LITMIR.BIZ

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laughingly interrupted her and playfully made as though she were driving them out of her room, although they were all very much concerned over the affair. However, they went finally, and she locked the door.

      “Rusty!” she called, “Down there!”

      The intelligent collie seemed to understand. He lay down by the doorway, his nose close to the bottom of the door and his ears alert.

      Finally Elaine, too, retired again.

      Meanwhile the wounded man was being hurried to one of the hangouts of the mysterious Clutching Hand, an old-fashioned house in the Westchester suburbs. It was a carefully hidden place, back from the main road, surrounded by trees, with a driveway leading up to it.

      The car containing the wounded Pitts Slim drew up and the other two men leaped out of it. With a hurried glance about, they unlocked the front door with a pass-key and entered, carrying the man.

      Indoors was another emissary of the Clutching Hand, a rather studious looking chap.

      “Why, what’s the matter?” he exclaimed, as the crooks entered his room, supporting their half-fainting, wounded pal.

      “Slim got a couple of pills,” they panted, as they laid him on a couch.

      “How?” demanded the other.

      “Trying to get into the Dodge house. Elaine did it.”

      Slim was, quite evidently, badly wounded and was bleeding profusely. A glance at him was enough for the studious-looking chap. He went to a secret panel and, pressing it down, took out what was apparently a house telephone.

      In another part of this mysterious house was the secret room of the Clutching Hand himself where he hid his identity from even his most trusted followers. It was a small room, lined with books on every conceivable branch of science that might aid him and containing innumerable little odds and ends of paraphernalia that might help in his nefarious criminal career.

      His telephone rang and he took down the receiver.

      “Pitts Slim’s been wounded—badly—Chief,” was all he waited to hear.

      With scarcely a word, he hung up the receiver, then opened a table drawer and took out his masking handkerchief. Next he went to a nearby bookcase, pressed another secret spring, and a panel opened. He passed through, the handkerchief adjusted.

      Across, in the larger, outside study, another panel opened and the Clutching Hand, all crouched up, transformed, appeared. Without a word he advanced to the couch on which the wounded crook lay and examined him.

      “How did it happen?” he asked at length.

      “Miss Dodge shot him,” answered the others, “with an automatic.”

      “That Craig Kennedy must have given it to her!” he exclaimed with suppressed fury.

      For a moment the Clutching Hand stopped to consider. Then he seized the regular telephone.

      “Dr. Morton?” he asked as he got the number he called.

      Late as it was the doctor, who was a well-known surgeon in that part of the country, answered, apparently from an extension of his telephone near his bed.

      The call was urgent and apparently from a family which he did not feel that he could neglect.

      “Yes, I’ll be there—in a few moments,” he yawned, hanging up the receiver and getting out of bed.

      Dr. Morton was a middle-aged man, one of those medical men in whose judgment one instinctively relies. From the brief description of the “hemorrhage” which the Clutching Hand had cleverly made over the wire, he knew that a life was at stake. Quickly he dressed and went out to his garage, back of the house to get his little runabout.

      It was only a matter of minutes before the doctor was speeding over the now deserted suburban roads, apparently on his errand of mercy.

      At the address that had been given him, he drew up to the side of the road, got out and ran up the steps to the door. A ring at the bell brought a sleepy man to the door, in his trousers and nightshirt.

      “How’s the patient?” asked Dr. Morton, eagerly.

      “Patient?” repeated the man, rubbing his eyes. “There’s no one sick here.”

      “Then what did you telephone for?” asked the doctor peevishly,

      “Telephone? I didn’t call up anyone, I was asleep.”

      Slowly it dawned on the doctor that it was a false alarm and that he must be the victim of some practical joke.

      “Well, that’s a great note,” he growled, as the man shut the door.

      He descended the steps, muttering harsh language at some unknown trickster. As he climbed back into his machine and made ready to start, two men seemed to rise before him, as if from nowhere.

      As a matter of fact, they had been sent there by the Clutching Hand and were hiding in a nearby cellar way until their chance came.

      One man stood on the running board, on either side of him, and two guns yawned menacingly at him.

      “Drive ahead—that way!” muttered one man, seating himself in the runabout with his gun close to the doctor’s ribs.

      The other kept his place on the running board, and on they drove in the direction of the mysterious, dark house. Half a mile, perhaps, down the road, they halted and left the car beside the walk.

      Dr. Morton was too surprised to marvel at anything now and he realized that he was in the power of two desperate men. Quickly, they blindfolded him.

      It seemed an interminable walk, as they led him about to confuse him, but at last he could feel that they had taken him into a house and along passageways, which they were making unnecessarily long in order to destroy all recollection that they could. Finally he knew that he was in a room in which others were present. He suppressed a shudder at the low, menacing voices.

      A moment later he felt them remove the bandage from his eyes, and, blinking at the light, he could see a hard-faced fellow, pale and weak, on a blood-stained couch. Over him bent a masked man and another man stood nearby, endeavoring by improvised bandages to stop the flow of blood.

      “What can you do for this fellow?” asked the masked man.

      Dr. Morton, seeing nothing else to do, for he was more than outnumbered now, bent down and examined him.

      As he rose, he said, “He will be dead from loss of blood by morning, no matter if he is properly bandaged.”

      “Is there nothing that can save him?” whispered the Clutching Hand hoarsely.

      “Blood transfusion might save him,” replied the Doctor. “But so much blood would be needed that whoever gives it would be liable to die himself.”

      Clutching Hand stood silent a moment, thinking, as he gazed at the man who had been one of his chief reliances. Then, with a menacing gesture, he spoke in a low, bitter tone.

      “She who shot him shall Supply the blood.”

      A few quick directions followed to his subordinates, and as he made ready to go, he muttered, “Keep the doctor here. Don’t let him stir from the room.”

      Then, with the man who had aided him in the murder of Taylor Dodge, he sallied out into the blackness that precedes dawn.

      It was just before early daybreak when the Clutching Hand and his confederate reached the Dodge House in the city and came up to the back door, over the fences. As they stood there, the Clutching Hand produced a master key and started to open the door. But before he did so, he took out his watch.

      “Let me see,” he ruminated. “Twenty minutes past four. At exactly half past, I want you to do as I told you—see?”

      The other crook nodded.

      “You

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