"Yes, I got a hint of that when I observed that Chichester and Madame Sin never seemed to be in evidence at the same time. Also because the exact sum of Blue Bay's cash reserve was so readily learned. Again when Wilson was killed in a room where only the three officials sat. He was killed by Chichester, who was at the moment animated by Satan's soul. He was killed, by the way, by a speeding-up of time. The rest were r.e.t.a.r.ded and suffered nothing but nerve shock. Wilson was killed when the speed of his time-stream was multiplied by a million: you can stop a heart without injuring it, but you can't suddenly accelerate a heart, or any other machine, a million times, without bursting it. That's why his heart looked as though it had blown up in his chest."

Keane stopped, the bitter look grew In his eyes.

"This failure was wholly my own fault, he said in a low tone. "I knew when I found the duplicate financial statement in Madame Sin's rooms that it was a trap to draw me to Chichester's home. Doctor Satan would never have been so careless as to leave a thing like that behind inadvertently. Knowing it was a trap, I entered it, and found Satan's soulless body. If I'd destroyed it immediately.... But I didn't dream that Madame Sin would follow me so quickly."

Beatrice's hand touched Keane's fleetingly. He looking at the geometric figure and did not see the look in her eyes.

"The world can thank heaven you're alive," she said softly. "With you dead, Doctor Satan could rule the world - - -"

There was a knock at the door. Gest was in the hall.

"Keane," he said. "I suppose this will sound like a small thing after all you've done. You've saved us from bankruptcy and saved Lord knows how many people from a living death from that time business you tried to explain to us. Now there's one more thing. Workmen in Chichester's home tell us that they can't build up one of the walls in the library, which is non-existent for some reason. There the room is, with one wall out, and it can't be blocked up! Do you suppose you - - -"

Keane nodded, with a little of his bitterness relieved by a smile.

"I remember. The time-diverter was pointed at that wall for an instant as the girl and I struggled. Evidently, it was set for maximum acceleration, to burst my heart as it did Wilson's. It got the library wall, which is gone because in the point of the future which it almost instantly reached, there is no library or home or anything else on that spot. I'll bring it back to the present, and to existence again, so you won't have a physical impossibility to try to explain to nervous guests of Blue Bay Resort."

"And after that," he added to himself, "I'll destroy this invention of h.e.l.l. And I wish its destruction would annihilate its inventor along with it - before he contrives some new and even more terrible toy!"

CRUSADER.

BY BASIL WELLS.

The deserts of Africa faded away about the wind-carved black ruins of the mystery city, stretching ever outward toward the rounded rim of that utter desolation - where burning rock and sand fused with the blazing heavens. The city lay as dead and deserted as it had lain for countless centuries beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara before the storm of a week ago ripped its concealing shroud of sand away.

Allan Allan, giant young crusader from the damp green sh.o.r.es of far-off England, crawled to the uppermost pinnacle of the exposed ruins and stared hopelessly out over that lifeless sea of blistering sand waves. Alone he was, the last of his ten comrades lying somewhere out there in that arid wasteland. This city had been his last hope as he fought thirst and heat across the outer levels to its ma.s.sive low walls. Now hope was dead.

Allan Allan tore the helmet from his blackened head and snarled defiantly up into the blazing thirsty sunlight. Sounds, mumbling and broken, issued from his cracked dry lips as he cursed Allah, Mohammed, and all the sons of the Prophet. Suddenly he was silent.

"Sata.n.u.s!" he moaned as he saw grotesquely shaped monsters chiseled deep into the lower tower walls beside him. "Creatures of the Beast!"

Weird monsters with the legs of many-bodied serpents about their ovoid torsos stared from malignant multi-gemmed eyes down at this barbarian interloper. Strange monsters, winged and scaly, were depicted there, and among them Allan Allan beheld the brutish shapes of strange half-men bearing clubs. He saw creatures more terrible than the mind of man could have conceived; dragons, serpents, and spear-maned, ungainly lizard-things that could never have existed.

Shuddering he turned away and stumbled toward a low black doorway in the tower wall. Low it was, three feet in height and twice as wide. He dropped to his knees and crept inward, out of the terrible blast of the tropic sun. With night he would venture out once again.

And then his groping hand found the ma.s.sive hollow circle of a metal ring, an armlet. He held it to the light, and as he did so, all the graven monsters on the walls seemed to rustle and whisper together in warning. Allan Allan's fingers tightened and he swayed unsteadily to his knees. A squat-bodied thing of stone, man-tentacled and hideous, glared at him. Allan glared back at it.

"Afraid are you?" he muttered. "Afraid that I will take some of your h.e.l.lish possessions away from this devil-haunted city of the dead?"

A ghastly chanting of warning, unholy voices seemed to blur discordantly in his ears. He shook the foul dust of the low-ceilinged rocky chamber from his tattered garments and crept back into the outer sunlight with his prize.

"I'll take it!" he screeched, madness and helpless rage thinning his deep voice. "Treasure of demons and monsters....I challenge them all...Laugh, sneer, at me....I hear you....I, Allan Allan of England fear you not!"

His prize was a plain circlet of ma.s.sive metal, deeply scored with the imprint of a score or more interlocking triangles. He slipped it over his sun-seared arm and instantly about him a soothing aura of coolness seemed to descend. The sound of gibbering demoniac voices died.

Allan's fingers slipped over the rough surface of the broad bracelet until they came in contact with a tiny raised stud, set into the corner of one of the sunken triangles. Idly he twisted at the bit of metal.

An electric tingle of strange forces flooded his body. There came a haziness that swiftly solidified into a transparent, unyielding wall about him like the curving inner sh.e.l.l of some giant croc's egg. Darkness flashed on about him - and sunlight - and darkness. Light and blackness alternated in swift flashes.

Slowly the strange sh.e.l.l or force that surrounded him drifted upward, high above the ma.s.sive, squat black walls of that sand-burled prehistoric city of the Africa wastes, and as it rose, in those momentary flashes of daylight, Allan Allan saw a withered human body slumped against the gloomy tower wall. Even as he watched the body swiftly disintegrated into a heap of scattered dry bones and withered skin. Then the sand once again swallowed the dark, evil walls of the ancient metropolis.

Stunned, his senses dulled by the endless struggle and thirst of the preceding days, Allan Allan's thoughts swept northward, to England and the green fields he was to never see again. He felt the sh.e.l.l lurch beneath him and go racing away, skimming close above the sand dunes, toward some unknown pagan h.e.l.l.

His weary eyes closed, the toxins of exhaustion, of worn out muscles triumphant, and he slept.

Later, much later, he awoke. Full realization of his predicament flooded sudden panic through his brain cells. He sat up, his feet braced against the opposite wall of the mysterious bubble of force. He looked down.

"The Channel!" he gasped. Knuckles cracked as his fists clenched. "England and home. The armlet of the ancients...it did this!"

The sh.e.l.l was flashing toward the great chalk cliffs of England, and with the surge of triumphant thought in his brain it increased its swift pace. He directed the sh.e.l.l toward some new goal, testing its response, and immediately, gracefully, it swung off in the new direction. Guided by Mental control was this mysterious chariot of the vanished ancient race, builders of mysterious, low-walled desert cities!

"Here," said Allan Allan aloud, "Is where I played at battle with my brothers. And here, in the lake, I came near to drowning.

"But the castle, Allan Castle, it is....is gone!" he choked. "A village where it stood. Strangely constructed dwellings. Even the fields are changed."

His Impalpable sh.e.l.l of nothingness hovered a hundred feet above the village green. Uncertainly he willed it to descend. It rested at last upon the gra.s.s and then he twisted the tiny inset stud back to its original setting.

The shifting shadows of night and day slowed and stopped at last in midday. Allan Allan felt the welcome pressure of turf beneath his feet and he drew in great gasps of the pure moist air. Then he was conscious of voices; of words idly p.r.o.nounced and strange.

Dark-robed men gathered about three women, two of them snaggle-toothed ancients, gray of hair and mad-eyed. One of them cringed like a whipped cur and Allan Allan could see the bluish marks of bruises upon her pasty flesh. The other cackled and shrieked gleefully at her companion's discomfiture.

The third woman was young, fair of hair and skin, and pretty. The dark-robed men and the a.s.sembled roughly-garbed villagers seemed to cl.u.s.ter close about her, a foul sort of hunger in their gaze. Now he could see that rough cords bound her wrists firmly together, cutting deep into the flesh. His hand dropped to the haft of his cross-hilted longsword.

The tattered robe was ripped from the girl's fair body and the crowd seemed to sigh hungrily. Corse men's hands examined her flesh and needles probed at her body. She screamed once.

Allan hesitated. A witch! Then her pain-filled gray eyes somehow found his and he read a mute, hopeless plea for aid in them. Here was no wanton of Satan's fold his heart told him.

"Hold!" he roared and his great sword flashed in the sun.

Startled villagers fell back from this grim sun-blackened giant in his strange trappings of mail and leather. He strode to the girl's side even as she slumped, unconscious, in his arms. He drew the cloak back about her soft body and faced the black-robed witch-hunters boldly.

Carrying her unconscious body he strode through their stunned ranks. Ten -eleven, steps he took before slender rapiers and pikes were raised against him. His sword hammered at their frail blades, sweeping them aside and smashing through cringing flesh and brittle bones.

Five of the black-robed men were down but now the villagers, armed with staves, axes and pitchforks, swarmed about him. His weary, heat sapped muscles were falling him. One mighty sweep of his sword cleared a narrow ring about him and then his fingers groped for the tiny metal stud. Shimmering walls built up about him and the girl, shutting out all others.

Momentarily, he glimpsed a blurring swarm of men leaping upon a mail-shirted warrior beyond the walls. And across the warrior's arm hung the body of a golden haired maiden!

A memory of mouldering bones below him in the Africa desert came to Allan. The blending of day and night into light and blackness. In alternating flashes, was the swift pa.s.sage to time, and...Every forward leap of his body in time left an exact duplicate of himself behind: Or was he....the duplicate?

Already his other body and that of the girl must have become blackened ashes at some witch-burning. How many days must have pa.s.sed he could only imagine, but now the green leaves of the trees where swiftly turning to brown, red and gold. Even as he watched, white snow blanketed the earth and the last leaves of autumn shook from the bare bleak arms of the trees.

He sent the time-cell gliding effortlessly upward away from the squalid stone-and-thatch huts of the village toward the depths of a great forest. There he could hide and rest, secure from any save poachers and gamekeepers.

And beneath him the snow was dwindling and dark patches of soil shoved through. Brooks and rivers were swollen and trees budded...

"America!" cried fair-haired Jocelyn Moore, one-time accused witch in the forgotten English village. "Here, Allan, will we be safe from persecution. The witch-hunters will not seek us here."

Allan smiled at her. She did not know that more than a century had pa.s.sed since the transparent sh.e.l.l of force had left England far behind. The exact date he could not know, she had told him that she was first accused in 1642, but he believed that this was the year 1780.

Downward the ovoid of nothingness swooped until they hovered above the green fields of tobacco and grain in eastern Pennsylvania. Allan twisted the little b.u.t.ton of metal backward, almost to his starting point, and the racing flood of day and night slowed. For perhaps five minutes did the daylight endure before night came again.

"See!" cried Jocelyn, "there is war here. The bodies of red-coated men lie mingled with the bodies of roughly-clad men. There must be a revolt against the King."

Allan's fingers sought the worn grip of his cross-handled sword and his eyes lighted eagerly. Perhaps here in this new savage world would he find comrades and battle against great odds, winning freedom from the decadent civilization of Europe.

A cl.u.s.ter of log-walled cottages, cabins, lay close by, and there they came to a halt. Allan snapped off the stud and the sh.e.l.l of force dissolved.

It was morning and homespun-clad men and women were coming from their rude homes. They spoke a strangely accented English as they cl.u.s.tered about this strange pair dropped, it seemed, from the very heavens. Blue Swedish eyes regarded them curiously - the mail-shirted warrior and the pale, black-robed girl.

"Come and eat," invited a yellow-bearded ox of a man.

There were no questions as to their origin. The war had sent many peculiar strangers pushing westward away from the seaboard. They were taken to be such and given shelter. Jocelyn cooked the food for the yellow-haired Swede and his motherless brood of six, and Allan helped in the fields.

And when the winter came, Allan joined the army of Washington.

The war was ended. Allan Allan bore the scars of many wounds on his great body and two fingers were gone from his right hand. For years had he battled the Hessian mercenaries of George, King of England, and he was now a citizen of a new nation.

Jocelyn had married blond-bearded Gustaf while he had been to war so there was now nothing to hold him beside the seacoast. Like a disease the urge to plumb the depths of the future came upon him.

"I will watch this new world grow," he said. "Watch it spread across the wilderness and grow strong and arrogant..."

Slowly, he cruised above the dwindling forests and spreading fields of America. Westward, ever westward, the frontiers pushed. Several times he touched earth again to eat and sleep for a time but nowhere did he pause for long.

He saw spiderwebs of steel cross the country and strange boats with smoking chimneys in the harbors. He saw vast armies of men in blue swarming down from the north and brave man in gray push up from the south. Allan slowed his leisurely flight through time yet further until the embattled ranks of the two armies grew clear before him.

Allan sent the time sh.e.l.l shooting skyward... Brother slaying brother...Blue and gray...

Into the west he drifted, over Kansas and Missouri. Here he saw renegade guerillas of both North and South plundering and killing. Rage seethed hot within his mighty-muscled frame.

Down he plunged silently off the sh.e.l.l of force around his body he heard pitiful moans of terrified women and came upon four trembling captives, huddled beneath a single blanket beside the fire. Bruised and b.l.o.o.d.y they were from the ordeal they had endured.

For a moment a film of flaming redness blinded Allan Allan's eyes and his blood rose savagely. The growl of a wild beast rumbled deep down in his chest as he drew his heavy sword.

Then, reason triumphed. He was alone and all but unarmed. From a stack of weapons and ammunition, carelessly stacked near the fire, he selected two rifles, powder cartridges, and several bags of bullets. Holding this plunder under his arms, he clicked the tiny stud rapidly on and off.

About him a vague looming ma.s.s of shapes was growing. No demons of Africa these, but clean-limbed fighting men, each bearing two rifles and ammunition, while at their sides swung cross-barred swords.

A score of giant handsome warriors - all Allan Allan.

They needed no instruction as to what they were to do. They knew. They swung about facing the sleeping guerillas and at that moment a guard, stationed outside the camp, saw them. He fired.

Two of the Allans returned his fire and the guard jolted backward, the cry of alarm dead on his lips. But the outlaws were warned. They all came boiling out of their battered tents and shelters of branches, pistols and knives in their grimy paws - only to go down beneath a withering blast of fire. The few who escaped bullets went down beneath a flashing wall of steel.

Seventeen Allan Allans faced one another there beside the fire. They looked at Allan, he of the bracelet, as their leader.

"While the weak and helpless are oppressed," he cried, "it is our duty to protect and avenge them."

Seventeen Allan swords flashed in the firelight and a cheer burst from their throats. This new crusade fired their imagination as that ancient plundering conquest had not.

"And now," said their leader, "let us rid the camp of this human carrion and sleep."

Gutted villages, burned cabins, and death-emptied farmhouses dotted the Missouri countryside. Plundering, killing and raping, the bushwhackers ranged the country like cowardly ragged wolves. Union troops and the shrunken Confederate forces of General Price were powerless to combat or control their depredations.

Into this welter of blood-hungry Kansans, Missourians, Seseshs, and Feds -border ruffians and men without a loyalty - plunged the Allans. Quick justice they rendered as they rode the outlaw trails and the cowardly followers of Quantrell and his unsavory ilk trembled in their stolen boots at the name of Allan.

Always they were the same, a score of clear-eyed mighty men well-armed and superbly mounted. Half of them might fall in battle with the tattered guerillas, but the next day twenty of them rode the b.l.o.o.d.y outlaw trails. Like Immortal avenging G.o.ds, they patrolled the rutted forest roads and brushy trails....

"Quantrell's men raid Hamdon," the little bald-pated man gasped through putty-colored lips, his eyes constantly watching the road down which he had just come.

"Come with us," ordered Allan shortly, "perhaps this time we can come to grips with them."

The Allans loosened their heavy swords and examined their spotless rifles and the loaded braces of Colt revolvers at their hips. Then they swung in behind their leader and galloped at a furious pace toward the nearby village of Hamdon.

The sounds of gunfire and of agonized screams came to their ears before they could see the village street. Then they topped a low hill overlooking the town and could see lazy curls of smoke drifting upward from a half-dozen mean dwellings. Black dots lay unmoving in the village street and hors.e.m.e.n rode between the houses as they went.

Two bewhiskered brutes dragged a struggling woman from a house by her plump legs. Her foot broke free and she landed a frantic kick in the groin of one of her captors. He worked out a long-bladed knife and plunged it into her body. His comrade laughed brutally and kicked her crimsoned bulk.

A Sharps spoke and the killer spun about with the bullet's impact. A split second later his companion joined him in the dust of the road, a bullet-hole drilling his breast bone. Their blood mingled suddenly with that of the dying woman.

Then the Allans smashed into the ragged ranks of the killers as they ranged the dusty streets of Hamdon. Outnumbered they were four or five to one; yet the cowardly bushwhackers fell back before them, flinging aside their weapons as they tried to escape.

"Quantrell!" screeched the bald-headed little man, pointing.

Even as he spoke, a bullet smashed into his face and his b.l.o.o.d.y-masked corpse slid to the dust.

Allan spurred his horse after the leader of the guerillas. Two mounted outlaws rode into his path and his cross-handled sword flicked out through their bodies in one mighty sweep. Then he was almost upon Quantrell.

A wizened, scrawny young guerilla, not over seventeen, rode beside the outlaw chief. Now he turned and lifted his revolver muzzle. His cold eyes glittered sneakily for an instant as he pressed the trigger and then Allan Allan felt a sledge smash against his skull as the gun roared.