o words:

"...ind ...aster...."

Bentley suddenly knew what the man was trying to say. The half-uttered
words could mean only--"Mind Master."

Bentley suppressed a shudder and extended his hands to the closed
right hand of the dying man. Carefully he removed from between the
fingers three tufts of thick brown hair, coarse and crude of texture.
There was a rattle in the naked man's throat.

Five minutes later the ambulance intern hastily scribbled in his
record the entry, "Dead on Arrival."

Bentley, more frightened than he had ever been before, entered a
taxicab as soon as the body had been removed and the streets cleared.
He stared closely at the tufts of hair in his hand. Maybe he had been
wrong in taking them before detectives arrived on the scene, but he
had to know, and he felt that these hairs proved his mad suspicions.

Caleb Barter was alive!

The hairs came from the shaggy coat of a giant anthropoid ape or a
gorilla.

CHAPTER II

_Ultimatum_

How terribly far-fetched it seemed! It was unbelievable enough that
Bentley had once reposed in the body of an ape. That had been in the
African wilds. But the idiocy of the thing now rested in Bentley's
belief that here, immediately upon landing, he was again facing
something just as horrible.

But the coincidences were too clear. The palaver about "brains," and
"Mind Master"--and those ape hairs in Bentley's hands. He wished he
knew all that had led up to that story he had read in the paper just
prior to the appearance of the naked man from the west door of the
Flatiron Building. However, the killing would get front page position
now, due to the importance of the dead man--Bentley never doubted it
was the man whom, in the paper, the "Mind Master" had promised to
slay.

Great apes in the heart of New York City! It sounded silly,
preposterous. Yet, before he had gone through that dread experience
with the mad Barter, Bentley would have sworn that brain transplantation
was impossible. Even now he was not sure that it hadn't all been a
terrible dream.

Should Bentley go at once to the police to give them the benefit of
whatever knowledge he might have of Caleb Barter? He wasn't sure. Then
he decided that sooner or later he must come out into the open. So he
caught a cab and went to police headquarters.

"I wish," he said, "to talk to someone about the Mind Master!"

If he had said, "I have just come from Mars," he could scarcely have
caused a gr