Tropic Terror by C.K.M. Scanlon

Book Details

Tropic Terror – When revolutionaries start to murder people in Puerto Rico, Special Agent Dan Fowler of the F.B.I. is sent down there to clean up the problem.

Follow Dan Fowler’s Perilous Trail as He Hurls a Defiant Challenge to the Evil Power of the Mysterious, Murderous Tyrant of Puerto Rico!

Tropic Terror (1936) – Dan Fowler Challenges the Evil Power of the Mysterious, Murderous Tyrant of Puerto Rico!
Chapter I – Morning, Noon, and Night
Chapter II – Midnight
Chapter III – To Commit a Murder
Chapter IV – The Entering Wedge
Chapter V – El Pozal de Sangre
Chapter VI – For One’s Country
Chapter VII – The Gun-Runners
Chapter VIII – Chiquita
Chapter IX – Death Sentence
Chapter X – Into the Jaws of Death
Chapter XI – Ways That Are Dark
Chapter XII – One Knave and Sixty Fools
Chapter XIII – The Last Stroke

C. K. M. Scanlon was a “house name” that Standard Publications used on their Dan Fowler stories as well as others. Tropic Terror  was written by George Fielding Eliot (1894-1971).

George Fielding Eliot (1894-1971) was born in Brooklyn, New York. His family moved to Australia when he was eight years old. When World War I began, Fielding became a second lieutenant in the Australian infantry, and fought in the Gallipoli Campaign from May to August 1915. In 1916 he was transferred to the European theatre, and fought at the battles of the Somme, Passchendaele, Arras, and Amiens. He was wounded twice and was an acting major at war’s end.

He wrote pulp fiction starting in 1926 as well as crime novels. The movie Federal Bullets (1937) was based on his novels of the same name.

Tropic Terror contains 19 illustrations.

Files:

1. Scanlon-TropicTerror.epub

Excerpt: Tropic Terror

Chapter I

Morning, Noon, and Night

JUAN YRIARTE was awakened by the sunlight pouring through the window. He sat up in bed, his heart jerking, his hand convulsively closing on the butt of the pistol at his side.

Dios! He had meant but to lie down and rest for a moment—he had meant to stay awake throughout the night, to watch—

Ah, but the night had passed, the blessed morning was here. He had lived to see another sun, after all. He had been a fool to be afraid, to let them frighten him with their childish threats. The warm sun of his native Puerto Rico gave him fresh courage.

He glanced at his sleeping wife, Maria, at his side; he looked fondly over at the bed in the corner where his two children slept peacefully on.

He was safe. They were all safe. Again he looked at Maria—yes, she was sleeping soundly. Furtively he reached into his pocket—he was fully dressed, save for his shoes—and took out a crumpled note.

His lip curled in scorn as he read it:

Juan Yriarte, your time has come. You have refused to take the oath of the Sons of Liberty. You have been decreed to be an enemy of the Republic, and you will not live to see another sun. Perish, fool, in your folly.

The Committee of Justice.

Bah! To think that he had been so frightened—he, Juan Yriarte, mayor of the municipality of San Alonzo. Refused to take the oath of the Sons of Liberty—why, of course he had! He was a Puerto Rican, but he was an American citizen first of all, and proud of it. He had no truck with this silly independence business—independence would be the ruin of the island, as well he knew.

He doubted if the Sons of Liberty had anything to do with such murderous threats, anyway. They were a noisy lot, always holding mass meetings and parades and making speeches, but he didn’t think there was any harm in them. Just young folks making noise, for the most part. Not murderers. Their gran jefe, Hernan Hernandez, was a pompous little fat man who loved display and oratory, but he didn’t have the courage to kill anybody. No, no, this Committee of Justice threat was not the work of Hernan Hernandez—

But there had been that affair at Rio Falardo, last week, when two gentlemen of known anti-independence sentiments had been found dead in the main street at dawn, knifed to the heart, with a note “Thus perish all enemies of the Republic—signed, for the Sons of Liberty, The Committee of Justice” pinned to the dead breast of one of them by the knife which had drunk his heart’s blood.

And there had been the shooting from ambush of that soldier near Cayey, with three witnesses that a voice had cried from the jungle whence the shot had come—”The Committee of Justice has spoken!”

HE SHIVERED a little. Fear, like a cold uncoiling snake, stirred anew in his bosom. His wife awoke suddenly.

“Juan!” she cried on a note of sharp alarm, then laughed a little sheepishly to see him sitting up there in the sunlight. “Oh, Juan, you are all right—of course, of course. Madre mia, what a dream I have had. I thought I saw you dead before me. But Juan, you have not undressed! What is the matter?”

“Nothing, chiquita,” he answered. “You have slept well?”

“I have slept wretchedly,” she answered. “All night I have been tormented by dreams; and by that miserable dog, snuffling and whining about the house. Listen! There he is again!”

A lop-eared mongrel pup came whining into the room from the kitchen at the rear of the house. He snuffled at the floor, ran a few steps, put his muzzle to the floor and whimpered.

“What is the matter with the beast?” wondered Juan Yriarte. “Here, Pedro—come here!”

The dog ran to him, put his forepaws on the side of the bed, licked his master’s hand, then ran back to the same spot on the floor and commenced nuzzling and whining as before.

A chill ran through the body of Juan Yriarte.

“He hears or smells something under there,” he said to his wife, trying to speak casually. “Let me investigate.”

He swung out of the bed, went to the spot where the dog stood, pushed the animal aside, knelt and put his ear to the floor. Nothing—nothing save the scurrying of a mouse or a big beetle underneath the house—that was what the dog heard, of course. But this sound did not die away, it persisted. It was steady—tick-tick-tick!

Juan Yriarte felt the hair rising on the back of his neck. He lifted his head, opened his mouth to scream the alarm at his wife—but that scream never left his throat. With a thunderous roar the floor of his home rose beneath him—the world was blotted out in flaming darkness.

When his frightened neighbors dragged him from beneath the ruins of his house, his mouth was still open —as though trying to warn that wife who would never need any warning in this world, those children who had died in that blast of vengeful murder—

Only the dog, preserved by some miracle, lived to crawl to his dead master’s side and lick his face, whining the while. He had done his best, poor faithful brute, but master hadn’t understood until it was too late.

Excerpt From: C.K.M. Scanlon. “Tropic Terror.”