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

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

FIRST PRINTING: MARCH, 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: 0-446-75-481-1

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

THE BLACK DEATH

CHAPTER I: Death in Sable

CHAPTER II: Out of the Blue

CHAPTER III: In Ruin’s Wake

CHAPTER IV: Not So Crazy

CHAPTER V: That Girl Again

CHAPTER VI: The Black Pig

CHAPTER VII: Brain Injury

CHAPTER VIII: Another Man’s Face

CHAPTER IX: Underground Crypt

CHAPTER X: Priestess of Doom

CHAPTER XI: The Four Electricians

CHAPTER XII: Death’s Decoys

CHAPTER XIII: On the Air

CHAPTER XIV: The Death Sentence

CHAPTER XV: Southwest

CHAPTER XVI: The Hooded Killer

THE

BLACK DEATH

CHAPTER I

Death in Sable

Three things seemed perfectly normal and ordinary on that spring afternoon. The three things were a building, a car parked in front of the building, and a man. The man’s destination, from the course he was following, might have been the building.

They seemed perfectly normal and ordinary, but they were not normal at all.

The building was in the center of a street that was only one short block long. The little avenue was called Bleek Street. The building in the center was really three old red-brick buildings thrown into one, though you couldn’t see that unity from the street. All you could see was that the center entrance was the only one used.

Over this center entrance was a small sign in gilt letters, which made the building unusual. The sign said, “Justice, Inc.” The building was the headquarters of the world’s most unique crime fighter, Richard Benson, more commonly known as The Avenger.

The car at the curb in front of this important structure seemed to be an ordinary sedan. It was about three or four years old, from the dullness of its paint. It was large, but of a common, medium-priced make. Only the most trained eye would have noticed how it sagged a bit on its oversized tires. This was caused by the weight of bulletproof steel sides and glass, and by many unexpected gadgets concealed under the car’s sedate exterior. For this was one of The Avenger’s cars, which meant that it was a combination traveling arsenal and laboratory.

The man just approaching the entrance of Bleek Street seemed the most ordinary-looking specimen of all.

He was middle-aged, rather slight in build, and was one of those individuals who walks with a stoop and wears his hat meekly on the exact center of his head. He had an indoor look and might have been one of a million clerks, except that he was dressed in quite expensive, though inconspicuous, clothes.

He was walking fast. And now it could be seen that he was breathing even faster. He was puffing as if he had been running hard, though actually he had not been running at all.

A still closer look revealed a gigantic fear in his eyes. A fear of imminent death! And yet it seemed even more than this. It was more horror than fear, as if the death about to strike was far more ghastly than death should ever be!

In his hand the middle-aged little man carried something that at first glance looked to be a half-crumpled handful of black tissue paper. Only the stuff was even more limp than thin tissue. It flopped around with the agitation of his hurried walk.

He carried it obliviously, stupidly, as if he didn’t really know he held it at all; as if he would have thrown it far from him in a gesture of terror if he’d realized he was carrying it.

In the midst of crowded New York, Bleek Street was an oasis of quiet. Dick Benson leased or owned all the buildings on one side of the street; the other side was entirely taken up by the blank wall of a vast warehouse. So, in effect, The Avenger owned the street. And no one went in there who hadn’t business with him.

The man with the horror-stricken eyes walked hastily. And there now seemed to be a slight change in his general coloring. It had been pallid, grayish.

Now it was darker.

Probably a score of passersby from the busy avenue at the corner saw the younger man catch up to the middle-aged one. None of them paid any attention. It looked as if one friend had caught up to another. That was all.

The younger man was about twenty-eight, quite tall, a little slouched, but with broad shoulders, and dressed in careless but excellent English tweeds. The playboy type it seemed.

He put out a long-fingered, uncalloused hand and got the older man by the shoulder.

At first the older man didn’t even seem to feel, though the grip of the long fingers crumpled his coat hard. He went right along, breathing hard, seeming darker than he had the moment before. It was a very queer darkness. It was a sort of very faint purple-black, far under the skin. Then the younger man stopped him.

The older man said something in violent protest and wrenched at the detaining hand. The fingers clamped harder. Still no one paid any attention.

The older man’s shoulder drooped, as if he were giving up whatever it was he wanted to do against the other’s protest. The grip of the long fingers must have loosened at the trick, for an instant later the older man had torn loose and was running as hard as he could down Bleek Street, toward the center building with the sign, “Justice, Inc.”

The younger man took after him.

The older man got almost to the building. Then his legs buckled, almost pitching him forward on his face. He recovered and went on. He screamed.

It was a terrible sound. It was harsh, hoarse, suffocated. He grasped his collar and tore it loose, so that it flapped at his neck, as if the thing had had a strangling tightness. In the move he dropped the floppy, flimsy black stuff he’d unconsciously held.

He reached the building, with the younger man racing right behind. The younger man was so close that he’d have caught up if his quarry had gone into the building. Perhaps it was this fact that made the older man change his mind in mid-stride.

Instead of entering The Avenger’s headquarters, the man veered sharply right and jumped into the ordinary-seeming old sedan at the curb.

He just made it. The younger man pounded at the glass and wrenched futilely at the door handle as the other threw a lock. The big car whirred into life and moved off. Whoever had parked it had left the ignition key in the dash.

And now, abruptly, violently, two of the three things that had seemed so ordinary and normal a moment ago became different—with a deadly difference!

The first was the little middle-aged man at the wheel. The second was this car.

The man driving the purloined auto was now almost as dark as an African chieftain. But with a darkness that was still of purple-black tints, down under the skin, rather than of brownish tan. Also, he was now obviously quite mad.

The madness showed in the things the innocent-looking old car suddenly began to do under his direction.

It skidded into the crowded north-and-south avenue off Bleek Street at twice the speed a right-angle curve demands. It clanged against a bread truck, righted itself and went north.

The bread truck, meanwhile, toppled over on its side with a crash that could be heard for blocks. Bread, rolls and assorted pastries paved square yards of the avenue. The whole side of the truck was ripped as if by a can opener. But the car that had done the ripping hadn’t even a bent fender.

It rolled on, a juggernaut in the hands of a lunatic.

Blackening fingers fiddled with things on the dash. And with each heedless touch something else happened.

The exhaust of the car showed grayish. At once, cars and pedestrians behind the car folded up and seemed to lose all volition. A touch of the grayish vapor and men and women fell and slept on the sidewalks, or slumped and slept over steering wheels. Popping crashes all along the street told of driverless cars smacking each other.

The gray vapor stopped rolling out. From the right-hand side of the car, under the running board, a curved steel rod shot up and in.

The flexible, clutching rod wouldn’t have caught anyone if an impatient youth hadn’t been jaywalking.

He was one of those street crossers in a vast hurry to get to the other side and stop and lean against a building and light a cigarette. He was edging into traffic, standing within inches of speeding cars to duck a few feet farther. He was so occupied with risking his life for an extra second that he didn’t see the commotion down the street from the big sedan, nor did he notice the flash of the rod.

The thing caught him as a hook catches a sack of mail; it held him pressed flat against the car body. Yelling, he was carried along, glued to the side of the juggernaut.

From the rear of the trick sedan a heavy metal bar with a curved end protruded. The sedan was shooting through a red light at the moment, and consequently through a stream of cars hastily broken in the middle to let this crazy projectile through. The swinging bar coupled onto the bumper of a car just grazed, as if directed by human hands, and this car jerked around at a right angle and was towed in the sedan’s chaotic wake, with the woman at the wheel screaming and trying to brake against the hidden enormous power of the machine pulling her.

No one could have told how many other things might have been done by the misdirected monster of steel if the man at the controls hadn’t suddenly reached the end of his endurance.

That strange darkness of skin had reached more than Negroid proportions now. He was fighting for breath, as if nine-tenths of his throat were closed. Great drops of sweat stood out on his forehead. His eyes were glazed and almost unseeing.

As if realizing he had no more time left him, he cut off the motor and turned the car sharply. It coasted toward the curb, sideswiped a parked car, leaped to the sidewalk and crashed into a plate-glass window.

The man at the wheel had sagged like an empty sack. As he did, he caused one more disturbance—if you could call it by so mild a word.

His dropping hand touched a button in the top of the old-fashioned gear-shift lever. There was a deadly dit-dit-dit-dit, and a machine gun under the leading edge of each front fender poured slugs in an awful hail.

The store behind the shattered plate-glass window was a ladies’ dress shop. The shrieking clerks dropped flat and were safe; but while the drums of the guns lasted, wax figures crumpled as though under blowtorches, and hangers of dresses whipped and shredded as if in a mighty wind.

Then there was silence. A deathly, awful silence, which was shared by the slumped figure at the wheel of the still undented car.

Outside, for a dozen blocks, the avenue was a mess. No one had been killed, but many had been bruised. The youth held against the side of the car like a fly was unconscious, either through fear or concussion.

Following the confused wake, two squad cars came screaming. With drawn guns, four cops from the cars leaped to the sidewalk and loped toward the machine that was half in and half out of the display window. They were white with rage, both as officers of the law and as citizens. They’d have shot the hoodlum who had driven a car like that as quickly as they’d have talked to him.

But the justified outrage soon died in them.

“Why, it’s one of Dick Benson’s cars!” said the man in the lead. He sheathed his gun and pointed to the small special insignia over the license plate. Every policeman in New York—and many in far corners of the land—knew what that little J stood for: Justice, Inc.

“Sure, an’ The Avenger never drove like that,” said a second man, big and red and Irish. “He helps folks; he doesn’t mangle ’em.”

“Somebody must have stolen it, then.”

“Boy, imagine stealing Benson’s car! This guy’ll wish he was dead before he gets out of this.”

The oldest of them, in plain clothes, with the lines of experience seamed on his face, said before even the car door had been opened, “This guy is already dead.”

They could see it, then, all of them. The awkward pose of the body in the driver’s seat, the horrible limpness, the dreadful stillness, told the story.

“Broke his neck when the car hit,” shrugged one. “Serves him right.”

“Maybe,” the oldest said. “But a busted neck wouldn’t explain the guy’s color. Look at him. He’s black!”

It was not an exaggeration.

The dead man wasn’t just dark; he was precisely what the plainclothesman had said. He was black. His hands, neck, face, all the exposed parts of him, were as black as if coal dust had been sifted thickly over him and caked on with moisture. The corpse was as black as ink!

CHAPTER II

Out of the Blue

The member of The Avenger’s little band who had left the car at the curb with the key in the ignition lock was Smitty.

Algernon Heathcote Smith—to give him the full name, which few people could use without getting a sock in the jaw—was a giant. Six feet nine, and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he looked huge even in the huge room which was Justice, Inc.’s, inner sanctum.

This room took up the whole top floor of the three buildings that had been thrown into one. The way it was furnished told just a little of the tremendous wealth behind the organization. But at the moment, all in the room were gathered in front of one object in a corner near the rear windows.

This object was a television cabinet, but it housed a television set such as few in this world have ever seen. Designed by Smitty, it was far advanced over even the secret-laboratory experimental sets of the big corporations.

The big cabinet had received a recent change. On its side was fastened a small additional cabinet, like a small annex on a building.

Nellie Gray pointed to this addition.

“I still don’t get it,” she complained.

Nellie Gray, standing beside the vast bulk of Smitty, made a contrast to draw the laughter of an observer.

She was barely five feet tall, weighed barely one hundred pounds, and was as dainty and delicate-looking as a porcelain doll. Strong men had been fooled by that look of tiny helplessness, to their sorrow.

“I don’t understand it,” the tiny blonde repeated to Smitty.

The giant explained.

“It’s a television scrambler—or unscrambler, as the case may be. You know how they scramble sound, then sort it out at the other end by use of a code pattern, so that anyone trying to listen in hears only gibberish? Well, this scrambles the images of television the same way. Anyone trying to get the image receives only a meaningless jumble of moving lines on his screen, unless he has an unscrambler that sorts it all out and makes a regular image of it.”

“Uh-huh,” said Nellie doubtfully.

“You’ll see how it works in a minute,” said the giant. “The set in Mac’s drugstore is fixed up. At just two-thirty, Mac will transmit a moving picture of his homely mug and you can see just how it works out.”

The “Mac” referred to was Fergus MacMurdie, another member of Justice, Inc. Mac was a tall, bony Scot with sandy hair, sandy ropes of eyebrows, bitter blue eyes and outstanding ears. He was a brilliant chemist and spent much of his time in a sort of superdrugstore that Dick Benson had set up for him.

The drugstore wasn’t super from the standpoint of size. It was, in fact, a rather small place. It was super because of the way it was divided. The store part in front took up only a third of the total space. In back was the heart of the store—a great room divided down the center, with a complete chemical laboratory on one side and an equally complete electrical workshop on the other.

It was in the electrical half, which was Smitty’s domain, that there was a television set matching this big one in the Bleek Street headquarters.

“Mac’s image will be sent in the usual way,” Smitty went on. “However, the scanning of the image will be scrambled. This will be done by scanning a code pattern by means of the auxiliary television-like pickup tube and utilizing the electrical impulses of the pattern to control the scanning of the image being broadcast. At this end a similar pattern which is synchronized by a television-scanning tube will unscramble the irregular television impulses so that the receiving tube reconstructs an image identical with the scene to be picked up at the transmitter. Clear?”

“Clear like mud,” said Nellie with a grimace. “Life gets so complicated that I sometimes wonder how much longer we can go on living.”

“That’s a swell idea for war,” said Cole Wilson thoughtfully. “You could send maps, or printed messages, With no chance of an enemy picking them up.”

Cole was one of the newer members of the organization. He was compactly built, almost too good-looking, dark of hair and eyes, with the straight features of an Indian. He was chain lightning in a fight.

“Someone else is working on this idea,” Josh Newton put in. “I can’t remember what I’ve heard about it, or who the experimenter is.”

Josh was a six-foot gangling Negro with the biggest feet in captivity. He looked dull-witted and when with strangers, assumed a sleepy, exaggerated drawl. Actually he had a brain like a trap and was an honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute. His pretty wife, Rosabel, who was never far from his side if she could help it, was also a Tuskegee graduate.

“Several good men are working on the same idea,” Smitty nodded. “For all I know, one or two may have accomplished it. But I’ll send the details to the secret government files as soon as I’ve perfected them, to be sure our country gets the device.”

“When did you say Mac was going to send a scrambled image and start the experiment off?” said Cole Wilson.

“At two-thirty on the dot,” Smitty repeated.

“It’s two thirty-one now,” Cole said mildly.

The giant glared at the clock. “Hey, it is! A minute past the time!” He glared at the blank, cold screen on the front of the television cabinet. “What’s the matter with the confounded Scotchman?”

“Maybe the matter is with the radio expert,” Nellie put in sweetly. The tiny blonde was always getting the big fellow’s goat. They ribbed each other unmercifully. But it was a sad day for anyone else who tried to rib either of them in front of the other.

“Yeah?” said Smitty, hotly defending his baby. “This thing may need some smoothing down, but it’s developed to a point where it will work, and work well. You’ll see.”

But they didn’t see. Two more minutes passed, and the screen remained blank.

“It might be,” said the giant uncomfortably, “that the dial isn’t set just right.”

There was a dial on the separate box. He moved this a very little. The screen stayed blank. A little more—

“Either Mac has monkeyed with the dial in the drugstore,” said Smitty wrathfully, “or—”

“There she goes,” said Cole.

Movement began to show on the screen. It waved, blurred, cleared again. Smitty was more intent on adjustment so that a maximum of clarity was attained on the screen than he was on what the screen itself showed. But little Nellie was staring at the emerging picture with a frown on her dainty forehead.

“That’s queer,” she said. “What was Mac going to do in this test—stage a play or something?”

“A play?” repeated Smitty absently. “No, he was just going to stand in front of the transmitter and maybe put out a wisecrack or two. Or a pun. That guy’s puns—”

“He isn’t just standing in front of the drugstore set now,” said Nellie. “Nobody’s standing in front of it. And he must have set up a whole stageful of scenery. Stage sets. Because he sure has disguised the store.”

“What are you yipping about?” snapped Smitty. “Of course it’s the store. It—” He really looked at the screen then. And on his fast face came a frown to match Nellie’s. “Say, that is funny.”

Instead of seeing the back end of the drugstore laboratory on the screen, they seemed to look into a crypt-like room. It had great, stubby Gothic arches, and the arches and walls were of heavy stone that dripped moisture in places, indicating that it was far underground somewhere.

Nellie shivered. “That can’t be the drugstore, Smitty. Mac couldn’t change it like that, no matter how much of a practical joke he tried to play. You’ve picked up somebody else.”

“Impossible,” said the giant. “It’s a million to one that no other set as complete as this is in existence. If there were, it’d be another million to one against our happening to hit on the precise unscrambling adjustment to catch a straight image. So you see, it’s—er—impossible,” he finished lamely.

“Sure,” said Cole Wilson sardonically. “So it’s impossible. So what are we looking at on the screen?”

They looked some more.

A grim, subterranean chamber carved of solid rock and lighted by something like concealed torches or candles. The illumination was yellowish and uncertain. Seepage like wet blood glistened blackly on the walls. It whispered of evil, of a horror somehow beyond horror.

“Where in the world,” breathed Smitty, “do you suppose that chamber of horrors is?”

And with the question he admitted that through some incredible accident his device had picked up a strange image. Huge as the odds against such a thing were, there was another set as complete as his in existence; and his unscrambler was, by chance, tuned to it.

So out of the blue was coming an alien picture.

“Look,” said Josh suddenly. “Is that an altar?”

Details were becoming clearer, both as the set warmed and as their eyes got more used to the dimness of the picture. The thing Josh had pointed out was a low, oblong block of stone in the center of the background.

“An altar,” said Cole in a low tone. “Or—a tomb.”

Now a shadow was growing over the screen. At first all they could see was that the image was darkening. Then the darkness lightened around the edges. It lightened in such a way as to make a definite pattern.

“Wings,” said Smitty suddenly. “The shadow of wings.”

It was. The shadow was focusing into a smaller compass and was darkening at the same time. Now it covered the center of the screen, leaving the edges in complete blackness. The effect was like that in an animated cartoon when a bird or bat flies straight at the camera lens and seems to swallow up the whole. Only this was not funny. There was an air of indescribable evil about it.

The inky-black shadow of the vast, unseen wings suddenly vanished. And Smitty gasped, and Nellie’s small hand convulsively closed on his arm.

Where nothing had been before, a figure now stood, introduced during the miniature blackout. The figure was tall, lithe and terrible in close-fitting black. The head was just a black blob, since a sable hood hid it completely. Over the broad chest, the outline of spread wings showed in a thin white line—a black emblem on a field of black.

“Better get the chief,” said Nellie. “I think we have blundered into something pretty important here. And pretty bad!”

Smitty nodded and stepped to a big fiat-topped desk. It was The Avenger’s desk. On it were buttons that connected with red signal lights all through the building—in the laboratory, rest suites, basement garage, everywhere.

The giant pushed the button activating the signal light in the laboratory. Benson was in there. The Avenger, who was one of the greatest scientists of all time, was usually in his laboratory when not engaged in making criminals sorry they’d ever been born.

Smitty gave the urgent signal, two shorts and a long. And it seemed as if The Avenger was in the doorway almost before Smitty’s big fingers left the button.

At first when you looked at The Avenger you found it impossible to fit the man to his gigantic reputation.

Richard Henry Benson was about five feet eight and weighed no more than a hundred and sixty-five pounds. If you’d been told that even the giant Smitty could not cope with this strange man in a physical encounter you would have found it hard to believe that, too.

Then, on looking at his face, you could have had a small idea of how the reputation was possible.

His features were classic in their regularity, the eyes were as brilliant as gems and almost totally devoid of color. His hair, cut close, was black as soot and grew in a virile cap.

Seeing The Avenger move, you’d have begun to believe the stories about him.

Now and then a man is born who seems to have an unearthly quality of muscle that makes up in power for any amount of quantity. Benson was such a man. In his hands, rather small, long-fingered, well kept, was the strength of steel; and in his rather slight body was a power almost beyond calculation. Furthermore, he moved with such effortless rapidity that it baffled the eye. At one moment he was in the doorway. At the next he was beside the desk—and none in the room had really seen the detail of his steps. It was as if he had leaped the distance, though he actually hadn’t, of course.

“Yes?” he said to Smitty.

“By some freak we’ve picked up a strange image on the test of the new unscrambler,” the giant explained. “It’s something pretty queer. We thought you’d like to look at it.”

They went to the big television cabinet.

“The guy in black turned toward the altar and bowed three times, his back to us,” Cole said. “Now he has turned again, as you can see, and is facing us.”

The Avenger watched with the rest. The atmosphere of unexplainable evil had deepened, if possible, on the screen, since the giant had momentarily left it. But Benson’s face showed no emotion. It never did show emotion; it was always as expressionless, as calm, as a thing in wax. Only his pale, deadly eyes lived and glowed in the midst of that impassiveness.

Words came suddenly from the hooded figure in black. Rather, the words came from the screen and you thought they were from the figure. Actually, they might have issued from all parts of the sinister rock chamber in a deep, hollow voice that had nothing human in it.

“All of us who live under the shadow of the black wings,” said the inhuman, sepulchral voice, “have great power given us by that shadow. The shadow of the wings is our demoniac mother and father and supporter. While we obey the Voice of the wings we are in safety, no matter what we choose to do. We have superhuman power. We can do anything. But when one steps out of that shadow, when one disobeys the Voice, the safety departs and the black wings take vengeance.

“One has but recently been mad enough to defy the Voice and depart from the black shadow of safety. To all those listening and looking now will come news of this fool’s end. His doom shall now be lowered upon him.”

While the slow words had gone on, that black, wing-like shadow had slowly blotted out the black figure again. It grew smaller, focused even more impenetrably over the hooded figure in the center, then lifted as before.

Now two figures were there.

The second was that of a middle-aged man, rather small and timid-looking, who seemed to stand in a trance. He was as still as a statue and might actually have been a wax thing; you couldn’t tell.

The hooded figure picked something from the oblong stone block that couldn’t be seen before. It looked like a crumpled handful of tissue paper rather messily doused in black ink so that lighter streaks were left. The tall figure put this into the limp fingers of the little middle-aged man.

The receiver still stood without movement, as if he didn’t know he’d been handed anything. He stood that way for many seconds.

Nellie screamed softly.

The man was swaying. And he was getting darker. Suddenly he collapsed like a pierced inner tube and lay on the rock floor. In his hand was still the thing that looked like a crumpled handful of tissue paper dipped in ink. The hand that held the black thing was also black.

The shadow of returning wings was deepening.

“That is all,” said the deep voice. “The fool who rebelled, Austin Gailord, is now dead. Take warning. Faithful to the Voice, under the safe black shadow, you have all power and all privilege. Disobey the Voice and this fate is yours.”

The sound stopped. The image blurred and disappeared.

The television screen was blank again.

CHAPTER III

In Ruin’s Wake

“Whew!” exclaimed Cole Wilson, dabbing at his forehead.

“What in the w-world did we t-tune in on?” stammered Smitty.

Nellie was more composed. But she also had less color than usual in her cheeks.

“That looked like a death sentence to me.”

All eyes went to the moveless face of The Avenger.

Benson’s colorless, icy eyes were inscrutable, but their diamond brilliance indicated deep thought. It was clear that he was not regarding this spectacle as at all funny. But that was all that was clear.

The rest were sorting things out a bit now.

“There’s a secret cult somewhere around here that we’ve never heard of,” mused Josh. “It’s a form of devil worship, and its emblem is a pair of spread black wings. That’s plain enough.”

Nellie’s dainty blonde head nodded. “More is plain, too. There are places—how many, and where, there’s no way of guessing—where people can go and catch the ritual of this worship of evil on other television screens. These images are scrambled so that no one else can oversee, except by the kind of accident that let us in on it. A one-in-a-million chance, Smitty calls it.”

Rosabel, Josh’s pretty wife, contributed her bit.

“It looks as though the head man, of the Voice, tells different members of the cult what to do. If they don’t obey, they die. Wonder what that black thing like tissue paper was, and what it meant when the little middle-aged man turned black.”

Again all eyes went to The Avenger’s brooding face. But all Dick Benson said was, “There’s the buzzer. See who’s at the door, Smitty.”

A minor product of the giant’s abilities was a little black box on the big desk that was a miniature television set. Tuned constantly to a receiver downstairs, it showed whoever entered the building vestibule and rang their bell. Smitty looked into the box now.

“Why, it’s Caghill, the cop over on Seventh Avenue. Why are we visited by the law? Somebody here been breaking the speed limit?”

This was usually worth a grin; members of Justice, Inc., were exempt from such things as speed laws because of the nature and value of their work for society. But if any grins were brought forth, they were wiped out again fast when Caghill’s looming, uniformed body filled the doorway.

“Mr. Benson,” the cop said respectfully, “somebody just stole your car.”

The patrolman said it in an incredulous tone, as if he still couldn’t believe it; as if someone had stolen the mayor’s pants or the commissioner’s gold shield. Such things simply weren’t done.

Smitty muffled an exclamation. They stared at him.

“The sedan!” he said, looking sheepish. “I . . . I left the keys in it when I came upstairs. I only meant to be here a minute.”

“Why, you fathead!” said Nellie. “You get out of a car and leave the keys in like any cluck of a half-brained kid!”

The Avenger’s diamond stare stopped her. And it suddenly reminded them of the possibilities of this thing.

“Good heavens!” said Rosabel. “That sedan is armored so it could plow through things like a tank! And the way it’s equipped. If anybody started fooling with the dash controls—”

“The thief did start fooling with them,” said Caghill grimly. “You’d better come and look. It’s pretty bad.”

Benson went with Caghill. Smitty, looking stricken at his carelessness, followed on their heels.

The giant went white as Seventh Avenue was reached.

The ruin left in the wake of the big sedan was being cleaned up rapidly and efficiently; but it was still pretty bad, as Caghill had said.

Cars were being driven away, mainly under their own power; the collisions when the gas put drivers to sleep had not been made at very high speed. But a few were fit for the tow car.

People were stirring and waking up under the ministrations of plainclothesmen and interns; waking up unhurt, since the gas only induced unconsciousness, with no bad after effects.

But there were broken limbs, and a few cases for the emergency wards, caused by cars that had gone wild. Far up, the crowd was thicker. Caghill and The Avenger and Smitty went up there.

The sedan was still half in and half out of the dress shop. Benson’s pale, awful eyes flicked on it, then went to Caghill. “The driver?”

“Dead,” said the cop. “And in a very funny way. Mr. Benson, this—all this damage—you can’t be held responsible for the actions of a crazy thief. But—”

“List damage and injury to everyone concerned,” said The Avenger. “I’ll take care of it.”

He went to the front of the car, then inside the shop. Police and mob instinctively gave way to admit the passage of the young man with the masklike face and the colorless, icy eyes. Those eyes took in the corpse of the thief and the ghastly peculiarity of its color.

Smitty said in a shaken tone, “What would turn a dead man black?”

The Avenger didn’t answer. He was closely scrutinizing the man’s flesh. In the minds of both—certainly in Smitty’s mind—was the spectacle just caught out of the blue, which they had witnessed on the television screen.

A small middle-aged man—as this man was small and middle-aged. Doomed to death by the hooded figure with the booming voice. Dropping in seeming death—and turning black in death.

“Have you identified him, yet?” The Avenger asked the nearest detective.

“Yes, Mr. Benson. His name is Austin Gailord.”

Smitty’s breath hissed out. That was the name given in the occult scene of “the fool who rebelled.” The name of the man who was doomed.

“Where did he think he was going in that car?” Smitty wondered. “And why did he monkey with all those gadgets—cause all that destruction?”

There seemed no possibility of answers to the questions. The lips that might have answered were dead.

“We’ll have a complete checkup on Gailord soon,” said the detective.

The Avenger nodded, expressionless as usual even in the face of unusually grim death.

He said, “When you’re through examining the car, let me know and we’ll pick it up.”

He and Smitty went back to Bleek Street. Almost at the building entrance, in the gutter, they found a thing they had not noticed on the way out. Smitty picked it up.

It looked like a crumpled handful of tissue paper, streakily dipped in black ink. There was a stem to it.

“A black orchid,” said The Avenger.

Again, as Benson’s steely fingers probed at the sinister flower, Smitty was pretty sure the thought in his mind was the same as that in the chief’s.

There had been a black orchid in the devil scene, placed in the lax fingers of a man about to die. This completed the chain of parallels.

Somewhere underground, miles away, a figure representing one Austin Gailord had been given a black orchid as a sentence of death. Back there on Seventh Avenue, Austin Gailord had died at about the same moment. He had died at the wheel of the stolen sedan. And here was a black orchid, dropped from his hand when he got into the car outside the Justice, Inc., entrance.

Smitty felt the flesh crawl clammily at his spine; but The Avenger said only: “Take this to Mac. See if he can detect any signs of poison in it. I will go on upstairs and wait for a police check on Gailord.”

Up in the big top-floor room, Josh was waiting excitedly for Benson’s return.

“I told Smitty I’d heard something about another man working on this same television stunt,” Josh said. “I couldn’t remember just who. But now I’ve placed it. It’s the well-known inventor, John Jay Hannon. There were short items in the science journals about it, months ago.”

Josh would hardly have bothered to report a thing like this to the man who seemed to know everything. Without a word being said, they all took it for granted that The Avenger knew more about the new television achievement than Smitty himself, just as the man with the pale, glacial eyes seemed to know more about every other specialized field than the acknowledged leaders in that field. Certainly, then, the announcement that the famed Hannon was working on a similar device would be known to Benson.

But the invaluable Josh had followed it up.

“I got in touch with Hannon’s home. He isn’t there. He hasn’t been there for weeks. I gathered that he was away on a trip, and the suddenness with which he went away came as a complete surprise to all his friends and employees. No one has any idea where he is.”

It might be very important news. Was a man revered all through the country as one almost capable of stepping into Edison’s shoes the same as the figure with the black hood hiding his features? Was John Jay Hannon the occult murderer they’d seen in a televised scene that might well have come from apparatus no one else but Hannon—and Smitty—was capable of inventing?

“Good work,” said The Avenger.

He told briefly of the carnage on Seventh Avenue; he knew his associates would want to know, and he never withheld from them the facts of present happenings. It was only his deductions of future happenings, or of motives and reasons, that he withheld till the proper time.

He said nothing, now, of anything he might have already deduced from the tie-up of a televised death scene and an actual, duplicating death, miles away. He went to the teletype in the corner.

Soon, the police report on Austin Gailord came through.

He was not a thief—at least, not till he’d gone crazy and taken the Justice, Inc. car. He was a manufacturer of auto parts in Hoboken and, lately, a manufacturer of bomber stabilizers, subcontracting from a big plant near Philadelphia. He was married, had two grown sons and was always, till now, the picture of respectability. It was not known why he had hurriedly come to the vicinity of Bleek Street, but, of course, the unofficial guess was accurate; he had come to see The Avenger.

Why, then, had he given up this idea at the very threshold of the Bleek Street headquarters? Why had he jumped into the car and driven off again instead? There weren’t even unofficial guesses about this.

The teletype message ended with the report that two questioned bystanders had noticed Gailord walking and thought they remembered seeing a younger man catch up with him and try to stop him. That was all. There was no dependable description of the younger man.

The vestibule buzzer sounded, then. Nellie went to the black box.

“A young man, English tweeds, the playboy kind,” she said. Had the giant Smitty been there, she’d have added, just to make him jealous, “He’s handsome, too.”

But Smitty wasn’t there, so she concluded: “He looks excited, but harmless. The photoelectric cell shows no weapons. Shall I let him up?”

The Avenger nodded. In a moment the tall young man came in from the stairs. He had broad shoulders and a lithe body, but he moved with a fashionable stoop and looked almost languidly around the room.

It was the man who had tried to stop Gailord.

He stopped looking so languid upon seeing something in the room. And instantly, without a word of warning, he leaped for Benson.

Anyone else on earth would have been overwhelmed by the suddenness of the attack. But Dick, seeming to melt from point to point rather than move, stepped back and sideways so that the impetuous young visitor plowed on emptily with nothing to stop him. He turned, rushed back, and there was a sticklike crack.

The Avenger, with scientific detachment and precision, had put a fist into his jaw where it would do the maximum amount of good.

Nellie stared at the prone figure in bewilderment.

“He must have come here just to kill you!” said Cole. “I’ll say he’s a good actor. He didn’t look at all threatening when he came in.”

“Maybe he’ll tell us about it when he comes to,” Dick said.

But the young man didn’t.

After a few minutes, he opened his eyes, glared around, then went placid and peaceful as a lamb.

“Hello,” he said pleasantly. “What happened to me? Oh, I know. I must have had one of my fits and you must have been forced to . . . er . . . pacify me. Right?”

Nellie looked at Cole, who shrugged. The lithe, broad-shouldered visitor didn’t look like one who was subject to fits. He looked very healthy indeed.

CHAPTER IV

Not So Crazy

The young man sat in a deep leather easy-chair. He lounged there in an indolent way, looking languid and harmless and self-possessed. The Avenger’s diamond stare had never left his face.

“You say you are subject to fits,” Benson repeated. “Just what is the nature of these fits?”

“You saw one of them,” the young man shrugged. “I’m all right. Then—zing! All of a sudden, I’m not all right. I go off the handle. I light into the nearest person.”

“How long have you suffered from them?”

“Oh, for years,” murmured the young man politely. He was unusually polite, streamlined.

The Avenger seemed to dismiss the subject of fits. He said: “You came here to see us, I believe. What did you want to see us about?”

“About Austin Gailord,” said the man.

Josh and Rosabel, Cole Wilson and Nellie tensed at that. But Benson didn’t change expression. He never did.

“You knew Gailord?”

“Very well,” the young man nodded.

“You know what has happened to him?”

The young fellow looked less streamlined for a moment. In fact, he looked rather sick. “Yes, I know.”

“Who are you, anyhow?” Cole Wilson burst out. Cole was the impulsive member of Justice, Inc. Sometimes, he got into trouble from his impulsiveness. The rest scowled at him for interrupting the chief’s questioning, but Benson himself paid no attention.

“My name is Schuyler Marcy,” said their visitor to Cole. Then he turned his light-brown, pleasant eyes back to The Avenger.

“There is an old Philadelphia family by the name of Marcy, I believe,” said Benson. “Wealthy at one time. Not so wealthy since the depression.”

“Flat broke, to put it bluntly,” said Schuyler Marcy cheerfully. “Which brings me to Austin Gailord. I was trying to get a job with him. I need a job quite badly. I knew him pretty well. I was to meet him here in New York, but when I did meet him, uptown, he suddenly seemed to go crazy and ran away from me. I followed in a cab. He came to within a block of this little street and paid off his cab. I didn’t get to him before he’d walked beyond the entrance of Bleek Street. Then he broke loose and ran to this building. Here, he got into that car and drove off.”

“You say he broke loose,” said Benson. “Why were you holding him? Did you want to keep him from coming here?”

“No,” Schuyler Marcy said, looking very honest about it all. “I simply wanted to take him to a doctor. He was acting so strangely, and he . . . didn’t look well. I thought he’d better see a physician at once.”

“Didn’t look well? You mean he was already turning—black?”

“Yes,” said Marcy, looking ill again. “Black, sort of.”

“This is all you can tell us?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Marcy.

“What do you intend to do, now?”

Marcy hesitated an instant. Then he countered with a question of his own.

“Are you going to investigate the cause of Gailord’s death?”

“After the havoc caused by my special car,” said The Avenger, “I could hardly do otherwise. Though the circumstances of his death are so queer that I would do it anyhow.”

“Then I’d like to stick around and help with the investigation,” said Marcy. “Gailord was my friend. I’d like to help nail whoever was responsible for his dying.”

“You think it was murder, then,” Benson said evenly.

Marcy shrugged. “Dead men don’t turn black naturally. Unless,” he added, “this is a sample of some strange, though natural, disease like the old black plague of Europe. But I suppose you wouldn’t know that.”

Marcy didn’t know, of course, that The Avenger was an outstanding medical authority; that he had written treatises on bubonic and other plagues that were used in most post-graduate courses.

“It is not the Black Death of Europe,” said Benson. “If you want to join us in investigating the cause, I think it can be arranged. You can stay here if you please.”

“Thank you very much,” said Marcy, getting up. He was all friendliness and gratitude. It was hard to remember that, a moment ago, he had flown at Benson’s throat in an effort to take his life.

“Show Mr. Marcy to a suite,” Benson said expressionlessly to Josh.

As he said it, the little finger of his left hand half curled as it hung naturally by his side. That meant: “Don’t let him out of here. Observe everything he does.”

Marcy went cheerfully, politely out in the wake of Josh. The Avenger said to Cole, “Check on him.”

With Wilson gone, Nellie said to their pale-eyed chief, “What in the world made him jump at you the minute he got in here?”

“I think I know,” Rosabel said, her intelligent eyes going to the corner by the rear windows. “He looked around the room. When he saw the big television cabinet, his gaze stopped. Then he went berserk.”

“That is right,” said Benson. “It was the sight of our special television set that made him attack.”

“Oh-ho!” Nellie said. “Then he’s in with that devil gang and their mumbo-jumbo. He saw that we had a set capable of receiving their ritual, and he wanted to kill you and destroy it.”

The Avenger didn’t answer. Nellie sighed. Then the television screen began to glow, indicating that someone in MacMurdie’s drugstore wanted to communicate with the Bleek Street headquarters.

They went to the cabinet.

MacMurdie’s homely face showed on the screen. His bleak blue eyes stared at them as if he were in the room. The sandy ropes of eyebrows over them were bunched a little in perplexity, and his lips opened.

But no words came out. Just as they were about to come, Nellie and The Avenger heard a faint scream, from somewhere behind the pictured image. They got a glimpse of the back of Mac’s sandy-thatched head as he whirled to see what was wrong. Then the Scot was gone, and the screen glowed blank again.

Mac was puttering around his laboratory behind the store part when Smitty entered with the black orchid. In front, tending the counters, was the clever, close-mouthed youngster Mac employed. The giant nodded to the boy and went into the rear laboratory, closing the heavy iron door that shut laboratory from story.

Mac looked at the black orchid.

“An exotic posy,” he commented. “One of yer many admirers sent it to ye, no doubt?”

Smitty reddened. “It came from a dead man,” he growled. “The chief wants it analyzed to see if there’s any poison on it. Maybe this is the thing that caused death.”

He brought Mac up to date on events, and the bony Scot whistled. “‘Tis queerrr enough,” he burred. “Well, let’s see if the posy can tell anythin’.”

It was a pleasure to watch the man with the big feet and big, sail-like ears work. But in this case it was an empty pleasure.

Mac, in a series of tests such as few men alive were capable of making, figuratively and literally tore apart the bloom with the blackish petals that shaded into gray-white down near the stem. And he found nothing murderous.

“If ’tis poisoned,” said Mac, “then somethin’ has been used that evaporates without trace in a few hours. And I don’t believe there is such a poison.”

“Then you exonerate the black orchid?” said Smitty.

“Yes. Somethin’ else must have killed the mon—and turned him black. And I can’t guess what would have done that, either!”

He went to the television cabinet to report to The Avenger. He switched it on, opened his mouth to begin—

And then that scream sounded!

Mac whirled from the cabinet. Again the scream came, faint but unmistakable through the iron door. It seemed to be laden with fear, with hopelessness. It was a ghostly, deathly scream.

The giant Smitty was already leaping for the door. Mac jumped after him. Smitty got the door open.

“Mr. MacMurdie! Mr. Smith!” the boy in the store was calling. “Hurry! Here! Please! A lady—”

He didn’t go on because, by then, Smitty and Mac were in the store, too, and could see for themselves.

Stretched out cold on the floor was a girl. “She st-staggered in here like she was d-drunk,” the frightened boy stammered. “She yelled. I guess you heard it. She looked all around, kind of wild. And then she went limp. I didn’t have time to catch her. I think she bumped her head when she fell. You don’t think she was d-drunk, d-do you? She looks too nice to get like that.”

She did look nice. Smitty, always susceptible to feminine beauty, could testify to that. He stared admiringly at her.

She was young, little more than twenty. She was rather tall and had on a silk dress under a spring coat that revealed all the expected curves. Her hair was dark-brown, and you felt that the eyes, closed now, would be of the same color.

“Water!” yelled Smitty gallantly. “Spirits of ammonia. Whiskey! Do something for her. You’re supposed to be a doctor.”

But Mac hadn’t time or need to do anything, because the girl stirred.

She opened her eyes, and they were dark-brown. Also, they were engagingly beautiful, even though they didn’t have a very intelligent expression at the moment.

She didn’t say a word. No “Where am I?” or “What place is this?”

She stared at Smitty without much expression, then looked the same way at Mac. Then, before they could move to help her, she got up.

“Feeling better, now?” said Smitty, with his hand under her arm.

She didn’t say anything. She moved her arm away and started for the soda fountain. She reached over it and touched the spigots there. She looked at them like a child who has never seen such things as soda fountain spigots. She opened one, closed it again.

Smitty looked his perplexity as he watched. He looked at Mac, who shrugged as if to say: “See what she does. Let her alone.”

“She’s been socked on the knob or something. She’s wacky,” breathed the boy clerk.

Smitty and Mac felt the same way, too. But they wanted to help; and they thought that just by watching they could get a clue to her trouble.

“Maybe she lost something very valuable that drove her out of her mind,” whispered Smitty to Mac. “Maybe she’s subconsciously searching for it here.”

Full of the spirit of helpfulness, they let her alone.

She certainly seemed to be searching for something.

Vacant of eye, she went from the fountain to a counter where alarm clocks were stacked in their square boxes. She opened a box, took out a clock, put it back. She went on toward the rear to a counter where talcum powders were arrayed. She looked at one of these.

Then she jumped.

Lithe as a deer, with nothing vacant whatever about her lovely eyes now, she flashed to the rear door, flashed through and shut the thing.

The ponderous bang of the metal portal seemed to echo out the store and along the block. It snapped shut like Mac’s surprise-parted jaws. As one, he and Smitty raced for that door.

It was bolted from the inside. And no one knew better than they did how heavy that bolt was.

“Hey!” Smitty yelped. “Hey!” It was about all he had in him.

“We’ve got to get her out of there!” moaned Mac. “Our equipment! All the lovely, delicate things! A crazy girl in there—”

They banged futilely at the door. And then Mac said abruptly: “Perrrhaps she was not so crazy. Did ye see her eyes when she raced in? They seemed to clear remarkably.”

Smitty nodded glumly. The giant was beginning to feel that something was very sour about the actions of their beautiful and “helpless” visitor. He began to smell a rat as big as a cathedral.

“We’ll have to torch that door down,” he said. “We can’t break it in.”

“Maybe,” conceded Mac, hurrying for the front door. “But we’ll try the rear firrrst.”

They galloped around the corner to the narrow areaway leading to the rear of the store. The door back there was even heavier than the other. It had even more locks on it. An army couldn’t have gotten in from outside. But from the inside, where all the catches were, a slip of a girl could get out very easily.

And had!

While they were wasting seconds in the store, the girl had calmly walked out the back door and was now safely away from there.

“The play-actin’, worthless little Jezebel!” raged Mac. “The— Anythin’ gone, Smitty? The little baggage went through all that act to line us out of here, then get back herself and take somethin’. But what?”

“The orchid,” came in a girl’s voice.

They fell over themselves to look around, thinking for an instant that the girl was not gone, but that she was hiding and had spoken.

Then Smitty realized that this was Nellie’s voice and that it came from the television screen. He hurried there.

Nellie’s blue eyes, sparkling with glee, stared at him.

“You big dope. She took you in nicely, didn’t she? Will you ever learn not to fall for a pretty face?”

“Why . . . er . . . I only wanted to help,” mumbled Smitty, red to the roots of his hair.

“Mac left the current on, so we saw most of what she did,” Nellie said. “She took the orchid and ran. I think that’s all she took.”

They checked. That did seem to be all. It was more than enough! They’d been taken in like a couple of children.

“You’d better come over here while you’re still clothed,” said Nellie. “First, you let somebody steal your car; then you let somebody walk out with a subject of laboratory experiment. Better come here before some little boy steals your undershirt.”

“You—” Smitty began hotly. But he couldn’t think of a suitable retort. He tried so hard that it wasn’t till later that the real puzzle of the thing loomed in his mind.

Who was the girl? How had she known they had the black orchid in the back room? Why had she gone to such lengths to get it, when there was nothing incriminating about it? Or didn’t she know it was not incriminating?

Smitty wished he could get hold of her again.

CHAPTER V

That Girl Again

“She must have been hanging around Bleek Street, drawn by the report of Gailord’s death and the confusion,” Nellie said, back at Bleek Street. “She must have seen Smitty pick up the orchid, then followed him to Mac’s store. There,” she added to the giant, “she realized she didn’t have to do much to lull your suspicions, so she simply took the orchid away with her.”

“Lay off, will you?” pleaded Smitty. “We pulled a boner. All right. It could have happened to anybody. The question is, now what?”

The Avenger supplied this. As usual, he paid no attention to the interplay of diminutive blonde Nellie and gigantic Smitty. He spoke out of a study of papers on his desk.

“We have a report on Schuyler Marcy. What he told us is true as far as it goes: He is a son of wealth which has disappeared, leaving him practically penniless. He has been at Gailord’s Hoboken plant quite a few times, and that may have been on the quest of a job, as he said. Also, he has been around the Bristal Airplane Co.’s plant, North Philadelphia, many times. He didn’t touch on that. And the report makes no effort to explain.”

“Gailord is working on airplane parts, now, isn’t he—wasn’t he?” said Smitty.

“Yes,” said The Avenger.

“Then it looks like Marcy is singularly interested in bombers. The Bristal plant turns out bombers, doesn’t it?”

“It does. In fact, it is the plant that subcontracted stabilizers from Gailord’s smaller factory.”

“That seems to tie something up in the same bundle,” frowned Nellie. “But I don’t know what.”

The Avenger went on “We have a report on John Jay Hannon, too. Or, rather, we have a lack of report that is almost as significant as a full report would be.

“For nearly eight weeks, no single person, as far as is known, has set eyes on him. He has vanished.

“John Jay Hannon,” Benson added, “is the inventor who has also, besides Smitty, been working on a television-scrambling device.”

“It looks as if he found the answer,” said Cole Wilson. “Then it looks as if he took the answer, sneaked off and hid, and has been using it ever since to organize this cult.”

“His disappearance could be accounted for by his hiding out somewhere,” said The Avenger calmly. “Or it could be accounted for by his being taken away by force, or by his murder and the disposal of his body. I think Hannon is our next subject in this affair of the black death.”

He looked at Smitty and Nellie.

“Two people are listed as closest to Hannon. One is a daughter—all the family he has—who lives in his apartment with him when he is in town and at his Long Island home when he is not actively engaged in some business deal. The other is a young man named Daniel Miller, who was his assistant for years and left about eighteen months ago to set up in business for himself as a free-lance mechanical engineer. I’d suggest that you two see what you can learn from them.”

The pale, deadly eyes went to Cole Wilson’s face.

“Cole, you and I might go out to his Long Island home. His workshop and laboratory are out there. We may find out something by a look around.”

Outside, Smitty looked solemnly, at Nellie and said: “Maybe we’d better split up in the interests of efficiency. You interview this Daniel Miller, and I’ll take on the daughter, Alicia Hannon.”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” snapped Nellie. “She may be young and good-looking. If so, you’d be so busy gawking, you wouldn’t have time to ask questions. We’ll work together.”

The giant grinned. He’d only been working to fluster the little blonde. Both knew that he hadn’t room for anyone else but her. But that didn’t keep her from getting jealous of others.

They looked up Miller first.

Daniel Miller, it appeared, had done very well by himself, since, leaving Hannon’s employ. He had a suite of four offices on the top floor of a Forty-third Street building. The suite was knee-deep in Oriental rugs, and the furniture was walnut. There were two very eye-filling girls they had to pass before they could get into the private office. When they did, they found the proprietor as impressive as his layout.

Dan Miller was twenty-eight or so but looked older because he was so large. He was over six feet and solidly built. He had a big blunt jaw and incisive dark eyes. He shook your hand in a steam-shovel grip and asked in a deep rumble what you wanted to see him about.

“We wanted to see you about Mr. John Hannon,” Nellie replied, with a sweetness that brought a black look to the giant Smitty’s moonface. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with Mr. Hannon on a rather urgent matter, and no one seems to know where he is. We heard you knew him well, and we thought you might be able to tell us how to contact him.”

Miller looked distressed. Also, he looked suspicious.

“I do know him well,” he admitted. “I worked for him for years. He’s one of the world’s finest. But I can’t tell you where he is, because I don’t know. I’ve tried to find out, too. No one seems to know where he has gone. I don’t like the look of it. But,” he said suddenly, “why are you trying to find him? What’s your interest in him?”

Nellie decided to come clean.

“We’re with Richard Benson,” she said. “I don’t know if the name is familiar to you, but—”

“I’ll say it’s familiar!” exclaimed Miller. He grew instantly more cordial. “As a mechanical engineer I know the name very well indeed. His new tin-reclamation process was introduced just as I was designing some new-type assembly lines for can factories. So you’re working with Benson. But why is he interested in Mr. Hannon?”

“We want to know if his disappearance could have anything to do with a television-scrambling device he was working on.”

Miller sighed in a sort of patiently exasperated way.

“That television scrambler!” he said. “It’s been the bane of the old man’s life. Ever since a reporter got wind of it and published a short item about it, Hannon’s had the life deviled out of him by all sorts of people. And the crazy part is he never succeeded with it, anyway.”

“He didn’t?” said Smitty in amazement. “You mean, he never perfected it?”

“He hadn’t while I was with him,” said Miller. “If he succeeded later, I haven’t heard about it.”

Smitty and Nellie stared at each other. If the inventor hadn’t completed the television scrambler, then the only apparent motive for violence against him had been removed.

They talked to the young mechanical engineer a little more. He told them what they’d already discovered: No one of all his friends and associates had any idea where he was; several important business deals were waiting his signature; all anyone knew was that the elderly man had gone away for a complete rest and told no one where.

“Well, his daughter will know if anybody does,” said Smitty. “On our way, Nellie.”

But Dan Miller got up as well as Nellie.

“You’re going to talk to Miss Hannon? Sounds like an excellent idea. But suppose I come along. I’ve known Alicia for years. She might tell me things she wouldn’t want to confide to strangers. That is, if there is anything to tell.”

“Good enough,” said Nellie. “We’ll be glad to have you with us.”

The Hannon’s apartment was in a building on the East River. It was a big building, pretty fancy. The Hannons, it appeared, had an extra-large apartment—two standard ones thrown into one—on the top floor on the river side.

Nellie and Dan Miller and Smitty rode up in an automatic elevator unannounced. Nellie pressed the buzzer outside the door.

Smitty didn’t know quite what pleasant words of entrance the tiny blonde had cooked up. Whatever they were, they were never used, because the giant spoke first when the door was opened by a tall, pretty girl with dark-brown hair and lovely dark-brown eyes.

“It’s her!” he exploded.

The girl glared at him and tried to shut the door. He had his capacious foot in the way. He pushed it open and the three went in. Miller was staring in astonishment at the big fellow, but Nellie was not. Nellie knew why he had galvanized to this sudden action.

The girl, Alicia Hannon, was the pretty bandit who had taken the black orchid from Mac’s drugstore.

Alicia Hannon stopped glaring, after a minute, and began to smile. The effect was charming, in spite of the circumstances.

“Hello,” she said to Smitty. “I feel all right now. The help I got from you in that drugstore fixed me right up. What can I do for you?”

Smitty was bewildered. He’d heard of Schuyler Marcy’s ferocious attack on The Avenger in the Bleek Street room, and his subsequent change to a polite, pleasant person. Now, this girl acted first like a wounded tigress, then like any polite hostess. The world seemed suddenly full of polite maniacs.

“For one thing,” said Nellie, answering the question for the giant, “you can tell us why you wanted that black orchid so badly. For another, you can tell us where your father is.”

“Telling about my father will take quite awhile,” said Alicia, looking distressed. “I’ll answer your question about the orchid. Will you step into the next room with me? It’s a sort of town workshop my father fixed in the apartment. The black orchid is in there on a workbench.”

She went across the room onto which the outer door had opened—a huge living room, richly furnished. She opened a door on the other side.

Nellie was quite properly suspicious of this girl. Being feminine herself, she wasn’t so easily fooled by an engaging surface manner. She looked into this second room pretty carefully before entering.

The room showed itself to be a quite innocent place. It was almost bare. At one side was a leather chair and a desk. Along the other side was a teak-wood slab, forming a kind of deluxe workbench. On this was a handful of blackish badly wilted stuff that might or might not be the remains of the black orchid. They couldn’t quite see from the doorway.

Nellie shrugged a little and followed the girl over to the teakwood slab. Dan Miller and Smitty went, too.

“You see,” Alicia Hannon said apologetically, “I wanted this flower because—”

Smitty had seen her move in a hurry at the drugstore when she flashed to that metal rear door and through. She moved the same way now—only, it seemed, even faster.

With the last word seeming to float in the air after her like the wake of a fast boat, she darted to this door. But she did not leap out of the room nor did she slam the door shut as she had at the store.

She pressed a button next to the door. It looked like an ordinary electric-light switch.

Almost as fast as Alicia, Nellie Gray moved. But it was not quite fast enough. There was a six-foot gap between Nellie and Alicia when the latter jabbed at that button.

There was a jarring thud as a heavy metal screen fell between the two girls. The thing came so close to Nellie that it almost cut her small nose off, and she banged into it so hard that she bounced back and nearly fell. She started to charge at it again, with Miller and Smitty now beside her.

“Don’t!” warned Alicia. Her tone was not at all pleasant, now. Indeed, at something in it, the three stopped as though barricaded by it quite as much as by the screen.

“That screen is electrically charged, now,” said Alicia. “If you touch it again,” she said to Nellie, “you’ll do more than bounce back. If your heart is in excellent condition, the voltage might not kill you. But you would find it very uncomfortable.”

“Why, you—” gasped the little blonde.

Alicia Hannon went out, not bothering to shut the door.

The three looked angrily at the screen.

It was of very heavy mesh. It divided the room lengthways, with the three cooped up in a long, narrow cell on the workbench side, and with the chair and desk and the doorway on the other side. The screen was not too heavy for muscles like Smitty’s to twist and wrench into an opening. But there was that electrical charge—

Smitty’s huge forefinger poked experimentally toward the screen, as you might poke an unbelieving finger toward a gleaming surface labeled “Fresh Paint.” You know, just to be sure.

Alicia Hannon appeared in the doorway again. She had on a crazy little wisp of a hat and was calmly drawing on her gloves. She was all ready to leave.

“Believe me,” she said, with not much interest, to the big fellow, “you won’t like it if you touch that screen. The walls inside the screened-in half, the half of the room you are in, are of metal. They’re electrified, too. Your best move will be no move at all. Just sit on the floor there.”

“You’re going to be pretty sorry about this,” said tiny Nellie in a grim tone.

“Look here,” Dan Miller said. “Why do you do a thing like this to me? You know me, Alicia. I’m your friend.”

“You seem to be on the side of people who are not my friends, now,” snapped Alicia. “Goodbye. I won’t see any of you again, I hope.”

“Wait a minute,” Smitty yelped. “How long are we to be held here?”

Alicia looked at a competent watch on her slim white wrist.

“A clockwork mechanism will shut off the current at midnight, tonight.”

“That’s nearly seven hours!” Smitty said. “You cant—”

Alicia Hannon was no longer in the doorway. She had calmly left them.

Smitty poked with that big forefinger at the screen again. Then he went into a kind of shaky dance, wrenched his finger away and howled.

There was enough current in the mesh to knock an ordinary man cold!

CHAPTER VI

The Black Pig

There was just one consolation in this humiliating situation for Smitty. Nellie had kidded the life out of him for being fooled by the good-looking daughter of the well-known inventor.

Now, Nellie had been fooled, too, right down to the ground.

“It’s amazing how a man can be fooled by a pretty face,” he said guilelessly. “That is, men are fooled. Other girls, of course, are too smart for that.”

“Shut up!” said Nellie waspishly. She whirled to Dan Miller. “You didn’t do so well, did you? You said you were an old friend; that she might talk to you when she wouldn’t talk to strangers. She didn’t seem to treat you much as a friend.”

“I’ve never seen her act like this before,” said Miller apologetically. “She has always been sweet and gentle—”

“Hummmmph!” snorted Nellie. “Come on, Smitty. Get us out of here.”

“Just like that, huh?” growled Smitty.

“What’s a little wire?” Nellie goaded him. “Come on, crash it. If you hit it hard enough—”

“No thanks!”

Nellie turned from him and went to the bench. She did not experiment by touching the wall. Looked at closely, you could see that it was of metal, all right, with dull paint hiding that fact from all but a searching glance.

“I remember about this, now,” said Miller suddenly. “The old man, Hannon, had this room fixed just after I left his employ. Twice, he was threatened by foreign agents after some of his inventions. Then he fixed this trap for anyone else who might break in and try to steal his secrets. I guess that’s why he had such a heavy current run to it—he didn’t care whether he killed a spy or not.”

“Couldn’t you have remembered this just a little sooner?” said Nellie over her shoulder. She was too sore to be very good company at the moment.

She picked up the blackish shreds on the bench. Then her tone changed.

“It’s that black orchid, all right. But, Smitty, did Mac tear it up as much as this in his experiments?”

The giant looked. “No, I don’t think so. Looks as if Alicia Hannon got mad at it or something and chopped it up in a vegetable grinder.”

It certainly did. The wilted, already-decaying flower was in bits. One more puzzle.

The giant turned from it and bent to the floor. He flipped back a rug. The floor showed sleek and polished under the thick Oriental, and Smitty grunted.

“Good. Hardwood strips. I was afraid the floor might be parquet, or even some composition like smooth cement.”

“So it’s in strips,” said Miller, who wasn’t very good company either, with a seven-hour wait ahead of him. “So what?”

Smitty didn’t answer. From an inner pocket, he took a very handy tool he always carried. It was like a very small pinchbar; but the hooked end was pointed instead of flat, and the straight end had a chisel edge that was sharper than most knives.

Smitty jammed the chisel edge into the hairline crack between two of the narrow hardwood strips and pried. A good deal of splintering followed the action.

After half a dozen tries, he removed a strip from wall to screen, about nine feet long.

“Oh,” said Nellie.

Smitty rammed the end of the strip at the screen, near the wall in which the doorway was set. Sparks licked around the thin strip and it smoldered and fumed, but he got it through a widened hole before it burned through. The end of it touched the electric button next to the doorway, then pressed.

The tiny blue sparks stopped playing around the short-circuiting wood, and the screen began rising up into the ceiling again, taking the wood with it and snapping it off as the metal frame disappeared into the ceiling slot.

“So we’ll be here till midnight,” said Smitty. “That’s what she—”

“Let’s cut the self-praise,” snapped Nellie, “and get along out to Hannon’s country place.”

“You think Alicia will be there?” said Miller.

“Maybe,” Nellie retorted. “But whether she is or not, that’s where The Avenger will be, unless we get out there too late to catch him. He said he was going there, before we left Bleek Street.”

“I’ll go along,” said Miller. “I haven’t met Mr. Benson; I’ve just heard about him. I’d like very much to meet him.”

“You will,” Nellie replied. “And right after that, you’ll probably find more things happening than you ever dreamed could happen around one person in the same short span of time.”

They climbed into the car, down at the curb, and headed for Long Island.

John Jay Hannon’s Long Island place was not very elaborate, but it was quite big. The grounds were acres in extent, and most of it had been left to grow up in trees and bushes and underbrush as it pleased. It made a pretty wild tangle. Around the lot went a high mesh fence with a barbed-wire strand at the top. Not too high to climb; but, undoubtedly, it was hooked up with an alarm somewhere so that if someone tried to climb it, the trial would be recorded in the house.

The house, as far as could be seen from the barred gate, was in about the center of the estate, and there was another building almost as big. This had no windows; it was probably Hannon’s well-guarded laboratory and workshop.

The Avenger stopped his car several hundred yards from the place, and he and Cole Wilson finished the trip to the fence through underbrush on the other side.

At the fence, Benson said evenly, “I think it would be just as well if we got in with no one knowing about it.”

Cole nodded and raised a foot. The Avenger’s steel-strong hands went under it.

Cole leaped upward as hard as he could and was further catapulted by The Avenger’s great strength. There was an overhanging tree branch so high up that none but a tree surgeon’s special stepladder would have enabled an ordinary man to reach it. Cole just caught it with his fingertips, got a better grip and drew himself up. He dropped down on the other side of the fence and went to the gate.

After a moment’s search, he saw the burglar-alarm connection at the gate. It went to a small house a dozen yards along the drive. No one was in the little building. Cole entered and cut off the alarm.

He opened the gate for The Avenger, then connected the alarm after he’d shut the gate again. The two went toward the house, not along the drive but moving with effortless silence through the shrubbery. It would have taken a sharp eye to see them.

They went around to the rear of the house. There, The Avenger took from a pocket a thing like a small watch. There was a tiny battery in it, and an indicator needle on a calibrated face. As he held this next to the lock on the door, the needle moved, indicating current flowing through an alarm wire fixed to the lock.

They went around to the front again. Anyone concealed in shrubbery, watching the front door, would see The Avenger and Cole. But it was more likely that if there were a guard, he’d be inside the house.

Anyhow, they had to take a chance with the front door, since the main objective was to avoid sounding an alarm.

Dick held his clever little telltale to the front-door lock, and the needle did not move. He picked the lock; then he and Cole went into the house. They listened and heard nothing.

“Looks like nobody’s home,” whispered Cole.

The Avenger said nothing. He went to the kitchen.

The kitchen was almost hotel-size. It was spotless and looked as if unused for all the eight weeks the owner, John Jay Hannon, had been away. But in the butler’s pantry, Dick saw a bread board, and on this were several crumbs.

The crumbs were fresh.

Someone had hidden out in this house very recently, and long enough to eat at least one meal. Whoever it was, had been very clever. He had gone over the place meticulously to hide trace of occupancy. But these few crumbs had been left unnoticed.

The two went through the house but found no one. Cole, however, suddenly gave a low whistle while they were in the basement.

There was a heavy-lidded incinerator opening down there. Cole had opened this. Now, he pointed, and The Avenger looked.

There was a dead animal in the incinerator chute. It appeared that someone had thrown it in and hadn’t gotten around to incinerating it yet. Perhaps the intention was to wait till darkness when the smoke couldn’t be seen.

The dead animal was a guinea pig. And the pig was black.

It was not just the short, bristly hairs of the little animal that were black; the hide was black, too. It was the strange black death, applied this time to a small laboratory test animal instead of to a human being.

“It looks to me as though Hannon has been hiding out all these weeks in his own house,” Cole whispered excitedly. “It looks as if he’s near here, now; as if he’d experimented on this thing sometime today—or, at most, yesterday, because the body is quite fresh.”

Dick said nothing. He stared with icy, basilisk eyes at the blackened little body. Then he took things from various small pockets and set to work.

Rapidly, he took specimens of the guinea pig’s flesh, blood and lungs. These he carefully put into labeled little bottles. After that, he went up the basement stairs and through a covered passageway from house to laboratory building.

A heavy door shut the laboratory from the passage, but this opened at a touch. It was unlocked. The Avenger’s pale, glacial eyes seemed to burn brighter; but if he suspected a trap in the innocently unlocked door, he did not say so.

The two entered a room like a small garage—big, low, with no supporting pillars in the center. It was crowded with scientific apparatus, most of it pertaining to radio but a good deal to chemistry, too.

The Avenger busied himself in an examination of the chemical apparatus.

There was a beaker that had been cleaned till it had a crystal polish on the sides, but in the bottom were traces of some gummy stuff stubbornly clinging. He scraped some of this into a tiny envelope, sealed it.

All the lights in the big room snapped out, as someone at the doorway punched the light switch. Cole swore, then was silent. The Avenger made no sound from the start. He dropped swiftly to the floor in case someone started shooting in the dark.

There was no sound of a shot, however. Instead, there was a step. It seemed to be the light, clicking step of a woman or a girl—the sound made by dainty high heels.

Benson had located Cole in the blackness. It was blackness, too. There were no windows in this ultramodern little shop; all light was from fluorescent tubes. With those clicked off, the blackness was absolute.

The Avenger’s finger pressed Cole’s arm.

“Gas!”

Cole nodded. He had reasoned the same way: A woman alone switches out the light, then walks calmly and unafraid in the darkness toward where she last saw two men! It argued that for some reason she was entirely unafraid of them. That meant that she expected them to be helpless. About the only reason they’d be helpless would be if gas had been released in the big room.

Each had nose clips with little pads of chemical-soaked cotton devised by MacMurdie. They slid these over their nostrils. The clips would keep them from the effects of any gas for about twelve minutes.

They stayed silent, crouched in darkness. The light, clicking steps of the girl continued toward them. She was a cool customer, whoever she might be.

Cole felt a hand touch him, felt fingers begin to feel over his pockets in an impersonal investigation. His own hands darted up. He caught slender wrists. There was a muffled shriek of surprise and fright.

“All right,” Cole called to The Avenger. “I have her.”

In a moment, the light clicked on again, as Dick’s finger touched the switch. It revealed a tall, beautifully shaped girl struggling in Cole’s grasp. The girl had dark-brown hair. What her face was like, you couldn’t tell. The girl’s face had a gas mask over it, hiding it from forehead to chin.

She had been fighting Cole furiously in the darkness. Now, with the lights on, she redoubled her efforts to tear loose and get away. She kicked him in the shin and clawed at his face.

“Hey! Cut that out!” Cole said.

He could talk if he breathed out with the words through his mouth, and then breathed in again through the chemical filters in his nostrils. This would keep him from inhaling any of whatever gas it was the girl had released.

But the girl couldn’t talk at all, through her older-type mask. She could certainly scrap, though. And she did, till finally her lithe body went limp. She had fainted.

That is, it seemed as if she’d fainted. But it might be an act. Cole held her very tightly as he carried her toward the door.

“Shall we take her to the house and see what she has to say for herself?” he asked The Avenger, breathing out with the words.

Benson’s head with its thick, jet-black cap of hair, nodded affirmatively. They went into the covered passage from laboratory to house, Cole still carrying the girl.

This passage was little more than an outside hallway. It was cement-floored, brick-walled. A couple of windows gave light, and, overhead, a couple of bulbs would provide illumination at night. It was soundly built but was only a shell, a covered runway, allowing a person to walk between the two buildings in any kind of weather without being exposed to the elements.

There was no one in the runway when they stepped from the laboratory. It certainly looked innocent enough. But an instant later it did not look at all harmless.

They’d about reached the center of the thirty-foot expanse when there was a bang behind them. The laboratory door had thudded shut.

They’d left this heavy portal open when they came out. It had no spring hinge of any kind. There seemed to be nothing to shut it automatically. Yet, it had shut, after standing open for perhaps ten seconds.

Both The Avenger and Cole had turned in surprise at the sound of its closing. Now, they turned back and found the other end of the covered passage barred. But not only by a door.

Four men had come soundlessly from the house while the backs of the two were turned. They stood there, now, with submachine guns in their hands. The guns were lined with the careless ease of trained hands at the man with the pale, icy eyes and at the dark-haired man with the girl in his arms.

Cole and The Avenger tensed instinctively for action. Then they relaxed. Behind them was a door automatically shut and locked by some spring or electrical mechanism. In front was the little group of grinning gunmen. At the sides were brick walls with barred windows.

“Yeah,” nodded one of the men, reading the helplessness in Cole Wilson’s eyes. “Be smart and don’t try anything. You’re hooked, all right. Boy, with these two, we do have a nice net full of fish!”

CHAPTER VII

Brain Injury

Cole was still holding the girl in his arms. His dark eyes darted to The Avenger’s glacial, masklike face.

The words of the leader of these four men hinted that they’d already captured someone else—that Benson and Cole were but two more prisoners. He wondered who the others were.

He was to find out shortly.

“Follow us into the house,” said the leader of the murderous four. “Don’t come any closer than you are now. Keep your hands over your head—you with the white eyes. I’ve heard of the trick stuff you carry around in your clothes.”

The four backed from the passage into Hannon’s house. The room the passage opened into was a kind of library, very large, rather bare. Cole and The Avenger followed as ordered, keeping the same twelve- or fifteen-foot distance between them.

In the big room, the leader said to Cole, “Put the girl down on that couch.”

Cole lowered the girl to the leather divan. The leader took the gas mask off her face.

On the desk in this room was a picture of a girl. The pictured face was the same as that of the girl on the couch. Even if her familiarity with the tricks of Hannon’s laboratory hadn’t hinted at her identity, this picture of her on Hannon’s desk would have done so.

She was Hannon’s daughter. Also, she was the girl who had tricked her way into Mac’s drugstore and out again with the black orchid, not knowing that a television screen was recording her movements, blocks away in the Bleek Street headquarters.

Cole thought he saw a chance in his moving around the girl. The movements allowed him finally to twist his left arm sharply inside its coat sleeve.

The twist unzipped the pocket inside the sleeve just below the elbow. Three little spheres about the size of small marbles slipped down into his cupped left hand.

He straightened suddenly and threw them at the floor at the feet of the four gunmen.

There was a faint plopping sound, and, at once, as if the entire section of flooring had caught violently on fire, thick, greenish smoke billowed up.

The men yelled and fired wildly through the sudden smoke screen. Red flashes laced the green-black smoke. Cole, on hands and knees and crawling toward the door, wished he’d had access to gas pellets instead of smoke pills. But he hadn’t. All he’d been able to get at were the smoke grenades. He thought they’d be enough, however.

He was at the door. He felt around for The Avenger, and his fingers rested on a leg. That was all. Something smacked on his head like a falling telephone pole, and that was all Cole Wilson knew for quite a little while.

The Avenger reached the door an instant later.

Dick wasn’t caught that easily. He had an idea more men than the four coughing back there in the smoke were in this place, and that the yells of the men would have drawn them. So when his slim but steel-strong fingers touched a leg, he swayed back while a swung gun clipped past him, straightened up, and lashed out with his fist.

He felt his knuckles crunch against the cartilage of someone’s Adam’s apple and heard the owner go down wheezing in agony. The Avenger felt a throat, and pressed at the nerve center at the base of the skull.

Another man went down, this time without sound. But it was a hopeless fight. Two clubbed guns found his skull at almost the same instant, and a third cracked against his shoulder so hard that the bone would have been splintered if it weren’t protected by slabs of rock-like muscle.

There was silence in the smoke-filled doorway. Then the smoke dissipated. Coughing and swearing, seven men went to the aid of the four who had originally trapped Cole and Benson.

Then they carried the unconscious Cole and Benson off.

Cole came out of it first. He came out of it hearing familiar voices—the deep rumble of Smitty’s voice and the high, clear melody of Nellie’s. He opened his eyes.

“Attaboy,” came Smitty’s rumble. “Feeling better?”

Cole nodded and looked around.

He got the impression that they were in a cell. It was a big cell, about twenty feet square, with no windows. Cole was foggily puzzled about the source of the light. Then he saw that Smitty or Nellie had fixed one of the tiny flashlights, which all members of Justice, Inc., habitually carried, on a bench so that it pointed upward.

Cole got back all memory with a rush.

“The chief?” he gasped, struggling upward.

He saw The Avenger, still and limp beside him. Nellie was bending over him, slim deft fingers touching his head.

“I think he’ll be all right,” Nellie said. “I don’t think there’s concussion. But you can’t be sure. He was hit pretty hard. What happened?”

Cole groaned.

“I have a dirty hunch that what happened was that once more I acted on impulse instead of common sense. I may have pulled a boner.”

He told them all that occurred.

“Now that I look back on it,” he confessed, “I can see that the chief could probably have thrown smoke or gas pills long before I had the chance. After all, he’s quicker than I am—quicker than any other living man. The fact that he did not try it, makes it look as if he had some plan in mind. If so, I sure knocked it into the middle of next week. And got ourselves knocked there, too.”

Nellie patted his hand. “You don’t know that,” she soothed. “Anyhow, it’s done. No use worrying.”

Smitty glared at her. Cole Wilson was extremely handsome, and the giant could be jealous even of him when the tiny blonde indulged in such gestures as hand pattings.

“We did just as foolish a thing as you,” she said. “We came here to join you, with Dan Miller, and had hardly set foot inside when we were picked up by a young army with machine guns. We didn’t have a chance and were taken completely off guard. We let ourselves be surrounded like a lot of dopes and here we are.”

“Miller?” said Cole.

Nellie told who he was and a little about him.

“Where is he now?”

Nellie caught her red lip between her teeth. “I . . . I’m afraid he was seriously hurt. Maybe even killed. He tried to put up a fight and was clubbed down. The gang just left him lying on the ground when they herded us in here. He sure looked like a goner.”

“By the way,” said Cole, “where is ‘here’? Are we in a basement?”

“No,” said Smitty. “Garden house. This is a separate little building in back where they store hose and gardening tools and wheelbarrows and such—as you can see if you stop strangling Nellie’s hand and look around. It’s built of cut stone like the house. Regular fort of a place.”

“Wonder why they shut us up in here instead of just knocking us off?” said Cole moodily.

“Who cares?” said the giant. “We’re still alive, which is the main thing. I have the idea, though, that the only thing that saved us was that these guys seemed to have something else on the pan that didn’t leave them time to take care of us properly. They were too busy, just then, for a neat and noiseless mass murder— Look! He’s coming around!”

The three stared anxiously at The Avenger.

The colorless, glacial eyes, like polar ice in moonlight, had opened. They stared around the solid little stone house as widely as possible without a head movement. They went to Nellie’s face, Smitty’s, Cole’s.

And the three felt icy fingers tear at their hearts, and Nellie cried out softly.

In the pallid, deadly eyes there was no recognition, it seemed, and no intelligence. Only dreadful vacancy.

“What’s . . . the matter with him?” whispered Smitty.

But they all knew what was the matter. It was hardly necessary for Cole to say, “Those blows on the head! There is concussion or something. We’ve got to get him out of here. Got to get him to a hospital.”

Nellie’s small hand went to Smitty’s vast paw now. That was where it was always to be found in times of real stress. But the giant released it after a second and strode to the door. He banged against it frantically with his shoulder.

It was a very solid door, thick, of oak. But such was the big fellow’s frenzy that he might actually have rammed it down, given time.

However, he wasn’t given time. The little door was still shivering when the answer came. A cold voice just outside said, “Hold it, pal. There are three of us here with Tommy-guns. And we’d be glad to use them.”

Breaking down the door was out of the question.

The Avenger seemed not to have heard the commotion. He didn’t even seem to notice Smitty. Dick simply lay there, staring with pale and vacant eyes at nothing.

“We’ve got to get him out!” Cole repeated with a quiver in his voice.

But there was no way to get him out. All they could do was stare at each other and at their chief for what seemed many dragging hours.

The little door opened from the outside. A man spoke in a harsh and domineering voice.

“All out. End of the line. But come slow, and come with your hands up.”

“One of us is hurt,” said Cole. “I don’t think he can walk.”

“He’d better walk,” snapped the man outside. “Nobody around here is going to carry anybody.”

Smitty gently raised The Avenger to his feet. Benson stayed upright, swaying a little. The injury, it seemed, was to his mind. His body worked fairly well. Smitty went out of the garden house first, with Benson next and then Cole, helping The Avenger keep his feet. Finally Nellie came out.

Cole saw that a rear driveway came almost to the door of the little building. Beyond that was the rear of the house and the laboratory. He saw these things because an outside light was on; otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to see at all. It was full night now, and a very dark one.

In the driveway was one of the biggest limousines he had ever seen. Around this was a group of men. And with the fellow who had opened the garden-house door were four or five men. All had guns in their hands.

“Into that car,” snapped one of these. “Step on it!”

The Avenger seemed not to have heard. He was staring vacantly around, at the rear of the house, up at the eaves, at the chimneys. Smitty looked, too. He couldn’t see anything that might have attracted the pale eyes. The eaves were just eaves, the chimneys just chimneys, with the usual lightning rods clamped to their sides.

“You heard me,” rasped the man again. “Into the car.”

There is a time for obedience. People who live dangerously, whose profession is peril know this. Smitty got into the back of the big limousine. With all those guns pointed at their heads—not their bodies, safely sheathed with bulletproof fabric of The Avenger’s invention—it would have been suicide not to. Maybe it would be suicide to obey too; but at least that way they’d live a little longer.

So the giant got into the car. So did Nellie. The Avenger, helped by Cole, put his foot up on the running board.

Then Benson staggered a little, lost his balance, fell sideways and forward so that his head almost grazed the end of the front bumper. One of the gunmen cursed and started a kick at the prone man.

Cole Wilson went berserk at this.

Roaring, he leaped at the man and knocked him a dozen feet away. From him he turned to two more, and though they got him to his knees finally, their faces were both smashed to pulp first. After that, half a dozen cursing men surrounded him and methodically beat him down.

But there was, strangely, no gunplay.

“Throw that clown inside,” somebody said.

They threw Wilson into the rear of the car. And then there was a commotion!

“Hey!” yelled a voice. “That guy— Benson! Where the hell—”

“He’s gone!” another screamed.

Smitty and Nellie looked at each other with dawning comprehension.

“An act,” breathed Nellie. “The chief was putting on an act. And it fooled them—”

“In that tree!” came a yell. “Get around it; Don’t let him get away. But don’t shoot unless you absolutely have to!”

Nellie and Smitty sagged back in the seat. So The Avenger hadn’t gotten away. He’d made a fine try at it, but now was surrounded. They tried to look out and see which tree, but the roof of the car cut off vision upward.

Smitty saw that between front and rear compartments of the big car was heavy glass. Nonshatterable, of course. And when the men closed the car door on them they did something to the handle.

Too late, Smitty realized what was happening. His great hand snapped to the door, but he couldn’t budge the handle. They were locked in here from outside. They were as helpless as they’d been in the little fortlike stone garden house.

A man got behind the wheel, grinning evilly.

“Take ’em to the river,” said the one who’d opened the garden-house door. “You know the place—where it’s good and deep. Run ’em over the edge, car and all, then report back here.”

“O.K.,” said the man at the wheel. He looked as if the order was a very enjoyable one.

The car smoothly and soundlessly followed the drive around the side of the house and swung down toward the gate. At one point, half a dozen men were tense in a circle around a big tree. Two more were cautiously climbing it.

To capture The Avenger with as little noise as possible, obviously.

At the gate, a man stepped from the little house, also grinning evilly. The gate swung open. The gang seemed to have taken over John Jay Hannon’s house entirely. With the consent of the eminent inventor? There was no way of telling.

The car rolled into the curving road and started for “the river. You know the place—where it’s good and deep.”

CHAPTER VIII

Another Man’s Face

The Avenger was back there, hopelessly surrounded and outnumbered. Cole and Nellie and Smitty were in a death car, being driven to a watery grave!

“The stock of Justice, Inc.,” said Nellie, “seems to be at a very low ebb at the moment.”

Just how low was indicated by the lightness of her tone. Every member of The Avenger’s little band lived with death always at his elbow and used to its presence. But they all knew that sometime death would get nearer than their elbow. It would get them by the throat! You can’t live forever in a constant war with the underworld.

Quite often, death seemed about to snatch them; and when this happened, instead of sitting down and moaning about it, the little crew made jokes about it. The worse the predicament, the lighter the tone.

And Nellie’s tone now was very light indeed.

“Well, it’s nice to be driven to the cemetery in style,” said Cole, glancing around at the luxurious flittings of the car. He had dabbed the blood from his face and was about recovered from the brush with the men.

“Swellest hearse I’ve ever seen,” nodded Smitty.

Suddenly there was a movement of the driver’s arm and a click. Thin steel shutters walled off the windows of the car.

“Like the back of a dog catcher’s truck,” growled Cole. “This guy Hannon sure had his house and apartment and car and everything else fitted up to trap people. He was certainly a suspicious duck.”

“Maybe with reason,” shrugged Smitty. “Everybody after his inventions all the time. And now it looks as if somebody has murdered him for one—which Miller said he hadn’t even perfected. The television scrambler.”

“Unless,” said Cole, “this Miller guy was mistaken and Hannon did perfect it after Miller left his employ.”

Nellie was the first to notice the change. She blinked sleepily, then sat bolt upright.

“Good heavens! This is like the back of a dog catcher’s truck! That thug up there is shooting carbon monoxide in here from the motor exhaust. Going to kill us with monoxide, then drown us in thirty or forty feet of water.”

They got out their nose clips and put them on. The clips might or might not protect them till they got to the river, depending on how long that took. But there was certainly no use just lying down and dying ahead of time.

The driver looked up in his rearview mirror and grinned bleakly back at them. There was no steel shutter over the glass separating front from rear.

Then his grin faded and suddenly the front of the car sagged in a curious way and the rumble and thump of a flat tire boomed out.

Faintly through the front glass they heard the driver swearing furiously. Then he hopped out of the car in a hurry. His haste was obvious. Here he was, less than half a mile from his starting point, and had a flat to fix with a car full of prisoners. If a cop ever caught up to him and got curious about the shuttered windows—

There was a swift rattle of tools, and the car started to rise up under the urge of a jack. Then it stopped, and suddenly one of the rear doors opened.

Smitty and Nellie and Cole blinked into the pale, glacial eyes of The Avenger. They weren’t vacant now. They were terrible in their intensity and purpose.

“Chief!” yelled Smitty. “Thank heavens! We thought we heard the guys back there say they had you up a tree.”

The three of them were out now. They looked toward the front of the car and saw that their murderous chauffeur was the same way. Out! He lay beside his jack, with a blue egg on his jaw where The Avenger’s fist had struck.

“The only thing up the tree back there,” Benson said evenly, “is my coat, spread on a fork to look as if I were in it. I got to the next tree, then to one over the gate. As your car came out, I dropped and got on the rear bumper. Fortunately, it is a dark night.”

“That f-flat—” faltered Nellie.

“When I fell toward the front of the car I wedged a small capsule in the tread so that it would burst with the first revolution of the wheel. In the capsule was concentrated sulphuric acid.”

The colorless, icy eyes went to Smitty.

“Change the tire, Smitty, and drive to Bleek Street,” he said. “I’ll see the three of you there in a little while.”

“If you’re going to stay around here, you’ll need help,” Cole protested. “Let me—”

“I’ll see the three of you at Bleek Street soon,” said The Avenger calmly. They knew there was no changing that decision.

Benson picked up the unconscious driver and faded into the underbrush beside the road. He went to the car in which he and Cole had come to Hannon’s place.

The man muttered a little and moved. Dick’s fist struck with exactness of force and direction at his jaw again, and the man entered a second sleep. Then Benson took a small case, like an overnight bag, from the back of the car.

He opened it to disclose what was probably the world’s most complete makeup kit.

In the top tray were dozens of pairs of shell-thin little optical cups with different-colored pupils. Just under this were myriad little bottles of hair stain. Under that, in the bottom tray, were chemicals to draw and distort flesh, wax fillers, pads, all the aids of disguise. In the lid of the box was a mirror.

The Avenger propped the chauffeur up in the seat and set the box so the mirror was beside the man’s face. Then he changed coloring, conformation and expression, till his features were unbelievably like those of the gunman. Finally, he selected contact lenses to match the man’s muddy-brown eyes, and slid them over his pale, glacial orbs.

He got out a hypodermic needle and gave the unconscious man an injection that would keep him sleeping for four or five hours. Then he locked the car from the outside and walked slowly back toward Hannon’s estate.

As usual, everything The Avenger had recently done had a sound reason behind it. From the pretended brain injury to the present disguise and return into the enemy’s stronghold—all was done according to a pattern.

When Dick had come to in the tool house, he had regained consciousness completely and instantly, as he did when waking from a sound sleep. Like a jungle animal. And almost the first thing he’d seen, which none of the rest had, was a peephole in one wall. And in the peephole was an eye.

So they were observed. That was why he had pretended the injury that would make him seem harmless, and hence would make their captors tend to pay little attention to him in future action. For that reason, he had adopted the vacant stare. This also permitted him to listen with all his power of concentration and still not seem to be listening.

The Avenger’s hearing bordered on the miraculous. He could hear sounds so faint that none of his associates dreamed there were sounds at all.

And it seemed to him, there in that solid little stone cubicle, that he heard something down below him. Down under the seemingly solid stone floor.

He never had identified the sound or even been absolutely sure he’d heard it. Indeed, he might have been hearing only the pulse in his ears; after all, those two blows had been bad ones. But he thought he had heard something and wanted to investigate.

Also, on coming out of the tool house, he had looked at the lightning rods on the Hannon house and observed that they seemed just a little taller than they need be.

As if, just possibly, they were aerials, not just lightning rods.

Finally, the men back there had shot at him and Cole in the house, but refused to shoot outside on the grounds. In the house, the sound of shots would be unheard by anyone on the road. Outside, the same sound would be heard for a mile and would draw attention.

This, and the bread crumbs, indicated that this gang had used Hannon’s place for some time as a hideout and wanted to keep on using it. Therefore, they didn’t want to draw attention with shots.

It all added up to something that needed to be looked into.

The driver of the death car was supposed to dump the car at a distant place, then find his way back as best he could to report.

The Avenger figured that the trip, with a cab back to within half a mile of Hannon’s place, should take a little less than an hour. He waited till that time had passed, then walked up the road openly to the gate.

The man in the lodge house set the seal of approval on The Avenger’s disguise. He saw him walking up, came from the small building and opened the iron door within the gate. Dick stepped through. Full in the floodlight, he waited for the other man.

“Any trouble, Harry?” the man said to The Avenger, staring right at him without suspicion.

“Naw,” said Benson. “It went off like a clock.”

This was a ticklish moment. He could duplicate the man’s looks, but he hadn’t heard his voice. All he could do was speak rather thickly, huskily, and as little as possible.

“Hey, what’s wrong with your voice?” said the gate tender, scowling a little.

Benson remembered the blow to the throat he’d gotten in on one of the men in Hannon’s library during Cole’s ill-timed smoke attack.

“One of ’em slugged me in the neck, back in the house,” he said huskily. He felt gingerly at his throat. “Feels like my Adam’s apple is squashed into apple sauce.”

“Oh,” said the man, grinning.

Benson went on toward the house. Next time he spoke, he would make it a hoarse whisper. No one could identify that, or make comments on the sudden difference in Harry’s voice. He went to the back of the house. He passed something that made his eyes glint a little behind the disguising cups. It was his coat, hauled wrathfully down from the tree and ripped into shreds by the furious and baffled mobsters. He was in Harry’s coat, now. It fitted much too tightly across the shoulders, but he managed to squeeze into it.

Another man hailed him. He was going toward the rear door, too. In fact, Dick had waited under a tree till he caught someone going in. Undoubtedly, there was a code tap, and he had no way of knowing what it was.

Dick fell into step with this man near the rear door.

“How’d it go?” asked the man.

“Easy,” Benson said, in his hoarse whisper. He explained why he was talking that way.

The other man said: “I don’t like that so good. Those three we knocked off were The Avenger’s buddies.”

“So what?” said Benson in his husky whisper.

“So what? Cripes! Don’t you know about that guy? He’s dynamite. Hurt any of his pals, and you can’t run fast enough or far enough to get away. If we’d caught the guy up that tree, everything would be swell. As it is, I think it’d been better to let his buddies go, with him still on the loose.”

“What can one guy do against a whole mob?”

The man tapped on the kitchen door. Four shorts, one long. The door opened. A third man looked out, with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. He relaxed as he saw the two.

Benson walked past him through the kitchen, still with the first man. They entered the hall. Benson started up the stairs.

In a big living room, opening off the hall, were four or five men. One of them was tall and stooped, with glasses over weak, vicious eyes. Benson recognized him as a gang leader named Suva, one of gangland’s murderers-for-hire. He’d caught a few glimpses of him before, but not enough to be sure.

Suva snapped: “Harry! Where you going?”

Benson pointed upstairs.

“Thought I told you to report to me when you got back. So you don’t report. You slide right on by and up to your room. Come here.”

Benson entered the room through the big hall door. He stood before Suva. The gang leader, with his command obeyed, was mollified a bit by the token of his importance.

“Did it go off all right?” he asked, in a different tone.

“Slick as grease,” whispered Benson.

“What’re you talking in the basement for? What’s wrong with your pipes?”

“Got socked in the Adam’s apple,” whispered Benson. “Anything else?”

“No. I just told you to report, that was all. Run along upstairs. There’s a game in the front room. Go and lose your dough like a sucker, the way you always do.”

Dick went up the stairs. There, he was confronted with trouble. This was a big house. Eight rooms opened off the second-floor hall. All eight doors were closed. Behind one would be the room in which Harry bunked. But Dick couldn’t know, of course, which this was.

Also, however, he couldn’t afford to fool around and reveal his ignorance by hesitating.

He chose the third door on the right, saw there was no light showing, and unhesitatingly opened it. He stepped into darkness. But the darkness didn’t last long. There was a click, light flooded the room, and two men looked at him over gun sights.

The guns were .45s and the trigger finger of each man was whitened with pressure!

CHAPTER IX

Underground Crypt

The two men were in two beds, one on each side of the room. They were typical thugs, shifty-eyed, slit-mouthed, pallid.

“What’s the idea?” Benson whispered. “Put them rods down.”

The guns lowered.

“Harry!” snapped one of the men. “You damn fool. You know no door in this joint is opened without the knock. You oughta have your knob blown off.”

Benson impatiently tapped on the inside of the door. Four shorts and a long. “O.K. now?”

“Yeah, sure,” growled the man. “What’s the idea of the stage whisper?”

The Avenger repeated his story of being hit in the throat. He added, “Anyhow, what I got to say ought to be said in a whisper.”

“What’s that?”

“I got a plan to get some heavy dough for ourselves out of this and lam.”

The man farthest from the door gaped at him.

“You mean—cross Suva? And the big boss? You’re nuts.”

“All right. If you don’t want to hear. I sneaked in here first because I thought you two guys might be interested.”

Benson turned as if to go out again. One of the men said hastily, “Wait a minute.”

His tone was almost a whisper, too. Benson had hit the right note. Avarice. He could see their thoughts in their faces: Maybe this Harry did have a workable scheme. In that case, they might throw in with him. If he didn’t, they’d hear all about it, then turn him in to Suva.

He sat down on one of the beds. “Come on over,” he whispered to the second man. “We’ll talk low, not yell across a room.”

The other man came over and sat down, too.

“Now, my idea,” Benson whispered hoarsely, “is this—”

His hands shot out.

Each hand got a throat, and each hand was a terrible thing of steel, relentless, unbreakable.

Each of the two men was bigger than Benson. But neither of them, with all his frenzied strength, was able with two hands to loosen the grip of this strange man’s one. At the ends of his arms, rigid as bars of iron, they struggled without sound, weakened, hung limp.

The Avenger injected the same numbing drag into them that he had used on Harry. He put them in the room’s closet and locked the door. Then he straightened the beds to conceal the fact that the men had ever been in them.

He went to the window.

A tree was within reach. He got to the nearest branch, crouched there a moment like a baleful leopard, then dropped to the ground.

He went to the tool house.

A complicated system of locks held the door. It was so very complicated, indeed, that it told a story of things far more important than garden tools being kept within.

It took nearly ten minutes to pick the locks. Then Benson went once more into the stone cubicle. He got out his flashlight and rayed it over the floor.

A minute search failed to reveal any opening in that floor. If something under this place needed examination, at least the way was not through the floor.

The Avenger slid out into the night again and refastened the locks. He searched around the grounds in a circle whose central point was the garden house. Then he stopped.

Back of the place, thirty feet or more, was a heap of black earth and rotting leaves. A pile of natural fertilizer. A search around this turned up the kind of thing he’d been hunting.

There was an innocent-looking broken branch lying beside the pile. He pulled up on it, and the whole pile rose. It was only a camouflage for a trapdoor in the lawn. Stairs were revealed.

The Avenger went down these and into a moist tunnel. The minute he did so, he heard voices, scraps of conversation and a queer whirring.

He went forward.

Under the tool house floor, but with no passage upward to it, he found the rock crypt of the television scene! The underground room from which that devilish broadcast had been made which they accidentally saw on Smitty’s scrambler.

In the crypt, now, was a big television cabinet much like Smitty’s own, but with enough changes to show that it had been put together by a different man. The screen was glowing with a moving scene; from it, came the conversational scraps Dick had heard.

The picture seemed to show the inside of a laboratory somewhere. It was taken from straight upward, as if the recording lens was in a ceiling. Two men in white coats moved in and out of focus. Now and then, they talked in fragmentary fashion as men busy on the same task will talk.

The whirring sound Dick had heard came from a camera placed in front of the television screen. A moving picture camera recording in film the action on the screen. A man was working the camera, eyes intent on his job. Benson stole up behind him.

In another instant, the man would have been down, never knowing what hit him. But at that precise second a voice came rumbling down the tunnel.

“Ray! Ray—”

The man at the camera cursed and kept on grinding. Then the screen went blank, though the power was still on. The man straightened up and turned toward the tunnel opening. The Avenger moved with him, and behind the man’s back managed to reach the oblong block of stone, like an altar, that had shown in the first scene.

He crouched behind it. In a moment, two men entered the crypt.

“Look, Ray!” said one angrily. “How many times do you have to be told to shut that door in the lawn when you come down here?”

“I did shut it,” protested the cameraman.

“Like hell you did. We nearly fell into the tunnel while we were makin’ a search around to see if that guy, Benson, is still near the place. The door was wide open.”

“I was sure I shut it,” said the cameraman.

“You better be more sure next time, pal.” The man’s tone changed. “Through for this time?”

“Yeah.”

“O.K. Come along, then.”

The three lugged the cumbersome camera and equipment out of the crypt.

“Would have sworn I shut the trapdoor,” came the cameraman’s voice once more.

There was complete darkness in the crypt. The Avenger left the shelter of the stone block and moved soundlessly to the door of the tunnel. He let ten minutes go by; then he went down it to the trapdoor.

There, a flash of his light showed the release catch, and he pressed it back. Just above him he heard a faint whistle. His hands went to his pockets, came out, and he thrust the trapdoor up.

He emerged into a glare of light from the outdoor bulbs strung in back of the grounds. And he emerged into a ring of men glaring murder at him, with guns in their hands!

He couldn’t go back. In the underground pit, he would be helpless. Without an instant’s hesitation he kept on upward, shut the door, and stood in the ring of men.

“I told you I shut that door!” That was the cameraman.

“Why, it’s only Harry,” someone else said.

The Avenger, hands clenched by his sides, looked calmly around the grim circle, taking the hundred-to-one chance that he could still get by on his disguise.

But that chance didn’t work out.

“Harry, my eye!” said a man in a hoarse, agonized whisper. “This the guy said he was socked in the neck? Only one guy around here got a knock in the throat. That’s me! That ain’t Harry! Look at his left hand. There’s no scar on the back.”

“Then if it ain’t Harry, it’s—”

“Yeah! It’s the guy with the white eyes. Benson! And we got him dead to rights—”

The Avenger’s clenched hands opened.

The whistle he had heard before emerging had obviously been a signal. It wasn’t a very bright thing for the whistler to do, since it had warned Dick as well as the other men.

When, after hearing the whistle, Dick’s hands had gone to his pockets, they’d come out closed over a dozen tiny smoke grenades. Now, their opening released them.

The pillar of smoke that instantly rose might have come from a burning garage, it was so dense and so big. It hid The Avenger so that a battery of battleship searchlights couldn’t have picked out his form. And immediately Dick moved in its cover.

Straight ahead of him he had methodically noted that two men stood near together who were shorter than the rest. Toward this spot, The Avenger leaped. Just before reaching the cursing pair, he took off in a high jump with all the force in his extraordinary legs.

It was done in perfect form, with body straight and horizontal at the zenith of the leap, as if an imaginary bar were being hurdled. He must have cleared the heads of the two with a foot to spare; he couldn’t see in the smoke.

He lit running. Toward the other outbuilding on the place—the garage.

The gang could have seen him, now, if they’d looked. But they didn’t look. The Avenger was supposed to be still in that circle of men and smoke. They moved in on themselves, clubbing around at random. A lot of yells showed that they were giving each other some trouble in the fog.

The Avenger slipped into the garage. Two cars were there, in the four- or five-car space. He started to get into one, a heavy coupé, when he heard voices.

There was a man’s voice and a girl’s voice. They came from the other car, a sedan almost as big as the limousine in which Smitty and Nellie and Wilson had been driven almost to their deaths.

Dick went soundlessly to this car.

In the back seat were Alicia Hannon and Daniel Miller.

Miller had blood down the side of his face, and Benson remembered Nellie’s words about how he had been left for dead when she and Smitty were captured.

Alicia was in a queer robe, almost like that of an ancient priestess.

“What kind of an animal are you, anyhow?” Miller was saying, with contempt in his voice. “The idea of working with the very gang that killed your father!”

“Dad isn’t dead—yet,” said the girl.

“Well, you should know,” said Miller cuttingly. “You seem to have the complete confidence of this cutthroat crew. They’d tell you the truth, I suppose.”

“Will you get out of this car?” snapped Alicia.

“I will not. I’m going to hide here till I see a chance to get away. And why, may I ask, did I find you here? Were you going to slip away, too? Double-cross your nice pals?”

“I was looking for you. I was sure you weren’t dead—only knocked out. So I did find you, here, trying to get away.”

“And you mean to say you’re going to turn me in to that bunch of killers?” Miller’s tone softened. “Alicia, we were good friends once, when I worked for your father. Maybe we were more than friends. At least, I hoped so. Now—”

The Avenger had looked over the car’s locks while he was listening. He saw that they were fashioned as were the locks on the limousine: they could be secured from the outside.

He locked them, softly, and crawled into the front compartment. A short search with deft fingers found the button that snapped shut the heavy glass between front and rear compartments. This car was made to trap people by the consistent Hannon, just as the other was.

The Avenger pushed the button and the glass slid shut with a solid bang.

“Hey!” came Miller’s startled voice. Alicia screamed, too, but Benson paid no attention.

The ignition was locked and there was no key, but it took The Avenger only a few seconds to connect the wires below the dash, working surely and swiftly by feel. Behind him, hell was being raised. But he could hear only dimly the cries of the trapped two. The rear compartment was pretty well sealed.

The car motor sounded. The Avenger got into first gear. He warmed the motor an instant, then gave it the gun.

Like a tank, the car plowed ahead, tearing the garage door off its hinges. The door slid off the hood after a dozen feet, and the sedan leaped down the drive.

Near the tool house, the men had discovered that once more, somehow, Benson had given them the slip. They all saw the car at once, after the rending crash of its exit from the garage. Yelling, they ran after it. They didn’t withhold the bullets, now. They poured slugs at the machine!

Splintered stars formed all over the bulletproof glass of the windshield and windows. Dents leaped into the metal of the body. But no bullets got through. The car was almost as well proofed as one of the Avenger’s own machines.

Calmly, Benson went for the gate. He went fast, to give himself a few seconds there. He didn’t think the car could take a collision with those iron bars and remain unharmed.

The gate guard came running from the lodge house. The Avenger threw a tiny gas grenade. The man stared glassily at him, and fell, with the gun he had drawn discharging its bullet into the ground.

So fast that his body seemed a blur, Benson leaped from car to gate and back again. With the gate open, he drove the sedan through. The following men were so close that two almost caught the bumper, but the car got away clean.

A good getaway. The Avenger headed for the Bleek Street headquarters with his two sudden guests. But as he drove, grim fury showed in his pale, deadly eyes, clear now of the disguising lenses.

He’d gotten away. But this was defeat!

The Avenger had meant to steal out, get all the members of Justice, Inc., and perhaps a dozen picked city detectives besides, and come back here and round up the entire gang.

The gang would scatter, now, with this warning. They would go to a new hide-out, and the pursuit would have to begin almost from scratch again. The way they’d let loose with their guns told that they’d not try to use this place as a headquarters any longer.

Benson had saved his life, but the murderous members working under the shadow of the Black Wings had won the battle. It remained to see if they could also win the war.

CHAPTER X

Priestess of Doom

Josh had some reporting to do when Benson got back to Bleek Street. At the urgency in the colored man’s face, The Avenger took that report before he did anything else.

“We got another of those television broadcasts,” Josh said tensely. “It was about three hours ago, several hours after you left here for Hannon’s home.”

“Like the first?” said Benson evenly.

“Just like it, except for one thing. The shadow of the wings deepened as it did before. The shadow left and showed a figure, like before. The figure put out a lot of high-sounding stuff about the members of the Black Wings being safe as long as they followed the instructions of the Voice, and being in terrible danger if they disobeyed. And—just as the first time—a man’s death was predicted. Or else it was accomplished right then and there; I don’t know.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes were like polar ice in moonlight. They seemed to burn and freeze like pale, liquid oxygen.

“The victim this time was a man named Edwin Maller. The same ritual was gone through. A figure stood in the underground stone crypt and was supposed to represent Maller. It was of wax, I think, not a living person. This figure was given a black orchid. Shortly afterward it shriveled and fell. And it had turned black.”

The Avenger remembered the swiftness with which the black death had struck Gailord after that first accidentally witnessed Black Wings scene.

“And this man, Edwin Maller?” he asked.

“In half an hour the police teletype carried the news about him,” Josh said. “He had just fallen over dead, in his home. The corpse seemed a little shriveled. and it was black! Just as Gailord’s corpse was. Maller,” Josh Newton added, “was a foreman in the Bidloe Locomotive Works.”

“Gailord—owner of a factory turning out bomber stabilizers,” murmured The Avenger, pale eyes lambent. Maller—foreman in another factory. There is a parallel. But you said there was one thing different about the television scene.”

“One thing very different,” Josh nodded. “In the first, the figure talking was a hooded man. His was this Voice they babble about. In this second broadcast, the talking figure—the central figure—was a girl! And she was not hooded as the man had been. You could see her face very plainly. She was the girl we saw take the black orchid from Mac’s store.”

The Avenger turned to Smitty. Dick had come up by himself, fast, from the basement of the building where the Justice, Inc., cars were garaged.

“We have two guests,” he said to the giant. “They are in the rear of Hannon’s car I came here in. Better bring them up.”

A moment later, Daniel Miller and Alicia Hannon were in the big top-floor room. Miller was fuming like a wet firecracker.

“Who do you people think you are, that you can keep me a prisoner like this? It amounts to kidnaping. It—”

“I thought I was rescuing you from that gang at the Hannon home,” The Avenger said evenly.

“You did. And I certainly appreciate it. But did you have to keep us penned up in the back of that car?” Miller got sore again. “The least you could have done was to turn Miss Hannon and me loose as soon as you got away from Long Island.”

The girl said nothing. Still in the damning robes of a Black Wings priestess, she stood there, not looking at anyone, not speaking to anyone. Josh was staring at her. He nodded vigorously to say that she was the one who had broadcast the death sentence on Edwin Maller.

The Avenger’s colorless, deadly eyes went to her face. It was still a pretty face, though very pale.

“Miss Hannon,” Benson said, with a vibrancy that stirred every hearer deeply, “your father is either dead or in danger of death; held by murderers. You know this. We are trying to help him, and hence you. You should know this, too, by now. Yet, consistently you have refused to help us. Have you anything to say, now?”

Alicia shook her head and tried to avoid the diamond stare of the pale, calm eyes.

“You broadcasted the death sentence on Edwin Maller from the crypt under your tool house. Don’t you think that needs some explaining?”

Alicia didn’t even bother to shake her head this time.

Miller said doggedly, “Just the same, there must be an explanation. I’ve known Alicia a long time. She wouldn’t work with the very people who hurt her father without some good reason.”

Hannon’s daughter didn’t even look at her defender.

“So you refuse to say anything at all?” Dick said.

The girl nodded.

The Avenger turned to Dan Miller. “And you, Miller?”

Miller shrugged. “I’d talk all day if I had anything to talk about. I’m convinced you’re on the right side. But I don’t seem to know much of value.”

“You said Hannon had not completed the television scrambler experiment,” Benson reminded the big young man with the forceful jaw. “But it seemed that Hannon did complete the work. He turned out a set the equal even of our own, which we thought was without parallel.”

Miller shrugged again.

“I’ve been out of Hannon’s employ, in business for myself, for some time. He hadn’t completed the thing when I left and I assumed he never had done so. Now—well, it seems that he did.”

“And also,” said The Avenger quietly, “he completed experiments on some drug or gas that turns dead bodies black.”

Miller’s eyes went wide. “You mean that black death stuff is Hannon’s invention, too?”

“It looks like it,” Dick said. “We found the body of a guinea pig, turned black, from a recent experiment, at Hannon’s place.”

He saw that Josh had more to say. “Well, Josh?”

“We have a report on this Schuyler Marcy,” the Negro said. “He told us he was trying to get a job with Austin Gailord. Said he’d met Gailord here in New York to talk it over. We find that Marcy had a job with Gailord. He has been on Gailord’s payroll for over a year.”

“Bring him up here,” The Avenger said.

Schuyler Marcy joined them.

Marcy looked his usual indolent, elegant self, in fresh-pressed tweeds showing Josh’s valet proficiency. But Marcy’s eyes were glittering with an anger that he kept from tone and face.

“You said I could help in this affair of the black death,” he began. “So I accepted what I thought was an invitation to stay at your headquarters. But I have been given no chance to help. And when I wanted to go out, I found out I couldn’t. I’m not a guest, I’m a prisoner. And I won’t stand for it.”

“You are a guest,” The Avenger said. “As are Mr. Miller and Miss Hannon. I believe you said you were trying to get a job with Gailord, Marcy.”

“That’s right.”

“But you already had a job with Gailord, Marcy.”

Marcy was silent for a moment.

“In other words,” The Avenger said evenly, “you lied.”

“All right,” said Marcy. “I had a job with him. What of it?”

“Gailord, dying on his feet, hurried to Bleek Street to ask our help. And you tried to stop him. Why?”

“How do you know he was coming here to ask your help?” Marcy countered.

“It’s a certainty. Gailord reached our very door, realized he hadn’t the strength to tell what he knew, then saw our car. He got in the car deliberately and deliberately raised all the commotion he could with it, to involve Justice, Inc. so deeply in his death that we would have to help with an investigation. His plan was successful. But you tried to prevent it.”

Marcy said nothing.

“What was your job with Gailord?”

No answer.

“Why did you enter this place, at first, with the intent to kill me?”

“Fits,” said Marcy equably. “I told you I was subject to fits.”

“I think,” said the giant Smitty very softly and very ominously, “that this is a case where our special ways of getting truth would be valuable.”

Miller exploded, “Oh, no, you don’t. You aren’t going to feed me any drugs, or hypnotize me or anything. I demand to be released. You’re not the police. We’re not criminals. You can’t hold any one of the three of us here a moment longer.”

Benson rather surprised the members of his little band, here. The Avenger had superpolice powers. No pressure these three could have brought could have coerced him. Yet, the man with the colorless, infallible eyes, said, “I called you guests. That is what I meant. If you want to walk out of here, if you persist in refusing to help justice to be done, you are free to do so.”

It startled them for an instant. Then they took him up on it. Miller was plainly speaking for all three when he said, “Fine. I’m going at once. You can reach me at my office if you want to.”

“I’m going back home to Philadelphia,” said Marcy.

Alicia, in the priestess robes, still kept silent.

“You came here in a car that belongs to Alicia,” Miller said, “now that her father can’t be found. If it’s all right with you, well use Alicia’s car to get to our destinations.”

“Of course,” The Avenger said expressionlessly. “Josh, please open the garage doors for them.”

While Smitty and Nellie, Rosabel and Cole Wilson gaped at their leader, the three “guests” went to the door. Then it began to make a little sense.

The Avenger’s little finger was half curled as his hand hung naturally by his side. It gave the code message.

“Follow them!”

Smitty, Nellie and Cole stepped to a panel in the side wall. Smoothly it swung out to reveal narrow stairs down to the rear of the basement. Stairs known to no one but them.

Benson went to the laboratory.

Through all the violence at the Hannon home, he had preserved the safety of various little bottles and an envelope.

The bottles contained the samples of the dead guinea pig’s blood, lungs and flesh. The envelope held the minute particles scraped from the beaker in Hannon’s laboratory.

He was in there for hours. Time ceased to have meaning. The Avenger on the trail of a scientific or criminal mystery seemed to be made of more than flesh and blood. He seemed not to need sleep or food or rest.

Josh and Rosabel took care of headquarters routine. Josh watched the teletype and the big television cabinet. Rosabel took care of phone calls and shielded Benson from interruption.

Still, their chief stayed in the laboratory.

Smitty reported, voice but not image coming from the big cabinet.

Smitty had perfected tiny belt radios that each member of Justice, Inc. carried. These could be picked up on the big set—just sound, of course, not image. A transmitter hardly as large as a slim cigar case can’t transmit television images.

Smitty said, “Following Miller. He has gone to his office, late as the hour is. He has been there ever since— Wait a minute. He’s leaving, now. I’ll report again.”

Then came word from Cole Wilson.

“Schuyler Marcy has done just one thing since he left Bleek Street. That is, trail Alicia Hannon. He has stayed with her like a shadow. He doesn’t seem to like the idea of Nellie being on the girl’s trail, too. Yes, he spotted Nellie. Once he tried to get Nellie out of it by hiring a cab to crash the one she was in. But she got another in a second or two and went on. Report later—if there’s anything to report.”

Finally, Nellie’s clear voice sounded.

“Alicia’s in her car alone, now. A long time ago she let Miller and Marcy out. She seems to be going to some definite destination, a long way off. We’re out past the Newark Airport on Route 1, going south and west. I’m having trouble following because a cab is conspicuous outside the city. And I believe someone is following me. A cab crashed into me in town, and I think someone hired it to do so. Also, a little while ago, I saw a car behind me that I’ve seen half a dozen times in the last half-hour. I think the man at the wheel is Miller.”

Miller!

But Cole had said it was Marcy who was following the girl.

A moment later, though, Nellie was confirmed.

“Miller is following Alicia Hannon,” Smitty’s voice sounded from the big set. “Ring around the rosy. I follow Miller, Cole follows Marcy, and both follow Alicia, who is also trailed by Nellie. It’s a mess. I wonder where it will end.”

That was all. The hours passed. Benson worked on in the laboratory, flaming brain concentrating on the tangible evidences left by the black death.

CHAPTER XI

The Four Electricians

The papers were full of the death of Edwin Maller.

Austin Gailord was a fairly important man, a factory owner, and his death hadn’t created nearly the stir that had been roused by the death of this obscure factory foreman, Maller. But this was because Maller was the second to go the same way.

Two black deaths began to set imaginations aflame and tongues wagging.

What was this queer scourge that, in forty-eight hours, took the lives of two men? Was it some grim new disease? If so, it appeared to be hideously scattered. The doctors were wondering if some epidemic was upon them.

All the metropolitan papers sent first-run copies in a rush to Bleek Street. Josh and Rosabel looked up from these to see The Avenger coming out of the laboratory.

Benson hadn’t slept for a long time, but the fact did not show in his face or actions. He seemed literally to be an iron man. The pale eyes were as clear as though he’d just risen from a rest; the pantherish tread was as firm and elastic as ever.

You couldn’t tell from the colorless, basilisk eyes whether he had been successful with his test tubes and retorts or not.

“Have you heard from Nellie or Cole or Smitty?” he asked the gangling Negro.

Josh gave their reports.

“But that was hours ago,” he added. “There have been no reports for a long time. I wonder if they’re in some kind of trouble.”

“If you do hear from them,” said The Avenger, “contact me at once. I will be in Wilmington, Delaware.”

He went to the roof, moving with that uncanny speed that seemed so effortless, but which left the eye baffled.

There was a facade above the top floor of the building. Hidden by this, except from the eyes of observers in distant, higher buildings, was a small autogiro that Benson had recently purchased.

The Avenger was probably the world’s best pilot. With his great skill, plus the addition of a few refinements on the machine that even the manufacturers hadn’t thought of, he could land and take off from even his small rooftop.* He rose in a perfect jump-start, now, with the motor roaring full on. He leveled off toward La Guardia Field, where he had a hangar of his own with half a dozen various types of planes.

* (The Philadelphia post office, of course, has maintained a roof-to-airport mail service for some time, but with a much larger rooftop for landing.)

There, he chose a bullet of a thing, all motor and, seemingly, no wings. He sped for Wilmington.

The Avenger had done more in the laboratory than work on the puzzle of the black death. He had recalled every detail of the televised scene he had witnessed over the cameraman’s shoulder in Hannon’s underground crypt.

That scene had showed two men in white coats, working in a distant laboratory. By piecing together all he had seen and heard, Dick thought he knew where that lab was.

“—tensile strength . . . acetate . . . viscosity—” were some of the scattered words he had heard the men say.

A part of a window had showed, reflected in a downward angle from the side of a glass tank. And in this had reared a building tower, far off, which Benson had seen once before and filed perfectly in his marvelous memory.

This tower was in Wilmington, Delaware. The scraps of words indicated that the men were experimenting with a new plastic or fabric, and the home of these experiments was also in Wilmington.

At the gigantic home plant of the Stockbridge Chemical Corp., to be exact.

In the huge administration building of the Stockbridge Corporation, Benson asked for Stockbridge himself, president of the vast organization. The information girl’s eyebrows raised clear to her hairline at the promptness with which Richard Benson was ushered into the private office of the man who was in some ways harder to see than the President of the United States.

She would have been even more surprised at old Stockbridge’s greeting. He shook Benson’s hand almost effusively.

“Fine to see you, Mr. Benson. Fine! Fine! Haven’t seen you since the time when you straightened us out on that new smokeless-powder process. What can I do for you?”

“First, you can answer a question,” The Avenger said. “Have you recently discovered a new rayon-type thread that is cheaper and stronger than any present type?”

Stockbridge’s effusiveness vanished. But he didn’t look angry; he just looked dubious.

“I can’t answer a question like that, even to you,” he protested. “If any of the directors found out—”

“So you have,” Benson said. “I was sure of it. Now, I’d like to have a look at the laboratory in which work on this new fabric was completed.”

“I didn’t say—” Stockbridge said weakly. “Oh, well, the answer is ‘yes,’ all right. Come along. I’ll take you to the lab myself.”

It was on the top floor of the big building and was maintained only for experiments. There were many research rooms in this building, and this was in the rear. From the window, you could see that building tower that had showed in the televised scene, reflected in the glass tank.

With Stockbridge raining questions which Dick Benson didn’t bother to answer, The Avenger looked the room over. It was empty, now; no scientific young men were in, proving again that the experiment had been satisfactorily concluded and was now in the hands of the production wizards.

When his gaze got to the ceiling, the pale, icy eyes halted. The Avenger stared at the electric-light fixture.

“There is an air space between the ceiling and the roof?” he asked.

“I imagine so,” Stockbridge said. “The room would be pretty hot without one. Why?”

“I’d like the names of any electricians who have worked on repairs on this top floor recently,” Benson said.

“I remember, now,” Stockbridge sighed. “You never did answer questions till you were good and ready.”

He got the required information from the building engineer.

Four men had worked at various repair tasks on that top floor. In a short time, Benson faced these four.

“Which one of you,” he asked, “repaired the overhead light fixture in Research Room 34?”

There was no answer. Three of the men looked at each other; the fourth stared blankly at Benson. This man was a young fellow with a cud of tobacco in one cheek that seemed to have become a permanent fixture.

“Certainly one of you did,” The Avenger said, in that even tone which could frighten an evildoer more than any shouts or threats.

The young fellow with the distended cheek said, “Mebbe I did. Quite awhile ago. We work all over the joint all the time. I can’t remember.”

“What do you mean by a long time ago?”

“If I did work on that particular room, it would have been about six months ago.”

“None of you worked on it more recently that that?”

No answer.

Benson turned to Stockbridge. There was no emotion in his pale, awful eyes.

“I shall have to hypnotize these men,” he said. “I will answer for their safety. They won’t be hurt; but one of them will answer my question.”

As he spoke he watched the four men—not their faces, but their hands. The fingers of the young fellow quivered a bit, then clenched into fists.

“I will start with you,” Benson said evenly. “The rest will please wait outside. Perhaps you’d better call a few company police to make sure they wait,” he added to Stockbridge.

When he was alone in the research room with the man, The Avenger said, “Look at the ceiling fixture in here. As you can see, it has been tampered with. The reason for that was to allow the fixture to be silently drawn up by someone hiding in the air space, and a lens substituted. Thus, all done in this room could be witnessed through the lens.”

“I didn’t do it,” protested the man. “I swear I didn’t. I got a good record. You can look it up.”

“You can tell me instead of my looking it up,” said Benson.

His voice had taken on a queer monotone. His eyes were unblinking, and as bright and blank as chips of chromium in his masklike face. Any of his aides would have known that monotone and that blank, insistent stare. No man could hold out against it, even when calmly forewarned as this fellow had been that he was going to be hypnotized.

In about four minutes, the man was in a trance and was answering everything asked him.

And his answers were not those of guilt. The Avenger could swear positively—if not in a law court—that the man was innocent.

He called in another of the four electricians.

There was sheer genius behind the pale, deadly eyes of The Avenger. He was less a man than a magnificent crime-fighting machine, dedicated to avenging a hideous wrong done him by the underworld years before.

But he was, after all, a human being. And human beings, no matter how efficient, make mistakes now and then.

Before he had started to hypnotize the second man, it was borne in on Benson that he had slipped up here.

The notification came in the form of a growing tumult from down below somewhere. The research room was near the concrete and steel stairway; and, in a moment, Stockbridge opened the door and said, “Something seems to have happened in the basement. It sounded to me as if someone yelled, ‘He’s dead.’ ”

There certainly was a commotion down there. The Avenger got down the three flights to the basement of the building in a blur of movement. He pushed his way through a crowd.

The man lay near the foot of the stairs. He was dead, all right. But there was more than that to it. A lot more.

The corpse was black.

Like something shriveled to a cinder, the body lay there, with white-faced men all around. A few girls from the upper floors, drawn by the shouts, were being kept from seeing the corpse, by the men.

It was the building engineer.

Beside him lay the thing that had come to be a dreaded symbol of this gruesome form of death—a black orchid!

So none of the four electricians was guilty of altering the light fixture. The building engineer himself had tampered with it and had hidden, in the three-foot air space, the television transmitter that had sent the actions within the room to the master set in the crypt.

Then the brain behind this Black Wings terror had discovered that The Avenger was at the Stockbridge plant questioning men concerning the light fixture. To be sure the engineer would not be questioned and talk, he had been sentenced to death.

But how?

How had the Voice—whoever it might be—learned of this so promptly and acted so swiftly, presumably from a distance?

Benson set about trying to find out.

There was a small cubicle walled off in a corner of the basement. It was the dead man’s office. There was a phone in there. The Avenger got the building switchboard.

The engineer’s name, a notebook told him, was Frank Stanton.

“Did Mr. Stanton just make a call from this phone?” he asked the switchboard operator.

“Yes, sir,” the girl said.

“Have you a record of the call?”

“No, sir. Mr. Stanton just asked for an outside wire. He didn’t have me get his number for him.”

“Give me the city operator.”

The Avenger got the answer he’d been afraid he would get. This was a vast company and many calls a minute cleared out of it. In the past ten minutes eight calls had gone out direct, without the Stockbridge operators getting the numbers.

The Avenger gave instructions for each building switchboard to check and see what employees had asked for a direct wire in that time. Then he turned back to the basement.

Stanton had the inevitable black orchid in his dead hand. But a man can’t simply wave his hand and produce a black orchid in a building basement. Either it has to be given to him, or he has to have it down there in the first place. Benson looked around to see if Stanton had carried it in with him that morning.

It seemed that he had.

In the trash box in a corner, Benson found a florist’s box, an outer and inner paper wrapping and the ribbon that had fastened the inner, green-tissue paper wrapping. He put these in another box, handling them carefully. With them, he put the black orchid.

Then he got his phone report.

Seven of the eight numbers without record by the Stockbridge switchboards had been traced to various employees. That left the eighth number as the one Stanton must have given.

“The number called was Murray Hill 7-9904,” said the operator. “I am locating that number.”

Grimly, The Avenger waited. It was pretty clear what had happened.

Stanton, asked the names of the electricians who had recently worked on the top floor, knew that the light fixture trick had been discovered. Hurriedly, he had called the Voice for instructions. The Voice, fearing that Stanton would be found out and would talk, had moved to kill him.

The Voice had ordered Stanton to take his black orchid and give it to the investigator. The engineer had started to do so, not fearing for himself at all, thinking only that he would deal death to an enemy. But, in handling the flower, he had contracted the black death, as the Voice had cold-bloodedly planned, thus shutting his lips forever.

In what manner had death been dealt? The Avenger had a shrewd idea that he would presently test in his laboratory.

How had the man happened to have the black orchid with him? Benson could only guess at that, but he felt that his guess was accurate: For days past, Stanton must have been instructed to keep the symbol of the Black Wings’ doom constantly with him “in case we have to deal with an enemy.” For days past, the Voice must have kept prepared to have Stanton unwittingly kill himself if exposure threatened.

“I have traced Murray Hill 7-9904,” came the operator’s voice. “It is the number of a man named Austin Gailord. It is a rural number, clearing through the village of Pinetown, New Jersey.”

Austin Gailord’s number, phoned in hysterical fear by the man now dead and black! But Gailord was dead and black, too. Dick had seen his corpse.

The Avenger got into his bullet-like plane and headed north and a little east.

CHAPTER XII

Death’s Decoys

Alicia Hannon’s big car rolled down Route 1 for twenty miles after passing Newark Airport. Then it turned west, onto a much smaller road.

Behind it, Nellie Gray was chewing her pretty lips with nervousness. The taxicab she was in stuck out like a sore thumb here in the country roads. It would be a miracle, she decided, if the girl up ahead didn’t know by now that she was being trailed.

Now and then, behind her, Nellie caught a glimpse of headlights. Sometimes, these were bright and sometimes were dim, but Nellie had a nasty conviction that always they were the same headlights.

What she didn’t know was that persistent headlights were also behind those, and behind the second pair, too. In fact, down that dark country road, six cars were now traveling, five drivers aware of a follower, but not aware that the follower, in turn, was being followed.

There was Alicia Hannon, Nellie in the cab, Marcy after Nellie, Cole after Marcy, Miller following all, and Smitty bringing up the rear. Like a comedy of burlesque-spy stuff. Only this wasn’t at all funny. Not when you remembered corpses as black as burned cinders, Black Wings on a black background and this diabolical Voice addressing faithful followers ready to do murder on request.

“I wish,” Nellie groaned to herself, “I had some idea where our friend up there in the priestess’s robes was going. Then I could cut ahead and not be so conspicuous in this silly cab.”

It seemed that her driver was beginning to have some wonders, too. About where they were going, that is.

“Got any idea how much farther this’ll take us?” he asked, over his shoulder.

Nellie confessed that she didn’t. “Why?”

“Because I’m gonna run out of gas any minute, lady,” the man said. “And I ain’t seen no gas stations on this road.”

“How much more have you?”

“Enough to take me maybe twenty miles,” said the cabby gloomily.

Four of the twenty miles followed. Then the motor gave the distress signal familiar to every motorist of long standing. The motor coughed, died, caught, died again. This time for good.

“I think,” said Nellie through set teeth, “that you had better buy a new gas gauge!”

“Mebbe,” said the man. “Now what?”

“Coast into that lane. Maybe the farmer up there has gas he can siphon off. I’ll stay in the cab.”

Muttering about the difficulties of waking a farmer at this hour, the man stopped his cab out of sight of the road, and walked toward the house. Nellie got out her tiny radio.

“Smitty,” she said urgently into the little transmitter. “Smitty—”

“Hi, kid,” was the instant answer.

Nellie sighed with relief. “Where are you?”

“On Route 23, New Jersey, following Miller,” said the giant.

The tiny blonde caught the picture at once. She giggled at the thought of all those cars sneaking after each other up this little secondary road.

“I guess you’re only about five minutes from where I am. Watch the left side of the road. I’ll flag you.”

She crept to the roadside, hiding behind a tree. She saw a strange car sneak past, then the car she’d seen Wilson drive from Bleek Street, another strange car, then Smitty’s bus.

She stepped out and waved.

The car slowed promptly for her, dimmed lights glinting on her small, dainty figure and bright blonde hair.

“Smitty—” she began.

Then she tried to jump back from the open window. The man at the wheel of this Justice, Inc. car was not Smitty!

She didn’t make it quick enough. Something flashed up, down, and a shower of lights burst in her skull! Whoever was taking Smitty’s place in The Avenger’s car was certainly no gallant knight. He had slugged Nellie with a gun barrel as hard as he’d have hit a man.

She knew nothing after that.

Rumblings like the frantic agony of a mother elephant were the first sounds to register on Nellie’s consciousness. She opened her eyes.

Smitty was bending over her. Her head was on his vast knee. His face was twisted with a fear that no personal danger had ever brought there. But when Nellie’s eyes opened, his expression instantly changed. The giant would have let himself be cut in pieces for the tiny blonde; but he wouldn’t have admitted it to her for anything on earth.

Smitty now looked exasperated.

“Here you are,” he said disgustedly. “Getting into a jam again. Can’t you play it safe once in a while?”

“I was trying to play it safe,” said Nellie indignantly. Her head ached as if it were about to split, but she couldn’t let the big fellow’s taunt pass unanswered. “I called you didn’t I? I didn’t try to go on after Alicia Hannon alone or on foot, did I?”

It was her turn to jeer.

“Looks to me as if you’d gotten into a jam. Otherwise, how could somebody else have been driving the car you started out with?”

“Well—” said Smitty uncertainly.

“Well what? Let’s hear you explain yourself out of that one.”

“It could have happened to anybody,” said Smitty defensively.

“What?” Nellie demanded.

“Well, right after you contacted me, I saw a tree down across the road. Just fell. I slammed on the brakes, and a hundred guys jumped from the underbrush along the road—”

“How many?”

“Fifty guys jumped from—”

“Fifty?”

“Well, there were at least three on each running board, all of a sudden. They all had guns and they were all aimed at my head. Somebody slipped a hypodermic needle into my shoulder, and here I am.”

“It didn’t occur to you that there wasn’t enough wind to blow even rotten trees down?” Nellie said sardonically. “Or that it was pretty strange a tree should go down just in time to catch you when other cars had passed a few seconds before?”

“Suppose it had occurred to me? What was I supposed to do—ram into the tree and wreck the car? Or drive off to left or right into an eight-foot ditch?”

“You could have rolled up the windows and locked the car doors and sat there while an army tried to get at you,” Nellie reminded him. She was back on home ground now, one jump ahead of her beloved behemoth, comfortably watching his neck redden.

“Well, I didn’t,” growled Smitty. “So here we are.”

“You and I?”

“And Cole,” said Smitty.

Nellie whistled. “They got all three of us, then! But where is ‘here’?”

“Somebody’s barn,” Smitty said morosely.

“You mean to say you haven’t busted out of an ordinary barn long before now?”

“I just snapped out of it,” said Smitty. “The drug kept me asleep till just before you came to. Cole’s still under the influence. As for breaking out—look around.”

Nellie looked around.

At first, she saw nothing—just the loading floor and empty loft of an ordinary, unused barn. Then her eyes raised, and she gasped.

Beams crisscrossed the structure, both as bracing and as division points, at about the second-story level. Up here, midway between floor and roof, there seemed to be eight or ten dark birds. Very large birds, and very evil birds.

They were men, perched up there watching the prisoners. Each man had a submachine gun in the hollow of his arm or across his knees. Some were grinning bleakly at them; some were watching with a sour, bored look on their plug-ugly faces.

But all were watching warily. You couldn’t have taken three steps in any direction without being riddled.

“Funny,” said Nellie.

“What’s funny about those vultures?” Smitty snapped.

“Funny they haven’t killed us already. Why are they just holding us here? And why are they up there instead of being more comfortable down on the floor? Surely they aren’t afraid we’ll try to jump a mob as big as that, armed as they are?”

Smitty shrugged. And then Cole sighed, and his eyelids moved.

They worked on him for a few minutes.

“Oh, oh! My head!” groaned Cole. He, like Nellie, had been slugged as well as drugged, it seemed.

Nellie suddenly realized that there was no illumination of any sort in here; still, she could see around. Yet, the blackness of pre-dawn had been on the land when she was taken.

Smitty! For Heaven’s sake—what time is it?”

“Half past two in the afternoon,” said the giant. “I don’t know if it’s afternoon of the next day, or two days from when we were conked. That drug they slipped into all of us seems to be powerful stuff.”

Then they found out why they were still alive and why their guards so carefully kept to the beams, up beyond the vision of anyone normally at floor level.

Two men came into the barn; they were carrying something like a wardrobe trunk, only shinier. One side of it was a kind of screen.

“Their television transmitter!” exclaimed Smitty.

Electric cable trailed back from it to the house.

The barn, it seemed, was not wired for electricity. The two men set the cabinet up near the three members of Justice, Inc. The two men were Suva, gang leader and public enemy, and a lithe figure in black with a black hood over its head.

“The Voice!” exclaimed Nellie.

“Shut up!” came the booming tone of the head of the Black Wings cult.

Suva walked warily toward Smitty and Cole and Nellie, then skirted equally warily around them. He did an odd thing, when he got behind the three.

There was a bale of hay back there, and against it Suva propped a license plate.

It was an old plate, 1940, New Jersey, a little battered and more than a little bent. Suva put it crookedly and upside down against the bale. It looked natural enough. Farmers, somehow, don’t seem to throw old license plates away. They throw them in the barn or harness room or garage.

Suva got from between the cabinet and The Avenger’s aides. The hooded figure in black went near them.

“All right,” boomed the Voice.

The television screen glowed.

“Smitty!” gasped Nellie suddenly. “They’re using us as decoys. That’s why they didn’t kill us. They know The Avenger got their recent broadcasts, and they’re setting the wave length the same way so he can see us here! They want to get the chief here and kill him. And if he sees us in trouble, he’ll come with Josh and Mac and even Rosabel. They’ll have the whole bunch of us—”

“Shut up!” boomed the Voice again.

But Nellie didn’t need to say any more for Cole and the giant to get it all.

The battered license plate—Benson would use it as a clue to their location. He’d trace the owner of that last year’s plate and speed to this farm. And into a trap!

“Chief!” shrilled Nellie suddenly, at the screen. “If you’re watching this—don’t come here! Don’t—”

The gun of every man in the barn swung toward her. Guns that weren’t included in the televised picture.

Nellie shut up.

The hooded figure with the black wings outlined in white on its black chest, stepped nearer the three.

“You have worked against the band of the Black Wings,” the Voice boomed resonantly. “You shall pay the penalty, as soon as it has been decided what that penalty shall be—”

He went on with the threats. They were, it appeared, on the air.

And at a distance, The Avenger was supposed to be watching, and to be lured into coming here with the rest, so that all of Justice, Inc. could be annihilated at one stroke.

However, it just happened that Dick Benson wasn’t at a distance.

CHAPTER XIII

On the Air

It had been well timed. The Voice had given Benson just about enough time to get from Wilmington back to Bleek Street before the decoying broadcast. Apparently, he had forgotten about Stanton’s betraying phone call, or had thought it could not be traced from so large a plant as Stockbridge Chemical Corp.

The Voice, or one of his hired thugs, had made another slip, too.

From the air, The Avenger suddenly saw two of his fleet of cars parked in a glade several hundred yards from a farmhouse and barn. That was all right. The Voice wanted him to find this place, anyhow. But his two cars were parked next to three strange cars. One of them was Alicia Hannon’s!

Smitty and Cole had been in those cars last night, and certainly they would never have parked them right beside the cars they’d been following.

The Avenger saw something else from the air. That was, that for miles around there was no place for him to set the plane down. Open fields were in abundance, but nothing long enough and flat enough to take his speed special that landed at over a hundred miles an hour.

He glided over the place high, with his motor cut off, and got the lay of the land. There was a big house, an even bigger barn, several other outbuildings on this farm. There was a lofty silo with a lightning rod that could be used very nicely as an aerial, with a few deft changes to the rod.

Then The Avenger went on to hunt a field capable of taking his winged bullet. He had to go for nearly twenty miles.

A kindly farmer took him back in a rattling truck.

“Yes sir,” the farmer said as they clanked past. “That’s Austin Gailord’s place. Gentleman farmer. Bet he never got a nickel profit out of the farm. Terrible how he died, ain’t it? The radio was full of it. And the other guy dyin’ the same way. You don’t suppose we’re in for some terrible kind of plague, do you?”

The Avenger left the truck a mile farther on and returned across fields to the farm.

A wood lot split across half the farm like a wedge, from the property line to within a hundred yards of the back of the house. The Avenger stole through this. An Indian couldn’t have heard him approach; certainly the New York gangster on guard at the inner edge of the woods—looking foreign and helpless and unhappy off the city pavements—had no chance.

The Avenger saw the man’s back fifty yards away, came soundlessly up on him, got him by the throat.

Forty seconds of pressure at the great neck nerve induced unconsciousness. Benson tied the man and gagged him and went on.

The cars were parked in the wood lot near the inner edge. There were four men lounging near them. The Avenger stole to the left and soundlessly ascended a tall tree. From the branches there he looked at the farmhouse.

He saw activity in one of the windows and took out a small but incredibly fine telescope. What he saw through the glass brought a glint to his pale, icy eyes.

He could see a bed, with someone on it, and, near the bed, two more people. One was a girl and the other a man.

The person on the bed was a man, too. And it was a glimpse of his face that had brought the glint to Benson’s eyes. For the first time in this deadly, foggy affair of the black death, one of Justice, Inc. was looking at the famed inventor, John Jay Hannon.

A glimpse exonerated him from all participation in the crime. His face was bruised, and he was so still that it seemed he must be unconscious. Drugged, perhaps.

The girl bending over him was his daughter, Alicia. Her face was a mask of suffering and fear for his safety. Almost equally concerned-looking was the man with her, Daniel Miller.

There was a long row of henhouses behind the farmhouse. The Avenger went from tree branch to tree branch till he got to the last tree, which was nearest the low outbuildings. A long swing and a lithe leap put him behind these. He went to the other end, fairly near the barn side of the house, and looked through a crack between boards.

There, in a little while, he saw Suva and several other men carrying a big cabinet to the barn. It was a television cabinet, but The Avenger’s colorless eyes didn’t fasten on it; they stared at one of the men with Suva—a man dressed in black from head to foot, with a black hood over his head.

Beyond the barn was a lofty silo, rearing up above the barn’s roof. The lightning rod went six feet higher. The Avenger got to the silo.

With him, he carried a small device of Macmurdie’s—an acetylene blowtorch no bigger than a perfume atomizer. With this, he burned a hole in the silo’s side. The flame was so hot that it charred through the wooden staves too fast for them really to catch fire. It just burned through.

He saw that the silo was empty, stepped inside on a carpet of decayed bits of silage and burned a small hole in the barn side.

From there, he saw the eerie broadcast, supposed to have been seen by him, fifty miles away in New York.

Before the scene was over, The Avenger took from an inner pocket a slender tube much like a boy’s bean-shooter. In this, he slid a tiny pellet no larger than a dried pea and of thin glass. He aimed the tube at the feet of the black-hooded figure and blew.

Whether it hit the man’s feet could not be seen because nothing happened. Nothing at all. But The Avenger seemed satisfied with the shot.

The broadcast was finished, and the men carried the apparatus back out of the barn. Machine guns kept Smitty and Cole and Nellie from trying to rush the open door.

The Avenger had seen, before the broadcast was over, that the guns covering his aides were in the hands of men high up off the floor, so as not to be in the range of the television screen. He climbed higher himself, to the top of the tall silo.

He did this by unwinding from his waist a length of fine silk cord with a weight on the end. He threw it up over the top bracing beam, then climbed hand over hand up its doubled strand.

He wasn’t quite to the top when he heard the sound of car motors.

Quickly, he made a hole in the top of the silo in the direction from which the sounds came. He looked through his small telescope toward the wood lot where the cars had been parked.

Men were all around these, now. The Avenger saw the television apparatus loaded into one, and Alicia and John Hannon being shoved into the rear of another.

The inventor was being carried, indicating that he was still unconscious. The girl was fighting like a tigress. If she had ever been in with this gang, it didn’t seem as if she were particularly friendly with them now. The Avenger nodded as this apparently confirmed some thought of his own.

He started to slide down the rope again and hurry to the cars.

It looked very much as if the Voice, having set his trap for Benson and the others of his aides whom they did not already have as prisoners, was going to leave here at once, to make sure no slip-up might involve him. And rather than have the brains responsible for the Black Wings cult get away a second time, The Avenger was going to see what he could do to prevent it single-handed.

But before Benson had started down the rope again, something happened to change his plans.

There was a yell from the direction of the woods. Most men would have heard just that—only an indistinguishable yell. But The Avenger’s marvelous hearing caught the words.

“Hey! Nick’s lyin’ here bound and gagged! Somebody slugged him—”

With any kind of luck, no one would have found the guard in the woods whom The Avenger had put out of the way. But the luck had been bad; the man had been discovered.

There was a crossbeam halfway down the silo. Benson slid to that and opened a hole on the barn side again. He took from his coat a tiny spring gun, then took from another pouch half a dozen of Mac’s anaesthetic pills.

The Avenger had come to the top in the first place to gas those guards in the barn who covered his aides. He’d had to go high because the gas tended to sink; if it were released on the barn floor, it might not get up to the perching guards.

So Benson had planned to smash them at roof level and let the fumes sift down efficiently.

Now, by halting midway, at about the level of the beams in the barn which provided perches for the men, he planned to make it quicker and even more effective.

He shot the little pellets through the hole so swiftly that they seemed to come in a solid little stream. They smashed against a beam in the center of the barn.

The Avenger slid down the rope again till he came to the ground level. He started to retrieve his rope. But he never completed this move because, then, another shout came to his keen ears.

It seemed to be in the deep tone of the Voice itself.

“He must be here! Something must have gone wrong! Destroy that barn! The rest of you—get out of here at once.”

The Avenger also heard several thudding sounds within the barn as men with machine guns fell from beams, then a lot of yells as the others discovered that something was the matter and tried to find out what. The gas was working fine.

Benson leaped to the square of wood he had burned from the silo wall and propped back in place while he was inside. He jumped out into open air, and took half a dozen swift steps to get around the barn and to the woods where the motors were racing.

Then he stopped abruptly.

“Destroy that barn!” the Voice had said.

Of course! There was a deadly trap conceived about that barn. Otherwise, the Voice would not have striven so hard to get him and all the rest of Justice, Inc. into it. This trap, warned by his bound guard, the Voice intended to spring at once, prematurely.

And Smitty and Nellie and Cole were in the barn, probably as unconscious from the gas fumes as the dozen gangsters who had been guarding them.

Destroy the barn!

But how? What was the trap?

Four shots roared out in the rapid drumfire of a machine gun. The Avenger was knocked a dozen feet back as four slugs hit him. They didn’t penetrate, but they had the kicking power of mule hoofs as they were stopped by the bulletproof celluglass undergarment—and the body behind it.

The Avenger fell to one knee, twisted sideways as another stream of slugs felt for him, then began running in great zigzag leaps toward the source of the fire.

He saw what the trap consisted of, before he’d gone a dozen yards.

On the side of the barn opposite the wood lot, another man had been posted. An old corn crib leaned here. Through the open-slatted side, Benson could see the man and catch glints of his gun barrel. Also, he got a glimpse of something else that added speed even to his terrific pace.

He got a glimpse of the precise nature of the trap.

This man was something more than a guard. Beside him, on the floor of the crib, was a thing only too familiar to Benson. It looked like a one-gallon can set on end—a can such as oil is shipped in. Out of the upper end of this, however, was a rod and a handle. It looked like the handle of a bicycle pump.

It was the detonator of a dynamite charge somewhere around. Somewhere? Easy to guess where. The charge, probably a terriffic one, was under the barn, like a war-time land mine. If the man pressed that plunger down, the barn and everything in it would go up in dust!

The machine gun was spitting flame and lead like a dragon! Two more slugs hit The Avenger, as he zigzagged toward the gunner, who was frantically trying to center his aim on the shifting, lightninglike figure bounding toward him.

The slugs hit with terrific impact, this close, but Dick Benson at the moment had even more than his normal terrible strength. He was fighting for the lives of his aides. The bullets spun him, but did not stop him.

The slats on the side of the corn crib didn’t stop him, either. He saw as he ran that they were fairly light, so he hit the side of the corn crib at full speed, spraying gas pellets inside as he did so.

The man had stopped firing and reached for the deadly detonator. His hand was on the handle when the gas rose up around him.

He tried to cry out, coughed instead, and sagged to one side. But the open air was filtering into the crib and was dissipating the effect of the gas.

The man got resolutely up on one elbow and forced his sluggish arm up. His fingers again found the handle from which they had slipped. He pressed down a little!

The Avenger’s steel fingers were tearing at the cracked slats of the corn crib. Another thing he had noted while running was that the door was solid and that a beam had been propped against it from the inside so that it couldn’t be opened. The only way in was the one Benson was racing to effect, now.

The slats fell aside. He forced his wiry body through. The man had the handle down a little, pushing as hard as he could. He was almost out, but not quite. Not enough!

No time to get to him. Even a leap would be too late. The Avenger threw the jagged end of the last slat he had ripped off.

It caught the wrist behind the resolutely straining hand so hard that the slat broke. Probably the wrist broke, too. Anyhow, the man gave a thin scream of agony, and dropped to the floor. There, the gas, a little heavier than above, finally got to him in spite of the air coming into the crib through the slats.

Very carefully, The Avenger cut the wires leading from the detonator in the general direction of the barn. Then he went to the house and phoned the state police.

The police gathered up the gunmen in the barn, and The Avenger gathered up Nellie and Cole and Smitty, unconscious, too. But nobody gathered up the Voice and Suva, Alicia and Hannon, Miller and Marcy. Dick Benson assumed that Marcy had been here also, a prisoner. They’d gotten away, warned by the unlucky discovery of the bound guard and led by the swift cleverness of the Voice. Whoever he might be.

CHAPTER XIV

The Death Sentence

The papers had made it front-page news, though not too big, when a second man had died of the strange black death. Now, with time enough elapsed for the details on the death of still another victim of the black doom to be in all the newsrooms, the papers really went to town.

The headlines were hysterically big. The war news was crowded clear off the page. There was mention of Austin Gailord’s terrible death and of Maller’s. And then the screaming account of the similar death of Frank Stanton, engineer at Stockbridge Chemical Corp.

One paper read:

Eminent scientist says new Black Plague upon us. Every war breeds at least one world-wide epidemic, he says. This, a new form of an ancient disease, is the spawn of the present war.

There were speculations as to whether the epidemic would grow to such terrible dimensions as to stop the war altogether. There were panic-stricken groups of people moving from city to country, and from country into the city, anywhere, just to be somewhere else, as if one can outrun a germ.

“One thing is clear, anyway,” Cole Wilson said. “And that is that there’ll be hell to pay all over the country if we don’t stop this Black Wings devil.”

“There’s another angle,” said Smitty gloomily. “With mass panic born, the Voice can assume mass control. I mean, instead of making one or two individuals do what he commands, in fear of death, he could make a lot of people obey, under the same mass fear. Why, he might get to be dictator of the United States, or something, given time.”

“So we can’t give the mon the time,” nodded MacMurdie.

They were all in the Bleek Street headquarters. Every member of The Avenger’s band. Before them were spread the still-moist editions of the latest papers.

“We’ll have to catch up with the skurlie before he can do any more damage,” added MacMurdie, bleak blue eyes like pin points of flame in his bony eyesockets.

To the Scot, it was as simple as that. But Nellie shook her blonde head doubtfully.

“For forty-eight hours, we’ve tried every known trick to locate the Voice. And we haven’t succeeded. He hasn’t broadcast any more. At least, we haven’t picked up any more stuff on the wave length he first used. Smitty’s had no chance to use his directional finder. So how are we going to catch up with him?”

“Maybe one of that gang the chief trapped in the barn will talk,” said the giant hopefully.

But they all knew better than that. In the first place, it was almost a certainty that all of the cheap thugs hired for the coarser dirty work would not know the Voice by sight and would not know where he would be liable to hide out. In the second place, if any of them did know, it was a cinch he’d never talk with the horrible black death hanging over his head.

No, the captured men were out as a source of information.

They all looked at The Avenger, sitting at his big desk with sphinxlike lack of expression on his face. Benson was making a long-distance call, and had been waiting several minutes for it to be completed.

“Hello,” he said evenly into the phone, as the connection was made. “Stockbridge? . . . This is Richard Benson. I called about the matter on which I saw you several days ago. You remember. I want to ask you a question about that, now. The question is—have you recently written any large checks in connection with that affair? . . . You have? . . . Thank you very much . . . Yes, the matter will be kept with the utmost secrecy, of course.”

He hung up, and the glacial, colorless eyes had a chromium brilliance. But he said nothing in explanation of his phone call. Instead, he looked at the little black box on his desk and pressed the button opening the street door.

“A messenger boy is coming up with a bundle,” he said, voice as calm as deep water. “I think the bundle contains flowers.”

Flowers! A box of flowers for Justice, Inc.!

It took the little band a minute to get it. But when they did, they got it hard.

Flowers! Orchids! Black orchids! Delivered here!

Tensely, they listened to leisurely steps mounting the stairs outside. Tensely, they watched for the door to open and the “messenger” to enter. Nellie shivered a little. Just what she expected in the way of a messenger, she didn’t know.

But it was distinctly an anticlimax when the door opened and an ordinary delivery boy came in. Death shouldn’t be sent by ordinary messenger service at two bits an errand.

“Mr. Benson?” the boy said, looking curiously around the vast room. “Flowers from Gresham Bros. Sign here.”

Benson signed; and, as he did so, Cole Wilson impulsively began to unwrap the box.

“No!” Dick snapped at Cole.

The Avenger’s monosyllable was like a shot, it was so sharp and imperative. Cole dropped the box to the floor, he was so startled by it.

Benson picked it up, very carefully, and placed it on the desk. He turned to the gaping delivery boy.

“You were given this at the florist’s shop?”

“Yes, sir,” said the lad, shrinking a little from the pale, deadly eyes, though those eyes held no threat for him and he instinctively knew it.

“You know what’s in it?”

“Why, no, sir. Just flowers, I guess.”

The Avenger called Gresham Bros.

“Yes, sir, the box contains orchids,” the voice in the florist’s shop answered. There was pride in that voice. “Black orchids. Haven’t you opened the box, yet? They are our very finest.”

“Isn’t it a little unusual for even a large shop like yours to have black orchids?” said Benson evenly.

“Yes, it is,” the voice said cheerfully. “But a customer of ours has recently requested us always to carry them. He orders quite a few, so we do. Sometimes, it’s very hard to get them, but Gresham Bros, always gives the finest service in New—”

“Who is this customer?” The Avenger’s vibrant voice bit it out so that even over a telephone it became a compelling thing.

“Why, his n-name is Jones,” said the man at the other end of the wire. “He has given us several addresses. Always telephones his orders. That is r-really all I know about him.”

Smitty wondered if the man would have sounded so chipper if he’d read in the papers of the presence of black orchids in connection with the black deaths. But the man had not read this in the papers. No one had. For the reason that, without explanation, The Avenger had told the papers not to print that detail.

That reason now began to show itself. Benson had hoped from the start that, through the delivery of the flowers, there might be a slight chance to trace the Voice. And there would have been no more deliveries had florists been warned by reading of the way the orchids were being used as death symbols. For that matter, the Voice would have ordered no more, fearing a trap through his telephoning for them.

It looked as if the florist’s connection was to be just another failure, however.

Gresham Bros, had never seen their exotic customer. They knew nothing about him, save that he always paid promptly, sending a Western Union messenger with cash.

“Can I go, now?” said the boy, looking scared, and also looking so guilty that it was blatantly apparent he was innocent.

The Avenger nodded; the boy went hastily to the door and out.

And Rosabel said from the corner of the room.

“The television screen! Somethin’s coming through! And I think it is a Black Wings broadcast!”

They gathered around the cabinet, Smitty and Mac half crouching as if some tangible enemy were entering their midst whom they could spring at and batter.

The screen glowed brilliantly. It was a mess of lines and moving blurs till Smitty adjusted the unscrambler. Then they got it.

This time, instead of seeing the underground crypt which Hannon had once built under his tool house as a storage space for dangerous chemicals, they saw what seemed to be an ordinary bedroom.

There was a high-poster bed, a dresser, chintz curtains over a window and an overhead light that glared with special brightness, showing that oversized bulbs had been installed for clear transmission.

No one was in the bedroom at first, but then Josh muttered, “Here he comes!”

The glowing screen had darkened in the center, and the darkness took on a strange and sinister pattern. It was one with which they were all familiar, the thick black shadow of spread wings. It was probably formed by the simple trick of holding black paper cut that way over the television transmitter, but it was no less eerie for its simplicity.

The shadow faded out. And all in the big room gasped.

There was the Voice, all right—tall, lithe, with the black hood hiding his head and with the black wings outlined in a thin white line on his chest. But with him were seven other figures, all standing as still as statues.

And these figures were—Richard Benson, Cole Wilson, Nellie Gray, Josh and Rosabel Newton, Smitty, and MacMurdie.

In a line stood duplicates of all of Justice, Inc. And the fact that this time you could see plainly that the duplicates were wax, not living figures, did not take away from the blow of it. Because many deaths, it is claimed, have been dealt at a distance by sticking pins in wax statues of the victim.

Sticking pins in them—or handing them black orchids!

The deep, booming voice sounded out.

“Members of the Black Wings army—”

So this was being broadcast, as was the first, to all the cells; or whatever you wanted to call the groups organized by this devil worshiper. Just how many were viewing this? The band at Bleek Street would have given much to know.

“You have seen how three traitors to our cause have been given the black orchid of death. Austin Gailord, Edwin Maller and Frank Stanton. Stanton’s retribution you did not actually witness, but you saw accounts of it in the papers. Now, you are to see what happens to enemies of the Black Wings outside their ranks.”

The hooded figure reached behind him and brought into view a tangled black mass, like half a dozen sheets of crumpled tissue paper dipped in black ink.

“As you know, the Black Wings organization sprang into being to help our country in a time of war.”

“Oh-ho!” whispered Smitty. “The patriotic note! I’ve been kind of waiting for that.”

“Shut up!” snapped Nellie.

“More and more, our organization is taking over, forcing greedy manufacturers to produce more goods for our country’s defense at less profit: forcing potential traitors to the United States to keep their tongues from betraying secrets. But, now, another organization is opposing us. This band of enemy agents calls itself Justice, Inc. At its head is a man named Richard Benson. He would undo all our good work, so we shall deal with him. Now!”

The hooded figure of the Voice approached the seven life-sized figures.

“To you, Richard Benson, Algernon Smith—”

“I’ll sink his head down into his chest if I catch him—calling me Algernon,” said Smitty fiercely.

“Cole Wilson—” said the Voice; the other names had been lost in Smitty’s outburst—“I give these pretty flowers. You will presently find out what they mean. And you, fellow members of the Black Wings, watch the papers for seven more of the black deaths!”

In the hand of each wax figure was thrust a black orchid. The hooded figure faced the screen dramatically, the shadow of the black wings blotted him and the other figures out.

After that, the screen showed blank. But for another half minute the pale, glacial eyes of The Avenger probed at it as if he would resurrect the detail he had been staring at so fixedly during the last of the broadcast.

That detail had nothing to do with the hooded figure, the orchids or the wax statues.

He had been staring at the chintz curtains of the room. Those curtains had moved rhythmically, just a little, it had seemed to him. They had not swayed, exactly. They had swung. They—

“Cole!” Nellie cried suddenly. “Cole, what’s wrong?” All turned toward Cole with the cry, and all felt ice touch their spines.

Cole was swaying on his feet as if someone had struck him a tremendous blow. His forehead was covered with great drops of sweat. His skin had darkened a little. The darkness was not like that of tan; it was caused by a faint, purple blackness deep under the skin!

“Feel kind of . . . funny,” faltered Cole. “Hot . . . in here.”

“Cole—”

“Water—” whispered Cole. “Burning up—”

He fell with a crash to the floor.

“Muster Benson!” yelled Mac, turning to where The Avenger had stood.

“Chief!” wailed Nellie.

But The Avenger was no longer in the room with them.

“It can’t be true,” gritted Josh. “That hooded devil can’t kill from a distance like that!”

Cole’s face was blackening with each second. He was unconscious now, gasping for breath.

“But it is true!” Smitty breathed. “Cole’s got it. The black death!”

CHAPTER XV

Southwest

The Avenger came back into the room with all the speed with which he’d left. From the laboratory, he carried a hypodermic needle, with the cylinder half full of amber stuff.

He injected this into the unconscious Cole’s arm.

His pale eyes were very grim as he answered MacMurdie’s unspoken question.

“It’s an antidote for the black death. At least, I hope it is. I’ve had no time to prove it by experiment. It may cure Cole. It may kill him!”

“What poison did you find on the orchids?” asked Mac. “I tried everything I could think of and found nothing.”

“That was because there is nothing about the orchids to kill anyone,” said Benson. “The poison is not in the flowers. It is in the ribbon tying the florist’s packages together.”

“The ribbon?” gasped Nellie. “Under the wrapping paper?”

“Yes. Use a strong lens on the ribbon from that package. You will find that very fine wire is interwoven with the thread. This wire is bent in dozens of places into almost microscopically small hooks, and the hooks are tipped with poison. You can’t even feel the hooks; yet they penetrate enough to inject the poison. Cole touched the inner ribbon.”

“Then,” said Smitty, “somebody in the florist’s shop must be in on the thing, after all. Whoever it is that wraps the boxes.”

Benson nodded toward his desk, and they all looked. They saw something they hadn’t caught at the time.

The phones there had a special switch at the base. When this switch was flipped over, it automatically connected with police headquarters so that they listened in on the conversation and rounded up the talkers.

The switch was flipped over on the phone Benson had used in talking to Gresham Bros. By now, everyone in the shop would be in police custody.

The Avenger looked anxiously at Cole. It seemed as if the unconscious man’s dreadful color was at least getting no deeper. But it didn’t seem to be lightening, either.

“Rosabel,” Benson said, “look after him, please. The rest of us will go after the Voice.” He turned to Smitty. “You got some sort of line with the directional finder, didn’t you?”

The giant nodded. He had adjusted his loop at the first of the broadcast in a line along which the impulses came strongest.

“But I’m afraid it won’t mean anything,” he said. “I just have a line—southwest. We have no way of knowing the distance. Might be ten miles. Might be a couple of hundred.”

“The line,” said Benson, “will be enough. We’ll take the big plane, bomber type, with the army markings, and head southwest.”

The watchword of the members of Justice, Inc. was obedience without question. In this case, as always, they gave the obedience. All of them but Cole and Rosabel were in the big plane in a remarkably short time. But they certainly were filled with questions.

The Avenger answered one of them, soon after the big ship had taken off.

“Did any of you notice the window curtains in that televised scene?” he asked.

They looked at each other. None had, particularly.

“They moved, rhythmically,” said Benson. Beneath them was the variegated landscape of New Jersey with a far glimpse of the sea. “The curtains swung.”

“You mean, with the movement of air currents?” asked Mac.

“I mean with the movement of water,” The Avenger said. “That bedroom is part of some floating structure somewhere.”

“It still seems like a big order, findin’ a ship in all the Atlantic,” said the Scot pessimistically. Mac was always gloomy till real danger was near. Then he got as optimistic and cheery as Pollyanna herself.

“Not such a big order. We can narrow it down. The floating structure is not a ship; the room had a standard window and sash, not a porthole or cabin window. And the movement of the curtains was slight, so the thing is not on the ocean. Coast Guard reports indicate a heavy swell at sea today.”

“So it’s on inland water,” nodded Nellie. Then she exclaimed aloud. “A houseboat!”

“That’s right,” said Benson. “Almost certainly a houseboat, on still water, in a line directly southwest. It should be sufficient.”

Mac’s bleak eyes were blue flames. “If the skurlies had thought to thumbtack the curtains down, any observer would have sworn they were in an ordinary house, and they could never be located.”

“But they didn’t think to do it,” chirped Nellie. “Oh, boy!”

They passed two lakes, with houseboats on them. The Avenger didn’t bother with either. All knew why. The Voice was dependent always on one factor: he must have something nearby to use as a camouflaged aerial for his broadcasts. Neither of these structures had such a thing.

Straight southwest. They passed over Camden, New Jersey, with sprawling Philadelphia beyond. There were a lot of houseboats here, and there was long study through glasses to see if any were suspicious. Several were, but intent study of their windows ruled them out. None had windows quite like the one they’d seen behind the chintz curtains.

The line took them toward Washington. Just at dusk, they sighted the maze of the Potomac. There were houseboats galore around there. There’s a housing shortage in Washington, and houseboats are popular as they’ve never been before.

Mac shook his head in dour despair, but even as he did so, The Avenger’s colorless, glacial eyes were centering on something.

Several miles down the river from the majority of the odd-looking boats, was one by itself. It was moored next to a sprawling structure, half fallen in, that could be recognized even from that altitude.

It was an old-time, wooden amusement pier, with dance space at its broad end entirely roofed over.

But one thing about it seemed in slightly better repair than the rest. That was its flagpole.

The pole was broken near the tip, but on it was still a sagging crossbar—which seemed hardly a necessary appendage on a flagpole—and a length of wire or rope still hung in an idle loop from the top.

The Avenger didn’t bother to keep his plane too far away. The army markings were camouflage enough. So many army bombers fly around the Potomac that even the most suspicious guard wouldn’t be concerned with the appearance of just one more.

He let the plane glide on, then circled slowly back while the dusk deepened. It was still light up here; but on earth, it was night.

He strapped a chute to his back.

“Keep watching through the quartz lens,” he said. “If you see a signal from me, come down at once. It will mean that this is what we’re after.”

The Avenger stepped out of the plane. For a moment, his chute was a black blob against the sky; then he was in the darkness, floating down toward the water.

The night was black; the water was black; the mushrooming chute was black. Dick had every reason to believe that his descent would be unnoticed, particularly since he had worked the lines to steer his dropping body to a spot at least two miles from the deserted pier.

Everything else seemed deserted in the place he’d picked as a landing spot. It was marshy, useless land along here. He got within thirty feet of the ebony-black water and dropped out of his harness.

He slid into the water, feet first, with a minimum of splash, and was swimming underwater many feet away when the chute settled down. He came up twenty feet from its outer rim and struck out for the pier. Far overhead, he got a last glimpse of the plane, circling idly as though on an army test flight. Then it could be seen no more.

The Avenger could swim with the silence of a seal. A quarter of a mile from the lonely houseboat, he sacrificed some of his speed for this silence and slipped in on the structure.

It was a standard-looking thing, with perhaps five small rooms in it, and was sturdy enough to be towed north and south along the inside passage if its owner wanted to follow the seasons. All the windows showed light but all were blank. The shades were tightly drawn.

The Avenger went around the blunt stern of the boat and into the shadow of the ruined pier. The night and the water were cold. An ordinary man would have been done in by now, but Dick’s physical condition was perfect enough to withstand the chill.

He was silent on a sagging crossbeam under the pier’s flooring. And above he heard a voice.

“Seems to me we ought to have heard something over the radio about it, by now.”

An answering voice said: “We might not hear a thing over the radio for days. The cops may be scared to let it out. Seven more black deaths? The whole country’d go nuts, it’d be so scared.”

The Avenger released his hold on the beam. He swam silently out a hundred yards from the pier and houseboat, then came silently back again. As he swam, he released a sort of metallic powder in his wake.

Up above, through a special quartz lens, one of his aides would see a violet-blue patch, dimly lovely, blossom on the water, though normal eyesight could not see it at all. It would tell them what they were waiting to hear:

“This is it. Join me at once.”

The houseboat was secured at the end of the dock. Benson dived silently at this point. He went down and down, about forty feet, he estimated it, before the chill ooze of the bottom touched his fingers.

He came up and went to the land end of the pier. There he lay in shallow water and held his breath while he listened. He listened for a long time, and at length was rewarded by hearing a faint sound of clothing.

He went to the spot, silent as the night itself. A man sat with his back against a rock. At the last minute, the man heard him; probably heard the water dripping from Dick’s clothing. But he heard too late. The Avenger’s cablelike fingers were at his throat.

Benson injected the anaesthetic drug, took the man’s dry clothes for himself and went to the pier. He believed the gang would not be numerous. It was probable that Suva had not yet recruited many to take the place of the eighteen rounded up at Austin Gailord’s stolen farm. But the man with the pale, infallible eyes used as much caution as if stealing into the midst of a regiment There was another guard at the land end of the pier, and a third at the center. It was these two who had been talking earlier. They were separated, now, at their proper stations.

Benson dealt with them, one at a time, as he had with the first man. He went on down the gloomy cavern of the pier to the roofed end.

Here he saw, in the dim light, one of the most diabolical contrivances he had ever encountered.

It seemed that this amusement pier had once had a lion or tiger among its attractions. The animal was long gone, but its cage remained. It was a standard oblong cage on wheels, like a circus cage. The thing was now up head-high on a timber platform. From this, a slanting incline led down to the end of the pier, where boards were loose.

The purpose was instantly apparent. At a suspicious visit, or a warning from the guards, this wheeled cage could be loosed and shot down the incline into forty feet of water, burying all in it and hiding the evidence of kidnaping.

All in it? The Avenger’s keen eyes had made out forms, but whose and how many he could not say.

“Miller?” he whispered.

There was startled movement in the cage.

“Who’s there?” came a voice.

“Marcy!”

“That’s right,” said the crawling voice. “I say! It’s Benson. Watch yourself. There are guards.”

A girl said, with a catch in her throat, “Oh, thank heavens! We’ve been in here for years, it seems, ready any minute to be sunk in the bay.”

“Is your father there?”

“He’s here,” came still another voice. Daniel Miller’s voice. Then he said, with grim humor, “You seem more pleased to see Mr. Benson than you have up till now, Alicia.”

“I couldn’t help him before,” came the girl’s low, tense voice. “You know that, Dan. You know they’d have killed my father if anyone got close in his investigation. So I didn’t dare help anyone—police or Justice, Inc., or anyone. I tried to fight by myself and, meanwhile, located father by myself.

“I took that black orchid and experimented on it, trying to isolate the poison and perhaps work out an antidote. I’m not a bad chemist, you know. But I didn’t find any of dad’s mysterious chemical in the flower, so it came to nothing.

“Then I pretended to throw in with the gang—even broadcast once—to get them to tell me where dad was held and maybe get them to turn him loose. They seemed to know from the start that I was acting; and when they told me to go to Gailord’s farm, it was only to trap me there and hold me a prisoner. I should have trusted Mr. Benson from the start, but I was foolish and didn’t.”

“Me, too,” came Schuyler Marcy’s voice cheerfully. The lad had nerve, at any rate. “I didn’t trust him at all. I saw that big television set of his, thought he was the real Black Wings leader, and tried to rub him out. Then I put on a peaceful act, to be allowed to stay with him and secretly work against him. All I found out, too late, was that he was on the level.”

The Avenger only said, “Is your father still unconscious, Miss Hannon?”

“Yes,” said the girl bitterly. “They’ve kept him bound and sometimes drugged for eight long weeks. It will be a miracle if he recovers. That is—if he gets a chance to recover! Are you alone?”

“I’m alone,” said Benson.

“I don’t see what one man can do against a whole gang,” sighed the girl.

Miller’s voice sounded, after a dull, tiny glow showed that he had looked at a luminous wrist watch.

“Six minutes to eight,” he said. “Those devils are having their next broadcast at eight o’clock.”

“Broadcast?” said Benson expressionlessly. His hands were busy in the darkness with the wheels of the cage.

“They send out their devil’s ritual at eight o’clock sharp, every other evening, just as if they were a regular broadcasting studio,” Miller said. “We’ve found out that much, while we’ve been held prisoner. There are extras, too.”

Alicia said, “Do you suppose you could stop them?”

There was no answer. She repeated the question, without response. The Avenger had faded back in the blackness of the covered pier.

Benson went to the houseboat, over the rotting floorboards. He had discarded shoes before jumping from the plane. Now, his sensitive feet felt wires, trailing to that flagpole. At the same instant, he heard a low hum as a motor started in the house. It was a generator, to deliver power for the broadcast.

There was bare deck between the boxlike house part of the boat and its bow and stern. Sort of a nautical front and back yard. Benson slid onto the front expanse and went to the nearest window.

There was a quarter-inch crack between drawn shade and window sash. But he didn’t put his eye to it. He took a small periscope attachment from his belt and looked through that, with only the tiny, wide-angle lens showing at the crack.

He saw Suva and two men fussing around a cabinet. He saw another man looking after the wires leading from it. He saw chintz curtains, oversized light bulbs. This was the room they had seen when the warning was given—

A cold ring touched the base of his skull.

“Stay perfectly still,” said a deep voice behind him. It was the voice of the Black Wings leader! A black-gloved hand reached over the shoulder of The Avenger, and knuckles tapped the window. Next instant, the three men inside were on deck, ringed around Benson. And the moment after that he was in the room with all of them.

CHAPTER XVI

The Hooded Killer

The lithe figure with the black hood over its head looked at a watch placed on the cabinet.

“Three more minutes,” he said. “We can’t disappoint the customers by being late. The suckers, I should say.”

“How about this guy?” growled one of the men, prodding Benson with his thumb.

“He’ll be an object lesson in the broadcast,” said the Voice. “Somehow, he managed to escape the black death we promised him in the special broadcast. But not for long. The muzzle of the gun I poked into his neck is roughened—and it was dipped in old Hannon’s poison! In a few minutes, the esteemed Mr. Richard Benson will be as black as coal and very, very dead. The suckers can watch him and get the idea that even if you escape the Black Wings’ vengeance once, it soon catches up with you.”

“Nice going,” applauded Suva. He turned to Benson. “O.K. chump. Just stand without making trouble till you begin to feel it.”

“Two minutes and a half,” said the hooded leader. He said to The Avenger, “Did any others of your band escape the black death from Gresham Bros.?”

“All did,” said Benson evenly.

The hooded leader went rigid, then relaxed and laughed.

“Yes? But you said you were here alone. You’d hardly come alone if others of your aides were alive to come with you.”

“I said I was alone—then. And I was. By now, all the rest, save one at the controls of a plane, will have parachuted down near here. Perhaps they have surrounded the houseboat already.”

“Hey,” said Suva uneasily, “maybe this guy’s telling the truth.”

“I’ve learned always to tell the truth,” said The Avenger calmly. “Honest men trust you for it. Liars and crooks like yourselves never believe it, and so they doom themselves.”

The hooded leader laughed again and waved back Suva, who had stepped angrily up to hit Benson.

“Don’t bother with him. In a minute or so he’ll begin to turn black and be out of our way. Just about time, Suva. Is everything ready?”

“Yeah,” said the mob leader, weak eyes venomous behind his thick glasses.

“All right. You three go out on deck and keep watch, just in case this bluffer isn’t entirely bluffing.”

Benson burst into action, then. He leaped for Suva, hands clawing for throat. Then he knocked Suva down and attacked the other two. After that, the leader’s gun found his neck again, bored in.

“I’d kill you for that, only I want you to die by television later— Ah!”

Moisture was on Benson’s forehead. He swayed as Cole had swayed back at Bleek Street.

“So the black death is beginning to work,” said the Voice. “And just at the proper time, too.” He stepped forward, eyes glaring at Benson through eyeholes in the hood, and began the broadcast. Benson staggered to a chair and collapsed in it.

The Voice dispensed with the buildup of the Black Wings’ shadow. There was no helper to perform the trick. All were out on guard. The leader opened abruptly.

“Members of the Black Wings, before you is a man doomed. You all saw him handed the black orchid at the previous broadcast. He evaded that death for a few hours, but he receives it, now, even as any of you who turn traitor and think to escape the death penalty will, in the end, die.”

A black-gloved hand picked up a black orchid from the bed. The hooded Voice strode to where Benson sat.

“I give you your sentence,” came the sonorous voice. And unseen members of the cult, looking at television screens in far places, must have gasped. “In less than five minutes—”

There was a scuffle outside the window, on the deck. As if in answer, there was a thudding sound, a curse cut off in the middle, at the stern of the boat. And then came a yell of terror from the pier.

“Beat it, boss! The guy was telling the truth! There’s a dozen cops or something—”

That voice stopped, too.

The hooded leader whirled toward The Avenger, his eyes red wells of hate in the eye slits. But there was still purpose in them.

He bounded to a dangling rope in the wall toward the pier. He yanked on this.

“That sends the cage with my prisoners in it to the bottom of the bay,” he snarled. “At least, there won’t be any witnesses—”

But there was no crash of the tiger cage shooting down the incline and through the loose boards at the end of the pier. The Voice glared at Benson.

“I tied the wheels,” said Benson calmly. “Whatever catch you released to let the cage roll down is useless. The cage is roped in place.”

“Damn you!” screamed the hooded man. “Then we’ll both go down—”

The Avenger was out of his chair and on the Voice before the latter had gone five feet. Benson got him just in time. His hand had flashed toward a lever in the inner wall. The Avenger pulled him back.

“That, I suppose,” said the man with the pale, deadly eyes, “sinks this boat. The water’s deep enough—forty feet—I measured it. But we’ll get along without that.”

The eyes glaring through the slits in the hood were so filled with wonder that, for an instant, there was hardly room for hate.

“You moved!” the hooded figure gasped. “You aren’t . . . you—”

“I’m not dying of the black death,” Benson finished for him. “No. I analyzed the cause, from the body of the guinea pig used at Hannon’s home for experiment. Also, I found an antidote. You did poison one of my aides with your orchids, but I gave him the antidote before we left. At the same time, I took an injection of it myself, to share the fate of my friend if I had unwittingly killed him. But I’m alive, and all right, so it seems the antidote is a success.” Strangling sounds came from the hooded man. His gloved hands moved in throttling sweeps. And then the door opened and Smitty, Josh, and Mac came in. Each dragged an unconscious gunman with him. Mac had Suva, and Mac’s knuckles were blissfully split with the soul-satisfying force of the blow to the jaw he’d given the crook.

“Thanks for smearin’ the men with phosphorus, Muster Benson,” the Scotchman said. “Made it verrra easy to find them in the dark.”

The hooded man stiffened as the memory came back to him of Dick’s “futile” struggle against his three men. He had rubbed a fluorescent substance on them that glowed betrayingly when they stepped out into the darkness.

His scream was like nothing human. Then he turned and sprang. He went headfirst through the window on the pier side. They heard him strike.

“After him,” snapped The Avenger. “Guard that cage out there!”

Then, alone in the room with the three gangsters sprawled at his feet, The Avenger turned to the television transmitter and completed the Voice’s broadcast.

“Members of this organization calling itself the Black Wings,” he said, in the vibrant, stirring voice that was one of the things making him such a leader among men. “You have been duped. Your leader, the cold-blooded killer who is ashamed to reveal his face but hides it always under a black hood, has told you that the Black Wings is an organization to help our country in a time of danger. That is not so. The Black Wings is a racket organization. It exists for just one purpose: to further the racket of this one man. I will tell you how.

“You members are chosen for one thing: you have access to laboratories or factories or other places where secret industrial or war processes are being experimented with. If the experiment is successful, you report it. Then you are instructed to conceal a television-broadcasting set—which, by the way, was invented by John Jay Hannon and stolen by this man—where it will send in detail the complete process.

“Finally, the hooded racketeer gets in touch with the man or corporation owning the process and blackmails this owner for a huge sum, threatening to make the secret process public if the demand is not met. The last blackmail demand was made on Stockbridge Chemical Corp., where, as you read, the building engineer, Frank Stanton, was killed by the black death. Stanton was no traitor. He obeyed the command, and was murdered for it to keep his mouth shut, as all of you would have died after performing your purpose. But this will not happen, now. The Black Wings order is disbanded. Your hooded leader is a prisoner at this moment. Members of the Black Wings, thank your stars that you have found out the truth behind your cult—and go and sin no more.”

Benson turned. There was the chair he had sat in when pretending to be in pain. He picked it up—it was a good, solid one—and brought it down on the television apparatus. Again and again, he smashed into the delicate array of tubes and coils. Then he went to the pier.

Smitty’s disconsolate voice came to him. “Chief? We didn’t find the guy with the bag over his head. I’m afraid he got away.”

The Avenger said evenly, “Josh? Mac?”

“Here,” came their voices. “We’re guardin’ this cage like ye said to,” added Mac.

“Good,” said Benson. “Because that’s where our man is. In that cage.”

Exclamations from within the cage greeted this.

And a puzzled silence from Benson’s aides. The Avenger’s flash rayed over the cage and its occupants—Schuyler Marcy, Dan Miller, Alicia Hannon, and still unconscious, John Hannon.

“In here?” repeated Marcy. “I don’t see how. No one has gotten out of here. The thing’s barred like a jail.”

“Say!” Miller said suddenly, mouth open with surprise. “There may be something in that. It’s pitch-dark out here. But just the same, a while ago, after Mr. Benson said he was here alone, I thought I felt someone crawl past me—and not crawl back again!”

Josh had been looking in the light of Benson’s flash. He said: “A trapdoor in the floor. At this end! And a hand could get through the bars and down to the catch, if that hand knew just where to feel under the floor for it.”

“So someone did get out, in the darkness!” Miller marveled. Then his voice broke, and he gasped, “Why—Marcy!”

Marcy, sitting tailor fashion on the floor of the cage, had moved. The move revealed a black piece of fabric easily identified by the eyeholes as the Voice’s hood.

Smitty roared his rage, and he and Mac both moved angrily in to open the cage and get Marcy out. But Benson’s voice cut in, as calm and even as if this were all a dinner-table conversation.

“Save the acting, Miller. You put that hood there, when you slipped back into the cage a minute ago.”

“Me?” Miller’s voice hardened. “You’re insane!”

“Marcy was accounted for, during at least one of the broadcasts. He was at Bleek Street. He couldn’t have worn that hood. But there’s other proof, I think. At Gailord’s barn, with a blowgun, I spattered a chemical against your shoe that ought to put you in the electric chair.”

Benson put a lens to his eye and nodded. He handed it to Smitty.

Smitty looked and whistled. Over the whole side of Dan Miller’s left shoe was a dim blue-violet glow as seen through the special lens. It was a label of death.

“May I?” begged Marcy through set teeth. And he didn’t wait for permission. He turned on Miller in the flashlight ray and hit him so hard that his body bent a bar of the cage a trifle as it banged back against it.

“I’ve been hunting for weeks for the boy that deserved that blow,” he said. “As you discovered earlier, I was already in Gailord’s employ when he died. I was a sort of unofficial detective for him, watching him and his plant, and frequently hanging around the Bristal Airplane Co.’s plant to see that everything about the Gailord stabilizer was going all right. Then I noticed that Gailord was acting strangely. Something was wrong. I couldn’t find out what. Then he died, and I’ve been living only to get the man responsible for his death. If he manages to dodge the electric chair—”

“He won’t,” said Benson. “We have enough evidence against him to convict a dozen men.”

He stepped to the open side of the pier and flashed his light toward the sky. After a while, a plane motor sounded; then there was the long swish of the amphibian bomber, with Nellie at the controls, as it landed in the water nearby.

It was lucky the plane was big. It had a good load, now. Three gunmen, including Suva, lay bound. Near them, handcuffed and raging, was Dan Miller, with Marcy hopefully waiting a chance to slug him again if he tried any funny business. Alicia Hannon was with her father, who had recovered consciousness after a bit of The Avenger’s skilled ministration.

Smitty and Mac and Josh and Nellie were near Benson, who was at the controls. Nellie was still grumbling rebelliously at being left to fly a plane around in peaceful circles while everybody else was having fun.

Mac said, “This black death, Muster Benson. Ye say ye spotted it? What in the worrrld caused it, anyway?”

The Avenger was silent for several minutes. Then he answered thoughtfully, “I believe I’ll not even share that secret with you. I’ll turn it over to the war department, with the antidote, still a complete secret. Even Miller doesn’t know the answer. He stole the completed chemical from Hannon. But he had to kidnap Hannon, too, to make more for him when he ran out. That’s why Hannon’s still alive.”

“War department?” repeated Smitty. “You think Hannon invented it for war?”

“I think so. The drug is highly volatile if mixed with ethyl alcohol. Makes a gas which produces the black death when inhaled just as surely as the drug itself does on the end of a small sharp point.

“It’s a thing that attacks the red blood corpuscles. It is an element that combines instantaneously with the oxygen carried by each red corpuscle, producing combustion, burning that corpuscle to a black mass. It starts a chain process, each corpuscle passing the chemical flame to the next. When all are black, with all the surface blood vessels and arteries filled with them, you have the black skin and flesh we have seen. The black death! This terrible poison can be introduced to the blood stream directly, or through the lungs. It could be a ghastly war weapon, turning an invading army into rank on rank of black, stiff corpses. I hope the army will never have to use it.”

The lights of New York showed ahead—the lights of the place where Daniel Miller would be judged and exterminated, where John Jay Hannon could be nursed back to health by his resolute daughter, and where, as a few small signs had indicated, Schuyler Marcy might also be nursed by Alicia for the malady whose only remedy is the pill of romance.

Again, The Avenger had rendered a great service to his country and to mankind. But there was no triumph in his cold, pale eyes; no look of victory on his impassive face. It had been just another chapter in the life that could only be ended one of these days by violent death.

But till that end came, he would continue to serve mankind, unsung and mainly unknown, in perpetual vengeance against the underworld.

To the end—The Avenger!

THE END

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

THE BLACK DEATH

CHAPTER I Death in Sable

CHAPTER II Out of the Blue

CHAPTER III In Ruin’s Wake

CHAPTER IV Not So Crazy

CHAPTER V That Girl Again

CHAPTER VI The Black Pig

CHAPTER VII Brain Injury

CHAPTER VIII Another Man’s Face

CHAPTER IX Underground Crypt

CHAPTER X Priestess of Doom

CHAPTER XI The Four Electricians

CHAPTER XII Death’s Decoys

CHAPTER XIII On the Air

CHAPTER XIV The Death Sentence

CHAPTER XV Southwest

CHAPTER XVI The Hooded Killer