CASTLE PERILOUS

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 118, 21 May 1938, Page 11 (Supplement)

CASTLE PERILOUS

READttB BEGIN MERE: n..A Urf *? e ' R#vel *"« his cn autre up Busby, Lancelot Bertram terina — - Buritanlan Zovania. encounm-^ entu '«» with thieves, oth-.. pl ®" er » ('«<» by Sheen) Md others, before finding, from a they" T*" A J'e'ue to the castle Zo7a„,.TA h V n -?irTf b^?;' twos"! b Ja£h # s!2 ,n -, The," twos to watch Strelaen-Denbura and S r el t e n _ DMlxb . Lancelot ° and Busby reconnoitre round the latter be?a of o th« y .U iflht .*"? flnd two memnann J mysterious and vengeful . a walking skeleton. P ?. Ch °PP® r and Spike, the aft ® r a Bti, T fight. Leaving them bound in the woods, Busby in Doirmn'nn' an # elot r ®J° ina his friends at Dollmann s farm. Next night he leaves again for ths Castle, outspeeds a police trap and encounters the lovely Coralie hlViri r,,ln<, .J loP, he onl * r ouses o re * t . Sh * wa,ke <« Into a trap laid LanliJin? h° n 'fc® hi .*' o1 the 9 an 9sters. rah Kit i 1001I 001 cau flht in an old rabbit trap at the crucial juncture, but is released by young Carl Doll**!?o stowed away in his motor cycle. They go to flnd Busby and his they have Vanished! Bound for the castle, they flnd an underground tunnel, solve the mystery nlml «J' oat » a n < ' discover food and ®J " Coralie, inheritress k„ ~ ca *t'«. captured and menaced by Caughton. Lancelot rescues Coralie, breaking Chopper's villanious the process, then contacts his tnree friends In a dungeon guarded by SpiM. Caughton plans diabolically to torture Coralio and Yeo, her lawyer who holds tha secret to the castle's treasure. CHAPTER Xin. I caught her up at the clear space where the gallery began. "But it's madness—" "It's nothing of the sort!" she flashed at me. "If they go back to the room now they will find it locked on the inside. The grime will bo up. They will hide Yeo aid bre Sk down the door. They will search and find the panel. They will catch us down here." "But—" "If they go to the room and find me there they will not suspect. They will leave Yeo. We can get him through the panel—perhaps away from the cattle before morning." "Yes," said I, "hut even if you do go back into the room the door will still be locked on the inside. You can't lock yourself in, leaving the key on the outside. I—" "Suppose I was to lock the door on the outside 1" broke in Poppy. "You mean—you will help?" cried Coralie. "I'll do anything you say, miss," replied the girl. "God knows, I don't want to go up there again—all I want is to get away. But if I went with you, and locked the door on the outside, I could hide until they had gone, and then come back." Coralie drew me aside. "It's a chance in a thousand," she urged. "I think the girl is sincere."

I nodded. "It's a terrible risk, but we'll have to take it." Then we were all four running full tilt along the gallery. There was not a moment to be lo^t. Of all the grim gamut of hazardfraught situations which had arisen since the affair of "Castle Perilous" began I think that mad dash to blind the gangsters by replacing Coralie in her room affrighted me most. As I lifted first Coralie, and then Poppy, bodily in my arms that they might reach the beams one thought thundered across my brain—if the gang reached the room first. Then Coralie was through the trapdoor into the secret room. Poppy followed. I was forced to repeat my former trick with Carl, the rifle and the wall-notch I had carved in order to make the ascent. As I climbed through the trap Coralie drew the panel bolts and lowered the harrier. Without a word Poppy passed through the gap, darted across the room, unlocked the door and withdrew the key. Then she had vanished, the door closed, and we heard the click of the key turned outside. As she entered her former prison, "Thank God!" breathed Coralie. To me, "Don't worry—we'll win through!" "11l be ready," said I, "just in case—" and I closed the panel with a heavy heart. We had not long to wait. Hardly had I thrust the bolts home than the gangsters arrived. My eye went to the peep-hole. I heard them enter, heard Coralie— playing her part skilfully—scathing them with words, demanding release, asking explanations. Then came her outcry—this time with the ring of genuine horror, and I knew they had carried in the steward of the castle, Yeo. "Oh, yon fiends—you utter fineds!" ehe cried. "To treat any man so!" Caughton'a voice was like a blast from the Pole as he snarled back at her: "This sort of treatment is not only confined to men! You'll get it, too, my beauty, unless I get the information I want when morning comes —and I don't mean 'perhaps.'" Then: "Yeo, listen to mel he added. "Here is Miss Mayne —if you won't tell me your pretty little story you will tell her. 11l get it out of the pair of you if I have to break you slowly, bone by bone. It's past one o'clock. You have till dawn." And with a final volley of threats, this man with the soul of a devil strode round the table towards the door, and so for the first time came into my range of vision. In all our previous near-encounters I had heard rather than P eon him. Now I saw him plainly—and if ever human bore likeness to the genus pig it was this man.

By Leigh Loman

Gross as any offal-fed boar, Caughton bulged fat; hard eyes, like glittering crumbs of glass, peeped through swollen lids; small, thick, sensuous lips stuck out belligerently from his bladder of a face; a round blob of a nose, uptilted to show the nostrils, added to his porcine appearance. So this was the chief! Then, abruptly, I glimpsed something of the versatility of the brute. For an instant he donned his social mask. Rage vanished from his countenance as greasepaint is wiped away by an actor. He smiled—and one saw in him the personification of benevolence, the epitome of bland, benign rotundity; it was easy to see how Coralie had been deceived on first acquaintance. Unctuously—"See that he tells you, my dear Miss Mayne," he said. "He will be disobeying the late Count Draxburg's instructions if he fails . . . and that would be such a pity." Swift as it came, the pose vanished. "For both of you!" he snarled. "Remember —I'll have no more of silence." At last the intruders were gone. The door was locked. Coralie tip-toed to it, laid her ear against the key-hole, listened, and after a while came across to the panel. I "I think it is all clear," she whispered, and I lovered the panel, arc! joined her. An old man, his head —and doubtless the rest of his frame also—a mass of ugly bruises, lay on the floor, scarcely conscious, staring up at us with lacklustre eyes. Ye* 's Tale of a Treasure Trove Coralie's eyes were misted with tears as she knelt by him and lifted his head. "See what they have done —I never knew men could be so vile," she said, angrily. And to Yeo, gently as one speaks to a sick child —"it's all right, now. You have come into the hands of friends." A little wine still remained in the bottle on the table. With this we contrived to revive him, and though the corners of his mouth had been torn at 6ome time during his captivity with a gag, he masticated a few shreds of food scraped from the plates.

"What are we going to doT" asked Coralie. "Take him down to the gallery now?" I shook my head. "Not until Poppy is safe in this room. If they caught her trying to enter, and then found Yeo gone, the fat would be in the fire. We must hang on until she returns —we can't, we daren't, desert her now. She knows too much. If anybody comes before she arrives, I must go behind the panel again." "But she should have been back by now," fretted Coralie. "Why doesn't she come ?" We were still asking this question an hour later. Poppy had failed utterly to put in an appearance. We dared not imagine what might have happened to her. We could only hope that before long she would rejoin us. But in that tense sixty minutes of waiting we had plenty to distract and amaze us, for, speaking with difficulty, the old steward of Strelsen-Draxburg castle told hi 3 story. It was a story which made me glance often and fearfully to the door. For at last I knew what great prize had brought Caughton and his wolf-pack of hired murderers ravening down upon this outlandish fold. The old steward's story wtus but haltingly told, and twice in the telling he nearly fainted from ill-use and fatigue, so that to give it word for word would prove a tedious recital. Boiled down to the bare bones, it was this: The environs of Strelsen-Draxburg castle hid the greatest discovery of the century —a discovery bf international importance. The concatenation of circumstances which led to the "find" and to the complications which had involved Coralie,

the Caughton gang, and the rest of us in the game of plot and counterplot, revolved, it seemed, round the forceful if eccentric character of a man now dead—that same Count Draxburg who had died a year ago. The count (said Yeo) had never been understood by the people of the surrounding countryside. Unmarried all his days, a recluse by nature, he had shunned contact with the outside world, busying himself with intellectual studies, served to the end by a small but faithful staff of servants who knew how to cater for his moods. Four years since, to his other pursuits the count had added a craze for the collection of geological specimens. "He went out alone, searching the hills and fields for rocks,. digging, and returning with bulging bags of them," said Yeo. "We never knew where he went. Always he searched alone."

Then came the day when the count returned, labouring under tremendous excitement, livid in the face, trembling in every limb. Yeo himself attended his master, anxiously. "And when 1 got liiin to his study he collapsed utterly in a sort of fit,' he said. "For two days he lay in bed, muttering, waking to stare wildly at me and fumble for the bag of rocks which this time he had hid under his pillow." Then came slow recovery, and at laet the day when the count sent to Stealth for his lawyer. Swearing both Yeo and the lawyer to secrecy, the count,

Answer to Brain Twizzler No. 1 on page six The attorney mailed the key and it also was locked in the mailbox.

Out-adventuring Anthony Hope on his own ground, Leigh Loman takes us in his new serial, "Castle Perilous," to Zovania, one of Europe s Ruritanian lost kingdoms, in the company of four Englishmen. Romance, in the persons of Lancelot and Coralie, flourishes amid terror and adventure, villainy and violence.

i equipped with a small wooden box, led - them at night from the castle after the > other servants had retired. 1 To their amazement he led them to f the waterfall which, crashing down the wall of rocks behind the castle, fed the i moat and the twin gorges with its liiss- - ing torrent. 3 To their even greater amazement he 1 led them by a precarious track half way . up the rock wall and direct to the fall 1 of water itself. "We thought he was t mad," said Yeo. "He pointed at the v water, roaring down within a short distance of our faces, and said he was s going to take us behind it." e The two men had hung back, fearing e that this was some lunatic trick to mur--3 der them. But the count, with his box, g crawled forward —and vanished. >■ A moment later they heard his voice, s faintly calling. Then he appeared again. This time they followed.

The path led directly under the waterfall and into a cavern which until now none had suspected, for the fall had been a constant screen for it. "Lighting a small lamp, the count bade us took well at the rock around and beneath us," said Yeo. "It seemed to be dark brown in colour, and great lumps of this dark rock lay about the floor of the cave. "Then he opened his box: and took out a email and delicate apparatus, with a glass cylinder ful\ of tiny metal rods. He did something to the mechanism. Into the cylinder dropped a thin bit of gold-leaf, and instantly it flew to the rods and clung there. "We asked what it meant. And he told us—it was a test to prove the presence of radium!" According to the count, the dark rock of the cave was uranium ore, rich in radium; and the strata was vast in extent. It might be that the greater part of the cliff was composed of the ore. "You are standing in the midst of not millions, but milliards of money," he told us! "It is the greatest radium deposit that has yet been uncovered!"

Back at the castle the count detailed his plan. Despite his dislike for worldly contacts, he meant to do something for humanity. No thought of exploiting the find for his own gain had entered his head. "It is the hospitals which need radium," he said, "and they shall have mine, but anonymously and in small quantities so as not to cause a sensation." The count's plan wa« that twice a year while he lived he would visit the cave under the waterfall by night, and bring out a small bag of the ore. Yeo was to take this supply to a hospital which the count named from a list of the leading European clinics, and, giving no name, place it in the hands of the resident radiologist. But the count realised he was growing old. To make sure that the plan was carried out in the same manner after his death, he drew up a new will, with certain conditions. The heir was to be called to Zovania by the lawyer, and in the presence of the lawyer and Yeo must make solemn oath to abide by the conditions in order to inherit the castle. The conditions were that the heir must stay at the castle at least twice during the year on certain dates, and repeat the procedure of digging out the ore supply for Yeo to distribute, taking no personal gain from the discovery and maintaining absolute silence. "But the count was worried .lest the local peasants, who often poached rabbits and game near the castle at night, should find the path and the cave. A piece of rock, taken away by chance, might carry the knowledge to the world, and so," said Yeo, "when I took the first radium supply to the hospital at Paris, I brought back with me a theatrical costume —the skeleton suit—and it was my task to Tiaunt' the grounds and fields I at night as a precaution." j For three years the count and Yeo carried out the scheme. Then came the count's death, and Martin, the young male heir, was summoned. "For a time all went well. But the thought of all that wealth must have been too much for him," said Yeo. "He stole some of the ore, and vanished. The next thing we heard was the report of his death in France—and so Miss Mayne, the new heiress, was summoned by the lawyer.

"Before she arrived, these other men came. They took ua unawares. They had part of the story from Martin, but not all. They did not know where the ore lay. The lawyer must have been kidnapped, but killed because he would not tell. The other servants are locked up somewhere in the castle." ♦ * * * Such was Yeo's story. As wo listened to that faltering, painfraught voice, droning on, halting, picking up the threads again, Coralie and I glanced often at each other. We were both deeply moved, for there were elements of greatness in this tale of the eccentric philanthropist, who, shunning the world, had yet done mighty things to relieve the sufferings of his fellows. Greatness, too, in the character of this j faithful servant who 60 modestly described his own important part as the agent of the count's unselfishness. From the first he had not questioned Coralie's identity—"l remember your_ mother, you are the living image of her," he said, simply. "It is best that you should know." But row the tale was done. The secret was ours. We had lingered long enough and it was time for decisive action before some surprise move by the enemy brought death to us all. "Should we wait any longer?" asked Coralie. "For Poppy?" I glanced at my wristwatch and shook my head. "It looks as though something serious has delayed her. We'd better get Yeo into the gallery." We — or rather Coralie — had acquainted the old steward with our recent movements. He seemed surprised to learn of the secret room, but the gallery and the tunnel were no mystery to him. It had been Yeo, of course, who had stocked the tunnel chamber -with food and equipment for his "skeleton" excursions, though he said he had always used another way into the gallery, a door which we had missed. '

The man was scarcely able to walk, so weak was lie after ill-treatment, so I carried liim as best X could through the panel opening into the secret room Crawling through the trapdoor on to the beam, I dropped into the gallery, where little Carl had been patiently waiting" for our return. Carl held the torch. Then Coralie lowered poor Teo on to the beam arid swung him over. I caught him as he fell and set him gently upon the sandy floor. J Up again, by means of Carl and the rifle used as a step, to the beam, and I had joined Coralie. I would have closed the panel, but Give her just a little while longer," pleaded Coralie, laying a restraining hand on my arm. "I'm afraid for her in this place, and—" "Listen!" I ejaculated. To our ears came the sound of voices, at first the words indistinguishable, then clarifying. One voice was Poppy's, and she seemed to be protesting with a man. "Let me go," we heard. And— "For heaven's sake, leave me alone!" The man's voice growled something angrily. After soma more of this the voices died away. "She tried to reach us and was intercepted," said Coralie, with a shiver. , "We must not wait," I urged. "We've got Yeo, and that's a lot to have accomplished. I a*n afraid we must abandon hope of helping Poppy and my friends for the moment. Tf we can only get Yeo away we can dictate terms. Or if we could get Yeo to tell his tale to the police we might even " To Be Continued.