BIGGLES WORKS IT OUT

by Captain W. E. Johns

XVI. WHERE THE TRAILS ENDED (Pages 184 – 192)

“The following day saw the end of El Asile as a white settlement, religious or otherwise. Captain Joudrier, as the senior French official, took charge, with Marcel as his assistant, so Biggles and his friends remained really as spectators”. The dead “Prophets” are buried alongside the Tuareg. The surviving white men are flown in handcuffs to Algiers and later taken to Paris to be dealt with for their misdeeds. Biggles wants to find the Australian gold, but none can be found. A further quantity of the black power described as fertilizer is found in an isolated stone building. It was something between a foundry and a laboratory. (Johns gives us a description of what is there and then adds “There were other things, but these need not be described”). Emile had told Bertie that Odenski was a chemist. Biggles uses the chemicals to turn the dark power into gold. “One never knows when the simple chemistry one learns at school is going to be useful,” said Biggles. His smile broadened. “A mixture of nitric and muriatic acids, boiled, is one of the few things that will dissolve gold. I imagine those carboys over there contain acid. Not many people would recognize gold in its liquid form; but as it wouldn’t be easy to handle like that, our prophetic friends turned it into a substance that might easily pass for the fertilizer known as basic slag. Add sulphate of iron to the liquid, and the gold is precipitated – but you saw what happened. When I heated the precipitate it returned to its original form of metallic gold”. Biggles says the gold will have to be sent back to where it belongs. Biggles hopes that von Stalhein and Groot flew to the Plaine de la Crau, where they would have been arrested by the waiting gendarmes. The Count has disappeared. “He might be anywhere by now, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life looking for him. We shall hear of him again, no doubt”. Bertie says the Count paid him well as he gave him a hundred thousand franc notes. Joudrier looks at the money and pronounces them forgeries. Joudrier says there is reason to believe that Count von Horndorf is really Jacob Theller, a master printer and forger who once worked for Hitler. Biggles and Ginger fly home in the Mosquito. Algy and Bertie go back in the Dakota with the gendarmes to the South of France for a few days off, then fly back home in the Auster that was still in Nice. As to what happened to von Stalhein, he and Groot did land at the Plaine de la Crau. Groot got out first and was arrested by the gendarmes. Von Stalhein took off and left him there. Groot shot and wounded a gendarme and was then shot dead. The Mosquito was never heard of again, but in view of what Algy had heard about the headquarters of the gang being moved to behind the Iron Curtain, Biggles was of the opinion that von Stalhein had found refuge there. Weeks later, some climbers in the Swiss Alps found the wreckage of a plane crash and the bodies of Jacob Theller and his pilot Luis Leguez, a Mexican ex-gangster of Chicago are found. Their plane has flown into the side of a mountain “either as a result of inefficient pilotage or bad weather”. Various printing plates for forgeries are found, as are a wonderful collection of precious stones from various robberies that the Count and his gang had engineered. “As Biggles remarked when he heard the news, with so much wealth available it was no matter for wonder that the Count was able to finance an air organisation on such an ambitious scale”. Emile, by his behaviour at El Asile, had already in effect turned King’s Evidence, so no charge was preferred against him. He had to rejoin his regiment but trained to be a military pilot and was posted to North Africa on account of his desert experience. One final curious fact was this. Monsieur Bourdau, who had spent a fortune in a genuine attempt to save the ibex had provided the means of their extinction. Not one survived the occupation of the oasis. They had fallen to the rifles of the meat-hungry adventurers who called themselves the White Prophets.