.
Van worked away from the doomed Tempest, taking Singer Durkin with him. He expected the bomb to let go with a rain of death, heavy parts of the fishing cruiser.
The Tempest burst suddenly. Waves rolled over the Phantom and Thad Burton. Singer Durkin appeared to be dead, but Van kept his hold upon the captain.
When at last the sea quieted, Thad Burton said hoarsely:
"Thanks for saving me, Phantom, but we are now in currents that will sweep us onto the death beach at Corpse Cay. Nothing can save us then."
Van did not reply. He was listening to the vibration of the sea-going cruiser's motor. A searchlight beam played out, raking the surface.
Van had expected that. Thad Burton groaned.
"The Corpse Cay skipper will make sure of us, Phantom! They intend to hunt us down."
Singer Durkin was reviving. "Swim now if you want to live, Durkin," Van said.
The large cruiser was coming closer, its beam combing the sea. Van started working with a small metal cylinder. He restored the pin in the nose of the toylike submarine, and wound up the spring in its side.
SWEPT apart by the swirling tidal rips of the Corpse Cay current, the three men who had been the Phantom's companions aboard the doomed Pelican, discovered themselves apparently alone upon a limitless sea. Then Chip Dorlan, fearing for the safety of the Phantom, and swimming in circles, came upon Frank Havens, supported by a life preserver.
"The Phantom probably is safe enough, Chip," said Havens. "But Captain Conners and his helper must have died. We can stay afloat a long time in this warm water, but the tide seems to be sweeping us out to sea, or perhaps toward Corpse Cay."
"Where's Steve?" said Chip Dorlan quickly. "Did he jump in time?"
In the moonlight, the rugged face of Frank Havens was gravely set. He lifted himself, scanning the water within his vision.
"I hope he heard the Phantom's warning in time," said Havens. "Steve is quick. Barring a shark getting in its work, I'll bet on Steve being somewhere about."
Chip Dorlan started to call out, but Havens laid a hand on his arm.
"I'm afraid it was shouting that brought death to Captain Conners," he said. "I'll venture to predict that the Phantom is making it uncomfortable for the killer right now. I don't understand yet what warning he had, but he saw something that took him overboard when he knew our boat was about to be blasted."
For a long time, hours it seemed to Chip, they drifted in the warm sea. They could make out nothing but the varying shapes formed by the Dark River mist that hugged the surface. Yet Chip could tell by the pull on his legs that the current was increasing in strength.
It was impossible to determine whether they were moving toward or away from sinister Corpse Cay. For, no judges of the sea and the tides, they could not know that they were on an ebbing turn that was bearing them away from Corpse Cay.
This peculiar swing of the tidal current happened only twice each twenty-four hours. And because they were drifting away from the island was perhaps why they came upon the empty boat.
"Look!" pointed Chip. "A motorboat! Whoever's in it must be asleep!"
No one was asleep, for no one was aboard the little cruiser.
Chip helped Frank Havens aboard. Both could see then that the boat had been used for fishing the Gulf Stream, small as it was. The cruiser carried two whipping troll poles to be spread with lines when fishing for the game marlin and sails abundant in these waters.
Chip found the instrument lights and flicked them on.
"Strange!" Frank Havens exclaimed. "Doesn't appear as if anyone would simply disappear from a perfectly good boat out here!"
Chip had picked up a shiny, beaded bag. On its side were the small gold initials, "MM." A faint perfume clung to the bag. Havens opened it.
"Marna Macklin's!" he exclaimed. "Chip, this cruiser must be Tommy Crane's, the one the Phantom was seeking. And look!"
They were staring at a brownish patch of blood on the side of the purse. Chip scanned the bottom of the cockpit. There was more dried blood on the slatted floor.
"Mr. Havens, do you think Tommy Crane and Marna Macklin have been murdered?"
CHIP'S eyes were wide. Havens shook his head slowly. Then he saw dead sailfish, with the mark of a gaff hook in its side.
"It's probably blood from the fish," Chip," he breathed with relief.
But Chip was taking a sheet of paper from an envelope he had found stuck behind the seat cushion. The brief message read:
Judge Macklin—I swear this was an accident, but I know I will be blamed for it. I tried to save Marna, but we were near a barracuda reef when she fell in. Knowing the police are already looking for me because of the Janyx death, all I can do is take to the swamps, then try and make my way out and get north. I had trouble with Janyx, but I was innocent of his death, just as I am innocent of Marna's. I got mixed up in something that I can't tell you about. It would only make everything—
Here the self-convicting note trailed off. The letters thinned as if a fountain pen had run out of ink. Havens found the emptied fountain pen between slats on the floor. It bore the initials "TC."
"This will kill the Iron Judge," Havens said gravely. "For once the Phantom got into a case too late to prevent tragedy."
Chip Dorlan was young, but he had been taught much of the Phantom's shrewdness and persistence. He was opening Marna Macklin's beaded bag. He had recalled seeing what appeared to be a note inside the purse.
It was a briefly penned message to Marna from Tommy Crane, asking her to meet him at a certain hour at the Lance Grover night-club in Miami. Chip was not concerned with the note. He held it and the self-condemning message that had been left incomplete under the instrument board lights.
"I thought perhaps it might be a frame-up," he explained. "But the writing is identical. Or seems so."
"Keep them and don't handle them again," advised Havens. "I have an idea we will soon hear from the Phantom. Perhaps the writing of the two notes is too much alike. It might have been lucky for someone that Tommy Crane's note was in Marna Macklin's purse."
Havens was trying to conceal from Chip Dorlan how deeply he was worried. For years he had known Judge William Macklin. A stern man himself when it came to fulfilling his duty as a newspaperman to the public, Frank Havens greatly admired the qualities that had given Judge Macklin the nation-wide name of Iron Judge.
This tragedy would break the Iron Judge, Havens was sure. Chip Dorlan understood Havens' mood, and was silent, continuing to search the cruiser.
Suddenly he said:
"Well, Mr. Havens, we should get the motor going. Perhaps we can find the Phantom, or Steve."
A minute later though, Chip was shaking his head.
"Every ounce of gas has been drained from the tank," he said.
The tide was changing again. Unknowingly, Chip and Havens were drifting back toward Corpse Cay. They had not gone far when there was a rumbling blast. A yellowish flare burst from the sea perhaps a mile away. It died down quickly. Havens groaned.
"More murder," he said. "Probably another fishing boat. It seems as if we should do something, Chip."
AS THE sound of the explosion died away, Chip and Havens could hear the steady vibration of a boat's motor. Yet they could see no lights.
"It might be the Singer Durkin's Tempest again," said Havens.
"No, it's a larger boat," Chip said promptly. "I was practically raised on boats on the San Francisco waterfront, remember. I know their sound."
Off to the northward a searchlight beam jumped into view. The drift of the tide had carried Tommy Crane's cruiser much closer now.
Chip crouched low in the boat and pulled Havens down.
"Maybe they're looking for this boat," he suggested.
The brilliant light swept the sea over a wide expanse. Suddenly Chip gripped Havens' arm.
"Look! There are men there! The light is on them! It might be the Phantom or Steve! We have a light! Maybe I can guide them to us!"
"Wait!" said Havens. "I'm not sure it would be a good idea. A boat running without lights wouldn't be lawful and those aboard would quickly stop our efforts."
It was well that Havens restrained Chip. Gunfire broke out from the boat holding its searchlight on the figures that could be seen low in the water.
The faint spray of geysering bullets jumped up in the light, spotting the apparently helpless swimmers.
It seemed that they must die quickly...
Only a few minutes before Chip and Frank Havens spotted those men in the water, the Phantom, who was one of them, was working swiftly at something with his hands, his eyes half blinded by the brilliant beam of the searchlight beating upon him. Then a machine-gun broke into a chattering song of death on the deck of the sea-going cruiser.
"Under!" Van rapped out to Thad Burton, floundering near him, and to Singer Durkin, half dazed but still able to keep afloat.
"I can't!" Burton groaned. "I never could dive! I guess this is the end! But since it is, there's something you ought to know, Phantom, about Corpse Cay!"
Accurate shooting along a searchlight beam on the sea is almost an impossibility. The stream of singing slugs raised and lowered, whining viciously away from Van and his companions.
Singer Durkin was merely paddling. He appeared too stupefied to dive or to understand that he was in the line of fire from his own killers.
Having spotted its prey, the seagoing cruiser was moving steadily nearer. Yet Van took time for a quick question.
"All right, Burton, what is it you know about Corpse Cay? It's a smuggling hide-out and transfer, I know. Probably bringing in jewels and narcotics, and possibly aliens."
Thad Burton repeated what Van had heard him say once before.
"All that's peanuts, Phantom," he said. "There's bigger stuff, and when they've got the Iron Judge where they want him, they—"
Skipping lead put a period to what Thad Burton was about to divulge. He groaned, gurgled, and went under. A slug had nipped the top of his skull.
VAN twisted in the sea. Singer Durkin was still paddling, untouched. The oncoming cruiser was about a hundred yards away, and was slowing. The machine-gunner was slapping lead in a circle around Van's head.
"There's no other way," the Phantom told himself grimly.
His hands released a silvery cylinder. It shot away with its fanshaped tail whirling on the force of the wound spring, headed to meet the approaching cruiser.
Van sank below the surface, seeking Thad Burton. His hands contacted the fat lawyer only a few feet under the surface. As Van came up, he saw Singer Durkin's moving hands and feet.
Then Durkin seemed to be lifted bodily from the sea by some invisible force. Around Van the water swirled into mad commotion. A crackling explosion threatened to break Van's ear-drums.
HE EMERGED, rolling Thad Burton on his back. He had a brief view of the death cruiser's high prow. Although the men aboard the vessel were killers, and were doing their utmost to erase the Phantom, Burton and Singer Durkin, Van was pleased that the miniature torpedo struck as it did.
"Its charge was meant only for fishing boats," muttered Van. "Nearly all of the men on the cruiser may have a chance to escape."
The ripping column of white fire from the thermite explosive sliced off the foredeck and the prow of the cruiser. Steel and wood appeared to dissolve in the consuming heat, until only about two-thirds of the vessel remained intact.
The sea rushed into that portion of the craft. Van could hear men shouting. The majority of the crew must have survived.
"Get the boats down!" That was the voice that Van had decided was the voice of the man who commanded the killers. "We might have known that devil of a Phantom had a card up his sleeve! Get off before suction carries us down! We must make it to Corpse Cay!"
At least two life-boats were in the sea when the cruiser, riven by the magnetic torpedo, finally heeled over and went under.
Thad Burton was reviving. Singer Durkin was suffering from the shock of the explosion, but that was all.
HASTILY the survivors of the blasted cruiser were pulling away, when Van heard other voices that gladdened and surprised him. Then Chip Dorlan and Frank Havens were helping haul Thad Burton, the lawyer, and Singer Durkin, the killer captain, into Tommy Crane's cruiser.
Durkin slumped down in the cockpit. His eyes were dull. Apparently he did not know that his colleagues in crime had made every effort to murder him. The clever Phantom filed that fact away for future use.
As soon as Chip Dorlan and Frank Havens had explained what they had discovered, the Phantom turned to Burton.
"About Corpse Cay, Burton?" he said. "You started to tell me of something big connected with the Iron Judge? Now something has happened to his daughter and his godson, Tommy Crane."
Burton's marble-like eyes were blue and cold. Perhaps because he felt comparatively safe now.
"I don't recall saying anything, Phantom," he said, tenderly touching the wound on his head.
"You've escaped with your life, Burton," Van said quickly. "But you're not out of the woods yet. By the way, some three years ago you were interested in a man named James Layton who was on trial for smuggling, and who later went to prison. In fact you were present at his trial, and visited him in jail several times, I've been told. Do you recall him?"
"Layton!" exclaimed Thad Burton. "What do you know of him?"
"I would suggest that if you accidentally meet up with a tough swamp angel known around Dark River as Blacky Burch, it might be well for you to know that his fingerprints match those of James Layton, who was sent to Atlanta."
Thad Burton's double chins quivered. There was quick fear in his marble-like eyes.
"Now would you remember, Burton," demanded Van, "what you intended to tell me about something big on Corpse Cay, something involving the Iron Judge?"
"No! No! There is nothing! As soon as we get away, I'm going back North!"
"We're not away yet, Burton," Van said quietly. "In fact, we are visiting Corpse Cay."
"I won't go!"
Van ignored Burton's sputtering. From a compartment of his body-fitting make-up case, so concealed that none saw his movement, he produced a small tube fitted with lenses.
There was a whispering hum from inside this tube. It was a rumbascope, a microscope operating with the energy of electrons, and hundreds of times more powerful than the average laboratory glass.
With this glass, Van examined bit by bit the evidence which might show whether Marna Macklin had been murdered or had died accidentally. He studied the writing on the two notes. One was virtually a confession by Tommy Crane. The other was an ordinary message written by Crane to the girl.
Van shook his head as he put the notes away.
"Any jury in the world would convict Tommy Crane on what we have here," he said. "But there may be just one thing that doesn't quite fit in."
He lifted the dead sailfish to the rear deck, holding it by the spiny snout. He thrust his hand deep into the rough throat. Some oily waste had been stuffed into the fish's mouth.
VAN finally held his hand over under the light. Three perfectly matched rubies flashed like great drops of blood in his palm.
"Whatever else Tommy Crane may have done, he is not guilty of the murder of Marna Macklin," he said. "And I venture to say that the Iron Judge's daughter is alive. These rubies are perfect. Tommy Crane did not hide them there, knowing that he must make his way through the swamps and get away. He would not have left them behind. Yet they were not likely to be discovered by anyone finding the derelict cruiser. It's just the needed bit of convicting evidence that Tommy Crane has been working with smugglers on Corpse Cay."
The Phantom had been noticing the increased movement of the boat. The strong tidal run toward Corpse Cay again was on. Light fog still obscured the surface in the late moonlight of the early morning hours.
Suddenly a low, rumbling sound could be heard. Thad Burton sprang to his feet.
"Phantom!" he cried. "We are drifting straight upon Corpse Cay! We'll be wrecked on the coral reef! The deep water is filled with barracuda and sharks!"
Van smiled grimly. "I thought we would wind up on Corpse Cay, Burton. And for a Northerner you certainly have detailed information concerning the surroundings of Corpse Cay. Perhaps you have changed your mind about telling what you know, for it may be that the thin man I called Blacky Burch is somewhere in this vicinity."
"I haven't anything to tell!" said Burton stubbornly.
A giant hand seemed to lift the small fishing cruiser, rushing it forward. There was a grinding, grating crash that hurled them all from their feet.
The boat was firmly lodged. A high sea swept over it as the sharp coral reef ground through its planking.
Singer Durkin who had been hunched on the bottom, feigning a stupor, suddenly leaped to his feet. He went over the side in a long, plunging dive that carried him into the deep, quiet water inside the barrier reef.
"Watch Burton!" rapped the Phantom.
He struck the water before Singer Durkin's feet had disappeared. He could see the killer captain's shadowy form going down deep.
Van was beside Durkin with two quick strokes. His hand had just gripped the captain's shirt collar when he realized that all around him the lagoon boiled with darting life.
A sharp, cutting pain crossed Van's right arm. He kicked out, driving toward the surface. A cold, slimy body slithered over his face.
He could feel the toad-like body of Singer Durkin jerking under the grip of his hand, but he held on, flailing out with one hand and kicking with his feet. A larger shape than that of any of the many smaller barracuda cut across Singer's legs. For the moment, it seemed useless for Van to bring the killer back to the surface as the man's body jerked again. Singer's thick-lipped mouth was wide open and he was screaming agonized gutturals as his face emerged.
Van had been hit but once, but the salt water was stinging the wound where the barracuda's teeth had cut his arm. As he came up, seeking the wrecked boat, a bright light from the shore played across the lagoon. Its beam spotted Van and Singer, and the cruiser on the reef.
As the light died out, Van helped Singer into the boat. Van himself was sick then. If Singer Durkin lived, he would go through life on one foot.
A loud-speaker on the shore carried a voice across the lagoon.
"Stay where you are! We will send a boat for you!"
Van quickly bound up Singer Durkin's bleeding leg. The man was unconscious.
Then it was that the Phantom proved the quickness of his thinking and the result of his years of training as he spoke to Frank Havens and Chip Dorlan.
"You stay here with Burton," he said. "Tell whoever comes out that Singer Durkin was here, but that he started to swim to shore and must have landed in the darkness." Van's eyes turned upon Thad Burton. "And whatever you know or don't know, if you make one move to talk too much, I am instructing Chip Dorlan to shut you up. They may take Chip's guns, but Chip is always provided with the means of silencing another man—for keeps."
Burton's eyes bugged out as he stared at the Phantom.
Van eased himself over the reef into the dark lagoon. He had a life preserver around the wounded, unconscious Singer Durkin. He swam silently but swiftly along the reef.
Van was well concealed when he saw the searchlight again and heard a boat putting out to the wrecked fishing cruiser. He held Singer Durkin, scrutinizing the moonlit surface of the lagoon. The water stirred and a sharp fin cut along the surface not far away. It might be one of the dangerous man-killing tiger sharks, or a more harmless hammerhead. Van had to take that chance.
Supporting Singer Durkin, he swam toward the half-moon beach...
In the meantime, and only short hours before, red-headed Steve Huston was having troubles of his own. He had been in many queer situations in his time. But never before had he seemed to be floating in space where there was neither time nor distance.
"Nice night for a swim," he muttered. "Only I'll take the cold water of Coney Island with lights ahead, rather than this Turkish dip and no place to go."
Then because of the vagrant swing of the cross tidal rips created by Dark River pouring its tropical rain flood into the salty sea, Steve found himself suddenly listening to the weird music of shrill tree frogs, accompanied by the deeper booming of bullfrogs in a swamp. His feet found treacherous, slippery bottom. He saw bushes along a flat shore.
But when he put out his hand, he jerked it back as if stung by a hot needle. He had, he thought, clutched an underwater root, but the root slid through his fingers and hissed. Never before had Steve met up with a root that hissed, and he did not like it.
Although it was moonlight, growing brighter now out on the open sea, Steve, floating in a narrow bayou, had no means of knowing he was moving inland, backed up from the sea by the deep, steady current of Dark River at flood tide.
Part of the time his feet touched bottom, but it was oozy and he stayed in his life preserver. He wondered bitterly what had happened to the others, and if they were alive.
"Captain Conners got his," he muttered. "So did that fellow helping him. I'd give a lot to know what became of the Phantom."
SEVERAL times Steve attempted to find land. But each time he found only slippery knees of great cypress trees, or thorny mangrove bushes through which he could not force his way.
He was beginning to believe this would go on forever when he saw the red light of a glowing fire.
"Never thought I'd wish to see wild Indians," he thought. "But knowing the brand of white men in these parts, I hope I meet up with a war party of Seminoles."
It was at this juncture that he came out suddenly upon a swamp hammock, a spot where the land had decided to hump itself out of the black water. It supported several live oak trees, and towering cypress grew about its edges.
Steve shed his life preserver quickly. The red blaze flared up brighter at the edge of the hammock. Steve could see it through interlacing branches. Then he stopped short as suddenly he heard a high-pitched cry, a man's voice. Frogs ceased thumping. A mournful night bird abruptly quit crying in the darkness.
"I've told you all I know!" the man screamed. "I can't tell you any more if you kill me! Take them away!"
Steve crept forward quietly. It was plainly a girl's voice that rang out then.
"He ain't of no mind to tell the truth yet, Blacky!" The accent was nasal, that of the swamps or back hills. "He was in with them snakes that took my pappy, an' the writin' was left for him so's he'd get it when I picked him up. I wouldn't have had no truck with it, but they said they'd cut off pappy's ears if'n I didn't do as they said to fool his gal, so's she wouldn't know he'd plotted to git money from her own pappy."
A man's voice broke in. Steve shivered. It had the same deadly cold effect upon his spine as had the root that had squirmed and hissed at him.
"I'm not a torturer, Tommy Crane! But so help me, you tell me where Singer Durkin and his rats took Marna Macklin, and what you had planned with them, or I'll let go the rope! It won't be pleasant dying like that, but no living human could say it wasn't right and proper! Now talk!"
COLD all over, Steve Huston listened to the threats of the man in the swamp. He did not feel thorns that ripped through shirt and skin as he squeezed under low-hanging bushes. The fire of pitch pine knots cast an eerie glow about a slimy, shallow pool of black water.
A giant cypress thrust from sight into the night. Its big roots were like the rheumatic knees of some monstrous human. One curving root descended into the middle of the black pool.
All around the water gleamed a staked screen that enclosed the livest and most virulent space Steve had ever seen. A dozen or more huge swamp rattlesnakes coiled and thrust their red mouths back and forth. And other reptiles with gaping mouths that showed deadly white inside the fanged jaws—cotton-mouthed moccasins. They must be kept in that pool, Steve thought instantly, as persuaders for tortured victims.
He saw the thin, yellow-faced man that the Phantom had described. The red blaze seemed reflected in eyes that glowed like living coals in a bony face. The long black hair of the thin man hung to his shoulders and he stood with Indian erectness. One clawlike hand gripped a rope that was looped over a limb of the cypress.
The rope was tied under the arms of a young man, around his body. His only support was the slippery cypress root to which he was clinging desperately.
Steve had not seen Tommy Crane, the godson of the Iron Judge before. He knew of him only as the wild young man whom the Phantom had come to Corpse Cay to save, along with Marna Macklin.
What Steve saw now as he heard this victim called Tommy Crane was a face that scarcely seemed human. It was bitten and black and swollen, and even now a small cloud of swamp mosquitoes and black gnats buzzed around the tortured man's face and body. The thin man was holding the rope lightly, but if he permitted it to slide loose, nothing could save Crane from plunging into the black pool of deadly snakes.
Steve Huston feared to move. His hand went to his automatic, but he knew that it had become water-soaked and useless. He chilled with the thought that whatever he did must be final.
"The man's a lunatic," he thought. "Else what did he mean about Tommy Crane planning to get away with Marna Macklin? And what did that girl mean when she said—"
He stared at the strange skin-clad girl whose own skin was coppery brown. The fire-light showed a beautiful elfin face, with lustrous black hair cascading down over rounded shoulders.
If this girl was one of the "swamp angels" he had heard about, Steve felt that he must have been missing something. But what she had said seemed to indicate that she believed the accusation being made against Tommy Crane.
The tortured young Crane cried out again.
"If anything has happened to Marna, I want you to drop me to the snakes! You fool! I love her! I was tricked, and Marna was taken! Then this Angel Smith here hit me over the head and tried to drown me! If you want to save Marna, you've got to believe me!"
"That isn't what this note to you says," the thin man said harshly. "An' the other time I saw you, you had just set fire to that taxidermist's place and burned him alive! You are in with those devilish smuggling killers! I took these rubies from your pocket! I happen to have seen the owner of these rubies killed by your boss, Singer Durkin!"
"Singer Durkin?" The cry was thick on Crane's swollen tongue. "I've never had anything to do with Singer Durkin! You're in with them yourself, and just want to get me out of the way!"
THE thin man permitted the rope to slip a little.
Crane jerked up his bare feet as the hissing snakes in the pool came within inches of his toes.
Steve Huston knew little of what Tommy Crane might or might not have done. But he could not stand for this torture. Yet oddly, for all of the thin man's apparent brutality, there was a definite ring of sincerity in his voice.
"And I suppose you'll tell me you've never had anything to do with Lance Grover, out on the Tamiami Trail?" snapped the thin man. "That Grover has not been paying you to deliver dope-loaded sailfish and marlin to Janyx to be mounted?"
"Yes, I owe Lance Grover a lot of money," Crane whispered hoarsely. "But all he told me was that some friends of his would pay off my debts if I worked with them."
Steve thought surely the thin man would let go of the rope then.
"And so you framed the kidnapping of Marna Macklin to save your own worthless skin?" he shouted. "You even double-crossed the killers you worked with, then bumped off Janyx to cover up stealing those rubies! How much is the Iron Judge expected to pay to get his daughter back? Or is she to be rubbed out because she knows too much?"
"You've got to believe me!" screamed young Crane. "I would die right now if it would save Marna!"
"Maybe he's tellin' the truth," said the fantastic Angel Smith. "If I only knowed they wouldn't cut off Pappy's ears, I wouldn't of brought him in."
"Shut up!" rasped the thin man. "All right, Crane! Your dying won't bring back Marna Macklin, but perhaps when you are in that pool, I'll get some truth that will help me save her!"
Again Steve saw the rope begin to slip.
It was more than he could take. With the empty automatic clubbed in his hand he threw himself from the bushes, straight at the thin man.
"Hold that rope, or I'll kill you!" he yelled. "I'll feed you to your own snakes!"
The fighting reporter was fast. He had been brought up in the rough-and-tumble school that had taught him to get his man, ethics or no ethics—but to get him. He counted on the surprise of his attack to remove the crazy thin man and enable him to seize the rope holding Tommy Crane before Crane slipped from the root. He had selected the exact spot behind the thin man's ear where his gun butt would do the quickest damage. He swung hard.
IF a flying wildcat had come out of the cypress tree and started clawing at his face, Steve could not have been more amazed than he was. The Smith girl's name may have been Angel, but Steve would always have another word for her.
She sprang upon him with the quickness of any swamp cat. His swinging blows with the gun was deflected. Nails clawed his face and pitched him off balance. His legs struck the low wire screen around the pool of hissing snakes.
Steve heard a quick oath. He dropped his gun as he felt writhing, cold bodies slap around his face and arms.
It seemed that a dozen fanged snakes were striking at his head.
Fighting with his hands and his feet, Steve came erect in about two feet of black water. Snakes lashed around him.
He was scarcely conscious that his fall had carried the swamp girl into the pool with him, and that she was beating wildly at his head with small, hard fists.
Carrying the girl, Steve performed the amazing feat of jumping from the pool to the slippery cypress root beside Tommy Crane. His face and body stung in many places where vicious rattlers and moccasins had struck him.
Powerful hands gripped his shoulders and hurled him and the wildcat girl to the hammock.
For the first time in a long and hectic career, much of it sharing adventures of the noted Phantom, Steve Huston was sure he was finished. He was finished.
He was certain his veins were burning with the venom that had been poured into them.
Yet he was still conscious enough to see Tommy Crane slide off the cypress root and fall into the black pool. And to realize that the yellow face of the thin man was close to his own.
Crane's scream was in Steve's ears. Steve struck at the yellow face.
Then the thin man's knuckles clipped his chin expertly. Tommy Crane's scream and the red blaze among the trees died together in a blackness that swallowed up Steve Huston.
GRIM-LIPPED, the Phantom watched the boat swing from the half-moon beach of Corpse Cay out to the coral reef. Lights moved as Frank Havens, Chip Dorlan and Thad Burton, the criminal lawyer from the North were taken from Tommy Crane's wrecked cruiser.
The Phantom had prepared for the moment when these men of Corpse Cay would discover the fishing boat from which Marna Macklin had mysteriously vanished.
He was only a hundred yards away from them, and the smooth water of the lagoon made a perfect sounding board.
The microphone plugs in Van's ears magnified the voices. All were rough and strange, but they brought the information he wanted.
"The skipper will burn up!" shouted one man. "This is the boat the dame was aboard when we took her! It's all smacked up so it won't float again! The skipper wanted that boat found!"
"The boat was found," Van heard Frank Havens reply. "We picked it up. It would seem that Tommy Crane got rid of his girl and is a fugitive in the swamps."
That was a clever feeler from Havens. It worked.
"Sure, Crane's in the swamps—where he's likely to stay!" roared the boatman. "But the Iron Judge won't know that now, and he won't see the boat, like he would have if it had been taken to Miami!"
Van chuckled grimly at Havens' next words.
"Why don't you bring the Iron Judge here to see the boat, seeing you've kidnapped his daughter?"
There was the sound of a slapping hand.
"Smart, huh? Well, maybe we will bring the Iron Judge here, but that ain't the idea! Who are you, an' where's the other mug we saw out here?"
"I'm Frank Havens, of New York. The other man was a boat captain who said his name was Singer Durkin. But he got tired of waiting and started to swim to shore."
"The fool!" shouted the boatman. "You'd think Singer would know the lagoon's full of 'cuda! Ten to one he don't make it!"
Ashore, the Phantom bandaged Singer Durkin's leg. He made the killer captain as comfortable as possible in an enclosure of coral rock. Then he cautiously opened his body-fitting make-up case and permitted its tiny light to illuminate the thick-lipped features.
The Phantom had never performed a quicker or more perfect making up than now, using Singer Durkin's face for his model. Moulages filled out his own cheeks. The features of Cyrus Starke vanished.
Within five minutes, Van was a toad-like figure in Singer Durkin's rough fishing clothes. His hair was light, his lips were thick, and his eyes were pale and protruding.
He made sure that Singer Durkin would not suffer for a few hours, giving him a hypo. He carried a tiny, but effective one, in his make-up case. His only fear now that Thad Burton would have his own reasons for tipping off the Corpse Cay men that the Phantom was disguised as Captain Singer Durkin.
Van moved up the coral wall. Lights were dotted here and there among the thick live-oak trees. All activities on Corpse Cay seemed well hidden from the air.
Coast Guard and other boats had given little attention to Corpse Cay in searching for the missing cruisers, since it was so well known how unpopular the waters about Corpse Cay, one of hundreds of small, scattered coral islands, were with fishing captains.
As a base of operations for smugglers or other criminals, no more ideal cay could have been selected.
VAN came to a flat space where soil had drifted over the coral rock. There were many flat-fronded coconut palms. Van suddenly stepped into a shallow hole and fell.
As he gained his feet, walking on with more care, he found that all of the flat space was pock-marked with shallow holes. They seemed to have been dug in uniform rows, as if the diggers had been planning to start a graveyard out here on Corpse Cay.
"Strange," thought Van. "For if they had to dispose of bodies, the sea would be convenient enough. Those holes have been dug for some other reason."
He had topped the highest eminence of the white coral, of which the whole cay was composed, when murmuring voices appeared to come from under his feet.
Van slipped the microphones into his ear, flattened himself and listened. Several persons were talking. Van's magnified hearing could follow words that came in at least four different languages. And the Phantom knew those languages as he did many others, as well as numerous dialects.
"Hindu, Italian, Rumanian and German," Van decided. "What's that?"
One voice, speaking German, had risen above the others.
"I am saying we should wait one more day," the man was saying. "We do not hear from those who have gone. How shall we know they have entered the United States? There are enough of us now to act—"
"Quiet, quickly!"
The warning was in English. The German ceased speaking.
Van judged that a cave, or rooms, had been dug under the coral formation.
"So they are running in aliens," he thought. "And the Tommy Crane angle proves they have been smuggling in jewels; probably narcotics also. It's a nice set-up, when a fishing fleet like that of Singer Durkin can be used. And to keep from being suspected, they were using Tommy Crane, perhaps others like him."
The Phantom was convinced now that he had the answer to the missing Gulf Stream boats. They must have unexpectedly come close enough to Corpse Cay to have suspected the activities going on there, and so had been done away with by the criminals.
It was a keen set-up these men had here, too. Any object set afloat by any vessel not too far off would eventually be drawn to the half-moon beach by the currents.
Outside boats did not have to approach near Corpse Cay. Nor did they have to make direct contact with the fishing-boat smugglers. Anything from dope to jewels, from human aliens to objects of art, could be set afloat in the night and would find their way to Corpse Cay if they were not picked up somewhere by the regular fishing cruisers. That had probably happened in the case of some of the missing ones—they had picked up something meant to go ashore at Corpse Cay.
And the packing of sailfish and marlin with jewels and dope was easy. It was usual enough to have catches mounted—which brought in Janyx, the taxidermist.
"No doubt he finally went crooked on his partners as all thieves do, and so he was murdered," thought Van. "Or—"
THAT came back to Tommy Crane, and the information that Blacky Burch—or James Layton, convict—had given the Iron Judge. Had Tommy Crane killed Janyx, after trying to get away with a fortune packed in a sailfish?
The Phantom was considering every angle now. And he was not entirely satisfied with what seemed plain, so far.
"There's something bigger, something deeper than smuggling in this," ran his thoughts. "And whatever it is strikes directly at Judge Macklin. Thad Burton knows what it is, or thinks he does. Marna Macklin has been seized. Young Crane has become a fugitive. That means—"
His mind flew to the two notes in his pocket. The Tommy Crane notes found in the boat and in Marna Macklin's purse. Those notes would make it appear that Crane might be a murderer, or had connived at the kidnapping of Marna Macklin. If the writing on the two notes were genuinely Tommy Crane's, the crime might be real.
However, the Phantom believed this to be a devilish frame-up. Those responsible were striking directly at the Iron Judge. They were attacking him from an angle that would hurt him the most keenly.
That jumped Van's thoughts to Blacky Burch, or James Layton. Just what was Thad Burton's connection with Blacky Burch? Burton practiced law in the court where James Layton had been sentenced to Atlanta—the Iron Judge's court—and may have been present at Layton's trial. But on the surface, since he had not been Layton's lawyer, as Van's previous investigations had proved, he could have no interest in the man who had been convicted, and had later escaped. It might have been well for Layton as Burton had been his counsel, for Thad Burton had a reputation for getting his clients acquitted, not landing them in prison, as James Layton had been.
What then, was Thad Burton's connection with Blacky Burch? For he did know Burch. The Phantom was no believer in coincidence, therefore it had to mean something to him that Burton had appeared near Corpse Cay aboard the Tempest, Singer Durkin's boat of killers, and that Blacky Burch had for months been living as an eccentric in the Dark River swamps near this very island. To the Phantom's mind, Blacky Burch, alias James Layton, a fugitive from justice, and Thad Burton, the noted criminal lawyer, had made Corpse Cay their goal by more than chance.
Van was linking all this with Blacky Burch's queerly contradictory actions in Miami. First, Burch had identified the Phantom, and had uttered a warning that Tommy Crane would be in danger near Corpse Cay this Friday night. Then, following the explosion murder of Janyx, Burch had appeared at the Iron Judge's residence to inform the judge that Tommy Crane might be implicated in the murder.
It had seemed then that Blacky Burch had meant to use this information for his own ends, perhaps to gain the influence of the Iron Judge to ease up the nation-wide hunt that had been waged for him since he had escaped prison.
An amazing theory came into the Phantom's keen brain then.
Could Blacky Burch have gone to Federal prison through deliberate connivance with Thad Burton, and then escaped? If so, what had been the purpose, and how could it be linked up with what appeared to be a drive to gain control of the Iron Judge, Judge William Macklin?
As the Phantom arranged persons and events concerned, with mathematical exactness, it all became for him a problem in human algebra.
Blacky Burch, an escaped convict was here.
Thad Burton, a noted criminal lawyer was here.
The Iron Judge who no doubt had sentenced Blacky Burch to prison was here.
Killers headed by clever minds were engaging in a lucrative criminal enterprise on the island, but they were apparently sidetracking all the high profits of jewel and dope smuggling, of the running of aliens into the United States in favor of what appeared to be a campaign of terrorism against the Iron Judge.
AND these killers, from Singer Durkin whom Van now was impersonating, to an unknown boss whom Van had only heard called "Skipper" were not of the type to miss profit for mere revenge.
"Something much more than revenge upon the Iron Judge is desired," the Phantom decided. "It cannot be protection from the law, for that the Iron Judge cannot give, even if he could be coerced into falling in with the killers' plans."
The Phantom's analysis went directly to the only remaining solution. He had come to the unknown quantity in his problem of human algebra.
And somehow it was linked up directly with the shallow, flat holes upon which he had stumbled, dug by the piratical habitants of Corpse Cay.
Carefully the Phantom investigated the mound of coral beneath which he had heard the voices. He came to a side where the tide of the sea rose high. Here it was restrained by a crude but effective breakwater, constructed of earth and matted trees. Set into this breakwater was a huge wooden gate that could be raised or lowered at will by leverage control wheels.
"A death trap," muttered Van. "That gate can be lifted to let the sea through. It would pour directly into that underground space where the smuggled aliens I heard talking are being held."
Van quickly circled the underground mound. He was making his way toward faint lights when a queer, small procession he saw halted him. A dozen men were walking through the live-oak trees. Each four carried long bundles. Their shapes were unmistakable—human bodies.
Van crouched in the trees watching. The procession reached a wall of the coral where the deep, open sea moaned in the rocks. One by one the long bundles slid from the men's shoulders. Van heard them splash into the deep water. On that side of the island there was no beach.
"No," Van thought grimly, as the dozen men moved away, "the killers of Corpse Cay have a graveyard without digging."
Watching with troubled eyes, it was plain to the Phantom that the corpses he had seen cast into the sea were the bodies of desperate aliens.
"Undoubtedly they paid a good price for being run into the United States," he pondered. "Therefore it has become much simpler and safer to dispose of them permanently than to take a chance on turning them free in the country. And those left behind have been informed that their friends or companions have already entered the land of freedom."
Van's blood boiled with the knowledge of the fiendish brutality rampant on this Corpse Cay. His one great hope now was that in the assumed identity of Singer Durkin he might have a chance to save his own friends, and possibly Marna Macklin from meeting the fate of the aliens he had just seen given to the Gulf Stream and it ravenous tigers.
NEVER had a more difficult role been thrust upon the Phantom. He was now preparing to meet killers he was supposed to know. Also he must appear to be more than just one of them.
"Singer Durkin probably was a leader, next in command to the one I heard called Skipper," thought Van. "The skipper was on that cruiser destroyed by their own ingenious magnetic torpedo. But it is believed by now that Singer Durkin escaped after every effort was made to kill him in the sea."
Van moved cautiously nearer the lights among the live-oak trees. Much time had elapsed since the blasting of Captain Conners' cruiser, and now there was a hint of daylight streaking the east. Several hours had passed since Havens, Chip Dorlan and Steve Huston had been cast adrift.
What had become of Steve? Havens and Chip Dorlan had not seen him after they had been saved from the blasted Pelican. Van could only hope that Steve had made it ashore, or had been picked up.
He would have been amazed to know that Steve Huston was at this moment secured in one of the strangest prisons ever devised. He would have been further surprised and enlightened if he could have known that a canoe with a high-speed motor had already landed on another part of Corpse Cay, and that the mysterious Blacky Burch was at this moment moving catlike toward the same lights that had attracted the Phantom.
Concealed from any eyes in the air by a canopy of great branches draped with Spanish moss, what might have been a vast cathedral formed by nature suddenly appeared before the Phantom. Cool and dark, requiring electric torches for lighting, the wide circular space had the illusion of a cathedral, furthered by the liquid notes of a mocking bird somewhere in the branches.
There the peaceful illusion ended.
Van saw Frank Havens, Chip Dorlan and the enormous Thad Burton securely roped to the curving knees of a cypress tree. The mouths of the three prisoners had been taped. That seemed strange, where any man could have shouted himself hoarse without attracting attention.
Then Van saw a shallow lagoon under the live-oaks. In the center of the lagoon was a tiny island, hardly more than matted mangrove bushes. These seemed little solid land, for the girl standing there was in the water to her white knees. And the small boat Van saw had been used to place her on this island.
Van suppressed a bitter oath. Marna Macklin!
Marna was alive. He had been certain of that all the time. His theory of the entire mystery included the girl. He was convinced that her death would have removed the power sought by her captors.
Van had never witnessed a stranger scene. Marna Macklin's vividly pretty face was lifted. Her fair hair tumbled in curls around her shoulders. Her torn dress was proof that she had put up a desperate struggle before she had been brought here.
It was what Marna was holding in her hands that held Van's attention. Those objects, and a weirdly waving movement in the shallow lagoon all around the small, half submerged island.
VAN was still far enough away for it to be necessary for him to employ his powerful glasses to make out details clearly. They showed him that Marna was holding a pad of paper in one hand and a fountain pen in the other. Her hands were stiffly at her sides. She was looking defiantly at the line of hard-faced men along the side of the lagoon.
"If you do not copy in your own hand what is already on the page you have been given, it will be but a short time until the stingarees swim over the place where you stand," one of those men told her. "You have but one chance."
Van chilled, understanding now the waving movement that appeared to be something like brownish cloth under the surface of the lagoon.
Stingarees! Hundreds of them. Each with a barbed spike on its whipping tail that would be driven into any living thing the ugly, kite-shaped fish might touch.
At this winter season, when stingarees came into bays and lagoons to spawn, there were sometimes millions of them in vast schools. Van had once seen Biscayne Bay fairly carpeted for miles by the vicious, stinging monsters.
A touch, especially contact with a bare human leg, would cause the barbed spikes to be driven into the flesh. If the stingarees swarmed over the little island on the tide now fast rising, Marna Macklin would be attacked. If nothing worse happened, the poison of the stingarees could leave her crippled for life.
"I will not write it!" the girl cried out. "I don't care if you kill me! I cannot make my father suffer! I don't believe Tommy Crane helped you! If I write to my father that Tommy Crane did, and that he is a murderer, it will be like putting a knife in Father's heart! I would rather die now!"
The hard-faced man who had spoken laughed loudly.
Van saw Frank Havens and Chip Dorlan fighting silently against the ropes that bound them to the cypress roots. Now he decided that their mouths had been taped to prevent them from advising the girl.
The water of the lagoon was rising inch by inch toward Marna's knees. Already the massed stingarees were crowding close to the soggy mangrove bushes upon which she stood.
Van searched among the men for the one who might be the real leader, known as the Skipper.
No such man stood out. It was the Phantom's hope that this Skipper had not yet landed from the blasted sea-cruiser. These men undoubtedly were carrying out orders that had previously been given.
"Wait until one of the pets slaps her with his tail!" growled one of the men. "She'll write the note fast enough!"
Van's theory was being confirmed. From what the girl had said, he knew now that the Iron Judge was to be informed that Tommy Crane was a fugitive murderer, and that he had aided in kidnapping the girl. Also, the Iron Judge would be convinced by the girl's letter—if she wrote it—that she was a prisoner in the hands of the Corpse Cay killers.
All of this was not being framed for ransom. The Phantom was certain of that. The Iron Judge was not a rich man. Moreover, with the smugglers of Corpse Cay profiting hugely from their criminal activities the direct plot against the Iron Judge had to involve something much greater than ordinary loot.
THE Phantom meant to appear before these men as Singer Durkin. With temporary authority, he could free the girl for the time. This would have to do until he could make another plan.
He must act quickly. At any moment, the Skipper might appear. And Van already knew that Singer Durkin's authority was not great enough for him to defy the Skipper.
He was moving, one hand upon a waterproofed automatic, when the girl cried out sharply. Van saw the flat, triangular side of the stingaree whip out of the water beside her island. The barbed spike snapped over and was imbedded in the girl's leg.
Van sprang from concealment, a command on his lips. But another man was quicker—a man almost as thin as Blacky Burch. But he was old and bent, and a long white beard hung from his yellowed face.
"Polecats!" he cried out in a high, nasal tone. "There hain't a man amongst yuh! Out'n my way!"
The bent old man appeared to have sprung from the bushes. His slight figure was in mid-air as he leaped. His bared arms swept out as stiff as rods.
Before the cursing, surprised men lining the lagoon could act, two were sent splashing head-first into the water among the suddenly disturbed and striking stingarees. They screamed as the maddened little monsters drove barbed tails into their bodies.
Then the bent old man himself was waist deep in the water. Curved brown tails rose up and drove into his thin legs, but he plunged ahead to the island.
"Stop the fool!" a man cried. "How did old Cypress get loose, anyway? Get him! No, don't shoot! We still need him!"
Who old "Cypress" might be, or why he was still needed was all a mystery to the Phantom who was still smashing his way through the bushes farther back from the lagoon. He saw that one islander had snapped up a gun, aimed at the old man's back and there was a snapping explosion from Van's hip, even as he jumped ahead.
The man aiming at the old man's back screamed with pain. His gun arm flew up and twisted crookedly, his elbow shattered by Van's single shot. He lost his footing and joined the others the old man had knocked into the lagoon.
More than a dozen hard-eyed men were turned now toward Van.
"It's Singer!" one man shouted. "What the devil? What's the idea shootin' at us, Singer?"
"Alla you get back!" Van commanded, in the thick, heavy tone of Singer Durkin. "Didn't you get the new orders about the girl? They're bringing the Iron Judge here! She must not be hurt before he sees her!" Van was forced to depend upon supposed confidence in Singer Durkin to make his quickly invented explanation stick.
There were muttered oaths, but all Van was noticing, as he forced his way through the men was that the brave effort of the man called old Cypress was doomed to fail.
NOW the old man was only halfway to the island. Half a dozen stinging tails had hit him, but he stoically kept from crying out with the burning agony, and tried to fight on to the island. Van saw him falter, then slowly begin to sink into the ooze of the lagoon bottom.
The Phantom jumped then. He left the shore of the lagoon in what appeared to be a desperate leap for the island, too distant to be reached. But his hands shot upward, gripped a swinging liana that curved down from a cypress limb.
The oaths of the surprised and discomfited killers were silenced. None of them had ever seen Singer Durkin perform such a feat.
Van's legs hooked through the stout vine as it swung, and his powerful hands shot downward. He lifted the old man by the shoulders, swinging him clear of the water. One brown stingaree still clung by its spiked tail in the old man's body as Van threw him back to the shore.
Another swing carried the Phantom closer to the half-submerged island. He let go, turned over in mid-air, and landed beside Marna Macklin. As he lifted her, he turned toward the men on shore.
"Bring the boat!" he ordered angrily. "And get them other mugs out've the lagoon before they're stung to death.
MORE than thirty men had been conducting the criminal murder business on Corpse Cay, the Phantom estimated.
For the time he ignored the muttering he could hear among them. They were accepting his orders, as Singer Durkin, but the necessity of rescuing Marna Macklin had put him in a tight spot. He was sure that Singer Durkin would not have interfered, that he could not have performed the rescue feat, and that the killers were puzzled but uncertain as to what steps to take.
Van carried the situation by sheer bluff. The men appeared more satisfied when he issued a command for Marna Macklin to be tied up, and her mouth taped the same as the other prisoners.
Van gave his personal attention to old Cypress. The yellow-faced swamper was suffering with swollen legs, from the barbs of the stingarees. His thin lips only tightened and he uttered no sound as Van used the point of a knife expertly to extract the spikes from his flesh. The old man's eyes, so small and deep they seemed lost in their sockets were burning and alive as he watched Van. Finally old Cypress said:
"I never reckoned the time would come when I'd say thankee to Singer Durkin, an' I ain't changed my mind none about your murderin' crew, Singer. I guess I'm an old fool for doin' what I done, but I was thinkin' o' my own gal Angel when I saw them stingarees hittin'."
"Don't talk," Van ordered gruffly. He had to cover any apparent softness. "We can be usin' you, Cypress, or I'da let the stingarees take you." Van was watching the other men. In groups, they were talking low, watching him. His ear microphones went into place unobserved.
"I'm tellin' you somethin's happened to Singer Durkin," one man was saying. "An' the Skipper's more than overdue. It's funny we ain't been able to pick up the Tarpon on the radio since last night, an' Singer ain't said a word as to how he come here from the Tempest."
This gave Van his cue. These men did not know what had happened to Singer Durkin's Tempest, or to the sea-going cruiser, which must be the Tarpon they had mentioned.
For some reason the survivors of the blasted sea-cruiser had not yet communicated with Corpse Cay. It was possible that the Skipper might have been killed. The survivors might have been picked up by some fishing boat, or even by a Coast Guard cutter.
Whatever the explanation, Van knew he must seize the advantage he had been given. He had to test out how far he could go as Singer Durkin, in changing the plans of the killers, and swiftly extricating Marna Macklin and his own companions from their danger. The real Singer Durkin might be found, or the survivors of the lost Tarpon might land.
Van strode over to a group of the men.
"I ain't had time to tell you the Tempest was blown up last night," he said. "The skipper thought my boat was being suspected. But there was an accident, and when the Tempest was sunk, the Tarpon caught fire. I was thrown into the sea, and then I ran onto these other prisoners of yours. They were aboard Tommy Crane's boat."
THE Phantom could see that some of the men believed his story, but there was doubt in other hard eyes.
"We were wondering why the Tarpon didn't get the radio signal," said one huge fellow, who looked as if he might have been a scar-faced pirate under Jean LaFitte. "You don't think the Skipper could have been drowned, do you, Singer?"
"I don't know," said Van. "I was swept away on the tide. Some of the men off the Tarpon got away in boats. Maybe we'll hear from them."
Van was thinking how the clever plan to incriminate Tommy Crane by setting his fishing cruiser afloat to be found had been upset. He mentioned it.
"If the Skipper was here, he would do something about that Tommy Crane boat," he said. "Anyway, you heard me say the plan has been changed, and the Iron Judge is to be brought here."
"What's new about that?" the big, scar-faced man demanded. "It's been planned all the time to bring the Iron Judge here to see the works and to let him know where he stands. Seems to me I remember the Skipper saying you was to get the Iron Judge to Corpse Cay?"
"Yeah, Singer," drawled another hard-faced man, "maybe you got a bad bump on the head or something? Say, you ain't figurin' on crossin' up the Skipper, are you?"
The Phantom was tense, every nerve keyed up. He had been on dangerous ground, and he knew it. But there was a sudden new note with the question just asked.
Half a dozen men muttered at once.
"Yeah, Singer? How about it?"
The Phantom's fingers were touching the butt of his automatic as the scar-faced man stepped close. He was trained to the last degree in reading men's eyes and voices, yet the subtle change that had suddenly come over the Corpse Cay mob seemed unbelievable.
"You said the Skipper didn't have the nerve for the big stuff when it came to a showdown, Singer," the scar-faced man said in a low tone. "It wouldn't be that he's got cold feet, would it—and the time has come for us to take over. Maybe if the Tempest was sunk like you say, the Skipper meant for you to go with it?"
The Phantom was forced to put everything on the play of a single card now. He prefaced his words with a sharp oath.
"That's exactly what he wanted!" he said. "And the time has come for us to take over and run the show our way."
Often the Phantom had enacted the role of a member of criminal mobs. But this was the first time that he had ever been forced into the position of apparently organizing a rebellion against the leader. And he did not even know the identity of the leader against whom the men were plotting! He had to think fast, to decide what move might be the safest, and how he might possibly free Marna Macklin and his own companions.
There was one serious complication. Thad Burton, the lawyer, knew he was the Phantom. And Burton, as well as Frank Havens and Chip Dorlan, was hearing some of the conversation.
But to mutiny against the murder leadership of Corpse Cay could not mean the freeing of the prisoners at this time. In fact, Van was convinced that the holding of Marna Macklin, possibly her murder, was involved in the bigger plan of which the unknown Skipper had been afraid.
VAN decided that the scar-faced giant was the most important man among these Corpse Cay killers. Attention was paid to him when he spoke. And Van did not even know this man's name or his position. To say nothing of not knowing the names of any of the others.
But he had to act now, with the likelihood of the survivors of that seagoing cruiser landing on Corpse Cay at any time. Or someone might find the real Singer Durkin the Phantom had left among the coral at the other end of the island.
"Come on," Van said to the scar-faced man. "I've a new idea we'll talk over. We can't wait longer than tonight to make contact with the Iron Judge or bring him here. So we must move fast."
"Okay, Singer," assented the scar-faced man, greatly to Van's relief. "You had the brains to start this thing in the first place, so I guess we can finish it."
With the scar-faced man, Van cut over the rock among the live-oak trees. If he could get this one man far enough away from the others, he meant to know much more of what he should be informed.
The scar-faced man might not return, but Van believed he could cover that. Only a few times had he ever been compelled to employ extreme methods to gain his end. He meant to do it now.
The windward side of Corpse Cay was a tangle of broken coral and crooked palms. The moaning of the sea could cover any cry that might be made.
Van walked a little ahead of the scar-faced man, selecting a spot for his surprise. He was convinced that they had not been followed.
There was a flat space of rock, flanked by coral and brush just ahead, but just before reaching it Van had a glimpse of the sea, where the sun had slanted upward and given it the sharp, white light of the winter day.
He restrained an impulse to exclaim, or to make any movement. For suddenly, down among the rocks, he saw a pointed log canoe. Even at that distance he could tell it was a swamp product, possibly the result of Seminole skill. For the canoe was carved out of a single cypress log. It differed from an Indian canoe in one respect, however, for Van saw the gleam of a modern outboard motor attached to the stern.
Van whirled. He must act now, strike swiftly before the man with him glimpsed the craft.
He was set to employ a quick ju jitsu hold that would paralyze the other man instantly when abruptly he drew in his breath and halted with his hands outspread. It was as though his intention had been carried out before he had touched the man he meant to overcome.
There was a look of pained surprise on the face of the scar-faced man. Then he was falling, lurching toward Van, his hands thrust out and his mouth twisted with agony.
Van sprang back as the scar-faced man struck on his face, quivered and lay at his feet.
And instinctively Van sprang to one side and ducked for the nearest palm bushes. For there had been a hissing whisper as something like a flying insect just touched his neck and passed on.
And as Van rolled, he had a view of the neck of the scar-faced man. He saw the bright feathers of some swamp bird. These were attached to a tiny dart. This dart was buried in the flesh of the scar-faced man. He was dead.
ALL around red-headed Steve Huston were tiny, almost invisible threads. They were as fragile as spider web. In these threads were glittering points like the finest of sewing needles.
Steve lay on a grass mat in the middle of a hut made of poles and thatched palm fronds. He was stripped down to his shorts. His body was shining with sweat.
"Boy howdy!" Steve's exclamation was a groan. "If the Clarion crowd ever got a shot of me now! It can't be possible that yellow devil is telling the truth, but when I've been bitten by a dozen snakes and nothing happens but a headache, he must know his stuff. So here we are."
He was talking to Tommy Crane, who also stripped down to his shorts. Young Crane looked much like a leftover from some barbecue. With his skin burned almost black, his face and arms swollen from insect bites, and his eyes bloodshot from fear and strain, Tommy Crane was a pitiable sight.
"If ever there was proof crime doesn't pay, you're it," said Steve Huston. "Feeling any better, Crane?"
"It would have been better if I'd died," Tommy Crane croaked hoarsely, through puffed lips. "Still better if I'd never been born. I don't want to live now, except there may be some hope that I can set things straight, then go away."
"Don't be a quitter," Steve said shortly. "I'll admit you played away out in the rough, but you won't be the first guy who's had to act the prodigal son. I've an idea you would give your life this minute to know Marna Macklin's all right. That's because you love her, and that's all that counts."
Steve glanced around at the countless spidery threads, and the scores of sharp points gleaming among them.
"Yeah," he said. "All that counts except figuring some way out of this trap. Wish I knew exactly where this Blacky Burch stands. One minute I thought he was a right guy, and the next I could imagine him killing just for the fun of it. Anyway, it looks like we wait right here for him to return."
Never had Steve Huston encountered anyone the equal of the thin and yellowed Blacky Burch. What the man had done, for instance, in the little matter of a dozen rattlers and moccasins striking Steve Huston and the swamp girl, Angel Smith. A quick antidote from Blacky Burch, and the snake bites had amounted to little more than bee stings.
Then Burch had explained that all of the snakes had been robbed of their poison, and that he was experimenting with this and the deadly poison of some swamp plants for purposes of his own.
Briefly, Steve had learned that in torturing Tommy Crane to compel him to tell the truth about Marna Macklin, Burch had only been working upon Crane's imagination. Young Crane had been in no real danger at any time from being poisoned by the snakes Blacky Burch kept in an enclosed pool.
The effect on Crane had been the same, though. He had not known the snakes were harmless until Steve had plunged among them with Angel Smith.
WHEN Steve had been revived, he had found himself in this strange swamp hut. Blacky Burch had coolly informed him that he was surrounded by plastic threads of Blacky's own invention, and that myriad small points on these threads did contain enough poison to kill any man at the slightest touch.
To prove his point, Blacky Burch had suddenly produced a captive swamp rat. Holding it by the neck he had thrust it against one of the threads. The swamp rat had died instantly, without so much as a kick.
Steve Huston had revealed his identity, and his connection with the Phantom. But that had been no news to the strange Blacky Burch.
"I've known that from the moment I saw you, Huston," had been Blacky's reply. "And because of it, and because I cannot believe what Tommy Crane tells me, you will remain here safely out of the way until I have attended to some outside business."
Steve had protested in vain. In the meantime, the swamp girl had suddenly disappeared.
"Angel Smith is like any swamp cat," Blacky Burch had said. "She is here and there, and sometimes nowhere."
All about the thatched hut were shelves containing scientific books. Other shelves were equipped with laboratory instruments.
With time to think over this queer situation Steve Huston decided that there was plenty of proof that the mysterious Blacky Burch was well grounded in some of the advanced sciences—especially in the application of poisons.
Slow hours passed and now the sun was turning the hut into an oven. Tommy Crane slept some from exhaustion.
Debating with himself about taking a chance on trying to remove the nearly invisible threads, Steve approached some of them several times. He tried to convince himself that Blacky Burch's prison of deadly poison was a bluff, like his pool of snakes. But he could not get the dead swamp rat out of his mind. And, recalling the somber black eyes of the thin man with the long, straight black hair Steve could easily imagine Blacky Burch an insane killer.
"But how in the Hail Columbia would he expect to get away with it?" muttered Steve. "Wonder if he's gone to Corpse Cay? If I only knew what has happened to the Phantom and the others!"
Steve's heart was as big as his fighting spirit. He looked at the miserable Tommy Crane, mumbling in his sleep.
"If ever a mug paid up for his mistakes," Steve thought, "he's the man. Hope it's as he says, and that his girl was only kidnapped, and won't be hurt. Every guy is entitled to another chance."
More and more it riled Steve Huston to think of the possibility that the supposed deadly threads were a bluff, and that he was being kept a prisoner by his mind alone. Yet Blacky Burch had so surrounded him and Tommy Crane that it was impossible to reach anything with which to remove the threads without touching one of the points.
OF WHAT the fatal virus was composed, Steve had not the faintest idea. He did see a plant he identified as wolfsbane, the deadliest of all vegetable poisons. That would be great stuff to mix up with the venom of rattlesnakes and moccasins, and a few other virulent creatures of the swamp.
It seemed hours since Steve had heard the outboard motor when Blacky Burch had departed. Steve wished that even the wildcat, Angel Smith, would return.
Tidal water ran in the black bayou outside the hut. It was this which finally caused Steve's brain to click on a few cylinders usually in use. The bayou filled with the rising tide, and the earthen floor of the hut grew damp.
"Of all the blank nitwits!" Steve suddenly grunted.
The next minute he was digging furiously in the soft earth. Water came up and filled the hole. But Steve was throwing the dug-up wet dirt against the threads that tore them, widening a space for his body.
Soon he was sure he could get Tommy Crane and himself out through the hole he had made, by ducking down into the water and under the thatched wall of the hut.
Salty sweat burned his eyes as he made the supreme effort. He was almost at the point of exhaustion from the heat of the swamp sun. His fingernails were broken, and his hands were blistered, but at last he was under the dangerous threads and near the wall.
At the sudden, light thucking of a canoe paddle he looked up, listening. The swamp girl, with her black hair streaming over her shoulders, was climbing out of a canoe in the bayou.
She was a lithe figure, clad only in the single garment of swamp cat fur hooked over her shoulders, as she glided to the hut door. There was a funny little smile on her red lips as she looked at Steve.
"Reckon it'd be right smart for we-uns to be makin' it out of the swamp, 'fore they come lookin' for Tommy Crane," she said to Steve. "I don't take to gals that wears shoes, but I'm been thinkin' up on it, an' it come to me that Tommy Crane was tellin' the truth, or he'd been scareder of them snakes. C'mon."
"All right, Angel," Steve said. He grinned at her as he commented, "And you sure look like one right now. I'll get Tommy down through the hole under the wall. I guess I believe him, too, and perhaps we can get him another chance."
"You been diggin' all that hole?"
Angel Smith threw back her head and laughed merrily.
"What's so funny about that?" demanded Steve hotly. "Hey! Look out!"
For Angel Smith walked into the doorway, carelessly brushing the supposedly poisonous threads and the gleaming points aside with both hands.
"Reckon Blacky Burch has been foolin' again," she said. "Betcha he showed you how them spider webs would kill a swamp rat. Seen him do it lots of times. The swamp angels done some stealin' off'n him, an' he fixed up this trick. Blacky wouldn't hurt nobody, 'less they was downright killin' polecats. Reckon all he wanted was just to keep you here a spell."
ANGEL SMITH was a girl, so Steve Huston turned his head and whispered steadily into space for a full minute. Then he picked up Tommy Crane and carried him out to the canoe.
"You think Blacky Burch is a smart man, do you, Angel?" Steve asked between gritted teeth.
"Yes, an' he's found out a way to mix up poison weeds an' such to cure the break-bone fever," said the girl, using the common term applied to the devastating and acutely painful dengue fever. "He's the first one that ever done that in the swamps. He saved my pappy, an' he's been doctorin' all of the folks. My pappy says he'll be a great man when what he's been doin' is knowed among doctors on the outside."
"So that's it," muttered Steve. This was a new slant on the queer Blacky Burch. "He's staying here to perfect his discovery?"
"Ain't knowin' about that," said Angel Smith. "Guess he stays 'cause he likes swamp folks an' wants 'em to live better."
Tommy Crane was muttering.
"I'm not a murderer—don't take me back—they've killed Marna—"
"Where are you planning to go, Angel?" asked Steve.
"I'm paddlin' for Corpse Cay to find my pappy," she told him.
Steve Huston was thinking that the Phantom would be pleased to learn the new angles he had found out about Blacky Burch. The strange thin man undoubtedly was regarded as a great benefactor by the swamp people. And he was working patiently to discover a new remedy for the terrible dengue fever.
"Okay, Angel," Steve said. "We'll find your pappy. There are some things connected with Tommy Crane I want to know. So we'll head for Corpse Cay."
"That's what you think!" The hard voice sounded from the mangroves at one side of the narrow bayou. "Hold up there!"
The heavy prow of a ship's lifeboat shot out of a little channel in the mangroves. Screaming with rage, Angel Smith raised her paddle and struck. It cut across the thin, long nose of a man in the bow of the boat. He swore angrily and caught at the paddle.
The heavier boat crashed into the thin side of the canoe, smashing it and sending it over.
Steve Huston dived deeply until he was on the oozy mud of the bottom. With the commotion in the bayou above him, the men he had seen in the heavy boat were having their hands full with subduing the wildcat Angel Smith.
Steve swam under water into the mangroves, putting as much distance between him and the boat as he could before he turned over and permitted only his face to emerge in the thick bushes.
"Hey, Lance, this is a break after all!" a hard voice floated back to Steve.
"Looks like Tommy Crane was playing smart and was going back, or someone was doing his thinking for him. Where's that other mug who was in the canoe!"
"Went under and never came up!" said another voice. "That's a break too! He was Steve Huston, one of the side kicks of the Phantom! We'd better take Tommy Crane to Corpse Cay before he gets more ideas! Or maybe sink him in the swamp!"
"But we can't take a chance in open water until dark," agreed another voice. "There'll be too many planes and boats. But we'll have to work fast. I've an idea that blasted Phantom made the cay, and if we don't put over the deal on the Iron Judge tonight, we never will."
Steve scarcely breathed as he listened to the men probing about in the water where the canoe had overturned. Suddenly he heard one of the men utter a sharp oath of pain.
"Lookout! That swamp devil! She nearly tore off my ear!"
One man in the boat emptied an automatic. There was a slight splash, and Steve felt sick and empty. Angel Smith had not cried out. There had been no sound or movement after her dive.
Never had Steve Huston been so bitterly determined as now somehow to even up the score with the killers he was sure had just murdered the queer, pretty swamp girl.
The men in the boat were still talking.
"I tell you, Lance, Tommy Crane has seen too much," said one. "How about knocking him in the head and leaving him where the law can pick him up. It will look like he died naturally."
The maddened Steve Huston started swimming silently toward the boat. There were four armed men to be dealt with—but the red-headed reporter was past counting the odds against him.
QUITE well the Phantom realized that the scar-faced Corpse Cay killer was dead. He had died instantly. There was the feathered dart in his neck, and that was all to show cause for that.
Never before had Van seen any poison act so swiftly. And the same death had just brushed his own cheek as he ducked into the palmettos.
He had whipped his automatic out, ready for action. He saw the slight movement of some palm fronds only a few feet away and was sure he could send a lethal slug tearing into the hidden ambusher who had shot two poison darts.
But Van held his fire. That killing, the attack upon himself could only have been made by some enemy of the murderous smugglers of Corpse Cay.
Van himself was the counterpart of Singer Durkin. He could think of no man who more richly deserved death. Most certainly he did not want to kill or wound any man who was out to take the life of the murder captain of the destroyed Tempest.
The Phantom had two courses. He could call out his identity, taking a chance on being believed and finding a friend, or he could adopt a more direct method. After all, it was possible that one of the other killers might have made the attack.
Van made his choice and acted in the same split second. He dived at the swaying palm fronds.
He heard the little hiss-like expelled breath blown through a pipe. Once more feathery death brushed his ear.
The Phantom's powerful hands came into contact with a man's body. The man was moving, striking with his fists. Despite Van's quickness, the fellow was about as easy to hold as an eel.
Trained in ju jitsu and in all forms of wrestling, the Phantom sought to gain a paralyzing hold. A lithe, steel-strong body wrapped around him with much the same effect as a boa constrictor.
"I've been waiting for this chance, Durkin!" a voice snarled. "Before I finish, you'll take me to Marna Macklin! If anything has happened to her, you'll wish you hadn't been born!"
Van saw the bony face of Blacky Burch. He shot up a punching fist, aimed at the thin man's chin. Blacky's head jerked to one side with the speed of a dodging snake. Long fingers that clamped upon Van's throat seemed to have the strength of steel wires.
The neck of an ordinary man would have been crushed, but Van had many times been forced to pit his throat muscles against strangling hands. His neck became iron-hard.
Blacky Burch whipped a knee into Van's stomach. Van's viselike thumb and fingers found Blacky's jaw in front of his ear. Few men had ever been able to beat that nerve-deadening grip, but Blacky Burch did not seem human. His skin and flesh felt as hard as sun-dried rawhide. His hands left Van's throat and the fire of tortured nerves burned along Van's right arm as Blacky's thumb punched accurately upon the nerve under his armpit.
It was such a battle as the Phantom had seldom experienced. Blacky Burch weighed little more than a hundred pounds. Yet that was his advantage. He was about as easy to hold as a writhing, slimy snake of the swamps.
The Phantom could have resorted to extreme measures that might have been fatal. But he had good reason to spare Blacky Burch as much as possible. The mystery of this thin man was the key to all of the deeper crime that appeared to have been plotted on Corpse Cay.
BUT Van's strength was matched by the thin man's quickness, and Blacky's almost supernatural ability to endure the agony of holds that would have laid out another man. Moreover, Burch was fighting calmly, intelligently. And the fact that he had just killed one of the Corpse Cay smugglers and was doing his best to eradicate the one he believed to be Singer Durkin was in his favor with the Phantom, who strove to overcome the man as silently as possible, yet leave him conscious.
Perhaps life in the swamps had built up the thin man's endurance, possibly numbed his nerves against normal pain. Van was forced to start smashing sledge hammer blows with his fists to Blacky's ribs.
The thin man weakened, but he was defiant.
"You can kill me, Durkin," he gasped. "But even then you lose. I've already removed the stuff from Corpse Cay. You have been murdering for something that has ceased to exist. And—"
Blacky Burch's eyes closed and he went limp.
The Phantom eased off his hammering blows. But never in his life had he been more completely tricked. The thin man's apparent surrender to the inevitable had been assumed!
He twisted, striking with lightning speed that caught Van by surprise. Van went to his back. Blacky's hands darted in for a new hold.
Van's legs snapped upward. The thin man shot into the air as if he had been projected from a catapult. Van was upon him then, jamming him to the coral rock as he landed.
This time, there was no trick when Blacky's hands spread helplessly, and he lay still. Only his black eyes glowed with hate as he looked at the man he believed to be Singer Durkin, killer captain of Corpse Cay.
"Now, Blacky Burch," the Phantom said quietly, "suppose you tell me why James Layton, escaped convict, risks his own capture to try fighting the smugglers of Corpse Cay single-handed."
The thin man's teeth were clenched. "So Lance Grover has told you about me, Singer," he said. "And perhaps Thad Burton, that crooked lawyer, has added his bit. Yes, I'm Layton, but you'll never know the real reason I wanted to kill you and every smuggling ghoul on Corpse Cay."
Van released his hold abruptly. "That's good, Blacky Burch," he said calmly. "Look!"
He passed one hand quickly over his jaws. He touched his eyes. The bulging features of Singer Durkin disappeared. His eyes were for a few seconds a normal, quizzical brown, instead of bulging pale orbs.
He as quickly restored the features to what they had been.
"The Phantom!" Blacky Burton breathed the name as if he had awakened from a bad dream. "I might have known that Singer Durkin had neither the nerve nor the skill to put up that kind of a fight. Phantom, we must save Marna Macklin! Or do you already know about her?"
"I know," Van said quietly. "Also, the saving of Marna Macklin must be accomplished in such a way as to make sure that the honor and the life work of the Iron Judge is not lost. And that seems difficult, with his godson apparently a fugitive and hunted by the law as a murderer."
BLACKY BURCH had something in his black eyes then that was unfathomable. The Phantom could read a sudden great resolve.
"Phantom, I must tell the truth," he said firmly. "Tommy Crane is innocent of the murder of Janyx, the taxidermist, and of plotting the kidnapping of Marna Macklin. But he could never clear himself. I can set him right, for I caused the death of Janyx. The mistakes of Tommy Crane are not too great to be forgotten, and Marna Macklin loves him. We must get away from here now. Then I will talk."
Only a few times had the Phantom ever looked through human eyes into so great a soul of a man. Here was the unexpected. And by it, in the understanding mind of the Phantom, Blacky Burch, or James Layton, was accomplishing more than any evidence could have done in clearing himself of criminal guilt.
For Van knew that Blacky Burch was lying. He had decided to sacrifice himself, a hunted convict, to give another man a chance and bring happiness to a girl.
Seldom were the Phantom's deductions built upon intuition. But it was his keen insight into human nature that brought him straight to his goal now.
"Blacky Burch," he said quietly, "you have known Marna Macklin at some time in the past, perhaps when you were James Layton. You were in love with her. You did not kill Janyx, and I have an idea that you've never committed a crime of any kind, not even that for which you were sent to prison."
Blacky Burch closed his somber eyes a moment. When he opened them he said:
"I have not changed my mind, Phantom. But there are some things you must know."
Van had been listening for several minutes to the strange story Blacky Burch told him when suddenly he produced the two notes that supposedly had been penned by Tommy Crane, and found in his fishing cruiser.
"The forgery here—for I have found it is forgery—is almost perfect," he said. "It ties up with some of the things you have told me. You have said you were sent to prison because of a letter in your handwriting which caused valuable jewels to be delivered to thieves who disappeared with them. You were studying science, and working as a trusted messenger for the jewel house, and the note supposedly written by you was accepted. But there was only your word that you had not written the note, and you were convicted."
"That's right," said Blacky Burch. "And sentenced by the Iron Judge. I never told the real story to a friend who visited me in jail during that painful time, because it would not have been fair. For she was Marna Macklin, the daughter of the judge before whom I was to be tried."
"And Thad Burton, the lawyer?"
"He was not my lawyer. He had been the counsel of another man who was already convicted and in prison. So when I was convicted and was to be sent to the same prison, Burton came to me with a proposition to—"
Every coral rock and every palm bush seemed suddenly to erupt an armed smuggler. A man with a harsh voice was in command of a score of men who descended upon Blacky Burch and the Phantom.
"Take them! Don't shoot! Now we'll find out how much this smart Phantom has discovered! Then he'll die with the others!"
FOUR men were carrying the toad-like Singer Durkin. Unable to walk because of his severed foot, he was upon a crude litter. The Phantom was bitter at having become so absorbed in the strange story of Blacky Burch that he had momentarily forgotten their danger.
Powerless to resist, Van Loan was stripped of his weapons. Singer Durkin's men took a metal blow-pipe from Blacky Burch, inspecting a number of feathered darts. That hurt the Phantom, more than being disarmed himself, for he had the deepest admiration for this queer, unconquerable thin man, who had been without weapons in the swamp, but had contrived to arm himself with primitive blow-pipe and darts tipped with deadly poison. And with them he had been ready to tackle the entire band of Corpse Cay killers.
Moreover, without laboratory equipment, Blacky Burch had become a healer among the swamp people, with great hopes of developing a remedy for one of the most dreaded diseases of the swamps. He might have left Dark River, and been safer, but he had remained to minister to the swamp folk, and to perfect his discovery.
In an underground tunnel, hollowed in the coral, a short-wave radio was in operation when the prisoners were herded toward it. Singer Durkin had already been taken away from where Van and Blacky Burch had been over come, and now he was carried from this tunnel.
"Put the Phantom and the other prisoners with the foreigners in the black hole!" ordered Durkin when he had listened to the radio for a moment or two. "The Skipper is in the swamp and has contacted us. The Iron Judge has been reached, and he is on a cruiser coming south, with only two men with him. He has been given the message that he must appear here alone, or he will never see his daughter alive again, and that Tommy Crane will be turned over for murdering her."
Singer Durkin twisted around, facing the Phantom.
"Hear that, Phantom?" he said mockingly. "And I've heard you're clever. You're on your last case, Phantom. Maybe I'll let you listen to the famous Iron Judge pleading for mercy. Too bad that you and the rest of the prisoners won't have a chance to leave Corpse Cay. The Iron Judge will never know who has dealt this hand, but he'll do as he is told, and he won't talk afterward. No one will ever know the truth about what the Iron Judge must do."
The Phantom made no reply. The cards of death appeared to be stacked against him, against all of the prisoners. He and the others, except Marna Macklin, who was kept outside, were conducted to the underground vault in the coral, the "black hole," which the sea could quickly flood.
Four hard-eyed killers armed with tommy-guns guarded the doorway of coral rock. More than a score of persons occupying the queer underground prison jabbered in alien tongues.
The Phantom was unbound, as was Blacky Burch and the others, but Singer Durkin had given his orders.
"Keep the prisoners apart and quiet," he had told the guards. "Shoot the first one who tries to talk to anybody."
Thad Burton kept his little eyes fixed upon Blacky Burch. The Phantom could see that Burton was aching to talk with the thin man, but could not under the threat of the guns.
KNOWING their different tongues, Van was quickly aware that all of the occupants of this underground tunnel who were here on his arrival were aliens who had paid high to be smuggled into the United States. But they were now hopeless, despairing.
Van slumped beside a wall not far from the guards. Frank Havens and Chip Dorlan had been placed on the other side of the guards. The gunmen were watchful, evidently having respect for the prowess of the amazing Phantom.
Van caught Blacky Burch's eye, and recalled how the thin man had been able to read his lips at their first encounter. The Phantom's lips moved.
"This place can be flooded from outside and all of us drowned," he said silently. "Dying by bullets now would be better than that. Singer Durkin would not dare permit anyone to leave Corpse Cay alive if he succeeds with the Iron Judge."
"If dying will help," Blacky's lips said in reply, "tell me what to do. I am ready."
Van's mind cut one more notch of approval for the thin man. Fugitive, victim of a great wrong, hopelessly in love with a girl who probably did not even remember him, here was a man among men—willing to take the rap for Tommy Crane and give him another chance. Ready now to die, should the Phantom say the word.
Of all the men worth saving he had ever met, Van judged this Blacky Burch was the ace.
"We need not die, but we must take a long chance," he said with his silent lips. "There are two hanging gasoline lights. The doorway is blocked from the outside, but it would be opened if there was shooting. Be ready to act in another minute or two.
"I am ready," said Blacky's thin lips.
"What the devil you whisperin' to yourself about?" one of the guards watching Van growled. "You keep buttoned up and be thinkin' up some prayers!"
"Perhaps I am," Van said, and smiled.
His right hand was hidden by his body. His fingers were writhing into various figures, but he kept his lips tightly closed as the guard commanded.
But the sharp, blue eyes of Chip Dorlan were fixed upon the Phantom's hand. Chip was reading a message. This was but one of the many methods by which Van had taught Chip to communicate with him—a simple form of the deaf mute sign language, but as he had told Blacky Burch, he directed Chip to "be ready to act when you hear trouble start."
After about half an hour the watchful guards relaxed a little. And then only when the Phantom appeared to have become drowsy. Van's eyes were nearly closed and his lips were partly open as a sound that seemed to be a slight snore came from them.
One of the aliens, a blustering Italian with gold rings in his ears, was in a chattering group in which Van spotted two big men who were undoubtedly Russians. Suddenly the swarthy Italian burst forth with oaths that rang through the tunnel. One of the Russians shouted back in his own language. Angry vituperation flew back and forth. Then half a dozen other aliens were crowding around the disputants.
Had the armed guards been more observant, they might have seen then that the Italian and the Russians were not talking at all, but were staring wildly at each other. Then one Russian lunged toward the Italian and flailed out with his fists.
"Hey, stop that! What's goin' on?"
Two of the armed guards rushed toward the shouting, milling aliens. The remaining two guards stayed by the door, but after a quick glance at the Phantom and their other prisoners, their eyes followed their companions.
The Phantom still was apparently half dozing. And the other prisoners had not moved, except to glance toward the excited, shouting foreigners.
Van's eyes signaled to Blacky Burch, then, and he came up on his toes with the quickness of a released steel spring. Already knowing Blacky Burch's fighting skill and speed, Van knew the thin man would be with him.
Even as the two guards by the door cursed and tried to swing their machine-guns around, they went down under the smashing bodies of the Phantom and Blacky Burch.
At the same instant, Chip Dorlan, a flying figure, aimed his jump at the back of one of the other guards. But the distance was too great. The guard sprang to one side and slapped his gun around.
That lead would have cut Chip Dorlan to pieces had not another tommy-gun started singing. It was in the hands of the Phantom, snatched from the guard he had laid senseless with one punching fist.
Chip Dorlan seized the fallen gun of the guard who had tried to kill him. Van had aimed low and the guard's legs were broken. The remaining armed guard was smart, or perhaps acted on instinct. For he jumped straight ahead, hurling himself among the frightened foreigners. From there he turned his tommy-gun toward the doorway.
A stream of slugs fanned between Van and Blacky Burch. Van saw the flat rock forming the tunnel doorway start to swing open. The roaring gun explosions had brought Singer Durkin's outside men.
Van was compelled to risk the shooting behind him as he charged to the outside, paving his way with the jolting weapon. Slugs whined from the rock. Then no more came.
Blacky Burch's thin figure was at Van's shoulder. Behind Blacky Burch Chip Dorlan. Frank Havens and Thad Burton, the lawyer, were following.
Van called out in a foreign tongue for the others in the tunnel to stay back out of the line of fire.
He heard Singer Durkin roaring curses and orders at his men. The bulk of the smugglers had dropped among the rocks. They were shooting with rods and one machine-gun.
"Drop down here!" commanded Van, motioning Blacky Burch and the others to the protection of the big rock that formed the tunnel doorway. "Stay under cover! I'll flank them!"
Darting ahead, zigzagging, moving with incredible lightness across the open space, the Phantom appeared to bear a charmed life. It was not so charmed though as to escape the nicking sting of three wounds, one in a leg, and the others along his ribs.
ALL but Blacky Burch had obeyed his order. The thin man elected to risk himself. But he was hit and Van groaned as he saw him fall and roll slowly back to the rock shelter.
Then Van was high in the coral, starting to circle around the dozen or more gunmen among the rocks. Chip Dorlan apparently was emptying one machine-gun, and Blacky Burch was still able to get into action.
Van heard Singer Durkin shouting, and crept silently toward the spot. He hoped to capture the killer captain, and compel the others to hold off.
But at this moment two smugglers sprang fully into view. Van might have killed either or both of them. But they held Marna Macklin bound between them, supporting her by the ankles, and were at the brink of a wall some thirty feet or more in height. Marna was suspended head downward.
"Every one of you walk out an' drop those guns, or the girl's brains will be spattered all over the rocks!" the concealed Singer Durkin roared.
The Phantom gripped the tommy-gun helplessly. To shoot either of the men holding the girl would be to let her drop to her death. And Van knew that Blacky Burch would feel as he did—that he would give up rather than see the girl harmed.
Knowing he could accomplish nothing single-handed against the scattered snipers, the Phantom eased with catlike quickness through the coral and bushes toward the sea. The cursed orders of Singer Durkin followed him.
"Hunt down the Phantom! Shoot to kill this time! Take no chances!"
Van was deeply chagrined that his trick inside the tunnel had resulted in his escape alone. For it had been a trick, and the Italian and the Russians probably never would understand what had happened. The fact was that the aliens had not uttered a word in dispute. Van had employed his own trained power of ventriloquism to start what had appeared to be a quarrel and a near riot.
Only the cleverness of Singer Durkin in using Marna Macklin had prevented the others from escaping. But, remembering the numbers of the armed smugglers on Corpse Cay, Van decided it perhaps was as well it had turned out this way. For with Blacky Burch, Chip Dorlan, Frank Havens and Thad Burton free and poorly armed, the Corpse Cay killers would have hunted them to the death.
Now they had only the Phantom to find and remove.
But given the wild island, and with the open sea about it as refuge, the Phantom felt in little danger from the smugglers. The rescue of the others, and the balking of the plot against the Iron Judge was his more immediate business. The Iron Judge must be now on his way to meet secretly with the killers of Corpse Cay, in a desperate effort to save his daughter and to protect Tommy Crane.
The Phantom eluded a blundering pursuit easily. An afternoon thunder squall was coming out of the east and darkening the sea around Corpse Cay.
Such sudden storms of the semi-tropical region usually blotted out all visibility more completely than the coming of night.
FEW men would have headed into the suddenly rising sea as the Phantom did when the thunder squall was at its height.
But he had remembered the canoe in which Blacky Burch had reached Corpse Cay and it was vital to reach it, which he did.
The high-speed motor which Burch had installed sent the light craft cutting through the toppling crests of the waves pushed up by the squall. The Phantom was preparing to perform a feat that would have been envied by the smartest navigator.
He had no means of judging the possible position of the cruiser bringing Judge William Macklin to Corpse Cay. But he did recall the set of the tidal current from Dark River, and the constant flow of the Gulf Stream that made a death magnet of the half-moon beach on the westward side of the island.
"There's but one sure way to save Marna Macklin and Tommy Crane, and probably the lives of the others," Van thought grimly. "An invasion by the law now would mean that all might die when Singer Durkin and his killers attempt to escape. From what I've heard from Blacky Burch, there's no doubt in my mind now but that their Skipper is Lance Grover, of the Tamiami Trail night club. He will be on hand when the Iron Judge arrives on the island."
Van headed the canoe for the swinging currents that even now must be bearing the Iron Judge nearer to the cay of doom.
"Yes, there's only one way," he muttered softly. "The Iron Judge must meet the Corpse Cay smugglers and their leaders. If anything goes wrong, only a miracle can save the lives of Marna Macklin and the others."
FOR a moment Steve Huston lifted his head to peer through the mangroves at the four armed killers in the ship's lifeboat. He could see Tommy Crane's battered and swollen face, for Crane's head lay over the gunwale of the dory.
Steve was still sick inside from the echoes of the shots that had been fired at the pretty swamp girl, Angel Smith, as she had dived and disappeared in the black bayou.
The long-nosed, well-dressed man who was apparently in command of the murder boat had been called Lance. From what Steve had heard from Tommy Crane that identified the man as Lance Grover, the owner of a night spot on the Tamiami Trail where Crane had come to grief.
Lance Grover spoke impatiently.
"We can't leave Tommy Crane alive, but I want it to appear that he was killed accidentally while trying to run away from the law."
"But we're not the law, Lance," said one of the other men. "If we could get hold of a water moccasin and have him bitten, that would look all right, but—"
"I've got it!" said Lance Grover. "He's already badly bitten up and I have a bottle of acid that'll finish him off. By the time his body's found, swamp buzzards will have covered up anything to tell what happened to him."
Steve Huston swore silently. He saw Lance Grover produce a small vial from inside his coat. Steve set himself, ready to surge forward. He hoped his weight would be sufficient to hurl the boat over and throw its occupants into the water.
A queer sound interrupted. A man in the stern of the boat exclaimed excitedly: "Skipper, the short-wave's working. I've got the Corpse Cay signal!"
For the moment the disposal of Tommy Crane was forgotten. The four men crowded around the radio set at the stern of the boat.
All Steve Huston could hear was a jumble of words that sounded like double talk. It was code, of course.
Lance Grover let out a jubilant oath.
"We didn't kill Singer Durkin, after all!" he announced. "He's alive, and though he's injured he's captured the Phantom and Blacky Burch. They have contacted the Iron Judge and he's expected on Corpse Cay tonight. The Iron Judge hasn't called the police, so it looks as if he'll deal our way."
"Then it's all set, Lance?" exclaimed another man.
"We're as good as in on the greatest push-over that ever was framed!" assured Grover. "It won't cost the Iron Judge anything to save his girl, and he won't dare squawk about it afterward. Bat Spalan is as good as paroled right now, and when he reaches Corpse Cay, he'll get the surprise of his life."
"Wait a minute, Lance," said another man. "How about Thad Burton, the mouthpiece? Durkin has him a prisoner. And why doesn't Thad Burton want Bat Spalan paroled? I understand that Burton has already been to the Iron Judge to try and have him prevent Spalan from being turned loose."
"I wish I knew what Thad Burton has on his mind," said Grover. "But whatever it is, it can't hurt now. It's too bad there'll have to be a sad accident on Corpse Cay once the Iron Judge has made good. We'll hold the girl, too, until we know that Bat is free."
STEVE understood little of what they were talking about. What chiefly concerned him was that the Phantom was a prisoner on Corpse Cay. That brought a grim smile to Steve's hard mouth.
"Unless the Phantom has slipped, that's the best news I've heard," he muttered. "Smarter crooks than Singer Durkin have held the Phantom prisoner—and what did it get them?" Steve pondered what he had heard about Judge William Macklin. Here was a queer and contradictory situation. The Corpse Cay killers evidently wanted Bat Spalan, a notorious criminal, set free on parole. Thad Burton, a criminal lawyer, wanted the man's parole denied.
"And seeing that these sea mobsters have been cashing in plenty on smuggled jewels and dope," mused Steve, "this Bat Spalan must be worth plenty to them—more than all of their other crooked business. Or possibly they've got cold feet since that Janyx was bumped off, and they're figuring on making some kind of a final clean-up."
Steve's thoughts were jarred to an abrupt end.
"All right, boys," he heard Lance Grover call. "Haul the boat over to that mangrove hammock. I'll fix Tommy Crane with this acid and dump him out. The buzzards and the crabs will do the rest."
The life-boat moved directly toward Steve's hiding place. The long-nosed Lance Grover was in the bow, beside Tommy Crane's limp form.
One man was pushing the boat along with an oar. Two others were standing erect, looking ahead. Steve could see the bulges their pockets made by their automatics.
"Here goes, Angel Smith!" whispered Steve. "If I lose out, I'll be seein' you."
He found what foothold he could on the slippery roots of the mangroves. From this scant support he lunged forward, his hands reaching.
Seizing the narrow bow of the lifeboat, Steve threw all of his weight upon it, swinging to one side.
"Look out!" yelled Lance Grover.
His warning was too late. Caught unaware by the sudden appearance of the red-headed reporter they had believed drowned, the four killers were sent sprawling into the black water of the bayou.
Steve failed, however, to make the heavy life-boat turn turtle. As the four men splashed into the bayou, the unconscious Tommy Crane slid from where he lay. Steve Huston caught at Crane's clothes. He pushed back into the mangroves, pulling Crane with him.
Sputtering and cursing, Lance Grover and the other three men came to the surface, floundering and catching at the sides of their boat.
Steve, unclad, except for his shorts, was gouged and torn by the mangrove bushes through which he forced his way, wading waist deep. He had only a minute or so before the gunmen scrambled back into the boat.
"Get him! Burn him out! Make sure you drill both of them!"
Lance Grover was raging, spewing black mud and water from his mouth. Two rods started cracking. The mangroves around Steve rattled as slugs tore through the bushes.
UNHIT, Steve sank down until only his head was exposed, holding Tommy Crane's face above the water. He heard the men try to force the heavy life-boat after him, but their oaths told him they could not push it through the thick growth.
"Back out, and follow the bayou around!" came the order. "He can't get away to deeper water, and he can't stay in there long!"
Steve had reached an open stretch of deeper black water. Long streamers of Spanish moss almost touched the surface. Steve's lively imagination pictured swamp monsters lurking in the murky pool. A stirring that might have been made by a bullfrog seemed to Steve to be the tail of an alligator.
"But it's this one chance, or there won't be any more," he muttered grimly.
Floating Tommy Crane on his back, Steve started swimming across the pool, headed for what appeared to be a long stretch of hammock land where he might have a chance to hide. He could hear the splashing of oars as the life-boat came around the mangroves he had just left.
Two-thirds of the way across the deep pool, Steve expected at any second to have the boat glide into view, and to hear the final smash of rods. Watching over his shoulder, he saw the pursuing boat swing into view.
"There he is! Blast him! Get both of them!"
One man was standing up, steadying a rod. Steve had to chance trying a dive, taking Tommy Crane with him.
The dead swamp air was shattered by a tremendous explosion. Blue smoke belched from the hammock ahead. The standing gunman weaved on his feet, then pitched over.
The other men were shouting. The man at the oars fought the boat back under the mangroves. Then Steve looked up and saw Angel Smith.
"Git over this way quick!" the swamp girl commanded. "That was the only load in Pappy's 'gator gun! Hurry!"
And a minute later, the girl Steve had believed dead at the bottom of the bayou, helped him get Tommy Crane into a flat dugout. The three men in the life-boat were still cursing and shouting as the remarkable swamp girl poled the dugout swiftly away through a winding channel.
Steve heard Lance Grover's voice. "We'll have to make it out of here! Even if Crane is alive, he'll never dare to show up after we've seen the Iron Judge."
The voices died out.
"They named you right when they called you Angel," Steve said to the swamp girl. "Where are you figuring on taking us?"
"We're gittin' Pappy's old motorboat, an' we're headin' for Corpse Cay," said Angel Smith. "I'm goin' to find Pappy."
Tommy Crane had his eyes open. His clear reason seemed to have been restored.
"I want to go to Corpse Cay," he said. "If I can't find Marna, then I'm going back to Miami and face whatever I've got coming to me. If anything has happened to Marna, they can send me up the rest of my life."
"I've an idea Marna Macklin may be all right," Steve Huston told him. "And I think there'll be plenty of excitement on Corpse Cay this night. Singer Durkin and his crowd have made the Phantom a prisoner, and that's always bad—for crooks who treat him rough."
YELLOW as if jaundiced, the gibbous moon, rising long after midnight, lighted the weirdest scene ever enacted upon a Florida key. Close to Corpse Cay the barrier reef of jagged coral lay like monstrous white teeth around the lagoon and the half-moon beach that so often had been the repository for the floating dead.
On the deck of a small fishing cruiser anchored just outside the reef a lone man stood, the cabin light illumining his lined face and the bushy gray of his thick hair. Plainly he was revealing himself with a purpose, making sure that all who saw would know that he was Judge William Macklin, the famous Iron Judge.
There was nothing of the sternness now in his eyes, nor of the grim sense of duty that had earned him his notable name. His eyes were deep and sunken, as if sudden age had come upon him.
He was peering toward the ghostly, coffin-shaped cay, as if he would pierce that realm of sinister shadows and see the girl who had for years been almost his sole reason for living. As if he might also see there the godson upon whom he had bestowed an affection that nearly equalled his love for his daughter.
The Iron Judge stood on braced feet, watching the small boat being rowed across the lagoon by four bearded men. In all of his long career, this was the first time the Iron Judge had kept an appointment outside of the law he had so long administered with fairness.
The small boat came through a narrow passage in the coral reef. Two of the men quickly boarded the fishing cruiser. They grunted, affirming that the Iron Judge was alone, except for two Miami boatmen the Corpse Cay men called by name.
"You will come with us, Judge Macklin," said one of the men. "We have been waiting for you since midnight. Your men will wait here to take you back to Miami."
The Iron Judge nodded, and his stocky, strong body appeared to be bent with weariness.
"Yes, I'll come," he said quietly. "Only tell me—is my daughter all right? I am not being deceived?"
"The girl's okay, Judge," said one man. "We ain't supposed to do any talking."
The Iron Judge climbed heavily into the small boat. His sunken eyes were fixed upon the half-moon beach where two fires cast an eerie, flickering light along the back wall of coral. In that light a few figures were moving about.
As the boat grated in landing, the Iron Judge was erect. His gaze went instantly to the girl at the top of the wall. Marna Macklin stood between two men, who gripped her arms.
"Marna, honey!" the Iron Judge cried in a choked voice.
"Dad! Oh, Dad, why did you come? Why—"
A rough hand went over the girl's mouth. The shoulders of the Iron Judge squared and his head lifted.
"Never mind it, child!" he called out.
"That shows sense, Judge Macklin!"
This approval, in a deep voice, came from a man seated on a log near one fire, with two men beside him. Singer Durkin. And there was a hard smile of satisfaction on his piggish face.
SINGER DURKIN was making no effort to conceal his identity. Neither was Lance Grover who stood a short distance away with several roughly clad men.
"You see, Judge Macklin, we are open and aboveboard in all of this," Grover said quickly, and with confident ease. "We are not asking you to do anything contrary to the law, and whether you accede to our request or refuse, the only possible evidence of a crime that can be proved is against Tommy Crane, your godson."
The lips of the Iron Judge moved stiffly, as if he would burst out angrily, but his voice was controlled.
"To see that my daughter is alive and unharmed is a great relief," he said. "What you say about evidence of crime is undoubtedly true, even if that evidence is false."
"False?" Singer Durkin spoke mockingly. "Read these two notes, Judge Macklin, and draw your own conclusion."
The Iron Judge was rigid and his hands hung at his sides as a flashlight was, held by one man, and two sheets of paper were held before him.
The deep lines of his face did not change as he read the note that had been taken from Marna Macklin's handbag in Tommy Crane's fishing cruiser.
His eyes took in the penned scribbling of the other note, which seemed in identical handwriting and addressed to Judge Macklin. The note that read:
I swear this was an accident, but I know I will be blamed for it. I tried to save Marna... the police are looking for me because of the Janyx death... I got mixed up in something that I can't tell you about...
Words that were damning of themselves, as if Tommy Crane had tried to square himself, knowing he was being hunted for murder.
"You recognize Tommy Crane's writing, Judge?" asked Lance Grover. "You can see how it would sound in court, especially when it would be shown that Crane knew all the time that your daughter was alive and that we had taken her here for—shall we say, her own protection?"
The Iron Judge nodded. That note apparently written by Tommy Crane was all the more convicting because it was not a confession, but an evident effort to maintain his innocence of murder.
"Is it true then that Tommy killed Janyx?" the Iron Judge asked. "I am not saying I will refuse to grant the request that will free my daughter, but I would know the truth."
"Sure he killed Janyx," Singer Durkin said quickly. "Heck! He stole a flock of rubies, and who do you suppose found some of 'em hid on Tommy Crane's fishing cruiser? The famous Phantom himself!"
"The Phantom?" repeated the Iron Judge slowly. "You have seen the Phantom?"
"Sure thing!" said Lance Grover. "And the Phantom will not lie, even if the truth hurts."
"Where is the Phantom?" asked the Iron Judge. "And how much does he know of all of this?"
"That's part of our own business, Judge," said Singer Durkin. "But we don't want to see your daughter harmed. We can forget all the evidence against Tommy Crane if you'll do just one thing that's not even breaking the law."
The Iron Judge glanced up at the top of the coral wall. His shoulders sagged again as he saw Marna's white face limned by the firelight.
The Iron Judge's eyes took in Singer Durkin, the two men close to him, and perhaps a dozen others in the background of darkness. His gaze went to Lance Grover. The night-club owner's clothes were of the best, but they were torn and soaked.
The Iron Judge scrutinized the several rough men around Lance Grover briefly. He seemed to sense some difference between the men with Singer Durkin and those with Lance Grover.
"I have heard that others have come to Corpse Cay," he said. "If I agree to what is asked of me will they be freed with my daughter?"
Singer Durkin and Lance Grover exchanged swift glances.
"There are some visitors here," said Grover. "They will be unharmed and not troubled after we have carried out what we have set out to do. Your daughter will also be held until that is accomplished—that is until you have made good your promise and we have finished on Corpse Cay."
"How would I know you would keep your word?" The Iron Judge's tone was unsteady.
"We would have no reason to do otherwise, for you would never bring out the truth without ruining your daughter's life, your own career, and sending Tommy Crane to his death or life in prison," said Grover. "That puts all of our cards on the table."
The Iron Judge hesitated, then spoke gently.
"I will do as desired, for I have no choice, if only you will let me hold my daughter in my arms, and speak to her."
"Why not?" Singer Durkin said heartily. "Okay, boys, bring the girl down here!"
Marna Macklin sobbed as the arms of the Iron Judge went about her slim shoulders. He kissed her, holding her tightly. With one arm still about her, he faced Durkin.
"All right, Durkin—tell me exactly what I must do."
Singer Durkin laughed shortly.
"I thought you pretty well understood that, Judge," he said. "You sentenced Bat Spalan to prison for twenty years. He comes before the parole board in a few days. Your word will get him a parole, and that's what we want. It is simple enough, and you are not breaking any law. Understand?"
The Iron Judge raised his voice for the first time. His tone was one of surprise. His arm tightened about the girl, swinging her a little behind him.
"You mean you want me to recommend Bat Spalan's parole, Durkin?" he exclaimed. "Why, that's strange!" The Iron Judge turned slightly, facing Lance Grover. "You told me differently, Grover, when you phoned me!" His voice was loud enough for every man of both groups to hear. "You said I would not be offending the law, because you wanted me to say the word that would keep Bat Spalan in prison, and that you had learned the whereabouts of Bat Spalan's ten-year cache of smuggling loot on Corpse Cay, and only wanted time for you and the convict known as Blacky Burch to get it away!"
Singer Durkin cursed suddenly, attempting to lurch to his one good foot, but sinking back.
Lance Grover was shouting, interrupting the Iron Judge's speech before he had finished.
"That's a lie! I never phoned you! I—"
The Iron Judge had not moved, nor did he appear other than bewildered.
"A lie, Grover?" he said. "Then it wasn't you who—"
THE bewilderment seemed to drop from the Iron Judge like a cloak. His voice rang out sharply.
"What is the trick, Grover? What's wrong between you and Singer Durkin? I had a radio message from the Phantom, and he told me that you and your men tried to murder Singer Durkin on his fishing boat, and that you machine-gunned Durkin after he was in the water!"
"The Phantom! Grover tried to murder me!"
Singer Durkin's words were an enraged yell. The killer captain's suddenly aroused anger blazed into action. He jerked an automatic from the front of his shirt, whipping it up at Lance Grover.
Grover was smarter, quicker—but he was not quick enough.
"Durkin! It's a trick! I never called—"
Singer Durkin's automatic flamed and Grover staggered, spinning from the impact of a slug that struck one shoulder. Instantly, Lance Grover's men were producing rods, hurling themselves toward the Durkin group.
Three of four men went down with the first crash of shots. The Iron Judge's startling accusation had come so unexpectedly that all calmness of thought was gone from the guilty minds of the Corpse Cay killers.
A slug smashed into Singer Durkin's body, but did not kill him. Then one of the Durkin men came back to reason.
"Stop it!" he shouted. "You fools! This is all a trick! We—"
The stocky figure of the man they had accepted as the Iron Judge moved then with incredible speed. He thrust Marna Macklin flat to the beach. In his hands suddenly appeared two of the latest in deadly, rapid-firing pistols.
The man who had come to his senses was surging toward him. He was the first to die. In the crashing of gunfire, only a few of the killers had heard and understood the truth—that this was not Judge Macklin before them, but the Phantom!
THE Phantom's rapid-firing pistols took quick toll of the scattering survivors of the divided Corpse Cay smuggling murderers. For a few incredible minutes, the Phantom was in reality the avenging spirit of the Iron Judge he had so cleverly impersonated.
Seeing the few killers in retreat, the Phantom turned back to where he had placed Marna Macklin. But within the past few seconds, the slightly wounded Lance Grover had flashed desperately into action.
Marna Macklin cried out. She was on her feet, and that Lance Grover was using her as a shield as he moved toward the beached small boat. The leader of the killers was holding a knife point against the girl's throat.
"Stay back, Phantom!" Lance Grover screamed, and in his tones was the fear to be expected of a cornered rat, but the kind of a rat that will kill ruthlessly. "Any move will finish her first!"
It was clear to the Phantom that Lance Grover was spurred by sheer terror. The night-club owner's knife at the girl's throat tied the Phantom's hands as effectively as if he had become paralyzed.
He could have shot Lance Grover with either gun. But no bullet could be quick enough to make sure that Grover's reaction would not drive the knife into the girl's throat, penetrate a vital spot so quickly that nothing could be done to save her.
The Phantom's sweeping vision took in all of the beach, while his eyes never seemed to leave the moving Lance Grover and the girl. There were only dead men strewn along the sand.
"You can't do it, Grover!" rapped Van. "There's no possible way whereby you can escape!"
Grover's reply was a laugh that rang out on a maniacal note.
"And no way you can save Marna Macklin if you try to stop me!"
Again the words were high-pitched, so close to madness that Van grew cold with the fear that Lance Grover might drive the knife into the girl's throat at any moment. He could see Grover's eyes glittering in the light from the fire.
Van was motionless, prepared to strike swiftly should a break come when Lance Grover reached the small boat. It probably would, for the man would be forced to shift his position to get the dory off the beach. But Grover's desperate cunning was greater than the Phantom had expected.
Grover halted, holding the girl before him, with the point of the knife apparently already sunk into her white skin.
"Drop both your guns, Phantom!" he shouted. "And walk away along the beach! If you don't, I know I'll die, but Marna Macklin will go with me!"
Slowly the Phantom dropped his hands and permitted the guns to slip from them. Scattered shooting still came from back on the cay. And it was this that covered the silent shadow that the Phantom saw gliding along the water behind Lance Grover.
"My guns will do you no good, Grover," Van said, his speech deliberately calculating. "They are empty."
He moved backward, step by step, watching that gliding shadow that now had appeared alongside the small boat behind Grover and the girl. He could make out three crouched figures in the shadowy outline that was a canoe.
VAN'S deliberate effort to tempt Lance Grover to try for his dropped guns had their effect. Again the desperate leader of the Corpse Cay killers laughed madly.
Then he was pushing Marna Macklin before him, the knife still tight against her throat.
"Back, Phantom!" he shouted harshly. "On back! I can only die once!"
Van's keen vision picked out the three shadowy figures in the canoe. One was Steve Huston! But the Phantom could not tell whether or not Steve had a gun. But if Steve were armed, he knew enough of the situation and Marna Macklin's deadly danger to refrain from shooting.
The girl herself appeared to be too paralyzed with fright to attempt to free herself. With Grover's bent arm encircling her waist, she walked stiffly toward the guns the Phantom had dropped.
And, step by step, the Phantom was moving backward, giving Steve Huston and those with him in the canoe every opportunity to act before Grover became aware of their presence.
Then the prow of the canoe grated lightly upon the beach.
The sound whirled Lance Grover. The Phantom was compelled to act now. He had to chance beating Grover's reaction, the drive of his hand that might inflict a fatal wound in Marna Macklin's neck.
Van lunged from his toes. The movement of Grover, Van's dive and the sudden cry that came from the beached canoe galvanized Marna into action.
Grover's pointed knife raked the girl's throat as she jerked to one side. Then her fingernails were clawing at Grover's face, and she was free, running along the beach.
Van's plunge carried him to his guns. He landed flat, one hand scooping up the nearest weapon. A maddened oath burst from Lance Grover.
Van whipped up the gun, but he had the sick feeling of knowing that what he had said to Grover had been partly the truth. The rapid-fire pistol clicked metallically. That one gun had been emptied.
What happened then was something that photographed itself upon Van's memory with imperishable clearness.
"Marna! Marna!"
The cry rang out in an anguished voice.
"Tommy! Tommy!"
The girl's reply was clear, unbelieving.
A figure that the Phantom knew must be Tommy Crane sprang from the beached canoe. Marna Macklin turned toward him.
But behind her, the madman, Lance Grover, threw his right hand high, then drove it forward. The knife he had held was a gleaming flash of light. And that blade would have been buried in the girl's white back had it not struck and gone deep into the figure that sprang squarely between Lance Grover and Marna Macklin.
"Marna—Marna!"
Tommy Crane cried the girl's name as he fell. The Phantom heard the girl scream, then she was beside Tommy Crane.
But the Phantom saw this in what might have been photographic flashes. For the empty pistol he held crunched down upon Lance Grover's head, almost before the crazed killer's arm could drop after his deadly knife throw.
Steve Huston and a strangely clad black-haired girl were coming from the canoe.
"Look after Marna Macklin, Steve!" the Phantom called.
HE PASSED two fallen killers, scooping up their dropped automatics without slackening his pace. He went up over the coral wall, his eyes fixed upon the middle of Corpse Cay.
He was thinking of the underground tunnel, of the aliens and the other prisoners there.
"If only I'm in time!" he muttered between clenched teeth.
Evidently two of the Corpse Cay killers had been given their orders. For crashing through waist-high palm bushes, the Phantom saw two figures springing over the coral toward the earthen wall and the gate that was meant to let in—the sea. The men must have been drawn away by the shooting on the beach but now were returning to carry out the final purpose of murder, the climax of death that was intended to destroy the last vestige of human evidence against those who had conducted an orgy of crime.
"Stop!"
Van's warning crackled. He would have given the two killers that one chance. He was too late, though, for their hands already had seized the bar of the gate which, once opened, would flood the black tunnel.
The two men turned as Van's borrowed automatics erupted. Their hands left the bar that would have opened the death gate. Their bodies plunged onward into the sea.
As the Phantom raced back and flung open the door, the thin figure of Blacky Burch was the first to appear from the underground tunnel. Beside him was Thad Burton, then came Frank Havens and Chip Dorlan, and all of them stared at the stocky man who seemed to be the Iron Judge. The Phantom tugged at the lobe of his left ear and Chip Dorlan whooped gleefully.
Two score jabbering foreigners were crowding about now. And all sounds of shooting had died out.
The Phantom smiled, and nodded toward the beach.
"The real judge," he said to his friends, "is down there."
Down on the half-moon beach, Judge William Macklin, the Iron Judge, bared his shock of gray hair as he knelt beside the body of Tommy Crane. Marna was beside her father, one white hand smoothing back the damp, black hair of the Iron Judge's godson, when the Phantom and his rescued friends approached.
"Tommy Crane told us—the swamp girl, Angel Smith, and me—that he was coming back to square himself," Steve Huston said to the Phantom. "I guess he's all square now, Phantom."
"Possibly too much will not be said about Tommy now," the Iron Judge said gently. "He did love my girl, and he gave his life to save her."
"Except for being foolish, in acting as the tool of smugglers, nothing could even have been said against Tommy Crane," the Phantom said quietly. "The Singer Durkin crowd murdered Janyx, the taxidermist, and framed it on Tommy."
It was Blacky Burch who hauled Lance Grover to his feet. The nightclub owner's long face was gray with fear.
"I should kill you here and now, Lance Grover!" said Blacky Burch. "You were behind Singer Durkin in his murders, and you planned to get Judge Macklin into your power to have him free Bat Spalan, so you could have a chance at the fortune in jewels and drugs he had buried on Corpse Cay. You thought you would be in the clear, as you were when you forged a letter that sent me to prison for a crime I did not commit. Tell the truth now! You forged one note supposed to have been written by Tommy Crane, and that you engineered the kidnapping of Marna Macklin!"
"No! I only financed Singer Durkin, and—"
BLACKY BURCH'S strong fingers rattled Lance Grover's teeth.
"The Phantom showed me that the note was forged. If you hadn't killed Crane, Grover, you would have burned for kidnapping Marna! You have been responsible for all the murders of Corpse Cay."
Blacky's iron-strong fingers closed suddenly upon Lance Grover's throat. The Phantom caught Blacky's wrists and removed his hands.
"Blacky, you are a man among men, and you will be cleared," the Phantom said kindly. "I know of the work you have done for the people of Dark River, even when the law was hunting you after you had escaped prison where you had been sent unjustly. I have no doubt that you will become famous for the cure you have discovered for a plague. And, Blacky, I'm thinking there will come a day when the Iron Judge who sentenced you to prison will be glad to welcome you to his home."
The Phantom's gaze followed the direction of Blacky's deep, burning eyes. The Phantom spoke quietly then, so that only Blacky Burch and Frank Havens who was beside him, could hear.
"Marna is young, Blacky," he said. "And you'll be a rich man."
"Phantom," Frank Havens asked, "what then is the real mystery of Corpse Cay?"
"For ten years," the Phantom promptly explained, "the Bat Spalan they were all so anxious to have paroled used Corpse Cay as a base for smuggling jewels and narcotics. He cached millions in cash and jewels that will never be claimed, now that the world is upside down. Lance Grover and Singer Durkin wanted to trail Bat Spalan to the cache. The word of the Iron Judge would have freed Spalan.
"Tommy Crane was already a tool for Lance Grover, taking jewels and dope to Miami in sailfish and marlin. Janyx, the taxidermist, was the go-between. The framed murder charge and the kidnapping of Marna Macklin was therefore made simple. It was believed the Iron Judge would never talk, once he had helped free Spalan.
"Grover and Durkin were ready to end their other smuggling business as too dangerous. They intended to murder aliens who had already paid them. They were forced to destroy fishing boats with their toy torpedoes when their occupants became possible witnesses. Grover wanted Durkin out of the way, because like all crooks he became too greedy. I was with Durkin when Grover's men tried to kill him. That made it easy for me to impersonate the Iron Judge and set Grover's and Durkin's men at each other's throats.
"It was simple enough to detect Grover's forgery of Tommy Crane's writing after Blacky Burch told me his story of his conviction and escape."
Thad Burton was standing dejectedly to one side.
"Anyway," said Burton, "if Grover and Durkin had not been in on this, Blacky Burch and I would have had a fortune. Blacky Burch or James Layton, saved Bat Spalan's life in prison, and Spalan told him how to find his Corpse Cay cache."
The Phantom smiled grimly.
"You should serve a term yourself for aiding James Layton to escape," he said. "For of course you did that. But seeing that Blacky Burch is the man he is, you are lucky. Your first proposition to him, that he get Bat Spalan's secret from him by—er—other means, would never have done you any good."
"I still think Bat Spalan's fortune should be found, and I ought to have a split for helping Blacky Burch out of prison," said Thad Burton. "Even if I did help him escape under a misapprehension."
"Blacky Burch has already removed the Bat Spalan fortune and has it hidden in Dark River swamps, where only old Cypress Smith and his girl, Angel Smith, know about it," said Van. "Blacky has planned to have the Iron Judge see that the fortune is restored to such owners as can be found, and the rest turned over to the government. As a matter of fact, the cache for which Grover and Durkin dug all over Corpse Cay never was on the island. But Spalan had sunk all of it in hollow iron buoys just inside the barrier coral reef, and Blacky Burch removed it right from under the noses of the killers."
THE Phantom smiled at fat Thad Burton.
"However," he said, "Blacky Burch's fortune lies in his own scientific discoveries in the Dark River swamps. That's why he'll be a rich man."
Angel Smith, the swamp girl, was beside old Cypress Smith.
"I've always knowed, Pappy, that Blacky Burch was too good for the Dark River swamps," she said. "Pappy, if Blacky is rich, I'll bet he'll git me a pair of shoes. I ain't never had none, an' he said he would buy me some some day."
The Phantom looked eastward and saw gray daylight beginning to break over Corpse Cay. The tidal current swung a floating box toward the half-moon beach, but it was plain to see it was empty, just a bit of flotsam.
The Iron Judge came over and gripped the Phantom's hand.
"In all the tragedy and comedy of life," he said, "there is always some one great soul that stands out. I shall make it my first duty to see that the record of Blacky Burch is cleared. I know now the secret of your own greatness, Phantom. You never have permitted your sense of grim justice to obscure your appraisal of real human values."
The Phantom pressed the hand of the Iron Judge, but his eyes were on the sea—and beyond. Right now it would be good to go back to Miami and finish his vacation as the playboy, Richard Curtis Van Loan, whom no one suspected was the Phantom. It would be good to fish in the very shining sea where so recently tragedy had drifted.
But Richard Curtis Van Loan's playing would not be for long. Some day, sometime, a call would come for aid for the desperate and oppressed. Then the playboy role would be laid aside, and again would appear the Phantom!
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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