The Mind Master

Beginning a Two-Part Novel

By Arthur J. Burks

A sequel to “Manape the Mighty”

A bullet ploughed through the top of the ape’s head.

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“Let’s hope the horrible nightmare is over, dearest,” whispered Ellen Estabrook to Lee Bentley as their liner came crawling up through the Narrows and the Statue of Liberty greeted the two with uplifted torch beyond Staten Island. New York’s skyline was beautiful through the mist and smoke which always seemed to mask it. It was good to be home again. Once more Lee Bentley is caught up in the marvelous machinations of the mad genius Barter.

Certainly it was a far cry from the African jungles where, for the space of a ghastly nightmare, Ellen had been a captive of 29 the apes and Bentley himself had had a horrible adventure. Caleb Barter, a mad scientist, had drugged him and exchanged his brain with that of an ape, and for hours Bentley had roamed the jungles hidden in the great hairy body, the only part of him remaining “Bentley” being the Bentley brain which Barter had placed in the ape’s skull-pan. Bentley would never forget the horror of that grim awakening, in which he had found himself walking on bent knuckles, his voice the fighting bellow of a giant anthropoid.

Yes, it was a far cry from the African jungles to populous Manhattan.

As soon as Ellen and Lee considered themselves recovered from the shock of the experience they would be married. They had already spent two months of absolute rest in England after their escape from Africa, but they found it had not 30 been enough. Their story had been told in the press of the world and they had been constantly besieged by the curious, which of course had not helped them to forget.

“Lee,” whispered Ellen, “I’ll never feel sure that Caleb Barter is dead. We should have gone out that morning when he forgot to take his whip and we thought the vengeful apes had slain him. We should have proved it to our own satisfaction. It would be an ironic jest, characteristic of Barter, to allow us to think him dead.”

“He’s dead all right, dear,” replied Bentley, his nostrils quivering with pleasure as he looked ahead at New York, while the breeze along the Hudson pushed his hair back from his forehead. “He had abused the great anthropoids for too many years. They seized their opportunity, don’t mistake that.”

“Still, he was a genius in his way, a mad, frightful genius. It hardly seems possible to me that he would allow himself to be so easily trapped. It’s a reflection on his great mentality, twisted though it was.”

“Forget it, dear,” replied Bentley, putting his arm around her shoulders. “We’ll both try to forget. After our nerves have returned to normal we’ll be married. Then nothing can trouble us.”

The vessel docked and later Lee and Ellen entered a taxicab near the pier.

“I’ll take you to your home, Ellen,” said Bentley. “Then I’ll look after my own affairs for the next couple of days, which includes making peace with my father, then we’ll go on from here.”

They looked through the windows of the cab as they rolled into lower Fifth Avenue and headed uptown. Newsies were screaming an extra from the sidewalks.

“Excitement!” said Bentley enthusiastically. “It’s certainly good to be home and hear a newsboy’s unintelligible screaming of an extra, isn’t it?”

On an impulse he ordered the cabbie to draw up to the curb and purchased a newspaper.

“Do you mind if I glance through the headlines?” Bentley asked Ellen. “I haven’t looked at an American paper for ever so long.”

The cab started again and Bentley folded the paper, falling easily into the habit of New Yorkers who are accustomed to reading on subways where there isn’t room for elbows, to say nothing of broad newspapers.

His eyes caught a headline. He started, frowning, but was instantly mindful of Ellen. He mustn’t show any signs that would excite her, especially when he didn’t yet understand what had caused his own instant perturbation.

Had Ellen looked at him she might have seen merely the calm face of a man mildly interested in the news of the day, but she was looking out at the Fifth Avenue shops.

Bentley was staring again at the newspaper story:

“An evil genius signing his ‘manifestoes’ with the strange cognomen of ‘Mind Master’ gives the authorities of New York City twelve hours in which to take precautions. To prove that he is able to make good his mad threats he states that at noon exactly, to-day, he will cause the death of the chief executive of a great insurance company whose offices are in the Flatiron Building. After that, at regular stated periods, warnings to be issued in each case ten hours in advance, he will steal the brains of the 31 twenty men whose names are hereto appended:” (There followed then a list of names, all of which were known to Bentley.)

He understood why the story had startled him, too. “Mind Master!” Anything that had to do with the human brain interested him mightily now, for he knew to what grim uses it could be put at the hands of a master scientist. Around his own head, safely covered by his hair unless someone looked closely, and even then they must needs know what they sought, was a thin white line. It marked the line of Caleb Barter’s operation on him that terrible night in the African jungles, when his brain had been transferred to the skull-pan of an ape, and the ape’s brain to his own cranium. Any mention of the brain, therefore, recalled to him a very harrowing experience.

It was little wonder that he shuddered.

Ellen noticed his agitation.

“What is it, dearest?” she asked softly, placing her hand in the crook of his arm.

He was about to answer her, desperately trying to think of something to say that would