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Hg SYNOPSIS. On Windward island Palidori intrigues Mrs. Golden into an appearance of evil which causes Golden to capture and tor ture the Italian by branding his face and .crushing his hand. Palidori opens the dyke gates and floods the island and in the general rush to escape the flood kid naps Golden’s six-year-old daughter Mar gory. Twelve year’s later in New York a Masked One calling himself "the Hammer of God” rescues an eighteen-year-old girl from the cadet Casavanti, to whom Jules Legar has delivered her. and takes her to the home of Enoch Golden, millionaire, whence she is recaptured by Legar. Legar and Stein are discovered by Manley. Gol den’s secretary, setting fire to Golden’s buildings, but escape. Margory’s mother fruitlessly implores Enoch Golden to find their daughter. The Masked One again takes Margery away from Legar. Legar loots the Third National bank, but again the Laughing Mask frustrates his plans. SIXTH EPISODE THE SPOTTED WARNING Enoch Golden had never formed the habit of taking others into his confi dence. And when events came into his life which seemed to leave him more and more dependent on his im mediate associates he betrayed an oc casional tendency to focus his neb ulous resentment against that situa tion on the exasperatingly imperturb able figure of David Manley. ' Young man,” he said, fixing his sec retary with a steely eye, “I came to this decision twenty long years ago, and nothing is going to change it. That woman was sent from my home, and she will never enter it again.” Manley, looking down at the note still held in his hand, thought of the troubled and tear-stained face of the girl who had so recently clung to his arm and asked him to plead her cause. And the memory of Margery Golden brought fresh courage to him. ‘‘But this woman who was once your own wife is only asking for a glimpse of her own daughter again. Surely that is asking little enough!” “And I repeat that I won’t allow it. I have saved my daughter from the dangers that woman’s wrong surround ed her with. I have saved her from —” "Have you?” interrupted Manley, de liberately meeting the older man’s stare. Any retort the older man was about to utter remained unspoken, for at that moment a soft-treading footman entered the room and crossed to the desk with a salver of mail in his hand. Manley, looking up, eyed that servant resentfully, and with a touch of sus picion. This intruder, he promptly surmised, was a new figure in the household retinue. “Be so good as to knock when you enter this room,” was the young secre tary’s sharp command. “Very good, sir,” answered the new footman, scarcely raising his eyes. “H’h!” Golden scolTed, looking up from the letter which he had just opened. “Since you're so ready to ask favors, here’s another friend to ask them for. Here’s the captain of the circle you’re so ready to champion! But instead of asking favors you see, he demands them!” He tossed the folded sheet angrily across the desk top. Manley took it up and read it. “Your happiness hangs on one small scrap of paper. That paper Is the portion of the Windward island chart Traces the Telephone Circuits. which you still hold. Unless this is delivered to me, and delivered as I have already directed, the Spotted Warning will come to your daughter Margery. And the meaning of the Spotted Warning she already under stands. JULES LEGAR.” “And what do you intend to do?” asked Manley, still staring down at this strange note. “Do you suppose,” retorted Golden, with a slightly tremulous finger al ready on the bell, “that I’m going to empty my safe to every blackleg who bandies about a catch-word that be longs to little Italy?” “But what earthly use Is this piece of chart to you?” asked the yonnger .man / nor of “THE OCCA SIONAL OF FENDER,’“THE WIRE TAP PERS," "GUN RUNNERS.’etc Novelized from THE PATHE PHOTO PLAY OF THE SAME NAME ATTMU* ITWNC4A “It’s use to me is not the point at issue,” doggedly retorted the older man. “But one point at issue is at least the safety of your daughter,” contend ed Manley, remembering only too well the events of the immediate past. “And that, young man, is a responsi bility which still rests on my own shoulders,” was Golden’s curt retort as the new footman stepped into the room in answer to his summons. “Tell Miss Margery to come here at once.” As Margery quietly stepped into the room Golden stared at her for a mo ment and then sank back into his chair. “What is the Spotted Warning?” he suddenly demanded. The girl, with her troubled eyes bent on the grim-lined face of her father, did not speak at once. “The Spotted Warning?” she re peated, in a little more than a whis per. “Yes, what i 3 that supposed to mean?” “It is a warning of death,” was the girl’s quietly enunciated reply. Man ley could detect the tremor that sped through her body. “And it means that you have been hearing from Legar again!” “But what does Legar mean by it?” asked Manley. “Why should he use such a phrase?” “It is a warning that comes to the person who is about to die. It is a message of warning, spotted black. It is the last word they send. And I have heard them say it has never failed — never once!” But the indomitable old fighter at the desk was once more on his feet. “That Sicilian black-magic stuff can’t intimidate me,” he thundered out. He turned to his daughter. “Until this Calabrian brigand farce is played out, I'm going to send you into the country.” “But where are you sending me?” asked the girl. “I’m going to send you out to your Aunt Agatha’s on Long Island!” was his curt response as he swung about to his secretary. “And while Mar gery's getting her things together, Manley, you send Train, the chauf feur, here to me for his instructions.” Manley, promptly crossing to the door, was startled to find the figure of the new footman standing close beside it as it was swung open. Ten minutes later, when Manley re turned to the library with Train at his heels, he found Enoch Golden staring down at a sheet of paper lying on his desk. At the center of this paper stood a large black blot. "It’s the Spotted Warning,” said Golden, his heavy face furrowed with a trouble deeper than he was willing to admit. “But how, in God’s name, did it get here?” Manley, after staring at the strange ly-spotted sheet, stared even more in tently at the ceiling directly above the point where the paper lay on the desk top. A momentary look of satisfac tion flitted across hi 3 face as Golden turned to him with a crisp command to precede Margery to Cedarton and there explain both the reasons for her visit and the precautions to be exer cised during that visit. “And as for you, Train,” continued the grim-eyed old millionaire, turning to his chauffeur, “I want you to take my daughter out to Cedarton as quick ly as your car and the speed laws will let you carry her. There are special reasons for this, remember. And from the moment you leave this house, don’t let anything or anybody stop you.” Thirty minutes later Margery Gold en. surrounded by her bags, sat hack in the swaying automobile, puzzled over this new and unexpected turn in the tide of events. And as mile by mile swam by beneath the hurrying wheels, the keen-eyed man in the driv ing seat found a load lifted from his own shoulders. Yet at the next turn in the road his light-heartedness suddenly departed from that keen-eyed driver. For as he took this turn and speeded up along a dustless stretch of open highway, he saw a figure run out to the middle of the road. It was not the fact that this figure stood directly in his path that most disturbed him. It was the discovery, as he drew down on It, that this figure wore a vellow band of cloth across the eyes, with a moon shaped apron falling almost to the end of the nose, that brought the redoubt able Train's heart suddenly up in his mouth. But even while that figure remained stubbornly and directly in his path, motioning for him to stop, he remembered his orders. Instead of slackening his speed, in fact, he in creased it, increased it to the limit of the engine’s power. And he would surely have ridden down that would be interceptor had not the latter, at the last moment, leaped quickly aside. Margery Golden, as he did so, half rose in her seat, for she, too, had caught sight of that mysteriously shadowed face. “But that was the Laughing Mask!” she cried aloud, in wonder, as they swept on. A little later she was startled by a THE DOUGLAS ENTERPRISE, DOUGLAS. GEORGIA. quick cry of warning bursting from the driver's throat. Staring ahead, she saw that still another effort was being made to Intercept them. This time it was a man with a red flag. Instead of stopping, the car swept past the man so close that its fender-end slapped against the flagstick itself as he re peated his lusty ahout of command. But that command was more or less lost on Train, a little dizzy now with the sheer drunkenness of speed. “Stop?” mocked the driver as he raced on. “I’m going to stop for noth ing this side of hell!” Yet that valiant boast was little more than the articulation of mortal pride so often preluding mortal disas ter. For, bearing down on them along that lonely stretch of roadway they could already see a second car. The point about this car that worried Train was that it was not approaching them as a well-behaved car should approach a comrade vehicle, but vermlculsted drunkenly from one side of the road to the other. Even Margery, as she leaned forward, puzzling over these strange movements, realized that peril was involved in passing a vihicle so uncertain of its course. At the same time, too, she could hear from far be hind her the prolonged and warning cry of an auto horn, wailing disturb ingly through the quiet air of the late afternoon. The next moment the two cars had met, head-on. There was a crash of metal and glass, a rending of honey-comb radia tors and coppered fenders. What happened after that for all time remained strangely like a dream to Margory. She remembered seeing Train lying close beside his wrecked car, with the blood trickling from his wrist and staining his whip-cord uni form. She remembered seeing other figures, even more helpless looking. But most of all she remembered how one of these figures, pulling himself together, had slowly risen to his feet. As he did so he turned half-stupidly about and stared down at her. And the moment she saw that pallid yet tri umphant face she knew that it was Le gar. She knew that he was confronting her, that he was slowly but determin edly making his way towards her. And she knew that in another moment she would have been their prisoner again had not a sudden and unlooked-for in terruption taken place. This interruption came in the form of a flying roadster, with a masked figure leaning low out from its run ning board as it swept down on them. She remembered the sudden shout of the men, the sudden clutch of the |S|KMBSta j j,.% “It Is a Warning of Death!” Was the Girl's Reply. strong hand as it caught at her while the roadster swept by, the equally sud den pain through her bruised body as she was swung safely up into the seat of the onward swerving car. She re membered, too, the arm close about her as she lay back, weak and pant ing, as they danced and speeded on along that lonely road. She remem bered turning in through a stone gate, winding along an orderly gravel drive way, stopping before a vine-bowered bungalow. She remembered, as the masked man at her side helped her in through an ivory-white door, turning dazedly to him and asking who he was. And she remembered the smile that showed just beneath the fringe of the yellow domino as he shook his head and the sense of deprivation that swept through her as she found her self once more alone. Then from the same door through which the Laugh ing Mask had stepped, she remem bered, she had seen a quiet-eyed wom an come out, a quiet-eyed woman who had crept, up to her, with tears well ing from her eyes and a smile of pity ing tenderness about her lips. “Margery, don’t you know me? Don’t you remember your own mother?” that quiet-eyed woman had asked as she had taken her in her arms. And as she stared up into that motherly face, bent so close over her own, she had said, with a gasp of bewilderment, "Are you—you the Laughing Mask?” But her mother, she remembered, had smiled, almost sorrowfully, and had put a finger to her lips. • •••••* The Tower of Destiny. Enoch Golden, anxious and worn out, sat waiting for some further word as to the fate of his daughter Margery. Nothing had come to him since Train’s startling message of the collision and the even more startling news of the girl's mysterious disappearance. He would have got little consolation from a talk that was taking place over the servants’ telephone below stairs. Part of that guarded conversation was car ried on by Wrench, the new footman, and much of it had to do with the very situation so disturbing the aged million aire in the room above. For it was Le gar explaining that a masked stranger at the last moment had snatched the girl from their hands and had apparent ly carried her off to some hiding place of his own. This was followed by the command to deliver still another mes sage to Enoch Golden, with the final warning that every wire leading into the Golden house must be cut as soon as possible. The new footman, in obedience to these orders, quietly traced out the telephone circuits to the basement and there severed the wires with a pair of scissors purloined for the purpose from Mile. Celestine’s workbag. Then, watching his chance, he carefully penned a note, wording it as Legar had duly instructed him to do. Then he returned to the neighborhood of the library door, with his ferretlike alert ness masked under his customary im mobility of face. It was not until his restless master discovered the telephone wires to be dead, and went storming through the house to determine the reason for this misadventure, that Wrench realized his chance had come. Slipping into the deserted library on the pretext of adjusting the rugs, he stopped before the rosewood table, hesitated a mo ment, and then lifted the heavily chased lid of Golden's cigar case and dropped the note inside. A moment later he had left the room, unobserved and unsuspected. It did not take many minutes of waiting to confirm the wisdom of Wrench’s movement. For Enoch Gold en, striding restlessly back into his library, sank with a sigh of weariness into the armchair beside the rosewood table. For a moment or two he stared abstractedly and unhappily about him. Then, with still another sigh, he reached out and lifted the heavily chased lid of silver. His fingers, in stead of coming in contact with a per lecto corseted in gold, rustled against a sheet of paper. Automatically he picked it up and unfolded it. Written on that mysterious sheet he found the following: “To fight me further in this is use less. And unless you open your eyes to this fact it will soon be worse than useless. It will be fatal. I repeat that I want your half of that chart. If you want your daughter to live, want her sent back to you, take that chart to the twenty-fourth floor of the Centra! Tower building, within the next hour, and hand it to the man in the black ulster who will be waiting there. No trickery can succeed. And this is your last chance! JULES LEGAR.” Silently the beaten man stared down at this strange missive. Slowly as he did so, the last of his once iron will melted away. He rose heavily from his chair and crossed to the vault. From this vault he took the map, the time-yellowed square of manilla about ■which so many of the sorrows and troubles of all his life seemed to revolve. Then, calling for his hat and coat and ordering a car, he tremblingly made ready for his midnight visit of capitulation to the Central Tower building. While these events were -taking place, however, there was one member , of the Golden household who remained far from inactive. When David Man ley so abruptly left a tranquil bunga low at Cedarton and so stealthily pushed his way through the shrubbery surrounding that bungalow, it was be cause he had made the sudden dis covery that Legar himself was in the neighborhood. Nor was it hard for him to guess the reason for that mas ter-criminal’s invasion of those seques tered grounds. And Manley, promptly deciding to stalk the stalker himself, was rewarded by overhearing enough of Legar’s plans, as the latter hurried ly issued his instructions to two of his confederates near the roadside, to realize the necessity of at once get ting in touch with Enoch Golden. Whatever happened, he felt, it was his duty to warn Margery’s father that Legar himself had acknowledged his ignorance of the girl’s whereabouts and had expressed his intention of tricking the chart out of its present owner’s hands. Ten minutes of frantic efforts at a telephone booth in the nearby village, however, convinced Manley of the im possibility of getting in touch with Golden by wire. Manley’s first thought, in his dilem ma, was to commandeer some nearby car. Yet nothing but a racer, he re membered as he snatched out his watch, could get him to the Central Tower building in time. His next thought, however, took him tearing down the village street like a madman. For the name of “Cedarton” had brought into his mind yet another name, the name of “Bobby Evart.” And Bobby Evart, who had his workshop and hangar on the southerly outskirts of that village, had been the first of the Racquet club members to forsake automobiles for aviation, and startle Long Island by his early morning hydroplane maneuvers over suburban golf courses and country homes. He had been the first civilian volunteer for the federal air scouts and at San Diego had twice broken his own alti tude record established at Pensacola, and was now immured in the mysteri ous task of fashioning a stabilizer for monoplanes, a stabilizer, Manley re membered, which was receiving sym pathetic attention from certain navy officials in Washington. Instead of finding this same in trepid Bobby poring over blue prints of stabilizer parts, however, the breath less Manley found his old-time friend in a rattan club chair tranquilly play ing chess with his maiden aunt. In two minutes the breathless newcomer had explained to the somewhat as ed young chess player a situation which brought a brighter light into the latter’s boyish eyes. “The point is,” cried Manley, “could you get me there. Could you make a landing at night?” They were already on their feet again, running for the hangar. “Yes, I can get you there! But what nave we got to make a landing on?” “The main building of the Central tower stops at the eighteenth story. That gives us a flat roof of several hundred yards. Could you make it on that?” “Not unless it was lighted!” ex plained Evart, shouting for his mechanician as he rounded the gloomy corner of the hangar itself. “But it is lighted,” Manley told him* “It gets the light from the tower itself, and the whole cornice line is strung with electrics, the same as the Singer building!” Evart’s finger, touching a buttbn, threw a white flood across the vaulted roof of the building. A touch on an other button sent the great doors swinging open. Manley looked at his watch. Then he shook his head. “It’s too late.” he proclaimed. But Evart and his mechanician were al ready at work on the wide-winged monstrosity nested under its metal roof like a pterodactyl in a cave. “Get aboard,” commanded Evart. “We're going to try for it anyway!' He turned to his helper. “Hey, Brown, throw my friend up that fur coat of yours!” “But what speed can you get out of this machine?” asked Manley as ho clambered aboard the chassis and struggled with his seat-straps. Evart, who had been stooping over his engines, looked up. “I got one hundred and four an hour out of her this morning,” he off-hand edly announced. “But I think I can push her up to one hundred and ten.” Manley’s heart beat faster. “Then there’s a chance!” he cried. “A fighting chance.” A sudden sense of chill caused Man ley to clutch for the fur coat thrown in at his feet, and struggle into it. As he did so the earth seemed sud denly to fall away from him. Villages became spangled checker-boards of lights. Highways became winding strings of pearls. Manley forgot the chilliness striking into his bones. He forgot Margery Golden and Legar. He forgot the ori gin of his mission that brought him winging through the midnight heav ens. He forgot the fact of his own puny existence and the trivial ends to which it had been given over. All these he forgot, completely and utter ly, until Evart, sweeping out along the twinkling shore lights of South Brooklyn, circled north again where the brazen figure of Liberty guarded the upper bay, and dropped lower along that tapering point of gloom where Battery park nosed like a ship’s prow into the tides of the Atlantic. They were still planing down, gently, like a settling sea bird, with the tilted planes veering a little westward to es cape the beetling skyscrapers along the canyon of lower Broadway. Manley thought, for a moment, that Evart had misjudged his position. Then he felt sure that Evart had also misjudged his height, that his stabil izing fin was already too low to clear the fiat roof that abutted the light strewn tower itself. But Evart, obviously, knew what he was about. For he took that ob long of flat gloom outlined in electrics with a gentle upward undulation like the upward swoop of a bluebird alight ing on a maple tree. Into that artful upward swoop was absorbed much of their momentum, for Evart had plain ly remembered that their running space was limited. But even with this precaution there remained a perilous paucity of runway, for before the bounding and quivering organism of nickel and steel and canvas came to a stop it lurched head-on into a wall of the tower itself. Manley could hear the crash of glass as the damper plane at the nose of the quivering chassis brought up short against one of the tower windows. I He was dimly aware of half-tumbling and half-climbing through a network of wooden stuts and steel piano-wire stays and cross-guys. He was vaguely conscious of Evart calling out that ev erything was all right, that there was no damage which a half-hour's work couldn’t patch up. But Manley, in truth, wa* thinteng little of either Evart or his flier. All his thoughts, as he climbed frantically up through the broken tower window, were revolving about the problem as to whether or not he was too late. And that all-vital question still ob sessed him as he mounted the Iron, treads of the stairway leading to the tower top, panting up flight after flight. until his lungs seemed bursting for want of air, and his over-driven heart beat drumlike against his rib-cage. And as he reached the top and flung out through the narrow door opening They Fought With Gasps and Grunts, on the campanile-like balcony crown ing that skyscraping structure, he knew, even as he saw two figures standing there before him, that he was too late. That much he knew, even before he caught at enough breath to call out a warning to Enoch Golden or swing about and spring for the second figure, already shrinking back in the shadow of that many-columned cupola. For in the hand of the second figure Manley had already caught sight of a tell-tale sheet of paper. It was a yellowed and time-worn scrap of paper, and lit tle more, but to Manley it had become the emblem and pennon of a desperate cause, a flag to be rallied round and fought for, to the last ditch and the last gasp, as harried soldiers fight through the smoke of battle for their colors. And Manley, as he clinched with Le gar’s stalwart emissary, fought for it. Nor was his opponent one to be de spised. The two men fought along the crest of that midnight tower as two mountain lions might fight along the brink of an Andean precipice. They fought with gasps and grunts, with strange guttural sounds, with teeth bared and face distorted, blind to the blows that were given and taken, un conscious of the fact that the very pa per for which they were fighting had already fallen to the cupola floor, and from there had been blown by the north wind to the furthermost edge of the cornice circling the stone column supports. Golden himself was already reaching for that paper when Legar’s confed erate caught sight of it, broke from Manley’s grasp and dove bodily for wdiere it lay. Manley, a second later, followed him. There, half astride the balustrade of coppered wood painted to look like marble, the fight was re newed. Each crouched low as he fought, drunkenly conscious now of the abyss that yawned so close to his feet. But still they fought. Then a second breath of night breeze, sighing through the tower top*, carried the paper slowly along the cornice edge. It was Legar's man who saw it as it moved. He wrenched away, twisted about, and caught at it as it fell. But already he was too late. It lifted with the wind, drifted and eddied slowly about in the moon light, and floated swayingly down into the darker canyon of Broadway, where it was soon lost to sight. But neither Manley nor his enemy saw that descent, for Legar’s man as he lurched suddenly forward threw all his weight on the outstanding copper cornice, painted white to look like marble. And it was a cornice made only for ornamentation, and not for support. For its fastenings surren dered to the strain of that suddenly imposed weight and the buckling seg ment of copper swayed outward as the desperately-clinging fingers clutched at its edges. Manley, hanging to the balustrade with one arm, reached out to grasp that buckling strip of metal to which a helpless man was hanging sheer over space. He caught at it, even as Golden caught at his straining shoul ders to hold him steady. But a law. stronger than the will of man. seemed to suck the metal slowly, inevitably, out of the clutch of his tired fingers. Then the last fastenings gave, the strained and twisted sheet metal tore slowly away, and the black shadow of a man fell like a plummet to the iron and stone of Broadway, three hundred feet below. (TO BE CONTINUED.)