Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 82: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

84 THE METAL MONSTER “Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter—Drake. They are not invulnerable. No! The sun—strike them through the sun! Go into the city—not invulnerable—the Keeper of the Cones—strike at the Cones when—the Keeper of the Cones—ah-h-h-ah—” | We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked its way. “Vulnerable—under the law—even as. we! The Cones! “Go!” he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed. “Martin! Brother,” wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a be- leaguered citadel. But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated —a lonely sentient ator, his one line of communication with us cut; severed from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, _outside space. : _ | | And Drake and I looked at each other’s eyes, neither daring to be first to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seerned to be the sorrowfiil soul. CHAPTER XIV “Free! But a Monster!" HE peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh in- tolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting phe- nomena of our psychology. | It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through pre- cisely the same causes that have given to animals their protective color- ation—the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonish- ingly developed in the late war. Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a jungle—the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to death. GOGO .S (GO)