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

#7: STOCKHOLDERS IN DEATH

#8: THE GLASS MOUNTAIN

#9: TUNED FOR MURDER

#10: THE SMILING DOGS

#11: RIVER OF ICE

#12: THE FLAME BREATHERS

#13: MURDER ON WHEELS

#14: THREE GOLD CROWNS

#15: HOUSE OF DEATH

#16: THE HATE MASTER

#17: NEVLO

#18: DEATH IN SLOW MOTION

#19: PICTURES OF DEATH

#20: THE GREEN KILLER

#21: THE HAPPY KILLERS

#22: THE BLACK DEATH

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

FIRST PRINTING: APRIL, 1974

COPYRIGHT © 1942 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 GEORGE GROSS

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY IS A DIVISION OF WARNER BOOKS,

75 ROCKERFELLER PLAZA, N.Y. 10019.

A Warner Communications Company

ISBN: 0-446-75-482-X

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

THE WILDER CURSE

CHAPTER I: The Call of Death!

CHAPTER II: Calling Justice, Inc.

CHAPTER III: Through a Corn Cutter

CHAPTER IV: Noise at Night

CHAPTER V: Widow and Nephew

CHAPTER VI: “Next Time I’ll Shoot.”

CHAPTER VII: Trail of Slumber

CHAPTER VIII: Time Bomb!

CHAPTER IX: The Impossible Murders

CHAPTER X: Ghost Phone

CHAPTER XI: Man in a Dress

CHAPTER XII: Battle in a Library

CHAPTER XIII: Death Walks

CHAPTER XIV: The Curse

CHAPTER XV: Murder Weapon

CHAPTER XVI: Flight to Doom

THE

WILDER CURSE

CHAPTER I

The Call of Death!

The man heard the peculiar noise distinctly, but he didn’t pay much attention to it. He should have paid a lot of attention to it, because it was quite important. It was, as a matter of fact, the call of death!

But the man did not know that. He heard it and thought vaguely: “We’ve got rats again. Have to do something about that.” Then he went on about his business.

His business was important, too, which was why he didn’t connect the slight noise with the rather terrible thing he had seen two days before. This was the body of a murdered man. The body was what was left of a portly, wealthy gentleman named Carl Foley, who had been one of the man’s employers.

The thing that had been terrible about it was its mangled look. Whoever had killed Carl Foley had done so in a way that made him look as if a streetcar had run over him, dragging and rolling his body under the wheels for a hundred feet or so in the process.

The man who had heard the noise—his name was Tim Phelan, and he was assistant engineer of the Thornton Heights Developing Corp.—had lived in the Orient for a time when he was younger. And something he remembered having seen there had clicked with the appearance of that dead and mangled body. Now he wanted to tell somebody about it.

He had decided that the one he wanted to tell was not a policeman. His tale sounded too fantastic for the police.

The one he wanted to talk to was a man named Richard Henry Benson. This man was also known as The Avenger, and fantastic stories were routine with him.

Tim Phelan had first gone up to the lobby of the building to phone anonymously from there. But that phone was out of order. So he had come back downstairs to use his own phone, chancing the risk that somebody would connect this call with him and think him crazy. He was just outside his little office when he heard that noise.

The call, though he didn’t know it, of death!

Thornton Heights, as most New Yorkers know, is a comparatively small but very exclusive section of the city. It is about seven blocks square and is built up solidly with fine apartment buildings. In the center is the tallest building, ten stories high, and in the basement of this is the central-heating plant for the whole development. It was in this vast cavern of basement, with its rows of furnaces and its complicated machinery, that the engineer’s office was located.

The head engineer, a man named Carter, held down the fort during the day. Tim Phelan, his assistant, was there on the night shift. It was now just after midnight.

“Even this guy, The Avenger, is going to think I’m nuts,” Tim Phelan murmured sourly to himself. “But I’m going to tell him, anyway. The look of Carl Foley’s body—I’ll swear I’ve seen dead men look just like that in Malaya.”

He went into the small, rather battered, office in the corner of the huge basement. The place was like a cavern, hollowly echoing the smallest noises. It echoed, once more, the queer noise Phelan had heard at first.

The one he had mistakenly associated with rats.

“Phone Acme Exterminator Co. in the morning,” he noted on his desk pad. Then he shut the office door, so that anyone who came into the basement would not overhear him. He went toward the phone.

When he’d started to phone from the public pay station upstairs, he had opened the telephone book to look up Richard Benson’s number, with a good deal of pessimism about finding it listed.

Phelan knew a little about The Avenger, as most folks do. He knew that Benson was an enormously wealthy man, though still very young. He knew he was internationally known in science, finance, literature, music—and in the brilliant solution of otherwise unsolvable crimes.

In other words, The Avenger was a big shot. The very biggest of big shots. And such men usually have private phone numbers and otherwise discourage the public from bothering them.

But Phelan had discovered that this was not the case. Dick Benson lived to help people who needed more drastic and subtle help than the regular police force could give them. In order to help, he had to be easily located. And to insure that, The Avenger’s phone numbers were scattered all through the book.

There were four phones listed at the Bleek Street address where Benson had his headquarters. There was a number under the title, “Justice, Inc.,” which was what he and his little band of crime fighters called themselves. There was a number for each of his associates—Nellie Gray, Fergus MacMurdie, Cole Wilson, Algernon Smith, Josh and Rosabel Newton.

It was easy enough to get The Avenger on the phone, so Tim Phelan dialed one of the numbers.

Then he paid with his life for not heeding that small noise he’d heard!

There was a slight scuffing sound, accompanied by a noise like that of heavy, snuffling breathing.

Tim Phelan got his number and heard a ring at the other end of the wire. He waited—a tense, rather scrawny little man of fifty or so, with thin gray hair and a leathery face, on which was an anxious, frightened look.

Behind his back, a hand slowly reached out. Fingers fastened on the knob of the office door. The upper part of the door was glass, so that Phelan could have seen if he had turned swiftly. But he did not turn.

“Justice, Inc.?” said Phelan into the phone as the ringing stopped.

A metallic voice answered, “Yes.” The voice sounded metallic, because it was not a human voice. It was part of an elaborate mechanism in The Avenger’s office that could answer a phone ring, activated by the motion of the bell’s vibrator, then could take messages by recording them on a roll of tape.

“I want to talk to Mr. Benson,” Phelan said.

And it was then that, behind his back, the hand got the little office door wide open.

Through that opening crowded a form right out of a nightmare, a gray ghost of a thing as deadly as it was bizarre. The thing leaped toward Phelan.

“I want to talk to Mr. Benson,” Phelan said into the phone. “I want—”

They were his last two words, because death struck. He didn’t even have time to scream. He was knocked flat with such force that the phone flew from his fingers and broke against a wall.

He never moved again. Horror, such as should never be, took over the small office. A long time later—or what seemed to be a long time—the hand reached the door. The nightmare thing went out. Silence held the cavernous gloom of the basement and the little walled cubicle in the corner that was marked, “Office, Engineer.”

Mrs. Markingham Mead lived on the sixth floor of the central building of Thornton Heights. Mrs. Markingham Mead had a corner apartment. At her own expense, she had had bricks torn out and great corner windows installed in her living room. It gave her a very nice view and, in summer, as it was now, a good deal of light and air.

However, the arrangement also gave her a headache when it rained hard and the wind blew from the east.

Now, at a little after midnight, it was pouring rain and there was a heavy gale. The gale drove the rain hard against the big windows and against the casement at the left and bottom, where there seemed to be a hair-fine crack.

Nobody had ever been able to locate this crack and fill it in. The result was that, now and then, Mrs. Markingham Mead was infuriated to see water seep in there.

It was seeping in there, now, forming a little rivulet that kept reaching for her expensive rugs, no matter how fast she sopped it up with a dish towel.

Mrs. Mead went to the phone and got the head engineer, Carter, out of bed.

Carter didn’t like this very much. He had just fallen into a deep sleep, and the last thing he wanted to hear about was Mrs. Mead’s damned windows and their leak. The leak was Mrs. Mead’s fault, he thought. She’d had the windows put in herself, hadn’t she?

He wasn’t very diplomatic over the phone. He told her he was sorry, that he couldn’t do anything about the leak. Yes, in the morning, he’d have a man over. Yes, they’d try once more to find the crack. No, he couldn’t come now.

Rather nastily, he suggested that she call his assistant. Then, grinning one-sidedly, Carter got back into bed, having wished trouble off onto little Tim Phelan.

Mrs. Markingham Mead went to the window, gasped, and sopped up water frantically to keep it from the rugs. Then she hurried back to the phone and called the assistant engineer.

There was no answer. Mrs. Mead, purple with rage, tried four times in three minutes, never getting an answer. She decided to tackle the man personally.

She threw on a dark-red housecoat and went toward the stairs, looking and acting like a battleship under forced draft. Gray wisps of hair streaking out from a nightcap furthered the impression, looking like smoke from flying funnels.

She charged down the stairs, making up things she was going to tell the man, who, with all the rest of the building operatives, hadn’t been able to find a simple little leak around the bottom of a window.

But Mrs. Mead didn’t tell anybody anything.

She surged into the huge basement like a ship of the line, looked around for the office, saw it and surged over to it.

The light was still on in the office, and Tim Phelan was still in there. Rather, what was left of Tim Phelan was still in there.

Mrs. Mead didn’t see him at first. She stood in the doorway, looking, till she saw a foot. The foot was sticking out from behind the big desk. She moved in a step and saw the condition of the leg just above the foot.

The purple tinge left Mrs. Mead’s face. Her face got as white as snow. She tried to scream, but her throat constricted so that she couldn’t.

She backed out of the office without ever having seen more of Tim Phelan than his leg up as far as the knee. That was quite enough. That was more than enough.

The general office of the whole Thornton Heights development was on the first floor. Mrs. Mead hurried there, moving like a sleepwalker, staring out of glazed and unseeing eyes. It was late, but there was a chance that someone would be in the office.

She prayed to Heaven that there would be, because she wanted to tell someone what she had seen and then go off into a nice, peaceful faint.

CHAPTER II

Calling Justice, Inc.

The office had an occupant, all right, even though it was a quarter after twelve at night. In fact, it had two occupants, though only one worked there.

The one that belonged there was a young man named, on the small door of his modest private office, Daniel E. Moran.

Dan Moran was vigorous, big-shouldered, blunt-jawed. He had a high, wide forehead and a long, strong nose. He was in brown tweeds, a little the worse for the rainy night, and he was sitting in his desk chair and looking up at the other person in the place. Also, he was holding this other person’s hand.

This other person, the one who didn’t belong in the Thornton Heights office, had a hand well worth holding.

She was a girl, rather tall, beautifully formed, with long, dark-brown hair and with deep-brown eyes. A slightly turned-up nose robbed her of classical beauty but made her something to cause one to turn and look at her twice.

Her name was Myra Horton. She sat the moment, on the edge of Dan Moran’s desk with her slim long legs shimmering attractively in the light from the one shaded lamp.

“Look,” Dan Moran said, apparently going on with a conversation that had already lasted some time in the same vein, “I’m getting a raise. It’ll be enough for us to live on very comfortably. So why don’t we get married right now?”

Myra Horton pursed her red lips in a maddening way.

“I’ve told you,” she said, “that I’m not quite sure.”

“You’ve known me for eight months. You’ve said you liked me a lot.”

“I do,” Myra said. “But I don’t quite know if I like you enough to look at you across a table three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Besides, there’s this other thing.”

Dan Moran was silent. He looked troubled.

“You’ve said enough to give me the impression that you suspect one of the Thornton Heights partners of being kind of crooked,” Myra went on. “You’re here tonight, going over the books as you’ve done more than one late night recently.”

“Well?” said Moran.

“Well, say the man is a crook. You prove it. He gets thrown out of the corporation, and you get a fine promotion for being so alert. Good. But say he’s not a crook and finds out you’re laying for him, or say he is a crook but you can’t prove it. What will happen? You’ll get thrown out so fast it’ll make your hair curl. And you’ll be blacklisted, besides. Then we’d spend our honeymoon looking for some way to buy food for ourselves.”

“Mercenary,” jeered Moran, not entirely kidding about it.

Myra frowned. It was a very attractive frown. “It does sound that way. But I don’t mean it like that. If I were sure, I’d marry you whether you had money or not—whether you had a job or not. It would make no difference. But I’m not sure, and this other situation just makes me a little less sure than ever. So we’ll put the decision off for a little while, Dan.”

It was at this moment that Mrs. Markingham Mead, having entered the main door of the general office, saw the light behind Dan’s frosted glass panel. She banged the door open so hard, the glass almost broke.

She stood in the doorway, disheveled, like a ghost of her heavy, elderly self. The red housecoat was gaping every which way. Her mouth strained several times before words got out. Finally, she made it.

“Basement!” she croaked. “Assistant eng— He’s . . . behind desk—”

The floor trembled to her fall.

“What in the world—” gasped Myra. Then she was bending over the unconscious woman, while Dan was leaping beyond her through the general office and to the iron stairs.

When Moran got to the little office, he didn’t stop at Phelan’s foot and leg. He leaped on around the desk and was confronted by the full view of the man’s body.

Moran stepped back a pace, eyes wide. Then he turned from the grisly thing and reached unsteadily for the second phone.

“Police!” he said shrilly into the phone. “And have them come fast! There’s a man here. There’s a dead man—”

He heard steps in the basement and banged the phone down. He whirled with big shoulders hunched and fists clenched. But it wasn’t an assailant who approached him.

It was Myra.

“I called the building doctor,” she said. “Mrs. ‘What’s-her-name’ is conscious, but she seems too scared to breathe—Dan! What’s the matter down here? You’re as pale as a ghost. The engineer—is he—”

“He is,” said Dan shakily. He got out of the tiny office in a hurry and shut the door before Myra could see in.

But, looking curiously over his shoulder, Myra got one glimpse through the glass of the door. She saw that foot, and she swayed.

Moran’s arm went around her.

“I didn’t want you to see,” he said. “Hang it, why did you have to come down here?”

Myra didn’t say anything to that. The foot, and the condition of the leg as far as she could see, were too vivid in her mind.

She got to a chair nearby and sat down. The roar of the vast furnaces was softly in her ears as she shuddered there.

Then the police arrived.

Dan Moran, swaying a little with the pure relief the sight of them inspired, took over at once. He led them to the little office. Myra heard one of the police exclaim aloud and heard the low whistle of another.

Then she got up and went out of the basement.

She went to the street and began walking, faster and faster, till she was almost running toward the nearest subway.

Dan had called the police. Myra was going to try to enlist the interest of someone else. That was Richard Benson.

One person had thought of getting in touch with The Avenger this night, and he had met death in the attempt. But Myra did not know that. She only knew that she’d heard vague but confidence-inspiring stories of this man, and that he had his headquarters on a little avenue called Bleek Street, which was in lower Manhattan.

Pale and with ghosts in her eyes, she took a subway to get to this place and tell someone about that foot and leg.

Bleek Street, in downtown Manhattan, is only one short block long. One side is occupied entirely by the blank wall of a windowless warehouse. The other side has small stores, small warehouses and, in the center, three old three-story brick buildings. All of these are leased or owned by Dick Benson. In effect, The Avenger owned the block.

The three brick buildings, behind their unimpressive facades, are thrown into one. The entire top floor of the resulting unity is one vast room, and this was where The Avenger and his associates were most frequently to be found when not working on bringing criminals to justice.

A big man entered the door of the place now, at a bit before one o’clock in the morning. Big? He was gigantic!

He had a big moonface in which light-blue eyes twinkled in a disarmingly good-natured way. This was Algernon Heathcote Smith. But anyone who knew him called him Smitty, carefully avoiding the two first names, which he detested.

Smitty passed under the small sign, “Justice, Inc.,” over the doorway. He went into a vestibule, waved his hand twice in front of a certain spot in the tiled wall that looked like any other spot, and the inner door opened.

Smitty knew all about that photo-electric-cell opener. An electrical and radio wizard, he had installed it himself.

He went up to the huge third floor, walked in, and was greeted by an insult. The insult came from another of The Avenger’s aides—one of his most valued, in fact, though you’d never think so to look at her.

Nellie Gray was a bare five feet high, weighed about one hundred pounds and looked as fragile as a Dresden china doll. She was so pink and white and dainty in appearance that you’d feel sure the sight of a spider would make her scream.

Little Nellie Gray, however, was a dead shot, an expert at boxing, wrestling, and jujitsu and had made more than one two-hundred-pound thug sorry he’d underestimated her abilities.

“Hello, amateur,” she said to the giant Smitty.

“Amateur what?” snapped Smitty.

“Amateur electrician,” Nellie snapped back.

Smitty was justifiably suspicious of brickbats. Tiny Nellie and the giant Smitty were more than associates. Either would have let himself be cut to ribbons for the other. Nellie had a soft place in her heart for the giant. But she never let this be apparent. She was all prickles, it seemed, where Smitty could see.

“Amateur electrician?” roared Smitty. He could take a lot, but aspersions cast on his vast electrical ability stung hard. “You half-pint—” He calmed down. He concluded resignedly, “What’s wrong now?”

“The electric-robot thing you designed to answer the phone when nobody’s here,” said Nellie. “The gadget that talks and records messages. That’s what’s wrong. Look at this.”

Smitty dutifully looked at the thin recording tape, a length of which Nellie held in her fragile-seeming little hands.

The tape had a hairline, regularly broken by tiny hills and valleys like the circular lines of phonograph recordings. Then this went off into an irregular line.

“Now, listen,” said Nellie, playing the tape.

Smitty heard a man’s voice say, “Justice, Inc.?”

There was a metallic, “Yes,” as his robot phonograph voice caught the “Justice” vibrations and responded. Smitty swelled with pride. In all the world, there was only one apparatus like this, and it was his own child.

“I want to talk to Mr. Benson,” came the man’s voice. “I want—” That was when the sputter occurred.

There was a sort of thud, a splintering noise, then silence.

Smitty played the tape again, with distress on his vast moonface.

“Say—it does sound as if it’s busted,” he admitted, chewing his lip.

“Sure,” said Nellie. “Just another of your thumb-handed jobs—”

“But maybe it’s something else,” Smitty interrupted, sore again. “The trouble could be on the other end of the line. Did you trace the call?”

“What for?” shrugged Nellie maliciously. “Your precious dingbat didn’t work, so—”

“Somebody calls here—probably in trouble—and you didn’t trace the call right away?” It was Smitty’s turn to jeer. “What a swell stunt that is!” He was getting the telephone operator as he berated her. “You can’t tell what that call might have meant. It might be that a life was lost because you didn’t trace it,” he went on. “Why, before I’d do a thing like that—”

He got his information then.

“That was a Thornton Heights number,” the operator said. They moved fast when Justice, Inc. called. “It was Thornton Heights 9-2243.”

Smitty muttered, “Sounds like that Scotman, Fergus MacMurdie, burring into the phone.”

The operator went on, “That number is out of order.”

Smitty whirled to Nellie, who was looking a bit crestfallen.

“See?” he exulted. “It was the phone, and not—”

The buzzer sounded, and a tiny red light showed that it was the street-door buzzer. Smitty went to a small black box on a huge desk.

The black box, its top screened, was his, too. It was, in effect, a little television radio that constantly showed the vestibule downstairs—and anyone in it.

Smitty saw a girl in the small screen.

“Oh, boy! Something!” he said. And Nellie’s pretty blue eyes began to get small green lights in them. She was really pretty crazy about the oversized guy, and he could always get her goat by pretending more interest in other girls than he really felt.

“Some designing little female, I suppose?” she snapped, reading Smitty’s tone correctly.

“I’ll bet she’s not designing,” Smitty said, pressing the button that opened the door downstairs. “Poor little thing! She looks as if she needs help.”

“To you, any female under sixty that isn’t in a side show,” said Nellie, “is a ‘poor little thing that needs help.’ You are a sucker, my over-grown friend.”

The girl came into the huge room, and Nellie’s look, and tone, changed at once. For Nellie had a warm and generous heart and plenty of sympathy for those in trouble.

This girl looked troubled, all right. She was very pale and was so agitated that her nose wasn’t even powdered. A very extreme case, Nellie knew.

Then, after the girl gave her name, Nellie knew there was something distinctly interesting here.

“I’m Myra Horton,” the girl said. “I want to see Mr. Benson as soon as possible. I want to tell him about a murder—a dreadful thing—in Thornton Heights.”

Thornton Heights! Smitty and Nellie stared at each other. It was a Thornton Heights number that had tried, about an hour ago, to contact Justice, Inc. A number now “out of order.”

“What about this murder? And why is it so dreadful?” said Nellie. She added: “We’re associates of Mr. Benson’s. You can talk to us.”

“It’s the murder of a man named Timothy Phelan,” said this tall, pretty girl, who had come in out of the night. “He was assistant engineer of the Thornton Heights development. He was killed by something, something that—” She shivered. “I just saw up to his knee. It looked as if he’d been run through a corn cutter.”

Smitty’s ingenuous-looking blue eyes were narrowed and still. Very still and very intent.

“Thornton Heights,” he said. “Murder. And the body is badly mangled. There was a man named Carl Foley killed out in Thornton Heights a few days ago, wasn’t there?”

“Yes,” said Myra Horton. “He was one of the officers of the corporation that owns the property.”

“And wasn’t his body badly treated, too?”

“Yes. He was—I guess he must have looked like this man Phelan does. That’s why I thought The Avenger ought to be told about it. Mr. Moran—a good friend of mine who works in the Thornton Heights office—called the police. But I came here to tell Mr. Benson, too. I thought he might be interested.”

“I think he’ll be very interested, indeed,” said the giant Smitty grimly. “We’ll get him and hustle out to Thornton Heights at once.”

CHAPTER III

Through a Corn Cutter

The Avenger was interested. Very much so. In an incredibly short time after Smitty got in touch with him, he was at the Thornton Heights central building, in the basement office, with two of the plain-clothesmen who guarded Phelan’s body.

Dick Benson, better known as The Avenger, was not the kind of man you’d expect to see after hearing such fantastic tales about him. You’d expect a giant, someone as big as Smitty himself. You’d expect someone with great bunches of muscle sticking out in all directions.

The Avenger didn’t look like that at all. He was only of average height, about five feet eight. His weight was average, too, about a hundred and sixty-five pounds. His body was rather slim, if anything. But when you watched him move, you saw that he got around like lightning, and soon you realized the truth. A few rare individuals seem to have muscle of a special quality, so that it is thrice as strong as ordinary muscle. And The Avenger was one of these few.

He entered the little office with his cat’s tread, with Nellie and Smitty close behind. Myra Horton stayed outside. She didn’t want to see any more of that body than she already had.

“Mr. Benson!” said one of the detectives respectfully, seeing the pale, enigmatic eyes and the close-cropped cap of virile black hair. “Glad you’re interesting yourself in this. It’s sure a funny-looking corpse we got here.”

Smitty thought the use of the word “funny” was pretty far out of line. But The Avenger said nothing; he never said anything unless he had something important to say.

The glacial eyes of the famous crime fighter rested inscrutably on the body.

Tim Phelan did indeed look as if he had been run through a corn cutter. The clothes were two thirds ripped off of him, as if by many fangs. His body was as torn up as if a pack of starving wolves had had access to it.

“What have you found out about this murder?” asked The Avenger.

“Nothing,” said the detective, with dismal honesty. He would later tell the press that the case was developing satisfactorily, but he wouldn’t try to pull that kind of line with someone like Dick Benson.

“A Mr. Carl Foley, one of the executives of this real-estate development, was murdered in this neighborhood recently, I believe,” said The Avenger.

“Yes, sir,” said the detective. “I was on that little job, too. Foley’s body looked just like this. Enough to haunt your dreams.”

“By now, you’ve got a complete dossier on Foley?”

“Yes, sir. Pretty complete,” said the detective.

“You think, too, that maybe the two murders tie in together?”

The Avenger didn’t give an opinion. He said, “In the records on Foley, is there any account of his having been, at some time or other, in the Orient?”

Smitty and little Nellie looked at each other. The question seemed odd to them. Apparently, it did to the detective, too. He looked puzzled as he answered:

“Nope. From all accounts, Foley was never out of New York State. Lived around here all his life. One of our few real New Yorkers. Why?”

Benson didn’t say why. His steely, slender fingers were deftly separating the dead man’s shirt over the chest. In a moment, a picture was exposed on the skin there. It was a tattooed picture of a snake coiled up a pole. Beside this was a ship’s anchor, with a bit of hawser twined around it.

“Looks as if this man has been to the Orient,” Smitty said, hopeful of getting at what Benson had in mind. “Looks as if he’d been a sailor before he got this assistant engineer’s job.”

The Avenger said nothing to that.

“Who discovered this murder?” he asked the detective.

“Dame by the name of Mead, upstairs,” said the man. “She called a guy named Dan Moran, who works here. She knows nothing about anything.”

“Does Moran work here on a night shift of some sort?”

“Nope,” said the detective. “He says he just happened to be in his office. Pretty late for that.”

“Myra Horton explained his lateness,” Nellie Gray spoke up. “I gather that Dan Moran is the boy friend.”

“We’ll have a few words with Moran,” said The Avenger, voice as even and inscrutable as his pale, icy eyes. “With Miss Horton, too. Moran’s office will be a good place.”

Over the double doorway to the general office was an oil portrait of some elderly man, evidently the founder of Thornton Heights. The man had a wide, high forehead, a luxurious beard and a long, strong nose. The plate on it was inscribed: “Samuel Kepper.”

Benson walked under this, across the office and into Moran’s private cubicle. They sat down there—Myra Horton, Dan Moran, Benson, Nellie and Smitty.

Moran blurted thankfully, “You used your head, Myra. when you got in touch with Mr. Benson about this. Two men killed in the same way in the same district within a week. There may be more murders, unless there’s quick action. And Mr. Benson is famous for that.”

The Avenger sat motionless, like a relaxed panther. He wasn’t looking at Moran; he was looking at a window pole, slanted against the wall. It was of standard length, with a metal hook on the end.

“About this Carl Foley—he was one of the heads of this company, wasn’t he?”

Moran nodded and reached out with his square, capable-looking hand to cover Myra’s hand.

“Tell me a little about the business set-up,” Dick said.

“There are four partners in the corporation,” Moran explained. “Or there were four: Andrew Sillers, Thomas Marsden, Amos Jones and Carl Foley. Now, without Foley, there are three. They are pretty wealthy: the development has been profitable from the beginning.”

“And what was that beginning?”

“Well, I don’t know much about it,” said Moran. “I’m just head bookkeeper here. I’ve only had the job a couple of years. There was this tract, held as vacant land long after buildings had gone up all around it. The owner was Sam Kepper. He and these four formed the original Thornton Heights development. Then Kepper died. That was years ago.”

Smitty and Nellie shifted restlessly, unable for the life of them to guess what all this dry business history might have to do with the hideously mangled corpse lying downstairs.

“You and Miss Horton were here in the office when Mrs. Mead found Phelan dead?” said Benson evenly, looking at the window pole.

Moran nodded, pressing Myra’s hand tighter. “I’d been doing some overtime work, and she said she’d meet me here at twelve; then I’d take her home.”

Moran told in complete detail of Mrs. Mead’s dramatic entrance into the office and of what he’d found when he ran downstairs. Then Myra Horton spoke up.

“Dan,” she said. “I think you’d better tell Mr. Benson why you were working late on the books tonight.”

There was a short silence while all eyes went to Moran’s face. Moran looked distressed. He shook his head a little at Myra, then shrugged uncertainly.

“I wasn’t going to mention that,” he said. “With two murders here, it might throw suspicion on innocent parties. Also, I’m not at all sure, as I told you, Myra.”

But it was out, now, and Moran shrugged again.

“For weeks, I’ve had a suspicion that some one of the four partners was taking money that didn’t belong to him and doctoring the books to hide it. That one of the four was an embezzler, to put it in a word. So, two or three nights a week, I’ve been going over the books for years back, trying to get proof. To be honest—I haven’t any, as yet. Not a speck. But I’m still sure there’s crooked work somewhere.”

Smitty’s giant hand smacked his equally vast knee.

“That begins to look like something’” he exclaimed. “If one’s a crook, maybe Carl Foley suspected, too, and got killed for his pains. And maybe this Tim Phelan found out something by accident and was killed, too, as he was trying to get in touch with Justice, Inc.”

Moran shook his head. “You see?” he said to Benson. “This is why I wasn’t going to mention the matter. I have no proof—and, meanwhile, it puts an ugly light on the murders.”

“Do you think that any of the partners suspect that you are checking up on them?” asked Benson.

“I’m sure they don’t,” replied Moran. He grinned a bit, one-sidedly. “There’d be plenty of fireworks if that were the case.”

It was then that the lights went out. They went out, not only in this office, but all over the building. There were some lights hung on wall brackets outside the entrance, and from the office window, you could see that these had gone out too.

The blackout was complete, and it was also pretty creepy.

“Dan—” Myra Horton cried in the darkness.

The office door opened.

“Don’t move, any of you,” a voice advised from the doorway. It was a level voice, and its calmness indicated an all-too-deadly self-control on the part of its owner.

The Avenger heard it first—a soft hissing sound like a slow leak. His hands flashed out in the dark to the remembered positions of Nellie and Smitty. His fingers touched the wrist of each, almost as a physician takes a pulse.

In the desperate work of Justice, Inc. there were many times when messages must be given but when it was inadvisable to speak them aloud. So by many code methods, the members talked to each other silently. One was by pressures of hand to wrist.

The Avenger’s fingertips gave the wrists of Smitty and Nellie a long and a short pressure. The message was plain.

“Gas!”

Instantly, in the blackness, Nellie whipped out a handkerchief and pressed it to her little nose. Smitty, putting the lapel of his coat to his nostrils, inhaled through this. The fabrics of lapel and handkerchief had been saturated with a chemical of Fergus MacMurdie’s concoction—MacMurdie was another of The Avenger’s aides—so that it would counteract, for a few minutes, the effects of any known gas.

Nellie and Smitty sensed that their chief was moving toward the door. “Sensed” was the word. It was too black to see a thing in here; and when Dick Benson wanted to move silently, no ears could hear him. More by a movement of air around him than in any other way, Smitty and Nellie were informed that he was near the doorway.

They heard a soft movement near the chair where Dick had been sitting when the lights went out. They caught the faintest possible blur of movement as The Avenger whirled in the doorway.

Then four shots crashed out in the small space.

The first shot was directed at the chair where Benson had sat; the lancing stab of fire from the gun muzzle pointed that way.

The next three shots were aimed at random toward the form charging toward the chair from the doorway. Smitty and Nellie heard Myra Horton scream and Dan Moran swear. Also, they heard a light thudding sound and the scrape of a shoe.

Then the door banged shut, and the lock clicked. An instant later there was the ping of glass broken in a thousand shards, and the opening of the door again. They heard the light, racing tread of feet that could belong only to one person—Dick Benson.

Smitty bounced from his chair.

“Go back,” The Avenger’s voice snapped, from just beyond the doorway.

The giant subsided impatiently. There was silence which was not so much silence as a complete suspension of time and animation for several minutes.

Then, without their having heard a sound of returning footsteps, the blackness was split by a white flare. The Avenger’s face, expressionless as a mask, showed in the light.

The white light came from a small disc, looking somewhat like a stomach pill, that would burn whitely for ten minutes. All the members of Justice, Inc. carried them around with them.

In its pale light, Smitty and Nellie saw Dick open the window. And they saw the limp forms of Moran and Myra Horton, sagging in their chairs. The gas had gotten them.

“Lights, Smitty,” Dick said.

The giant went out of the office and to the basement. He found the main fuse that had been pulled from its clip and replaced it.

When Smitty went back, the office was cleared of gas. Benson was working to revive Moran, and Nellie was bringing Myra back to consciousness.

“So somebody does suspect that Moran was checking up on them,” Smitty said. “And Moran was to be killed just as Foley and Tim Phelan were—to shut his mouth.”

The Avenger, not looking up, said, “The gas used is harmless. It was meant only to give the intruder a chance to do what he came here for; what he turned out the lights for.”

His colorless, icy eyes flicked toward the chair he had occupied.

Following the pale gaze, Smitty saw the jagged hole through the chair’s back, heart high, and remembered the first shot, aimed straight at where Benson was supposed to have been sitting.

“Then the whole act was pulled just so you could be killed?” exclaimed Smitty.

“It would seem so,” said The Avenger, without a trace of emotion in his tone. “Moran wasn’t harmed, so it would appear that the murderer was not interested in him. Nor was there any attempt to take the books Moran was working on. I guess I was the one wanted.”

Moran stirred a little under the skillful fingers.

“The gunman heard me leap at him from the doorway—where I supposed he still was,” The Avenger went on. “His next three shots caught me squarely in the chest. They knocked me to one knee. By moving fast and locking the door as he went out, he gave himself just enough time to escape.”

Another might have asked how it was that three heavy bullets, catching Benson in the chest, had not killed him instead of merely knocking him down. But Smitty, of course, knew the answer to that.

The Avenger and each of his aides constantly wore an undergarment of marvelous, pliant stuff which was Benson’s invention and which he called celluglass. This was bulletproof but did not, naturally, kill the hard impact of a slug against it—an impact something like the kick of a mule, if a .45 were used.

“You’ve just started an investigation out here,” Nellie said. “You’ve barely had time to get to the place. And an all-out effort has been made to kill you. Somebody certainly is anxious not to have the Foley-Phelan murders looked into too deeply.”

“It would seem so,” said The Avenger, pale eyes and masklike face as expressionless as though made of marble.

CHAPTER IV

Noise at Night

At four o’clock in the morning the streets of Thornton Heights—and of the other blocks around it—are as quiet as a graveyard. The trash collectors have already gone, so there is no banging of big cans. The other morning life has not begun.

At four o’clock everyone in Thornton Heights is usually asleep; but on this morning, four hours after a scrawny little assistant engineer has been killed, several were awake.

One was another scrawny little man, quite a bit older than Tim Phelan, and quite a bit wealthier.

The home of this one was the entire top floor of one of the northwest buildings of the development. It held ten rooms, each seeming more luxuriously furnished than the last, till you got to the master bedroom.

This room was hung with valuable tapestries and had an onyx mantelpiece that had come right out of a European palace. The great four-poster bed had also come from a palace. Kings had used it.

Maybe kings had even cowered in it, as the present occupant was now doing.

The occupant was Andrew Sillers, one of the fortunate partners of the Thornton Heights Development Corp. That is, everyone considered him fortunate. He himself didn’t think he was fortunate at all, right now.

Andrew Sillers was a little over sixty and should have weighed forty pounds more than he did. His neck was like a fluted rake handle, with the cords standing out sharply. His hair was lank and dry-looking. His hands were like claws as they alternately pulled the bed clothes over his terrified head and then pulled them down again.

They pulled the covers up because he didn’t want to hear that noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Then they pulled them down so he could hear—to discover if they were still making it. Whoever “they” could be.

The noise was still coming, all right. Anyhow, he thought it was, though he couldn’t swear it was not his imagination.

It sounded like some restless animal in his bathroom. Then it seemed to be near the window, only to jump to the door an instant later.

It was a snuffling sound. A majority of people would have recognized it instantly and said it was a homey and cheerful thing. As a matter of fact, Andrew Sillers had recognized it. But the associations it carried just now made it very far from homey or cheerful to him.

Now the sound seemed to be coming right toward his bed. Sillers whimpered, barely audibly, and flopped the covers up over his head again.

There was a discreet tap at his closed door; then the door was opened. This could be seen plainly enough because Andrew Sillers had a night lamp on a low stand. That lamp was never out, these nights.

In the doorway stood a stalwart servant with a gun making a bulge at his shoulder. He’d have made three of little Sillers, and just the sight of him—stolidly chewing gum—should have reassured the thin little man.

But, somehow, it didn’t.

“Did you call, sir?” said the big fellow. He stumbled over the “sir.” Obviously, he wasn’t used to using the word; obviously he was no regular servant.

“No,” said Sillers.

“I was sure I heard you.”

“I just cleared my throat,” snapped Sillers.

“Oh! Everything O.K., then?”

Andrew Sillers was tremendously impelled to tell the man of that sound. But he dared not. The man would have thought he was crazy. So would everyone else, if they knew.

Because the sound, Sillers would have sworn, was made by a pig. Or pigs.

Pigs on the top floor of a building in a congested metropolitan area!

“Everything is all right,” Sillers said waspishly to his burly guard.

“O.K.” The man went phlegmatically out.

Sillers glared after him. If he had heard that sound, and if he could associate it with the things that Sillers was fearsomely able to, he wouldn’t be so confoundedly calm.

A mellow tinkle chimed out. It was a chime from a Spanish church, originally, stolen and sold to Sillers on a trip abroad. It now meant that visitors were at Sillers’s door.

The big man popped back in.

“Somebody to see you, sir,” he said. “Do I let him in?”

Sillers looked at a clock. Ten minutes after four. Terror showed on his face. It was no hour for honest men to come ringing doorbells.

“No,” he squalled. “That is, not unless it’s somebody I know very well.”

However, it was someone he knew well.

Peering through a freshly contrived peephole in Sillers’s outer door, the guard saw the face of Amos Jones.

Amos Jones was another of the corporation’s partners. It seemed funny that he’d be calling at such an hour, but he fell into Sillers’s category of “somebody I know very well,” so the guard opened the door.

Amos Jones came in. Right after him came three guys whose appearance made Sillers’s guard dive for his gun. They looked even tougher than he did.

“It’s all right,” said Jones blandly. “These are employees of mine.”

Jones was the kind of man who would do most things smoothly. He was of average height, but he was twice as heavy and twice as pink as most men. His face was set in a broad smile, which was not matched by his watchful—but bland—little gray eyes.

He waddled toward Sillers’s bedroom door, knowing his way very well indeed. At the door, he jerked his head for his three “employees” to stay outside. He went on into the bedroom.

“Amos!” said Sillers. Wrought up by terror of who could be calling at such an hour, Sillers was a bit vexed when he found the call was innocent. “What in the world are you doing here at four o’clock in the morning? Waking a man out of a sound sleep—”

“Were you sleeping?” Jones interrupted, with his wide, beaming smile.

Sillers’s eyes missed his. “Of course.”

“All right—you were sleeping,” Jones said blandly. “But something has just happened—rather, it happened a few hours ago—that I thought you ought to know about. It’s about Phelan.”

“Phelan?” Sillers said. “Who’s Phelan?”

“Timothy Phelan.”

“I don’t know any Tim—”

“You ought to,” said Jones, not quite so suave for an instant. “You’re the one who hired him. Phelan, assistant engineer.”

“Oh! Oh, yes! What about him?”

“Nothing,” said Jones sardonically, “except he’s dead.”

Sillers stared with squinted, alarmed eyes.

The door chime tinkled again. Both Jones and Sillers whirled toward the door.

Again, a face showed in the peephole that fulfilled Sillers’s description of who he would allow in here. The guard opened the door an instant later and into the bedroom came the third partner, Thomas Marsden.

Marsden was a tall, thin individual, plainly about as old as the other two, but with coal-black hair. Maybe the hair was dyed, and maybe it wasn’t; but its presence on a head that had seen at least sixty summers gave a preserved, unhealthy look.

Jones always looked bland and good-natured. Marsden always looked gloomy and sad. He looked sadder than ever, now, as he blurted, “You two hear about Phelan?”

Amos Jones nodded. Sillers barked. “What is this about Phelan? You said he was dead, Amos. All right, he’s dead. What’s the rest of it?”

“The rest,” said Marsden sadly, “is that he seems to have died just as Carl Foley died.”

Andrew Sillers’s clawlike hand went to his lips and trembled there, then slowly came down again as he achieved a hard-won self-control. The other two stared curiously at his greenish color.

“The news upset me, too,” Marsden said slowly. “And I suppose it upset Amos. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have come here at dawn, as I did. But I don’t think it hit either of us as hard as it seems to be hitting you. Why, Andrew?”

“Yes,” said Jones. “Why? Do you know something about this stuff that we don’t? Are you holding something back?”

“I d-don’t know anything that you don’t,” stuttered Sillers.

“We know nothing at all,” Jones said. “Carl was murdered, and we naturally felt that there was a slight possibility of danger to others in the Thornton Heights set-up. Then an engineer is murdered, the same as Carl, and naturally we are pretty disturbed. Now, it’s a certainty that something pretty bad is hanging around Thornton Heights. And who knows where it will stop? Maybe another partner or two might be . . . er . . . eliminated. But as for knowing anything—no, we don’t know any more than the police.”

“But you seem to,” said Marsden. “Come on—out with it. What does this business mean to you that it doesn’t to us?”

Sillers stared at them without seeing them. And near the bathroom, for just an instant, he seemed to hear that damned noise again.

This time, however, it was surely imagination, because neither Jones nor Marsden gave any indication of hearing it.

Sillers tried evading a direct issue.

“Look,” he said, after clearing his throat, “do you suppose anyone around here could be keeping . . . pigs?”

“Pigs?” echoed Jones.

“Pigs!” exploded Marsden. “In Thornton Heights? Or anywhere around Thornton Heights? You’re mad, Andrew!”

“I just asked,” said Sillers hastily. “I’ve heard that sometimes people keep chickens in city backyards, or pigeons in city attics. I just wondered—”

“What do you think this is?” said Marsden. “A farm—or a city sub-division?”

At a strangled sound from beside him, Marsden whirled quickly.

“What on earth’s wrong with you?” he snapped to Jones.

The bland, pink man had his mouth open, and his face was paler than the other two partners had ever seen it. His eyes were wide and sightless for a moment, and his hand went to his lips as Sillers’s had done a moment ago.

“What’s wrong with you?” Marsden repeated.

“Eh?” said Jones, in a high falsetto. Then he laughed a little, eyes still wide. “Wrong with me? Nothing. Why?”

“You certainly look like something’s wrong. Did I say something to upset you?”

“Upset me?” parrotted Jones. He laughed again. “No. Of course not. I . . . I felt queer for a minute. I think my heart’s not what it ought to be. I think I’d better see a doctor about it. Have a little spell once in a while.”

Marsden looked in a puzzled way at Sillers, then impatiently looked away. There were two terrified men here, now, where there’d been but one before. And the expression on Marsden’s face was one of bewilderment that there should be any terror at all.

Fear, yes. Two men had been murdered in this exclusive seven-block square. But not naked terror such as had ridden in Sillers’s eyes and now showed also in Jones’s.

Sillers, for his part, didn’t notice Marsden’s glance at all. He was staring at Jones.

Amos Jones had a heart as sound as a new dollar watch. Sillers knew that. There was nothing the matter with his heart. Therefore, he had been seized that way because of something Marsden had said.

Sillers knew what that was!

Marsden jerked the attention of his two partners back to the matter in hand.

“There have been two particularly nasty murders here in Thornton Heights,” he said tartly. “This has always been a most respectable neighborhood. We have a high grade of tenants. They won’t like this. One more such occurrence, and some will start moving out.”

He sounded like a schoolteacher scolding a bad child. Murder, it seemed, was most annoying to Marsden.

“The question is, what can we do to prevent more trouble? That’s what I came here to talk about, Andrew. I suppose that is what Amos came for, too.”

Jones nodded his head.

“So—what do we do?”

They talked it over at length, and finally, at Marsden’s suggestion, it was decided to hire fifty men out of a well-known private-detective agency as special police.

Sillers gave the matter his approval, but in his eyes was a look of somber skepticism. He looked, in brief, as if he believed that fifty thousand special police would not be able to prevent more trouble.

Amos Jones looked the same way. Sillers kept glancing at him out of the corners of his eyes. Had he heard that noise, too, when he turned so pale? Sounds that might have been made by pigs?

Sillers decided he had not. Even in Sillers’s imagination, the noise had not sounded at that particular moment. No, it was what Marsden had said that had drained the blood from Jones’s face, though Marsden himself hadn’t seemed to be affected by its significance.

CHAPTER V

Widow and Nephew

Josh Newton was another of The Avenger’s aides. He was a tall, gangling, sleepy-eyed Negro. He looked as if he didn’t have wit enough to come in out of the rain. Actually, he had a brain as sharp as a scalpel and was an honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute.

His voice was crisp and incisive as he picked up the phone at the big desk in Bleek Street and dialed a number.

“Acme Exterminator Co.?” he said. Then: “I would like to speak to the representative of your company who takes care of Thornton Heights.”

Nellie and Smitty were in the vast top-floor room, too. They looked at each other.

“Calling exterminator companies now, Josh?” said Smitty. “What you got—ants in the belfry?”

But at this moment, someone must have come to the phone on the other end and must have said his name was Fowler.

“You call on Thornton Heights, Mr. Fowler? . . . You do. I am calling for Mr. Richard Benson, and I would like to ask if Mr. Timothy Phelan, assistant engineer at Thornton Heights, got in touch with you yesterday at any time . . . He didn’t? . . . No call from Thornton Heights in the last month? . . . Thank you.”

“What,” said Nellie, as Josh hung up, “goes on?” The tiny blonde had a curiosity large enough for Smitty, and it was all too seldom satisfied around here.

Josh grinned at her. “I don’t know. The chief said he saw a notation at Thornton Heights last night to get in touch with the Acme Exterminator Co. It was on the desk of the murdered man, Tim Phelan. It was in Phelan’s handwriting; he knew that because there was a boiler report next to it in the same hand and signed by Phelan. So the chief told me to get in touch with the company and see what he had to say to them.”

Smitty shook his head wonderingly.

“I was in that office, too. I didn’t notice any such notation. And I don’t remember that the chief looked around the desk much.”

“You wouldn’t notice a two-headed pony if it didn’t kick you,” jeered little Nellie. “The chief has eyes all around his head and a memory like a roll of film.”

The Avenger came into the huge room in time to prevent an explosive retort on the part of the giant. He came from the direction of his private laboratory, which was one of the world’s finest, so Smitty guessed he had been studying the slug he’d dug out of the wall of Moran’s office before leaving. The bullet that had torn through the chair instead of through Dick.

The Avenger’s colorless, icy eyes flicked toward Josh.

“No call from Phelan,” Josh reported.

Dick Benson sat down behind the big desk. At first, the rest thought they’d get no hint of why the call had been made. But, for once, The Avenger thought audibly. And after he had done so, Smitty and Nellie realized they should have had the same thoughts—if they’d had the concentration to notice the notation on Phelan’s desk in the first place.

“Then Phelan had just made note of it,” mused Benson, “meaning to call, first thing in the morning. He must have jotted it down very shortly before he was murdered. Why? He must have seen or heard vermin.”

He dialed the Thornton Heights office. The others heard a feminine voice answer.

“Are the Thornton Heights buildings much troubled by insect pests?” Dick asked.

“Why, of course not!” the girl said indignantly. “You won’t find a single—”

“This is an official call,” Dick said evenly.

There was a pause, then a change in the girl’s tone.

“Every large building in every city has a few roaches and silverfish,” said the girl. “We have our share. No more.”

“Have you had more than the usual number of complaints from your central building, the one in which your offices are located?”

“No, sir,” said the girl. “This building is exceptionally free at the moment.”

“How about mice or rats?”

“There we have a clean slate,” said the girl. “These buildings are of the best construction. There hasn’t been a complaint of that nature for years. Three years, to be exact.”

The Avenger hung up.

“It wasn’t insect vermin he wanted to report,” he mused. “There aren’t any to speak of. So it wasn’t anything he saw. It must have been something he heard—like a sound of mice or rats. But there are none of those, either.”

He said no more, but it wasn’t necessary to say more. The others understood plainly enough.

What Phelan had heard just before he was killed was a sound made by his approaching murderer. A sound, probably, like that made by rats.

An animal sound.

And his body looked as if wolves or something had worked on it.

Fergus MacMurdie and Cole Wilson came in, obviously in answer to a recent summons to headquarters.

MacMurdie was as tall as Josh Newton and almost as thin. He had feet almost as big. His ears were bigger, sticking out like sails from his sandy-haired head. He had bleak, bitter blue eyes under sandy ropes of eyebrows and a raw, freckled skin. But while he would never win a beauty prize, he had won all sorts of reprieves from death with his strength, quickness and general fighting ability.

“Raring to go, chief,” said Wilson impulsively. “What’s the job you want done?”

It would be Cole Wilson who blurted out something. He was the latest member of the little band and the most impulsive. He lived for action, looked it and could move like chain lightning. He had the sharp features and slanting forehead of an Indian, and his hair was heavy and dark and had never known a hat.

“Have you read up on the Foley murder?” Dick Benson asked them.

“We’ve read what there was to rrread,” burred Mac. “It wasn’t much. Partner in Thornton Heights killed late one night in his own office. Murderer must be some 1942 Jack the Ripper, from the way the body looked. Leaves a widow—second wife—and a nephew.”

The Avenger nodded.

“Better have a talk with the widow and the nephew,” he said to them.

The unfortunate Carl Foley had not lived in his own development. His home, a big gray stone house with newly installed iron bars over the basement and first-floor windows, was a mile from Thornton Heights.

Wilson looked at those bars as the two men approached the front door. They were an inch thick, and the cement and lead in which they were set still gleamed pale and fresh.

“Foley was certainly scared of something, just before he died,” Wilson observed.

Then the door was opening for them. A trim maid said she’d tell Mrs. Foley they wanted to see her.

Mrs. Foley came immediately into the rather musty drawing room of the house. She looked inquiringly at them. She was under thirty and wore a most attractive gray negligée which set off her dark hair. She had beautiful greenish eyes which instantly gave MacMurdie, who was completely woman-proof, the conviction that she wasn’t to be trusted as far as he could throw a locomotive.

“You are special police, or something?” she asked, in a wan, sad voice. Instinctively, she addressed her words to Cole Wilson, who was as darkly presentable as Mac was homely.

“Special police,” said Wilson. Which was the truth. All the members of Justice, Inc. held special cards from the police departments of a dozen big cities. “We wanted to ask you a few questions about Mr. Foley, if you can take them.”

She waved a limp and beautiful hand to indicate that she would manage to bear up under questioning.

“We noticed thick steel bars, newly installed at the lower windows,” said Wilson. “Was Mr. Foley afraid he would meet some untimely end?”

“I believe he was,” Mrs. Foley said. “He acted very nervous, very strange, for weeks before he . . . before his—”

“How do ye mean—strrrange?” burred the Scot.

“He hired a chauffeur who was an ex-wrestler, as a sort of guard,” said Mrs. Foley. “And he had those prison bars put over the windows. He jumped when anyone came near him unexpectedly. Even when I did. And he always seemed to be listening.”

“Listening?” said Wilson. “Listening to what?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Foley. “I never heard anything. And if I didn’t, I don’t see how he could have. Yet, he was always listening as if he did hear something.”

“Did what he thought he heard scare him?”

“I should say it did,” sighed Mrs. Foley. “Carl lost at least thirty pounds in the month before he died. The doctors said there wasn’t a thing the matter with him. So it must have been just that he was so afraid.”

“He was killed in his office, I understand,” Cole said, very sympathetic in tone, “late at night. Did he often work nights?”

“He used to. But during the time he was so scared, he hardly ever went out of the house after dinner.”

“Did he say why he went, that night?”

“No. He seemed more nervous than ever. I was awfully surprised that he went out. But somebody phoned him just before, and I guess some matter was discussed that seemed to Carl to be so important he’d better see about it personally.”

“Oh, so someone phoned just before he went out!”

“Yes.” Mrs. Foley looked beautifully reproachful. “I’ve told the regular police all this already,” she complained.

“Has anyone but the police—and friends—called here since Muster Foley died?” Mac asked suddenly.

“No.” Mrs. Foley shook her head. Then, after a moment, she said, “But what do you mean, anyone besides police and our friends?”

“I mean—anyone,” said the Scot.

“An electrician came yesterday,” said Mrs. Foley with indifference. “He said Mr. Foley had called him just before he . . . it happened. He said he’d been told to fix the lights.”

“What lights?” Mac said.

“I don’t know. I was out. When I got back, the second-floor maid told me about it. He did something to the lights in Mr. Foley’s upstairs study. I’d thought they were all right before he came.”

“Could we see those lights?”

“Of course,” sighed Mrs. Foley.

They went up broad, curved stairs. Cole said, “Did you tell this to the regular police?”

“No,” said Mrs. Foley. “They didn’t ask, and I didn’t think to tell them. It didn’t seem important. Is it?”

“Don’t know yet,” Mac said.

They looked at the lights in the small, book-lined study. There was a central fixture and four around the walls.

No one of them had been repaired, damaged or touched in any way whatever, as far as Mac and Cole could tell. The electrician might never have monkeyed with them, for all the evidence that was left.

Then Cole’s sharp black eyes were drawn to the shiny plate over the wall switch. It had been taken off and put back on recently. You could tell because it hadn’t been put back exactly as before. A hairline of paint showed fresher than the rest.

Cole promptly took it off again. Underneath was the wadded wire and switch mechanism, innocent, correct. There was nothing wrong here.

They thanked Mrs. Foley and went out. As they started down the stairs, they were almost bumped into by someone coming up.

This was a young fellow, about Cole’s age and build, but with yellow hair and a face almost too good-looking. He looked eagerly, almost boyishly, at the two.

“You’re with Justice, Inc., aren’t you?” he said. “I’ve heard of you. Spotted you by the names. Maid said you were here. I’m Clarence Beck, Mr. Foley’s nephew.”

Mac and Cole hardly had time to nod acknowledgment, when he rushed on:

“Uncle Carl and I were pals as well as relatives. Say, I’d like to help in catching his murderer. Didn’t ask the regular cops, because I knew there was no chance. But I’ve heard about how you work. I don’t see why I couldn’t stick around with you. I’d sure like to help.”

“Well,” began Mac doubtfully, “I harrdly think—”

“Swell!” Clarence Beck said. “I’m sure I can be of some use. I know, for instance, who phoned Uncle Carl just before he was killed—the phone call that got him out of here and to his office, that night. I found out after the police were here. I’ll be glad to tell—”

He stopped suddenly and snapped his fingers. “What do you know!” he exclaimed. “Forgot something. Very important, too. Don’t go ’way, now. I’ve got to make a phone call. A girl named Myra.”

He dashed into the first-floor library.

“Brain like a feather,” muttered Mac.

“I think he’s all right. Just impulsive,” Cole said defensively. He had a weak spot for others like himself.

“Just the same, we can get along without him verrra nicely,” Mac said.

They went on out the door.

There was something in the street that hadn’t been there when they went into Foley’s house. But neither Mac nor Cole, versed as they were in the ways of danger, paid much attention to it. It was too common a sight in any big city.

It was a big, dull-red moving van. It was backed in to the curb at an angle, just in front of the car they’d come in. As they emerged from the Foley doorway, two men were laboring out of the next house with a piano.

They were crossing the sidewalk just as Cole and Mac got to that point on the way to their car. The two members of Justice, Inc. paused a moment to let the movers get past.

The scuffling feet of the men drowned all other sounds of feet. And with two at the piano and a third just lifting a chair into the open rear of the van, it would seem that the whole crew was in sight.

Cole and Mac never knew what hit them!

Padded pipe, or something of the kind, crashed down on their skulls from behind. They pitched forward. Before they’d hit the walk, the sluggers behind them caught their bodies.

A woman was walking toward them half a block away, but she didn’t see anything. The piano was between her and what had happened. No witnesses were ever to report this.

The men with the blackjacks heaved Mac and Cole into the van. Still another man in there—that made at least six in this odd moving gang—threw carpet over the two bodies. They loaded the piano in, shut the big rear doors and drove away.

CHAPTER VI

“Next Time I’ll Shoot.”

A call to the Thornton Heights general office had revealed the fact that neither Amos Jones nor Thomas Marsden nor Andrew Sillers were coming there that day. They could be reached at home.

The Avenger wanted a word with the remaining partners of the rich development. He drove toward Marsden’s address first.

Marsden lived in a three-story apartment building, four blocks from Thornton Heights. The building was named “Marsden Manor.” Apparently, it was owned by Marsden as a separate and personal venture, having nothing to do with Thornton Heights.

A glance at the vestibule bells revealed that, while this was a six-apartment building, there were only five apartments in it. The top floor, which should have had two, had only one big one, and this was all Marsden’s.

Benson pressed Marsden’s bell. There was no answer. He pressed again. Marsden’s office had said he was here. Even if he were out for a while, some one of his servants—there must be several for so large a place—should be at home to answer the ring.

But none did. The speaking tube remained mute.

The Avenger took out a ring of master keys of his own design. With but a glance, he picked one out and put it in the vestibule door lock.

The door promptly opened. He went upstairs to the third floor.

He didn’t attempt to open the lock there; but with one of the keys, he scraped at the lock as if he were working on it.

A tremendous voice said, “G-go away or I’ll shoot. I’ll shoot through the door!”

“Do you usually shoot visitors without even knowing who they are?” said The Avenger.

“B-but I know who you are,” came the trembly voice on the other side of the door. “We don’t want you in here.”

The Avenger’s deadly, pale eyes glittered like polar ice under the moon. This was interesting. He was used to having the doors of criminals barred frantically against him. But Marsden was a wealthy, respected man. Why was he so eager to have nothing to do with Richard Benson?

“All right,” Dick said. “If you don’t want to see me, I suppose there’s nothing to do about it.”

“We don’t want to see you. Good-by!”

Benson walked down the stairs audibly then walked back up them silently. The man on the other side of the door seemed satisfied that The Avenger had really gone, as easily as that, which showed that he didn’t know much about Dick Benson after all.

There was a window above the third-floor stairwell. The Avenger’s fingers hooked over the sill. He drew himself up and then out.

The next window in the third-floor line could be reached by leaning far to the side. He reached it, swing up, raised it and slid in.

He was in a small sitting room where there was a desk with several phones on it and a man behind it. The man whirled as Benson straightened from his catlike entrance. In the man’s hand was a .38 revolver.

“I thought my servant told you we didn’t want you in here,” the man said.

The words were composed, but the voice was not. It shook badly. So did the gun. Shaky guns are far more apt to go off than steady ones in the hands of experts.

“You’re Marsden, aren’t you?” said The Avenger, voice as calm and expressionless as his mask of a face.

“Yes. And you’re Richard Benson, and I want nothing to do with you—unless I have a gun in my hand. It looks as though Andrew was right, after all.”

“Andrew? You mean your partner, Andrew Sillers? Right about what?”

The Avenger’s voice was a powerful tool, a compelling thing. Few could defy its cold vibrancy. Probably Thomas Marsden couldn’t have understood its compulsion, either, if he had not been so frightened. He looked at The Avenger as if in deadly fear for his life.

“Get out of here!” he said, waving the gun unsteadily.

His hand touched a button on his desk. The door of the small sitting room opened and a servant in a white jacket came in. He was plump and soft, with a bald head and popping eyes. At least, the eyes were popping when they rested on Benson, who was supposed to have walked peacefully away from the front door.

“Show this man out,” said Marsden, words much more resolute than his voice. “You have the gun I gave you. Keep it against his back till the door closes on him.”

The white-jacketed man drew a gun which he seemed to regard with as much fear as he did Benson. He walked around The Avenger and pressed the muzzle against his spine. Benson could feel it quaking against him.

Now, The Avenger had ways of taking guns away from people. He had ways of making people talk, too, without the use of violence. Quite probably, he could have done both of these things in this instance, but the mention of Andrew Sillers’s name had decided him to leave here peacefully and go at once to see Sillers.

Marsden had said, “It looks as though Andrew was right, after all.”

That seemed strange enough to call for investigation.

“I’ll be back,” he said evenly to Marsden.

Fear leaped higher in the tall, thin man’s gloomy eyes.

“The next time you try to break in here, I’ll shoot you on sight,” he yelled.

His gun covered Dick till The Avenger had gone out of the room. And the servant’s gun trembled against his spine till he had walked out of the apartment.

But The Avenger wasn’t to talk to Andrew Sillers for a while, yet, which was black misfortune for Andrew Sillers.

He had just started his car toward Thornton Heights, when the radio came to life.

“Calling Mr. Benson. Urgent! Mr. Benson.”

The Avenger said into his own transmitter, “Yes, Nellie. What’s up?”

“It’s Cole and Mac, chief,” came the little blonde’s voice. “They’re in some kind of trouble. Couldn’t talk. Either Cole or Mac tapped an SOS on his belt-radio transmitter. I just heard it. That’s all I know.”

“Exact time?” Dick asked.

“Just a minute ago. Ten thirty-two.”

“Have Smitty meet me at Carl Foley’s house. That’s where they were last, as far as we know,” said Benson.

“You mean have Smitty and me meet you, don’t you?” Nellie said hopefully.

“No. Just Smitty.”

“Oh!”

You could fairly see Nellie’s disappointment. The diminutive blonde lived for excitement. And it now looked as if she might miss some.

The Avenger, pale eyes glinting as they always did when some of his band were in trouble, sped toward the Foley house.

Smitty’s car shrieked to a stop in front of the Foley residence just a minute after The Avenger got there. The first thing the two noticed, of course, was the car in which Mac and Cole had come here earlier.

It was sitting at the curb in front of the Foley place just as the two had left it. Just on a wild chance, Smitty went over the interior swiftly to see if a note had been somehow left before Cole and Mac were spirited away.

There was no note.

“Looks bad,” said Smitty.

Dick nodded. Then he went rapidly to the Foley door and pressed the bell. The door was opened by a very good-looking young fellow with hair almost as blond as Nellie’s.

“Were a Mr. MacMurdie and a Mr. Wilson here awhile ago?” The Avenger asked.

“Yes,” said the young fellow, looking annoyed. “They were. About my uncle’s death. They were going to take me with them while they investigated it, but they went off and left me while I was making a phone call—”

He stopped and looked intently at The Avenger, taking in his close-cropped, virile black hair, his masklike face and pale, deadly eyes.

“You’re Dick Benson!” the young fellow said breathlessly. “Say, this is an honor! I’ll ask you what I asked your two aides: Can I help nail my uncle’s murderer? I’m Clarence Beck, Foley’s nephew,” he added, all in a lump.

“When did MacMurdie and Wilson leave here?” asked Benson.

“Ten-twenty,” said Beck.

“You mean—about ten-twenty?”

“No. I mean ten-twenty. On the nose. I remember, because the first time I tried to call my number it was busy and I looked at the clock to try again in just two minutes. It was ten-twenty.”

“Then they managed to tap the SOS twelve minutes after they left here,” remarked Smitty.

“What’s this?” Beck picked it up sharply. He might seem too young for his years, rather impulsive, but he had a head on him. “SOS? Managed? That sounds like they’re in some sort of trouble—”

At just this moment, there was a commotion next door.

Smitty and Beck and Benson had been standing on the Foley doorstep. The door of the next house swung open and a woman came out. She had on a coat, unbuttoned, and had her hat in her hand. She had, evidently, just entered her house and was now flying out again.

“Help! Police!” she began shrilling. “Thieves!”

Hardly seeming to move, The Avenger was beside her.

“What is wrong?”

“Robbers!” yelled the woman. “I went out to the corner for a headache remedy. While I was gone, robbers came. In a moving van, my maid says. And my maid let them walk out with half a dozen chairs and my piano. A piano—in broad daylight! Help! Thieves!”

Smitty looked at Benson.

“There we go,” the big fellow said. “They took them away in that van. Drove up here just to do it, and had the crust actually to cart off some furniture to make the act look right.”

“Sure!” chirped Beck. “All we have to do is locate that van.”

He was moving as he spoke, moving with The Avenger and Smitty. When they got into their car, Beck climbed in, too. Smitty looked at Benson with one eyebrow up, but The Avenger didn’t say anything. He seemed willing to have Clarence Beck along.

“My gosh, you’re big!” Beck said to Smitty.

“Oh, quite!” growled the giant, wondering unhappily what was happening to Mac and Cole. And, above all, why it was happening. How had the snatchers known that the two were at Foley’s place, and who was behind them? Who was so anxious to keep Justice, Inc. out of this murder investigation that an attempt had been made on Dick’s life last night and that two of its members had been kidnaped this morning?

Following the cold trail of that van in which Mac and Cole were prisoners presented no problem at all for a few blocks for the simple reason that this was a one-way street. Anyone driving a thing as conspicuous as a moving van, with a couple of kidnaped victims in it, would be careful to live up to the rules so as not to draw police attention.

The Avenger went down the street. It ended in a big north-and-south avenue, in the heart of Thornton Heights. The name of this central avenue of the subdivision was Wilder Avenue.

Here, you could go two ways, and Dick Benson paused. He stopped beside a newsstand. The boy there, a sharp-eyed youngster of about fourteen, came promptly to the car, scenting a customer. Then he saw who was at the wheel, and his eyes got big.

He knew The Avenger, all right. Every newsie for miles around the big city knew him. In fact, they were all banded into a sort of informal young army, taking orders from The Avenger; and, many times, their sharp eyes and habits of observance had helped Justice, Inc.

The boy snapped to attention.

“Orders?” he said eagerly.

Benson’s masklike face almost relaxed in a smile. He had a tremendous sympathy for these kids, and a respect for them, too.

“No orders,” he said, voice more human than usual. “Did you see a moving van turn this corner within the past hour?”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy.

“Can you give a description?”

“Yes, sir. It was pretty big, but not as big as some of the new, special jobs. Dull-red, as if it was about five years old and hadn’t been painted. It was going kind of fast for a van. When the driver went around the corner he rode up over the curb as if he wasn’t used to wheeling such big jobs. That’s how I happened to notice it.”

“Good work,” said Benson. “Which way did it go?”

“North,” said the boy.

The Avenger put his hand out to shake the boy’s, which was far more reward for the kid than the folded bill that was left in his fingers.

“Swell work,” bubbled Clarence Beck enthusiastically. “I didn’t think you could get to first base following a van after so much time had elapsed. Of course, you won’t get any farther on its trail than this, but it’s wonderful you’ve tracked it even this far. You’d be a swell guy to have on the home team’s side—and a bad one to have for an enemy.”

Smitty glared at him. The big fellow was chewing his lips. He rather agreed with Beck about its being impossible to follow such a cold scent much farther. But he didn’t want to put it into words.

Then the trail extended itself a few more steps, due to the ingenuity of the two men somewhere ahead in that van.

There was a corner drugstore. Around the front of this a dozen people were standing, trying to look in the window. There was a cop at the door.

The Avenger stopped and got out. The patrolman was as quick as the newsboy to recognize the masklike face and the pale, cold eyes. He said, “Mr. Benson! You wanta go in the store?”

“What’s in there?” said Benson evenly. “What’s the excitement about?”

“Fella fainted,” said the patrolman. “Anyhow, I thought he’d fainted when I carried him in here, a while ago. He keeled over on the street, half a block ahead of me, and I ran and got him. But the druggist says it ain’t a regular fainting spell. He says it looks to him as if the man was drugged. Or maybe gassed.”

The cop scratched his jaw reflectively.

“I think maybe the druggist is right,” he added. “When I picked the guy up and started away with him, I felt a little wobbly for a minute, as if I’d whiffed something. But when I went back, I didn’t. Guess the stuff floated away.”

“Thanks,” said Benson.

He got back in the car and resumed the northward trip.

Smitty had heard the talk, and knew as well as Benson why that man had “fainted.”

“Mac!” he said.

The Avenger nodded and put on speed. The trail was not so cold now. Beck stared at both, mystified.

CHAPTER VII

Trail of Slumber

There was no mystery to it. Fergus MacMurdie, one of the world’s top-ranking chemists, had devised many concoctions for crime fighting. The chemical to nullify effects of gas, used by The Avenger’s aides to saturate their coat lapels and handkerchiefs, was one of them.

A special anesthetic gas was another.

Mac turned out little, fragile pellets, filled with a volatile liquid which would put a man to sleep in a few seconds when it was exploded near him. He always carried some, and he was surreptitiously dropping one out of a crack in the van every now and then to try to leave a trail.

A trail of sleeping people.

It was a rather bizarre sort of trail to leave behind, but it worked.

Twelve blocks farther on, Benson and Smitty and Beck saw another little crowd. This one was on the sidewalk, and a man with a small black bag was kneeling beside a prone figure. The crowd looked alarmed. They had no way of knowing, of course, that the gas was harmless. They didn’t even know it was a gas that was responsible.

About a mile along, there was a third knot of people, at a corner, and a commotion to the left, down that street.

The big car followed the eerie trail left and then right, up a big boulevard. Mac was sure smart, Smitty thought admiringly. But then, suddenly, the big fellow saw a hole in the beautiful theory. A great big hole.

“Hey!” he exclaimed. “I don’t think it’s Mac that’s leaving this trail for us!”

The Avenger said nothing. Under his deft hands the big car was streaking through red lights and around traffic jams, inexorably lessening the lead between it and the still unseen moving van.

“If Mac could get at his gas pills,” Smitty argued, “he could just drop a couple in the truck and knock out whoever’s holding him and Cole prisoners. Then he could cut a way out of the van. He wouldn’t just drop them out a crack in the van. Anyhow, there aren’t usually cracks in moving vans big enough for those pellets. They’re as big as small marbles.”

The giant began chewing his lips again.

“Looks to me as if the guys that got Mac and Cole found those pills and guessed what they were. Looks to me as if they are dropping them out, every so often. In fact, it looks as if we’re going straight into a trap!”

“So it does,” said The Avenger calmly.

Young Beck suddenly chattered in excitement.

“You mean to say you think we’re heading into danger? And you just keep right on? You don’t stop to take any precautions about it?”

Benson didn’t say anything. He didn’t bother to explain his fundamental rule about such things: If someone sets a trap for you, walk right into it. You usually learn things in traps.

The big car fled through a park. Two blocks past that, Beck said suddenly, “There’s a van! Would that be ours?”

The Avenger’s pale eyes flicked sideways down the small street indicated. Smitty stared tensely.

There was a huge, dull-red bulk waddling slowly down that street like a fat lady in a narrow movie aisle.

“We’ll see,” said Benson calmly.

He rounded the next corner, made a second right turn, and stopped the car just short of the end of this parallel block. The three got out, with Clarence Beck fairly simmering with excitement.

“Calm down!” snapped Smitty. “If there is trouble, and if you pull some dumb play, I’ll slap you one.”

He still wondered why The Avenger had allowed this feather-headed blond guy to come with them. He seemed to Smitty to be a first-class liability.

At the corner, they just caught a glimpse of the huge van trundling into a garage entrance that seemed to have to swell to swallow the thing. Then they saw a corrugated-sheet-steel door lowered over it, cutting off the garage from the sidewalk.

“End of the line,” said Beck eagerly. “Oh, boy, give me a smack at some of these guys! I’ll bet they’re part of the gang that killed Uncle Carl.”

“How do you know it was a ‘gang’?” The Avenger said. “It might have been one man who killed him. Or even an animal, from the description of the body.”

Beck didn’t turn a hair. “It’s always a gang that kills,” he said. “Give me a gun!”

“You’re not going in there,” was Dick’s even reply. “You will stay outside. If Smitty and I aren’t out with our two friends inside of ten minutes, you will get in touch with the police.”

“Aw—”

The colorless, glacial eyes rested on Beck’s face for just an instant.

The young fellow said no more.

Smitty and The Avenger looked over the roof line of the half block of buildings between the corner and the garage. The roofs were on a level, three stories above the ground, till the garage was reached. There, they dropped to a story and a half, where the garage’s humped low roof occurred.

The two went up to the roof of the corner building, leaving Clarence Beck standing disconsolately in a corner doorway. Then they went across roofs and dropped to the roof of the garage, by lowering themselves on a thin silk line The Avenger unwound from around his waist.

There was a trapdoor in the rear corner of the roof, near where they softly landed. The Avenger went to this, and listened a moment. He silently lifted it, revealing a steel ladder.

He started down that.

Smitty followed. But the giant was about as disturbed as he ever got. He didn’t like this at all. In the first place, he was sure this was a trap. And, if so, announcement of their coming would be as plain as if announced by bugle calls.

It was a bright day, and the opening of that trapdoor would throw a square of light down onto the darker floor that could be seen by anyone in the place.

Smitty closed the trapdoor over his head as he lowered his bulk down the ladder. At least, he could shut off that betraying square of light. He looked down from it, and saw half a dozen private cars—and the big moving van. The van was near the center of the small garage.

The Avenger, Smitty saw, wasn’t going clear down to the cement floor. At least, he wasn’t that rash. He’d gone down to where he could reach a roof girder, and had swung out on that. Smitty joined him there.

They crouched on it, eight or nine feet under the curve of the roof and sixteen or eighteen feet from the floor.

Voices sounded from the front of the place. The garage office was there, flimsily walled off from the rest of the place. They couldn’t hear words, could just hear the voices. There seemed to be a lot of men in the office.

The Avenger worked his way to a point over the van. Smitty followed. About five of the ten minutes had passed since they’d told Beck to phone the police. And they weren’t caught, yet. It began to look pretty good. It began to look as though they’d free Mac and Cole, all right.

If the two were still alive to free.

The top of the van was close under their feet. Benson dropped soundlessly to it, with Smitty close behind. Dick softly tapped, “O.K.”

Inside the van the same code was repeated.

“O.K.”

The Avenger took out another of Mac’s gadgets—a midget blowtorch. With his body between the tiny bright flame and the office part of the garage, Benson burned a square in the top large enough for a body to pass through.

He looked in, played a small flashlight around.

The ray lit on the angry faces of Mac and Cole. The two lay on the van floor, securely bound; one of them must have tapped out the O.K. with his forehead.

The Avenger started to lower himself into the dark cave of the van. Smitty’s vast paw caught his chief’s shoulder for an instant, while he stared urgently at him.

Smitty’s tense look said, “My gosh! Do you think you ought to go down in there? If they ever caught on, we’d be as helpless as rats in a trap.”

Benson kept on going down. And then Smitty yelled a warning, but it was too late!

A loop, seeming to come of itself from the dimness of the garage, lassoed his big shoulders, and he was yanked off the top of the van. An instant later, with the agility of a monkey, a figure substituted for him up there. This figure had a submachine gun cradled in its arm, and it pointed the thing at the hole.

Smitty tried to yell as he hit the floor, but for an instant the breath was knocked out of him. However, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t yell. He made noise enough for six without yelling. The Avenger could have been deaf, inside the van, and still have known that a lot was wrong.

First off, three men jumped Smitty, rising up from behind cars standing nearby.

The three were quite confident that they could handle him, big as he was. Why not? His arms were bound to his sides by the taut noose. Anyhow, guys as big as Smitty were always slow and muscle-bound, weren’t they?

But it seemed that they were not. Not always. And the noose around Smitty’s tree-trunk arms didn’t last long. It was only quarter-inch hemp.

Smitty heaved his great chest and bulged muscles of arms and shoulders as he did so. The rope parted just as two men tackled him from the waist up and a third put arms like a vise around his big legs.

“O.K.,” one sang out. “Tie him up—” The “up turned into an uppgh” as Smitty jerked one huge leg up. The man went up with it, further assisted by a knee under the chin. At the next instant, Smitty whirled like a giant top and the two men hanging onto his arms and shoulders were snapped off like the end-men of a big crack-the-whip.

Four more instantly piled on the giant, dropping the ropes with which they’d meant to bind him. Smitty went back a pace under their combined onslaught.

The big fellow had never learned to box. He’d never had to. He just hit, and whether the recipient of the blow had had his guard up or not made no difference. Frequently, Smitty knocked out a man with that man’s own fist, by slamming it back against his jaw.

He knocked out one of his attackers like this. Then he raised a tremendous left fist and brought it straight down like a hammer on a nail. The nail was the head of another of this gang that had been indiscreet enough to annoy Justice, Inc.

The man’s head seemed to sink clear down beneath the level of his collarbone, and he sagged, out of it for a good long time.

Now, however, another had crept behind him, and this one slugged him with a wrench or something. It staggered the giant. While he was off balance, three more dove at him. He fell over backwards like a falling tree, and at least four jumped on top of him. Maybe five. He was past counting.

They slugged at his head with gun butts and saps, as if they were beating a shark to death in the bottom of a boat. Smitty tried to roll with the blows a little, but didn’t miss them all. The already dim light in the place seemed to be dimming still more.

Smitty went limp.

He wasn’t actually out, but he would be in another ten seconds, so why keep on? Why not save himself a little bit by pretending?

“The big dope’s made of scrap iron or something,” one of the men complained bitterly. He kicked at Smitty’s head. “Don’t bother to rope him, now. He’ll stay put for a while. Just throw him into the van. If any heads stick out of the van, cut ’em off at the neck with slugs.”

Smitty’s big bulk was hauled back up to the van top with a rope thrown over the roof girders and handled by five men. Up there, the grinning monkey with the submachine gun steered the giant frame to the opening made by The Avenger.

They dropped Smitty unceremoniously through, and he lit on his head and shoulders on the van floor.

If he hadn’t been two thirds unconscious, and relaxed, he would have broken his neck. As it was, the shock did little more than snap him back to consciousness again.

“All set?” yelled someone outside, from a distance.

“All set,” was the answer.

“Then give ’em the works.”

CHAPTER VIII

Time Bomb!

The first voice outside, the one from a little distance, was composed to the point of indifference. It sounded slightly familiar. Even with his wits a bit addled, Smitty caught that faint familiarity. He thought The Avenger did, too.

Benson had his flashlight on, and it seemed that his deadly, colorless eyes were glittering more balefully than usual.

The voice went on.

“One of you in back, another in front. Guns trained. If anybody tries to get out of the van, pour lead. The rest of you, fix up the big bang.”

Feet scurried outside the van. Then came sloshing, dripping sounds along the van walls. With it came a raw, strong smell instantly identifiable as gasoline. They must be throwing it on with open buckets.

Somebody did something under the van, and there was the sound of a match striking.

“Give it about five minutes’ worth of fuse,” directed the voice.

Fuse! Some sort of explosive! Right under the van.

When the explosive let go, it would knock the truck up against the roof girders and splinter it like a match box. After that, it would burn like an oil-soaked torch.

Smitty looked at The Avenger. The pale eyes and masklike face showed no emotion at all. Smitty took off his coat, hunched the shoulder into a peak, and stuck the wadded fabric up through the hole in the van top.

There was a sound like a couple of hundred typewriters rolled into one. When Smitty pulled his coat down there was no shoulder left on it.

He looked at The Avenger again and found that Dick had shifted to the front of the van.

All during his fight outside the van, Smitty had wondered why The Avenger didn’t try to get out. Benson could have tossed a gas pellet out and put that guard by the hole to sleep, it seemed to Smitty.

Now, with his brain a bit clearer, Smitty knew why The Avenger hadn’t. It would have done no good. Put that one man to sleep, sure. But there were a dozen more to take his place, and the garage was too big to fill completely with gas and put them all out.

Dick Benson might have escaped, himself. But he hadn’t come here to do that. He had come to rescue Mac and Cole who were still tied up, by the way, since too much had happened to allow anyone time to untie them.

Smitty couldn’t see what The Avenger was doing at the front of the van. And he wished he could. He wished he could be sure that something was being done, because this was a deadly spot they were in.

The silence in the garage was sort of unhealthy, it was so complete. In it, Smitty could suddenly hear the sputter of a fuse.

Then there were running feet, the slam of the garage door at the front—and more silence.

“Chief,” said Smitty tensely, “we have to do something.”

“We cerrrtainly do,” burred the helpless MacMurdie, heaving at his bonds. “ ’Tis a sweet bonfire they’ve lit under us, Muster Benson.”

“Ever light a bonfire under a mule?” came The Avenger’s calm, even voice.

And what, wondered Smitty, did that have to do with the situation?

“Looks like a sure roasting for the mule—if he doesn’t move,” The Avenger’s calm voice went on. “So, he moves. We’ll do the same trick.”

As he concluded, a square of partition between van body and cab sagged back in his hands, and then the three in the van with him got the idea.

The van had been turned after it got inside the garage so that it nosed against a side wall. With a guard at the front of the garage and another at the back, the sides of the van were toward them.

The cab was deeply recessed, so that the two guards were unable to see into it from the sides.

They didn’t see The Avenger crawl through the front hole and settle down under the wheel. They might not have seen even from a better angle, as a matter of fact.

So they didn’t see. But they heard the starter grind, of course, and then heard the thunder of the motor. Yelling, they started pouring lead into the van, and into the cab, blindly through the sides. The slugs went in like cheese, but The Avenger did not give them time to nose around for victims.

With the first pop of the motor, he was in gear, and he made the truck leap back and around toward the rear door like an angry mustang.

The man there screamed in mortal fear as the great hulk leaped at him. He dropped his gun and scrambled to keep from being mashed like a pancake against the rear door.

Then the van leaped forward, toward the second guard, who was still shakily trying to shoot The Avenger through the windshield. Benson pressed hard down on the accelerator, motor shrieking in first gear.

The man at the front gave up, too, unnerved by the onrushing juggernaut. He jumped for his life. The van crashed the steel front door, then rolled through, taking bent door and most of the frame with it.

There was an ear-shattering bang behind the van, then the roar of flames.

The Avenger stopped the truck calmly by the curb, face and deadly eyes as expressionless as though he had just strolled out of a restaurant.

“Phew!” said Cole shakily.

“Ditto,” said Mac.

Smitty looked at his big hands, laughed wryly at their tremor, then untied the two. When he looked up, The Avenger was gone.

Dick Benson came back as the three climbed out of the van. In the distance, fire sirens were shrieking. Dick started to the corner, around which he had left his car.

He was not alone. Dragged with him was the gangster who had been at the front door. The explosion had knocked him out, and Benson had gone back and neatly scooped him up. Now, with one bar-steel arm around the unconscious shoulders, The Avenger was walking along as effortlessly as though he were carrying a sawdust doll that weighed about two and a half pounds.

At the corner, Smitty suddenly exclaimed aloud and stared at a doorway.

Beck had stood in that doorway when they left him to go into the garage. Beck had been told to call the police if The Avenger and the others weren’t out in ten minutes.

Nearly twenty minutes had passed, and Beck had not done so. At least, there weren’t any police coming here, now, save those on the local beat in answer to the fire call.

And Beck himself was gone. He was nowhere around the place.

Back at Bleek Street, The Avenger took his prisoner to a small second-floor room instead of to the huge top-floor room.

The man was a perfect specimen of his ratlike kind. He had a gash for a mouth, a rat’s chin and forehead, a stringy, unmuscular body, and couldn’t have looked you squarely in the eye to save his life. He was the kind that is dangerous only when armed with a couple of guns. Then, with guns against unarmed people, he could be as brave as a lion!

The man kept wailing, “You lemme go. I want to be put in the coop. I wanna be arrested. Where’re the cops?”

He was not the first crook taken prisoner by The Avenger who, after one look into the glacial, pale eyes, bleated in terror to be arrested.

Benson paid no attention to the man. He was mixing a small beaker full of some red stuff that looked like blood. The thug’s eyes kept riveted to this, in fearful fascination.

“What’s that stuff? What’re you gonna do to me? I won’t swallow that stuff, if that’s the idea you got in your bonnet.”

The Avenger walked toward the man, holding the sinister-looking beaker. The man backed from him till the edge of a chair caught the backs of his legs.

He fell into it and leaned way back, still staring at the red liquid.

“This won’t taste bad at all,” came The Avenger’s voice, on a strange dead level.

Mac looked at Smitty with a grin just twitching the edge of his dour Scotch mouth. Smitty nodded, ever so little, as he got the significance of it.

“I won’t swallow that! I won’t, I tell you!” The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He licked dry lips, staring—staring at the vial. “You turn me over to the cops.”

“Not bad at all,” said The Avenger in the level monotonous tone. “Come, now. Not—bad—at—all”

“You got no right,” the man began. His eyes had a glassy look. “You got no—”

He stopped talking. He was sitting as still as if dead, eyes wide and unblinking, like a mechanical thing rather than a human being.

It had been as simple as it was ingenious.

The Avenger, with those glittering, colorless eyes of his, was one of the world’s greatest hypnotists. But you can hypnotize a person by having him stare at an inanimate object, if he stares hard enough, just as well as you can hypnotize him by forcing him to stare into your eyes.

By tricking the man into staring hard at the vial of red liquid, The Avenger had induced him to hypnotize himself. He sat there now in a deep trance.

Dick set the unused beaker down on a table and faced the gunman.

“You allowed us to follow that van to get us into a trap, didn’t you?” Benson said.

“Yeah,” said the man.

“How did you know we’d follow?”

“We saw the guy with the big ears tap on his little trick radio,” said the man. Mac glared at the reference to his outstanding organs of hearing.

“We let him tap,” the man went on. “Then we dropped one of them little sleep pills of his—whatever they are—every so often, so you could get a line on us.”

“The van was stolen, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” said the man.

“The garage? Did you overpower the regular garage men so you could use the place?”

“No. They helped us,” said the man. “They seemed to be in on it.”

“Who owns it?”

“Guy named Sliver, or Silver, or somethin’ like that. I’ve never seen him.”

“Is he the head of your gang? Is he the man you’re working for?”

“I don’t know who we work for.”

“Who pays you off?”

“Some big guy from the West Coast,” said the man. “I’d never seen him before.”

“Was he the one who directed operations at the garage?”

“Yeah,” said the man.

Smitty said in a low tone, “That’s the one who tried to shoot you in Dan Moran’s office last night. I thought his voice was familiar; after a while, I placed it.”

The Avenger nodded so mechanically that Smitty suddenly realized Dick had recognized that voice all along. The giant subsided. Benson went on.

“The idea was to blow up the truck and let it burn, then say a careless driver had lit a cigarette near the open gas tank, wasn’t it?” he said to the man.

“Somethin’ like that,” the man replied. “An accident. Get rid of the lot of you and no kickbacks.”

“But who,” persisted Benson, “wants all this done?”

The man simply didn’t know. He was a small cog in a large and deadly machine, the nature of which was still deeply shrouded in mystery.

The Avenger looked at Cole Wilson.

“Might as well take him to headquarters,” he said.

He clapped his hands sharply. The gangster woke with a jerk. He stared wildly at them.

“What’d you do to me?” he yelled. “You . . . you— That red stuff! Did you make me take it? You got no right—”

Wilson walked him out of the room. Mac, pacing up and down thoughtfully, said, “This Clarence Beck—Carl Foley’s nephew—I keep thinkin’ of him, Muster Benson. He may be the reason Cole and I got trapped, back at the Foley house.”

The Scot scowled dourly.

“He left us at the front door and said he wanted to make a phone call. But maybe the young mon made his call before, to these skurlies, tellin’ ’em to back their van up to the Foley place and take us for a ride. Then maybe he faked the phone call, so he wouldn’t be with us when we were snatched.”

“It’s possible,” said The Avenger expressionlessly.

“And look how he ran out on us,” said Smitty. “He didn’t call the cops. Instead, after we’d got into the garage, he beat it off some place.”

“Far as that goes,” Mac picked it up, “he might even be the mon behind his uncle’s murder. No doubt, he gets quite an inheritance. And he’s bubble-brained enough to try almost anythin’—”

The Scot’s voice trailed off as he saw that Benson was deep in thoughts of his own. Out of this abstraction, after a moment, two words came.

“Silver,” said The Avenger slowly, pale eyes like diamond probes in their concentration. “Silver.”

“Eh?” said Mac. Then: “Oh!”

Their hoodlum guest had said that garage was owned by someone named Silver, or Sliver.

“Could that name be Sillers?” said The Avenger. “Andrew Sillers of Thornton Heights?”

The colorless, baneful eyes lost their tense look.

“You and I will visit Sillers, Mac,” Benson said. “I was on my way to see him when I learned that you and Cole were in trouble. Smitty, please look up all available data on Sillers. See if there is anything in his background that might indicate that a supposed pillar of wealthy respectability would hire gunmen to do wholesale murder.”

CHAPTER IX

The Impossible Murders

A phone call had told Benson and Mac that Andrew Sillers had changed his mind. Earlier, they’d been told that no one of the partners would be at the office today. Afraid to leave their homes? Perhaps so.

But now a precautionary call at Sillers’s big apartment revealed that he’d changed his mind and had gone over to the central building to the office.

He had gone alone, said the servant answering the phone. And he had gone in a hurry.

The Avenger and Mac entered the Thornton Heights office, and the receptionist told them that Mr. Sillers was not in the office. In fact, she seemed surprised that anyone had thought he was. She said she thought he’d planned to stay home that day.

Mac noted that Benson’s icy, pale eyes were like moonstones in their slitted clarity. The Avenger went to the office of the head bookkeeper, young Dan Moran.

“Well!” said Moran, as they entered. He got up and came toward them, hand outstretched to shake theirs.

He seemed glad to see them and very pleasant; but under this, Mac thought he sensed a strained and anxious attitude, not, however, connected in any way with their visit.

He, too, looked surprised when Benson said he had come to have a talk with Andrew Sillers.

“I talked to him first thing this morning,” Moran said. “He told me then he was going to stay home today.”

“Perhaps he will come in in a few minutes,” The Avenger said, face as expressionless as his colorless, inscrutable eyes. Then he said, evenly, “Do you happen to know a young man named Clarence Beck?”

Dan Moran’s face was normally a pleasant one. He was a big, healthy young fellow with, it seemed, a healthy and even disposition. But he didn’t look quite so pleasant at mention of that name.

“Beck?” he said. “Yes, I know him. Carl Foley’s nephew. For a while, he pretended to work here in the office. But he got tired of that and just loafs now. I guess he got quite a piece of change when Foley died.”

“He knows a girl named Myra,” said Mac. “Would that be Myra Horton, your friend?”

“It would,” said Moran, tensing his husky shoulders. “He has known her almost as long as I have.”

“You don’t seem to like Beck,” Dick said. His tone indicated that Moran could answer or not, as he chose.

It looked, at first, as though Moran chose not to talk about anything as personal as his relation with Myra Horton. But people had a habit of saying things to the owner of the cold, impersonal eyes that they wouldn’t have said to any regular human being.

“Not a little bit, I don’t like him,” he snapped. “I’d like to marry Myra, I’ve wanted to for a long time, and I think she’d accept me—if it wasn’t for Beck.”

His face darkened.

“He seems to want her, too, though I don’t think he has ever asked her to marry him. Anyhow, he keeps hanging around. And he has all the breaks—money, attendance in the best of schools, polish from trips abroad before the war, swell cars, everything. I don’t have any of that. I had to quit school to support my folks when I was sixteen. All I have, I make here. It isn’t fair.”

“I see,” was all Benson said.

Mac put in, “Do ye know where Clarence Beck is?”

“You mean—this minute?”

“Yes.”

Moran shook his head. He’d drawn a veil over his feelings again and was his normal self.

“Haven’t the faintest idea,” he said.

Mac sighed. “I wish we could get hold of him for about a minute,” he said to Benson. “Ye know, before we . . . er . . . parted earlier today, he mentioned that he knew who had made the phone call to Foley that drew him here to the office. The last call he made before he was murdered. Maybe the call that brought him to his death.”

“Phone call to Foley?” said Moran. “I can tell you who phoned him that night. Not that the call meant anything, I’m sure, considering who made it.”

Benson’s agate-pale eyes swung to him. Mac’s bleak blue ones did, too.

“Mr. Sillers phoned him,” said Moran. “From the office here. I happened to be working late that night and overheard him.” He looked at Benson. “Myra mentioned to you why I have been working late, recently.”

“Ye heard this mon, Sillers, tell Foley to come to the office the night he was murdered here?” snapped Mac, in a good deal of excitement.

Moran shook his head.

“I didn’t hear any of Mr. Sillers’s conversation with Mr. Foley. I don’t know if he asked him to come to the office. All I heard was his greeting. I was out in the big office and saw Mr. Sillers working the switchboard himself to get a line. I heard him say, ‘Carl?’ Then I came in here, into my own office.”

Mac saw Dick Benson’s head tilt a fraction to one side, as if those keen ears of his heard someone do something outside in the big office where men and girls were working. Mac himself heard nothing but the cheerful, routine hum of a big establishment.

The Avenger said to Moran, “Does Mr. Sillers own a garage, outside of those connected with Thornton Heights?”

Moran nodded. “He has a small garage quite a way north of here. I’ve done bookkeeping on it for him. I think it just about breaks even. He doesn’t pay much attention to it—”

There was a scream in the general office! It was a blood-curdling one! And, as if in answer, many other shrieks and yells sounded.

In a single bound, it seemed, The Avenger was at the door. Mac padded at his heels. After them, came Moran, face pale and questioning.

Benson threw the door open.

They all saw the thing that had caused the commotion, as soon as they came into the big office. It was a man at the outer door.

The man was swaying as if he must crash to the floor at any moment. His clothes, blue working garments, were slashed and bloody. Blood came from his lips and nostrils, and his head was gashed.

He glared unseeingly at those in the office, took a step forward, swayed more wildly.

“Basement!” he croaked. “Thing down there—”

The three men sped toward the man. He fell before they reached him.

“I heard the outer door open,” said Benson, “and thought perhaps it was Sillers coming. But this is not Sillers.”

“No,” said Moran, bending over the man. “This is our head engineer, Carter.”

He jumped for a phone to get a doctor. Everyone else in the place seemed too paralyzed at sight of the bloody figure to do it. But Mac, a fine physician as well as pharmacist, knew a doctor could do no good.

The glassy eyes took on a more terrible glaze even as he stared. And Benson shook his head.

Carter, head engineer, was dead! Dying, he had gotten to the office. The last of his strength had gone in the effort.

“He was hurt some little time ago,” said The Avenger.

Mac saw what the pale, infallible eyes had instantly noted. There was a lot of coagulated blood around the hideous wounds on the man’s body. He had lain for some time with the wounds bleeding, then had had a last flare of consciousness and had summoned the will power to drag himself up from the basement.

Since there was nothing to be done for Carter, the two raced for the place where he had apparently been hurt. They got to the iron stairs leading down and sped to the basement.

Everything seemed all right in here.

The vast space, as clean and spare as the engine room of a battleship, was empty of life. The banks of furnaces, supplying thousands of people with hot water and occasional heat to take the edge off the night chill, roared softly like sleeping lions.

Benson went swiftly to the small office in which Tim Phelan had met his end. The little space had been cleaned after that tragedy, and it had taken a lot of cleaning, too.

Now, it would have to be cleaned again, for it was in here that Carter had also been caught by death. There was blood all over the place, and the desk and chair were overturned in the wildest disorder.

From the door, blood spatters extended in a tortuous line. These, Mac assumed, had been left in Carter’s trail as he toiled toward the stairs. But The Avenger wanted to make sure of that.

He followed the trail of anguish. It went past the door, and then, a little nearer the wall, came back to it. Benson followed the rust-red spots to see what Carter had visited before making his way upstairs.

The thing he had visited was a companion in death; a companion with whom his soul was probably, even now, communing.

Another dead man lay at the end of the basement, behind the farthest of the big boilers. This one obviously had not gone anywhere. He hadn’t been killed lingeringly as Carter had.

This one had died fast; the crimson trickles around him showed no movement of the body after it fell.

“Sillers,” said The Avenger, with a glance at the expensive clothes—now terribly ripped and soggy—and at a huge sapphire set in a platinum band on the scrawny hand.

There’d been a lot they had wanted to ask this man. Had he hired professional gunmen to attack Justice, Inc.? If so, why? Had he called Foley down to his death? What had he said to his partner, Marsden, to cause Marsden to exclaim, as he glared over a gunsight at The Avenger: “It looks as though Andrew was right, after all.”

No one would ever ask the man anything now.

The Avenger’s pale eyes were like little chromium chips in his mask of a face. Mac knew that his own perplexity was shared by Benson; knew the questions racing through the fast brain behind those colorless orbs.

Sillers had sneaked into the building and down into the basement so secretively that no one of the employees even knew he was in the place. Why? His body looked just as Phelan’s and Foley’s—and Carter’s—looked, after death. What killed like that? And, having murdered, how could the killer get away without being seen?

Benson went to the basement door, first making sure there were no other exits. There were none—only this door.

The door led to the stairs—nowhere else. The Avenger went up the stairs, now seeing the blood trail again. On the first floor of the main building there was just one exit, the main front door. There was no rear opening.

The wide hall through the side of the building went past the double doorway of the general office. Twenty or more people worked in there. Most of their desks faced the doorway.

The Avenger approached the doorway, down the hall, without sound. He looked inside through the crack between opened door and jamb. He tried to pick a moment when no one happened to be gazing at the hall and to get past the door without being seen.

Two in there saw him, in spite of the fact that they were clustered around Carter’s body and the doctor, with their attention very much distracted.

It was impossible for anyone to walk past that double doorway, in working hours, without being seen. Yet, presumably, a murderer had walked past it, then Andrew Sillers had walked past it, then the murderer had returned past it, and no one had noticed at all!

Dan Moran hurried out to the hall and came up to Benson. He was even more agitated than he’d been at sight of Carter.

“Myra!” he said shakily.

The Avenger stared at him.

“You may have noticed I seemed a little upset when you first came into my office,” he said. “Well, it was because of Myra. She was in the office talking to me just before you and your man came. Then she went out for a minute—and didn’t come back. I was a littie worried about her—”

He clenched his fist.

“Now, it’s worse! I’m something more than worried. Two men have been murdered in this building, and I don’t think Myra left the building when she went out of my office. Where is she?”

His voice cracked on the last words.

The street door opened, and a man came in. He was young and almost too good-looking, with yellow hair and ingenuous eyes.

“Hello!” he said, pausing and looking at Moran and The Avenger. “I seem to have run into some excitement here. Police cars yelping up the street and all. What’s happened?”

It was Clarence Beck.

CHAPTER X

Ghost Phone

Mac grabbed Beck’s shoulder so hard the blond youth exclaimed and tried to get away.

“Hey!” he said. “What’s the idea?”

“Why did ye run out on us at the garage?” Mac snapped, bitter blue eyes blazing. “Why didn’t ye get in touch with the police in ten minutes? Why—”

“I’ll explain if you’ll give me a chance,” said Beck.

Mac let him loose, and he stood rubbing his shoulder where the Scot’s iron fingers had dug in.

“I was taken for a ride,” Beck said angrily. “It wasn’t my fault I didn’t do as I was ordered. Those thugs had a more complete trap rigged up than you guessed. They even had men in the street and must have seen me with you. About a minute after I hit that doorway, three of them jumped me. They piled me into a car.”

Beck touched his ribs.

“Kicked me around a little. I guess they started out to kill me and then decided I wasn’t in with you enough to make it worthwhile to take the risk. They dumped me out of the car ’way up the Merritt Parkway, then drove off. I thumbed a ride back. Say, I’m sure glad to see you two alive. I didn’t think you could possibly get away from that garage.”

“Did they get the fire out before the building burned down?” asked Mac.

“Sure,” said Beck. “The garage is all right.” Then he grinned excitedly. “I get it. Trying to test me; trying to see if I really was ridden away from there. Well, I was, all right. I know about the fire being put out, because I was curious to see if your bodies had been discovered. I went around past it on the way here. I found there was no trace of you guys, and the garage is O.K. except for a hole burned in the roof over where the van must have been standing.”

It was double talk to Mac. He thought it smelled. He thought Beck smelled. But The Avenger seemed to pay no attention to him. Benson was walking toward the outer door.

Mac swung in beside him, and Beck trotted along like an overgrown boy. Mac told him what had happened—two more of the violent murders. Sillers dead. Carter, head engineer, dead.

“Why, that’s horrible!” exclaimed Beck. “Sillers and Carter! What are you going to do about it?”

The Avenger said nothing.

Beck said, anxiously, “Say, there’ll be a flock of folks moving out of Thornton Heights after this. Four killings in this one little area. In the one central building, in fact! It’ll give Thornton Heights such a bad name it will never live it down. It’ll bankrupt us, unless we find the murderer.”

The Avenger didn’t answer that, either. They’d gone out the front door and were at the door of the nearest building. Benson went in and they found the janitor, a stooped, taciturn man with a drooping mustache.

“Did Mr. Sillers come in this building this morning?” Dick asked the janitor.

“Sillers!” exclaimed Beck. “Why, it was the next building he—” His voice died in a hurry as the colorless, terrible eyes flicked his way.

“No, Mr. Sillers ain’t been in here in weeks,” said the man, shifting a cud of tobacco from left to right. “He’s one of the owners. He doesn’t go barging around the buildings.”

They went to two more buildings, while Dick made his strange request. At the third, they got an answer that seemed even stranger—to Mac, at least.

“Yeah,” this janitor said. “Mr. Sillers came in here about an hour ago. Went to the basement—I passed him coming out. He said I needn’t stay with him.”

“How soon did he come out again?” The Avenger asked, face as masklike as ever.

“I wouldn’t know. I went on about my business. It don’t do to stand around where he can see. He likes people to work for what he pays ’em.”

So the murdered man came into this building, went out again and into the main building and was killed there. What did a visit to this smaller building mean, Mac wondered.

Then The Avenger stood still an instant, as though listening. But he wasn’t listening, it developed; he was feeling.

He got a tiny black disc from his vest pocket. A threadlike wire trailed from it. The wire went to a small case under his belt which held the world’s smallest efficient two-way radio set. It was one of the giant Smitty’s brain children.

All the members of Justice, Inc. wore them next to their waists. When one wanted to get in contact with the rest, there was the tingling of mild shock, and the person thus notified got out his receiver.

Benson had felt the premonitory tingle, it seemed.

“Yes?” he said, into the quarter-sized transmitter.

“Nellie talking,” came a tiny, high voice. “There’s something queer going on in connection with this Myra Horton. She phoned here a while ago, then hung up before she had said anything.”

“Hung up?” said Benson.

“Yes. She said, ‘Hello,’ and I said, ‘Hello, this is Nellie Gray talking.’ Then she hung up.”

“You’re sure it was Miss Horton?”

“Dead sure. I recognized the voice.”

Clarence Beck suddenly caught The Avenger’s arm.

“What’s this? What about Miss Horton? She’s a good friend of mine. She’s more than a friend. If she’s in trouble—”

Benson shook off Beck’s grasp with what seemed an easy and small ripple of muscle.

“Did you trace the call?”

“Can’t,” Nellie said. “The chief operator said it was an unaccounted-for telephone. The phone company’s excited about it, too, and is going to try to find where it is.”

“All right,” said The Avenger. “No orders. I’m going to look up a little data that may tie in with Miss Horton, among other things.”

He put the tiny microphone back in his pocket. Beck was staring at him, on the verge of a hundred anxious questions.

The Avenger said in a low tone, as if to himself, “The main street in Thornton Heights is called Wilder Avenue. I wonder why?”

He turned. “Mac, stay and help the police if you can.”

He started off. Beck tagged after him. “Can’t I help? Can’t I go along? If Miss Horton is in a jam—”

“Come if you like,” said Benson expressionlessly. “You might find it dull. I’m only going to the public library. I may be there for several hours.”

Just before Nellie had gotten the unexplained call, the mountainous Smitty came back from his job of getting information on Andrew Sillers.

That is, he had come back from the job of not getting any information. At least any information linking him to murderous, or even shady, enterprises.

“Never been on a police blotter even for speeding or parking wrong,” growled Smitty. “Evidently, Sillers is a careful old hen in pants, who wouldn’t even curb his car near a fire hydrant if his life depended on it. All he’s done all his life is make money and not spend it, except on himself, where it shows most.”

“That’s not very helpful,” said Nellie.

“I’ll say it’s not. There isn’t one thing I could dig up that would indicate that he’d mix with gunmen. Yet, it sure did look as if the gang after us was hired by Sillers. And they play for keeps!”

“Of course,” said the little blonde patiently, “there is probably a great deal of stuff you weren’t able to find.”

“Huh? What do you mean? I didn’t have time to go sluething around, but I got all the known facts on Sillers.”

“Probably a good many things would have been ‘dug up,’ as you put it, if you’d had me along to help.”

“Look here, half-pint, any time I can’t find out more in a minute about somebody than you can in a week, I’ll—”

The phone rang. Smitty glared. Every time he was going good, giving this maddening little blonde what was coming to her, something happened to interrupt him.

“Hello,” he heard Nellie say. Then after a minute, she clicked the receiver.

“Hello, operator. I was cut off. Please call that number back and connect us again. No, I don’t know what number it was.”

A few more minutes, and Nellie slowly hung up.

“What’s wrong?” said Smitty.

“Myra Horton just called. She said, ‘Hello.’ Then she hung up.”

“Hung up?”

“Yes. Just like that. And when I called back, the operator said there was no record of any call.”

The phone rang again. Nellie picked it up, listened, and looked funnier than ever.

“That call came from an unrecorded phone,” she said.

“Ghost phone, huh?” said Smitty.

Any good electrician with a spare phone can plug it in on a line and talk. An instrument like this, not listed, not wanted, is a “ghost phone.” There are a whole lot more of them than the phone company would like, although they can’t be used more than two or three times without being traced.

“Yes.” Nellie went to the big radio cabinet. She got The Avenger on his tiny belt set and told of the incident. Then she went back to Smitty.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” she said. “There was something sneaky about the way that connection was broken. The phone was hung up softly and slowly. It’s as if Myra Horton grabbed a chance to phone where she wasn’t expected to and someone got her from behind and clapped a hand over her lips, then very gently hung up the phone.”

“What an imagination you have,” jeered Smitty.

“Did you hear any sound at all to bear out a yarn like that?”

“No,” Nellie confessed.

“Any sound of any kind to give a clue as to where she was when she called?”

“No sound at all— Yes, there was, come to think of it. But it’s nothing I can place. There was a kind of low roar behind her words. A sort of whispered roar.”

“Probably a lion with a cold in its chest,” said Smitty. “Myra must have been phoning from the zoo.”

“Are you ever funny?” Nellie snapped. “Here’s a nice girl in a mess, and all you do is make jokes.”

The phone rang again. Nellie snatched at it. “Hello!”

Again Smitty saw a queer look on her face. Strain his ears as he would, he couldn’t hear anything coming out of the receiver she held so tensely in her white small hand. After a minute, without a word, she replaced the phone on its cradle.

“Now what?” said Smitty.

“That was Cole Wilson,” said Nellie. “Anyhow, it was supposed to be.”

“What do you mean, supposed to be?”

Nellie looked thoughtful and a little grim.

“Cole went to hand that gunman over to headquarters. He should have been back here long ago. But he hasn’t showed up.”

“Look,” said Smitty, exasperated. “If you’d kindly tell a guy what happened—”

“When I picked that phone up,” said Nellie, “a whispering voice said, ‘This is Cole. Don’t say a word, just listen. And listen hard because I’m where I can’t talk loud.’ Then he whispered, ‘They got me. I need help bad. Come to the little park at Thornton Heights. Crescent Park, they call it. Hurry!’ ”

“Thornton Heights again!” growled Smitty. “I’m getting so I hate the sound of that name. Do you think it was really Cole?”

“He isn’t back, and he ought to be,” shrugged Nellie.

They tried to contact Cole Wilson on his belt radio. There was no answer.

“All right,” said Smitty. “The chief’s busy, so I’ll take care of this. I’ll go out to this Crescent Park and nose around.”

“We,” corrected Nellie, “will go out. If you went alone, you’d surely get into some sort of trouble. You need protection.”

Smitty grinned, though the grin was a trifle subdued in view of Cole’s call for help. They went to the basement and climbed into a fast car.

“I hope,” said Nellie, “That that was really Cole calling, not somebody doubling for him.”

Smitty drove fast.

“I hope, if somebody’s got Cole, that he is still able to make phone calls; that he isn’t lying somewhere with a bullet through his head.”

Smitty drove faster yet.

The little park referred to was about half a block square and at the east edge of the big Thornton Heights oblong. It was a loafing and recreation spot for all the buildings, but there were few people in it at this hour.

It was just a little before the adults would be coming home from offices, and a little after the kids from school got through playing and were at home getting their ears washed.

Smitty and Nellie left the car and walked to the center of the thing. It was about as big as a football field, just the playing part. In the center was a fountain. Around this was a circular sidewalk, much marked with roller skating. And around the walk were trees and shrubs in a thick hedge.

It made a kind of glade in the center.

There was no one and nothing to see in the bulk of the cleared space. Nellie and Smitty wound up in this small bay with the fountain tinkling beside them.

Several benches were along the walk. A woman sat knitting on one. On another was a stalwart nursemaid in white. Her small charge was evidently beyond the trees, playing, for she sat alone.

“See anything off-color anywhere?” said Smitty in a low tone.

Nellie shook her lovely blonde head.

“Not a thing. Just an innocent, open park. I don’t see how anyone could be held against his will around here.”

“Maybe—” began Smitty.

At the east edge of the park, a siren sounded. It wailed from down the street, growing in volume as it approached the park.

“Squad car?” said Nellie.

Smitty just stared toward the sound.

So did the nursemaid and the woman with the knitting utensils.

A yell came from the edge of the park. The woman with the knitting bag got up and began walking hastily toward the sound, with the morbid curiosity that makes mobs grow.

“I don’t know what’s up,” said Smitty over his shoulder toward Nellie. “But it might have something to do with Cole. Let’s go!”

He began loping toward the still-wailing siren.

“The squad car—or whatever it is—seems to be going away from here!” he complained. “Maybe it’s just—”

He stopped. There was no sound of Nellie’s incisive little footsteps tapping in his wake. He whirled around. There was no Nellie.

He got back to the little enclosed bay with the fountain in the center in about four jumps.

Nellie wasn’t here, either. Nobody was. He could see the woman with the knitting bag still walking hopefully toward where curiosity-provoking sounds had rent the air. The nursemaid was gone.

“Nellie,” yelled Smitty.

His voice echoed back from the surrounding buildings, and several windows opened and people stared curiously out. That was his only response.

The giant didn’t yell again. She’d have heard him the first time, and answered—if she could.

A sort of growl came from Smitty’s vast throat—an anxious, ferocious rumbling noise, like the warning of a mother elephant whose young is threatened. Smitty went awe-inspiringly crazy, when anything threatened the diminutive blonde.

But there was nothing around here to go crazy against. Just an empty little park.

A voice came. Anyhow, Smitty thought he heard it. He thought he heard the words: “If you try to make trouble, shell die!”

The voice seemed to have come from the fountain!

Smitty glared at this arrangement.

The statue in the center was a bronze cast of a big fish, balancing on its curved tail and spouting a fetching spray from its gaping jaws. Smitty jumped for it, splashing in the shallow stone basin up to his knees.

He listened. Nothing. He grasped the bronze fish in his two big hands and wrenched. There was no give to the thing, no sign that it was some sort of trick arrangement turning on its base and perhaps revealing a hole leading downward.

Smitty twisted harder. Something had to give, when pressure as gigantic as that was applied. The fish broke off at the tail. The giant threw the four-hundred-pound metal form from him and bent over the base.

Water from a slim pipe shot by his cheek in a peaceful stream, and that was all. There was no secret to this fountain, nor to the statue.

Nellie had been here, and now she wasn’t here. There was no place for her to go. But she had gone!

CHAPTER XI

Man in a Dress

Nellie was too busy fighting the murderous noose to do or hear or see anything else.

She’d taken one step after Smitty, toward the wailing sound, when the thing settled around her slender white throat. She saw Smitty’s great back, like a wall before her; then she didn’t see anything but bursting colored lights.

Thin, unbreakable wire, or something of the kind, cut in deep toward her windpipe. She clawed at it and kicked backward but without results. Then she was being dragged somewhere, still fighting.

If the pressure at her throat had been made by strangling hands, she could have done something. In fact, with her knowledge of jujitsu and wrestling, she could have done a lot. But even the man who wrote the book couldn’t fight piano wire sunk so deeply in flesh she couldn’t get her fingers on it.

Then she stopped fighting and stopped thinking and everything else. She fell into an unconsciousness that was almost like death!

Cold dampness against her cheek was the first returning sensation she had.

It felt like a clammy, dead hand pressed there. The sensation was nightmarish, horrible; and the terror it inspired hastened her return to consciousness. Her eyelids snapped up.

She could see nothing. She was in blackness so complete that it seemed as if light had never existed. She thought she was blind for an instant, but her eyes felt all right. She reached for her little flashlight, tucked in a belt under her skirt. That is, she tried to reach.

She couldn’t move her arms.

Sheer panic reached for her. She gritted her teeth.

“All right, so you’re tied up,” she said aloud. “You’ve been tied up before. Don’t lose your head.”

“. . . lose your head,” came a whispered echo.

She was in some black pocket that was rather large, it seemed, and had rock walls. Her cheeks had sensed a little more about the clammy pressure against them. It wasn’t a hand, it was damp, cold, stone wall. Her head was leaning against it as she lay slumped on more cold, damp stone.

She brought her bound hands to her lips. Whoever had tied her up hadn’t taken the trouble to bind her arms to her sides; he had just tied her wrists, which was a mistake.

She felt the bonds. They were slim and wire-strong. Insulated phone wire, or something of the kind, she thought. An end went from them to the bonds at her ankles so that the noose around each tightened if she moved much.

She arched her pretty but steel-strong little body to give the greatest possible slack to this connecting link, and got a strand of the covered wire between her teeth. She twisted her head back and forth, bending and rebending the wire. Her neck muscles felt as if they were on fire, before the job was done.

But finally it was done. The much-bent wire frayed and parted under its insulation. The insulation itself snapped without much pull.

Nellie stood up—and bumped her head. She crouched lower and got out the flash.

She was in a cave, about four and a half feet high and twelve or fifteen feet wide and an unguessable distance in length. It seemed to be a natural cave, too, with uneven height. It was the last thing on earth—or in earth—you’d expect to find here in New York.

“Hello, there,” she called experimentally.

From some wall in darkness ahead of her bounced the echo. “. . . lo, there.”

She started forward, to see where the wall was, and if there was any way through it. Alongside her, the rock was steamy with moisture, and it was twenty degrees colder here than it had been in the open air.

Nellie found that the wall was a long way off. Just before she got to it, she stopped abruptly and listened. She had a hunch she was listening for her life. Chills crept up and down her spine.

She heard, very faintly, a kind of heavy snuffling, shuffling sound, as if a blind giant with asthma were nearby! For some reason, the sound was perfectly horrible. It was a thing to haunt you.

She couldn’t see where it was coming from. It seemed to be sounding at her right. She went to the wall there: rough, irregular, solid rock.

It did seem as if the noise was slightly more audible close to this wall, as if whatever made it was just on the other side. But that might have been imagination.

Her fingers felt lonesomely at her belt for the little radio. It wasn’t there. She’d found out this dismal fact when she got out her flashlight, kept right next to the radio. There was no way to call for help.

She was at the end wall, now. It looked as solid as the others. But there had to be at least one way into this amazing cave. Otherwise, how could she have found herself here?

She began tapping at the wall. There wasn’t much of a cross-section at the end to cover.

In less than a minute, her fingertips hit something that wasn’t rock at all, though in the light of the flash it looked remarkably like it. Probably, though, in a real light, she’d have seen that it was not stone like the rest.

It was thick fabric of some kind. Probably canvas.

Nellie pushed this up and crawled through the resultant hole. Something touched her ankle, and she stopped and trained the flash downward. She bit down a yelp.

The something that had touched her ankle was a man’s rib! At least, Nellie assumed it might have been a man’s. It could have been part of the remains of a woman, too, for that matter. The central fact was that a skeleton lay on the floor and she had almost stepped on it.

It wasn’t as fearsome as it seemed at first, because it was a very old skeleton. It was yellowed and crumbling. The skull lay a few feet away, and there was a round hole in the back. Nellie had seen skulls like that before in museums. Ancient flintlocks, or other primitive muskets, with power enough to send a ball through bone but not clear through and out the other side like a modern slug, made holes like that.

She stepped over the skeleton, picked her way around debris from several more, and went toward a hairline crack of light in still another wall. She saw that it came from a kind of crude door of ancient oak, set into the rock. She looked through the crack.

There was some kind of lighted area in there, but that was all she ever had time to see.

Something made a slight noise behind her. She turned fast, and her flashlight played for just a second on a stalwart figure in a nursemaid’s white garb. The face seemed heavy for a feminine face, though, and the voice that came from it was a male voice.

“Never satisfied, huh? Better for you if you’d stayed tied up where you were.”

Ferocious as a little wild cat, Nellie started it. Her arm flashed out for the throat over the white fabric. The figure ducked and she half tore off the white cap, revealing yellow hair.

Somebody grabbed her shoulders from behind. Somebody from the lighted compartment beyond here.

Nellie put up a fight that had to be seen to be believed. She threw the rear attacker forward over her bent shoulder as if he’d been a sack of meal. He thudded on the floor. One or more of his buddies back of her crooked an arm around her neck and one around her waist.

Her hand shot up, found just the right place over a main nerve in the forearm and pressed hard. There was a howl of agony and the arm disappeared.

But the arm around her middle tightened and twisted, and she fell. At least two fell with her, and her head banged against the floor. She clutched out and got a fistful of white nursemaid’s dress.

Somebody dragged her half a dozen yards and let her drop with a thump. Then, when she hit out, her hands found only empty air.

She heard a heavy door, or something, bang tight. And then she heard a voice say, “Nellie!”

She looked toward the voice.

She was inside the small chamber she’d seen through the crack in the door. Apparently, caves of various sizes were strung along here, like beads on a chain. This was one of the smaller ones. It was lit by a candle stuck in a bottleneck.

The owner of the voice was Cole Wilson. He was bound with so much phone wire that he looked like a mummy.

“Always nice to see you,” he said, “but this time it’s a pleasure I’d like to forego.” He was obviously having trouble keeping the light tone. His face was paler than usual. He shook his dark head a bit. “It’s not a nice place, Nellie.”

“Oh!” said Nellie. She went to the door which had just admitted her. She shook at it. It was so massive that she doubted if Smitty himself could have done anything about it.

“Did you phone me awhile ago, Cole?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“I was afraid not,” said Nellie.

“I haven’t phoned anyone or done anything,” Cole said. “A block from headquarters, I saw a woman in a taxi having a fainting spell or something. I jumped to the door and opened it, to help her, and a gun was stuck in my face. The ‘woman’ was a man in a dress. One of the oldest tricks in the world—and I fell for it.”

His voice was full of disgust.

“The gun slugged me. When I woke up, I was here, like this. In this animal house.”

“Animal house?” repeated Nellie.

“Use your nose,” said Cole.

Nellie sniffed. And now, with her mind on it, she caught it. An odor of something living, but not human. The smell of a den or lair. It made the chill touch her spine again.

“You might untie me,” said Cole. “I don’t think it would help any, but it would at least be more comfortable. The reason I don’t think it would help is that our friends—whoever they are—wouldn’t have left you in here unbound if they thought being loose would help us any.”

Nellie worked at his wire. She kept sniffing.

“I think maybe we’re going to be a meal for something,” said Cole.

The Avenger had said he was going to the public library. Evidently, Clarence Beck had thought he meant the big New York one on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, for the blond youth looked surprised when Benson stopped his car in front of one of the small public libraries.

“Think they’ll have what you want here?” Beck said, in a naïve invitation for The Avenger to put into words just what he was after.

“I think so,” Benson said expressionlessly. “I want some local history. Probably there is more of it here in the locality than there would be downtown.”

Beck skipped alongside him as he went up the wide steps.

“If I can help you,” he said; “if I can look up anything for you—”

The Avenger said nothing.

It was quite a neat and sizeable library. There was a main room, two-storied, with books going up to the top and reached by narrow iron ramps to many shelves. It was patterned after the main library in that all around this big room were tiers of balconies, each a low floor crammed with books.

The book desk was in the center. The Avenger went to this with his smooth, catlike walk.

“I would like whatever books you have on history, typography or real-estate transactions of this immediate section,” he said. “Any books written before 1900.”

“All of them?” asked the librarian.

“All of them.”

Dick went to a long table, with the irrepressibly youthful Beck beside him.

In about ten minutes, an attendant came wheeling a book bin on silent rubber tires. There were several score books, all old. The Avenger looked these over rapidly, took out three, and began skimming through them.

As he did so, some curious things began happening behind his back.

A man in a dark-blue suit, a little the worse for wear, and a derby hat in the same condition, tiptoed from street door to librarian’s desk. He took every possible precaution to make no noise, a thing which naturally made the librarian, a woman of forty with fringy hair and glasses, stare at him with raised eyebrows. You’re supposed to be quiet in a library, but you don’t have to be that quiet.

He got to the desk. She started to say something. He put a thick finger to his lips. There was a pad of scratch paper and pen and ink on the desk. The man wrote, then handed the pad to the librarian.

She read the short message with eyes widening. Then she looked at The Avenger, bent over his book with the rare concentration that was one of his strengths. She looked at him with loathing, with positive horror. She nodded violently to the man.

Then the second curious thing happened.

In an elaborately careless way, stopping now and then to glance at the books nearest her on the shelves, she went to the rear of the big main room. There were two attendants there. She passed them smiling, saying something.

They looked at each other in a breathless, frightened kind of way and drifted toward the door. The librarian paused near two other small groups, and these groups, too, after a few seconds, walked slowly out of there. The librarian started to go back toward the door, too.

The Avenger, pale eyes brilliant on the rapidly turning pages of the last book he had selected, said to Beck in a low tone, “You’d better get out of here, fast.”

“Why, what do you mean?” said Beck.

“Something is about to happen. Everyone has been leaving. Haven’t you seen that? Leave here at once!”

“But what about you?”

“I’m prepared for trouble. I got ready for it when I noticed that we were followed here to the library.”

“Followed? We were? I didn’t notice that.”

“If you don’t leave at once,” said The Avenger, eyes on the book all the time as if he were aware of nothing but the printed page, “you may be carried out.”

“All right, I’ll leave. In a minute.”

Suddenly, Beck’s voice was entirely different. Suddenly it wasn’t ebullient and over-youthful any more. It was quite steady. And when Benson turned, he saw that Beck’s eyes were steady, too, and so was Beck’s hand, in which a gun was held.

The gun was pointed at The Avenger’s throat!

“Turn around, chair and all,” said Beck. “Sit with your back to me.”

Benson did so, pale eyes brilliant as ice in moonlight. The gun came lightly to rest on the back of his neck.

“I saw you ‘get prepared’ in the car,” Beck said. “You put quite a number of interesting and deadly little gadgets in your pockets, didn’t you? Well, I’m going to take them all out again. I’m going to give the men who are after you a nice, fair break. You can face them with empty hands, and we’ll see what the famous, and oh-so-pious, Avenger will do in a case like that.”

Cautiously, his hand went up. He clutched the collar of The Avenger’s coat and jerked downward, sliding the garment half down his arms and body and pinioning arms to sides. Then he began going through Benson’s intricately pocketed vest and dumping things out.

CHAPTER XII

Battle in a Library

The coat trick is a good one. Yank a man’s coat halfway down his arms and he’s held as neatly as if in a straight jacket, particularly if it is buttoned, as Benson’s coat had been. It works with almost everyone.

But it didn’t work with The Avenger. Because the coat trick is a good one, and one that is widely known, the man with the colorless, deadly eyes and the steel spring body had long ago worked out a reply for it.

A very simple reply.

First, he jerked his body to the left, with no preliminary movement of any kind to warn the man behind him. Then he caught the wrist above the hand that was dipping into his vest pockets and after that he shot his body forward from the waist in a powerful catapulting action.

The instant shot that had come from Beck’s gun seared The Avenger’s neck, but that was all. There were no more shots, because then Beck himself shot forward over Dick’s shoulder in a great, awkward arc and crashed on his back on the floor. He was up and running in a single bounce. Running toward the door—and toward a group of at least a dozen men there!

Benson strained on the coat. It was fairly new and of good material, but it couldn’t stand that explosive strain of muscle. It is doubtful whether heavy canvas would have held up.

The coat fell from him, with all the buttons off the front and ripped from bottom to collar in the back. But the strain also ripped the vest, and it, too, dropped to the floor.

Meanwhile, the calm, colorless eyes had noted the odd way in which Beck was treated by the men at the door. As Beck had raced toward them, a couple had raised their guns and aimed at him. Which was strange. His actions had been that of a man in with the gang—another of their band. Yet, they uncertainly pointed guns at him.

However, none shot. They parted, with equal uncertainty, as if not knowing quite what to do about this fellow who had held a gun on a man they, too, were against. They let Beck go through and out the door.

Then they confronted The Avenger again. That is, they confronted the spot where Benson had been. That spot was empty now. Whatever the cause of their indecision about Beck, it had allowed The Avenger about five seconds in which to get somewhere else.

He had used the narrow margin of time to leap to the nearest book balcony, swing himself bodily up and over its low rail, and crouch there on the steel flooring between narrow partitions made up mainly of rows of books.

He’d had no time to pick up the pieces of the vest, which was a pity. Because in the vest’s various pockets were special crime-fighting inventions of his that would have made things very interesting for this gang which had the nerve to come into a public library after him in broad daylight and to take over the library for their own murderous purposes.

With the unique articles in the vest, he could have overpowered these twelve or fifteen men easily and quickly. It was what he had planned; indeed, it was the reason he’d let them come up on him like this.

But Beck had knocked his methodical plan into a cocked hat.

However, The Avenger wasn’t bare-handed by any means. His right hand went to a slim sheath at the calf of his right leg, and his left hand to a slightly dissimilar sheath at the calf of his left.

His right hand came out with a streamlined little .22 that looked more like a sleek length of slim pipe with a bend for a handle than a revolver. On the end was a silencer, of his own devising. This weapon, with grim affection, Benson called Mike.

In his left hand appeared a needle-sharp throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle. This was known as Ike.

The Avenger crouched silently there. He heard one of the men yell, “He got away! It ain’t possible, but he did! Out! After him.”

Another, however, cut in with less excitement. “The guy couldn’t have got out. There’s just this one door and we’re plugging it. He must be on one of them balconies. Look around.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes glowed like glacial ice. He was going to have to fight his way clear—if he could. Some day he was going to get into a spot from which he couldn’t extricate himself. That conclusion, in a life as perilous as his, was foregone.

It might be that this was the spot. It remained to be seen.

He moved just a little and got Mike up and around a stack of books so that the little gun could level on the men near the door. The Avenger seemed to take no aim at all when Mike spoke.

To be precise, Mike didn’t speak so much as whisper. There was a little, subdued “Phhht!” And the man at the extreme left fell as if he were dead.

He was not dead. The Avenger never took life. To avoid doing so, he had practiced shooting for countless hours, till he could put a slug from Mike within a fraction of an inch of where he wanted it. And where he wanted it was on the exact top of a skull. That way, the slug grazed off the bone, knocking the owner of the skull unconscious, but not killing him. “Creasing” him was what an old-time Westerner would have called it.

When the man fell, the rest gaped at him in something like fear. They’d heard nothing, seen nothing. And their pal fell with blood trickling from the top of his head as though someone had clubbed him down.

Another man fell in the same way. And then the big fellow with the derby who seemed to be their leader, yelled: “Get behind something. Take cover! All of you!”

They scurried in various directions. But not before a third man had sprawled face forward on the smooth tile floor, out like a light.

The third shot had revealed The Avenger’s approximate position on the first balcony. The man in the derby raised up like a jack-in-the-box, and threw something.

The something hit about where Benson had shot from. There was a crashing bang as it exploded! Books showered in all directions, some almost whole, some torn to shreds. The flooring of the balcony gave way and slid down at this section. But Benson wasn’t on it.

With the last shot, he had raced silently down the balcony along the narrow lane at the rear.

The man in the derby swore as he saw no body in the ruins. He began tossing grenades like peanuts into a monkey cage.

Explosion after explosion banged out, as each little deadly bomb lit a few yards forward from the last one. But, each time, the flooring that came down descended empty of all but books and twisted plates of metal partition.

Then Mike spoke a fourth time. The man in the derby, raised for one more murderous toss, sagged back and down with a hole right in the crown of the derby where the top of his head should be. If his head had a dome on it higher than average estimation, he’d be something more than unconscious; that was a chance The Avenger had had to take.

The gang down there seemed to be out of bombs. But it was a draw; Dick was out of slugs. Ammunition for Mike was in his coat. And the little gun had a cylinder so small that it held only four cartridges, with number of bullets sacrificed to small and streamlined size.

“Rush him! We got to get outta here after those bombs!”

The Avenger couldn’t see who had shouted, but he could see the results. With the courage of fear, half a dozen men raced for the ramp up to the left end of the balcony—or of what now remained of the balcony. The other end would do nobody any good; it was knocked to bits, floorless and yawning.

There were three of the rolling book bins up here, half filled with books the attendants had been intending to put away when the librarian got them out of the place.

These book bins were of thin sheet metal, like boxes the size of wardrobe trunks, on four small wheels with a kind of baby-buggy handle at the end so they could be pushed.

Benson got one of these and rolled it down the ramp with a hard shove.

It hit the first of the men. It knocked him over as a bowling ball knocks over a pin; and, to carry out the simile, it toppled the two men behind him, too. The others, near the foot of the ramp, managed to jump back down and out of the way.

As the thing rocketed past them, they emptied their guns into it, just in case the man they were after was crouching in there. Methodical, they were taking no chances of his getting away.

The Avenger pushed the second of the three down while the men were reloading their guns. They were not trying to hide behind anything; they’d evidently sensed that no more unheard shots would mow them down.

Those of the gunmen who had bullets left in clips, shot savagely into this book bin, too; and their slugs were swelled in number by a fusillade from the guns of the rest, who were lurking farther back.

The third bin, like a rolling trunk of steel plate, came down. And after all, you can’t just keep on shooting at empty book bins forever. The gang in here was too wise to do that. They held their shots, and the men at the foot of the ramp tried another rush upward.

They went cautiously watching for more heavy bins coming down at them like thunderbolts—the first man in the rush before now lay safe to one side with a broken kneecap—and the men below, spread out and concealed, covered the upward advance with their automatics.

Three times, this murderous crew had gone after the man with the pale diamond eyes and the masklike face. They were going to be good and sure that this time would see success to their venture.

The men got to the top of the ramp. And as they did so, a furious shout came from below.

“Get the guy! There! If he gets away this time—”

A tall, skinny fellow, with a gray felt hat, was pointing his gun at the last book bin to roll down—the one on which the gang had been too clever to go on throwing away slugs they might need later.

The Avenger had been in that one!

There was movement looking more like a zigzag streak than a running man. Bullets lanced toward the shifty target and several hit. These men were good. But the impact of the lead against The Avenger’s bullet-proof sheath didn’t knock him off his feet.

He got to the librarian’s massive desk and slid down behind it as an especially well-aimed shot showered him with splinters from the corner. He dove to the opposite end, out for an instant and back.

His arm had flashed forward as he appeared, and a man with a leveled gun screamed and dropped the gun, staring with sick eyes at the blade which squarely transfixed his wrist.

The Avenger had done more than merely trade the hiding place of the balcony for the hiding place of the librarian’s desk, when he leaped from the bin and ran. He had also retrieved half his vest, calmly careful, even in that crowded half second, to get the left half. Beck had emptied the pockets of the right half.

He dipped into the inside pocket of this half, and threw half a dozen glistening little pellets over the top of the counter and back toward where the men were.

Half a dozen columns of smoke instantly mushroomed into being. They merged quickly and became a suffocating, impenetrable pall.

“Watch for gas!” someone yelled.

The Avenger didn’t have any of the gas pellets, which was unfortunate, but he had another brand. He tossed these. Explosions sounded that made those of the gangsters’ grenades, a moment earlier, seem like the pop of firecrackers. The screams took on an anguished tinge, which showed the power of imagination.

The bangs were just bangs and nothing more. Benson had long ago discovered that enemies can be disorganized by sheer noise if it is rightly timed.

He stood up, walked around the counter and out the front door.

The librarian and the library attendants were out there, with a few bystanders to whom they’d evidently been telling awful things. The librarian shrieked and turned to run. The Avenger caught her arm.

“Who,” he asked mildly, “do you think I am? Why are you so afraid, and why did you get out of your own library with such obedience?”

“You’re New York’s worst gangster and murderer,” the woman whimpered. “The man in the derby hat told me. He wrote it on a note and said he and his fellow policemen were going to arrest you and it would be wise for us to leave because there might be shooting.”

“Thoughtful of him,” commented Benson.

With his curiosity satisfied, he got into his car. He contacted police headquarters on his radio, and advised that a dozen or so first-class public enemies were at the public library to be gathered in after wrecking the place if squad cars could get there in time.

Then Dick Benson drove away from there, with bullets from the first of the gang to emerge through the smoke starring his bullet-proof windows as he rolled away.

The Avenger radioed Bleek Street.

Josh Newton was there with his pretty wife, Rosabel. Nellie was not there. Nor could Benson raise her on the radio.

He couldn’t get Cole Wilson, either. Nor could he get hold of Mac. He finally got Smitty, but not constructively and not for long.

“Nellie’s disappeared somewhere, chief!” the giant’s tortured voice threaded from the radio. “I’ve got to find her! Thornton Heights—Crescent Park. She just disappeared! I’m going nuts!”

The radio went dead.

The Avenger had been going to Thornton Heights, anyway. But now he drove even faster than he would have otherwise.

CHAPTER XIII

Death Walks

Just before getting to the swank subdivision of Thornton Heights, The Avenger passed a squad car. As he got to the beginning of the central street, Wilder Avenue, he saw a second squad car.

Everywhere he turned, there were men walking slowly, looking very tough and alert. These were special policemen that the corporation partners—the ones still alive—had brought in here.

Thornton Heights swarmed with special guards, and there were plenty of regular cops around, all with the idea of preventing more Jack-the-Ripper murders in the seven-block square.

The whole bunch of them didn’t seem to be doing much preventing.

Benson caught up with Smitty in the small playground called Crescent Park. It was almost dark, by now, but the giant was still dashing around the place, almost literally sniffing for a trace of Nellie as if he’d been a tremendous bloodhound.

“She just disappeared into thin air,” he groaned, telling The Avenger about it. “Somebody caused a commotion at the edge of the park, and I turned that way and took a few steps that way. And behind my back, in about two seconds, she disappeared.”

“I think she’s safe for a little while,” said Benson.

Pale, glacial eyes were as icy as ever, and his tone was as emotionless as ever, but there was a faint line between his thick black brows. No matter how expressionless The Avenger looked, he was always deeply stirred when one of his small band was in trouble.

“You do think she’ll be safe for a while?” said Smitty eagerly, clutching at Benson’s steel-cable arm with a vast paw. “But why? What makes you think that?”

“I’ve gathered that our killer, because of the nature of his murder weapon, has to move around a good deal to kill,” Benson said. “Therefore, late night would be the time he would prefer.”

“He killed Sillers and Carter in midmorning,” Smitty said gloomily.

“He took a big chance, doing it. He won’t take that chance if he can help it. And he’s in no hurry with Nellie. He has her in his power, so he can take care of her at the most convenient time.”

“If I could only be sure!” said Smitty frenziedly.

“Nothing is sure in life. Particularly in our kind of life. Come on to the office.”

They went into the central building, Benson with his cat’s tread, his deceptively average-sized body dwarfed by the loom and spread of Smitty’s six feet nine. And in the general office, Smitty found a companion in misery. In just the same kind of misery, too.

The employees had gone home at five, several hours ago. But one was still there, at the switchboard. This was Dan Moran.

Moran was plugging in lines and making one call after another. He concluded one and started the next as The Avenger and Smitty walked up behind him.

“Hello. Mrs. Smith’s boarding house? . . . Mrs. Smith? . . . This is Dan again. Has Myra come in yet, or phoned? . . . Any news of her? . . . Thank you.”

He turned a pallid face toward Dick and Smitty.

“I can’t locate Myra Horton,” he said. “I’ve tried for hours. She has simply . . . disappeared. Whoever killed Sillers, and the rest, has got her, too! I know it!”

Dick said, “I haven’t been able to locate Mac, Smitty. Have you seen him around?”

“He was with the police, searching the basement on the Sillers and Carter murders, last I knew of him. You don’t mean to say that Mac’s unaccounted for, too?”

“You and Moran stay here,” Benson said. “Stay together. Don’t either of you let the other out of his sight.”

“O.K.,” said the giant gloomily. “In union there is strength, and so on. Also safety. But I don’t care much about being safe if I can’t do something about Nellie and do it pretty fast.”

The Avenger went out. He went to Andrew Sillers’s apartment in another of the Thornton Heights buildings.

There were no guards here, now. With their boss gone, dead, their job was also gone. A middle-aged, foreign-looking woman in a maid’s dress opened the door for Benson. She was, it seemed, the only person left after the police search this afternoon.

The maid stared with wide eyes at Benson. “I thought you was a policeman,” she said. “I’m not supposed to let anybody in. Say, are you . . . you’re not . . . the one they call Avenger?”

She didn’t wait for Benson to answer. She had been staring at his face, feature by feature. And now, she shrieked wildly and burst past him and ran down the stairs. Benson heard the street door bang open and slam shut under a hysterical hand.

Pale eyes narrowed in his mask of a face. The Avenger went into the deserted apartment. The first thing he saw, on a little table beside a cleaning rag, was a picture of himself. It was a newspaper photograph, taken in spite of his displeasure—he hated publicity—months before.

The woman had been phlegmatically cleaning the dead man’s apartment, just as usual, and had sunk into this chair and looked at the picture. This explained how she had recognized him, but it didn’t explain her deathly fear.

The Avenger walked rapidly through the big apartment. He saw several more pictures of himself—same picture, same newspaper. Everyone working here, it seemed, had been carefully taught to spot him on sight.

He went to the master bedroom, identifiable as Andrew Siller’s by its extra richness and by a cabinet-sized photograph of the man which rested on the dresser.

There was an extension phone in here. He got the central office with it and heard Moran’s voice. Evidently, the distracted young man was still trying to find Myra.

The Avenger asked to speak with one of the detectives who had been at Sillers’s apartment that afternoon. In a minute a voice said, “Hello.”

Dick asked, “Did anyone come here while you were looking around the apartment this afternoon?”

“Not a soul,” said a cheery voice with a brogue.

“No one at all? You’re sure?”

“Well, no one but a building employee. Electrician.”

“You let him in?”

“Why, yes,” said the voice. “Wouldn’t have, while an investigation was going on, but the guy said a short circuit had been reported in here and that it had better be fixed or there’d be a fire. Didn’t seem any reason to take a chance like that, so we let him in. He only took about five minutes to fix the short.”

“Where was that short circuit?” asked Benson evenly.

“In Sillers’s bedroom, I think. It was all right to let the guy in, wasn’t it?”

“No one, of course, wants to risk a fire in a building full of people,” said The Avenger.

He hung up. He stood on a chair and examined the central light fixture in the ceiling. Beside the shield plate of this, next to the plaster, was a tiny hole.

Benson got down from the chair, went to his car outside, and came back up to the apartment with a small bag, looking like an overnight bag, in his hand. He went to the dresser and looked at the photograph of Sillers.

The Avenger opened the thing that looked like a woman’s overnight bag, and set it, top up, next to the photograph.

Dick Benson was one of the great masters of disguise.

Part of this was due to a more exhaustive study of the subject than most men had made. But part was due to something that no amount of work and study could ever duplicate.

That was the character of his face.

There’d been a time when extreme grief and nervous shock had paralyzed the muscles of Benson’s face. At that time the flesh of his features had taken on a queer consistency almost like that of living putty. Where he put them, in whatever way he shaped them, they stayed.

Now, he was over that shock, and his face was entirely normal. But he had discovered that an injection of a harmless drug, with one of the commoner local anesthetics as its base, would deaden the facial nerves and give him once more, for a few hours, flesh with the eerie consistency of modeling clay.

The Avenger turned some of his rare leisure hours to modeling. He was one of the world’s best sculptors, though this was little known because he’d had little time to demonstrate it. However, several works of his were at the Metropolitan Museum; and that skill was illustrated now as his marvelously learned fingers shaped his living flesh till it became an exact duplicate of Sillers’s pictured face.

In the make-up box were dozens of pairs of tissue-thin cupped lenses that fit over eyeballs so that no one could see that lenses were being worn. Dick Benson put over his pale orbs a pair that were mates of Sillers’s light-gray eyes.

The face was done. He whitened his thick black hair and pushed it up at the sides so that what showed under the edge of a hat would resemble Sillers’s lank, scant hair.

The body was different. It was beyond even Dick’s ability to make his explosively powerful frame and muscular neck resemble Sillers’s wasted body and scrawny throat. But the night was chill, and Sillers customarily bundled up well; rows of overcoats of all varying weights, hanging in a closet, indicated that.

The Avenger swathed himself in a light topcoat, buttoned the collar up right under his chin and went out.

He went to Amos Jones’s home.

Sillers’s residence, the shell of a dead man, was deserted; but there was plenty of life around Jones’s house. Two burly men stopped Benson at the door.

“Can’t come in here, buddy—” One man said.

Then he saw the face of the man in the tight-buttoned topcoat. Light from an ornamental lantern beside the door shone on thin, unhealthy gray skin and sharp, miserly features; on the acquisitive gray eyes and the deep, fearful lines in the forehead over them.

A hoarse whisper came from the guard’s lips. It was probably meant for a shout. He leaped back.

“It’s . . . it’s old Sillers!” he gasped to the other. “It’s— Sillers is dead! And here he is—walkin’ around!”

Both the men burst open the door and retreated through it to get away.

The man in the shrouding coat walked after them.

The two guards had given some sort of alarm, because, inside, all was confusion. Some were running when the muffled figure walked through the doorway; some—with a shred more courage—stood their ground, but stared in horror at the invader and made no move to stop him.

“Where’s Amos Jones?” they heard the muffled figure inquire in a hoarse whisper. Dick Benson, of course, did not know the sound of Sillers’s voice; he’d never heard it.

A man in butler’s livery had barely enough life in him to nod to a closed double door. The muffled figure went there, opened the door and stepped in.

Amos Jones was sitting in the library here, at a big desk. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting, twisting his hands, now and then, and looking very worried. He was still a rather plump little man, but he was no longer a blank and pink little man. His face was the color of parchment. Something had been gnawing at him for quite a while, it appeared.

He looked up, and went all to pieces. He had to hang onto his chair arms to keep upright.

“Andrew!” he squawked. “But you’re dead! Andrew! B-back . . . from the g-grave—”

“Don’t be silly,” said the thin, acquisitive lips in the thin, gray face. “All I have is a cold. Can’t talk well.”

“You are too dead! Everybody s-says so!”

“If someone is after you, to kill you, do you know of a better way to keep safe than to play dead?”

“You mean y-you just p-played dead? You aren’t r-really— It’s just a scheme to throw the m-murderer off your track?”

Amos Jones leaned back in his chair. He laughed, high and shrill and close to hysteria with relief.

“You’re smart, Andrew. Wish I’d thought of that. But I don’t mind admitting you gave me a shock. What a smart way to throw The Avenger off the track!”

There was a pause that lasted perhaps a second longer than was natural. Then the man in the swathing overcoat said, “I’m not so sure it’s The Avenger we have to face.”

“Well!” said Jones, staring. “What made you change your mind? Didn’t you get one of those untraceable phone calls with a voice saying that the Wilder curse would be visited on you by The Avenger? And didn’t you get a note that was the mate to . . . this?”

With the last word, Jones dug in his top desk drawer and got out a sheet of note paper crumbled as if in fear and rage, then straightened again. He handed it to The Avenger.

The note stated:

Your time is very near. The curse of Wilder is to be visited on you for your gross betrayal of an innocent friend.

The Avenger

CHAPTER XIV

The Curse

Benson said, “I’ve never been quite clear about this Wilder curse.”

Jones put the crumpled missive back in his desk. “Why, I thought you knew every last detail of the old Wilder farm,” he said.

“I know most of them,” said the man standing in Andrew Sillers’s shoes. “And what I didn’t know I looked up in some old books in the library—”

Amos Jones interrupted with some first-class, though shrill, profanity.

“The library!” he said bitterly. “You say, all of a sudden, you’re not so sure this Avenger is behind these murders. I’ll tell you how sure I am. When your fine collection of thugs failed to get him, I offered my equally choice crew two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to . . . to liquidate him. A quarter of a million, Andrew.”

Jones mopped his forehead.

“He was followed to a library, late this afternoon. I guess he wanted to look through those old books, too. With such a handsome reward at stake, my men went right in after him. They practically tore the place down. And they didn’t get him! All they got was this ghastly little souvenir.”

He held up a slim throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle.

“Could I have that?” said the man in the tight-buttoned coat. “Thanks. Too bad about the library failure. Now, on the Wilder farm stuff:

“I know, of course, that the land forming Thornton Heights was once a farm belonging to a man named Jed Wilder. I know that he sold it to a man named Samuel Kepper, after people had started building all around here. Kepper held it till long after the city had circled the open land. Then he formed the corporation, and Thornton Heights was born. After that—”

Jones mopped his pallid forehead again.

“Don’t go into that,” he pleaded. “We got Thornton Heights away from old Sam Kepper in a perfectly legal way. Perfectly legal and you know it. Nobody could touch us, including old Sam. He and his family could say we swindled him, but nobody could prove it.”

Jones lighted a cigar and laid it down after a single puff.

“I’ll tell you something, Andrew. Now, I’m damned sorry we chiseled the property away from old Sam. That’s why The Avenger is on our trail. He goes after people who pull crooked stunts but can’t be touched by law. The dirty murderer. The—”

Some more shrill profanity followed.

“This Wilder curse,” interrupted the muffled figure before Jones. “You were going to go over that, just in case I don’t know all of it.”

“I guess you know it, all right!” snapped Jones. “But if you insist on having it thrown in your teeth—

“Old Jed Wilder had a farm neighbor, Calvin Burlowe. Wilder cheated Burlowe out of a prize pig. Anyhow, that’s what Burlowe always insisted. So Burlowe, crazy mad, went to him one time and raved out that Wilder would not live to cheat anyone else. He promised Wilder that that pig would be the death of him.

“Only a little while later, just after he’d sold the farm, Wilder stumbled home drunk one night. And, according to the old stories, he staggered into the pig pen. He must have fallen. And he hadn’t tended his pigs for two days—probably drunk all that time. Anyhow, they found him next morning, and all the local fools swore it was Burlowe’s revenge. They swore it was the curse Burlowe had laid on Wilder, and they called it ‘Wilder’s curse—’ Oh, come now. I know you know all about it. You told me some of it yourself—”

Jones was suddenly very still. He whispered:

“It’s just because I’ve been talking about it. It isn’t really—”

He strained, tense, still as stone. Only his lips moved.

“Do you hear it?” he whispered.

“Hear what?” said the man before him.

“I don’t hear it!” screamed Jones suddenly. “I know I don’t!” He covered his face with his hands. “I’ll die if I keep on hearing it! The Wilder curse! The Wilder curse! He tricked Burlowe. We tricked old Sam. Never live to—”

The muffled figure turned and went out, leaving Amos Jones still screaming there.

Dick Benson went to the big main building and started into the office. Something like a ten-ton truck seemed to smash into him. It was Smitty.

Smitty, drawing back, started to mumble an apology. Then he stared, goggle-eyed.

“Holy jumping—” he began. “Sillers! But Sillers is dead—”

The Avenger threw off the hampering topcoat. A glance at that cable-steel body, erect and pantherlike, told Smitty his mistake. Give that muscular structure any face you wanted to, and you couldn’t mistake it.

“Chief! You made me believe in ghosts for a minute.” Smitty began hopping in rage, mystification and fear.

“There’s been another,” he howled. “Another disappearance! They got Moran this time.”

“Moran?” The Avenger’s hand clutched Smitty’s huge arm so hard that even the iron-thewed giant winced.

“Yes. He vanished. Just like Nellie. I . . . I was phoning Bleek Street, just on the chance that Josh or Rosabel had heard from the doggoned little half-pint. I had my back to Moran for about five seconds. In that time, they got him!”

“They? You saw someone?”

“I didn’t see a thing,” stormed Smitty. He had been told to protect Moran, and he’d slipped up on the job. Added to feelings that would have been chaotic, anyway, was fury at his own carelessness. “I turned from the phone, and there was no Moran. Just as in the park I turned and there was no Nellie. How can people vanish like that?”

“Go on,” said The Avenger, tone clipped and urgent.

“That’s all there is. Moran was gone. Without sound or sign. I ran to the office and looked in. No Moran. Then I thought I heard him yell. Sounded like he was in the basement. It wasn’t a very pretty yell, chief.”

The giant’s big hands clenched till the knuckles crackled audibly.

“I beat it down there. No Moran. He must have yelled from just outside the building. But by the time I got up and out, there was no sign of him or anyone else.”

“So, now, Moran’s gone,” said Benson. He started toward the door and started fast. “We have little time, Smitty. Come on.”

One by one, Nellie, Mac, Cole, Myra Horton and Dan Moran had disappeared in the devilish net of mystery and murder cast over sleek Thornton Heights. Only Smitty was left to accompany Benson.

But saying that only Smitty was left was a little like saying that you were left to face battle only in a twenty-ton tank. “Only Smitty” was as good as a regiment, particularly when he was stirred up by a threat to Nellie.

The Avenger led a rapid way to Crescent Park. On the way, he removed the tinted lenses from his eyes.

“In all your searching around here,” he said, “did you come across a granite outcropping, with an iron stake about six inches high embedded in the center?”

“Yes,” said Smitty sourly. “I fell over the thing. It’s in a little cement circle, and there’s a bronze plaque of some sort over it. So I guess I should have seen it,” he added grudgingly.

“That’s an old surveyor’s marker,” said Benson. “It’s been there about a hundred years. Where is it?”

Smitty galloped to it with The Avenger. Benson oriented himself with the aid of the stars and began pacing straight west. He counted the paces carefully. At the end of the thirty-second, he was next to the fountain, in the center of the park.

In fact, he was standing squarely on the spot that rang an anguished bell of memory in Smitty’s brain.

“Hey!” he cried. “It was right here that Nellie vanished a couple of hours ago!”

“Yes,” said Benson. He flicked on his small flash, and in the backwash of light, his eyes seemed like pale holes in the thin, gray face which was still that of Andrew Sillers. “This is where she would disappear.”

Dick took from his belt a slim steel rod with a point on one end and a chisel edge on the other. He inserted the edge in the sidewalk crack nearest to where he stood.

“Thornton Heights used to be a farm, owned last by an old-timer named Wilder,” he said. “It had an interesting history as the Wilder farm, but its history before that is even more interesting.”

The steel edge was sliding and feeling inquiringly all around the sidewalk slab on which Benson knelt. It looked like any other slab to Smitty.

“Always, this farm has been used as a place to hide things. People hid in it when the Indians rose. Powder was stored in it during the Revolution. Slaves were concealed before the Civil War. Lately, the mystery of those murders has been hidden here.”

“Here?” said Smitty. “Where?”

“In the caves under our feet.”

“Caves? There aren’t any caves around these parts.”

“That’s the common belief,” said Benson. “But an old book in the library tells of them and gives a rough drawing of their location. The old entrance was thirty-two paces due west of that rusted-iron surveyor’s peg. Let’s hope there’s still an entrance. There must be, and Nellie must have gone down it.”

“If there were caves,” argued Smitty, “the builders would have bumped into them when all these buildings went up.”

“No,” said Benson. “Perhaps by accident—perhaps by someone’s deliberate design—Thornton Heights was laid out so that this open park covers the section of the caves. There aren’t many and they aren’t big, but— Ah!”

The sidewalk slab shifted a little.

“Held down from underneath,” said Benson. He pried hard. There was a rasping click, and the slab tilted on edge. Darkness showed beneath. Cold, clammy air surged up.

“This is it,” said The Avenger.

They lowered themselves into the cavern in which Nellie had dazedly found herself awhile ago. As Smitty went down after The Avenger, the sidewalk slab lowered into place again. There was nothing to prop it up with.

They started off unwittingly in the direction opposite to the one Nellie had taken. They bumped into a wall pretty fast, going this way.

Smitty started to turn back from what seemed a blind alley. But not Benson.

The Avenger had made a long and special study of concealed doors and openings. He went over this seemingly solid-rock wall, before turning back, to see if it held some secret portal.

Smitty didn’t see what hairline crack The Avenger’s pale, infallible eyes picked up, nor what slight projection Benson’s fingers touched. But he did see a ragged fissure grow and widen as Benson pulled open some sort of heavy, rock-faced door.

They went through this and found themselves in a tunnel that was man-made, not natural. Through this tunnel went big pipes, some covered, some not, and bundles of electric cable as big as a man’s thigh.

Thornton Heights was as big as a small city. It required the servicing of a small city. This was the tunnel through which passed the main steam and water pipes and the electric and phone cables supplying the buildings.

Smitty exclaimed suddenly and picked something up from a niche in the wall. It was a handset telephone. But it was just the phone, wires trailed loose from it.

“Our ghost phone,” said the giant. “Say, this may have been the phone Myra Horton used, when she hung up before saying anything to Nellie. The call we couldn’t trace.”

The Avenger nodded. “It has probably been used for more than one untraceable call to the partners of Thornton Heights, too,” he said.

Then they both began to hear the same noise. A soft, even roaring. The one Nellie had said she’d heard, which had drawn Smitty’s facetious remark about a lion with a cold.

“The roar of the furnaces,” said The Avenger. “Just on the other side of this wall is the basement of the main building. That explains how people can seem to appear and disappear down there. Some sort of entrance connects the two. Probably Sillers was led through here, to his death in that basement, from the basement of the nearby building he entered.”

The roar of the furnaces was suddenly blotted out by a roar a hundred times greater. And with the sudden sounding of this second roar, a great cloud of swirling white began to fill the small tunnel.

“Steam!” yelled Smitty suddenly. “Somebody’s turned a valve on a big steam pipe! Beck!” he howled in conclusion.

Benson saw it at the same time: just a glimpse of a man’s face and head beyond the steam. And the face was the too good-looking one of Beck, under Beck’s thick yellow hair.

Then white mist sponged it out.

Already, the first fringe of the steam had reached them, spouting out in solid sheets from a little way down the tunnel. Smitty began leaping forward toward the source.

“Smitty!” snapped The Avenger. “Stop!”

The giant stopped. “Have to turn that valve off,” he cried urgently.

“For these long runs, that will be superheated steam,” said Benson. “Dry steam. Hot enough to melt lead. If you try to wade through it, it will strip the flesh from your bones!”

“If we stay here it’ll burn our lungs out, too,” panted Smitty. Already the tunnel was almost unbearable. “It’s die if we do and die if we don’t. I’m going to—”

The scream sounded then! It was a shriek of insensate terror, faintly heard, coming not from ahead of them or from behind them, but, it seemed, to their right. Although, to their right, there was what appeared to be nothing but solid wall.

CHAPTER XV

Murder Weapon

Blind instinct urged that Smitty and The Avenger run down the tunnel away from that steam, get anywhere away from it. The great majority of people would have obeyed the wild call and would have been trapped at the tunnel’s end and parboiled alive like a couple of Christmas turkeys.

Dick Benson didn’t obey the blind panic. Expressionless face shielded by a handkerchief, he put his forehead to the wall. Another blood-chilling scream—a girl’s scream—sounded faintly.

“That’s Nellie!” moaned Smitty. He gathered his huge shoulders for a plunge against the solid concrete block with which the tunnel was lined.

Dick’s upheld hand stopped him. His other hand went over the tunnel wall, sensitive finger tips almost like separate little organisms in their intelligent quest.

It was agony to breathe. A bath of fire covered them. Their senses swam so that the giant thundering of the escaping steam seemed low and far away.

Two of the big cement blocks fell inward as Benson pushed. He pushed more loose, making a door big enough to squeeze through. They fell out of the tunnel, sobbing for air. But The Avenger, even as his lungs labored for oxygen, was replacing the blocks, to keep the deadly superheated steam from following them.

This time they hadn’t come across a regular door—it was just a spot in the wall where the blocks were loose—but Benson’s sensitive fingers felt many chips in the edges of the blocks, indicating that they had been taken down and put up again quite often.

His flash lanced through darkness ahead of them. At the same time, he sniffed.

“Smell anything?” he said.

“Nope,” said Smitty, after a minute.

The Avenger wasn’t entirely sure he had, either. He went forward, hunting for whoever had made that screaming plea for help. The screams, ominously, did not sound any more.

He barely kept from walking over the edge of a chasm and into nothingness. He halted just at the brink, arms like steel bars suddenly thrown out to save Smitty, too.

There was a pit here, maybe twenty feet deep by fifteen in diameter. It looked like an old cistern, crudely rock-lined.

Benson’s flash lit on a girl’s face, straining, wild, eyes blind with horror. It was Myra Horton’s face. She stared at the white light without seeing it, or without realizing that it was there, while her mouth strained to let out the screams that were blocked in her throat.

She was halfway up the side of the well, clinging by finger and toe tips alone, like a fly. Only an extreme of terror could have lent her the strength to hang on there.

“Look!” Smitty gasped. “Below her—”

Something vast and sickly white surged and snuffled below the girl, with flashes of ivory, foam-flecked, shining in the flashlight like short, terrible swords.

One of Myra Horton’s hands slipped as they looked, jerking her down several inches toward the horror underneath!

Benson moved like flowing light.

There was a wide plank, thrown like a drawbridge across the old cistern. He kicked an end loose so that it clattered down to the bottom of the pit. It formed a ramp up. He leaped two paces down this and held out his arms toward the girl.

“Jump! Backward!”

Myra was too far gone in terror even to hear. She just clung there, mouth writhing. Her dress had been ripped by the rough rock wall, and the long white pattern of rigid muscles stood out sharply.

In wordless co-operation, Smitty jumped to his side. The Avenger grasped his huge wrist with his left hand, and Smitty leaned far out, till Benson’s right could catch the leather belt at Myra’s waist, above and below which was ripped and tattered fabric.

Chancing everything on the strength of the costume belt, The Avenger pulled the girl from the wall. She hung in his grasp, with the ripping ivory fangs underneath almost grazing her face. Then Smitty doubled the tremendous muscles of his arm, bringing up both Benson and the girl, like a rising derrick, till both were on the ramp.

They leaped up the ramp, and at the edge, Dick shook the board, then pulled it out and threw it to one side. It was done just in time. The monstrosity down there had already started to charge up the thing at them.

“Phew!” panted Smitty, wiping at his forehead. “W-what is that nightmare?”

“A boar,” said The Avenger, voice calm and emotionless, even at such a time.

His light played over the raging hulk in the pit. It was gigantic—systematically starved till its ribs showed—and still probably weighing four hundred pounds. It was dirty white, with mad red eyes, either albino, or colorless from having been kept in the dark.

“I have never seen such a giant of its kind,” said Benson. “Nor have I ever seen such tusks. They must be ten inches long.”

“A boar!” repeated Smitty.

“Yes. This is our murder weapon. I got an inkling of it when I saw Phelan’s body, and I was sure of it when I saw Carter and Sillers. I’ve seen men killed by boars in Malaya; the boar is one of the most savage of all animals, you know. And those bodies looked like these. Phelan, who has been in the Orient, probably caught the resemblance, too. Probably he was phoning to Justice, Inc. to tell that, and perhaps other vital information, when he was killed.”

“But how could anybody lead that thing around? Control it?” demanded Smitty.

Then he saw for himself. There was a ring in the insane giant’s nose. It could be handled, as a bull is handled, by that ring.

Smitty had his coat over Myra’s body. It covered her like a tent. He held her as though she’d been a weightless baby in his vast arms.

The Avenger closed his eyes for an instant. He was recalling to his cold, clear brain all the details of an old drawing he had seen in the book at the library. He had printed that crude map indelibly in his memory, even as death peered over his shoulder.

“There should be another way out, on the opposite side of the pit,” he said. “Can you make it around there with the girl? Take it easy.”

The last words were unnecessary, as far as Smitty was concerned. These was an uneven rim around the well, from eight inches to a foot wide. Inching around that, with the snorting, squealing horror underneath slavering for a chance at them, Smitty took it very easy indeed.

The opening across the pit from where they’d entered required no seeking; it was a heavy canvas flap, about the color of the rock, but readily located.

They walked through this.

Smitty muttered something and stepped gingerly away from the spot he’d hit, after crowding under the canvas flap. He had brushed against the same ancient skeleton Nellie had touched. By a different circuit they had come to the same destination.

Ahead of them was the same oak door, through a crack in which Nellie had looked and seen Cole Wilson. The Avenger clicked off his flash and went to the door. He peered through the crack. At the slight tensing of his shoulders, Smitty laid Myra down and went to look, too.

More than Cole and Nellie were in that next room now. The light from the candle played on four people.

Nellie, Moran, Cole and Mac were in there.

Tough phone wire bound them all. Nellie and Cole, free of their bonds for a little while, had been tied up again—though, as far as Dick and Smitty knew, they’d been tied up right along.

“Well,” said Smitty. “We’ve found them, anyway. Now, all we have to do is get them out of here.”

He started to force the door, but The Avenger, trying it, found it unsecured. They opened it and walked in, reaching those they wanted to rescue with almost too much ease.

“Ye’re sight for sore eyes, Muster Benson,” Mac said.

“Thank Heaven you found us!” breathed Moran.

“Didn’t I say he would?” Nellie exulted.

Cole said, “Why the gray hair, chief?”

Benson’s facial muscles were no longer gripped by the paralysis of the drug. They delineated his own face again. But his hair was still gray in imitation of Sillers’s hair.

“Never mind the hair,” he said evenly. “Our job is to get out of here. Fast!”

He and Smitty started untying the four.

“We know who’s behind this, Muster Benson,” growled MacMurdie. “ ’Tis the last person ye’d ever think. That lightweight, Clarence Beck!”

Dan Moran looked at the still unconscious Myra Horton, whom Smitty had carried in here, not wanting to leave her out of sight even for a minute. Moran’s eyes flashed, and he let out a couple of phrases.

“Sorry,” he said to Nellie. “But when I think of what that yellow-haired devil has done! Just a harmless playboy, eh? So friendly with Myra—and all the time planning to kill her!”

“Yes,” said The Avenger evenly, “that’s a pretty nasty thing to do, isn’t it, Kepper?”

“It certainly is,” said Dan Moran.

Then his breath caught audibly. And Nellie and Cole and Mac and Smitty stared first at The Avenger and then at Moran.

“I . . . er . . . what did you call me?” he said to Benson.

The colorless terrible eyes were like diamond drills.

“I called you ‘Kepper,’ ” The Avenger said.

“I don’t think . . . I quite get you.”

“Yes, you do. You’re Sam Kepper’s son. Your father owned this section for a little while when it was still the old Wilder farm. You must have played around it as a little boy. You must have learned about those caves then.”

“You’re crazy!” Dan Moran said.

“You must have been about twelve when Thornton Heights came into being. You must have gone somewhere else to live with a relative when your father died, after losing his interest in the property. You could come back, grown up, and get a job as bookkeeper, without Jones or Marsden or Sillers or Carl Foley even recognizing you.”

“I tell you that Clarence Beck is responsible—”

“Beck has no motive,” The Avenger’s calm words cut across Moran’s protest. “You have. Revenge! You must have planned your revenge from childhood, Kepper. The four partners had cheated your father. They would die for that. And then the Wilder curse came to your mind. Old Wilder, the original owner, had cheated a neighbor. The neighbor had laid a curse on him, saying Wilder would die of the very thing he had cheated to get. A giant pig. Wilder was killed; was almost torn to pieces. Why not terrify the partners before they died, with the same curse?”

“Frighten them with pigs? In crowded New York?” said Moran. But his eyes were losing their bewilderment and taking on a mocking look.

“A boar,” said Benson. “One of nature’s most ferocious fighting machines. Kept hidden in these caves. The crooked partners felt that it was something of the kind that killed Foley and then Sillers, just as Wilder, that earlier swindler, had been killed before them. Meanwhile they kept hearing noises: the sound of pigs—a terrible sound to them—produced through tiny amplifiers wired in the electric-light circuits of their homes, I should imagine, since an ‘electrician’ went to the residence of Foley and then of Sillers, after their deaths, to remove the evidence. Pretty effective, too. Marsden and Jones will probably either commit suicide or die of fright if those noises keep on in their homes much longer.”

Moran abandoned all pretense of innocence.

“The noises will keep on, all right,” he said. “Hidden in the basement of each house is a small phonograph hooked to an electric clock. Every half-hour, as long as the current is on, or till the mechanism happens to be found, they’ll hear the evidence of the Wilder curse at work against them.”

Myra Horton stirred and opened her eyes. She glared at Dan and shrank back.

“He brought me down here!” she said shakily. “I started to phone. He hit me and took the phone away. He threw me in that pit. And I thought he loved me—”

Nellie silenced her. She and the rest were staring at Dan “Moran” Kepper in loathing and horror.

“What would you have me do?” snarled Kepper. “These men swindled my father out of every dollar he owned. My father died of the shock. They killed him as surely as if they’d shot him. So I decided they must die, too, and die in terror. It was just revenge—righteous execution.”

“And the murder of Tim Phelan?” said Benson evenly.

“He found the door from the basement to the caves,” snarled Dan Kepper. “And he kept wanting to babble about the look of Foley’s body. Naturally, he had to die.”

“And Carter?”

Kepper shrugged.

“He blundered in while Sillers was being given what he deserved. Could I let him live to put me in the chair?”

“So you started out in righteous anger—and shortly became a ruthless killer—just another murderer.” The Avenger’s voice had a snap in it like that of a steel whip. “And you tried to palm your murderous work off on me! You signed notes, ‘The Avenger,’ and got Sillers and Jones so frantic that they hired gunmen to kill me and the rest of Justice, Inc.”

Kepper turned mocking again. “Are these all clever guesses,” he said, “or do you know something?”

“I knew you were Kepper’s son the moment I laid eyes on you,” said Benson. “You should have found some way to get the picture of Thornton Heights’ founder, Sam Kepper, off the wall of the general office. Save for the old-fashioned cravat and beard, it could be a picture of you. Also, I knew you were the murderer when I saw the ring in your murderous pet’s nose: The curious hook on the end of the window pole in your office—I’d never seen a window pole like that before—was to lead the boar around with. If you want more knowledge—”

Kepper stood up, with the phony “bonds” dropping to the rock floor.

“That’s plenty,” he snapped. He raised his voice. “All right, bring Beck in. The show’s over. They know too much. They’ll have to die—all of them!”

From the ancient oak doorway came half a dozen men. The Avenger recognized one or two; they’d been Sillers’s gun toters.

From the opening on the opposite side of the little cave came eight or ten more. All were armed with sawed-off shotguns and automatics. The latter group half carried Clarence Beck.

Grinning, two of the men shoved Beck forward. He lit at the feet of Benson and his friends.

CHAPTER XVI

Flight to Doom

Beck was in bad shape. He had been knocked around a lot. There were lumps on his head and bruises on his face, and his mouth was battered and swollen.

But he didn’t get much sympathy from Dick Benson.

“I overrated you considerably,” The Avenger said to him, his pale, icy eyes, and his voice and face, expressionless.

Nellie stared. She wondered if Benson hadn’t meant underrated. But it developed that he hadn’t.

“I thought that if we let you go along with us, you’d see we were for you and not against you,” Benson said. “But you didn’t. All you did was help try to get us killed.”

“Sorry,” said Beck through thick lips. “If you’d seen the note Uncle Carl Foley got before he was killed, and if you’d heard him talk, you’d have been convinced, too.”

He went to Myra Horton’s side; and the tall, pretty girl clung to him in a way that made Kepper sneer. Kepper was edging toward the oak door.

“Give me five minutes,” he said to the gunmen. “Then you can join me in the basement of the main building. I’ll have the steam out of the tunnel by then.”

The unspoken part of his command was only too clear.

One of the men, a little younger than the rest and, apparently, a little less callous, said huskily, “You want us to bump all of ’em? All seven of ’em? Gosh, that’s a pretty nasty order.”

Kepper’s cold gaze settled on this man’s face.

“Do you want any of them to live to put you in the electric chair? This way, no one will ever know. They’ll never be found down here.”

“The result,” said The Avenger somberly, “of taking the law into your own hands. You start out to kill four men in ‘righteous execution’ and end by being forced to kill a dozen.”

“Shut up!” snapped Kepper. He looked at his men again. “Give me five minutes,” he repeated.

He went out and closed the oak door behind him.

The grim executioners faced their victims, guns tensely leveled. There were about two guns aimed at each of the ones to die—Smitty, Mac, Cole Wilson, Nellie, The Avenger, Myra and Beck. Not much chance to try anything.

Clarence Beck showed up pretty well. He had good stuff in him; the feather-brain act had been a phony. He cracked very little, kept his arm around Myra and was still.

The members of Justice, Inc., of course, didn’t crack at all. They all knew that in one of their fights against crime they were going to die. You can’t risk death daily forever, without having it catch up to you, eventually. They were used to looking death straight in the eye.

The Avenger said calmly, “Kepper’s tricking you. You’re to die down here, too. Don’t you know that?” He stared at the gang.

“Shut your face!” snarled one of the men. “And keep your hands absolutely still. We know about all the junk you got in your pockets and up your sleeves. Don’t try to palm something on us.”

Benson kept his hands still. He seemed to be listening, listening for something besides the words of the gunman.

“Kepper doesn’t need five minutes for anything but your destruction,” he said, voice as even as if he were telling Josh Newton to get a car out for him. “Why shouldn’t you shoot us at once and go right along with him? Why meet him in that basement in five minutes? It doesn’t make sense.”

Several of the men looked a little uneasy, but most of them just sneered.

And The Avenger kept listening.

“Kepper can’t let you live,” he said. It was his perfect calm, as if he were in no danger at all, as if he knew something important that they didn’t know, that was unnerving most of the gangsters. And they were really being a little unnerved, too, before the glacial, deadly eyes and the level tone.

“Kepper can’t allow you to live,” he repeated. “You know as much about him as we do. And we are to die because we’re dangerous to him. Don’t you realize that you are to die down here, too? That we’ll all rot in these caves together?”

“Look,” said the younger man, the one who had found such a mass murder difficult in the first place. “You don’t suppose this guy’s really got something, do you?”

“Naw!” said the man who had told Benson to shut up. “The guy’s stalling, that’s all. We know he’s smart. Don’t let him bluff you—”

A yell sounded from beyond the closed oak door! Benson’s pale eyes narrowed till they were like chromium slits in his masklike face. He had seemed to be listening for something. It appeared, now, that he was hearing what he had expected.

It had been a dreadful sound, that hoarse shriek. It had been packed with all the fear man ever felt. Shaken, pale, the gunmen stared at each other.

“What,” mumbled one of them, “was that?”

The hideous sound came again—the cry of a man in the last stages of horror. This time it was sliced off in the middle, and the ensuing silence was even more horrible than the sound had been.

The cave was suddenly plunged into darkness.

Benson, moving like a streak of light while the attention of everyone was on the terrible cries, had plunged toward the bottle in which the candle guttered. He had smashed bottle and candle and all with one lash of his hand.

Instantly the cave was a bedlam of shouts and curses.

“Cut ’em down!” one clear cry sounded out. “It’s them or us!”

A little sheet of fire cut toward the wall where the prisoners had been when the light went out, as at least a dozen guns let go. But, not unnaturally, the prisoners weren’t there any more. Nor was The Avenger near the spot where the candle had been. Half a dozen slugs whistling in that direction hit only rock wall.

Dick Benson made his way to the oak door. It was securely barred from the outside, as he’d known it would be. Kepper had told his men to follow him, in five minutes, through that door; then he had fixed it so no one could get out! It confirmed the conviction that gunmen as well as prisoners were to die down in this hole.

His feet splashed in water as he made his way back.

There’d been no more shooting. In such close quarters, and in the dark, the thugs couldn’t shoot without accidentally killing each other. They could only feel savagely around for enemies and swing clubbed guns when they thought they’d found one.

Evidently, a couple got hold of Smitty and recognized him by his great size. There was an annoyed roar from the big fellow, then a dismal snapping sound. It was a sickening sound, as if someone had stepped on a berry box. Something gave, when those huge hands clamped tight, and it was never the hands that gave!

“All right, take it, then,” Nellie’s voice whipped out. Right after that, there was a yell and a thump. Someone had laid hands on her, then had been tossed expertly over her dainty shoulder to land with a violent thud on the floor.

The Avenger sought to avoid a fight rather than join in the action. He stood in the darkness for an instant while, once more, he recalled the diagram of the caves which he had studied at the library.

Someone brushed against him. His steely fingers instantly caught a throat—and as instantly released it. There was no mistaking MacMurdie’s ponderous Adam’s apple.

“There’s still another way out of here,” The Avenger whispered into the Scot’s ear. “Possibly even Kepper didn’t know of it. It’s at the far end of the cave. As you touch the others, lead them down there.”

“O.K.,” Mac muttered back. “Say, Muster Benson, there’s water in here—”

Benson moved away, toward the far end of the cave. Two men got in his way and were identified as the enemy. Benson’s incredibly strong hands went out, and each got a neck. He brought his hands sweepingly together with a surge of those amazing arm and shoulder muscles.

The two men dropped. Benson went on. He was ankle deep in water now.

Somebody yelped, “Hey! What’s all this water doin’ in here?”

The yelp was followed by a smack as Cole Wilson or someone located a thug by his big mouth and got in a good swing.

The Avenger had threaded through the blind melee to the far end of the cave. His hands felt the opening that yawned to the next cave. It was not what he wanted. The next cave was the last, a blind alley, leading nowhere.

His hands touched the wall to the left of the regular opening, and his fingertips outlined a crack raggedly forming an oblong about three feet by four. He got two fingers in one part of the crack and pulled with gigantic strength. The oblong became a slab, swinging from the wall enough for him to get a full handhold.

But as he was reaching for it, light cut the blackness. Some one of the gunmen either had a flash he’d finally thought to use, Or else some one of them had torn a little flashlight from the belt of one of the members of Justice, Inc.

The beam slashed over struggling bodies—and on Benson, Mac, Beck and Myra, at the end wall.

Also, it showed the crack of the partly opened slab.

Instantly, the full gang surged that way. “They’re gettin’ outta here! Stop ’em! Kill ’em!” The flash was smashed out.

Another sheet of flame, formed by a dozen lines of fire lancing from gun muzzles, swept toward the end wall. But with the yell, all there had fallen flat to the floor. And before a second, more deadly burst could come, The Avenger’s voice sounded out.

It didn’t seem loud; yet it vibrated through the cave like a paralyzing flood, stopping all there for an instant.

“I told you Kepper had planned your deaths as well as ours. Have you felt the water in here? Have you noticed how it was rising?”

One stray shot had punctuated his words, searching for his head. No more sounded.

“Pretty soon, this water will be up to your waists,” The Avenger’s vibrant, powerful voice rang out in the blackness. “Then up to your chins. Then solid to the roof. And you will be trapped in it. Kepper turned a valve from a city water main when he went out of here.”

“You’re stallin’ again,” came a voice. But it was a very troubled voice. Because you couldn’t dismiss the fact that the water in here was now almost knee high, and rising all the time.

“Stalling?” said Benson. “Try the oak door and see. You were supposed to follow Kepper out that door. And he locked it against you as he went out.”

There was a rush toward the oak door. And during it, The Avenger got the slab open enough for a body to squeeze through.

He’d remembered where each person was. He caught wrists, one after one, of Myra, Beck, Nellie and Cole and impelled them through the opening.

Then the gang surged back, squalling in terror. They didn’t think The Avenger was stalling now. That locked door had convinced them all.

“In with you,” Smitty roared in the darkness. “I’ll plug the hole after you.”

Mac and The Avenger went into the opening. Smitty backed after them.

There was a roar as somebody shot at the opening. The giant grunted as a bullet smacked against his chest and was stopped by the bullet-proof celluglass. Then Smitty doubled his colossal fists, smalled them straight forward like the pistons of a locomotive.

The end of the tunnel was suddenly clear. He caught hold of an ancient iron handle on the inside of the movable rock slab and swung it closed again.

And that was that!

“O.K.,” he called after the others. “Take your time. I can hold this door as long as you want it held. We got them bottled up good, chief.”

The rough tunnel that the rest went along slanted up, then ended in an overhead slab of stone. It was a rough stone, a flat boulder. It moved when The Avenger got under it and heaved.

The stars shone with the lifting of the boulder. All clambered out. The boulder was the one with the ancient surveyor’s peg set in it.

Off to the east, they could see a car parked, with police lights on it.

“Go to that squad car,” said The Avenger to Beck. “Tell them to round up the others near here and come prepared to take a dozen or more prisoners.”

Beck started off, with Myra beside him. Meanwhile, the screams of the prisoners sounded even through the rock door down there, and along the tunnel.

“Let them think they’re going to drown,” said Dick, colorless eyes narrowed. “It won’t hurt them at all.”

Nellie was shifting from one small foot to the other. She burst out: “This Dan Moran! I mean Kepper! He got away ages ago! Shouldn’t we try to catch him, too? You’re not going to let him escape, are you?”

“Escape?” said Benson. He turned toward Nellie, and even the little blonde felt disturbed and uneasy at the pale, impersonal stare. “You remember that cry of fear, just before I knocked the light out?”

“Why, yes,” said Nellie.

“That was Kepper,” Benson said. “In the path he chose there was a twenty-foot pit with a monster boar, mad with hunger, in the bottom. Kepper’s grisly murder weapon. His road lay over that pit, on a wide plank thrown across. Rather predictably, he stepped out where he thought the plank was, and fell into the pit. Because it happened that the plank was not there any more.”

“It happened?” repeated Nellie, a little pale. She could picture what had happened in that black pit, and she wished she couldn’t imagine it so vividly. “It . . . just happened?”

The Avenger said nothing.

Benson never took life. But always he maneuvered the master crooks he pursued into deadly situations where, if they went ahead with their plans to destroy innocent people, they only destroyed themselves. Thus, Kepper, plotting murders to conform to the bizarre details of the Wilder curse, had brought the same doom upon himself!

Another case was concluded.

The master plotter was dead in a manner satisfying savage poetic justice; the underlings waited in terror for the police to round them up.

Mac said, “And the remainin’ partners? The skurlies, Jones and Marsden? Are ye going to prosecute them?”

“Their swindle was legal,” Benson reminded him, voice cold and calm. “And they have already paid heavily for it. They can pay some more by listening to the sounds that now terrify them, the sound of the beasts of Wilder’s curse. We’ll leave Kepper’s hidden mechanisms where they are, in Jones’s and Marsden’s homes.”

He started toward the car he had parked when he raced here from the library. Following a few feet after the lonely, erect figure, Nellie and Cole and Mac realized afresh how much more of a flesh-and-blood machine than a human being was this dreaded fighter of the underworld.

A machine of vengeance that would go till death stopped it. Always The Avenger, taking toll against criminals for the great wrong criminals had done him years ago.

It would be war to the end. No single battle, like this affair of the Thornton Heights murders and the Wilder curse, would be more than an incident in it.

THE END

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

THE WILDER CURSE

CHAPTER I The Call of Death!

CHAPTER II Calling Justice, Inc.

CHAPTER III Through a Corn Cutter

CHAPTER IV Noise at Night

CHAPTER V Widow and Nephew

CHAPTER VI “Next Time I’ll Shoot.”

CHAPTER VII Trail of Slumber

CHAPTER VIII Time Bomb!

CHAPTER IX The Impossible Murders

CHAPTER X Ghost Phone

CHAPTER XI Man in a Dress

CHAPTER XII Battle in a Library

CHAPTER XIII Death Walks

CHAPTER XIV The Curse

CHAPTER XV Murder Weapon

CHAPTER XVI Flight to Doom