Also In This Series

By Kenneth Robeson

#1: JUSTICE, INC.

#2: THE YELLOW HOARD

#3: THE SKY WALKER

#4: THE DEVIL’S HORNS

#5: THE FROSTED DEATH

#6: THE BLOOD RING

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

FIRST PRINTING: DECEMBER, 1972

COPYRIGHT © 1940 BY STREET & SMITH PUBLICATIONS, INC.

COPYRIGHT RENEWED 1969 BY THE CONDÉ NEST PUBLICATIONS, INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THIS WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION IS PUBLISHED BY

ARRANGEMENT WITH THE CONDÉ NEST PUBLICATIONS. INC.

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY PETER CARAS

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY IS A DIVISION OF WARNER BOOKS,

75 ROCKERFELLER PLAZA, N.Y. 10019.

A Warner Communications Company

ISBN: 0-446-64-985-6

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

STOCKHOLDERS IN DEATH

CHAPTER I: Stockholders in Death

CHAPTER II: The Search

CHAPTER III: Nicky Luckow

CHAPTER IV: Wanted—For Murder

CHAPTER V: Suicide Heights

CHAPTER VI: The Warning!

CHAPTER VII: Beyond The Law

CHAPTER VIII: Cement Coffin!

CHAPTER IX: Human Tank

CHAPTER X: Hide-Out

CHAPTER XI: Flaming Death!

CHAPTER XII: Dead or Alive

CHAPTER XIII: Desperate Call

CHAPTER XIV: Three To Die!

CHAPTER XV: Life for a Life

CHAPTER XVI: My Brother’s Killer

CHAPTER XVII: Police Slaughtered

CHAPTER XVIII: Veiled Lady

CHAPTER XIX: Down to the Sea

STOCKHOLDERS

IN DEATH

CHAPTER I

Stockholders in Death

It was after one o’clock in the morning, but Joseph Crimm, semi-retired lawyer, was just walking home from his office on Lexington Avenue. It was the latest he had worked for a long time. Joseph Crimm, dapper and elderly and kindly-eyed, very seldom had anything important enough to work that late on.

He did now. Something very important. He was extremely thoughtful about it. Now and then he frowned a little.

It was dark here. Crimm had a beautiful house, remodeled, though the house was in a spotty neighborhood on the East Side. New York is like that—big, expensive apartments nest in the middle of slums; remodeled tenement buildings that house millionaires, right in the center of warehouse or loft districts.

Crimm’s place had a terrace overlooking the East River, and was as nice a home as you’d care to see, once you’d entered the front gate. But outside the wall, the street was shabby and as dark as the inside of a hobo’s hat.

Crimm didn’t usually notice the darkness and shabbiness. He did, tonight, because he was walking. He didn’t often walk from the office to his home. He hadn’t really intended to tonight.

His elder son, Tom, had promised to call for him at twelve thirty in his car. Tom hadn’t showed up, and when Crimm went outside, the night air was pleasant; so he had decided to walk, instead of flagging a taxi.

Now he was a little sorry. It was very dark. Also, he was aware of a chronic affliction that began to make itself noticeable in the form of extreme tiredness, as if he had walked ten miles instead of less than one.

He would have taken a cab, now, to go the last block or so to his home. But he was in a region where there were no cabs; so he plodded on—

To his doom!

A car came down the dark street. The car was dark, too, and melted in with the building shadows. Only its dim cowl lights were on. Crimm paid little attention to it, at first. Then he eyed it with sudden relief.

It was, he thought, Tom’s car. It was the same model and color as the sedan his son drove. Tom had been delayed, had found him gone from the office and was just catching up to him now.

Crimm’s relief faded into uneasiness.

He began to sense that this wasn’t his son’s car, after all. Something about the way the figure at the wheel wore his hat, sat in the driver’s seat, was different. It was someone else with the same kind of sedan.

The car whirled suddenly and came straight at the spot on the sidewalk where Crimm stood.

The elderly, retired lawyer thought at first that the driver merely meant to make a U-turn in the street and go back the way he had come. But the front wheel, instead of continuing cramped for a turn, straightened out, and the sedan continued to leap straight at him.

Crimm yelled and ran to the right.

The car jounced over the curb, screeched to a stop before crashing a building wall, and backed up. It tore at Crimm again.

Crimm began to run down the walk toward his own gate. After him, on the sidewalk instead of the street, came the sedan.

It was mad, nightmarish. It was the kind of thing you often dream might happen but know very well never actually will.

The car chased down the walk like a mad thing. It squeezed between hydrants and building walls, twisted out on the street and back up on the walk when some obstruction gave too narrow a lane for it to negotiate. But always it charged at Crimm.

After the first yell Crimm was silent. He needed all his breath. Needed it for running and ducking.

He side-stepped into a small doorway. The car plunged right at him. The door posts might or might not have held the bumper from nosing in and crushing him. He didn’t wait to find out. Instinctively he leaped out again and went back along the walk, away from the river.

The car came right after him.

The thing seemed like a live creature, insane with hate, motivated by just the one purpose of mangling Crimm’s spare figure. It was like a bull elephant charging at a victim, regardless of all obstacles, no matter where the victim should turn.

At no time did Crimm see the man at the wheel. He scarcely paid attention to the man. indeed. It was as if the car itself were the thing ramming at him, with no human will to guide it.

The crazy, horrible game could not go on long. For nearly three minutes Crimm doubled and wheeled and ducked, narrowly missed death a score of times by the flailing bumper.

Then he clutched at his chest, uttered a wheezing groan, and sank to the sidewalk.

Now the car could have rammed over him with no trouble at all. Now it had simply to go straight ahead. But, with an entire lack of sense, it did no such thing.

It stopped well away from the prone figure of the elderly man, backed into the street and went at a law-abiding, subdued pace back toward the center of Manhattan.

Crimm lay there. A rattling kind of gasping was coming from his bluish lips, but he was unconscious of that. He was unconscious of everything. And that was fortunate, for his kind of affliction carries pain so great that it is scarcely to be endured.

A woman came out of the building across the street, saw the body and ducked back in. Two men followed her out in a moment and carried Crimm into their apartment.

They took a wallet from his pocket, identified him, phoned the police and his home.

Joseph Crimm had two sons; Tom, the elder, and Wayne, the younger. Tom reached the house where his father was held in less than half an hour; Wayne in about an hour and a quarter.

Wayne was about twenty, looking impulsive and emotional with his rough blond hair and intense blue eyes. Tom was twenty-six, though he looked to be thirty. He was as dark as his young brother was fair, and had a disillusioned, cynical expression on his face. In fact the characters of the two were plainly to be read on their countenances.

Wayne was idealistic, generously honest, willing to trust people. Tom was realistic and hard-boiled. He would take nothing for granted, but would examine it from all sides, skeptically, before putting any faith in it. Then his faith would be lukewarm.

Tom and Wayne were bending over their father with stricken faces. The doctor was at a distance. No need to ask him how the patient was. Joseph Crimm was dying. That was plain enough.

The police had come and gone. They’d heard a tale of a car almost running this man down, then of his fainting with a heart attack. No license number of the car, nothing. What could they do? Even if they’d found the car’s driver, they’d have been helpless. According to the dying man’s own admission, the car had never touched him.

But Tom and Wayne were getting a different version and were forming different conclusions.

“I meant to leave you two a fortune,” Crimm whispered to his boys. “Now there is very little to leave. I’m sorry.”

“What’s this talk of leaving us anything?” said Wayne stoutly. “You’re going to stick around for years yet. You—”

His father’s slight smile, twisted suddenly with pain, stopped him.

“There was a large fortune, till a few days ago,” he whispered. “Then, I bought stock in the Ballandale Glass Corp. A great deal of stock. Enough to control the vote at the next meeting—”

A spasm wracked his body and stopped his words.

“Dad—we don’t care anything about money—” began Tom.

Crimm shook his head, just a little, in command for him to keep still and listen.

“Not much time left. Get this clearly. I bought the stock to swing control from the receivers of the Ballandale Corp., which recently went bankrupt. Those receivers, the Town Bank of New York principally, were going to smash the concern, again, to squeeze out minority stockholders. Then they’d buy it back cheap. I wanted to stop that.”

“You mean—the Town Bank where we’ve done most of your business?” said Wayne softly.

“That’s it. Bunch of thieves! I mean it. My stock was delivered to my account there. They stole it. I’d bought the stock secretly, in small lots, so no one would know I was getting control. The stock was still unsigned by me, held in dummy names. So there you have it. Town Bank stole over two million dollars’ worth of my stock—and no one on earth can prove it was my stock and that they took it.”

“But, Dad,” said Tom, “you said you distrusted Town Bank, yet you had your stock delivered to your account there—”

“I did not. There was a misunderstanding. My brokerage house was to deliver it to my home. They made a mistake and sent it to the bank—”

A suppressed scream came from Crimm’s lips, as he had the worst heart seizure of all.

Sweat came to the man’s clay-colored forehead as he stopped the scream and wrenched out a few words.

“Sorry I . . . no fortune for you . . . my own sons—”

Joseph Crimm was still. The supreme pain of angina pectoris was over. He was dead!

Tom and Wayne drew long breaths and stared, white-faced, at each other.

“I’m a murderer,” whispered Tom.

“Don’t say that.” Wayne caught his older brother’s arm. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“If I’d met him with the car, he wouldn’t have been walking. And that drunken fool of a driver he told about would not have had the chance to scare him to death—”

Tom was suddenly silent. He stayed that way for so long that Wayne started to say something. Tom held up his hand, and his face had become a mask of rage.

“Wayne—that driver wasn’t drunk nor crazy. This is deliberate murder!”

“I don’t see—”

“Look! Dad has just been robbed, in the coldest, crudest way robbery can be accomplished, by an unscrupulous bunch of business men. Now Dad is a fighter. He’d have made things hot for that gang; so they put him out of the way. It was well known that he had a very bad heart. All right! Chase him with a car; scare him; make him run and leap as even a well man of sixty-five should never do, let alone a sick one. Then, when he keels over with a heart attack, just drive away. There’s your victim, dead! But there isn’t a mark on your car, and even a witness could never make a charge stick, because you never actually touched him.”

Wayne’s blue eyes were wide and flaming.

“Dad’s death is cold-blooded murder,” said Tom furiously. “It’s up to us to prove it, though I haven’t the faintest idea how. And it’s up to us to get the Crimm fortune back from those highbinders at Town Bank.”

Wayne nodded, looking ten years older in the last ten minutes.

“We get the money back,” he said harshly, “and we pin murder on whoever drove that car. But—how do we do these things?”

“I don’t know, yet.” Tom’s hands went over his face. “If only I’d been able to meet him in the car! But I had a blow-out as I was coming to the office. A piece of glass or something cut a V-shaped lump out of the tire, clear to the fabric. The right rear. Then she blew.”

Wayne’s hand went impulsively to his older brother’s shoulder.

“Don’t feel like that. It wasn’t your fault. Come, let’s get Dad home.”

Joseph Crimm couldn’t have been moved before. He was so close to death that the attempt would have killed him, at once. He could be moved now that death had struck.

In a mournful procession, he was borne on down the block to the Crimm home. After him came Tom and Wayne, with shoulders bowed.

Murder—subtle, deliberate, clueless! They both felt sure that’s what it was. Someone would pay; both vowed that.

Someone would pay! But—by what means could they be brought to justice?

CHAPTER II

The Search

The two brothers, even after they reached home with their sad burden, took a little while to realize just what they’d been told.

They had heard what had been done to their father’s fortune, but it took a while for it to sink in. Banks, on the whole, are as ethical as any other form of business. Now and then, a banking group does arise which is ruthless and shady in its dealings, just as in any other business endeavor. But it’s alway harder to believe it of banks.

At first Tom and Wayne didn’t really believe a bank had stolen over two million dollars of their father’s securities. Then they began to accept this monstrous thing as a fact, and go into action.

“One thing,” said Wayne. “Dad wasn’t in the least out of his head. His mind was clear as a bell at the last. If he said that happened, it happened.”

Tom nodded.

“Far as that goes, I remember Dad mentioning, once, that a bunch of highbinders were after Ballandale Glass, and that he felt like stepping in and blocking the play. So he did it, after all.”

“All that stock,” said Wayne. “Over two million dollars. Surely there’s some sign that it belonged to Dad, even if it was bought secretly and not yet signed over to him.”

“There must be notes on it among his papers,” agreed Tom. “We’ll look.”

They went over the house, particularly Joseph Crimm’s library and home office and his bedroom. But they found no scrap of paper mentioning a transaction in Ballandale stock.

They went to his office, arriving there at gray dawn. And there they found signs that someone had come before them—and had searched for something, too.

The vault was closed; but when they opened it, the contents were found to be disarranged. The desk drawers were in a jumble, unlike the orderliness with which their father usually kept things.

There was no way of telling who had searched that place before them, nor what the mysterious searcher had found. But there was one clear fact:

No hint of Ballandale stock purchases was anywhere among their father’s papers.

Tom’s face was a dark, frozen mask. Wayne’s was openly furious, and his blue eyes flamed.

“All right,” Tom said in a low, trembling voice. “They’ve gotten away with it, so far. They got the stock, and made sure there wasn’t a thing left behind to trace ownership. They killed Dad to shut him up. But, by heaven, we’ll get them for it!”

Wayne nodded.

“We’ll report this right away. Now! The police—”

“The police!” echoed Tom bitterly.

Wayne stared at him, frowning a little.

“Why, yes! Why not the police? This is crime. You call in the police in a criminal matter.”

“Sure, it’s a crime. But on a big scale. On thefts involving millions of dollars, my small brother, the police are about as much good as an air rifle against elephants.”

“But—”

“You know who the Town Bank directors are, don’t you?” said Tom harshly.

“Yes! We’ve met most of them at Dad’s at one time or another. There’s Lucius Grand, Robert Rath, Louis Wallach and Frederick Birch.”

“And Theodore Maisley, president of the bank,” added Tom. “You know their caliber—all powerful, wealthy, influential men. And you’d call the cops against a bunch like that! Why, men of that stripe own the police.”

Wayne chewed his upper lip. He had often been rubbed the wrong way by his older brother’s cynicism. He was now. But he had to admit there was some slight justification for it. It’s hard for the police to get a handle against such men.

Wayne suddenly banged his right fist in his left palm.

“Of course!” he exclaimed. “Just the thing!”

“What’s just the thing?” snapped Tom sourly.

“We’re not the first people to find ourselves in such a predicament. Others, besides ourselves, have been pitted against men too powerful, too subtle, for the regular police. And they’ve still managed to do something about it. They’ve gone to Justice, Inc., to The Avenger, for help.”

“Avenger?” said Tom, scowling. “Who’s that?”

“Don’t you ever read?” said Wayne. “There’s a man named Richard Henry Benson, who mixes in just such cases. He’s young, and tremendously rich. Some time ago his family was lost in a crooked deal, and ever since he has made it his business to fight crime—in revenge!”

“Baloney!”

“It’s true! I’ve heard Dad speak of him.” Wayne’s eyes were shining with a light of hero worship. “He has his headquarters in Bleek Street, in lower Manhattan. He has some helpers, and they all call themselves Justice, Inc. That’s because they see to it that justice is done, no matter how smart the crooks—”

“For how much?” Tom’s voice was a stream of cold water across his brother’s enthusiasm.

“What?” said Wayne, jerked back to earth.

“He sees that justice is done—for how much?”

“He doesn’t work for money,” Wayne protested. “He has all any man needs—”

“Hooey! Show me a man who doesn’t work for money, and you’ll be showing me a corpse. Of course he gets something out of it.”

Wayne’s jaw set. It seemed to have gotten much more mature in the last few hours.

“It’s my vote that we go and see The Avenger and ask him to help us,” he declared quietly.

“Sure! And have him chisel half of Dad’s fortune, if he recovers the stock! Nothing doing.”

“All right, what’s your idea on this?”

“Town Bank stole that stock and killed Dad,” said Tom grimly. “So that makes them thieves and murderers. Yet they are too high for the police to tackle. There’s only one thing to do. That is—get even tougher thieves and murderers after them!”

The puzzled crease deepened between Wayne’s blond brows.

“There is a lad in New York named Nicky Luckow,” Tom said. “A nice boy. Rackets, gang murders, dope, all the rest of it. He’d bump off the mayor for a thousand dollars. That’s the man I want help from, in a case like this.”

“You’re crazy!” gasped Wayne. “Luckow is the most notorious gangster in the East.”

“Right! I’m going to him and tell him about this. I’m going to offer him a quarter of the value of the Ballandale stock—if he and his gang can recover it, and find out which Town Bank official is directly responsible for Dad’s death.”

“But if you did locate the murderer, you couldn’t turn him over to the law when you’d rounded him up with such a crew.”

“There’s no law against it. When Luckow and his crew find our man, he’ll be dealt with at no bother to the courts.”

“Tom!”

“Bunch of racketeers at that bank, huh?” raged Tom. “We’ll see how they like being stacked up against professionals for a change.”

Wayne stared at his brother. Lumps of muscle quivered at the corners of his mouth. Tom’s eyes were cold points of resolve.

“I’m going to The Avenger,” said Wayne.

“I’m going to Nicky Luckow,” grated Tom.

“You damn fool,” said Wayne, glaring.

“You trusting babe in the woods,” sneered Tom. “Go to your chiseling Avenger and see how much he tries to gyp out of you!”

In lower Manhattan there is a street only a short block long. One whole side is taken up with the windowless back of a great storage building. The other side has several stores, vacant, a vacant warehouse and, in the middle, three old brick apartment buildings.

The street is named Bleek Street. In effect the block is owned by one man, since he has the stores and warehouse across from the storage building under long lease, and owns the three old brick buildings.

That owner is Richard Henry Benson, known to police and underworld, alike, as—The Avenger.

The three old three-story buildings, behind the shabby facade, are thrown into one; and the interior is furnished with a quiet splendor possible only to a very rich man.

The entire top floors of the three buildings are one enormous room; and in that room, when they are not at work on some dangerous case, are to be found the little crew calling itself, Justice, Inc.

Four of them were up there now: Nellie Gray, Josh Newton and his wife Rosabel, and Smitty, whose full and much-hated name was Algernon Heathcote Smith.

Smitty looked at the clock. It was a quarter of nine.

“Where’s the chief?” he asked.

“In the lab,” said Nellie. There was a reverent tone in their voices. Almost an awed tone. You didn’t speak lightly of The Avenger. “As far as I know he’s been there all night.”

“He doesn’t seem to need sleep or anything,” said Josh. “I sometimes think he isn’t human—”

There was a soft buzz and they all were silent.

Down on the street, in the center of the three converted buildings, was the entrance and vestibule under the small sign which simply read:

JUSTICE

The buzz had indicated that someone, down there, wanted to get in. And when that happened, it was usually important.

Smitty switched on a small television radio. The giant, with his moon-face and not-too-intelligent-looking china-blue eyes was an electrical engineer of superb capability. He had designed the gadget. It showed whoever was in the vestibule.

On the screen, now, flashed the image of a young fellow with hurt blue eyes and blond hair.

“Yes?”

They saw the young fellow start when Smitty’s voice sounded out of nowhere in the vestibule downstairs.

“I am Wayne Crimm,” he said, looking around, not knowing in what direction to pitch his voice. “I would like to see Mr. Benson.”

Crimm? At that name, they all looked at each other.

In the corner was a teletype that continually flashed the news of the world before the eyes of The Avenger and his aides. It had flashed a message concerning that name, early in the morning.

Joseph Crimm, well-known lawyer, had dropped dead of heart failure a block from his home in the late night.

Now his son was here to see Dick Benson.

Smitty stared at Nellie, who nodded.

“I’ll get the chief from the lab,” she said. “You let Wayne Crimm up. I’m pretty sure the chief will want to see him. And I’m pretty sure that when he does, there will be some sparks flying, somewhere!”

CHAPTER III

Nicky Luckow

Nicky Luckow was a power in New York’s underworld. Some went so far as to say that he commanded it. Whether or not he headed it, he was so powerful that anyone could find him by merely looking up his address in the Manhattan phone book. He didn’t have to hide out.

Nicholai Luckow, West Twenty-fourth Street.

The address given was that of the Jeff Hotel. Luckow owned the place, a small one; and few but his henchmen had rooms there.

He was sitting in his second-floor office when the message came. The office was large, luxurious, and very, very businesslike. There were filing cabinets, a desk where a dark-eyed girl with a hard mouth worked, his own desk, and a battery of telephones. It didn’t look like a gangster’s lair at all.

The man who came in gave it away, though. He walked like a cat with a grouch against the world. His eyes were hooded and mean. The bulge at his left shoulder fairly shouted the fact that he packed a gun.

Luckow looked at the card the man dropped on his desk.

THOMAS W. CRIMM

He looked at the card for a full minute, eyes as expressionless as dully polished stones. Then he raised immaculately tailored shoulders in a small shrug.

“Bring him in!”

Tom Crimm was in the little lobby of the hotel. He saw that the clerk behind the key counter looked like an inquiring weasel, and Tom was glad of it. He saw that three men watching him from other parts of the lobby looked like rats on a large scale, with a rat’s deadliness of eye, and he was glad of that, too.

The tougher this outfit was, the better Tom was going to like it.

The man who had taken his card came back.

“O.K., buddy.”

Tom got into an elevator with the man. The elevator boy looked at him with a pair of treacherous orbs, as if contemplating sticking a knife in him just for the hell of it. The cage stopped at the second floor.

Tom walked down a hall, and past an open door. There were five men in the room behind the door, playing poker, though it was earlier in the morning than Tom had seen cards played before. The five stared at him with an absolute lack of curiosity on their evil faces, as he went by. Then he was in the office of Luckow. himself.

Tom stared at a flat, blue-jowled face, and into eyes appearing more like gray-blue stones. And for just a moment he felt fear crawl along his spine, and he was not so sure he was being as smart as he’d thought he was.

But the apprehension died swiftly. To catch a crook, hire a crook. To deal with a murderer, employ another murderer. He’d show that bank gang—

Luckow listened to Tom’s story as if hardly hearing it. He grunted once or twice, and stared without words when Tom concluded.

“There you have it,” said Tom. “Somebody in that crew killed my father. I want him spotted and the stock recovered. There’s between two and two and a half million dollars’ worth of the stock. Your take”—Tom had read the books, and knew a few of the terms—“your take, if we can get the stuff back and nail the killer, will be five hundred thousand dollars. I guess that’s worth working for.”

“Yes,” said Luckow. His voice was soft, smooth, a bit sibilant. He was a product of the slums, but had put such a veneer over it that you’d never know it. “Yes, that would be worth working for.”

“Then you’ll throw in with me?” Tom said eagerly.

“I’ll think it over for a little while.”

“I’ll go back home and phone you—”

“Take a room down the hall,” said Luckow smoothly. “I’ll give you a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on this in a couple of hours.” He turned to the man who had brought Tom in. “Show him to Room 236, Tim.”

The man with the catlike walk and the hooded, mean eyes took Tom down the line to a vacant room. He returned to Luckow’s office.

“What do you think of the layout?” he said. He was Nick Luckow’s personal bodyguard and a trusted man.

“The answer’s ‘yes,’ ” said Luckow, “but I won’t tell the chump in 236, for a while. Make him think I’m not sure whether I want it or not. But I want it, all right. That guy’s going to be a gold mine to us, Tim.”

“He looks like he knew a thing or two,” said Tim.

Luckow almost smiled. And the grimace, on his hard flat face, was worse than a scowl.

“He’s a wise guy, Tim. And a chump who thinks he’s a wise guy is easiest to twist around. You can fool ’em clear to the end. A lot of ’em stay fooled even after the smoke’s cleared away and they’re planted. Oh yes, I’m taking him up on his proposition, all right. I don’t turn away gold mines when they walk up to me. Two to two and a half million in unlisted stock. Well, well! And we’ll get it back for him for five hundred grand. Sure! Sure we will!”

In the great third floor room at Bleek Street, The Avenger heard Wayne Crimm’s story with hardly a word of interjection.

Richard Henry Benson didn’t have to talk to be impressive. Just the looks of the man insured something like awe in all beholders.

His average-sized body concealed a physical power that was colossal. You knew that the moment you saw him. But the physical power was dwarfed by the sight of his face. It was paralyzed; white as the thick, virile hair above his broad forehead.

From the white, dead face peered a pair of eyes that were so light gray as to be almost colorless.

One look at The Avenger told you why the underworld hated and feared him as poisonous snakes hate and fear a mongoose.

As Wayne Crimm’s story unfolded, Smitty and Josh began to look more and more savage. And the faces of Nellie and Rosabel expressed more and more sympathy. All Benson’s aides existed only to fight crime, because all of them had been badly hurt at one time or another by criminals. And here was a rotten thing being turned up before their noses.

A theft of millions of dollars’ worth of securities! Subtle murder to conceal the trail of the theft! No clues for police to work on—and, indeed, perpetrators of the crime too powerful for the police to handle, in any event!

“That’s why I came to you for help,” concluded Wayne. “The thing is too big for the regular channels of justice. And that is why Tom, my brother, went to Luckow.”

Smitty and Josh started a little. Benson’s pale, infallible eyes suddenly were like chips of stainless steel in his paralyzed countenance.

“Your brother went to Luckow? You mean Nick Luckow?” he said vibrantly.

“Yes! Tom said Dad’s fife and the securities had been taken by violence, and that he’d have revenge the same way. So he has thrown in with the most notorious gang in the country.”

“He’ll get small comfort there,” observed Josh softly. The Negro was a philosopher. “Milk does not come from stones, nor honest help from rotten crutches.”

The Avenger was not talking. He was on his feet, going toward the door.

“We’ve got to get your brother away from Luckow, first thing,” he said, voice quiet but packed with power. “When honest folk tangle with criminals—”

He did not complete the sentence. But Nellie Gray, with a world of sympathy in her lovely blue eyes, could have completed it.

When honest folk tangle with criminals—great tragedy results. If any man on earth was in a position to know that, it was Dick Benson.

“You are going after Tom—in that nest of killers—alone?” gasped Wayne.

“Yes! He can’t be allowed to stay with Luckow,” Benson said, his eyes flaring. “I can foresee all sorts of trouble if that is permitted.”

“Probably he’ll be home by now,” faltered Wayne.

“No! He’ll be at Luckow’s. He could be very valuable to the man. Nick Luckow is smart, in his animal way. He won’t let your brother out of his sight if he can help it.”

“But—going alone!” said Wayne.

The giant Smitty was as concerned as Wayne. But Smitty said nothing. If the chief was determined to go alone, nothing could be said that would sway him.

“If I went there with help,” said Benson, “there might be trouble. If I go alone, they will think me harmless.”

Josh snorted a little at that. The idea of any man being able to look at The Avenger—with his dead, white face and terrible, pale eyes—and think him harmless, was almost funny.

But there was nothing funny about Benson’s actions. They were suicidal. Josh and Smitty knew that. And even Wayne suspected it.

Everyone seemed to know it but Benson, himself. He treated it as a matter of course.

When he got out of his car in front of the notorious Jeff Hotel a few minutes later, there was almost a smile in his cold, colorless eyes.

Benson walked clamly and unhurriedly into the lobby of the hotel. The desk clerk turned his inquiring weasel eyes on him, and clenched his hands suddenly. That death-mask of a face! The icy, pale eyes! Thev clerk was only on the fringe of the underworld, but he knew this man by sight.

His hand stealthily slid under the edge of the counter and pressed something. The Avenger saw the move and knew it was a warning to those upstairs.

Trouble! Danger in the lobby!

Benson walked past the desk, not seeming to move fast, yet getting to the elevators in an incredibly short time.

The three men who habitually lounged in the lobby were all starting for him, now. One had his gun halfway out. The Avenger slid into the cage waiting at the lobby floor, and closed the metal doors with a jerk at the lever.

“Hey—” began the rat-eyed boy at the controls.

He stopped as the pale and awful eyes bored into his own.

“Luckow’s floor,” The Avenger said to the elevator operator.

“It’s f-five,” said the boy.

He stopped. There was something about the icy glare in those eyes that robbed his will of the ability to lie. Anyhow, Luckow had enough rodmen around to take care of any one man—even one like this. So he didn’t see why he should risk his skin to conceal the floor on which the mob leader had his office.

“Two!” he corrected himself, sending the cage upward as he spoke.

He was almost smiling when he opened the elevator door on the second floor. Luckow’s men would take care of this smart ape with the snow-white hair and the dead pan and the white-steel eyes.

As Benson came out of the cage, a man in the hall turned idly; then he stiffened as he saw a stranger. His gun came out with a swiftness of draw that would have compared with the draw of the old Western gun-fighters.

But it wasn’t fast enough.

The Avenger had taken one step from the cage door. It was an easy, flowing motion, but it was actually so swift that it made the moves of the hall guard seem like those in a moving picture retarded ten times.

Benson’s fist flashed up. It caught the wrist behind the gun. The automatic spun up, butt over muzzle, while the man watched with gaping jaws.

The Avenger caught the gun expertly, while the guard rubbed his wrist and wondered if the bone were broken. Benson whirled toward the cage.

The operator had his hand at the back of his neck, where a knife was snuggled under his collar. At the glare in the pale eyes, he slowly took his hand away, trying unconvincingly to smile. And with a shaky whistle to show that he was really the most harmless fellow alive, he shut the cage door and started back toward the lobby.

“I want to see Luckow,” said Benson.

His voice was quiet. There was no more emotion in it than there was in his dead, still face. The guard stopped rubbing his wrist as he began to realize who this man was. He had heard tales, too. He was willing to believe all of them, now. Any guy with guts enough to come here, alone—

He did not realize, of course, nor did the world at large, that the guts of Richard Henry Benson came not from ordinary courage, but from a sort of supercourage springing from the fact that he didn’t care whether he lived or not.

Some day, he knew, he was going to die in a brush with professional killers. But he was entirely indifferent to that prospect. The sooner he died, the sooner he would be united with wife and daughter again.

A man who genuinely doesn’t care whether he dies or lives, can do almost impossible things.

“Well,” Benson said, still not raising his voice and yet getting a whiplash effect from it, “show me to Luckow.”

“O.K., pal,” said the man.

He started down the hall.

The office was at the front end. The path lay past several open doors; one of them was No. 236. As The Avenger went past this, his quick eyes noticed that it was open an inch and also noted a man within.

The man was walking slowly up and down the room, face twisted with rage and anger. He did not look like the type usually to be found here.

Benson stopped, and swung the door farther open.

“On second thought,” he said to the man with the injured wrist, “I won’t see Luckow. Not yet, anyway. I’ll stop in here first.”

“Want me to come in, too?” said the man, resigned to being held a prisoner so that he couldn’t give the alarm.

“No! Stay out.”

The man’s mouth hung open in surprise. This human hurricane with the steely eyes and the white hair was, in effect, giving him a free hand to call as many pals as he pleased.

He acted in a hurry, running toward the front of the hall where Luckow sat in his office.

Benson shut the door and turned to Tom, who was staring in surprise. The Avenger knew that a lot of alarms had already been given. One more, by the hall guard, wouldn’t matter much.

“You’re Tom Crimm, of course,” he said smoothly, eyes cold and calm and impersonal.

“Yes. I—”

“And you have come to this gang for help in your father’s death. I don’t blame you. The idea, on the surface, would seem to have merit. But, believe me, it is the wrong way to go about it. There is danger that—”

“I get you now,” said Tom, staring fixedly. “You’re this Avenger guy Wayne talked about.”

“Some call me that,” said Benson. “Please, there is little time—”

“And Wayne sent you to pick me up,” said Tom, getting louder of tone. “Sent you out like a nursemaid, to take me home and wipe my little nose for me. Well, I can wipe my own nose.”

The chill, pale eyes daunted Tom; but he kept on, working himself up into a fury.

“What’s your racket, anyhow? Everybody’s got one. So what’s yours? Think you can get all my father’s money, if you recover it? This stuff of working just to help people in distress is the bunk. I don’t believe it for a minute.”

“I knew you had sense, the first time I saw you,” a voice purred from the doorway.

Tom and The Avenger turned. Nicky Luckow was coming in on padded, soundless feet, like a great cat. His dull eyes turned on Benson.

“I’ve heard of you,” he said. “I have the same ideas as Tom, here. What’s your racket, pal? Why the sympathy for the underdog?”

“I don’t believe you’d care to hear about that,” said Benson, eyes like ice chips, face as emotionless as the face of the moon. He had lost! He’d known it the moment he looked into Tom’s cynical, dark eyes, and noted the wise sneer on his lips when he spoke of rackets.

There were steps in the hall. A lot of steps. Nicky Luckow’s hand slid from his coat pocket. There was a belly gun in it—a squat, small thing designed to blow a man’s abdomen into a streaming red crater.

“The boys will be glad to hear anything you’d care to say about anything,” purred Luckow. “They’ll be glad—”

There were at least a dozen men in the corridor. The many steps told that. And there the mob leader stood, to hold The Avenger at gunpoint till the gang could get in here. Benson shrugged. His stainless steel chips of eyes reflected on the odds coming to face him, and in their cold depths was a calm decision that it was too much trouble to deal with them.

Benson’s foot flashed up and out.

The Avenger had learned about all the arts of fighting, both officially and defensively, that there were. One was la savate, originating in Paris among the Apaches.

Luckow had been warily watching the pale and deadly eyes; so the movement of Benson’s foot didn’t catch his vision till it was almost to his waist. And then there wasn’t time to do anything about it.

The toe of Benson’s shoe cracked on his wrist, and the runt weapon spanged against the far wall. Luckow snarled, and leaped.

Benson’s fist went out. It didn’t seem to travel more than four or five inches. But Luckow stopped as if he had banged into a stone wall. Stopped, and sagged to the floor.

The Avenger went to the window.

“I’d appreciate it if you would visit me. Bleek Street is the address,” he said to Tom Crimm.

Tom’s sneer was shaken, but it was still in place on his lips. And the skepticism was undiminished in his eyes.

Benson opened the window. Down in the street, a few people stared up at the sound of the window’s opening. More stared swiftly, when a man with a white, dead face and snow-white but virile hair dropped from that window like a trained acrobat, lighting like a feather on the sidewalk.

The Avenger drove away with his pale eyes somber. He lived only to fight crime—and to help people threatened by crime’s clutches. But it’s difficult to help a person who refuses to be helped.

Benson had a stop to make before going back to Bleek Street. He went to the Crimm home, near the East River. He located the scene where a mad car had charged again and again at a sick, elderly man.

There were only few faint traces of tire tracks around there. Walking people had obliterated most of them. But one short length provided something interesting.

It would seem that the automobile that had chased Joseph Crimm had a distinctive peculiarity about its right rear tire.

There was a deep V-cut in that tire, according to the bit of track left.

CHAPTER IV

Wanted—For Murder

The night after Joseph Crimm died, at almost the same late hour there was a light in the solid stone building of the Town Bank, on upper Broadway.

The light was in the small conference room. It illuminated five men, huddled around a big oval table at one end. The men talked in whispers to be sure the night guard—even though he was a floor below and many feet to the rear—could not catch even a syllable.

“We’ve got to give this thing up!” insisted one man. He almost whimpered it. He was horribly frightened and did not trouble to hide it. Fear rode high in his spectacled blue eyes. Fear distorted his lean, long-nosed face and made his pudgy body tremble.

The man was Theodore Maisley, president of the bank. The person he was addressing most directly was Lucius Grand, one of the directors.

Lucius Grand was tall and broad-shouldered, and had a jaw like a snowplow. He had stony eyes, too, which were not being softened any as they turned on Maisley.

“Get hold of yourself, Maisley,” he said, with contempt in his voice. “Everything is going fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”

The three other directors nodded agreement with Grand.

The three were Robert Rath, Louis Wallach and Frederick Birch. Rath was pompous and plump and loud-spoken. Wallach was thin and a little stooped, with the face of a deacon and a voice so soft it was almost a whisper. Birch was choleric and red-faced, but with a sort of emptiness in his blurry gray eyes which indicated that behind all the bluster was a wide streak of yellow.

“I tell you we’re heading into terrible trouble,” bleated Maisley, the president. “We’ve got to give it up.”

“What would you suggest that we do, Maisley?” asked Wallach in his soft, near-whisper. He rubbed his thin, dry hands together like a bishop about to pronounce benediction.

Maisley fearfully outlined his ideas of what they should do.

“We ought to burn that damned stock. If it’s ever found in our possession we’ll get jail for life. Maybe the electric chair! Don’t forget Joe Crimm.”

“Burn the stock?” It was a maddened bellow from Grand.

“Ssh,” said Wallach quickly. “Ssh! The bank guard—”

“Burn the stock?” Grand said in a lower tone. “Are you crazy?”

“But Crimm—”

“Is dead,” said choleric, red-faced Birch, voice as blustering in its carefully low-pitched tone as if he had shouted. “And he died naturally. Don’t forget that. A heart attack. They don’t put people in the electric chair for a heart attack.”

“The stolen stock, though,” Maisley persisted, wiping sweat from his forehead. “That’s grand larceny. Damned grand—$2,380,000 worth.”

“That will be taken care of,” said plump and pompous Rath. “Joseph Crimm was taken care of, wasn’t he? Well, this will be taken care of, too. All we have to do is—”

“You all seem to forget that there is a very weak point,” interrupted Maisley. “Crimm ordered the stock delivered to his home. You know that, don’t you? He was specific about it. Sent a note in his own handwriting to his broker. Instead of that, the broker, Haskell, deliberately delivered the stock to the bank, as we had ordered. Now, Haskell is a weak spot. If he ever talks—”

“He won’t talk,” whispered Wallach, rubbing his thin hands together. “That, also, will be attended to. You’ll see.”

“I’m against this,” persisted Maisley. “My vote is to drop the whole matter. Millions from the eventual sale of the stock? More millions from voting control of Ballandale Glass? What of it? The millions won’t do you any good if we get tripped up. Out-and-out crime like this—”

His voice died uncertainly at the look in the eyes of Grand and Wallach and Rath.

Maisley, with shreds of honesty still clinging to his petty soul, was in a bad spot. He was afraid of what might grow out of all this. But he was afraid of his associates, too.

Theodore Maisley, president of Town Bank, was not the only one to whom the weak spot in the crime plan was apparent. There were others thinking along that line. Right at the moment, in fact.

The Avenger had said that Nicky Luckow, Public Enemy No. 1 in the East, was smart in an animal sort of way. And he was correct.

Luckow’s eyes, like dully polished stones, were duller than usual as, for the fourth time, he went over what Tom Crimm had told him.

“Funny,” he said, “that your dad would have the stock sent to the bank when it was the bank he was thinking of fighting. If he didn’t trust ’em why’d he let the stuff get near enough for ’em to sink their hooks in it?”

“He says he didn’t,” said Tom. “He says he ordered the stock delivered to his home.”

“And it was sent to the bank instead,” mused Luckow. “Who’d be the guy to send it out?”

“Dad did business through the firm of Haskell, Lampert & Klein, on the New York Exchange. Particularly through Haskell, I guess. Probably it was Haskell who sent out the Ballandale Corp. stock.”

Luckow pressed a buzzer on his desk.

“I think we have something there, kid,” he said softly. “This guy, Haskell, may have a few things he’d like to talk about—if he’s approached the right way.”

Tim, the man who looked like a mean cat with a grouch against the whole world, padded in in answer to the desk buzzer.

“Tim, get Blinky and go with Tom here. Tom’ll show you where. There’s a guy he knows who may have something to say that we’d like to hear. Tom’ll do the questioning. You and Blinky will do the work of loosening his tongue.”

For an instant, faint apprehension came over Tom’s face. He had tied in with a tough gang just because they were tough; he had tough work ahead of him. But the sinister overtones in Luckow’s voice as he spoke of “loosening” Haskell’s tongue sent a chill to Tom’s spine.

He snapped out of that momentary weakness, though. His father had been robbed of his fortune and murdered. Anything that happened to men who could do things like that—anything—would be better than they deserved.

“You’re going with us, aren’t you?” he said to Nick Luckow.

The mob leader smiled a little, softly, dangerously. It had been some time since he went with his boys on a job. He preferred to let others take their chances with New York’s excellent cops.

“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I got some thinking to do. Luck to you, kid.”

Tom and the two called Tim and Blinky went out to a sedan parked in front of the hotel.

“So?” said Tim softly, at the wheel.

Tom gave the address of Harry Haskell, his father’s broker.

Haskell lived in a rather small penthouse on Riverside Drive. When the car pulled up to the building, Tim and Blinky hung back at the door.

“You go in, kid,” said Tim smoothly. “You know the ropes in these joints and you look slicker than we do. Get the guy in the lobby to look another way and we’ll catch up to you at the elevators.”

Tom went in. No one so easy to fool as a wise guy.

“To see Mr. Haskell,” he said, at the lobby desk.

“Just a moment, please,” the night man said.

He turned to a house phone. And as he turned, like twin shadows, the two Luckow men left the doorway and slid past his back to the automatic elevators.

The night man turned back to Tom.

“Mr. Haskell says it’s too late to see anybody. He is ready to retire.”

“Say it’s about Ballandale,” said Tom.

The night man nodded as he turned from the instrument a second time. “He’ll see you. Twenty-first floor. Penthouse.”

Tom got in the cage where Blinky and Tim were pressed to one side, out of the night man’s sight. He pushed the button for the 21st floor.

Tom’s heart was thudding hard as they went up. He was leaving the straight road entirely, now. No one knew that any better than he did. Haskell wouldn’t talk short of torture.

Well, let it come. The end justified the means. If he could turn up his father’s murderer this way—

The door was opened the instant Tom knocked. A wary, slightly frightened face peered out. The face of Haskell, himself, not a servant. The mention of Ballandale had upset him and made him secretive, all right.

“Crimm! I don’t understand, this is—”

Haskell tried to shut the door when he saw the two men behind Tom Crimm. But Blinky shouldered it open and took a gun carelessly from his pocket as he entered.

“This the guy, kid?” he asked, staring at the broker, a shivering, scrawny man in a violet dressing robe.

“That’s him,” said Tom.

Blinky’s fist flashed out. It got Haskell on the point of the jaw.

Blinky lowered the man to the carpet. Then, methodically, he went from door to door of the living room and locked each. No telling where the servants were.

He went back to Haskell, picked him up and deposited him in an easy-chair. Then he tied him to the chair, and slapped his face, hard. Tom watched with burning eyes. This man knew something of that stock.

Haskell’s eyelids fluttered under the slapping. He opened his eyes and cowered in the chair as much as his bonds would allow.

“Crimm!” he said. “What is the meaning of this? You, the son of my old friend, actually allow this brutality to be inflicted on—”

“That ain’t all he’ll allow, if you don’t sing,” said Blinky, lighting a cigarette.

“Sing?” repeated Haskell, seeming to withdraw into the loose folds of his violet bathrobe.

“Squeal, blow your top, talk,” explained Blinky.

“Talk? But about what?”

“Listen,” said Tom, voice edged like a knife. “You know all about Dad’s purchase of Ballandale stock, don’t you?”

Haskell was suddenly very still. His eyes seemed to retreat far back into his head, on the run from two terrors: this that confronted him and some other fear.

“You had that stock delivered to Dad’s bank instead of to his house, didn’t you?” Tom rapped out. “And yet, he ordered the home delivery. Now, you’ll tell us why you did that. Whose order were you obeying?”

Haskell looked at Blinky as if for help. Blinky grinned almost happily, and took the glowing cigarette from his lips.

“You ain’t got any idea how these things can hurt,” he said, eyes glittering in anticipation.

“Crimm!” moaned the broker. “For heaven’s sake—”

“Speak up!” said Tom grimly. “Who told you to send that stock to Dad’s bank instead—”

Haskell coughed and sagged forward in his bonds. His head rolled on his chest and his tongue hung out a little.

From his chest, a thin stream of red suddenly appeared! It was like magic. Horrible magic!

“Haskell,” said Tom almost stupidly. “Haskell—” Blinky grabbed Tom by the shoulder. “Come on! Scram! Quick!”

“But Haskell—” faltered Tom.

“The guy’s dead! Don’t you know a dead man when you see one? Some ape got him from the door. Silenced gun.”

“Then we ought to get the one who—”

“To hell with the one who got him. We got us to think about. Scram outta here, I tell you! We’ll take it if the cops—”

He and Tim were pulling young Crimm with them as he spoke. Into the elevator. Down to the lobby.

As they stepped into the cage, they heard a door click smoothly shut, far below. The man who had killed Haskell with a silenced gun had made good his escape in another elevator. He’d been so fast, they couldn’t have caught up with him even if Blinky and Tim had wanted to try. Which they hadn’t.

They emerged into the lobby. There was a big urn by the elevator shafts with sand in the top for cigar and cigarette butts.

Blinky picked this up and threw it! The night man, just starting to turn at the sound of the cage door, was on the receiving end. The urn caught him in the face. He went down like a felled ox.

They got to the car unseen. But that fact ceased to comfort Tom a little later, at Luckow’s headquarters.

The police band was tuned in on the mobster’s radio. A voice announced:

“Calling all cars. Wanted, Thomas Crimm. Age, twenty-six. Height, five feet nine and a half. Complexion, dark. Dressed in brown suit and brown felt hat. Last seen near the Trimore Palace Apartments. All cars. Wanted, Thomas Crimm, Age, twenty-six. Height—”

Shivering, Tom snapped off the thing. He hadn’t quite realized how definitely the night man at the building could identify him.

Just him. Not Blinky and Tim. For he had done all the talking. And, of course, he hadn’t anticipated the intrusion of another party with a silenced gun.

Wanted, Thomas Crimm. Wanted for murder, of course. The police don’t delineate murder any more on the air; too many people can listen and speed excitedly to whatever address is given. But that’s what they wanted him for, all right. Murder!

Luckow’s hand touched Tom’s shoulder for an instant.

“Tough, kid. But you stick with us. We’ll keep you under blankets.”

Blinky and Tim left the room to hide their smirks. They were clear out of this, due to a speck of foresight in having Tom do the entering. They’d done that just in case. Just in case—

CHAPTER V

Suicide Heights

Others heard that police broadcast. One was Theodore Maisley, president of Town Bank.

Maisley was driving home in his big coupé. He lived out of New York, on the Jersey side, up along the Palisades. He scarcely saw the familiar road along the cliff edge, with the Hudson far below. The car almost drove itself.

He was listening to the broadcast with terror that was actually a pain in his chest. He seldom had the police wave length tuned in. But of late he’d had it on a lot, listening in a sort of fearful fascination. Wasn’t he, too, a criminal?

Maisley was not of the stripe that makes a good crook. He had too many scruples left. He wanted a lot of money, greedily. But after the prospect of ill-gained millions was presented, the crooked part of it appalled him.

“Young Crimm, wanted for murder,” he whispered to himself, swinging the coupé around a curve in the winding cliff road. The address, Trimore Palace Apartments, had given it all away to Maisley. That was where Haskell lived.

“He went there to make Haskell talk,” Maisley whispered on. “It must have been that way. And Haskell was dead when he came, probably. Or killed right after. To keep him quiet. First Crimm, then Haskell. Two murders!”

He braked a little as he approached an exceptionally sharp curve. It was a very bad one. The cliff, there, was rather grimly called Suicide Heights because of its sheer long drop to sharp rocks, below.

“I don’t believe Tom Crimm did it,” Maisley whispered. “I don’t think he killed Haskell. But he’ll burn for it just the same. They framed him! Two men dead and a third framed for murder.”

He stared blindly at the approaching curve.

“I can’t stand that kind of thing. I won’t stand it. I’m going to police headquarters first thing in the morning and tell everything I know. I don’t care what they do to me—”

Maisley swung his coupé halfway around the curve—and screamed!

Two cars abreast were thundering toward him around the far side of the curve. He could see the two sets of headlights, horrifyingly close, coming at mad speed.

There was a pair of ordinary headlights and beside it, to the right, a pair of yellow, moonlike foglights whose amber glare many people prefer to the standard beam of regular lamps.

Some fool was passing another car on that sharp curve! And now two cars swept toward Maisley’s coupé at fifty miles an hour or better!

The bank president screamed again and swerved the coupé hard right. He might, just possibly, miss the two cars roaring toward him.

He wrenched left, but it was too late!

There was a railing along the roadside, but the coupé had nosed through with that hard right swing. A front wheel dropped over. A giant couldn’t have swung the car back onto the road, now.

The coupé kept on going all the way over the edge, falling end over end in thin air.

The two sets of headlights swept callously on toward the George Washington Bridge, with no attempt to stop and see what had happened to the man in the coupé. Though of course you’d know what would happen at the end of that long fall.

The Avenger had heard that grim police broadcast, too. But even before the broadcast, he had seen the news of the murder of Haskell and suspicion against Tom Crimm flash on his private teletype. And so, for the second time in only a few hours, he moved to help Tom.

He had to get the young fellow out of the clutches of Nicky Luckow. It was more necessary, now, with the police after him, than ever.

This time The Avenger didn’t go to the Jeff Hotel. That was Luckow’s known hangout. And there was just a chance that Tom might be connected with Luckow, and the hotel searched by the police. Luckow would figure it that way, too; so he’d have Tom lying low somewhere else.

The most logical place, thought The Avenger, whose brain was a great filing cabinet of all the crooks in New York and their habits and haunts, would be the Brooklyn Bird.

That semi-fashionable night club was owned by Luckow, though very few knew it. Luckow went in for night stuff. He owned the Bird outright, had a half interest with another racketeer in several roadhouses and had money in several burlesque theaters.

But the Bird was the best bet. So Benson went to Brooklyn.

It was after two o’clock in the morning when he got there. The place was jammed, of course; that’s the shank of the evening at spots like the Bird.

Couples were coming out of the blazingly illuminated doorway and getting into cars. Other couples were going in. Then a man came out alone.

The man was middle-aged, but tried to act much younger. He was bareheaded and wore a tuxedo. He staggered when he walked past the doorman.

The doorman held his arm for a minute.

“Sure you’re all right, Mr. Keenan?” Benson heard him ask.

“Sure! Sure, ’mall right,” said the man. “Lemme go.”

He jerked free and walked with exaggerated dignity to a big sedan down the line of parked cars.

Benson went to the car, on the roadside. It was pretty dark here.

The man addressed as Keenan opened the rear door of the car and fumbled around. Benson stealthily opened the door on the other side.

The man finally saw him.

“Hey, you! Wha’ you doin’ in my car—”

That was all he said. The Avenger’s hand shot out. Thumb and forefinger clamped in a secret pressure at the base of the intoxicated man’s skull, where a nerve lies close to the surface.

The man jerked a little, then sagged forward, as painlessly and mercifully unconscious as though doped. The Avenger lifted his body into the rear of the car, and climbed in himself.

Man of a Thousand Faces, Benson was called. And his swift work now revealed the reason for the title.

With a flashlight and a tiny mirror, he set to work. His pale, infallible eyes took in, feature by feature, the unconscious man’s face. And, feature by feature, Benson altered his own face to match.

The nerve shock that had paralyzed his face had made a weird, living plastic of the flesh.

Benson prodded the base of his nose and stroked firm fingers up the bridge. His nose became thinner at the nostrils and higher in the bridge—and stayed that way when his finger pressure was removed. His hand cupped hard at his jaw, and the compressed flesh at the corners made the jaw point narrower. His fingers worked at the flesh of his cheeks; and his cheeks became a trifle pudgier-looking, making his whole face seem shorter.

He put on the man’s tuxedo, holding his powerful shoulders in to imitate Keenan’s narrower ones.

The Avenger surmised that Keenan had come out to his car to get a box he had forgotten to take into the Bird. The box was from a Manhattan florist’s shop. Benson picked it up, and got out of the car on the sidewalk side. He went to the door.

Every member of Luckow’s gang would be on the alert against Richard Benson. But the staggering Keenan was known to the doorman, at least, and could reel into the night club with no hand raised to stop him.

The doorman winked at the reeling figure in the tuxedo.

“For Millie?” he said, looking at the box.

“That’s right,” said Benson, imitating the voice he had heard a moment before when the doorman tried to help Keenan.

He went on in.

“You forgot your hat, Mr. Keenan,” the hat-check girl called gayly.

“Not leavin’ yet.”

Keenan went into the big café room. There he stood a moment, swaying uncertainly. The headwaiter came up. As the doorman had attempted to do, he slipped a hand under the reeling man’s arm.

“Here, Mr. Keenan.”

The Avenger didn’t try to shrug the grip away, as the real Keenan had, outside. He didn’t know where “here” was.

The headwaiter steered him to a table next to the floor, with one chair beside it and a half-finished drink on top.

Benson sat down, holding the florist’s box. He pretended to drink, keeping an owlish gravity, and keeping his lids lowered as much as possible to hide the pale clarity of his deadly eyes. Those eyes weren’t remotely like Keenan’s. They were a source of risk.

The lights went low and the chorus danced out. Ten girls with veils for costumes. The second from the end glanced brightly at Benson, and soon was near in a twisting dance step.

“Eddie! The flowers! For me? How nice.”

Benson’s pale eyes, under lowered lids, followed her as the number was concluded. She was at the end of the line as the girls danced off the floor and through a narrow doorway leading to the dressing rooms.

Benson got up and went unsteadily toward that door. The headwaiter frowned, then shrugged tolerantly and made no move to stop him. Keenan, whoever he was, had the run of the place.

Benson went into the dressing-room corridor just in time to see the girl who had spoken turn into the end room. He went there, opened the door and stepped in, himself. Now, by design, he didn’t stagger any more and he opened his eyes to their normal width.

“Eddie!” exclaimed the girl, as he came in. “You ought not to come here—”

She stopped and swayed back a step, her hand at her throat.

“You’re not Ed Keenan,” she said. “Your eyes—”

Benson put the florist’s box on the vanity case, and in doing so, allowed the girl to spring behind him and out the door again.

He had gotten in here smoothly and without fuss. Next thing was to locate Luckow and Tom Crimm.

He thought the girl might be the guide.

He was correct. She flew up the hall again, and into an unmarked door. Benson followed, not letting her see that he was coming after her. She was intent on giving a warning.

She went through this room, through a door covered by an innocent-looking drape, and up narrow stairs. At the top, she knocked four times on a heavy door.

The door was opened. Down the stairs and out of sight, The Avenger heard her say a few words. Then she stepped into a room, and the door was shut again.

He went up and knocked four times.

The door opened six inches, and was hastily pushed as the man behind it saw pale, deadly eyes and a deadpan face. But The Avenger had hand and arm through the crack, now. The hand closed on the guard’s windpipe.

After a moment, Benson lowered him to the floor and went on. There was a small suite here. He heard the girl’s voice in the next room; so he opened that door and stood on the threshold.

Tom Crimm, Nick Luckow and the excited girl stared at him. Luckow’s hand flashed for his gun.

In Benson’s hands was no weapon of any sort. But such was The Avenger’s air of calm certainty, as he stood there, that Luckow’s hand came away from his holster empty. Benson acted as if an army were at his back; and it shook Luckow’s nerve.

“You again!” said Tom.

The young fellow was white and nervous. His fear was plain in his eyes. He’d thought the cops were bursting in to take him off for murder when the door opened so unceremoniously.

“Me again,” nodded Benson quietly. Luckow said nothing. He simply glared at Benson with murder in his dull eyes. His jaw was blue where The Avenger’s fist had contacted it at the Jeff Hotel.

“I suppose the police are right behind you?” said Tom.

“No,” said Benson, voice quiet but vibrant. “Why should they be?”

“If you turned me in, you’d get in good with the cops, wouldn’t you?”

“I have no idea of turning you in,” said The Avenger. “The idea I have in mind is strictly the opposite. I’d like to see that you don’t get taken for a little while. You’d have a hard time of it, right now, with the murder charge so definite and recent against you. I can put you in a place where no one will ever find you.”

Tom’s eyes, suspicious, keen, wary, played over the face of this man who had rearranged his features to resemble another man, but whose dead countenance and pale eyes were unmistakable when you knew who it was.

“No one will find me here,” Tom said. “You’ve got more than that in mind. You’re just trying to get me away from Luckow, again, and get your own hooks on me.”

“I want you to leave Luckow,” nodded Benson. “This rat is dynamite for you—or for anyone else impulsive enough to trust him.”

It had been a long time since anyone had called Nicky Luckow a rat to his face. The mobster’s eyes glinted and his jowls darkened.

He turned to Tom Crimm.

“Want to leave, kid?” he said.

Tom shook his head, angry eyes on The Avenger.

“You’ll hang with us?” persisted Luckow.

“Yes,” said Tom.

“O.K.!” Luckow’s face suddenly became impassive. “You run along to the next room, now. I want to ask this guy a coupla things.”

Tom went out. The girl went with him, after a swift glance had swept between her and the mob leader. Benson saw that glance, though he seemed not to have seen it.

Luckow turned toward him.

“When any guy sticks his nose into my business the way you have,” he said, “that guy dies! And when any guy messes up gang business like you have a dozen times in the past, he oughta get burnt by anybody getting his hands on him. Get me?”

“Certainly,” said The Avenger. “You mean that, on two counts. You intend to carry me out of here feet first; you mean that you didn’t send Tom out of here so that you could question me—but just so that he wouldn’t witness a killing.”

‘That’s right,” said Luckow in his soft, dangerous voice.

Downstairs, eight men came after the girl. Luckow’s swift glance had told her to come back with all the help she could. The eight men came up the stairs with drawn guns.

They went into the first room behind the concealed door at the top of the narrow stairs.

From the inner room, Luckow’s room, a familiar figure was emerging as they entered. The figure closed that door, turned, and faced them.

“Nick,” said one of the eight, “the girl said—”

The man addressed as their leader rubbed his right fist suggestively.

“He’ll keep for a while,” he growled. “You guys stick around here, though, and be sure he doesn’t try to get out. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He walked through their ranks, down the stairs, and through the café room. From all sides were little nods of recognition. To some he nodded back; to others he paid no attention.

He went out the street door, got in the car The Avenger had come in and drove to Bleek Street.

And up in Nicky Luckow’s suite the eight gunmen finally went into the room to see why the Benson guy was so quiet. Benson wasn’t there!

Instead—they found Nicky Luckow, in shorts, with a tuxedo lying beside him, bound and maniacal with rage.

No detective in New York could twice have invaded the mobster’s den single-handed. But The Avenger, who could fool his way into places by making his face over to look like others, had; and he had twice walked out with ease. But he had failed twice, in the final analysis.

He had failed to make Tom Crimm see reason. The son of Joseph Crimm was still in a wolves’ den—thinking it to be a safe fold—with doom hanging over him every moment of the day and night.

CHAPTER VI

The Warning!

Next night the light burned again in the directors’ room of Town Bank. And that light illuminated very grave and worried faces!

The faces of Grand and Wallach, Rath and Birch, were worried enough tonight. Also, frightened. All, that is, save the thin countenance of Wallach.

The director who looked as bland as a deacon was rubbing his dry thin hands together slowly and smiling a little.

“Maisley was badly scared,” he murmured. “Maisley might have talked. So Maisley was taken care of. You see? We are all quite safe.”

Birch’s choleric, red face was a shade paler than usual. He moistened his lips.

“I wonder how it was made to look so much like an accident?” he mused. “His coupé was found on the rocks beneath Suicide Heights. He was found in it, smashed like a—like a bug in a gear wheel. What made him drive over the edge like that?”

“What do you care?” said Wallach, with his dry smile.

“Oh, I don’t really care,” said Birch hastily, glancing around as if afraid death would hear him.

The four looked at each other covertly; had been doing so all evening. None of them seemed to know just who was responsible for the clueless death of Theodore Maisley. Wallach, with his bland, deacon’s placidity? Birch, the choleric and blustering? Rath, pompous and loud-spoken? Grand, wide-shouldered and arrogant?

“When this started,” said Grand, seeming to feel the unspoken question and hastily to answer it, “I didn’t have any idea there’d be murder involved. I don’t like it, gentlemen.”

“Nor do any of us,” purred Wallach, rubbing thin fingers softly together. “But—what would you do? Crimm had to be put out of the way so that his stock could be kept safely. Maisley had to go, because he might have turned informer on us. Both were attended to. And it has been done so well that no suspicion can ever be attached to any of us. The same with Haskell.”

“But—murder,” whispered Birch.

Grand stuck out his big jaw.

“This Ballandale stock,” he said. “Who’s got it? Which one of us? It isn’t me.”

Wallach smiled dryly.

“Of course, each of us would deny having it. I deny it, myself. So, I am sure, would Birch and Rath. What difference does it make which of us has it? The stock is safe, and we will gain control of the corporation in a few days, when the next meeting is scheduled. You all know how much we stand to make out of the transaction. And, afterward, we can dispose of the stock, a small block at a time, and pocket that money, too—”

Wallach stopped, and stared with a faint look of perplexity at Birch. The blustering, red-faced director was glaring with wide eyes at the door of the conference room. And, now, his face wasn’t even pale; it was a ghostly white.

Wallach turned to the door. Rath and Grand whirled, too. The door was opening.

There was no way for anyone to get into the bank after hours, save the banking officials themselves. Yet, that door was opening, and all the directors were in here. The guard wouldn’t be intruding—he’d had orders to stay on the floor below.

The door swung all the way back. On the threshold stood a man of average height and build, in a gray business suit, looking more like a machine of gray steel than a man.

The man’s face was as white as Birch’s; but fear had nothing to do with pallor in this case.

“Who are you?” boomed Grand, jaw out. “How dare you come in here?”

“How . . . how did you get in, anyway?” stammered Rath.

Birch tried to talk and couldn’t. Wallach was very still; dry, thin fingers for once not rubbing each other.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the chill, deadly figure in the doorway.

There was silence as The Avenger stepped into the conference room and calmly closed the door behind him. Grand’s jaw no longer stuck out. Birch’s face was more bloodless than ever.

“You may have heard of me,” said the white-faced, pale-eyed man. “Richard Benson.”

Birch swallowed audibly. Every one of them had heard that name. Richard Henry Benson! He was the peer of all of them in the realm of high finance. He was wealthier than all of them put together; could have bought and thrown away their bank.

But they’d heard of him in another way, recently, too. And it was this that froze their voices in their throats.

Richard Benson. Man of a Thousand Faces. The Avenger! Wherever crime had been done, that name could terrify. And under the circumstances, it could terrify in this sleek business room as well as in a gangster’s hangout. “I see you are very busy,” said Benson, with deadly irony in his voice. “I won’t take up much of your time. I came here to make a request.”

They stared at the pale, awful eyes like rabbits at a weasel.

“Millions of dollars worth of stock have been stolen,” said The Avenger. “Joseph Crimm’s stock in the Ballandale Glass Corp. Three murders have been committed: Crimm’s, Maisley’s and Haskell’s.”

His face was as dead and emotionless as though he were discussing the best way to serve soup. His eyes were as expressionless as ice under moonlight. His voice was without emphasis. Somehow, that very calm, glacial tone was more horrifying than wild threats.

“Someone among you,” said Benson, “knows who is directly responsible for the murders. Someone among you can produce the stock. So here is my request: Return the stock to Tom and Wayne Crimm and give up the murderer, with a full confession to the law.”

The last two words echoed in the tense room.

“—the law.”

Wallach was the one who finally answered. There was cold nerve in his lanky body; courage of a sort in the brain behind his thin face.

“Mr. Benson, I can only assure you that we don’t know quite what you are talking about. We have read of the tragic deaths of Maisley and Crimm. But Crimm died naturally of a heart attack, and Maisley unfortunately drove his car too near a cliff edge and fell to his death. Neither of them has anything to do with murder, I’d say. As for the stock you mention—”

The icy, pale eyes had become colder and colder. And Wallach finally stopped, words trailing off into silence.

“You will accede to my request,” said Benson, “or I shall declare financial war on you. With your connections in banking and financial matters, you probably know whether or not that declaration would be important to you. I will expect an answer shortly.”

The Avenger turned and went out. And behind him, four frightened men stared at each other. Grand moved first.

“After him! He can’t get away like that! Get him!”

He sprang to the door. The door did not open to his jerking hands. This was for the very simple reason that a chair had been propped under the knob on the other side.

Grand ran from the door to the telephone and put a call through in a hurry to a number that had been listed with the first preparation for the Ballandale plot. An emergency number!

Down at the great bronze door of the bank, the bank guard stood with a queerly empty look on his face, and with eyes that seemed to look at things but not see them.

Benson went unhurriedly to the man. His pale, infallible eyes bored into the guard’s like diamond drills.

“You will open the doors for me,” he said, voice oddly monotonous. “You will lock them after I have gone out. In five minutes you will inject this into your thigh.”

He put a hypodermic needle into the man’s robot-like left hand. The guard opened the door, closed it when Benson went out to the deserted street.

Five minutes later the guard would use the hypodermic needle, blink, look around with a start, and hurry to where banging on a door sounded, from the direction of the conference room. But he wouldn’t be able to say anything about what he had done.

All he would be able to say would be that he had gone to the street door in response to a continued, urgent pounding there—and that he had stared through bullet-proofed glass to see two pale and deadly eyes that seemed to grow and grow till he fell into them and went to sleep.

The directors would know a miracle of hypnotism when they heard about it. But the guard wouldn’t know till he was told.

The Avenger turned the wheel of his car and swung into Sixth Avenue, near Thirty-fourth Street. He drove down Sixth, his face a mask, eyes like stainless steel chips. A car was following his closely. It had picked up the trail eight blocks above, about fifteen minutes after he he had left Town Bank and was on upper Broadway.

The driver of the trailing car was clever. He drove now with regular lights, now with cowl lights, flaring. He drove far behind for a while, then very close. Whenever a truck loomed, going in the same direction, he hung behind the tail of the truck and out of sight.

But The Avenger had faced precisely this sort of danger too often for any man to fool him.

He went on down Sixth Avenue, turned slowly into his own street—Bleek Street.

The car behind was powerful. It had a pickup like an electric locomotive. It screeched around the corner on two wheels, like an animal that had only been waiting for a dark spot from which to spring. It went half over the curb, and its nose rammed the side of Benson’s car.

The Avenger had been driving with the windows down. A touch of his finger, just before the crash, had snapped all windows up.

Four machine guns were suddenly chattering from the big sedan that held Benson’s car rammed against the blank wall of the storage warehouse across from his headquarters.

The glass of Benson’s car was starred in a hundred places, but did not break. The armor of its sides clanged under the leaden hail like a tin roof in a rainstorm, but was not pierced by it.

However, there was a cold efficiency here that went far beyond the usual, murderous gang efficiency. Not one or two machine guns, but four! And when these were found to be ineffective, there was another deadly weapon, brought along for just such an emergency.

One window of the attacking sedan rolled down a foot. It revealed, for just an instant, a little more clearly, the five dark figures within. One of the figures had a round object in his hand. And the round object was thrown forward in a flat, practiced arc so that it came to rest directly under The Avenger’s car.

The round object was a bomb! It contained enough explosive to lift Benson’s car twenty feet and let it fall again in a tangled mass—with The Avenger a shattered, pulped thing at the remnants of a steering wheel.

He had had his answer from Town Bank: A death sentence!

CHAPTER VII

Beyond The Law

The girl was very pretty, in a dark, sinuous way. She had big, dark eyes and silky chestnut hair and a figure that had landed her many jobs in show business.

But that was before her brother had become so wealthy and could afford to give her enough to live comfortably.

Her brother was Nicky Luckow. And the girl, Beatrice Luckow, was with her brother, now. Her beauty was very much marred by a hard line around her lips that matched the hardness in Luckow’s face, and in the faces of three of Luckow’s men who were also at his apartment. “The sap’s played right into our hands,” exulted Luckow. “So little Tommy Crimm’s going to get back at the guys that turned the heat on his dad, eh? And what do you think his idea is? An idea—I’ll admit—that I stuck in his brain first.”

“What?” said Beatrice, hard young eyes examining a thumbnail that was tinted deep crimson.

“We’re to stick up the Town Bank. How do you like that? Tommy goes with the boys. All they’re to do is get back this Ballandale stock. That is, that’s all Tommy knows they’ll do. Of course if there’s a lot of cash just lying around, the boys might kinda take to it.”

“What’s so wonderful about that?” objected Beatrice.

“Tom goes with ’em,” said Luckow. “Didn’t you hear me say that?”

“Well?”

“Well, if everything goes right, he comes back with the boys and we go on with the stock stuff, with all the bank dough we can get stuck away somewhere. If things go wrong, young Tommy is left to take the rap. The perfect goat! Get it?”

“He’d talk,” said Beatrice.

“Not when a guy like your brother, Nicky, works it out,” said the mobster exultantly. “Look! Three of the boys are out right now, on the trail of—guess who? Wayne Crimm.”

Beatrice nodded slowly.

“I see.”

“Sure! Smart, huh? Tom takes the rap, we’ll say. He’d want to talk, turn us all in, too. But if we have his kid brother, Wayne, at the cement plant, Tom will never talk. At least I don’t think he would. You’ve met him a coupla times. What do you think?”

“I don’t think he’d squeal, with his brother’s life hanging in the balance,” agreed Beatrice. “That is a smart stunt, Nicky.”

“Right! A goat if we need one to clear the gang’s skirts from a bank stick-up. An extra dividend if we don’t need a goat.” Luckow smirked. “And tonight’s the night, if I get a certain phone call—”

The call came about an hour later. From Tim, Luckow’s man who looked like a cat with a grouch against the world.

“Nick—they’re in.”

“O.K.” Luckow hung up and turned to one of the three men. “Blinky, get the kid in here.”

Luckow grinned at Beatrice. He carefully kept his sister’s fingers out of any crooked stuff. But he trusted her implicitly, of course, and she knew a lot of his business.

“We got word that the directors of the Town Bank have been going in there a lot nights, lately,” he said. “So we hung the plan on that. Kind of hard to get into a bank after hours. But not when the big shots keep going in. We fixed it to get there the first night they were reported as going in. Then, when they come out—”

He laughed.

“So Tim just phoned that four of the bank hot shots just went in. So the job’s in the bag—”

Tom came into the room, following Blinky. Luckow’s face became impassive. Tom looked at him and then at his sister. Beatrice stared back at Tom with no expression on her pretty face.

“You still want to go through with it, kid?” Luckow said smoothly. “You haven’t lost your nerve?”

Such was Luckow’s tone that even if Tom had “lost his nerve,” he’d have been stung to a fast denial. But Tom didn’t need the jeering tone. His face was harsh and reckless, his eyes narrowed.

“Of course I want to go through with it,” he rasped. “The men who murdered Dad and took his fortune are beyond the law because of their wealth and influence. So we’ll go beyond the law to strike at them.”

“O.K.,” said Luckow, flicking a triumphant glance at his pretty but hardboiled-looking sister. “Then we’re all set to go.”

Luckow and Blinky and Tom went downstairs to an alley entrance. A car was there, with four men in it, waiting. Blinky and Tom got in. Luckow, as usual, was staying out of actual maneuvers.

“There’s just two things you guys have got to remember,” said Tom, as the car lurched forward. “No gunplay; nobody killed. And no loose robbery. You’ll see cash lying around, if our plan goes through, but leave it alone. You’re working for half a million dollars on the stock proposition. That ought to be enough.”

“Sure,” said Blinky promptly.

At the tone in his voice, the man at the wheel almost snickered. But he kept silent.

The car stopped around the corner from Town Bank. Six men walked leisurely toward the entrance. There were excited voices from inside the bank. Then the big doors rattled, and opened.

Four men came out. Tom recognized Grand, one of the bank directors. The other three he did not know by sight, but assumed correctly that they were Birch and Wallach and Rath.

It was ridiculously easy.

Blinky stepped up to Grand, while the others crowded close to Grand’s fellow directors. A gun poked into each set of ribs.

“Back into the bank, you guys,” Blinky said in a low tone.

The men glanced wildly around. There wasn’t anyone within two blocks at this late hour.

“Go on! Back in!”

The four directors backed into the bank again. The six men from the car around the corner followed them. The bank guard, still looking dazed from his unaccountable hypnotic spell a while ago, stared at the six men and then started to draw his gun.

Blinky’s automatic rose, flailed down. The bank guard fell with a creased skull.

Grand had recognized Tom by now.

“Crimm! What in Heaven’s name do you mean by this? Murder of Haskell—now bank robbery! Are you mad—”

“Yes,” said Tom steadily, “I am. Mad enough to put bullets through you and your three precious companions if you don’t do exactly as you’re told.”

“You are insane! But what do you want here?”

“Dad’s Ballandale stock,” said Tom. “After that, the name of the man responsible for his death.”

“You’re talking in riddles, boy. We have no stock. As for your father’s heart attack—”

The words froze on Grand’s lips at the look in Tom’s eyes. Birch let out a sound very much like a whimper. Rath and Wallach stood in frozen quiet.

“We’ll go to the vault,” said Tom. “We’ll have a look through the safe-deposit box of each of you. We’ll keep on looking, if that doesn’t turn the stock up. We have at least two hours before it becomes dangerous to stay here. We’ll take the whole time, if necessary.”

Wallach’s thin, dry lips moved.

“We can’t open the vault. Nobody can. There is a time lock on it that is set for nine in the morning.”

“None of that,” snarled Blinky. “We’ve cased this joint. See? We know there’s no time lock. Get going! Lead us to the vault and open it. You other three go ahead in single file.”

The four directors, on stumbling feet, went to the rear of the bank. There was an iron grille. Grand unlocked that with a key on his watch chain. The little group went to the vault door.

“For the last time, Crimm,” said Grand pleadingly, “you are making a hideous mistake. You’d become a bandit, a killer, all to no purpose. There is no Ballandale stock in this bank—”

“Open up!” snapped Blinky.

Grand manipulated the combination with his chalk-white fingers. Finally the great door swung open with ghostly ease and silence in the gloom.

They went in, all but one man left in front as a lookout.

“Open your safe-deposit boxes, one after another,” ordered Tom.

Birch went first. He hauled a box from steel shelving and opened it. Tom riffled through the contents. There was a lot of cash in thousand-dollar bills, some bonds, some other certificates, but no Ballandale.

“Put it back. Next!”

Rath withdrew his steel box. Tom looked through it, and did not find what he was after. Meanwhile, Blinky was dipping into the first box. The thousand-dollar bills went deftly into his pockets.

“Grand!”

Lucius Grand shakily took his box out.

There was no Ballandale stock in that, nor in the box belonging to Birch. Tom’s face was twisted in dark frenzy. He had counted a lot on getting the stock. Whoever had the certificates in his possession, he had reasoned, would know who had killed his father.

But none of these four had it.

“Damn you all,” he raged. “Where is it? Who has it? If one of you doesn’t speak up, all four of you will have a torture session, here, in this soundproofed vault—”

As if to refute his statement that the vault was soundproofed, a noise came from the front of the bank. It snapped through the open vault door like a minor bombshell.

“Scram everybody! Trouble!”

The yell was followed by a sharp crack as a gun was fired.

Luckow’s men didn’t delay any. They piled out of the vault at top speed, leaving the dazed directors behind them. Tom, after a second of indecision, ran after them.

At the door was another prone figure beside the bank guard’s. This man was dressed in plain clothes, but had under his lapel a badge with the inscription: Pinkley Protective Association.

“All right,” snarled Blinky. “You dummy—what goes on here?”

“This guy found the door open. You know we didn’t shut it because we figured we might have to lam out fast.” The man who had been left as lookout was panting the words. He was hauling at Blinky’s arm to get him away. “He had it open for a look around before I spotted him. Then he started for his gun, and I yelled and let him have it.”

“Blinky, we just gotta get out of here—”

Luckow’s men streamed for the big street door. The sound of that shot would have been heard in the street. The cops would come any minute.

“I told you—no killing!” Tom said in a strangled tone, staring with wide eyes at the dead watchman. “I told you—”

He was talking to himself. The gang was gone.

Grand had come up. He grabbed Tom’s arm.

“So—murder as well as banditry. You—”

Tom could hit hard, and he did, now. His fist slammed against Grand’s oversized jaw, and Grand slid back a yard. Tom ran out the door, too, and to the corner where the car had been left.

Down the street sounded a police siren. It was coming fast.

Tom turned the corner in time to see the car swirl off bearing Blinky and the rest from danger.

“Wait! Wait for me—”

The car faded down the street. The police sirens were right in Tom’s ears, now.

He started to run, knew he’d be caught that way.

A coupé slid to a stop beside him. At the wheel was a woman’s figure. She opened the door, and he hopped in. The coupé dashed on and around the next corner just as the squad car appeared down Broadway.

“Many thanks,” panted Tom. He looked at the woman. She was young, he sensed. But that was all he could tell. She had a veil over her face so heavy that he couldn’t see a single detail.

“You’ve saved my life, and more,” panted Tom. “But how did you happen to come along so appropriately?”

The veiled woman at the wheel did not answer.

Tom had jumped into the car without question. Anything to get away from the police. He was full of questions, now. But asking them did no good. The woman at the wheel remained silent while she sent the coupé forward at a fast pace, down through town and over the Brooklyn Bridge.

“You’re working for Luckow, I suppose?” he said, finally. “You were posted as a sort of extra lookout to take care of any details that might slip? I didn’t know Luckow had girls doing that kind of work.”

Still no word from the enigmatic, veiled figure at the wheel. She stopped the car a block from the Bird, Luckow’s Brooklyn night club.

Tom wanted to try some more to make her talk, but he didn’t dare. At any moment a cop might come along and see him.

He ducked into the Bird, and up the private staircase.

Blinky opened the door when he knocked four times.

“For the love of—” gasped Blinky, on seeing Tom’s face.

Luckow stared over his shoulder with his impassive face for once showing emotion. First, stark surprise. Then, as he whirled to Blinky, a mounting fury.

He repressed both almost instantly, and turned smoothly to Tom again.

“I’m sure glad you got out of that bank, kid. The boys told me the job went sour. If they’d caught you—”

“Well, they didn’t,” said Tom, with a show of bravado.

“So I see.” Luckow smiled a little. He was most dangerous when he smiled. “Better go in your room and rest up after this. I’ll be along later.”

When Tom was gone, he whirled to Blinky.

“You sap! You said you’d left him there to take the rap for the gang.”

“We did,” said Blinky, tone completely bewildered. “I don’t know how he got away. There were no cabs or nothin’ around there for him to lam in.”

“Leave it to you guys to mess things up,” said Luckow, less furiously. “Well, you got nearly two hundred grand out of the vault while the Crimm sap’s back was turned. That’s a good haul. And we can turn the kid in, now, as well as before.”

“Better make it fast,” pleaded Blinky. “The guys at the bank know Tom, and they can maybe describe one of us enough for the cops to catch on. Tom Crimm and some of the Luckow mob! They’ll go over your joints for Tom. If they find him, we’ll all take a rap.”

Luckow shook his head.

“They won’t find him. Because I’m turning him in, right now. It’ll clear us. And he’ll never talk.”

“You got his brother?” said Blinky.

“Yes,” said Luckow. “We picked up Wayne Crimm while you were out. I got the call just after I came here from the apartment. So I turn Tom in right now. If he tries to squeal, his kid brother dies. He’ll take the rap!”

Luckow picked up his phone and started to dial headquarters. Tom would be tossed neatly to the wolves. He’d be picked up at a distance with some of the bank cash on him—

Luckow’s dialing finger stopped as if frozen. He gripped the phone convulsively and listened with something like fear on his hard, flat face.

CHAPTER VIII

Cement Coffin!

The sleek, streamlined little gang of killers that had been called into action by Grand, after The Avenger burst into the conference room, were dead sure that Benson, in his ruined sedan, was as good as a mangled corpse right now.

Why shouldn’t they be? His car had been rammed so hard and so deftly that it couldn’t possibly move under its own power. Under it was the bomb, with the fuse terribly close to the detonation point. If the man with the white hair and the steely eyes tried to flee from the sedan, they could cut down on him with their machine guns.

The man at the wheel of the killer car slid into reverse and tried to whirl back away from the doomed car.

And couldn’t!

From The Avenger’s sedan slid four steel bars with hooks at the ends. One of the four found the front bumper of the gangster’s car. There were yells from the car.

“Pike! Get going! That thing’ll go up in a second!”

“Break loose from the guy’s can!”

“Get going!”

The man at the wheel charged forward with a clang against the disabled sedan, and backed up furiously. The steel hook held.

They’d set a trap under an enemy’s car and, due to this damned gadget sliding from under his chassis, were firmly hooked to death, themselves.

All five of the men in the murder car were screaming. Pike, at the wheel, dared not monkey around any more. He gave her the gun, in reverse. The car sped backward, away from the bomb.

It dragged The Avenger’s car back from the bomb, too.

The thing went off with a terrific roar. Both cars bucked and jumped.

And then the five saw that the car they’d been helplessly coupled to was empty.

The man with the deadpan face was gone. The death trap that had been so sure—was sprung.

“He got away while we were shakin’ around in the pineapple blast,” snarled Pike. “Where is he? Where’d he go?”

But he could ask that question till he was blue in the face, and get no answer. Not on Bleek Street.

As has been said, The Avenger figuratively owned the street. And in the buildings lining his side of it, there were more trick exits and entrances than anyone could ever dream of, unless he were a member of the little band calling itself Justice, Inc.

Benson had slid into one of these entrances.

Calmly, he made his way to the central cluster of buildings and up to his third-floor headquarters, leaving the band outside to slink off with a damaged car, before police came in answer to that blast.

Josh was up in the big room. Nellie had been there, too. She wasn’t there now. Nor was young Wayne Crimm, who had been staying there.

“Nellie left, after Mr. Crimm,” said Josh, when The Avenger inquired about them. “Mr. Crimm insisted on going out, late as it was, and in a little while Nellie went out, too.”

Wayne Crimm had been thinking a lot, while he was up in The Avenger’s safe headquarters. One of the things he had been thinking hardest about was a man named Ballandale.

Arthur Ballandale was president of the glass corporation that bore his name. It had occurred to Wayne that, quite possibly, he might know of his father’s secret purchase of Ballandale stock and be able to shed some light on the riddle of its theft.

So he went out to see Arthur Ballandale, even though it was after midnight. He couldn’t wait till morning. He was too excited with his hunch.

He had had to argue a little with Josh and Nellie about getting out. But they had no orders to hold him there; so they’d had to let him go.

At the corner of Bleek Street, he took a cab.

“Madison Avenue at Fifty-fourth Street,” he told the driver “And step on it.”

The cab went away fast. But not too fast for another cab, always at that corner for The Avenger or his aides if they needed it in an emergency, to follow.

At the same time, a man who had been lounging near the corner went into a drugstore and phoned.

He gave the address he’d overheard Wayne give.

Arthur Ballandale, in his big apartment near the intersection given by Wayne to the cab driver, was a late retirer. Wayne had remembered that when deciding to go impulsively to see him at this hour.

He met Wayne at the door, himself. He was a man of sixty or so, with clear health in his cheeks. He was well-kept and looked much younger in dress trousers and smoking jacket.

“Glad to see you, Wayne,” he said cordially. He had known Wayne’s father well. “It’s a little late, but I’m pleased by your visit. I judge something important brings you here?”

“It does,” said Wayne earnestly. “It’s a matter concerning Dad, and Ballandale stock. Did you know that, just before he died, Dad had bought millions of dollars’ worth of stock in your corporation?”

He told of the transactions, in secret names, and of the delivery of the stock to the wrong place—and of its theft.

Ballandale’s face grew more and more puzzled and incredulous.

“That’s a serious charge, Wayne,” he said finally. “Do you realize what it would mean to accuse the directors of a respectable bank of out-and-out theft?”

“Nevertheless, that’s what I do accuse them of,” said Wayne. “And I came to you for help. We can’t trace the stock transactions because Dad was all too successful in buying up blocks of it so that no one would find out who the purchaser was. But surely you, as president of the firm that bears your name, would know of such transactions? Surely you can prove that Dad did buy the stock?”

Ballandale shook his head slowly.

“I’m sorrier than I can say,” he replied, “but I’m not in a position to know anything about it. I’m president of the corporation, yes. I started the old Ballandale Co., and have headed it ever since. But I became a minority stockholder when it was merged with other small companies to become the Ballandale Corp. Now, as the president, I’m only a hired hand, like any other employee. And the stock transactions are in another world. They are in the world of Wall Street and have nothing to do with the actual functioning of the concern. Wayne, I’m a blank to you, I’m afraid.”

Wayne’s shoulders drooped. He was very young and very impulsive. And he’d been very sure he was on a hot trail. He left, after a few more words with Ballandale, and went down to the street again.

He was too depressed to notice that the cab he’d left now sagged on its springs just a little more than it should have done if empty. He gave the driver orders to go back to Bleek Street, and opened the cab door.

A man pointed a gun at him from the cab floor.

“Get in, buddy.”

Wayne got in. The cab drove smoothly off.

Nellie Gray had gone after Wayne, not to spy on him, but to keep guard over him. She hadn’t seen, from a block away, the gunman creep into the street side of Wayne’s waiting cab.

But when she saw the cab turn north instead of south toward Bleek Street, she knew instantly that something had gone wrong and that her trailing was justified.

She followed in her own cab.

The trailing extended for a period of nearly an hour. Then, far out on Long Island, the cab she was after stopped in front of a small factory with a high, gray tower.

The driver of the perpetually chartered taxi was a trusted man directly employed by The Avenger.

“I’ll go in with you,” he said.

Nellie Gray was hardly more than five feet high, and looked as fragile as a pink-and-white statuette of fine porcelain. But she was a little blond bombshell who asked no help from any man.

“No, Bill,” she said. “You stay out here. I may come out of that place fast and need you with motor running to get me away.”

Bill, husky cabby, didn’t like that. But he chewed his lips over it in silent worry as Nellie slipped from the rear and went to the gate of the place.

“Gailord Cement Co.,” she read over the closed gate. She saw a man stalking back and forth through the gate’s pickets, knew she couldn’t get in that way.

But she had to get in there, somehow. Wayne Crimm was in there. And he had been entrusted to her capable hands when Benson left headquarters.

She saw three other men in the small plant yard. And at sight of all those odds, her hand went to her slender waist.

At his belt, each member of The Avenger’s little crew carried a transmitting and receiving radio set hardly larger than a good-sized metal cigar case.

Nellie got hers out, now.

“Smitty,” she whispered into it, when she had tuned to their own special wavelength. “Mac. It’s Nellie. I need help. Come at once. Gailord Cement Plant, beyond Jackson Heights. Mac, Smitty, come at once. Gailord Cement Plant—”

“Better walk around outside the fence,” one of the three in the yard growled to the man at the gate. “See that nobody trailed that guy.”

Nellie crouched low. She was in a dark dress and blended with the night. She saw the gate open, saw the man come out.

When the gate closed again, Nellie was on the inside. There was a truck at the gate, under shelter, loaded with bags of cement to go out first thing in the morning.

With a courage few men would have displayed, Nellie had managed to slide almost between the legs of the man coming out and get under the truck before he or the other three could see her.

She could see the dim columns of their legs, in the darkness, where they stood at the side of the truck within a yard of her.

“We’ll keep on prowlin’ the yard,” one of the three said. “This is important. Luckow said so.”

The three separated. One went right, one left, and one straight ahead toward the shadowy outlines of the cement plant itself.

On the theory that the safest place to be when someone is hunting for you is right behind him, Nellie followed that third man. Toward the building.

She kept within ten feet of him, like a lovely little wraith in the blackness. She didn’t veer till he had gotten to the factory wall.

There she slipped to the side, through a small door.

Down through a great, piled room, she saw a glint of light. She went toward it and found herself looking into a small office, probably that of the plant superintendent. There were three men in there.

Two were sitting far back in swivel-chairs, with their feet on the desk. The third huddled in a corner with a gag over his lips and with so many ropes around arms and legs and body that he looked like a mummy.

That third man was young Wayne Crimm.

“Do we give him the usual?” said one of the men, jerking his head toward Wayne. “Cement coffin?”

The words were all too graphic. He meant, would they put Wayne in a barrel, pour cement around him and then sink him in the Atlantic some night.

“I guess so, after a while,” the other man said. “But not right away. We hold him on ice, for now.”

Nellie started a little in the darkness outside the door. But that was all she did do—just start a bit. She knew that any further move would mean her death.

For a gun had suddenly, without warning, been thrust against her side!

“Havin’ a good time, kid?” snarled a voice above her.

She looked up. She hadn’t been as smart as she’d thought. The man from the gate was there, with a .38 in his hand. He must have spotted her taxi, slugged the driver and rolled him off into an alley; then he had returned to see who had come here in the cab. At least, she hoped that the driver had only been slugged—

“Hey!” yelled one of the men in the office, feet slapping to the floor in alarm. “Who’s out there?”

“Me,” sung out the man. “Just caught up with a visitor. In there, you!”

Nellie marched into the office with the gun prodding her shapely back.

But the other one stared at Nellie’s blond loveliness with no spark of anything but lust for murder in his cold eyes. There was going to be immediate use for a cement coffin, after all.

Unless, Nellie thought frantically, that brief radio S.O.S. of hers had been heard.

CHAPTER IX

Human Tank

At the corner of Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue is the world’s strangest drugstore. Bought originally by Dick Benson, he had placed it in the proprietorship of his aide, a tall, dour Scotchman named Fergus MacMurdie.

The front of the store was like any other drugstore, but the rear three-fifths served as a dual laboratory. Down one side ranged benches containing transcendent paraphernalia belonging to the giant electrical engineer, Smitty. Along the other side was a complete laboratory in which MacMurdie conducted his chemical experiments.

Mac’s blue eyes were bitter, now, and flaming. He had been listening to the big, special radio in the laboratory. He had just heard one interrupted sentence on the radio’s special wavelength. Then he began transmitting himself, feverishly.

“Smitty! Smitty! Mac calling. Smitty!”

About five minutes passed before he got a reply.

“O.K. Mac. This is Smitty.”

“Ye overgrown clown,” burred Mac. “Why don’t ye pay some attention to the silly little belt radio ye’ve made us all wear? Where are ye?”

“Out near the Brooklyn Bird, checking on Luckow,” came the giant’s voice.

“Meet me at the Gailord Cement Plant, beyond Jackson Heights. Nellie—she’s in troub—”

Mac didn’t even bother to finish the word. He knew Smitty would already be on his way, radio disregarded.

Two things could turn the good-natured giant into a human landslide. One was calling him by his full name, Algernon Heathcote, instead of the nickname of Smitty. The other was—trouble threatening Nellie.

When that diminutive bundle of pertness was in peril, Smitty was like a mad bull elephant.

Mac got out to the vicinity of the cement plant almost as swiftly as if he had flown. He found Smitty lurking down the block from it, chewing his fingers in impatience. Smitty had been there for nearly eight minutes.

“You croaking Scotch raven!” he rumbled in a savage whisper. “Did you stop to change your suit, or what? I’ve been here an hour—”

“I didn’t call ye till thirty-five minutes ago, ye mountain of suet,” Mac snapped back. “And you were nearer, to start with— Sh-h-h.”

Down the block from the dark spot where they lurked, the plant gate was opening. Methodically, the man there was coming out to patrol the outside of the grounds as well as the inside.

The man came toward the two. A sort of growl rumbled in Smitty’s throat, and Mac felt profoundly thankful he wasn’t that man.

The fellow got within ten feet of them, then saw the Scot’s foot protruding from behind a big trash box. He stopped dead.

It wasn’t the first time the Scot’s huge feet had given him away. But in this case it didn’t matter.

Smitty came within a dozen pounds of weighing an even three hundred. But he was up and over that trash box like an agile boy. He got the man by the throat as a startled yell came to his lips.

Smitty didn’t bother to use both hands. Why should he? This guy was hardly six feet tall and didn’t weigh more than a hundred and ninety. A pigmy, that’s what he was.

The giant held the man rigid, at arm’s length, for a minute or so, then opened his huge hand. The man dropped like something loosed from the jaws of a dredge, and Mac and Smitty went to the gate.

The fellow had locked it when he came out. Smitty didn’t even bother to swear. He looked around, caught up a big beam, inserted the ends between the two-by-four slats of the gate.

There was a grinding wrench, and the gate came to pieces like wet paper.

“Smitty! The noise—” protested Mac.

“What’s the difference? The guy back there got out a yell. They’ll be coming to investigate anyhow—”

Two men did come, even as he spoke. Smitty and Mac crouched behind the cement-loaded truck till they were within arms’ length. Then Smitty straightened from his crouch.

To those two men it must have seemed as if he kept on going up for ten minutes. He seemed to tower above them in the darkness like a brick chimney. Then Smitty grabbed them.

A shoulder in each hand, a swing, two heads smashing together!

“Ye’re not leavin’ much for me to play with,” Mac complained bitterly.

He didn’t say any more. If he had, he would have addressed it to empty air. Smitty was galloping toward the plant building like an elephant whose young is threatened.

They reached the door. It happened to be unlocked.

Smitty burst into the plant, with Mac on his heels.

At a far corner, near a cubicle walled off for the superintendent’s office, were two men, a girl, several sacks of cement and a barrel.

A yell came from Smitty’s lips like nothing Mac had ever heard before. The giant went like an express train off rails toward the sinister tableau.

The man with Nellie dropped her arms, and the man with the club dropped that. Each drew a .45 and began firing with methodical and excellent aim.

Benson and his aides wore bullet-proof garments of The Avenger’s own devising. Made of woven strands of an incredibly tough and pliant plastic he called celluglass, it was transparent, light, but stronger than steel.

Smitty had on his, shielding him from throat to knees. But even at that, the kick of a .45 slug can stop the average man, whirl him around, club him hard.

However, Smitty was not an average man. He grunted with the shock of each terrific slug against his barrel chest, but kept right on. And the two began to look very scared indeed.

“He’s gotta vest on!” one of them squealed. “Get him in the head!”

This was different. Slugs in the head would kill. But Smitty didn’t falter. If anything, he speeded up, with his head moving from side to side on his vast shoulders, and his columnar legs carrying him in a zig-zag path.

He got to them, picked up one of the sacks of cement.

A sack of cement is not exactly a feather. But in the giant’s hands this one seemed so. Smitty threw the thing as if it had been a basketball. It caught one of the men on the chest and he fell with a broken back. The other man tried to run.

Off by the office door was still another man, one Smitty hadn’t seen at all. This man was on one knee, with his right hand braced on his left forearm. In the hand was a .44 revolver.

At that range, braced in a marksman’s pose, the man couldn’t miss his target: the giant’s head.

It was sure death for Smitty. Only a matter of seconds. But the giant didn’t know that. Nor did MacMurdie.

Mac was still near the door, busy himself. A man had scrambled in after them from the plant yard. Mac had knocked the gun from his hand and was now methodically reducing him to mincemeat with great knobs of fists that were like bone mallets.

Smitty got his hands on the second man, and for a moment he was comparatively still as he pressed great thumbs at the fellow’s windpipe. It was the instant for which the unseen, calm marksman was waiting.

His sights were on Smitty’s right ear. His finger was tightening.

There was a queer little spat. It was like a soft handclap, hardly heard at all in the place. But with the deadly little whisper, something happened to the marksman.

He sagged to the floor, and on the exact top of his head was a neat gash, as if he had been clubbed. Only there was no one around with a club.

His gun clattered as he fell, and Smitty’s attention was drawn at last. He stared almost stupidly at the person who had so nearly been his executioner, then whistled as he realized what a close call he’d had.

Mac came up dusting his hands from the encounter by the door. Mac saw the other prone man, the gash on his head.

“Oh, oh!” he said. “Mike did that. The chief’s here. Where are ye, Muster Benson?”

The Avenger carried two of the world’s oddest weapons. One was a deathly-sharp little throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle. The other was a silenced little .22, so streamlined that it appeared to be a length of slim, blued steel pipe rather than a revolver. He carried the knife in a sheath below his left knee, and the gun holstered at his right calf. The knife he called, with grim affection, Ike. The gun was Mike.

Mac had seen the man drop, from a little distance, had heard the tiny spat of sound, and had seen the gash leap into being. Only one gun and one man could do that; Mike, in the hands of Dick Benson, who never killed but used his marvelous little gun only to knock enemies cold by “creasing” them.

The Avenger came toward Mac and Smitty from a door on the opposite side of the plant.

“So ye heard Nellie’s call, too,” said Mac.

Benson nodded, dead white face as emotionless as a mask of ice.

Smitty had Nellie in his arms and was bearing her toward the door. Mac caught up Wayne Crimm’s bound form.

“Now why,” the Scot mused, “did these skurlies kidnap the boy? If his father were alive, it might be they’d hold the boy’s life over his head to keep him from fightin’ the gang that stole his stock. But his father isn’t alive—”

“His brother, Tom is,” said Benson steadily.

Mac looked at him.

“News came over the teletype just as I was starting out,” said The Avenger. “Town Bank was held up, a protective association operative killed, the bank guard slugged and lying at the point of death. Tom Crimm was recognized as the leader of the bandit gang.”

“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac, eyes round. “A cat’s-paw for Luckow! And a goat!”

“That’s right,” said Benson.

“And Wayne must have been taken to keep Tom from talkin’, and make him take the rap for the gang!”

“Yes. But we’ve got Wayne out of their hands, now.”

The Avenger went into the office. He picked up the phone and dialed the Brooklyn Bird, Luckow’s private number.

There was no time for a ring, when he heard the phone at that end being picked up. He spoke, tone as calm and measured as the voice of Fate, herself.

So it was that when Luckow started to dial, and to hand Tom over to the electric chair to clear himself and his gang, he heard the words that froze his reaching finger and sent fear to his heart such as he had never known before.

“This is Benson. We have taken Wayne from your men. Act accordingly with Tom Crimm.”

CHAPTER X

Hide-Out

Nicky Luckow’s one slightly redeeming trait was his feeling for his sister.

He had never allowed crooked matters to concern her. He had taken her from show business because he didn’t like that kind of life for his sister. He was tyrannical with her; and she looked as hardboiled as she was pretty. But she was not one of the gang.

Therefore, the fact that next day he sneaked Tom Crimm to her apartment to stay for awhile showed how badly he was worried.

He had been anxious to turn Tom over to the cops. If the police found young Crimm dazed, with bank cash on him, after a tip from a mobster who openly confessed that he was afraid his boys would be suspected, Luckow and the gang would be in the clear.

But now, Tom could talk if he were caught. Wayne was no longer held as a threat over his head. He could talk plenty. It would hang Luckow!

So now, Luckow was as frantically anxious to keep Tom from police headquarters as he had been before to take him there. He was so anxious that he was putting him in his sister’s place to lie low for awhile.

“He’s plenty hot,” he told Beatrice. “He was wanted for the murder of Haskell. Now, besides, he’s wanted for a bank stick-up and the murder of the Pinkley man.”

“That’s all right,” said Beatrice, studying one crimson-tinted fingernail. “I’ll see that no one ever gets an idea he’s here.”

“I noticed you have a new maid.” Luckow jerked his head toward the bedroom door. Beyond that was the person referred to: a pretty, young Negress with liquid, dark eyes.

“Yes. Name’s Rosabel. But she’s all right.” Beatrice studied another crimson nail, with the hard lines around her pretty mouth more apparent than ever. “I’ll take care of Tom, the young sap. Don’t bother any more about it.”

Thus lightly she dismissed the new maid, Rosabel, who happened to be the wife of Josh Newton, and like the Negro, an aide of Richard Henry Benson.

Later in the same day, the powerful Town Bank began running around in little circles.

The Avenger was one of the wealthiest men in the world, though few knew that. Benson kept huge sums of cash in various banks. He needed a lot. His bill for wrecked planes and cars alone was enough to bankrupt a rich man. He needed expensive equipment constantly.

Millions on deposit in many banks. One of them was Town Bank.

His opening shot was to withdraw $1,100,000 from Town Bank, and to have several close friends of his take out $4,500,000 more. It was all done swiftly; and even a big bank can be embarrassed by such large withdrawals without notice.

His next maneuver was to drive far below par the shares in three concerns in which he knew Rath, Birch, Grand and Wallach were heavily interested. Thus the directors were unable to come personally to Town Bank’s aid if such aid became necessary.

Finally, rumors began to be whispered around that the bank wasn’t as sound as it looked. In starting those rumors, The Avenger wasn’t being heedlessly cruel. The assets of the bank were enough so that no depositor would lose, in a crash. If any did, Benson would have made up the loss out of his own pocket. All he was after was the executives.

The lesser employees of Town Bank scented that some titan was after them, and wondered who. The directors did not wonder. They knew!

“We’ve got to get Benson,” snarled Grand, at his home that night. “It’s our skins if we don’t.”

Wallach and Birch and Rath were there. They weren’t meeting at the bank any more, after that had been used as an entrance for thieves. But if they had been still meeting there, they’d have ducked it tonight. That was because they would have been afraid someone would see them with the fifth man in the group at Grand’s home.

This fifth man was thin and wiry and Latin-looking. He was not at all like the four businessmen. He was Louie Fiume.

Now and then, a smaller city produces a major gangster. Louie Fiume was such. From Denver, he was a smoother, more streamlined killer than any of the biggest cities had produced.

He had been brought in here by Grand and Wallach. It was his car that had rammed The Avenger’s the night before. It was his men who had nearly killed the white-haired scourge of the underworld. It was Louie, according to Grand’s next words, who had the whole proposition in his lap, now.

“You’ve got to get him, Fiume!”

Louie’s Latin darkness was moved by a sardonic grimace.

“The guy’s a ghost,” he said. “He slips out of stuff nobody else could. We wire a bomb to his self-starter. So what? So he comes up to the car with some kind of electrical dingbat or something. Maybe it rings a bell, or shows a red light, I don’t know what. Anyhow, he just opens the hood, takes off the bomb, and drives away.

“We ram him twice, once with a bomb we throw and the second time along the cliff near where old Maisley got his. What happens? The first time some goofy hooks stick out from his car and hook onto the boys’ can. They have to drag him away from the bomb when they drag themselves away. The second time he just happens to be in a can that nobody can knock over. That sedan must weigh five or six tons. All the boys got was a smashed front end, and he drives on.

“Then we lay for him at the door to that joint of his on Bleek Street. And what do we get? A thing like a glass cake-cover in a delicatessen slides down over him, and our slugs bounce off it like something out of a pea shooter.”

“It all looks,” said Grand, with a vague idea of taunting the slick gangster into more earnest action, “as if you aren’t as tough as is generally thought.”

Louie Fiume’s cold eyes swung steadily to Grand’s, and stuck there, getting colder and colder.

Grand cleared his throat and changed his mind.

“We think you’re tough, of course,” he said hastily. “That’s why we hired you. But we can’t afford to have any more delay in getting the man.”

Louie lit a long, specially-made cigarette.

“I got an idea on that,” he said. “We can’t seem to touch this guy with a face that looks like something dug up out of a cemetery. But he’s got helpers, see? A man-mountain called Smitty, and a funny-looking Scotchman, and a Negro called Josh. Now, Benson’d go through hell for any of ’em. That’s well known.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re not so bright yourself, are you?” said Louie, arrogantly. “It’s like this. We can’t get Benson, but we can get his gang. Then we hold ’em and tip Benson they’re in trouble. Benson does what we can’t do—gets himself in a spot. Then we spring the trap and rub out the whole lot of ’em.”

Grand nodded. Birch licked dry lips and shivered, but nodded too. Wallach rubbed dry, lean hands together. Rath gulped and looked hastily away from the gangster’s face—but said no word of protest.

It was an illustration of the way crime deteriorates character—and also of the desperate plight of these men—that they could now listen to plans to kill four or five people where a little while ago the murder of two had made them physically ill.

“Go to it!” said Grand, sticking out his big jaw. “But whatever you do, do it fast.”

“It’ll be fast,” grinned Louie. “In fact, some of it will be done in about three minutes, if calculations are right. The big guy they call Smitty—”

The big guy called Smitty wasn’t far from the clandestine meeting at that moment. He was across the street from Grand’s home, in a doorway dark enough and big enough to shroud even his gigantic bulk.

He had been detailed by Benson to watch every move of Lucius Grand.

Similarly, Mac had been set on Rath’s trail, Josh on the trail of Birch, and Nellie Gray ordered to watch Wallach.

With all the directors at one spot, now, all Benson’s aides were, too. They were all near Grand’s home, each waiting for his man to come out. But they weren’t together. That might have tipped off their play. Each had a hiding place similar to Smitty’s doorway.

Wallach came out. Smitty didn’t see Nellie go after his car, but knew she had. He shook his huge head, troubled as always by the thought of how reckless the little blonde was.

Rath emerged, and Smitty knew, though he could not see, that Mac was slipping in his wake. Birch shook hands at the door with Lucius Grand, and left. And, after him, almost as black as the night, itself, Josh padded soundlessly.

Another man came out, after a short wait. Smitty was in a dilemma about this one.

He had seen him go in. The man looked like a rat. And Smitty liked to smash men who looked like rats. Now, he was coming out. He looked very rattish indeed. The giant wondered if he ought to disobey orders and trail him, or do as Benson had said and stick around where Grand was.

Not being able to see into the future, he decided loyally to obey orders to the letter. And thus he made true Louie Fiume’s prophecy that something “would be done in about three minutes.”

The other directors had come out. All but Grand. Smitty, after awhile, walked across the street to see if he could get nearer the house and do a little window peeping.

He got under a tree that was valiantly holding its own in the city’s dust and soot. Something fell on his head, as if the tree itself had leaned over and batted him one with its trunk.

That was all Smitty knew, for an hour and forty-five minutes. He knew the interval because the watch on his vast wrist was still running when he groaned and opened his eyes.

“Must have been hit with a building girder,” he mused. Then he was silent. His aching eyes had caught sight of a foot, on the dirty, cracked old floor near him. The foot was enormous. It was so big that he feared it could only belong to one person.

Opening his eyes further, he saw that he’d been right. Mac lay there beside him, bound and unconscious.

Smitty looked around. The two of them were in a bare room looking as if it were in a building two hundred years old and ready to fall down. There was a candle glittering on a box in the corner, illuminating large holes in the cracked plaster—

The scarred door of the room opened. Smitty got a glimpse of a couple of men, and of a third figure that was half shoved and half thrown into the room. The door closed. Smitty stared into the eyes of Josh Newton.

Josh had a lump on his jaw that would have showed purple if his own skin hadn’t been too nearly that same color to permit a contrast. He was bound, too.

“They got me while I was hotfooting after Birch,” Josh said thickly. “Four of them.”

“They got Mac while he was after Rath,” retorted the giant gloomily. “And me while I was outside Grand’s home.”

Josh shook his head wonderingly.

“How many of them took you?” he said. “I’ve always thought you could beat off any six men.”

“Not if you’re clubbed by somebody up a tree, in the darkness,” said Smitty bleakly. “Smart gang after us, all right. Looks like the roundup is complete, except for Nellie, Rosabel and the chief.”

The giant stopped and commenced biting his tongue. More steps had sounded outside, and one maker of the steps clicked along on dainty high heels.

Once more the door opened. This time it was Nellie Gray who was bundled roughly into the room, caught as she was intent on following Wallach.

Smitty’s vast shoulders bulged as he tried to break his bonds and jump at the men who had manhandled Nellie. However, the bonds wouldn’t break. This gang had taken sufficient account of the giant’s horsepower when they fastened him. He was bound with fine steel chain instead of rope. Yards of the stuff. This was one time when he could not bulge his gigantic muscles and burst his bonds.

The roundup was just about complete, now. Save for The Avenger himself.

As long as the chief was loose, however, Smitty could retain a large measure of hope.

It was fortunate for that hope that the big fellow could not overhear the gang’s plans for the white-haired menace of gangdom, a little later.

CHAPTER XI

Flaming Death!

Louie Fiume, himself, was there, now.

“There” was a tumbledown tenement building in one of the poorest sections of New York. It was so old and dilapidated that it was to be torn down shortly as unsafe. Meanwhile, it was condemned and no tenants dwelt in it.

It was in a room of this old wreck that Josh and Nellie, Mac and Smitty were held.

Louie Fiume was in another room, a floor above. He was chafing at some delay. Then the delay was explained as one of his men came hurriedly in the door.

The man was slender, dapper, almost good-looking, save that something was wrong with his eyes. Those would have given him away to any experienced cop.

“Well, you punk!” flamed Fiume. “Where have you been? We’ve been hanging around here for an hour, waiting for you.”

“I couldn’t help bein’ late, Louie,” the man whined. “I got hung up. I took a shot at the white-haired guy from the warehouse roof on Bleek Street, like you said. I’d swear I got him in the belly, but he didn’t drop—”

“He and his gang wear some kind of funny vests. Ain’t you onto that yet? You got to get ’em in the head.”

“I was too far off for a head shot,” pleaded the thin, dapper man. “Anyway, he didn’t drop, and next thing I knew he was on my tail. I been all this time doubling around to get away from him.”

Louie Fiume looked suddenly as motionless as a block of basalt, with only his dark eyes alive in his face.

“He tailed you?”

“Yeah, for a little while.”

“Any chance he tailed you here?”

“None at all.”

Fiume didn’t even breathe, it seemed.

“Well,” he said, after a moment, “we’ll see in a minute whether he did or not. There’s the phone. Go into your act.”

The fact that a telephone was in this abandoned, condemned building was due to Town Bank. The bank owned this shell through foreclosure. It was coming in handy, now.

The man picked up the phone. He had been a female impersonator before Louie picked him up. Fiume had found many uses for him; but none so important as this.

The man got Benson’s Bleek Street headquarters. In a voice that perfectly mimicked Nellie Gray’s, he inquired if this was “the chief.”

The Avenger’s cold tone, unmistakable even over the phone, came back. And Louie expelled a great sigh of relief. Bleek Street was miles from here. If Benson answered his phone there, it meant that he couldn’t have trailed the female impersonator here, after all. So that was all right.

The man was almost whispering, but still imitating Nellie’s voice in a startling manner.

“Chief, they’re holding us, all of us, at a place in Harlem. I didn’t get a chance to see the number, but the building is between 118th and 119th Streets, on the east side of Lexington Avenue. It’s a sort of gray clapboard, and looks like a four-story house with a peaked roof. It’s the only one like it on that side. Come in a hurry! Ugggh—”

The man made strangling noises, as if somebody had discovered that Nellie was phoning and someone was throttling her.

He hung up, grinning. Louie grinned, too.

“That’ll bring him,” he said. “Everybody thinks he’s so damned smart— What do you want?”

One of his gang had come in, a bulky man with reddish hair and a sullen face.

“There’s one of the bank guys at the door,” the man said.

“What?”

“One of the bank guys. He wants to come in.”

Louie Fiume swore in exasperation, and went downstairs. He looked into the choleric face of Frederick Birch.

“What are you doing here?” Fiume snapped. “Don’t you know there’s fireworks about to start in this place? Why can’t you keep out of business that’s none of your concern?”

“But it is my concern,” said Birch apologetically.

“It isn’t! You guys hired me to do a job. I’ll do it, if you don’t mess around.”

“I came to see if it wasn’t possible just to hold these people prisoners for a while,” bleated Birch. His face was very pale and his hands moved agitatedly. “After all, a mass murder—”

“It ain’t mass murder,” snarled Fiume. “It’s slaughter! So what are you going to do about it?”

“If you could just hold them prisoner—”

“No dice! They’d talk later, wouldn’t they? You’d never get away with whatever it is you’re trying to do. No, they got to die. Particularly the white-haired guy. And he’ll be along here any minute. So, with everything set, you have to come around and whine about mass murder! Beat it!”

“What are you going to do?” chattered Birch.

So Fiume told exactly what they were going to do. He took a malicious pleasure in it.

“We’ve got thermite bombs all over this old shack. See? The minute Benson steps through that door, he steps into a trap that chutes him right down to the basement. Then the bombs go off. Ever try to put out a thermite fire? You can’t. This old firetrap will be a furnace. And in the center of it will be this Benson guy and everybody working for him.”

“Fire! Burning them to death!” Birch swayed. “My heavens, you can’t—”

A man jumped into the hall from a vacant front room almost at their elbow. The room had a window on the street, and the man had been posted at that window.

“Guy coming,” he said swiftly. “Holds his head down so that his hat’ll cover his face. He’s coming for this door.”

Louie glared murder at the white-faced bank director.

“So now there isn’t time for you to get out of here!” he raved. “All right. You’ll stay and see it, that’s what you’ll do. You’ll get a belly full before we’re done.”

“Let me out—” began Birch wildly.

“And tip off Benson, coming up to the door? Hardly! Take him, Pike. Stick close to him. When it’s all set, you drag out with him and pile into one of the getaway cars.”

The man called Pike dragged Birch with him down the hall. The dim candle in the hall was extinguished, plunging everything into complete darkness.

There was a light tap at the door.

“Got crust,” admitted Louie grudgingly. “Coming right up and knocking.”

The man at the door turned the key, then leaped far back. The door was opened by the man outside.

The man came in, looked around inquiringly. At least it seemed as if he were doing that; it was so dark they could only see a vague movement of his head. Then he took a forward step, yelled, and fell fifteen feet to the basement floor.

“Got him!” shouted Fiume, with an unholy triumph in his voice. “Set ’em off, you guys!”

Five men raced to five parts of the building where thermite bombs waited to make an inferno of the condemned tenement building. In about ten minutes blazing walls, roof, floors would smash down on the helpless man in the basement, and his bound aides.

“Fire ’em!” yelled Louie again.

There seemed to be an echo to his words. But the echo did not repeat the syllables.

“Don’t do it,” said the echo.

But the echo was in the cold, terrible voice of The Avenger.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Fiume laughed. It was a diabolical laugh, full of murderous amusement.

“Don’t do it, huh?” he said. “You down there. The guy that has the nerve to call himself The Avenger. Why shouldn’t we do it?”

The only answer was a repetition, words clear and cold, calm and steady.

“Don’t do it!”

Louie yelled to the scattered members of his gang:

“You heard me. Set ’em off. Wait till the fire’s going good, to be sure that guy don’t get up out of the basement. Then hightail it out the front door.”

There were soft flares of whitish light as the thermite was started at its deadly task.

That wooden building, never any good even when new, had been drying and rotting for a long time. It started to blaze like tinder.

In the room where the candle glittered on the box, Mac and Nellie and Smitty and Josh saw flickering red tongues show under the crack of the closed door. They stared at each other, instantly getting the whole thing.

Fire! And they were bound in here—helpless as rats in a burning ship—

Swiftly the building caught. In four minutes the heat was beginning to be felt even in the hall, where no bombs had been placed. The man in the basement was screaming incoherently. His fingers appeared at the edge of the hole through which he had been chuted. The fingers looked like pale asparagus stalks in the firelight.

Louie laughed, and stamped on them. Quiveringly they lost their hold, and their owner crashed again to the basement.

“O.K.,” Louie yelled. “Out!”

But, now, something very queer was happening to the door they were to flee through.

It sprang into living flame.

Door and jamb were suddenly a fierce red glow. It was as if that whole section were a great match which had been struck and had spontaneously ignited.

Yells of astonishment, and then of growing fear, came from Louie Fiume’s gang. Now that they were all together near the front door, it could be seen that over a dozen were here.

Several sprang for the door, blazing though it was. They clawed at it to get it open, fell back squalling with burned hands.

And behind the gang, the hall suddenly became an inferno, too.

They were trapped between a portal too fiery to flee out of, and a roaring flame in the center of the hall that leaped higher even as they watched.

Fiume’s gang was normally disciplined. But it lost all that, now. It was every man for himself.

Some burned their hands again trying to get near the front door and open it. Some raced to the front room and yanked at iron bars placed there long ago to render the first floor burglar-proof. Only about half the crew had sense enough to take the one possible way out:

Over the roofs.

These jammed the staircase in the dark, looking like figures out of hell with the reflected red light of fire licking at them.

They scrambled up those stairs to the roof.

“Lam! Everybody! The fire department’ll be here in a second, and the cops, too—”

That was Fiume’s voice. Seven of his men were going to be charred sticks in the ashes of that fire. But the leader, himself, at least, had gotten clear.

The scattered members of the gang streaked to the left, down the pitch of the roof to the flat one next door.

But a compact group also moved more methodically to the right, to the opposite roof. The group took a fire escape to the ground, three buildings down the line.

The Avenger’s car was at the curb. They all piled into it. Nellie and Mac, Josh and Smitty—and a man who appeared to be the bank director, Frederick Birch.

But “Birch” reached to his face and took thin glass eyecups from blazing, colorless eyes. Those eyecups had pupils painted on them resembling in color the pupils of Birch’s eyes. And the face, with flesh as dead and pliant as any plastic, had been shaped to resemble Birch’s face.

The Avenger became himself, again, with all but Smitty staring at him in a kind of awe. Smitty was driving, fast, to get away from the scene of the fire and couldn’t stare at anything but the traffic.

“One of that gang fired at me from the warehouse roof in Bleek Street,” Benson said, voice and eyes as cold and emotionless as if he were merely remarking on what a nice, starry night it was. “I trailed him to the tenement. Then”—he raised his voice so that the giant at the wheel could hear—“your latest invention came in handy, Smitty.”

Smitty listened. That latest invention was something the utility companies would have paid a fabulous sum for. It was a radio-telephonic hookup. The Avenger’s phone was wired to a radio transmitter on a constant wavelength. When the phone rang, his radio buzzed. With a power signal activating an induction coil near the phone, he shorted the instrument, in a sense, and listened to the phone message, and could answer the speaker, over his own radio transmitter, even though he was miles away.

“I trailed the men to the tenement and then I saw Birch coming down the street,” said the Avenger quietly. “I don’t know what he was coming for. We’ll never know. I slugged him, and made up to resemble him. Then I took his watch and wallet and let him lay. I figured he’d think he had been attacked by a common thief, when he regained consciousness, and go on with whatever business he had in mind. Which he did.”

Mac’s bleak blue eyes were very somber.

“Then the man who fell into the basement—”

“Was Birch,” nodded Benson, pale eyes flaming. “One of the bank men, at least, has paid for his crimes. I came first, was mistaken for him, and managed to get you all free and the lot of us out of there. The man crushed in the basement was the real Birch.”

“But the blazing door that kept the skurlies from gettin’ away,” said Mac.

“You should know how that was done, Mac. One of your brain children accomplished it. You know the chemical you evolved which is so volatile that it leaps into flames with the mere warmth of a candle twenty feet away? I dashed a vial of that against the door when I came in. The heat of the building fire very soon set it off. I warned the gang not to fire the building. They did—and about half of them have given their lives in consequence.”

A sound came from Smitty that was like a croak, but was really a gasp of awe.

This man with the dead face and the pale eyes and the virile hair! He would be a perpetual marvel to his aides. The Avenger did not take life. Instead he maneuvered enemies into positions where, if they tried murderously to destroy him or anyone connected with him, they destroyed themselves instead.

Once more the master chess player called The Avenger had moved living pawns into such a position. And half the pawns had been swept from the board.

CHAPTER XII

Dead or Alive

The colorless, infallible eyes of The Avenger had a glitter in them like that of gray-fogged glass. Things were rushing to a time limit.

Because of the deliberate rumors about Town Bank, there had been many withdrawals. And the directors couldn’t bolster up the bank’s liquid assets with their own money because Benson had driven their personal securities down to a point where it would be ruinous to sell them.

Town Bank and its unscrupulous executives were in a desperate position. But it looked as if, with ingenuity, it could last for another twenty-four hours before closing its doors.

And in another day the stockholders of Ballandale Glass Corp. had their meeting. At that meeting, the Town Bank directors, with Crimm’s big block of stock to give them a majority, could vote in a policy that would swiftly ruin the corporation.

Then, at once, they could sell that stock, as secretly and circuitously as it had been bought, and get the cash they needed to save the bank. After that, they would follow their original plan to wait till the corporation had smashed, buy the pieces for five cents on the dollar, and make millions by building the concern up again.

In twenty-four hours the stockholders’ meeting—

Then safety for the ruthless bank crew.

So The Avenger had to wind their clocks for them before that time had passed. And a day is not very long when you are confronted with an involved criminal mess.

Benson had a dozen plans in his flaming, cold brain. But with time pressing urgently, with a thousand things to be done, there had to be a bad break.

It was furnished by Tom Crimm.

Benson’s belt radio sent out its tiny, urgent signal. Benson listened to Rosabel’s voice.

Josh Newton’s pretty wife was still the “maid” for Luckow’s sister in her apartment. And she had something to say, now, that instantly took all The Avenger’s attention.

“They’ve got Tom?” he snapped back. “The police?”

“Yes,” came the small voice from the radio case. “He went out. Luckow and his sister had both told him not to. But he said he was going crazy cooped up; so he went out. A patrolman saw him. They’ve got him cornered in a garage on Amsterdam Avenue. Beatrice Luckow just came back from trailing him and phoned her brother. So I’m telling you the whole thing, just as she told it.”

“What garage?”

“I didn’t get that, Mr. Benson,” said Rosabel. “But I guess there won’t be any trouble finding it.”

Benson started for the door. No, there wouldn’t be much trouble in finding what hole they’d cornered Tom in.

Tom was wanted for two murders and bank robbery. A man wanted for all that is taken by the police—dead or alive! With a strong chance that it will be dead. The cops don’t mess with men as dangerous as that.

Tom had brains enough. He would realize that. He would know that if he tried to walk out and give himself up, chances were he’d be shot down by an excited rookie before he took two steps.

That meant one thing: He’d have to shoot it out with the police like any seasoned crook.

Dead or alive!

No, there’d be no trouble locating that garage. Just cruise up Amsterdam till you saw crowds of people held back by patrolmen, cops and plain-clothesmen shooting at windows from behind barricades.

And how anyone could enter a mess like that and come out unseen and unscathed with the man a hundred police were after, would seem to be an unanswerable question.

The Avenger got out his make-up kit and began to work with swift fingers.

Man of a Thousand Faces.

His fingers molded and prodded and shaped. In a moment he had a heavy, phlegmatic face. He had on his habitual gray, one of the dozens of suits that made him inconspicuous in a crowd. He just kept that on; but from a cabinet he got out a derby, a little worn.

He cut a cigar in half, steely fingers flying at their task. He lit the cigar stub, let it die out; then he clamped the long butt in his jaws.

He was a heavy-featured, heavy-footed plain-clothes-man with cigar butt and derby in about three and a half minutes.

He raced to the basement of the Bleek Street building and got into a fast car. He went up the ramp and over the sidewalk to the street with siren screaming.

There was a police star on the car. The Avenger had enough influence with the police department to have plastered all his cars with similar stars, if he had cared to. That was because he had worked with them so effectually in the past.

Now—and a regretful glint appeared in the cold, pale eyes—he was going to have to work against the police. He didn’t like that at all. But it was necessary, if Tom’s life were to be saved.

He screamed uptown, with his police badge getting him the right of way, and went up Amsterdam Avenue. Very soon he saw the commotion he’d anticipated.

It was even worse than he’d thought.

A gun battle, in mid-morning! There must have been ten thousand spectators, at a safe distance behind a cordon of cops. And there must have been a brigade of police. Out of that melee, The Avenger had to pick Tom Crimm.

He braked his car, with a squeal of tires, and shouldered through the crowd. He was so typically detective that no cop even thought of stopping him. He went to a knot of detectives behind a truck, and stared at the garage—a three-story building with half the front windows out.

“Down, you chump!” hissed one of the detectives. And a bullet from a top floor window came close to his head.

Instead of ducking, Benson walked toward the yawning street door of the garage

“Hey! Come back!” cried one of his fellow detectives—as they deemed themselves. “The guy’s crazy, in there! He’ll drill you in a dozen spots! Besides, the joint’s full of tear gas—”

The Avenger didn’t seem to be moving fast. Which was what had drawn the most urgent of the yells of warning. But just the same he was in that doorway before more than one more slug could be sent down at him—at a narrow miss.

Not too hard to get to the door. The reason none of the others had was because of the tear gas. They couldn’t have stood it. But Benson simply reached into a vest pocket, got out two plain glass, tissue-thin cups to slip over his pale eyeballs, and put them on to protect his eyes from the stinging gas. Then he raised the lapel of his coat and breathed through that. The lapel was chemically treated and was as good as a gas mask.

He went through the clouds of tear gas as if it had been fresh air—up to the second floor. It was from those windows that Tom, caught in his own tragic foolishness, had been firing.

Tom was choking and his eyes were streaming. But he could see an advancing figure, and he fired at it frantically. Three bullets hit Benson’s bulletproof, celluglass undergarment. Then The Avenger was up to the choking man.

His fist lashed out with delicate precision. Tom fell. The Avenger shouldered him and walked down to the first floor.

But not to the front.

There was a rear entrance onto a narrow areaway, from this particular garage. Benson unlocked and opened that, and came out with his burden in the midst of a cloud of gas.

There were men in here, too. For their benefit Benson coughed and wiped at his eyes. They stared at him with awe. None of them recognized him, but New York is a big place with lots of detectives; so none thought of that.

All they saw was one of their number, apparently an iron man who only coughed a little from gas that would have downed any one of them—and who even kept the butt of a cigar nonchalantly between his clenched teeth—coming out of a seething garage with a desperate man over his shoulder.

“Boy, you’ll get medals for this!” one of the uniformed men breathed. “Here, we’ll take the guy—”

“Too much trouble with the crowds if we have a parade,” growled Benson. “Keep up the show. I’ll take this man in, myself, sneak him out the areaway here. Then we won’t have a mob hanging on our necks and messing up the works.”

It was good sense. The men nodded, and Benson went to the areaway entrance alone, with Tom over his shoulder. His own car was around the corner on Amsterdam. There was a cab parked near here, though. It was empty. The driver was undoubtedly on Amsterdam watching the battle.

Benson calmly appropriated the cab, drove off in it with Tom still unconscious in the rear—and ran into more trouble than all the crowd and all the police had been.

There were men around there who wanted Tom as badly as the cops did, but who hadn’t been reckless enough to try to snatch him in that barrage. Those men belonged to the Luckow mob!

They simply couldn’t have Tom taken. He could talk too much. So they had hung around on the fringe, baffled and furious—

Till Luckow himself, from the corner, happened to see a man who was obviously a detective come out of the areaway carrying the fellow over whom all the shooting was occurring.

The Avenger couldn’t know that, however, not being a seer. He only knew that he had gone three blocks when a car overhauled the cab and bore down on him from the right. He speeded up, and the car beat him to it and got a little ahead.

Then another car took its place at the right of the cab. That one clanged into him and drove him to the curb. The one ahead cut across his path and stopped him with a jolt.

Benson was not in one of his bulletproofed jobs, now. He was in a standard cab that could be riddled like cheese.

He bent over in the seat, and opened the right front door of the cab. He rolled out of it and got behind an iron light-post.

Already men from the second car had the rear door open and were dragging Tom’s unconscious body out. Benson had Mike, the little, silenced .22, from its holster. Its deadly small message whispered out and one of the men dropped. Another joined him in a second or two, but that was all Benson could do.

It was one man against a mob; and even though that one man was The Avenger, himself, such were the odds that the mob could not fail to win out.

At least six men were firing methodically at the iron post that was all that stood between Benson and death. He couldn’t move a fraction of an inch from its shelter, to use Mike again, or attempt a suicidal move to recover Tom, or anything else.

He was caught there. And, caught, he could only listen while one of the cars drove off with Tom in it.

The other one did not drive off. And the fusillade of bullets continued. Ever a resourceful killer, Luckow had seen in this an excellent opportunity to get this guy with the dead face who was so dangerous. He had recognized Benson.

The bullets began coming from shallower angles as the men spread out and moved to get to one side where they could drill Benson. In a few more seconds they’d have him.

The Avenger didn’t dart either to right or left, as, of course, they had expected.

He leaped straight up.

There were ornamental side-arms on the light-post, up about ten feet. Benson caught one of those and swung, hard, straight toward the gang car which was still tangled with the taxi only a dozen feet away.

He shot over the heads of the amazed gangsters, hit the top of their sedan, and leaped down to the other side.

They still had him. They could swivel and pour lead at his running figure till one of the slugs found his unprotected head. But he didn’t have to run far.

A coupé shot up beside him, door opened.

Benson leaped in, with a move so swift and smooth that it was almost as if he had flowed in. There was a woman at the wheel of the coupé, so heavily veiled that even his keen eyes could not see her features.

Tom Crimm could have had a word to say about the veiled woman who had quite probably saved Benson’s life. But she was an enigma to The Avenger.

She had swirled into his orbit, picked him up, and was presently to swirl out again just as mysteriously.

About a dozen blocks from the taxi scene, she pulled to the curb.

“You had better get out here,” she said.

Her voice was cultured and low. Benson peered at the veil, his eyes like diamond drills.

“Please,” she murmured.

He got out. The Avenger never distressed a woman, particularly one who had helped him as this one had. He looked after her, as the coupé whirled off down the street. As he went on to Bleek Street, he noted down every detail of her appearance in memory; type of veil, clothes, shoes, tint of nail polish, shape of ears.

He kept thinking of her because she was a riddle; and The Avenger was always challenged by riddles.

At Bleek Street, however, thoughts of her were driven out swiftly. They were driven out by the specter of death!

CHAPTER XIII

Desperate Call

Wayne Crimm was young enough to take things at their face value. He was young enough to believe what a man’s lips said without looking into his eyes to check the truth of the statement. Also, he was still impressed by a man’s worldly position more than he, himself, realized.

Wayne was alone at Bleek Street when the buzzer announced someone in the vestibule downstairs. He had seen the aides of The Avenger work the release lever, after observing whoever rang the bell on their special television set. He went through the same motions and saw Robert Rath, downstairs. So he let him up.

Wayne met Rath at the second floor. And Wayne met Rath with a gun in his hand and fury and wariness in his blue eyes. This man was one of the little set who was responsible for his father’s death and the loss of his father’s fortune. If he tried just one trick—

But Rath tried no tricks.

The bank director was only a shadow of his normal, loud-spoken, plump self. He was shivering and pale, and in his eyes was fear and contrition. It was the sight of these things in his face that had impelled Wayne to let him up from the vestibule.

“Wayne,” Rath said, glancing around as if afraid of being overheard even in this sanctum, “I’ve got to see Mr. Benson. Is he in?”

“What do you want to see him about?” snapped Wayne.

Rath swallowed. Then he broke completely. Shuddering, he clutched wildly at Wayne’s arm.

“I’ve got to get out of all this,” he chattered. “Murder, robbery, crime—I can’t stand it anymore. I want to throw in with you and Benson. I want to right some of the wrong I’ve done.”

Wayne felt fierce triumph fill him. The break they had all been hoping for! If this man, one of the insiders in the nasty mess of the Ballandale Glass stock, should talk, all would be well.

“How do I know you’re on the level about this?” he demanded, keeping a little wariness to the last.

“When you all hear what I have to say,” Rath replied, “you’ll know. But I want to speak to Benson. Where is he?”

“He isn’t in right now,” said Wayne. “Nobody is here but me.”

In the wall at his elbow, a little glass dot was glowing deep red. He didn’t see it, and wouldn’t have known what it meant if he had. But any of The Avenger’s aides would have known.

That tiny red signal meant danger; meant that the visitor standing next to it was armed.

Rath looked desperate at the statement that The Avenger was not in.

“When will he be back? I haven’t much time. If any of the others should find out I’m here”—he shivered again—“I’d get what Maisley got.”

“He ought to be back soon,” said Wayne.

“I’ll wait awhile for him. As long as I dare. Where can I wait?”

Wayne was not entirely a fool. He still had his gun drawn and was still covering the bank man with it.

“There’s a small office on this floor. You can wait in there. And you’d better be telling the truth. Because if you try to lie to a man like Mr. Benson—”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” said Rath earnestly. “Where is this office?”

Wayne led him to a small room in the rear. There were books from floor to ceiling. There was a big desk with three phones on it and a swivel chair behind it.

“I’ll tell him you’re here as soon as he comes in,” said Wayne.

He went out. The door locked automatically as he swung it shut. The lock, a ponderous one, would keep Rath a prisoner, he knew. He thought he was being pretty smart in this whole affair. And he was jubilant at the prospect of getting the lowdown from Rath.

He went up to the third floor, to the great room where The Avenger and his aides spent most of their time while at headquarters. He would wait for Benson there—

Quite a naïve young man, Wayne Crimm. Young enough to believe Rath. Young enough to assume that, of course, when Benson returned to the Bleek Street place he would go at once to the top floor.

But it happened that Benson didn’t.

Pale eyes intent in his white, dead face, The Avenger went to the second floor instead of the third. He walked with his silent, catlike tread to the little rear office. There was some dope there he wanted to get. Some information on nail polish, with particular regard to the various colors of the stuff.

He opened the door without warning of any kind of what waited inside.

He opened the door—and stood on the threshold looking into the muzzle of a .38 revolver that seemed to laugh grimly at him under the frantic, deadly eyes of Rath.

For the space of a heartbeat, Benson considered action. But in the same fraction of a second he dismissed the idea.

The gun was pointed, not at his chest, which was protected by the marvelous celluglass plastic, but at his head. And a shot there would kill him just as surely as if he had been an ordinary police rookie, instead of The Avenger.

Also, that shot would be forthcoming without hesitation if he moved.

It was going to come anyway. His pale eyes told him that, as they peered into Rath’s frenzied, desperate ones. But if Benson were utterly still, it would take Rath a little while to work himself up to the point of doing murder in cold blood.

“So,” said Rath finally, with a deep, hissing sigh, “the simple methods sometimes succeed where the elaborate ones fail.”

Benson said nothing. Face as still as the frozen face of the moon on a winter night, he stared at Rath with his pale eyes like ice.

“We have set complicated traps to get you,” Rath went on, injecting fury and triumph into his voice as he lashed his courage to the point where he could pull the trigger. “They failed. Finally it occurred to me that it might be possible to come here openly, face you as I’m facing you now, and shoot you down. With your organization, you are prepared to beat complicated traps. But it might not occur to you that death could be this simple. It looks as though I win.”

“It does,” nodded The Avenger.

His tone was as calm, as cold as his dead face. And into Rath’s eyes began to creep a shade of uncertainty. This man with the death-mask countenance acted as if he had a machine gun under each arm. Rath longed for him to make some little move of attack so that he could fire at him.

But Benson continued to stand still.

“Come into the room. Shut the door behind you,” Rath said harshly.

Benson did so. The click of the lock sounded like the tick of doom.

The Avenger spoke then, voice measured and glacial.

“You are determined to kill me?”

“Yes,” said Rath. His finger was tightening a bit on the trigger. He was almost at the point where he could twitch it.

“Suppose,” said Benson, “I call off the war against you and your institution, Town Bank?”

Rath stared.

“That doesn’t sound like you, Benson,” he said suspiciously. “All I’ve heard about you is to the effect that once you have started on something, you don’t stop till it is finished, no matter what threatens you.”

“Perhaps,” said Benson, “I have never been in such a dangerous position before.”

Rath could agree with that. He knew this man was going to die; knew that lead from this gun of his was going to smash into the dead face and through Benson’s brain.

“You are killing me,” said Benson, “to keep me from exposing the murders and theft of your little crew. Isn’t that right? But if I gave up my war against you—then you wouldn’t have to kill me.”

“How could I trust your word in a thing like that?” snapped Rath.

Benson took a slow step toward the desk.

“Suppose I stop the wheels of Justice, Inc., right now, in your presence. Then you’d know I was acting in good faith. In other words, suppose I act before the threat of your gun is taken from me instead of after?”

In Rath’s eyes was a blazing thought. Heavy lids drooped hastily to hide it. The thought was very comforting.

Let this man go ahead and call off the dogs. Then, with that done—kill him as intended before.

Rath nodded.

“All right, Benson. Your life in return for our safety. First, call up your friends who withdrew all that cash from our bank. We need it badly. Tell them to deposit that much with us, again, at once. They’d do it if you insisted.”

“Yes,” said The Avenger tonelessly, “they’d do it for me.”

He went on to the desk, careful to move slowly and not alarm Rath into firing. A nervous man with a gun is more dangerous than a couple of polished killers.

He sat down at the desk. His right hand went for one of the phones. His left unobtrusively touched the desk edge.

He picked up the phone and leaned back in the swivel chair. Rigidly, Rath’s gun moved to keep absolutely in line on The Avenger’s head, muzzle yawning toward the thick white hair over the paralyzed, glacial countenance.

“Mr. James Bard,” The Avenger said, to whoever answered the phone. Rath knew that name, all right. It was the name of a great financier. The bank director had heard of Benson’s host of friends among financiers as well as longshoremen, mechanics and others in the humbler walks of life. Here was proof.

And here was the first step in the tearing down of the wall the pale-eyed man had been building inexorably around the Town Bank crew.

“Jim,” said The Avenger steadily, after a moment. “Benson talking. You remember I asked you to withdraw whatever funds you might have on deposit in Town Bank, a few days ago? I’d like to ask you to do something else, now. I want you to request every person you know with large funds in that bank to draw them out, too—”

“Damn you!” screamed Rath, as he saw his whole new hope being dashed to the ground by the man behind the desk. “Damn you—”

He pressed the trigger three times, in such quick succession that the three shots sounded like one long explosion.

Three slugs banged straight at the skull of The Avenger! At that range they couldn’t miss. They went straight into the pale forehead under the thick white hair.

And instead of the spurt of life blood from the brain behind that spot—there was a round of bursting glass.

The Avenger’s eyes smiled grimly even though his lips could not.

Rath screamed again, incoherently, and staggered a little. He noticed that Benson was breathing through his coat lapel, but his numbing brain couldn’t gather the reason for it.

The bank man tried to fire again, and couldn’t force his hand to line the gun. Then he tottered and fell prone.

The Avenger hung up the phone, over which at no time had he really talked to anyone. He got up and went to a little switch in the wall.

So easy just to walk in here and shoot down The Avenger. Rath could have been pardoned for thinking that. Because Rath couldn’t know of the thing at the desk which Benson had been so careful to reach.

When The Avenger’s finger had touched the desk edge, a thin, non-reflecting sheet of glass had slid between him and Rath. The glass was curved a little. That curve had showed Benson’s head as being a foot higher than it really was. So that when The Avenger slid down low in his chair, the curve of the glass gave a false target. Rath had drilled a forehead nearly twelve inches over the target he’d thought to shoot at, hitting glass instead of flesh.

Then the vibration of the shots had released a gas of MacMurdie’s devising that promptly put the man to sleep.

Benson turned the wall switch stopping the gas flow, opened windows to air out, and left the room. Rath would be unconscious for a quarter of an hour.

Meanwhile, Benson wanted to talk to Wayne and find how it was that the fellow had gotten in in the first place.

But Wayne Crimm was not there.

Wayne’s hat lay on a table in the big top-floor room. There would seem to be no reason for his dangerous desertion of Benson’s safe hideout.

Yet he had obviously dashed away, shortly before, in such a hurry that he hadn’t even thought to take his hat.

CHAPTER XIV

Three To Die!

One reason why The Avenger had walked into headquarters with so little of his usual superhuman awareness of danger, was that the place had been left in the reliable hands of Josh Newton.

Wayne shouldn’t have been alone there, to use his own discretion about whether or not to admit visitors. Josh should have been with him. The reason he wasn’t, was Josh’s pretty wife, Rosabel.

Rosabel Newton was in a difficult spot as maid for Nicky Luckow’s sister. She had known that when she got herself hired. But Rosabel had more courage than most men. And at no time did she shirk her duties because of fear.

She wasn’t shirking them, now.

In the living room of Beatrice Luckow’s apartment, Luckow and the man called Blinky were talking. Rosabel could hear their voices only as a rumble. So, in the bedroom, she opened the door an inch.

She shouldn’t have been in that bedroom. She should have been in her own room down a hall and around a corner, where she could have heard nothing whatever. But she was in the bedroom, and she was hearing things. Plenty!

“This sap, Tom Crimm, is too hot to hold,” Blinky was complaining. “We’ve got to rub him out, Nicky.”

“If we do that,” rumbled the mob leader, “our first plan is shot. Then we’d have no goat for the bank job.”

“You ain’t got one as it stands,” Blinky pointed out. “If Tom gets caught, he squeals. If he dies, we beat the rap on the bank stick-up any way we can. We’ve done it before; we can do it again. Let me go out to The Corners and turn the heat on him.”

There was silence from Nicky Luckow. Then:

“I’ve got one more play to try first,” the mobster rumbled. “I’m still laying for the kid brother. If we get him, we can swing back to the first idea: Turn Tom over to the cops, with his brother’s life snuffed out if he talks, and let him clear us on the bank job—”

Rosabel backed soundlessly away from the door. She had a report to make on this. She got the little radio from her waist as she backed away.

She touched a night table in the room, and held her breath as it teetered. But it did not fall, only made a little creaking sound and then settled upright. She went on, into the bathroom, and closed the door.

The tiny radio was warmed up by then. She whispered into it, “Rosabel calling. From Beatrice Luckow’s apartment.”

A little voice came from the set, just audible enough so that the compact earphones didn’t have to be used.

“It’s Josh, honey. Go ahead.”

“About Tom and Wayne Crimm,” Rosabel breathed into the transmitter. “Did you ever hear of a place called The Corners? I think it’s out of town somewhere, because one of the men spoke of going ‘out to The Corners—’ ”

Rosabel stopped talking, then. And she felt as if a spot between her shoulder blades were slowly turning to ice. It was doing that at the sudden touch of a hard, cold object.

That object was a gun muzzle.

She turned, and looked up into the dull stones that Luckow had for eyes.

Behind Luckow, in the bathroom doorway, were Blinky and Luckow’s sister, Beatrice. Blinky was snarling soundlessly at the pretty Negress crouched over her small radio. Beatrice was expressionlessly looking at her crimson fingernails.

“I thought you said this maid was all right,” Luckow rasped to his sister. “All right, huh? She’s a little spy.” His gun prodded painfully into Rosabel’s back. “Drop that radio or whatever it is.”

Rosabel’s hands opened. The curved metal case tinkled to the floor. Luckow smashed it flat with his foot.

“You spy,” he snarled. “Who are you working for? The cops? The white-haired guy? And what’d you spill before we heard that table creak and came in here?”

Rosabel said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Luckow jerked her to her feet.

“Well, it doesn’t matter whether you spilt or not. The important thing is, not to see if you’ll talk to me, but to make sure you won’t talk to anybody else. Take her to The Corners, Blinky—”

That was all Rosabel heard. Without warning, treacherously, Luckow’s fist flashed up in a cruel blow. It caught her flush on her rounded, firm jaw.

And miles away in Bleek Street, Josh went crazy.

He knew Rosabel wouldn’t have taken the risk of radioing unless she had something very important to talk about. And, once started, he knew she wouldn’t have stopped unless something terrible had happened.

Her voice had ceased almost in the middle of a word.

Then there had been a beginning sound like the crackling of a match box under a heel. That was when her radio case went under Luckow’s foot. That sound had stopped as the pressure crushed the radio’s internal workings.

Then silence.

That was why Wayne was alone at headquarters. Josh raced out of the place without a word to him, or a thought of anything but Rosabel’s safety.

The Corners! Josh didn’t know where it was. But he found out in a hurry.

It was a small, little-known roadhouse on a side road in New Jersey. Luckow had a half-interest in it.

Rosabel had mentioned the place, and Josh had no other lead to where she might be taken if she were caught. Of course, they might have killed her where they found her.

Shuddering, Josh dismissed that thought. He clung to the logical idea that they wouldn’t want to commit murder in the apartment of Luckow’s sister. And he sped for The Corners in The Avenger’s fastest car.

Josh was a very dark Negro, indeed, and he made it a habit to wear dark clothes. The result was that he could slip along in the darkness of night almost like an invisible man.

He left his car a half a mile from the roadhouse and made his way across open fields toward the rear of it. He was thinking grimly of the way his wife’s voice had abruptly stopped, and hoping that his hunch about her being brought to the place she’d mentioned was right.

The Corners was a huge old farmhouse remodeled into a mongrel thing with an electric sign in front. There was a parking lot at the side, in which were twenty-five or thirty cars.

Josh crossed the lot like a streak of darkness within darkness. He got to a big tree, whose upper branches scraped the side of the building.

Up there, on the third floor, were dormer windows. The biggest branch came within four feet of the central window.

Josh went up the tree like a great black cat. He poised a moment, then leaped the distance between tree branch and roof. He hit the roof with a little louder thud than he liked; so he reached out and caught one of the leafy twigs of the big bough. He drew these harshly over the shingles.

That was to tell anyone inside who might have heard the thud that it was caused by the butting of the branch. Then he went to the dormer windows, crawling along the gutter, and peered into one after another.

The fourth showed a small attic room with somebody in it. There were two people in it, to be accurate, a man and a woman. But at first Josh only saw the man.

It was Tom Crimm. On his face was a queer look. It was compounded of fear and anger, with a tragic expression of guilt and regret thrown in.

Then Josh saw the woman, and things began to whirl around in his head with angry confusion.

The woman was Rosabel. And Rosabel was tied so tightly that the cords sank deep into her wrists and ankles. There was a gag over her lips, too.

Josh stayed where he was for a moment, too wrathful to move. He saw Tom stride toward her, with a knife in his hand.

The look on Tom’s face was a clear record of the chaos and guilt in the brain behind it. He had wanted his gang tough, to smash the bank crowd. But in all his planning he hadn’t contemplated anything so extreme as this.

With a sweep of the knife, he slashed the rope at Rosabel’s wrists. Another took care of her ankles. Then he removed the gag. His hands were trembling as he did so.

“They were going to kill you!” he said indignantly. “I heard them. Going to murder you here, as soon as the roadhouse customers were gone for the night, so the shots wouldn’t be heard. Killing women! I didn’t intend to have anything like that happen.”

No one connected with Tom in all this had denied that he had a brain. It was just that he used it in the wrong way, breaking the law, himself, to get even with the lawbreakers.

He was beginning to see just what kind of force he had unleashed when he played into the hands of Nicky Luckow. Murdering women in cold blood! He had thought the murder of the watchman at the bank was the last straw. But this—this went beyond that.

He helped Rosabel to her feet. She flexed her arms as the circulation started to return.

“I’ll help you down the back way,” Tom said. Josh, on the roof outside, nodded the gratitude which he wasn’t able to voice. “You can slip off toward the highway—”

Josh saw Tom’s face suddenly go blank, then saw him make a quick move toward the door which stopped before he had gone two feet.

Josh couldn’t see the door from where he perched. But in a moment he saw the man who came from the doorway.

It was Luckow’s man, Blinky. And in his hand was an automatic.

“So you were going to help this little spy get away!” said Blinky, so softly that Josh barely heard. “I had an idea you’d be like that. You dumb punk!”

“Look here,” flamed Tom. “I expected some rough work when I came to you guys for help. I’ve gone through with my share of it and I haven’t kicked yet. But I’m kicking now! I won’t be part of the murder of women.”

“Won’t you?” said Blinky.

“No! Where’s Luckow? I want to see Luckow.”

“You’ll see him,” droned Blinky. “He ought to be here any minute. You’ll see him. Then, if your luck’s good, you can go from here to the chair. If it ain’t good, you’ll go out with the dame, here. Got that, you lily-handed amateur crook?”

Tom sneered.

“If you kill me, there’s no more chance for you to get that chunk of my father’s fortune in Ballandale stock. If you try to hand me over to the cops for the bank holdup, I’ll talk my head off.”

Blinky grinned.

“You wouldn’t talk.”

“Oh, no? There’s nothing you could do to stop me! There’s no threat you could hold over me that would—”

He stopped. His eyes widened.

“Look here!” he said hoarsely. “You haven’t any ideas about— Where’s my brother, Wayne?”

“I wouldn’t have the slightest idea,” said Blinky.

He struck, then. Because Tom had leaped. He flailed down with the gun and Tom slumped to the floor.

With the fall, Josh began edging in front of the window to leap in. But he heard a noise from the far end of the roof that made him jerk his head that way. He thought he saw another head down there, just ducking under the eaves.

He changed his mind about going into the room where Blinky was. He pussyfooted down the line to the next dormer window. It was dark behind that one.

At the other end of the room he distinctly heard a noise. And this time he definitely saw a head thrust up and then duck down again.

Somebody at each end of the roof. He slid into the darkened room next to the one in which Rosabel and Tom were. The minute he hit the floor he knew he had made a mistake. He sensed someone in there, close!

He didn’t get his psychic warning in time. The roof or something seemed to drop on his head and he went down.

A light snapped on. The catlike, mean-looking fellow called Tim stood and stared down at him. He nudged the unconscious Negro with a hard toe.

“Didn’t you ever hear of burglar alarms?” he jeered to the unresponsive ears. “That tree looks like an easy way to get into this joint. It ain’t the first time we’ve trapped a guy sneakin’ up it—and trippin’ the alarm as he went.”

He hauled Josh into the next room and dumped him next to Tom and Rosabel. Rosabel had been tied and gagged, again. She stared over the gag with horror in her eyes as she saw Josh’s plight.

Tom was still unconscious. But his lips moved a bit.

“Wayne—” was the word they formed. “Wayne—”

Josh wasn’t the only one who had gotten an urgent call at the Bleek Street headquarters. Sometime after Josh had left in such a hurry and while The Avenger was still being held at gunpoint, Wayne had received a telephone call. Benson discovered that about four minutes after finding evidences of the boy’s hurried departure.

To each phone at the Bleek Street place was wired a recording device which made a small record of every conversation carried on. And the most recently recorded conversation revealed itself to Benson’s ear like this:

“Hello.” Voice furtive and disguised. “I want to speak to Wayne Crimm.”

“This is Wayne Crimm speaking.” Wayne’s voice.

“Well, I’m one of Luckow’s mob. I won’t say who. I got some dope for you on what happened to your old man, if you want to hear it. It’s about your brother, Tom.”

“Of course I want to hear it—if it’s on the level and you really have something to say.”

“I’ve got something to say, all right,” snarled the furtive voice. “And I’m sure glad to get it off my chest. I’ve been shoved around a little here at The Corners, and I don’t like it. I’ll show those guys—”

“What’s the dope you claim you’ve got?” Wayne’s voice interrupted.

“It’s about your brother, kid. Maybe you ain’t got the guts to take it.”

“I’ll take anything you can give,” snapped Wayne’s hostile voice.

“All right. Hold onto something. Your brother, Tom, killed your old man.”

For perhaps thirty seconds the record whirling impersonally in the vast Bleek Street top-floor room gave out no sound but that of Wayne’s heavy breathing.

Then his voice came, strangled, furious.

“Liar! That’s a lie and you know it. You said you had something to tell me. And you try to feed me that kind of stuff—”

“I said it’d hit you where you live. It’s the truth. Your brother did it, himself, that night. Want the proof? All right. Tom told you he’d been held up by a blow-out, didn’t he? Said something cut a V-shaped piece out of his right rear tire. Well, he didn’t have a blow-out. And the car that killed your dad had a V-shaped piece out of the right rear tire! It was Tom’s car!”

Another silence. Then: “You . . . you’re lying, I tell you!”

The Avenger’s eyes were grim as he heard this. He had told of seeing the V-shaped mark in the tread of the tire left by the murder car on the sidewalk. Told of it in the hearing of young Wayne.

“Where are you?” yelled the boy’s voice from the record. “The Corners? Where? I’ll cut your heart out for that lie! I’ll—”

Only a click answered, as the caller hung up. Then there was a broken sob from Wayne, and that was all.

The Avenger snapped the record off. Here was the answer to Wayne’s absence.

There was just enough devilish plausibility in the phone call to Wayne to send the boy raving out to find his brother and demand explanations. Perhaps enough to impel him to try to kill Tom!

There was a case of the latest in fine guns along one section of the east wall. Benson stepped to that. His pale, infallible eyes ranged over the guns. A Mauser was gone. So it was the latter.

Wayne Crimm had gone out, furious, insane, to kill his own brother, Tom. He had fallen for a kidnap trick.

The Avenger left Bleek Street, a fast gray shadow. Behind him, he had to leave Robert Rath, locked in the second-floor office. But the bank director would be safe there. He couldn’t get out of that room.

CHAPTER XV

Life for a Life

More than Josh had heard the call over Rosabel’s little belt radio. Mac and Smitty had heard it, too. It took them quite a while to get to The Corners, because they had been north of New York, looking around Theodore Maisley’s country place, and the place on the road where the bank president had been forced over the cliff.

They had found something, too. Though many hours had passed since that accident, a trace had endured. They had found tire tracks up a soft lane off the main road. The tracks told of a car having been driven in, turned around, and then driven out again.

The lane was just beyond the curve where the cliff was called Suicide Heights.

“It could have been this way,” rumbled the giant, Smitty. “Maisley is driving out toward his house. He gets to the curve. A car is coming toward him, from the opposite direction, so it’ll meet and pass him on the curve. Another car waits in this lane, and shoots out as that second car goes by. Then the two cars race abreast toward Maisley. He swings to the right to try to miss them and goes over the cliff.”

“Nice reasonin’,” said Mac ironically.

“What’s the matter with it, you Scotch raven?”

“Plenty,” said Mac. “In the first place, there isn’t a chance in a hundred that another car would happen along in just the right place at just the right time. In the second, if one did, and this guy shot out, the other car’d pull ahead or drop behind before the curve was reached. If he didn’t, it would mean he was in on the killing. In which case both cars would have been in the lane and come out together.”

“Then why was this car in the lane?”

“How do I know? Maybe it had nothin’ to do with the accident.”

Smitty played a trump card. Mac’s blue eyes had missed a trick this time.

“This waiting car,” he said, “had a V-shaped cut in the right rear tire just as did the car that shagged Joseph Crimm into heart failure.”

Mac whistled, and looked closer.

“I guess maybe you’re right,” he conceded. “I guess the car did have somethin’ to do with Maisley’s death. But how—”

It was then that Smitty felt the vibration of his tiny radio indicating a call. He held up his hand and listened. So did Mac. And they got Rosabel’s beginning message to Josh. Got that—and the sudden silence.

Without a word to each other, Mac and the giant piled into their car. Trouble! And when one of The Avenger’s aides got into a jam, it was the concern of all the rest of them to get him out.

Mac knew where The Corners was. He started toward it, down Hudson Boulevard, at seventy.

Cops started to phone ahead to stop the maniac in the blue sedan, then refrained as they saw the police insignia which was on several of The Avenger’s machines.

To The Corners.

Mac spotted the car in which Josh had come. All The Avenger’s aides were trained in tactics like army majors. The Scot had decided on a rear approach to the roadhouse as instantly and surely as Josh had. So when the blue sedan came to a stop, it almost nosed into Josh’s car.

Smitty nodded.

“One of us here,” he rumbled. “The three of us can take that place apart and not bother to put it back together again. We—”

The Scot’s bony hand on his arm stopped him. From the roadhouse across the fields came the sound of shots. Many of them.

The two began to run toward The Corners.

Tom came back groaning, to consciousness, about ten minutes after the smashing blow on the head had knocked him out. He opened dazed eyes and saw the face of the man who had socked him.

“Hi, sucker,” said Blinky.

Josh and Rosabel, lying next to Tom, were bound. Tom was not. In a moment he saw why Blinky hadn’t bothered to tie him up.

Blinky had his gun in his hand and was evidently going to stay right in the room with the three to make sure there was no slip-up.

“So you’re going to kill me—and these two,” said Tom thickly.

Blinky shrugged, gun carelessly alert.

“The black boy and his dame—yes,” he said. “You—I still don’t know. Nor does Luckow. He was up here a minute ago and said to hold off for a while.”

“Luckow here?” repeated Tom, starting to get up. “I want to see him—”

“Relax!” snapped Blinky, gun jerking into line. “Just lie right there where you are.”

Tom relaxed. The bitterness of his thoughts was reflected on his face. It isn’t nice to find you have made a major fool of yourself. Tom was finding that out, now. Even more than he’d found it out when he saw that this gang was ready to execute a helpless girl in cold blood.

He glanced at Rosabel with somber sympathy in his eyes, then looked at Josh.

The Negro’s eyes were staring rigidly at a section of wall, high up.

Tom’s eyes followed his gaze. And he saw what Josh had been staring at. There was a section up there, about six inches square, that was obviously a little opening. And the section was swinging silently inward.

Tom started to yell. Was a gun going to be poked in that small hole, to mow down the three of them? Was this death, coming in?

He choked the sound as he realized that this was not logical.

The little opening was moving very furtively. There would be no reason to conceal its movement from Tom and Josh and Rosabel, because they were helpless. Therefore, it must have been done to keep Blinky from knowing it. It must be a friend moving the panel.

Then he saw a part of a face in the opening, and held his breath. Rather, he saw a part of a veil, beneath which only dimly could a woman’s face be seen.

A veiled woman! It was a veiled woman who had helped him once before—at the bank getaway.

A hand appeared where the face had been. In the hand was a curious little sack that glistened dully. A forefinger pointed at Blinky, whose back was toward the opening.

Tom didn’t get the silent message, but quick-witted Josh did. Do something to distract the attention of the guard.

Josh suddenly began to fight his bonds, writhing noisily on the floor as if he had abruptly gone crazy with fear of approaching death. Blinky guffawed, and watched him.

“That’s the stuff. Just one more heave and maybe you can get loose. Maybe!”

The hand in the opening had tossed the little sack and now the opening didn’t show any more. Tom looked sideways at what he held.

The sack was of semi-transparent oiled silk. Within it was soft fabric. He opened the sack a little and a sickish sweet odor came to his nostrils.

Josh was making even more noise, and Blinky was enjoying even more the seeming frenzy of the Negro. His attention was off Tom.

Tom leaped!

Still weak and dazed from the blow on the head, Tom couldn’t conceivably have overcome Blinky in a straight tussle. But in the oiled-silk bag tossed by the veiled woman was a wad of cotton soaked in chloroform. And that did the trick.

Blinky heaved and fought against the stuff jammed to his nose and mouth. He almost got away from Tom twice. But in a minute or less he lay on the floor, out, breathing heavily.

Tom untied Josh and Rosabel.

“Out of here, fast,” he whispered.

“And then?” said Josh sardonically, as he frisked Blinky for the key to the door lock.

“To Mr. Benson’s place,” said Tom humbly.

“Oh! You don’t think you’re so smart any more!”

Tom winced. But he had it coming, and he knew it.

Josh got the key. Softly he opened the door and looked out.

The top-floor hall was empty. The three tiptoed to the rear stairs and down. They landed in the kitchen of the place. There were two men there, indifferently throwing some chicken sandwiches and salads together for any of The Corners’ patrons indiscreet enough to order food. Josh crept upon one and Tom on the other.

They struck together, and the two in soiled chefs’ whites sagged to the unclean floor. Tom and Josh took their guns.

“Look out!” Rosabel screamed.

The two crouched, and shots went over their heads. Their luck was gone. In the doorway were three men, and behind them could be heard the steps of others.

There was a big butcher’s block next to them. Swearing at the ill luck that had let them come so close to escape and then gone back on them, Tom tipped the block over.

He and Josh crouched behind it, with two feet of hard maple as a shield. The men at the door came toward the block, changed their minds as a bullet got one in the leg and another in the arm. They found shelter, too.

For the moment Tom and Josh could hold them off. But the moment couldn’t last long. There were too many of Luckow’s men around the place. In two minutes, or more, the three who had thought to escape death would be killed or captured again.

CHAPTER XVI

My Brother’s Killer

The shots Mac and Smitty kept hearing as they sped toward The Corners, came from the rear of the place. So they went to the front. And they didn’t exactly sneak in.

Smitty piled on the doorman, whose back was turned while he stared down the hall toward the rear. The doorman was six feet six, picked for his height and bulk. He looked like a child against Smitty’s six feet nine and his nearly three hundred pounds of brawn. He went down with a single blow. Smitty went on, with Mac behind him.

The hat-check girl began to scream like a calliope as the two men raced past and into the café rooms. Some of Luckow’s men hadn’t yet reached the kitchen. They whirled from the end door of the main room and began shooting at the giant and the sandy-haired Scot.

Mac picked up a heavy glass water pitcher and hurled it. It caught one of the men in the skull and he went down. Smitty didn’t bother with stuff as light as pitchers.

The giant picked up a chair and threw it the length of the room. It tangled up with another gunman’s arms. The two raced on.

Some of the bullets were thudding against their bodies, stopped by the celluglass garments. Their kick slowed Mac a little, but not Smitty.

There were still two Luckow men in the doorway of the short hall going back to the kitchen.

Smitty got the two as they turned in terror and tried to flee. His big hands each found a throat, and his great fingers squeezed.

Then he dropped the two limp bodies and picked up a table.

The patrons in the café room were yelling or screaming according to their sex. But none were trying to interfere. So the giant ignored them.

With the table before him, he started ramming down the hall to where he could see a knot of men still firing into the kitchen. The table was little use as a shield, but it did prevent those down there from seeing where the giant’s head was. His head, after all, was vulnerable.

The knot at the kitchen door had split by now. Some were still firing into the kitchen to try to get Tom and Josh. The others turned and tried to get the giant and the Scot who raced toward them behind the table in the giant’s hands.

Smitty kept right on going. He hit the knot of men as if he hadn’t been aware at all of their existence.

There were yells as Smitty did his best to squeeze seven men through a doorway that couldn’t have taken more than two at once. Bodies jammed and bones broke! It was as if a tank had hit the group.

No one of the seven was shooting, now. All were in a tangle of arms and legs that made them look like a heap of puppets carelessly piled in one disorderly snarl.

Smitty trod on the table, with men underneath it, as he forced his way into the kitchen. Mac came after him. A face showed before Smitty’s, disappeared again as a huge fist made a red mess of it.

“Door!” yelled Mac.

Rosabel and Tom and Josh ran for it. Smitty and Mac went behind them, covering them. From the jumble of men at the door, one propped on an elbow and carefully aimed at Mac.

Smitty’s hand jerked. The massive butcher’s block behind which Tom and Josh had crouched, suddenly seemed to come alive. It slid like a rocket across the floor and banged into the gunman; then Mac and the giant were outside with the others.

“Across the fields,” panted Josh, leading the way toward his car—and, though he didn’t know it—toward the one Mac and Smitty had come in, also.

The five began to run across fields.

There was a slow, vengefully careful shot. Tom yelled and clutched his arm.

“Down!” snapped Mac.

The five dropped. There was death behind them. They didn’t dare delay. But there was death in front of them, too, barring their path.

Another careful shot rang out. Smitty saw Tom’s hair stir, the bullet had been so close.

“The skurlies!” gritted Mac. “So they had guarrrds in the field, too.”

But Tom corrected that impression. Tom had seen the dark bulk of a car, in the field, itself, and then had got just a glimpse of a white face in the night.

“It’s Wayne!” he cried. “Wayne—this is Tom. Your brother. Come on, everybody, it’s all right—”

A careful shot interrupted him. He dropped in a hurry, with a gash in his side.

“Wayne—for Heaven’s sake! I told you this was Tom—”

“I know it!” came Wayne’s voice, husky with rage.

“But you’re shooting at me! You young fool—”

“I’m going to kill you, Tom,” raved Wayne’s voice. “You dirty murderer! So you wanted to get Dad’s killer, eh? You were very anxious to do that! You killed him, yourself! But you’ll pay for that. I’m going to shoot you if I die for it, myself!”

There was stunned silence. Then Mac’s voice.

“What’s the lad talkin’ about, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” shivered Tom. “But we’ve got to get out of here. That gang behind us will be along any second.”

Yes, they had to get out of there. But how? Their bodies would be silhouetted against the lights of the roadhouse if they rose up. Wayne was hidden by darkness and the bulk of a car. He could pick them all off if they tried to rush him.

“Wayne, listen to reason!” begged Tom.

The answer was a shot that almost took a piece out of his ear. Wayne was beyond all reason. He was a madman for the moment.

Then a new factor entered the picture; one that Mac had feared right along.

There was a scream of a police siren. A car’s headlights began jiggling crazily. A squad car was being driven over the field toward them. The sound of the shooting had finally drawn the attention of the State Police.

“What’ll we do?” panted Tom. “The police would shoot me on sight, if they caught me. And if we try to run, my own brother will kill me.”

There was no answer to that one as far as Mac or Smitty or Josh could figure out.

Blazing searchlights blared over the plowed ground.

“All right, everybody! Drop the guns. Hands up. You’re under arrest.”

“Hey—behind us—” yelled one of the men unseen behind the dazzling lights.

Still another car was jerking over the rough field. It was silhouetted in a beam of light as one of the flares was turned its way. And Smitty sighed in relief. That was the chief’s car! Benson was here, now.

The police didn’t share the knowledge of the newcomer’s identity. They fired at the car.

The slugs had no effect whatever. It raced toward them. From a little tube in front came something about the size of a grapefruit. It lobbed against the squad car. And from it, rose lazy loops of stuff like mist.

At almost the same moment Mac saw young Wayne fall. The searchlight revealed a small, neat gash on the top of Wayne’s head, put there by Mike, The Avenger’s deadly little .22.

Mac got up almost leisurely from the furrow in which he had lain.

“Everything’s all right, now,” he said. “We’re out of trouble. Let’s go!”

He walked toward Benson’s car, with the rest following. Tom stared in awe as Smitty picked up Wayne as if he had been a kitten; stared harder at four State cops lying as if peacefully asleep.

“Gas bomb,” said Mac briefly. “It puts a man out for ten or fifteen minutes, but doesn’t hurt him any.”

“Josh, take your car,” came Benson’s cold, calm voice. “Smitty, take the one you and Mac came in. Mac, drive Wayne’s car so it can’t be traced. I’ll drive mine. Back to Bleek Street.”

The little cavalcade moved away from The Corners—and death—with The Avenger in the lead.

Benson had meant to hypnotize the captured bank director, Robert Rath, and get some information from him on his return from The Corners. But one look into the second-floor office where he had been imprisoned showed that he’d get no information from Rath.

There was no way for Rath to escape from the room. But the man, crazed with fear, had found a way to escape from The Avenger and doom.

Rath had drawn a piece of the shattered desk glass hard across both wrists, severing the big veins there. He lay, now dead!

The giant Smitty was behind Benson, staring over his shoulder.

“Here’s one crook the State won’t have to bother with in court,” he said. “Good riddance.”

Benson shook his head, pale eyes icy in his white, death-mask countenance.

“I had counted on getting information from him,” he said. “And we need it badly. Tomorrow the stockholders’ meeting of Ballandale Glass Corp. is held. That will save Town Bank. We have to get them before the meeting.”

“Josh and Mac and I have been after Wallach and Grand and the others enough to know that the directors’ nerves have cracked wide open,” mused Smitty. “If you could pin down the one man responsible for the murders and the stock theft, their spines would melt like snow in the sun. Get the chief crook, and they’ll all go to pieces.”

“The name of the chief crook was what I hoped to get from Rath,” said Benson. His pale eyes glittered. “Well, there may be some record on our picture trap that will help. Josh must have developed the film by now. We’ll go and see if it has caught anything.”

The picture trap referred to a small section of outer wall of the building bearing the sign: JUSTICE. In that section of wall was a small round bit of glass in the middle of a tapestry-brick design that effectively concealed it.

The bit of glass was a telescopic lens on one of the world’s finest cameras. An electric eye controlled the shutter so that, if the device were set, a picture would be taken of anything moving in front of the lens. At night, pictures were taken by the aid of infrared rays.

Benson had set the camera trap before leaving on the heels of the misguided Wayne Crimm.

Josh had the film from the camera developed when The Avenger and Smitty got up to the great top-floor room. Benson, face a white mask, eyes like ice under a polar moon, extinguished the lights and projected the resultant pictures on the screen.

There were two of them. One had been caught when the front of a car crossed the path of the photo-electric cell and tripped the shutter. The other had been snapped when a man’s body had done the same thing.

The second showed the man, just getting out of the car, looking toward the doorway.

“Wallach!” said Mac. “He had the nerve to come here—”

“He no doubt learned of Rath’s impulsive visit,” came The Avenger’s cold voice in the dark. “When Rath didn’t come home again, he must have come here to find out what had happened to his fellow director. Wallach—and another.”

That was true. There was someone with Wallach; somebody who stayed in the car and whose face was hidden by Wallach’s shoulder.

Wayne Crimm was in the room, with a bandage on the top of his head where Mike’s bullet had creased him.

“That’s Tom’s car!” he blazed suddenly. “Then that must be Tom at the wheel—”

“Wayne,” came Benson’s voice. It was calm and quiet, but there was a lash of authority in it that would have quieted a far older and more reckless person than Wayne Crimm. “I have told you that your brother Tom really had a blow-out the night he was to meet your father. I checked on that early in the game. So the V in the tire of the death car must have been cut there deliberately by the same person who cut one—deeper, so as to cause a blow-out—in the tire of Tom’s car. As for your brother being at the wheel of that car—Tom was out at The Corners when this picture was taken.”

Wayne flushed miserably and was silent. He had made a diamond-studded fool of himself once tonight. He thought he’d better not do it a second time.

Benson flashed that picture off the screen and studied the first one.

This showed no person at all; was simply a shot of the front of the automobile in which Wallach—and someone else—had come to find out why Rath hadn’t left this building.

Into Benson’s colorless, deadly eyes, as he stared at this shot, came the cold brilliance that told that he now knew almost all that was necessary to be known about the case in hand.

And yet the front of the car looked ordinary enough.

There was a New York license plate, standard headlights, twin foglights underneath the headlights and a grilled radiator protector.

Benson’s eyes, like pale diamond drills, were on those fog lights.

In spite of the steep angle of the picture, it could be seen that the lights were on a bar just under the headlights, and that the bar, at the near end, was thickened in a sort of hinge arrangement.

“That would do it,” he said, voice low-pitched but vibrant.

What it was that would do it and what “it” was, his aides were not to find out. For at that moment a sound of shots came to them from the street outside. So many shots, so quickly spaced, that it indicated that quiet Bleek Street had suddenly turned into a battlefield.

CHAPTER XVII

Police Slaughtered

Louie Fiume was a hard, smart killer. Benson could testify to that, after the various clever attempts on his life by the imported gangster. And The Avenger got another indication of it a moment after he looked out a window, with the rest, to see what the shooting was about.

There were two squad cars in Bleek Street. Behind each, police were crouching while they shot at various slinking forms that kept up a running fire in return.

The street was lighted better than most; Benson had seen to that. The lights revealed all The Avenger needed to know.

They revealed men that looked familiar to him.

First he saw two who had been in the car that had tried to bomb his own machine. He had later found who they worked for.

“Fiume’s gunmen,” he said.

Then he saw another pair, working side by side with the first.

“Luckow’s men!”

After that—

Mac rubbed his eyes as he stared out and down, and wondered if he were going crazy.

He saw a man with a white, still face and thick white hair. This man had a little, long-barreled .22 that from this distance, at least, looked remarkably like Mike. Then Mac saw a big fellow. Smitty! Finally he saw a bony, red-haired guy. Himself!

“What in the worrrld,” burred the bewildered Scot.

The Avenger’s eyes were suddenly frosty, grim.

“Fiume wants to get us. Luckow wants Tom Crimm—and would benefit by our deaths, also. So the two gangs have teamed up on us. And either Luckow or Fiume had the bright idea of drawing police here and, made up as members of Justice, they’re doing all too good a job. In the street lights, anyone would swear that Benson, MacMurdie and Smitty were out there shooting down the police. The whole New York force will be after us for this.”

“We’ve got to go out there!” blurted Smitty. “Those cops—they’re in a spot. We’ve got to help—”

He broke for the door, with Josh and Mac after him. The Avenger stayed at the window. For just then the scene outside had gone dark.

Someone down the block had shorted the street-light cable, plunging everything into blackness.

Benson sped for the door, and down the stairs after his aides, like a flying shadow. His swift mind had grasped the plan with the instant of the light failure.

Smitty was just opening the street door, with Josh and Mac close behind, when Benson got to the bottom of the stairs.

“Shut that door! Down! Fast!” he cracked out.

Almost with his words, came the sound of shots—and the splintering of bullets as they crashed around the three at the doorway.

At the same moment one of the squad cars wheeled so that its headlights arrowed across the street and played on the entrance.

Smitty had the door shut, then. The door was of steel so the death missiles outside were blocked. The giant stared at Benson.

“The lights went out so that the men in the street could slip away from the cops,” said The Avenger. “That way, the police will think the gunmen merely came in here, led by the three made up as us. They’ll be over here to arrest us as fast as they can make it.”

“But, chief,” said Mac. “We’ve got worrrk to do—and it’ll take us days to talk our way out of this, if indeed we can do it at all.”

“That’s their idea,” said Benson. “Fiume and Luckow have worked it quite cleverly. We have the police after us, now, as well as the gangs. And, yet, we haven’t an hour to lose in fruitless attempts to explain—”

There was an enraged banging on the door.

“Benson! Open this door in the name of the law!”

The Avenger nodded toward the basement stairs. There were ways out of Bleek Street that even the police didn’t know. And it was time to use one, now. And it was explained later about the killers disguised as Justice, Inc.—if, as Mac had said, you ever could explain such a thing.

There was a beautifully concealed opening from one end of the basement into the street tunnel in which ran electric cables and public utility steampipes. Benson herded everyone from the place and into it—Tom with his arm in a sling from his brother’s misguided bullet; Nellie Gray, Rosabel and Josh; Mac, Smitty and Wayne.

The tunnel led to another concealed opening a block and a half away. Through this opening they all emerged into a three-car garage that seemed to belong to the apartment building beside which it rested, but actually had no part in that building’s existence.

“Take the big car,” said Benson. “That will hold the lot of you. Go to the Minerva, up at the north dock. I’ll join you there soon.”

“Ye’re not going with us, now?” said Mac anxiously. The Scot was always more worried about The Avenger’s safety than his own.

“No,” said Benson, eyes like ice chips in his dead, white face. “I have another place or two to visit. But I will be with you on the steamer soon.”

He slid off into the night, a gray fox of a man who moved as soundlessly as a shadow over the street.

The Minerva, referred to by Benson, was the old freighter he owned, docked at the moment far up the Hudson for repairs. It would be an excellent place to stay under cover for a while.

Smitty drove the lot of them to a small boathouse down near the Battery. The boathouse belonged to Benson, though it was held in another name. The boat in the shed was The Avenger’s too.

It was a low, powerful craft. But the giant didn’t open her up. He might have attracted the attention of the river patrol if he had.

He sent the craft at a decorous pace up the river to the dock at which lay the Minerva.

Dock and freighter were in darkness save for one light where Benson’s watchman stayed. Smitty whistled twice, three times more. It was the signal to the watchman that he was to pick up his dinner pail and go home; that his boss wanted to do a few things around the dock that needed no witnessing.

Smitty saw the light go out. He gave the man five minutes to get away.

“All out and on board,” he said to the rest, in a low tone.

Wayne and Tom went first, with Wayne helping his older brother and flushing every time he saw the bullet-plugged arm Tom carried in a sling. Wayne’s own bullet.

Rosabel and Josh followed. Then Nellie and Mac climbed to the dock and went up the gangplank to the deck of the Minerva.

Smitty was left alone in the boat.

The giant lifted aside the grating in front of the engines and opened the low, flat hull. His big hand found the sea cock. Searchlights on the police boats might hit on the first launch moored beside the Minerva and give away the fact that someone was on board the old freighter. So he would sink the little craft to hide it. It could be raised later and cleaned out.

But first, before opening the valve and scuttling the fast launch, Smitty had to disconnect an automatic safety device that The Avenger had installed on all his boats, large and small.

That was a hook-up between sea valves and bulkheads which snapped the latter closed whenever the former were opened. Thus, if a valve were opened by mistake, or developed a defect, it would not inadvertently result in disaster.

It was just one more little example of how large a part methodical foresight played in The Avenger’s “luck.”

Smitty disconnected the safety-bulkhead device and opened the valve. The launch settled silently and swiftly under the surface. Smitty joined the rest on the Minerva’s deck.

They all went below, where a light could be turned on without its showing through any crevices outside. In the raw illumination of a single bulb their faces were strained.

Tom Crimm stared at them with lackluster eyes. He was pretty low; even lower than his remorse over the insanity of joining forces with a mobster like Luckow would tend to drive him.

“All of us have worked for days on this,” he burst out suddenly. “And what has been the result? No one has found out anything. We’re as far as ever from knowing who killed Dad, and the others. And tomorrow, in only a few hours, the Town Bank crowd will be saved by that meeting of Ballandale Glass stockholders. We’re beaten—”

Mac looked at Tom with a little sympathy deep under the bleakness in his blue eyes.

“Whoosh!” he said. “Ye’re too pessimistic, Tom. We know a lot about this, right now.”

Tom stopped, and bit his lips.

“Sorry. I know everything possible is being done to help Wayne and me.”

Nellie Gray smiled at him to show there were no hard feelings. She said to Mac:

“Some gang spy must have reported that all of us were gone from Bleek Street. Otherwise Wallach, and whoever was driving that death car, wouldn’t have dared come openly to the door to see if they could help Rath.”

Mac nodded.

“It’s my bet,” he mused, “that the skurlie drivin’ that car for Wallach is the man we want to get our hooks on. And it’s also my bet that the chief knows all about him right now.”

CHAPTER XVIII

Veiled Lady

Louie Fiume and Nicky Luckow, birds of a feather, were at Beatrice Luckow’s apartment. They had come there, taking separate and circuitous routes, from Bleek Street. They lolled in easy-chairs, with cigarettes and drinks at hand, looking and feeling pretty pleased with themselves.

Beatrice, Luckow’s sister, didn’t show any feeling at all on her dark, pretty face. She was as expressionless as usual. Now and then she looked at Fiume. For the rest, she stared at her crimson-tinted fingernails and said nothing.

She had taken no other maid, after the exposure of Rosabel. The three were alone there.

At least, they thought they were alone.

“I guess we fixed up that Benson guy and his gang,” laughed Luckow, raising whiskey to his lips.

“ ‘We’?” said Fiume, darkly sardonic.

“Well, it was your scheme, of course,” Luckow said hastily. “And a smart one, too, fella. Making up three of the boys to look like Benson and two of his buddies and then popping off a coupla cops was the smartest thing I ever heard of.”

“Thanks,” said Fiume, still sardonic.

“You got the kind of brains this town needs,” Luckow said. “Let’s me and you go into partnership. We’ll run New York in a year.”

“It’s an idea,” said Fiume. “But first we got to get together on this Crimm business.”

“That’s in the bag,” said Luckow. “Benson and his crowd get burned down by the cops, with luck. If not, they will be thrown in the cooler for weeks. Till long after this goofy stockholder’s meeting tomorrow that’s supposed to mean so much. That’ll save the Town Bank pirates. And after that—well, we’re on Easy Street.”

“Yeah?” said Fiume skeptically.

“Why, sure,” said Luckow, looking surprised. “Like this: Wallach and Grand split millions on the stock deal, and more when they sell Crimm’s stock. They don’t know we know that, but we do. And that’s our stake. When they get the dough, we put the squeeze on them. Kick through or go to the chair for murder! Boy, we can bleed ’em of every dime they’ve got.”

“Nope,” said Fiume.

Luckow appeared more surprised than ever. Beatrice looked up from her tinted nails for a moment, too.

“We’ve been dopes,” said Fiume. “So the squeeze is out. Reason why? Because Wallach and Grand aren’t the boys responsible for this. They ain’t got the guts. They’re just stooges for somebody else. Somebody higher up.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m as sure as a guy can ever be when he knows something and can’t prove it. Those guys are dummies. There’s a biggie in the game above them. I don’t know who. But till we can get him, there’s no squeeze—”

Two men and a girl, thinking themselves alone.

But in the window outside, black with the darkness of pre-dawn, a face appeared for just an instant. The face was as cold and dead as the face of the winter moon. In it, two pale eyes rested briefly on Beatrice’s tinted nails.

A gray steel bar of a figure began to inch down a ledge from the Luckow window just after the word “squeeze.”

It was eighty feet to the ground, and the ledge from fire escape to window was less than two inches wide. But The Avenger negotiated it almost without thinking of what he was doing. His steely fingers hooked to slight niches in the tapestry-design brick of the apartment building, while his feet trod the ledge as surely as if it had been a floor.

Benson moved with his abdomen held out from the wall a little. That was because of the delicate apparatus hooked to his belt.

The world’s tiniest dictaphone was there, geared to an equally tiny record that was in tape instead of roll or disk form. On the tape was duly recorded the words that should—unless catastrophe occurred first—clear Benson and his aides with the police:

“Making up three of the boys to look like Benson and his buddies and then popping off a coupla cops was the smartest thing I ever heard of.”

The Avenger descended to the ground. As he left the fire escape, he grudgingly conceded Fiume’s shrewdness. For the clever mobster had deduced precisely what Benson had:

Somebody was over the Town Bank directors. They were merely stooges in this game.

Benson hailed a taxi. He got into it, head down a little so the driver wouldn’t see too clearly his unforgettable face and eyes.

He gave an address half a block from Wallach’s home.

There was one way to check on the bigshot guessed by Fiume. That was through the stooges, Wallach and Grand. And, since it was Wallach who had come with the unseen driver to Bleek Street in a fruitless effort to help Rath, it was Wallach that The Avenger intended to query first.

But it happened that once more the thought processes of a crook paralleled those of a defender of the law. In Beatrice’s apartment, Fiume turned to Luckow.

“Look,” he said. “There’s one way to find out if I’m right. That’s to have a gander first around Wallach’s place and then around Grand’s. We’ll see what we can see.”

“O.K.,” said Luckow.

It’s faster going down an elevator than walking down the fire escape. The two men got to the door just in time to hear somebody give an address to a taxi driver. Fiume’s eyes narrowed a little as he noted that the address happened to be near that of Wallach’s place.

His eyes widened again as the cab passed through light and he saw the man in back. The Avenger had his head up, now, and his face was clear to both Luckow and Fiume.

“How in hell,” breathed Luckow, “did that guy get away from the cops? The—”

“It don’t matter how he lammed,” snapped Fiume. “What matters is that he did—and that he’s going to Wallach’s! Hop the phone in your apartment and get your gang. I’ll get mine. We’ll smash that guy at Wallach’s and be rid of him. This time, with all your rods after him, and all mine, too, there’ll be no way out for him!”

The Avenger couldn’t hear that enlightening conversation, naturally, being two blocks away at the moment and rolling farther every second.

He got out of the cab in Wallach’s block a little later, sent the cab away and walked like a soundless gray shadow to the door.

And there, in front of it, was the car that had been photographed in the picture trap.

Benson’s eyes glittered like ice under a wintry sun. He took a few seconds to go over it, and verify it. Yes, there was the same license plate—made out in some phony name of course. There were the twin foglights, about headlight distance apart, fastened to a bar that seemed to have a hinge pin on one end.

To make doubly sure, he looked at the right rear tire. It had a sharp V-cut in it, so regular and clean as to have surely been made by a knife.

The Avenger went on to Wallach’s door, looked at the lock a moment, and inserted a thin steel loop. A few seconds with the flexible bit of steel turned the bolt.

As noiselessly as a gray fox, The Avenger stepped into a small hall, dimly lighted. And from a room a little ahead and to the right, he heard voices.

There was Wallach’s voice—and the voice of some other man. It was not the voice of Lucius Grand. Benson, whose ear was photographic in the precision of his memory, knew that.

Wallach was justifying Louie Fiume’s statement that the Town Bank directors “ain’t got the guts.” The deaconish-looking man was cracking, and cracking badly, from the whimpering tone of his voice.

“I can’t do it,” he was moaning. “I can’t! There’s too much chance that the police will walk into the stockholders’ meeting and tap me on the shoulder for complicity in murder.”

“You’ll do it,” came the voice of the other man, ruthless, inflexible.

“I tell you, I can’t! It’s all very well for you. You’ve covered your tracks beautifully—”

“You’ll do it. At nine o’clock in the morning you will receive a large manilla envelope with the Crimm stock in it. You will attend the stockholders’ meeting of Ballandale Glass, and vote for the course of action that will smash the concern. If you don’t— Well, remember Maisley and Joseph Crimm and Haskell.”

“You’re made out of stone,” came Wallach’s dry voice. “You—”

The Avenger had been creeping up on that doorway, a step at a time, testing each board before he trod it to be sure no sound would result. Suddenly he froze, and was listening to something in the other direction. The street direction.

From a block or so away came a faint squeal of rubber. An unmistakable sound. A car had whirled around the corner there so fast that it had skidded on dry pavement.

He sprang back toward the street door and wrenched it open.

A car coming this way much faster than most cars travel. It might be just anybody in a hurry, or it might be a squad or gang car—either of which would be bad medicine for The Avenger.

Benson seemed to have thought all this out in a tenth of a second, and to have acted to get away equally fast.

Behind him he heard Wallach’s frenzied yell.

“Somebody in the hall— Somebody listening to us—”

Then Benson was on the sidewalk. And down the block was coming the car that had made the noise. It was full of men! Behind it another appeared, squealing around the same corner and also full of men.

Benson turned the other way.

From that end came two cars—three—

The door of the house he had just left slammed open. Benson got a glimpse of Wallach in the doorway, and of some man who kept hidden behind Wallach. There was a glint of light on metal over Wallach’s shoulder.

Benson heard a sharp little snap, and then heard a slug whisper past his cheek. The man behind Wallach was shooting over Wallach’s shoulder at him with a silenced gun.

The Avenger’s pale eyes flared. Death in the doorway. A dozen men coming from his left. A score coming from his right.

At the curb was the death car with the twin foglights and the V-cut in the tire. Benson sprang to that. He got just a glance at something like a wisp of gray fog trailed on the edge of the front seat. He opened the rear door and sprang in there.

Swiftly he rolled down a window and leaned Mike, his little .22 on the sill.

The car started off with him.

It jammed toward the two cars coming from the corner where Benson had first heard the tire sound.

A dark shape with something like mist around its head had straightened up a little behind the steering wheel of the death car and was guiding the machine while slumped far down out of bullet range.

The two cars with the gangsters in them were charging straight at the death car!

“Left!” snapped Benson to the figure at the wheel.

And Mike’s deadly little whisper sounded out on the heels of the word, almost lost in the whirring of tires.

The little slug hit the left front tire of one of the two cars plunging toward The Avenger. The car sagged on a flat and whirled off before the man at the wheel could wrench it straight.

There was a resultant gap between the two oncoming machines. The death car leaped at the gap. The man in the other oncoming car slapped the wheel over to close the gap, but couldn’t make it in time.

Like an elusive quarterback sliding between two lunging tackles, the death car got through. There was a moment when the two cars poured hasty shots at it broadside, then it was past.

But behind it were the other three cars, that had been traveling in the same direction to start with. They shrieked after the death machine.

“Hurt?” said Benson, to the slumped driver ahead of him.

“No,” came a soft, refined voice. A woman’s voice!

She was a fine driver. She skidded around a corner to the right, around the next to the left and instantly up over the sidewalk and into a blind little areaway.

The car nosed into it like a crab into a hole, bounced a bit as the brakes wouldn’t quite hold enough and the bumper ticked the building wall, then stopped. The lights were flicked out.

Past them on the street the three cars shrieked along the path it was thought their quarry had taken.

“I’ll take the wheel,” said Benson.

He slid over the back of the seat as the woman moved to the right. It was the veiled lady who had once before helped him.

“You knew I was in the car?” she said.

The Avenger nodded.

“I came out of Wallach’s house to take the wheel myself. Then I saw the end of your veil trailing on the front seat. You were hidden clear down below the dash. So I got in back to shoot while you drove.”

As he spoke, Benson glanced sideways at her. Not at her face, which was so hidden by the veil that even his sharp eyes could not make out her features.

The car was doubling and twisting through the streets. Then he headed for the dark dock where the Minerva lay.

At the dash of the death car something was ticking, so faintly that it could scarcely be heard. Or perhaps it was a motor tappet just a bit loose—

“You’d better let me out now,” said the girl beside Benson.

“No,” said The Avenger. “You’ll be safer with me for a while. This time, the mob may guess who is under that veil, and it wouldn’t be so healthy for you.”

“You know who I am?” gasped the girl.

“Yes!”

Benson gave the wheel a last twirl, and sent the car into a dark shed. He helped the girl out, closed the shed door.

“There’s a boat of mine half a block up, at dock,” said Benson. “We will stay on that till daylight, which isn’t far off, now. Then—”

She followed him up a dark gangplank to the deck of the Minerva.

“Then?” she said.

“Then we’re going to turn a lot of folks over to the police,” said Benson. His hand pressed her arm. “I’m sorry. It has to be that way.”

“I’ve known for a long time it would—have to be like that,” said the girl in a low tone.

“It was Tom who finally made you decide to fight the other way?”

“Yes,” said the lips behind the veil, “it was Tom.”

Benson led her to a dark hatchway, and down. He lowered the heavy lid over them as they descended. He opened a steel bulkhead door and light showed.

“Well,” said MacMurdie, speaking for the group that had been waiting in the hold of the Minerva, “we’d begun to worry a little about ye, Muster Benson. Did the skurlies give ye a wee bit o’ trouble?”

CHAPTER XIX

Down to the Sea

Tom stared at the veiled girl, trying to make out the features under the mesh. There was a very grateful look in his eyes. She had saved him from the chair when she had driven him away from Town Bank the night he had been such a fool as to hold it up with the Luckow mob.

But the rest looked at The Avenger.

There was grim finality in the pale, deadly eyes; the look of accomplishment that came to their colorless depths when Benson had finally gathered all the facts he needed to know to annihilate a supercrook.

MacMurdie knew that look. So he nodded.

“Ye’ve got our man where ye want him, then?” he said in his broadest Scotch accent.

“Yes,” said The Avenger, voice cold and calm as ice. There was a faint throb of a propeller as some boat passed the dock in the river outside. No one paid any attention; the river traffic is always heavy in the Hudson. The sound of the propeller died.

“That Town Bank crew of pirates—” burst out Wayne Crimm.

“They are not directly responsible,” said Benson. “They were only hired hands. It was another man who killed your father, shot Haskell with a silenced gun, and forced Maisley over the cliff. That last, by the way, was done rather well. The man drove a car with a pair of foglights under the regular headlights. As he approached Maisley’s car, the foglights were swung to the left, on a hinged bar. So two sets of lights rushed toward Maisley. He undoubtedly thought two cars abreast were plunging toward him, swerved right to avoid them, and went over and down.”

“You can prove all this?” said Tom eagerly.

Benson nodded. “Quite easily. I have the car outside, with the foglight arrangement. And the rear tire with the telltale V-cut in it is still on the machine. There will be fingerprints all over the car. We’ve got our man as surely as if he were seated in the electric chair this moment—”

A voice came from the door—hard, ruthless, triumphant.

“That’s what you may think, Benson. But let me assure you that you are a little mistaken. It isn’t you who have me. It is I who have you.”

They all whirled to face the voice. It was coming from the steel bulkhead door. The door had not been quite closed by Benson when he came in. It was an inch or so ajar.

“You are supposed to be practically omnipotent, Benson,” continued the man just outside the door. “But apparently there are tricks that can take you in. That car you mention was rather important to me. So on the slight chance that something might happen to it before I was through using it—which I am now—I fixed it so that I could trace it no matter where it went, or by whom it was driven. Didn’t you hear a slight clicking from the dash as you drove?”

The Avenger said nothing. Eyes like diamond drills gauged the distance to the partly opened steel door.

“That clicking was caused by a rather crude wireless sending apparatus,” the voice went on. “A simple spark signal, constantly sounding, and keeping me informed of the location of the machine. I had ample time to gather up Fiume’s men and Luckow’s men and come here to this dock. Your trail was as plain as though you had scattered colored paper in your wake.”

Tom and Wayne Crimm were pale and desperate-looking.

Josh and Rosabel, Mac and Smitty and Nellie stared at their chief’s face. It was as dead and expressionless as ever, of course. Even in moments of extreme stress it could express nothing.

The pale eyes were expressionless, too.

The group in the hold felt a slight jar. They heard propellers throb heavily under load just outside the hull. And they heard water lap gently against the steel shell between their ears and the river.

The ship was moving.

The propeller they’d heard a while ago was that of a stealthily approaching tug. Now the tug had slipped a line to the docked freighter and was towing it out to sea!

Smitty roared like a maddened bull, and dashed toward the steel door.

It slammed in his face.

They were trapped in here, while the Minerva bore them gently and easily toward the broad Atlantic.

“They’re going to scuttle the ship and sink us,” breathed Rosabel, dark eyes seeking Benson’s dead face.

The Avenger said nothing.

Nellie Gray spoke up. Her voice was as calm as if she were commenting on a new shade of lipstick.

“You’re all familiar with the Minerva,” she said. “Don’t you remember where the sea valve is located?”

Smitty suddenly smacked one big fist into an equally huge palm.

“Of course. The sea cock’s under the deck plates of this very compartment. That gang out there will find that out with a little searching. They’re going to have to come in here and take up the deck plates to do their scuttling job. When they do—”

His big hands opened and closed like the jaws of a steam shovel.

The killers outside, it seemed, found out about the location of the sea valve at just that time. There was a scrape at the door, as the great bar on the other side was raised.

Smitty leaped to the door as it opened an inch.

“Down!” snapped Benson.

The giant fell just in time. Over his head poured a burst of machine gun slugs. The gang wasn’t going to be circumvented quite so easily as he’d hoped. The instant the door was opened, they’d poured in lead to discourage just such attempts as Smitty had had in mind.

The cold, clear voice of the man who had addressed Benson a few minutes ago, sounded out.

“It seems we’ll have to take over that compartment you’re in, Benson. Go aft, into the next compartment.”

As the man spoke, the bulkhead door at the far end of the compartment, opposite the one through which Benson and the rest had come, was opened a little. It had been barred before, like the other one, to keep them prisoners. None of the little group had made a move.

“Go on! Into the next compartment!” the cold voice cracked out. “Unless you all want to be gassed.”

Benson and his aides didn’t care about that threat. They were always equipped to go through a gas siege. But there were Tom and Wayne Crimm to consider—and the girl who still kept her face veiled. They weren’t prepared for gas.

“Into the next compartment,” nodded Benson.

The group filed in, through the steel doorway, and the bulkhead door clanged shut behind them.

They were in the aft compartment, with the hull rounding at each side of them to form the Minerva’s stern. They could hear a little through the door that had just been barred after them; could hear the activities in the compartment where the fatal sea valve was.

“All of you,” ordered the cold voice. “In here. Get to work. Are the boats ready to lower? Then open the valves now. Let the ship be settling while we tow her out. Then we’ll leave her, awash, at the last minute. That way, even if she is sighted, no one can get to her in time.”

“That voice,” said Wayne Crimm suddenly. “I’ve heard it before.”

“Yes,” said Benson quietly.

“I can’t quite place the speaker, though—”

“You’ll know in a minute,” said The Avenger, colorless eyes like blazing white agate.

“In a minute,” said Tom, shivering, “we’ll be dead.”

But just then Smitty gave a delighted yell.

“Why, of course!” he boomed. “The valve—”

It happened then. Somebody in the next compartment opened the sea cock.

And there was a heavy thud and a steel bar dropped into place—on Benson’s side of the bulkhead door.

“Whoosh!” shouted Mac jubilantly. “Where were ourrr brrrains? Of course! The safety gadget!”

Careful method in every move of The Avenger. A sea cock could be opened by the wrong hands, or it might corrode and become defective. So on every boat, large or small, that Benson owned, there was the same device.

A safety hook-up that closed the sea-value compartment hermetically when that valve began to admit water. Smitty had had to disconnect that safety hook-up to sink the launch. This gang, naturally, hadn’t dreamed there was anything to disconnect when they opened the Minerva’s cocks.

“Ye knew they were trailin’ ye here to the boat!” Mac accused Benson, staring with suddenly wide eyes. “Ye wanted ’em to do it.”

The Avenger nodded, pale eyes as cold and calm as winter moonlight.

“The leader out there, at Wallach’s house, shot at me with a silenced gun. That shot decided me to let the marksman trail me here—and to a trap. Because possession of that gun will nail him to the cross—”

Yells from the men in the next compartment and sudden banging on the steel doors told that the mob had discovered that they were caught.

“Hey! I can’t get out!”

“How—”

These and other yells came to the ears of those in the aft compartment. Smitty grinned. Then there was a louder hail.

“Shut off that valve! We’ll be drowned ourselves if we can’t—”

A wild clangor cut off this cry. Someone was blasting at the aft bulkhead door with a machine gun!

Benson almost seemed to smile. Though he couldn’t actually, of course.

“Come, we’ll go on deck,” he said.

“But we’re locked in here,” began the veiled girl.

The Avenger’s steely forefinger began counting rivets in the deckplates overhead. He touched one.

A concealed hatchway slid evenly back, showing the pink of beginning dawn.

“This old boat has a lot of tricks,” said Benson calmly. “That’s why I thought it would be a good idea if our enemies did trail me here. We could have gotten out of the other compartment as easily—”

A sharp, vicious spat sounded out, and a bullet glanced from the deck an inch from the white paralyzed face. One man, at least, had not been trapped in the valve compartment: the leader of mobsters and Town Bank stooges alike, the man who had been at Wallach’s with the silenced gun.

“Let me at him!” snapped Mac, trying to push up past Benson.

The Avenger’s hand on his shoulder repressed him. The pale eyes, eyes of an infallible marksman, searched the deck of the Minerva, which was lightening with dawn.

Benson saw a furtive head over the freighter’s bridge rail. There was a mask over the face. The leader in the Ballandale stock plot had easily guessed that blackmail might be in the minds of Fiume and Luckow if the plot were successful, and he was keeping his identity hidden from the mob, even now.

Mike spoke! It was silenced .38 against silenced .22. And Mike won out.

The little pellet from its whispering muzzle creased the head over the masked face, and the man on the bridge sagged forward over the rail.

“Go and get Ballandale, Smitty,” said Benson, voice as calm as the dawn around them.

“Ballandale!” exclaimed Tom Crimm.

His brother Wayne nodded excitedly.

“Of course! Ballandale! It was his voice—only I couldn’t place it. But how did you know?”

The Avenger’s colorless, flaring eyes watched Smitty climb to the bridge, start to descend again with the unconscious man like a sack over his vast shoulder.

“The moment it became apparent that the Town Bank directors were the pawns instead of the king in this death game,” said Benson, “it got pretty clear that the king was Ballandale. Aside from the bank men, the president of the corporation, himself, would be the only one in a position to know of Joseph Crimm’s secret stock purchases, to know just how to wreck the corporation at the stockholders’ meeting. However, just knowing that Ballandale was our man and being able to prove it, were two different things. That was why I let him trail me here with the gangs—to get him red-handed.”

Smitty dumped the masked man on the deck unceremoniously. He took the mask from him, revealing the features of Arthur Ballandale. There was a slight flutter of Ballandale’s eyelids. The gash on top of his head was much shallower than that which Mike usually inflicted.

“And ye have him red-handed?” repeated Mac dourly. “Ye know the power of rich men to evade the law.”

“This will be one who won’t,” said The Avenger quietly. “First there is the silenced gun—which is still in his hand. That will be the gun that killed Haskell, I believe. Then there is Ballandale’s car up the street, with the tell-tale foglights and hinged bar to tie him to Maisley’s death. Finally, the Crimm stock will be in his possession. That will strap him to the chair. Not to mention the V-cut in the rear tire, which can be connected with Crimm’s death—”

The veiled girl screamed. And Ballandale’s silenced gun spat again.

Not at Benson. But at the holder’s own head.

Ballandale had recovered consciousness on his way down from the bridge. Surrounded by hopeless odds, hearing what seemed a sure death sentence read against him, he had jerked the gun to his own head, almost without expression on his face, and pulled the trigger.

Mac spoke the epitaph.

“Whether he could have beaten the rap, we’ll never be knowin’.” He stared at The Avenger’s white, death-mask face. “He has sent himself to the Great Beyond. ’Tis a queerrr habit yer powerful crooks have, Muster Benson, of savin’ the law trouble and expense by disposin’ of themsel’s!”

Benson said nothing to that. He looked down river. Red, in the rising sun, the tug that had been towing them was getting away in a hurry. They’d cut loose when the shots indicated trouble and were fleeing to save their hides.

Mac stirred himself.

“I can get enough steam up to bring the Minerva back to dock,” he said. “I’ll go to the engine room—”

“No!” said Benson quickly.

Mac, and the rest, stared at the white face.

“At the dock,” said The Avenger, “the fine crop of gunmen we have penned securely in the valve compartment are only trouble makers, to be booked as such at police headquarters and soon bailed out. But here on the open river, away from the dock, they can be taken for a charge that will keep the whole lot of them behind bars for years. Piracy! Get to the radio room instead, Mac, and call the river police.”

They all stared in something like awe at the man with the white hair and the deathly white face and the pale eyes.

Ballandale, master crook, dead by his own hand. The two remaining Town Bank highbinders, Wallach and Grand, to be easily convicted for their sins by evidence Ballandale was bound to have in his strongbox. Fiume’s gang and Luckow’s gang, held in a big steel cell below decks, to be imprisoned for piracy.

A few hours ago it had seemed that failure for once was tapping the shoulder of The Avenger. Now all that was changed—and the whole case neatly disposed of.

Except, in Tom Crimm’s estimation, for Tom Crimm himself!

“How about me, Mr. Benson? I’ve been a fool—worse than a fool! I was in a bank holdup. I’m wanted for murder. I resisted arrest with a gun at the garage—”

“We have a good deal of front-page credit for the police department aboard,” said Benson quietly. “I think the commissioner will be willing to trade: a dropped charge against you in exchange for two gangs and a dead murderer.”

Tom sighed deeply, raggedly, with relief. Then he faced the girl with the veil. He had been looking at her all along with an expression in his eyes that brought one of amusement to Nellie’s.

“You saved me from a police slug or the chair, at that bank,” Tom said softly to the girl. “And you’ve helped all of us besides that. Won’t you take off the veil? Show us who you are?”

The girl shook her head agitatedly and started to move quickly away. The Avenger’s eyes swung to her, gentle for once.

“Go on,” Benson said. “Take off the veil. You’ve got your brother’s certain imprisonment to worry about in a little while. You’ll need a friend—or more than a friend—such as Tom would like to be.”

“Her brother—” gasped Tom.

“Yes. Nick Luckow!” said The Avenger. “The tint and texture of her nail polish gives her away. You can see that whether or not she wears a veil.”

The girl had the veil off, now. She had eyes only for Tom.

“I never really shared Nick’s activities,” she said, in a low, pleading tone. “I’ll admit I didn’t move to stop any of them, though—till you came along. I . . . I kind of liked you. I heard the things they meant to do to you, and helped a little. The last time was when I heard Nick phone for the gang to go to Wallach’s house after Mr. Benson. I hurried there first and got in that car to wait and see if I could help. But I guess a man like Mr. Benson doesn’t need help. And I guess it doesn’t make much difference anyway—when you’re a gangster’s sister—”

Tom caught her arm and urged her toward the bow, where they could have a little privacy.

“If a gangster’s sister can stand a bank robber,” the rest heard him say, “I guess—”

They were out of earshot then. The Avenger watched them for a moment, then turned abruptly and strode farther aft. Over the stern, from down the river, a police boat could be seen speeding in answer to Mac’s call.

Nellie Gray’s eyes were luminous with compassion as they rested on the chief’s erect, lonely figure.

Others, he could help. Himself, never. There was nothing left in life for The Avenger but the annihilation of crooked gangs like these, and grim battle against crime to avenge the death of his own loved ones.

THE END

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

STOCKHOLDERS IN DEATH

CHAPTER I Stockholders in Death

CHAPTER II The Search

CHAPTER III Nicky Luckow

CHAPTER IV Wanted—For Murder

CHAPTER V Suicide Heights

CHAPTER VI The Warning!

CHAPTER VII Beyond The Law

CHAPTER VIII Cement Coffin!

CHAPTER IX Human Tank

CHAPTER X Hide-Out

CHAPTER XI Flaming Death!

CHAPTER XII Dead or Alive

CHAPTER XIII Desperate Call

CHAPTER XIV Three To Die!

CHAPTER XV Life for a Life

CHAPTER XVI My Brother’s Killer

CHAPTER XVII Police Slaughtered

CHAPTER XVIII Veiled Lady

CHAPTER XIX Down to the Sea