Night of the Werewolf (17 page)

“We read you, Jack! And do you ever sound good!” Joe responded. “Just keep dumping that foam!”

After a few more passes by the plane, the blaze gradually sputtered out. As soon as the fire-blackened woods cooled enough underfoot to permit their passage, Frank and Joe clambered out of the ravine.

A few hundred yards beyond, they reached the road bordering Indian Lake. Ahead and to the right, they could glimpse Eagle's Nest looming on the hillside in the moonlit darkness. The boys ran toward it. Parked near the roadside was a light-colored four-door sedan. Frank and Joe recognized it as the Tabors' car, which they had seen standing in the driveway of the family's house. Something else lay on the roadway nearby.

“Frank, it's another wolf skin!” Joe exclaimed, pausing long enough to snatch it up. “Wow! Look at those fangs, and the claws feel razor-sharp!”

“This one's got straps, too, for buckling it on!” Frank noticed, playing his flashlight over the furry disguise.

“But never mind all that now, we can examine it later. Let's find out what's going on at Eagle's Nest!”

Flinging the wolf skin over the hood of the car, the Hardys hurried up the hillside. Frantic voices reached their ears.

By this time, they were nearing the old timber mansion. Frank shone his flashlight in the direction of the cries. Two figures could be seen on the upper-story porch.

“It's Mr. Tabor and John! They're tied up!” Frank gasped.

The Hardys reached the building, ran inside and up a stairway. Making their way through the ancient structure, they came out on the porch and began untying the Tabors.

“The scoundrels who tied us used guns to
make
us call for help!” Karel Tabor exclaimed.

“Where are they?” Joe asked, working busily.

“You didn't see them?” put in John. “They must have gone out a different way than you came in.”

At that moment they heard a resounding thud, and the whole porch quivered. More blows followed.

“Great Scott!” cried the elder Tabor. “This porch is braced with temporary supports, and they're knocking out the props with sledgehammers!”

As he spoke, there was a loud rending, creaking noise and the porch started to give way! The Hardys' hearts were in their mouths as they realized they would be dumped down the steep hillside to their deaths on the rocks far below!

The porch swayed and teetered perilously beneath their feet. “Quickl” Frank cried. “Back inside!”

Mouldy timbers were cracking and splitting, ancient wooden pegs coming loose! Without bothering to finish untying the two prisoners, the Hardys dragged them frantically into the building through the open doorway.

Not a moment too soon! Scarcely an instant after they were inside the old mansion, a deafening
crack
resounded through the night air. The porch broke loose and crashed down the hillside!

With deft fingers, Frank and Joe finished undoing the ropes. “We'd better get out of here pronto!” Frank urged, straightening up from his task. “No telling what those crooks'll do next!”

The answer was soon apparent as the Hardys and the Tabors hurried to the stairway leading to the ground floor. Half a dozen figures were about to swarm up from below. Evidently the gang had realized that their intended victims had escaped destruction, and they were coming up to finish them off in person!

Frank and Joe recognized Neal Xavier's sharp-eyed visage among the upturned faces of their enemies, visible in the glare of the Hardys' flashlights.

“Come on! Grab some of these loose timbers!” Joe yelled to his companions.

The floor of the musty old mansion was strewn with boards, beams and other debris. Together the Hardys seized one good-sized plank and hurled it into the midst of their onrushing foes. Karel and John Tabor followed suit.

All four rained more wooden missiles on the crooks below. Then, before Xavier and his accomplices could recover their weapons and collect their wits, the group rushed down the stairway and leaped on them, kicking out and punching in all directions.

Despite the odds, the four held their own in the wild melee that followed. Even so, the outcome might have gone against them had two more fighters not joined the fray. The newcomers waded in, fists flying. One of the enemy quickly went down for keeps, then another, as punches connected with jaws. In the shadowy gloom, illuminated by moonlight streaming through the gaping windows and open sections of walls that were being replaced or repaired, Frank finally recognized their welcome allies.

“It's Dad and Jack Wayne!” he shouted to Joe.

The fight soon ended as the crooks lost heart. Neal Xavier tried to get away, but Frank brought him down with a flying tackle.

Fenton Hardy explained to his sons that he and Jack had been flying to Hawk River when they picked up Joe's radioed calls for help. Jack had landed at the airfield near Hawk River just long enough to load a tank of fire-fighting foam onto the aircraft. Then, within minutes, they had flown to the scene.

“It took a while to find a place to set down after the fire was out,” Jack added, “but I guess we got here in time.”

“You couldn't have timed it better!” Frank said gratefully. “Boy, that was some scrap!”

Joe was nursing a set of badly skinned knuckles. “If this joint was Dark Eagle's castle,” he said with a wry chuckle, “I guess you could call what happened a battle royal!”

From among the workmen's supplies inside the mansion, Karel Tabor produced several lanterns, and Fenton Hardy proceeded to interrogate the prisoners. Besides Neal Xavier, they included the crooked contractor with whom he was involved and three of the latter's gangster stooges, as well as another man, who proved to be a male nurse from the Pine Manor Rest Home.

Mr. Tabor looked pale and exhausted from the night's hectic events. However, his color gradually returned after taking some of his heart medicine, and he seemed jubilant over the fact that the mysteries troubling his firm and his family were at last being resolved.

The Hardys learned that he had discovered several serious engineering errors in Xavier's architectural work. He also found out that Xavier had taken bribes to let the contractor use cheaper, substandard materials than the specifications called for on construction jobs which he carried out for Chelsea Builders.

“Why didn't you report him?” Fenton Hardy asked.

“I was afraid if the news leaked out it would harm our firm's good name,” Karel Tabor replied. “So I agreed to say nothing if he would promise to reform and return the bribes. To ensure this, I recorded his full confession on tape.”

“And that's why you said nothing when Joe and I came to your office?” put in Frank.

“Exactly. I left it to Neal's own conscience as to how much he would tell you about the stolen contents of the safe.”

Xavier had cleverly twisted this situation to throw suspicion first on Upton Associates and then on his trusting boss, Karel Tabor himself, who was unaware that Xavier had, in fact, arranged the safe robbery with the help of the contractor's gangster associates in order to get rid of the incriminating tapes.

Xavier had joined Chelsea Builders with high ambitions, hoping some day to become the firm's president. Under Fenton Hardy's shrewd questioning, he confessed that he had connived with the same accomplices to cause the various building disasters and thus force Karel Tabor into early retirement.

However, John Tabor posed a new threat to his ambitions. The young architect was so brilliant, it seemed likely he would be chosen to succeed his father as head of the company. So Xavier devised the werewolf plot in order to drive the young man out of his mind, or at least make him appear unfit to run the firm.

From friendly chats with his boss, Xavier already knew about the family werewolf legend, and he gleaned other information by calling Desmond Quorn. At first he had pestered John with disturbing phone calls, disguising his voice. Later, after recommending the Pine Manor Sanatorium to the young man's father, he had harried John further with ghost voices by means of electronic gimmicks planted with the help of a friend who worked there as a male nurse. The latter was an expert hypnotist. While pretending to help John relax, the nurse had implanted post-hypnotic suggestions to make him behave suspiciously when he returned home to Hawk River.

On learning that the Tabors planned to call in the Hardy boys, Xavier had carried out the various incidents in Bayport to try and scare them off the case. He had also been the limping masquerader at the barbecue party—another step in his war of nerves against the Tabors.

Fearing that the Hardys might soon crack the case, Xavier had decided to eliminate both Karel Tabor and his son, John. To do this, he had first decoyed the Hardys off on a false scent, then lured the Tabors to Eagle's Nest with an emergency phone call.

Xavier's plan was to have his savage Doberman attack and kill the elder architect, which he assumed would not be difficult, given Tabor's weak heart. John would be found unconscious nearby with a wolf skin disguise, which Xavier had fashioned from a pelt the gangsters had stolen in a fur warehouse robbery. John would then be blamed for killing his father in a fit of werewolf mania.

“But you two punks had to spoil everything when you spotted our campfire in the ravine!” Xavier snarled at the Hardy boys.

The porch “accident” was his substitute murder plot for getting rid of all four victims, when it turned out Frank and Joe had survived the fire.

“His plan nearly worked, too,” Frank remarked to his father as the Hardys strolled outside while waiting for the State Police to arrive and take charge of the prisoners.

“Another second or so, and we'd have taken a plunge with the porch,” Joe added, then gasped.

“What's wrong?” Fenton Hardy inquired.

Joe hastily clambered up one of the broken porch supports toward something that glinted in the moonlight. When he climbed down again, he was clutching a lightly gleaming hatchet.

“It's Dark Eagle's silver tomahawk!” cried Frank.

Next day, Chet and Alena accompanied the Hardy boys to the Mohawk village near Hawk River, where Frank and Joe presented the trophy to Hank Eagle. The Indians gazed at it and examined it with awed reverence.

“Dark Eagle died on the porch when he was very old, looking over the lake,” Hank told the Hardys. “The mansion was probably getting pretty dilapidated even then. The tomahawk must have fallen from his hand and embedded itself in one of the supports. You don't know how much finding this means to my people!”

“It will always remind us of our proud past,” said his uncle, the medicine man, “and be an inspiration to our young ones!”

“It might even inspire Chet to build a better canoe,” Joe whispered to Alena with a grin.

“Listen! She's already promised to come paddling with me, wise guy!” Chet retorted. “But first we're going to stop on the way back to Hawk River for a few hamburgers and a banana split!”