movement.

“Coming down the stairs,” Felix breathed. “Going out to breakfast, perhaps. If they don’t, we’re trapped like rats!”

Five long minutes they cowered there in the dark. Then, satisfied that all was well, Felix tucked some wires through a crack in the wall, and they were away.

“You’re all right!” A moment later in the broad light of the street the inventor’s son offered Johnny a slim hand. “I—I just wanted to make sure. You weren’t much afraid, were you?”

“Do you mean—” The muscles in Johnny’s face hardened. “Mean to say there really wasn’t any danger back there?”

“Danger?” Felix stared. “Of course there was danger! Those men were there, somewhere, no doubt about that. They’re bad ones too! Up to something rather terrible, I imagine. But then,” he added as a sort of afterthought, “we’re not detectives. I only wanted to get some things in there to try them out. You may have a chance to help at that. There’s a lot of things to do.

“But not tomorrow.” His brow wrinkled in thought. “Father and I will be away tomorrow. Tell you what—that’ll be all for today. Why don’t you come back day after tomorrow? We’ll try something out then, something rather thrilling, I’d say.”

It was to be thrilling, that thing they were to try out; but the thrill was to be of a different sort than that expected by Felix. Fate too would step in and change the date for them. Fate has a way of doing that little thing, as Johnny had long since learned.

Gripping Felix’s hand, Johnny hurried away to catch a bus.

“Just in time for one more auction,” he thought to himself. “That other auction brought me luck and promise of adventure. Why might not another do the same? Might go to the shack and see if Drew Lane is there,” he told himself. “Do that after the auction is over.”

He was going to the shack right enough, but not in just the manner he would have chosen.

CHAPTER III
THE BATTLE

“There! That’s the one! The one up next!” Johnny sat up with a start. Arrived at the auction house where all manner of strange things lost, damaged or stolen, are sold, he had taken his place among the bidders. He had found himself crowded in between a thin man and a stout one. He knew the stout one slightly; they called him John. The slim man was new and quite strange for such a place. His clothes were new and very well kept. His face was dark. His lips were twitchy, his slim fingers ever in motion. There was on his left cheek a peculiar scar. Two marks, like a cross, as if someone had branded him, so Johnny thought.

And now, to his great astonishment, after dozing through a half hour of uninteresting auction, he found this stranger whispering shrilly in his ear. Before the whisper had come he felt a sharp punch in the ribs. The punch may have been made with a sharp elbow. Johnny had an uncomfortable feeling that the business end of some sort of short gun had been stuck into his side.

“Say!” he whispered back. “What’s the big idea? This is an auction house; not a hop joint!”

“I know! I know!” came in an excited whisper from the slender, nervous-eyed man. “But listen to me!” One more prod in the ribs. “You’ll remember it the longest day you live! You bid on that next package! And get it! Take it away from ’em, see? Take it away! Me? I’m broke,” the stranger went on hurriedly. “But I got a hunch. An’ my hunches, they’re open and shut, open and shut. Just like that! So you bid! See?”

The package in question seemed about as uninteresting as it well could be—a, plain corrugated box tied round with a stout hempen cord. There were scores quite like it. Some were larger, some thinner, some thicker. Johnny had seen many such packages opened.

“Broken bits of statuary,” he thought to himself, “or old clothes, like as not, or jars of cheap cosmetics. What do I want of that package?”

But the stranger was insisting. “Bid! Bid! See, I got a hunch!”

“Bid?” Johnny grumbled in a whisper. “What for?”

The auction room was warm. He guessed he must have fallen asleep. Always after a nap he felt cross. He wouldn’t bid on the silly package. What if this fellow did have a hunch? He had a mind to tell him so.

Strange to say, when the package went up, he did bid. “One dollar! Two! Three dollars!” And he had it.

He turned about to look into the slim stranger’s face; wanted to see how he felt about it. To his surprise he found the seat empty.

“That’s queer!” he thought with a start. “Perhaps I dreamed the whole thing!... No, not all of it,” he amended ten seconds later. “Here comes the collector after my deposit. I’ve got a good mind to tell him I didn’t buy the package.”

This notion too he abandoned. Digging into his watch-pocket, he dragged forth a crumpled dollar bill.

“O.K., Buddie, you get your package after the auction.” The collector went his way.

Johnny had not meant to stay the auction through. Now he must, or forfeit his dollar. He debated this problem and decided to stay. The package did not interest him overmuch, but his money was up. He would have a look.

Losing all interest in the auction, he spent his time thinking through his unusual adventures of the night before. Closing his eyes, he seemed to see again that frightful wavering skeleton which in time he came to believe was his own. Two other skeletons he saw, one with a long-bladed knife wavering in its hand.

“I saw them later on the streets, those men,” he told himself, “only they were all dressed up in flesh and had their skins on—clothes too. It’s a queer business! Eyes staring at a fellow from the wall!” He shuddered. “Fairly gives you the creeps! Wonder why I agreed to join up with such an outfit as that old professor and his children.”

“People,” he whispered after a long period of deep thinking, “certain people have a way of getting inside of you and making you like them. They may be very good and they may be very bad, in certain ways, but you like them all the same. And you’ll follow them as a dog follows his master. Queer old world! The professor is like that, and so’s his daughter. Fellow’d come to like the boy too.

“Wonder what we were up to in that strange house,” he mused. “Good thing we got out of that cellar before anyone showed up! I doubt if that boy’s much of a fighter.

“Dumb!” He stirred impatiently in his seat. “Got a lot more to sell at this auction. Radios, somebody’s trunks, ‘with contents if any,’ some puppies—hear ’em squeal!—pop-corn in a sack, six broken lamps and a hundred more things. Guess I’ll get out. Buzz around here after awhile and pick up that package.”

When he returned to the auction room two hours later darkness was falling. A dull, drab fog had come creeping in from the lake. Lights glowed through it like great staring eyes. They reminded him of the eyes in the wall at the professor’s house.

“Bought a package here,” he grumbled to the clerk. “Some busted thing, I guess. Here’s the ticket and the rest of the money.”

“Here you are!” The parcel man handed out his prize package.

The thing was heavier than he had expected. Prying up a corner of the box, he thrust in a hand. He touched something round, smooth and hard. “Like a skull,” he whispered.

“Only some sort of electric lamp,” he