by Lee Falk
"Knows you took a ride. Didn't he tell you about this place?"
"This place ... uh ... no, what place?"
"Killer's Town."
"Is that a real name?"
The crowd laughed at that, a quick, ugly laugh.
_ Koy looked at the girl thoughtfully. He couldn't believ his luck. The one man he'd met in this new world whom h thoroughly hated was Colonel Weeks. And this was hi daughter who had just walked in. He waved to Sport, standing at the side with squat, powerful Baldy.
"Lock her up in that room next to my office," he sai
Pretty stepped up to Koy, his pale-blue eyes narrow.
"I told you, I saw her first."
Killer Koy looked at him thoughtfully. This mad do. was bound to cause trouble, unless he knew who was givin the orders. He smiled for a moment. Pretty relaxed. The Killer Koy slammed him in the mouth. As Pretty staggere back, Sport chopped him on the back of his neck, and Bal dy kicked him in the stomach as he fell. He lay on th floor, clutching his stomach and writhing. Baldy was read with another kick to the head, but Koy stopped him.
"Any more trouble from you, and you're stone dead. Got that, Pretty boy?" he snarled.
Pretty groaned. Koy kicked him in the side.
"Got that?"
"Yes."
"Throw him outside till he cools off," said Koy. Sport and Baldy did just that. They tossed Pretty from the veranda to the grass. Pretty lay there, curled up, his head filled with murder. When the time comes, when I get my chance, he told himself. Koy talked quickly to his little group of aides. "Keep an eye on that guy all the time. If he acts up again, blow his head off."
Caroline, pressed back against the wall, watched the action in horror. What kind of place was this? Who were these awful men? Nobody told her. Koy's orders were carried out, and she was locked up in a small bare room on the top floor of the inn—a room without windows.
Colonel Weeks, desperately anxious, waited in his office until night. Though the hoofprints could have been Dynamite's, though the red-haired girl might have been Caroline, she could have been someone else. He tried to recall if he had mentioned Killer's Town to her. He couldn't remember for certain, but he had a sinking feeling he hadn't. Why would she enter the place? If she was ignorant of the place, could she have gone in out of curiosity. Why? He tortured himself, waiting, wondering, hoping that his precious daughter would come bouncing into his office, telling about her great day on Dynamite, and all this worry would be for nothing. The entire Patrol was worrying with him. The new off-duty men watched from the windows or the gates. The word spread to the far-flung patrolmen on missions—and they kept in touch by radio. "Has the girl returned yet?" "No." Tension mounted each hour. As it was reaching the snapping point—it snapped.
A note for Colonel Weeks was on its way from Killer's Town. One of the native workmen had come out of the gates waving a white handkerchief on a stick. Obviously scared, he had walked directly to one of the Jungle Patrol observation vehicles. The man had been forced to do this. His wife, who worked as a cleaning woman in the Inn, was held as hostage to guarantee his behavior. Koy watched him approach the Patrol car through binoculars, pleased with his own cleverness. The Patrol car raced, back to town with the man, sending the word ahead by radio. Weeks waited nervously at the front gate, pacing back and forth until the car arrived. He snatched the note from the frightened man.
Weeks:
She's here. Want to make a deal to get her out? Drive back with this man to our gates. Come alone, or you'll never see her alive.
The note was unsigned. Weeks ordered the patrolmen out of the car and took the wheel. The trembling black man sat beside him. A group of patrolmen massed around the car protesting.
"You can't go alone."
"I've no choice."
He was wearing no jacket, no hat, no gun, as he backed the car out of the Patrol driveway and sped off into the night. The patrolmen stared after him, angry, helpless. He raced through the town, out to the Phantom Trail, and sped on grimly through the woods, disregarding the bumps. The black man held on as the car bounced.
"Did you see my daughter?" asked the Colonel.
"No sir."
That was the extent of the conversation. The Patrol cars still posted about Killer's Town saw the lights of the car as it approached. They had been forewarned by radio and did not interfere. The Colonel sped past the road sign—Killer's
Town—then stopped at the closed gates. There were no lights on in the town behind the wall and also no sounds. They were waiting. The Colonel jumped from his car and ran to the gate. He grabbed the bars, shaking them, and called out.
"I'm here."
Brilliant light flashed into his eyes, temporarily blinding him. A dozen powerful searchlights were trained on the gate. He covered his eyes with his arm. A voice boomed out, amplified by a megaphone.
"You got my note, Weeks."
"Where's my daughter?" Weeks shouted, still covering his eyes.
"She's with us. Safe—not hurt yet."
Weeks groaned at that.
"Want her back? Here's the deal. Get off our backs. Get your guys away from my town for good. We want your promise in writing. We want those Boy Scouts of yours out of those hills and gone for good. Got it?"
"Listen to me, you miserable ... if you think," began Weeks, boiling with fury.
"Easy, pop. We're holding all the cards—your kid."
Weeks doubled his fists, trying to control his anger, and shouted through clenched teeth.
"How do I know she's safe and unhurt as you say?"
"Don't you trust our word?" came the mocking reply.
"No!"
"Okay, wait a minute." Then some indistinct mumbling. Weeks waited tensely, still blinded by the bright lights. Suddenly, he was in the dark. Another searchlight turned on, shining not at him but at the roof level of the high building called Killer Hilton.
On top of the renovated old building that had formerly been the Governor-General's mansion, there was a railing and platform, the kind known as a widow's walk. Two searchlights illuminated it. Several figures appeared up there, a girl held by two burly men. In the dark, outside the gates, Weeks stared. Caroline's voice came through the megaphone.
"I'm—I'm alright, daddy," she said.
"Caroline, have they hurt you?" shouted Weeks.
"No, daddy," came the slight, frightened voice.
Evidently the megaphone switched hands. The next voice was the first one he had heard.
"No, daddy," the voice mocked. "Not yet," it added.
The widow's walk was suddenly dark, then searchlights once more blazed into Weeks's eyes.
"Okay pop, that's it. You know the deal. Get rid of those snoopers. Those Boy Scouts. I want them gone—by dawn! Think it over. Now, blow!"
The lights went out. There was ribald laughter from the town. Back in her little room, Caroline heard it. She had heard it all. She pictured her father out there beyond the gates. What a fool I was to ride into this place, she told herself again, for the tenth or twentieth time. "Poor daddy," she sobbed aloud.
Weeks drove back alone, slowly. Everything he loved and believed in was at stake. His child, the Patrol, his honor. How could he bow to this blackmail? The morale of the Patrol would disintegrate. His own private moral standards could not allow it. Yet he had to think of Caroline. He reached headquarters, and went directly to his office, ignoring the waiting patrolmen. There, not a drinking man, he downed two slugs of whiskey, then called Chief Togando. News had reached the police chief and he got to Weeks's side in ten minutes. Togando had never seen his old friend so gray and broken.
"That hood's got my little girl," he said.
Togando nodded and touched his shoulder.
'You got a note?"
Weeks showed it to him, and then, with some effort, pulled himself together and told about the incident at the gate.
"Isn't there some legal way we can get into that place?" asked Togando angrily.
&nbs
p; "We've been through all that. None that we know of yet. And certainly not now, with Caroline in there."
"We might talk to Sago," said the Chief.
"Your cousin, the General? No, he'd be all out for a frontal attack. How I'd love to see that," said Weeks bitterly. "What can I do, Mano? I can't give in to blackmail." It was the first time he'd ever called the Chief by his first name.
"I don't know, Randolph. We keep going around the bush."
"But now Caroline's in the bush," said Weeks tensely.
"We'll think of something. Meanwhile, we'll keep this to ourselves. Don't let it out."
Weeks nodded. The Chief got up, patted Weeks on the back, and left
Give it time? Think of something? What was there to think about? Police, army, navy—none could help; none had the authority. Exhausted, he lay forward on his arms on his desk and fell asleep.
Dawn at Killer's Town. From the widow's walk atop the inn, Koy, Eagle, and Sport peered through binoculars. In the distance, at four points of the compass, the Jungle Patrol cars were holding their observation posts. Koy swore.
"What'll we do now? That idiot Colonel hasn't moved."
"Give it an hour," said Eagle.
Koy agreed. They left the roof for breakfast—a raw egg in whiskey was Koy's usual meal. They discussed the next step if the Patrol cars did not pull out. There were several ideas, then Eagle the lawyer came up with a good one, something he had seen in an old building on the grounds. Koy chuckled approvingly. The hour passed. Returning to the roof, they could see that the Patrol cars were still there. Koy nodded with a cruel grin.
"Do it," he said.
About an hour later, Colonel Weeks was awakened by the telephone on his desk. It was a direct report for him from one of the Patrol cars at the site of Killer's Town. What the Colonel heard made his eyes smolder with fury.
A cage had been put up on the side of the inn, hanging from the roof, near the sign: Killer Hilton. Inside the cage was a figure, a girl. Caroline Weeks, alive and weeping. Weeks slammed the phone back on the receiver. He looked about wildly, then rushed to the rifle rack on the wall. If the Patrol, police, army, and navy were helpless, he wasn't, he assured himself. Two patrolmen burst into the room as he pulled the rifle from the rack. Despite his angry commands, they forcibly led him back to his desk. He glared at them.
"They've got Caroline in a cage!" he shouted.
They nodded. They'd heard the report.
"They want our men taken away. But that won't end it. Then they'll want something else. That's the way it is with blackmailers," he said brokenly. The patrolmen stood silently, watching their leader wrestle with himself.
"But she's in that cage. Those rats won't stop at anything —they know we're helpless." He suddenly stopped and stared at the men, then slapped his hands together.
"I want to be alone," he said.
"Colonel, are you sure ?"
"Don't worry. I won't do anything foolish."
The men left the office. Weeks grabbed his phone. "Why didn't I think of him at once?" he told himself. Then, into the phone. "Radio, put me on the X band at once."
What if he wasn't there? He could be anywhere. Waiting for the call to go through, Weeks kept his fingers crossed. He had to be there.
Excitement erupted in the Patrol radio room. The X band was the only contact with the Jungle Patrol's unknown Commander, the figure at the top of the Patrol organization chart. There was an office next to the Colonel's. On the door was the lettering: "Office of the Commander." The door was always locked. Only one man had the key, Colonel Weeks. The few who had peeked inside this office, when the Colonel went in, described it as a bare room—no windows, no furniture, no rug, only a heavy iron safe set into the wooden floor. Inside this safe, in some unknown way, orders from the Commander appeared. Their arrival was signaled by a light outside the door. When the Colonel opened the safe—he alone had the combination, there was a note, always brief and to the point, seemingly materialized out of thin air. Replies back to the Commander were also placed in the safe, where after a time they vanished.
There were also other ways to reach the Commander: by radio, by mail through a post-office box under the name Walker, by homing pigeons at cotes at the jungle's edge, or by the swift falcon, Fraka, also kept at the cote. Radio was the swiftest, and now Colonel Weeks waited at his phone impatiently. Maybe the Commander wouldn't be there, wherever there was. No one knew where the Commander's transmitter was. Somewhere . . . out there. There had been a Commander ever since the Patrol was founded two hundred fifty years ago. He had always, it seemed, remained anonymous. Patrolmen speculated. Was he one man or many? Why was he unknown? Who was he—or they? There were never any answers.
Now, the Colonel's phone rang. He grabbed it anxiously.
"Hello, Colonel Weeks here," he said.
A voice replied, deep, pleasant, but with the ring of immense authority, the voice he had heard many times, of a man he'd never seen.
"This is the Commander. How are you, Colonel Weeks? What can I do for you?"
The man speaking, and the place where his voice was coming from, was far stranger than anything any of the patrolmen had ever imagined when they discussed the mystery of their unknown Commander. At the eastern end of the jungle, near the remote Misty Mountains, was a place all jungle folk knew as the Deep Woods. No one in the Patrol had even heard of it. And though few had even been close to it, and only a handful had actually seen it through the centuries, all jungle folk knew it was taboo. Even the fierce Tirangi, on their occasional relapses into headhunting, avoided it as did the primitive Massagni, rumored to be cannibals in this age of moonwalks. The Deep Woods was feared and avoided for several reasons. This was the land of the pygmy Bandar, whose poison weapons caused instant death. The pygmies, it was well known, treasured the privacy of their shadowy domain and resented intruders. Then, too, even if you were foolish enough to go looking for them, the Deep Woods were hard to find. You never knew you were there, until a pygmy peered out of the bushes, with a poison arrow in his tiny bow. There was one clue, the sound of a roaring waterfall. When you heard that, if you were wise and not bent on suicide, you turned around and ran in the opposite direction.
But the real taboo concerning the Deep Woods was another more mysterious matter. Somewhere behind the waterfall, reached by secret entrances, were the fabulous Skull Throne and Skull Cave, the legendary home of the Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks, the Man Who Cannot Die.
At this moment if you were there, you might see a large animal resembling a dog enter the cave. The mouth of the cave, carved by the wind and water of eons, looks like a giant skull. And the animal that looks like a dog is actually a big mountain wolf with the pale-blue eyes of his kind. He trots through the cave, past rocky chambers containing a variety of wonders: a dim grotto containing rows of engraved stone plaques behind which are the vaults of long- dead Phantoms—twenty generations of them. Another chamber contains shelves filled with large folio volumes, the chronicles of the Phantom. Another chamber glitters and gleams In the torchlight, filled with treasure chests brimming over with precious jewels, gold, silver, and platinum objects. A deep, pleasant voice comes from another chamber and the wolf heads for that. Inside is a powerful radio transmitter. Seated, speaking and listening, is a large man clad in tights, hooded and masked, with two guns in holsters on a gunbelt that bears his ancient insignia, the Sign of the Skull.
"Your daughter, Colonel Weeks? Killer's Town. I've just returned to Bangalla from a distant place and know nothing of this. Tell me."
This is the voice on the other end of the X band. The unknown Commander of the Jungle Patrol.
Colonel Weeks told him all about it—Killer Koy and the new town, the impotency of the Jungle Patrol and all other enforcement agencies, his night trip to the gates; the ultimatum from Killer Koy. Then of Caroline in the cage.
"Have you told me everything?" asked the Phantom.
"All that we know. The Lower Gamma banfc gang a
re there. Also the escaped lifers from here. But the plane goes in and out several times a week. Perhaps there are many more criminals."
"What happened to the old man who owned the place?"
"Matthew Crumb? We heard he's still there, unless they've killed him," said the Colonel. He waited for a moment.
"I will look into the matter, Colonel."
"What shall we do?"
"Nothing, Colonel, until you hear from me. Over and out."
There was a click and that was all. Colonel Weeks stared at the phone. Do nothing? How could he do that with Caroline in that cage? But what else could he do? Orders are orders.
Guran, the pygmy chief, and a dozen other little Bandar warriors were waiting at the Skull Throne as the Phantom dashed out of the Skull Cave with Devil, the wolf, at his heels. They were waiting for him to start the feast spread on mats on the ground before the throne, celebrating the Phantom's return from a distant mission. But he had no time for a feast now. He raced to a patch of grass where Hero, the big white stallion, was grazing, untied, and quickly saddled him. As he did, he explained to Guran the nature and location of the place where he was headed. Guran and the others pleaded with him to eat before leaving. They knew he was hungry. He glanced at the feast, sighed, but