eeded in his treachery. A few minutes he had been certain
that Eva would come to Baker's dock at the time set, but now doubts
began to assail him. With her obvious faith in Locke, she might decide
on the chemist's antidote, and there was always a possibility that it
might restore Brent, in which case Flint realized that his life would be
forfeit to the Automaton.

Nor were his fears unfounded. He had barely passed the fountain where,
half an hour before, he had been set free, when an emissary came out
from behind a neighboring tree and took up his trail.

De Luxe Dora also had waited only long enough to see Eva and Locke enter
Brent Rock, when she turned her runabout around and drove rapidly back
to Professor Hadwell's. She arrived there just in time to meet an
automobile coming from the opposite direction and containing three
emissaries of the Automaton.

In answer to an inquiry, Dora pointed out the chemist's house to them.
They piled out, and their leader knocked at the door, while Dora drove
off.

The chemist answered, and the leader produced a vial, glibly lying as he
handed it over.

"The Williams Drug Company sent me to have this stuff analyzed," said
the leader. "I'll wait."

As the professor admitted him he did not see the other two men pressed
close to the wall on either side of the door. The moment the professor's
back was turned they slinked after their leader into the house. In a
dark corner of the hallway they crouched as their leader went into the
laboratory with the chemist.

The professor sniffed at the vial, which contained nothing but pure
water, and in surprise turned to the emissary for an explanation. But it
was too late. The emissary dealt him a blow with a blunt instrument that
stunned him and, as he reeled back and grasped at a table, the other
thugs rushed from the hall and rained blow after blow on his venerable
head and beat him to the floor. A convulsive shudder--a long-drawn-out
sigh--and he lay still.

With barely a glance at him the emissaries set to work to smash all the
paraphernalia of the place, sparing nothing in order to make sure that
the antidote would be destroyed. Glass tubes, retorts, bottles, even
furniture were smashed to bits in their orgy of ruin--and there, in the
midst of the debris, his life's work finished, lay the old chemist,
dead.

Tiring of their own efforts, the murderers at last desisted. One of them
went to the street door and peered out, but in a mom