The Apeman's Secret Read online

  Meanwhile, Joe had whispered something hastily to Sue Linwood. Suddenly she began to scream at the top of her lungs.

  “Shut her up!” Noah shouted angrily to his men. “If that racket carries far enough, she’ll have every cottage on the beach wakened up before this place is even set on fire!”

  One of the guards darted toward her and tried to clap his hand over her mouth. But Sue writhed away from him and kept on screaming!

  With all of the crooks’ attention focused on the girl, Frank and Joe seized their chance to fight back. Joe grabbed a chair and disarmed one guard, while Frank floored another with a hard left to the jaw!

  Vern Kelso and Rollo Eckert quickly joined in the fray. In moments, the scene in the cottage turned to bedlam as Noah’s party fought wildly with their intended victims. The furniture was smashed. At one point, Rollo picked up one guard bodily and hurled him clear across the front room!

  But above the noise, the Hardy boys heard the roar of an engine as a plane swooped down toward the beach. Scarcely a minute or two later, three men came charging in the front door of the cottage. Fenton Hardy was in the lead, followed by Jack Wayne and Zack Amboy!

  The tide of the battle soon turned, and the famed private investigator now took charge of the prisoners. Not only were Noah Norvel and his guards lined up with their hands in the air and their faces to the wall, but Vern Kelso and Rollo Eckert were as well.

  “You’ll all answer to the law!” Mr. Hardy told them curtly. “Great work, Sons!” he added proudly to Frank and Joe. “You not only solved your own cases, but mine, too!”

  The boys learned that soon after his first radio contact with Jack Wayne, he had found a pilot willing to fly him from Long Island to the Westchester County Airport, where Wayne and Zack Amboy had picked him up after dropping the boys at Bayport.

  Further questioning revealed that Micky Rudd, aside from pirating Archie Frome’s cartoon character, had not taken part in the network executive’s violent attempts to cover up the secret.

  “Did Kelso drug Zack Amboy?” Joe asked.

  “He had Rollo Eckert do it and tried to frame Zack by means of the two anonymous phone calls and the drawing dropped in the museum,” Mr. Hardy replied.

  Frank shook his head. “And all this to keep his job,” he said.

  “I’m afraid the network will have to get along without him from now on,” Mr. Hardy said with a grin. “He’ll be in prison for a long time!”

  After the criminals had been delivered to the police, the Hardy boys went home, dead tired. Just before he fell asleep, Frank vaguely wondered if there would be another mystery for them to solve in the future. But he was too exhausted to worry about it and had no idea that The Mummy Case would soon require their full attention.

  The Hardy boys were awakened the next morning by a visit from Chet Morton. The fat boy looked utterly crestfallen as he showed them a set of photostats he had just received in the mail from Star Comix. The photostats showed how his Captain Muscles story would look when published in one of the Star Comix books.

  “Just look what they’ve done!” Chet wailed. “They’ve changed the wording in the balloons to make Captain Muscles sound like an idiot! They’re running it as a funny story, as if the whole thing’s a joke!”

  “Well, after all, it’ll appear in a comic book,” Joe pointed out, smothering a grin.

  “Never mind him, Chet,” Frank sympathized, clapping the double-chinned cartoonist on the back. “Besides, you’ve still got the money they’re paying you. That ought to be good for some fun!”

  “You’re right,” said the fat boy, brightening up as his usual good humor came to the surface again.

  “Tell you what, guys! I’ll use it to throw another big disco party for all the Bayport gang!”