"Juney was shot in the back," announced another operative, bending to examine the wound. "I think I see what happened. Squeaky-Voice was at that stovepipe hole, and plugged him from there as he tried to let us in. Then Juney tried to lock up again, just as we pushed the door open." Upstairs they went, and investigated further. The hole had joined a narrow chimney, with no way out except the upper end, a rectangle eight inches by ten. Even with six corpses to show, the agents returned to their headquarters with a feeling of failure. "In the morning," they promised one another, "we'll give that one Salter we're holding another little question bee." But in the morning, the jailer with breakfast found that prisoner dead. He had been caught with a noose of thin, strong cord, tightened around his throat from behind. Suicide? But the cord had been drawn into the little ventilator hole, and tied to a projecting rivet far inside and above. On the same day, police, federal agents, newspapers and the public generally were exercised by the information that Shannon Cole, popular contralto star of stage, screen and radio, had been kidnapped from her Beverly Hills bedroom. No clues, and so the investigation turned to her acquaintances, among whom was Ben Gascon, recently retired from stage, screen and radio. * * * * * Benjamin Franklin Gascon left the office of the Los Angeles chief of detectives, where he had spent a most trying forenoon convincing his interrogators that he had no idea why he should be brought into the case. He knew nothing of the underworld. True, he knew Miss Cole professionally, but--and his face was rueful--had no reason to count himself a really close friend of hers. He had not seen her since the termination of their latest radio assignment. His personal affairs, meanwhile, were quite open to investigation; he had grown weary of ventriloquism, and had retired to live on the income from his investments. Later, he might resume his earlier profession, medicine. He was attending lectures now at the University of California in Los Angeles. And once again, he had no idea of how he was being brought into this case, or of who could have kidnapped Miss Cole. But, even as he departed, he suddenly got that idea. "_Tom-Tom!_" It took moments to string together the bits of logic which brought that thought into his mind. Things had happened to people, mostly gangsters, at the hands of a malevolent creature; that is, if the creature had hands--but it must have hands, if it could wield a gun, a slip-cord, a knife! It must also be notably small and nimble, if it really traveled up chimneys, down ventilator shafts, along power-lines and through stovepipe holes. Gascon's imagination, as good as anyone's, toyed with the conception of a wise and wicked monkey, or of a child possessed by evil like the children of old Salem, or a dwarf.