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

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

FIRST PRINTING: JANUARY, 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: 0-446-75-394-7

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

THE GREEN KILLER

CHAPTER I: The Apeman

CHAPTER II: Poisoned Darts

CHAPTER III: The Killer

CHAPTER IV: The Purple Haze

CHAPTER V: Souvenir

CHAPTER VI: The Antitoxin

CHAPTER VII: Lucky Shot

CHAPTER VIII: Dark Water

CHAPTER IX: All Is Lost

CHAPTER X: Double Trouble

CHAPTER XI: “Secret Orders”

CHAPTER XII: Reception Committee

CHAPTER XIII: Alden Stahl

CHAPTER XIV: Search for Treasure

CHAPTER XV: A Life for a Life

THE

GREEN KILLER

CHAPTER I

The Apeman

The man looked like a monkey.

He looked so much like a monkey that the first thing you thought on beholding him was that you weren’t seeing a man at all, but a large ape dressed in man’s clothes.

He was of average size—that is, for a human being—and he had a fair spread of shoulders. But as he walked, with a sidewise hitch as an orangutan walks, his knuckles almost touched the sidewalk. This was because his knees were bent in a gnarled way, as though they could never be straightened again.

His face was flattened, with a pug nose that had wide nostrils—apelike nostrils. He had a felt hat jammed far down on his forehead, but under the brim you could see coarse red hair. His forehead was about an inch and a half high.

In addition to this oddity of appearance, the man had another highly noticeable characteristic.

He looked very, very ill.

The small part of his simian face that could be seen under the hat brim was sheet-white. His lips kept quivering, and his hands trembled, hanging low below his knees.

A very sick man who looked so much like an ape that if he’d visited the zoo, the monkeys would probably have started chattering to him from their cages! Surely, you’d never see another like him in New York.

But anyone thinking that would have been proved wrong in about two minutes. For there was another like the man, and this other was trailing the man. One ape after another. And with the second ape acting in a sinister, deadly manner.

The first man was shambling along a side street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues where there weren’t many people. When he did approach anyone, he kept as far away as possible, trying to hide his bizarre appearance.

The second man seemed to have a magical ability to disappear altogether when people approached. Like some wild thing direct from a wilderness and carrying stalking methods of the jungle into the heart of a modern city, this man blended with shadow and other covering till he was almost invisible.

It was about ten o’clock at night, so there were plenty of shadows. Ahead, Sixth Avenue showed more brightly, but this side street was dimly illuminated.

The first man stumbled on his crooked, unsteady legs and almost fell. The second increased his pace with grim eagerness, and there was a glint of steel in his right hand. As he moved faster, for just an instant he flitted across a lighted patch and could be seen.

He was much smaller than his quarry. And, though the first man was white, this one wasn’t. He was a native of some tropical region, shambling, dark-skinned, savage-looking. There wasn’t a trace of humanity in his wild features.

But there was more mystery in the night than that represented by just these two men who looked like monkeys.

The first man, ducking and keeping to the building shadows as a group of people passed him, slunk by a dark, open areaway. The group of people passed just at the mouth of the dark den, which was perhaps why he wasn’t molested.

But there was no one near when the apelike trailer reached the opening of the areaway. So he reached it—but never passed it. In fact, he never did anything else in this life.

With a whisper like that of a snake, something uncoiled from the darkness. The thing that uncoiled looked like a snake, too, till it wrapped around the startled dark man. Then it could be seen to be a rawhide cord with a weight at both ends.

Like a thing alive, the primitive but effective weapon tightened around the man, holding him helpless. Long arms reached from blackness, fastened on the little fellow, and jerked him in. There was a stifled shriek that wasn’t loud enough to be heard more than a few feet. Then, silence. Ghastly silence!

The first man went on. In his weakened, desperate gait could be seen no signs that he’d ever been aware that he’d been tracked or that the tracker was now eliminated. He just went on, crazily, unsteadily, knuckles brushing sidewalk, toward more brightly lighted Sixth Avenue.

In the darkness of the areaway, words sounded.

“Got it?”

“Yeah! I feel like one of these here vampires or something.”

“The hell with what you feel like. Time for the next.”

“Sixth Avenue down toward the Village, ain’t it?”

“Yeah! We’ll get him there. Come on.”

The drugstore on Sixth Avenue and Waverly looked like an ordinary drugstore when you first walked in. But the back room was out of the ordinary.

This back room was huge. It was divided down the middle into two laboratories. One was filled with electrical-and radio-experimental apparatus. This belonged to Smitty, of the fabulous little band of crime fighters called Justice, Inc. The other half was for chemical work, and it belonged to Fergus MacMurdie, who was proprietor of the store.

MacMurdie stood behind the soda fountain at the moment. Mac was tall, with huge hands and feet and coarse, reddish skin. His hair was sand-colored, and his eyebrows looked like ropes of sand with little bitter blue eyes under them.

On the other side of the counter were Smitty and Josh.

Algernon Heathcote Smith was a six-foot-nine, near three-hundred-pound giant. His good-natured moonface and china-blue eyes made him look stupid. But he was far indeed from being stupid.

Josh Newton was also an important member of Justice, Inc., though he didn’t look it. A gangling Negro, he looked sleepy and dull. But he was an honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute, and he could think as fast as he could fight in an emergency, which was extremely fast.

The passion of Josh’s life was maple-nut sundaes. He was now indulging in his fifth, at Mac’s soda fountain. And the Scot was moaning in anguish because these things cost money. Smitty was now on his third sundae. Smitty wasn’t such a maple-nut addict, but he liked to see Mac writhe at the loss of nickels from the drugstore till.

Smitty happened to be looking squarely out the front show window; and, when he stiffened a little, the other two turned to stare also.

They saw a man who looked so much like a monkey that the first thought was that a trained ape had escaped from a circus. Then they saw that it was indubitably a man, with the pallor of bad health whitening his face and with crooked, unsteady legs barely hitching him along.

After that, they saw the closed delivery van.

The van was dark and had lettering on the side, but the lettering was so faded that no one could make a complete name out of it. Which was probably intentional. It looked old, but it crept along the street with a noiseless smoothness indicating a fine motor.

It crept along in the wake of the man!

The three in the drugstore saw that the driver had his eyes hard on the apelike fellow and that a man next to the driver had one foot out of the cab as if preparing to leap.

And an instant after they saw these things, the man did leap.

The van was almost up to the limping sick man. The fellow with his foot on the running board leaped out. The driver stopped the van, and the rear doors of the thing flew open.

Two more men jumped out!

The three of them fanned toward the monkeylike figure. Their intention was unmistakable.

“A snatch!” gasped Smitty. “Right on crowded Sixth Avenue at ten in the evening!”

“Or a murder!” said Josh. He said it on the run. For with the first glimpse of the deadly three from the van, the members of Justice, Inc., were streaking for the street door.

They burst out onto the sidewalk. As they did so, one of the three men socked the apelike one on the head with a blackjack. The other two caught him on the fly, as it were, and jumped back toward the van with him.

They got to the van, too. And the third fellow jumped back to the cab. Van doors and cab door slammed shut as Josh and Mac and Smitty galloped up. The three scrabbled at the doors but couldn’t open them.

“By gosh, they’re getting away with it!” yelled Smitty, outraged.

The van had started.

“No, they aren’t,” snapped Mac. “Watch it!”

His hand shot forward in an expert throw.

A tiny object glistened in a glassy way as it arched toward the rear of the van. It hit the pavement almost under the rear wheels. It exploded with a spanggg! Next instant the two rear tires went wheeee as air rushed from them through a hundred jagged slits in the rubber. The tiny bomb had been a fragmentation affair of Mac’s devising that would knock even puncture-proof tires to ribbons.

The van wobbled violently. Mac threw again.

This time it was a little smoke bomb. It hit in front of the van and sent up a fog through which no driver could see. They heard the van crash unmusically into a parked car. They ran for it.

The smoke bomb had stopped the truck. That was on the credit side. On the debit side was the fact that if you could not see out of the cloud, you couldn’t see into it, either.

Smitty and Mac and Josh got to the van and found the three men in it gone. They had slipped off under cover of the smoke and were hopelessly gone by now.

“How about the poor mon they slugged?” said Mac.

Their victim was in the van. The men hadn’t attempted to carry the apelike figure with them in their frantic escape. He lay moaning on the floor of the truck.

There was a mob around the van, now, coughing in the smoke that clogged Sixth Avenue. Cops appeared in the murk.

“Back, everybody. Stand clear. What goes on here? What—”

“Oh, hello, Mr. MacMurdie,” said another cop as he caught sight of the Scot’s homely face and sail-like ears. The cop’s voice was respectful. Every officer in New York knew the members of Justice, Inc. Around the Sixth Avenue drugstore, which was a sort of second headquarters for the band of crime fighters, police knew them even better.

“What happened? Car afire?” the cop asked Mac.

The Scot explained what had happened. “The three skurlies got away in my smoke barrage. I think they went north on Sixth. Two had felt hats; the third wore a cap. Dark clothes.”

The officer ran north. The other one looked at the moaning, apelike fellow.

“I’ll take him to my store,” said Mac. “If he knows anythin’, or has anythin’ to report, we’ll turn him over to ye.”

The second cop nodded and chased after the first. Mac and Smitty and Josh went back to the store with the man.

The fellow was not unconscious, but obviously the knock on the head had been serious for him in his weakened condition.

“He’s a very sick mon,” Mac confirmed the man’s invalid appearance. “But what he’s sick of, I haven’t the faintest notion.”

The man, meanwhile, was babbling in semi-delirium.

“Don’t let them get me,” he whispered, staring wildly around. “They’ll kill me! Kill everybody!”

“You’re all right,” soothed Smitty. “Nobody can hurt you here.”

“The monkey disease,” whispered the man, paying no heed to the soothing words. “The two guards in the jungle. Emeralds! A bucket of emeralds!”

Josh and Smitty stared at Mac. This was queer, even for delirium.

“Who wants to kill you?” asked Mac.

The man stared through him.

“Kill everybody! Bucket of emeralds. The two jungle guards. The green killer!”

Smitty whistled. Then the giant took from a vest pocket a little black disk. It was no bigger than a quarter, but it was a perfect microphone. It was connected to a tiny, curved case at Smitty’s waist which housed the world’s smallest and best transmitting-receiving radio set, perfected by Smitty in his radio research.

“I think the chief would like to sit in on this,” he said. Then he spoke into the little mike. “Smitty calling. Chief—Smitty calling.”

Josh, meanwhile, blinked bewilderedly at Mac.

“What on earth do you suppose he means—‘Green killer. Bucket of emeralds. Jungle guards’?”

Mac shrugged. “Emeralds are green. So is the jungle. Maybe one or the other of them has almost caused the mon’s death. So he calls it, or them, the green killer.”

Smitty had by now contacted “the chief,” who happened to be none other than Richard Benson, more familiarly known as The Avenger.

“Yes,” came The Avenger’s cold, calm voice, after hearing the story, “bring him to Bleek Street. He sounds like a man in need of help.”

Mac closed the store for the night. The three went toward Smitty’s car, helping the sick, monkeylike man between them.

A uniformed patrolman hurried up to them.

“There’s something you guys might like to know,” he said. “It might tie in with this, though I can’t guess what ‘this’ could be. There’s a fella murdered up four blocks and halfway over to Seventh. Murphy found him a minute ago. Says he’s an Indian or something. His throat’s badly cut, but the Indian died of a head wound, and it looks as if his throat was cut after he was dead.”

“That’s funny,” said Smitty. He looked at Josh and Mac. “You two go on to Bleek Street, and I’ll join you later. I want a look at this dead Indian.”

They nodded and got into his car. Smitty turned north, to see what the dead Indian looked like and try to figure why his throat was cut in addition to a death wound on his head. If, indeed, this was the case; it takes a good man to know whether a cut has been made immediately after death instead of before. Murphy might have been wrong.

“Bucket of emeralds,” he heard the wounded man murmur as he turned from the car. “The green killer.”

CHAPTER II

Poisoned Darts

Bleek Street is only a short block in extent, a back eddy of an avenue. But it had become might in the books of the police and of the underworld since The Avenger appeared on it. For Bleek Street is the headquarters of Justice, Inc.

The entire top floor of the three buildings on Bleek Street is one vast room, and here the members of Justice, Inc., meet. The Avenger was there when Josh and Mac came in with the apelike man. And with him was petite Nellie Gray and Rosabel Newton, Josh’s pretty wife.

Nellie Gray was the last person you’d expect to see connected with a crime-fighting organization. But the pretty blonde was as valuable to The Avenger as the giant Smitty himself. Many a burly crook had laid hands on Nellie—to wake up in a hospital a few hours later.

Nellie stared in perplexity mixed with sympathy at the man Mac and Josh brought in.

“Why, he looks like an ape,” she said, noting the way the man’s knuckles scraped the floor when he stood as straight as he could, and the way his red hair—it was flaming red—grew low on his forehead.

“And he’s sick,” she added, looking at his pallor and the emaciation of his limbs. “And hurt.”

Where the man had been hit, on the back of his head, blood was clotting. It was all over the neck of his coat and shirt, too.

As they stared, the man sagged on Mac’s supporting arm. He had passed out again.

“Natural enough,” shrugged the Scot, helping him to a divan. “The mon was nearly murdered.”

Benson bent over the man and applied first-aid treatment to him. The Avenger was the most unusual of all the unusual characters making up Justice, Inc.

Benson was a man of average build, but he could perform feats of Herculean strength that the giant Smitty found it difficult to emulate. He could move with a quickness that baffled the eye.

Now and then, rarely, an individual appears whose muscle seems to have a different quality from ordinary muscle, so that, ounce for ounce, it packs many times the wallop of ordinary human sinew. The Avenger was one of these rare individuals.

But more remarkable than his strength was his appearance.

On his well-shaped head the hair grew thick and virile and was inky, jet-black. In contrast, his eyes were so pale-gray as to seem wholly without color. In moments of stress, they were terrible eyes, like deadly, pale holes in his face. And his face was deadly, too, in its complete lack of emotion.

The simian chap on the divan stirred under The Avenger’s expert aid.

“It may be a few minutes before he can talk,” said Benson to Mac. “You say he was nearly murdered?”

“Yes.” The Scot frowned thoughtfully. “Another mon, only four blocks from there, was murdered. An Indian, the officer thought him to be. Smitty went to have a look and see if it was connected with the attack on this mon. The big fellow ought to be back any minute now with a report.”

Smitty had expected to be back any minute, too. When he went with the cop to look at the dead man, he expected that a couple of minutes would tell him all he needed to know.

He reached the areaway and shoved through the usual crowd. The dead man hadn’t been moved.

“Looks more like a monkey than a man,” the officer who had guided Smitty observed.

The giant nodded and marked down one similarity immediately. The man who had been yanked into the van looked like an ape. This dead man looked like an ape. There must be some connecting thread, because in all his life Smitty had never seen human beings as simian as these two.

“See his throat,” said the cop.

Smitty looked at the dead man’s throat, and quickly looked away. It had been gashed half through. But, as had been said, the real death wound appeared to be on the Indian’s head. The skull was caved in terribly.

“South American,” said Smitty, staring at the wizened little corpse. “I’d say from Brazil, at a guess. And he doesn’t look as if he’s used to wearing shoes much, either.”

That was true enough. The body was clad in an odd way—in all the correct garments, but incorrectly adjusted.

The native wasn’t used to buttons and shoelaces and such. Next to him lay a short, broad-bladed dagger with a double sawtoothed edge.

“Hate to have met him in a dark alley,” said the cop. “Maybe it’s just as well this baby was bumped off.”

The wagon clanged up. The officer looked at Smitty. “Guess they’ll take this to the morgue, unless you want to look around some more first.”

“Anything in his pockets, or any marks on him?” asked Smitty.

“Nope. No identification of any kind.”

“I guess there’s nothing else, then,” said Smitty.

The wagon halted at the edge of the crowd. Smitty pushed through and started toward Bleek Street.

And it was almost his last walk!

He got down the rather dark street a little distance, enough to be away from all the people morbidly staring at the scene of murder. He heard a whisper past his ear.

It was a tiny little whisper, such as a husky mosquito might have made. It sounded very innocent and meaningless. But right after it, there was a brittle click and then the sound of a light object falling to the sidewalk.

Smitty had the sixth sense of all who live perilously, which tells of danger near. This sense now warned him so violently that he could feel the hair prickle on his scalp.

The giant could move with the swiftness of a stripling boy when he had to. He moved that way now, ducking low, leaping to one side, leaping back for the object that had fallen to the walk, finally jumping so that a parked car was between him and the other side of the street.

There, bending over the thing, he looked at it with the aid of a tiny flashlight.

“Boy!” he breathed. His hunch had been hideously right.

The little obiect was a dart, a miniature arrow only four inches long, with a needle-sharp point and with two feathers at its tail.

The point was discolored in a way with which Smitty, who frequently assisted Mac in chemical experiments, was all too familiar.

It was poison! A poisoned dart, and it had come a half-inch from his cheek.

Smitty looked through the two windows of the parked car at the buildings across the street. He looked for a long time before he saw the one window that was open a few inches, and behind which there was dark movement.

He debated calling the police up the street, then decided not to. It would probably mean the death of one or two of them. They weren’t equipped to handle savage death from the jungle here in the middle of New York City. It was the function of Justice, Inc., not to expose others to death, but to bear the brunt of peril themselves.

Smitty ducked from behind the car and legged it across the street fast. He felt a light tap on his chest as another dart sang eerily from darkness! That was all right. Smitty, like the others of the band, wore at all times a bulletproof garment made of a flexible, fine stuff invented by The Avenger and called by him celluglass.

If that stuff would stop bullets, which it did, it would stop these little darts, which were sent with only enough force to prick a person lightly.

But Smitty had arms, legs, and head to consider.

He got to the opposite sidewalk. There was a slight whisper, and he felt his hat tug up a bit. A dart was stuck in it. He reached the doorway of the building and charged in.

The window was on the second floor. He dashed up dark stairs, rounded the newel post, ran for the front—and was suddenly covered with small human forms as a big dog can be suddenly covered by fleas!

Smitty hit out with hamlike fists. He could dimly see heads, so most of his blows hit home. He saw, with a lot of satisfaction, one little form after another go down. But there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of them. As fast as one bounced to the floor, another sprang in from somewhere.

The only break Smitty got was that no one was trying to stick him with poisoned pins. There were so many swarming over him that they couldn’t use the darts for fear of pricking each other.

The giant took two forms and tossed them over the stair rail. They clattered down below and promptly ceased to make any noise.

He took two others and knocked their heads together. And all the time he felt a creepy sensation going up and down his spine.

Busy as his hands were, they couldn’t help, after a while, but feel a striking similarity among the forms he was mauling around. Also, they couldn’t help but feel the striking malformation of the forms.

They all felt like monkeys!

Was he fighting men—or giant apes?

He gathered three or four in his arms and squeezed. When he got through, at last, he could count his assailants. There were only six, now. And the battle between giant and pygmies lasted only another half-minute.

He smacked two clear back down the hall out of sight in shadows, and the other four ran. They ran silently, wholeheartedly, around the newel post and down the steps, leaving Smitty panting, the solitary figure on the field.

He didn’t stand there long; he went on to the front of the building, which was his goal. He opened the door leading into the room he’d decided on as belonging to the partly opened window.

At first, he didn’t see anything in the room. It seemed vacant even of furniture. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw a vague white figure on the floor, sitting with back to the end wall. He went toward it.

It was a girl, in a gray-white dress.

“Hello!” he said, in amazement. It looked as if he had the wrong room after all. But there was the window, partly open. “What are you doing here?”

The girl didn’t say anything.

“Are you in with that gang of baboons, or did they capture you and bring you here?”

The girl didn’t say anything.

Puzzled, Smitty bent over her. He could see her only faintly, but it was enough to show that she wasn’t tied up. There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t get up off the floor. And there seemed no reason why she shouldn’t talk.

“Look here—” Smitty began. He broke it off to say, “Ouch!”

Something like a needle had jabbed him lightly in the back of the hand.

For an instant the giant just rubbed at it absently. But then he heard light footsteps scamper down the hall outside, to the stairs, down them. And at the same time, the realization of just what that needle prick was exploded in his brain.

The little monkey men had been stupid to gang up on him when he came in, though they probably hadn’t dreamed that the man existed who could lick all of them as Smitty had. What they should have done, if they’d kept their heads, was let him come peacefully down the hall, then pop him with arrows from a safe distance.

One of the little men had just done precisely that, now.

He had crept to the open door of the room, calmly aimed, and calmly sent a poisoned dart into the giant’s hand.

Smitty whistled and began frantically sucking the back of his hand. This was curtains for him, unless—

“Come on!” he snapped to the girl. “We’ve got to get out of here fast!”

The girl didn’t say anything.

Smitty, too desperate to fool around any longer, stooped and picked her up. He held her under one arm like a roll of carpet and ran down the stairs, sucking his other hand as he did so.

He got to his car.

“Can you drive? Do you know where Bleek Street is?” he said swiftly.

The girl just looked at him, blank-eyed, like a broken doll. She didn’t say anything. She did, however, stand on her own feet, now that he had set her down.

He shoved her into the car.

Already, the giant was experiencing a not-unpleasant feeling of numbness. It made him step on the gas till the big car squealed on two wheels as it shot into Sixth Avenue against the red light. He had only a few minutes to live!

Curare!

He knew the symptoms. He also had read, not once, but several times, that there was no known antidote. But Dick Benson now and then upset what was known and what was unknown.

“Got to get to the chief!”

The giant reeled drunkenly in the driver’s seat. The car reeled, too, but miraculously avoided collisions. He whirled into Bleek Street. His eyes were getting dulled to light.

“Come on, you!”

This was to the girl, as he got out of the car. Overhead was the small sign, Justice, Inc. He could hardly see it.

If the girl had continued to be moveless as well as speechless, she’d have had to sit indefinitely down in the car, for Smitty hadn’t time to haul her out and hadn’t the strength left to carry her.

But this time, she seemed at least to hear him. She got out of the car in a brainless, docile way, like an automaton. She followed him to the door.

Smitty passed his hand three times, then once again, in front of a spot next to the inner door. The thick panel of bullet-proof glass opened in response to the action of an electric eye. Smitty went into the elevator. Like an inanimate object attached to him by a string, the girl followed.

Smitty was on hands and knees when the car reached the top floor. He opened the door of the vast headquarters room and fell in.

The girl followed and squatted on the floor like a child or a savage, but Smitty could no longer see her. He could no longer see anyone.

“Chief,” he whispered. “Chief!”

“Yes, Smitty.”

The Avenger had been at the big desk thirty feet from the door when the giant fell into the room. He’d covered the thirty feet so fast you could hardly follow his movements. Dick had one fear in an otherwise fearless nature. That was for the safety of his aides. Nothing called forth all the powers of genius he possessed as quickly as trouble to one of them.

“I’m here, Smitty.” The voice of the man with the pale, glacial eyes was vibrant, compelling.

Smitty moistened his unfeeling lips.

“Curare!” he got out. And then the world went black for him.

Mac drew in his breath with a frightened hiss. A brilliant chemist, he knew the dread meaning of that word. Death within a few minutes. Sure death! No known antidote.

But then commenced a drama that held the breath of everyone—except of the girl Smitty had brought in. She continued to sit on the floor without movement or sound, like a broken mechanical thing, seeing nothing, interested in nothing.

The Avenger leaped for a ceiling-high cabinet in which were countless bottles. One of the bottles was in one hand and a hypodermic needle was in the other when he leaped back to the giant again.

Mac watched despairingly. He was too good a chemist to hope for Smitty’s life, even with Dick Benson administering to him. Curare, known also as woorarli, an extract derived from the cocculus Amazonum, containing picrotoxin! You couldn’t cheat death with that stuff!

Mac stared at Smitty. He was breathing with less difficulty. Then he was breathing normally, though his eyes were closed in a profound stupor. And color was coming back into his face!

The Scot gazed with awe at The Avenger. The mask of a face was as emotionless as ever. The eyes were as calm in their colorlessness. Mac looked at the little bottle The Avenger held. It was like pale milk; no telling what was in it.

But whatever it was, Smitty was incredibly going to be all right again. He had come to the chief in childlike faith that somehow he could cure him. And his faith was justified.

Dick nodded in answer to Mac’s look.

“It seems to work. It’s an antidote I perfected about four months ago, and I haven’t yet had time to prove it. Had to take a chance with Smitty, though. I’ll turn it over now to a laboratory for proving, and afterward it can be sent out to all hospitals.”

The girl on the floor looked vacantly up at The Avenger.

For the first time she spoke.

“Radium,” she said. “Radium. The green killer.”

That seemed to be her contribution for the day. She said no more, though they tried in every way possible to make her speak. Just those two incomprehensible things. Radium. Green killer.

CHAPTER III

The Killer

The man’s name was Arthur Heber. He was from New York, originally, but had lived in South America for many years, not coming back to the States till now.

He told them about it, propped in a chair, looking more than ever like a trained ape instead of a human being. A very sick ape.

He’d lived for years in Manaos, Brazil, far up the Amazon River. He’d had a rubber plantation, which he’d lost. Then he had been in charge of an experimental station trying to grow tung trees. This had failed, and he had lived in poverty on what he could make as a guide.

“I was about to starve when Alden Stahl showed up,” he said.

To none of them but The Avenger did that name mean anything. But little Nellie noticed that the pale, cold eyes of The Avenger glinted suddenly, like icy jewels, at the mention of Alden Stahl.

“He’s part engineer and part prospector,” Heber began to explain.

“I know,” Dick interrupted. “Go on.”

Stahl had heard there was a spot far up the Negro River, a branch of the mighty Amazon, where pitchblende was found to be miraculously rich in radium. He wanted Heber to guide him there.

“I didn’t want to go,” said the man who looked like a red-haired ape. “I knew of the spot. Never had been there. I don’t think any white man has ever been there. Stahl heard of it from a dying native who had radium sores all over him just from being near the rich pitchblende deposits.”

“Why didn’t you want to go, Heber?” asked Benson.

“I’d heard it was a bad spot to enter. The natives are mean. Little, wild fellows. Use poison darts. You never see them. You feel them all around you. And then one day you feel a kind of pin prick, and that’s that! I told Stahl. But he’s brave. He said we’d go anyhow.”

Heber moved his legs restlessly, acting as if the crooked knee joints pained him.

“I told him I’d heard there was more wrong with the place than mean natives. I told him that everybody in Manaos has heard, at one time or another, that some funny kind of disease is around the place. I don’t know what it is. Nobody seems to know. Nothing like it anywhere else on earth.”

Heber’s tortured eyes went to his bent legs.

“It turns a man into a monkey,” he said.

It sounded insane. But it wasn’t insane when you looked at Heber—at his apelike figure. Mac and Smitty, Nellie and Josh and Rosabel were tense as the grim tale went on.

“Stahl offered me a lot of money, and I needed money badly. So I took him up the Negro River, north and west of—”

“I’ve been through there,” said Benson evenly. “Isn’t there a rumor of the existence of some ancient Indian city?”

Heber nodded indifferently. “Yes. I’ve heard of it. Supposed to be quite something. Never saw it, though, and I shouldn’t wonder that it doesn’t exist except in somebody’s imagination. Supposed to be not far from the spot where the pitchblende is said to be.”

He picked up his story.

“We got to within sixty miles of the place Stahl was heading for. He was crazy to get there. The radium, he said, would be invaluable for America’s defense program. He simply must find it. Our native porters began to desert.”

Heber stared at nothing, with haunted eyes.

“We started early on that last day. We were an hour along when I began to feel funny. Couldn’t seem to straighten my legs, and every bone in my body ached. I looked at Stahl and saw he was feeling the same way. The natives looked at both of us, dropped everything, and began running back the way we’d come as if the devil was after them. We were hit. The green killer had us.”

There it was again. That green killer stuff.

“Is that what ye call this disease?” asked Mac.

“Yes. Everybody calls it the green killer. Because it seems to come from the grass near that region. You just walk through this grass, high boots or not, and after a while you’ve got it. And you start looking like a monkey. It seems to take every bone and twist it—hurts like hell, too—into monkey shapes. And it stimulates the growth of hair in some odd way. Look how mine’s grown down on my forehead.”

Heber shivered.

“I was going back then. I didn’t care if there was radium ahead of us or not. But Stahl still wanted to go on. His country needed the stuff, he said. We argued about it when the little black men charged us. Monkey men! They had this disease, but it didn’t seem to hurt them except to stunt their growth and change their appearance. They didn’t seem sick from it.

“Anyhow, I ran. No sense in both of us being caught. If one could get away, he might bring help to the other. So I ran. I managed to get away, but they caught Stahl.”

The Avenger drew a deep breath. His face was as much of a mask as ever; but Nellie, who was delicately tuned to the chief’s every motion, knew that he was deeply stirred.

“Stahl was killed?” he asked.

Heber shrugged. “I don’t know. Not as far as I saw. The little men were all around him. But they were just holding him, the last I saw, as if they meant to take him prisoner but not to kill him. I have a hunch he’s alive, held by these men. Of course, he won’t stay alive long. The monkey disease kills, in time.”

The Avenger paced the big room slowly but with every small muscle in such perfect tune that his tread was like that of a panther.

“Stahl,” he said, “is an old friend of mine. I traveled Brazil and Peru with him for nearly a year. We worked together on some tin mines I promoted when I was about twenty.”

“I know he’s a friend,” nodded Heber. “That’s why I was hunting for you in New York.”

“You were on your way here when you were attacked on Sixth Avenue, then,” said Smitty.

“Yeah. Stahl talked of Mr. Benson often. He was the world’s best engineer. He was the world’s best authority on rare tropical diseases, too. So when I got loose from the natives and got to Manaos again, I came up here for your help as fast as I could make it. Your old friend’s down there, and he needs you, Mr. Benson.”

Nellie impulsively looked at her watch.

“Okay,” she said crisply. “We can leave in about ten minutes.”

But The Avenger shook his close-cropped black head.

“This is one time when haste must be made slowly,” he said. “It would be meaningless for us to rush down there and fall victim to this queer disease before we could locate Stahl. We must beat the disease first. You seem to have it rather badly, Heber.”

Heber’s mouth twitched, and he shifted his bent legs restlessly.

“I’ll say I have it.”

“I’ll take a sample of your blood,” said The Avenger. “I’ll work on it immediately. If you will bare your arm—”

Heber drew back from the glittering needle. His face was twisted in fear. Then it went apologetic.

“Do you mind if I take the sample myself? In another room or some place? I’m scared to death of a needle in the hands of somebody else.”

“As you please,” said Benson evenly. He turned to Josh. “Take Mr. Heber down to one of the suites, please, Josh. Bring the blood samples back up when he’s ready with it. Take this vial.”

He gave Josh a small, wide-throated bottle.

“And while Heber is resting, please wash his shirt out and clean up his coat a bit. The bloodstains from the wound on his head—”

Josh and Heber started for the door.

Then there was trouble of a peculiarly deadly sort, from the last source on earth they’d expected.

There was a vicious twang, and an arrow skinned past Heber so close that it took a fleck of cloth from his coat. Then the arrow buried itself in the leather depths of a divan beyond Heber, across the room.

They all whirled, Heber with his mouth open in fear and amazement.

The archer was the girl Smitty had brought in.

Unnoticed, she’d risen from her dull-eyed squat on the floor and crept to the far end of the room. There, on the walls, The Avenger had hanging some different types of native bows and arrows. The girl had taken one down, fitted an arrow into the bowstring and sent that death shot with an expertness unexpected in a New York young lady supposedly innocent of all jungle lore.

Mac jumped to her side. But he didn’t grab the bow from her. Grabbing was not necessary. He took it from her limp fingers with ease.

She looked at Heber, the man she’d tried to kill, with no emotion on her face at all. She looked vacantly at the rest. She said not one word.

She squatted again on the floor.

“What’s the matter with her?” Heber wrenched out. “Who is she, anyhow? Is she crazy?”

There were no answers to these questions at the moment. He went on out with Josh to get the blood sample while Josh cleaned his clothes up a bit.

The rest turned their attention to the girl.

She was a very pretty girl—pretty even with a face as vacant as an empty dish and eyes as witless as the eyes of a month-old child. She had reddish-brown hair and light-brown, almost amber, eyes. She was so long-legged and lithe that it looked as if she might be a professional dancer. She was expensively dressed, but clothes and makeup suggested that she hadn’t touched herself for many hours.

“Who are you?” said The Avenger gently.

The girl didn’t say anything.

“How did you happen to be caught by the monkey men?”

There was no answer.

“Why did you try to kill Heber?”

She only looked at the pale, icy eyes with a sort of brainless curiosity. Benson leaned closer and stared into the pupils of her eyes. Then he rigged a tiny mirror and light on his forehead and stared harder into the pupils.

“Paralysis of some sort,” he said. “Yet, it leaves the motor muscles and nerves unaffected. Nellie, take our odd guest downstairs and look her over, inch by inch. Make a note of any marking, no matter how slight, and report here as soon as you can.”

Nellie went out with the girl, who followed docilely, like a beautiful machine.

Josh came up with the vial full of blood, and Benson took it quickly. He went toward the vast laboratory he maintained.

Mac said, “There are a couple more things I’d like to ask Heber. D’ye mind?”

“No. Go ahead,” said Benson, pale eyes abstracted.

Mac went out, and Benson continued to the laboratory.

In addition to countless other pieces of apparatus, The Avenger had one of the latest and best electron microscopes, those mighty scientific eyes with a magnetic field for a lens. It could magnify up to a hundred thousand diameters. With the blood sample from the sick man downstairs, The Avenger went to this machine.

Mac, a floor below, knocked at the door of the suite given to Heber, got an answer, and went in.

The apelike figure of their guest was stretched on a bed. Heber opened his eyes as the Scot entered, but he didn’t move. He just looked questioning.

“Too tired to talk a little more?” said Mac.

“No. What’s on your mind?”

“In my store,” said Mac, “while ye were gettin’ over that clout on the head, ye said somethin’ about emeralds. A bucket of emeralds. Nothin’ about radium—just emeralds.”

Heber smiled faintly.

“Did I say that? I guess I was scrambled in the top story. I was going back to something Stahl told me in Brazil. I said he got me to guide him by offering a lot of money. He did offer me a lot, but it wasn’t enough to make me start for the kingdom of the green killer. I guess he saw that, so he put out this hot air about emeralds. He said a witch doctor near where we were going was said to have a whole lot of raw emeralds, and there’d be no reason why I couldn’t grab them off on the trip. That, plus the money, was enough to get me to go with him.” He grinned ruefully. “There weren’t any emeralds. He admitted it the last day out, before the monkey men captured him.”

“Oh!” said Mac. Then: “Got any idea who tried to kill ye?”

“No,” said Heber, looking puzzled. “If Indians had tried to get me, I’d have known. But this gang weren’t natives; they were whites. Nobody I’d ever seen before.”

“How do ye mean, if Indians had tried it, ye’d have known?”

The sick man explained.

“There’s a definite tribe around that section—the monkey men who hold Stahl. They’ve got more brains than most of the natives. At their head is a young Indian who has been to school in England—”

“What?” exclaimed Mac.

“Yeah. Smart boy,” said Heber bitterly. “He knows the answers, all right. For one thing, he knows that when the outside world comes into the jungle—the natives go out. So this young leader is seeing to it that no white gets in. When anyone does come near, members of the tribe follow him out, if it’s to the ends of the earth, and kill him, so he won’t go back again or lead anyone else back.”

“Nice boys,” said Mac thoughtfully.

“Very nice. There’s a squad of them in New York, now. Followed me up, I guess. One of them was found killed near your store, I hear. That has me stumped. Who’d kill him? Unless it was one of the gang that tackled me. But why would they kill an Indian, and why did they go after me, and who are they? It’s got me licked.”

Then he got indignant.

“Also, why did that girl try to drill me with an arrow? What’s she got against me? I never saw her before in my life.”

All of which were questions with no answers, as far as Mac was concerned. In fact, the Scot gloomily decided there’d probably never be any answers, particularly for the completely goofy conduct of the girl.

Nellie was just coming back into the laboratory after going over the girl’s shapely white body carefully, as instructed. She went to the giant electron microscope, where The Avenger was busy.

“There are two tiny punctures in the skin of her left shoulder,” Nellie said.

Benson nodded as if he’d expected that. But he thrust pencil and paper toward her.

“Draw them.”

Nellie made two little dots, close together. “They slant in a little toward each other,” she added.

“The bite of one of the giant South American spiders,” he said. “No antidote. Even in a body as large as a human’s, it causes total paralysis for a few hours. The motor nerves recover first, so that the victim can move. But in some way not yet explained by scientific investigation, the conscious will remains numbed for long after that.”

“So our guest won’t be ready to answer questions for quite a while?”

“It may be days before she can tell us who she is, and why she tried to kill Heber. Though I have an idea on that.”

“You have?” gasped Nellie.

“Yes. If you noticed, the girl handled that bow and arrow like a native.”

“How in the world does that answer the question of why she tried to kill him?”

But The Avenger didn’t answer. He had withdrawn into concentration over the electron microscope so intense that it was as if he had literally gone into another room and shut the door. Nellie went quietly out and left him working.

Working on the disease that could turn a human being into an ape.

CHAPTER IV

The Purple Haze

The police force of New York City had learned that The Avenger didn’t like to give out any information until he had a case all worked out. They had also learned that Dick Benson always did work them out, eventually, and that the force then got a whole lot of credit for something they hadn’t done.

So the police hadn’t expected any reports from The Avenger, but they were careful to give him reports on every detail they encountered, as soon as they could.

So they called him the minute they’d finished going over the delivery truck in which Heber had nearly been kidnapped under the noses of Smitty and Mac and Josh.

Nellie took the call, since The Avenger was so busy at the microscope.

“There are prints all over the truck,” said the sergeant who had called. “Nice plain ones. But they don’t tell us anything. They don’t match up with the prints of any crooks we have in our files.”

“Did you find out anything else?” Nellie asked.

“Nothing to get excited about. We traced the truck. It belonged to a guy named Hatch, till three days ago. He sold it to a fellow he’d never seen before, who laid cash on the line. That’s all Hatch knows. He described the man, but nobody here knew of him.”

“Are you holding Hatch?”

“No. We threw everything but the captain’s badge at him, and he kept telling the same story. He’s okay. We checked him off. His address is on South Street, Brooklyn, if you want him.” He gave Nellie the address.

The diminutive blonde thanked the sergeant and hung up. Then she called Smitty.

They’d all had a good rest by now. It was three o’clock in the afternoon after the crowded evening during which Heber had nearly been killed.

“The chief’s busy with the funny disease,” said the excitement-loving little blonde. “Heber’s still resting and is no good to anybody. The girl can’t or won’t talk, yet. Let’s you and I go and see this man Hatch.”

“Why not?” said Smitty.

“And I’d suggest that we take a couple of Mac’s persuaders with us.”

“Good idea,” said Smitty.

He got the “persuaders.”

Mac, one of the finest chemists in existence, had perfected many curious chemical compounds. One of the strangest was a faintly purple gas, released from a sullen-looking liquid, which clouded a man’s brain and robbed him of the will to resist questioning. A sort of truth gas. It didn’t always work, but in a majority of cases it did. To some extent, at least. Many were the reluctant admissions they’d drawn from a case-hardened crook with a “persuader.”

“I’d better go alone,” said Smitty. “There may be trouble, and you know how you are. You’re always catching it in your pretty neck, and then I have to go and rescue you.”

If looks could kill, Smitty would have been hash after Nellie’s glare. The giant grinned. It was a sure way to get a rise out of her—tell her that she was always getting into trouble and needing help.

They went out to Brooklyn.

The South Street address, they discovered, belonged to a tailor shop. A very innocent-looking tailor shop in a basement. A front-window sign said:

Tailoring, Dry Cleaning

Bert Hatch, Prop.

Mr. Hatch was alone when they walked down and in. He looked with appreciation at Nellie’s small perfection and almost with alarm at Smitty’s towering bulk. The giant always seemed to scrape whatever ceiling he stood under and to fill whatever room he entered.

Smitty followed up the look of apprehension by coming right to the point and booming threateningly. “You sold a truck to a bunch of gangsters recently, didn’t you?”

“H-huh?” stammered Hatch. Then he recovered his poise. “I don’t know who you are or why you’re asking, but I didn’t know they were gangsters. Honest!”

Nellie looked at Smitty in a way that told him to shut up. She had been staring at Hatch’s chubby, but firm, face, and she had decided that this man would tell nothing but what he wanted to tell. And the police had already heard that. It was a place for a persuader, all right.

She took one of Mac’s little pellets from her purse in such a way that Hatch, looking perplexedly from one to the other of them, couldn’t see. She broke the fragile shell by a hard pinch.

“Hey!” said Hatch suddenly. And now he didn’t look quite so much like a puzzled, innocent man. He looked wary. “What are you doing? What’s that purple stuff?”

The faintly purple haze surrounded the three of them. It affected Smitty and Nellie as well as Hatch; but since they were the ones who were doing the questioning, this did not matter. They had enough wit left to carry on.

“To whom did you really sell your van?” asked Nellie.

“To a man I never saw before who said his name was Gleason, just as I told the cops,” Hatch replied. The fact that he was no longer alarmed about the purple haze, didn’t ask any more about it, showed that the stuff was working. He was losing that shrewd caution of his and was softening up.

“What did he look like?”

“He was a big fellow, half bald, with a scar over the bridge of his nose. He wore horn-rimmed glasses with one plain lens and one reducing lens. He talked in a high, squeaky voice.”

“Is that what you told the police?”

Hatch hesitated just an instant, but the truth gas was working beautifully.

“No, I told them differently. I hadn’t any idea my old van was to be used for criminal purposes. But it had been. So I figured I’d stay out of trouble by lying about it.”

“Do you know where this big man with the glasses could be found?”

“I don’t really know. But I have an idea. He said something to another man with him—a smaller guy with yellow hair who limped—about a boat; where could they keep the van on a boat? The other man said something about keeping it in an old East River yard where the boat was abandoned. That’s all I know.”

“That,” said Smitty, “should be quite enough. Let’s go, Nellie.”

They got outside. The giant turned solemnly to her.

“The other night,” he said, “You went out with Cole Wilson.”

Cole Wilson was another member of Justice, Inc. At present, he was turning his production-management and engineering talents to the swifter production of heavy tanks for the army, at the government’s request. Wilson was black-eyed, dark-haired, and altogether too good-looking for Smitty’s peace of mind—when it was considered that the big fellow was pretty gone on Nellie.

“Yes, I went out with Cole Wilson,” said Nellie, who had inhaled quite as much of the persuader as Hatch had, and would be under the influence for another minute or two.

“Where did you go with him?”

“We went to the New York field office of the F.B.I, for some espionage information he wanted.”

Smitty grinned all over his big face.

“And what did you tell me later you did?”

“I said Cole and I had gone to the Pink Room for some dancing,” Nellie admitted.

“Why did you do that?”

“Just to kid you a little.” The influence of the purple mist was wearing off. Nellie looked sideways at the giant. Then she snapped indignantly, “You dumb edition of King Kong! You took advantage of me!”

Smitty hooted with delight.

“You made me talk when I was still fuzzy with that stuff!”

The giant doubled up with laughter. “Trying to make me jealous,” he gasped. “As if I cared where you went with Cole.”

“Oh, don’t you care?” said Nellie with ominous innocence. “Then, if that’s the case, I’ll really go places with Cole and have fun and—”

“Aw, now, Nellie,” protested the giant, with all mirth draining from voice and face. “I was only kidding.”

“I’ll only be kidding, too. But it’s going to be a lot of fun with Cole. He’s so good-looking.”

Smitty was still protesting in anguish when they reached the East River on the Manhattan side.

They went to the newsstand at the foot of Fortieth Street.

Justice, Inc., had a large band of helpers, which had proven invaluable. This band consisted of the newsboys of New York.

They all knew The Avenger. They all swore by him and lived to imitate him. They were the sharpest-eyed lads in the world, and they knew things and noticed things that even the police didn’t. It’s a small happening that can take place around a newsboy’s stand without his getting hep to it.

Of this boy, Nellie asked, “Do you know of any abandoned hulk of a boat around here docked at a yard also unused?”

The boy didn’t. Nor did the next one north. But with the third, the giant and the tiny blonde drew fire.

Their informant, a kid of fifteen or so with black eyes like gimlets, nodded at once.

“East River Wrecking Co.,” he said. “It handled junk. Went out of business last year. The yard’s never been sold or rented. There’s an old scow there, resting on the bottom.”

Smitty and Nellie went to the yard, and they stopped their clowning around at once.

The very look of the place was sinister.

Junkyards tend to be big, and this was no exception. It was at least a quarter of a block in extent, along the crowded river. Only the river, right at this point, wasn’t so crowded.

Between sidewalk and yard was what at first seemed to be a high board fence. Then Smitty and Nellie saw that it was not a fence; it was the back of a low shed. Smitty looked around, saw that no one was near them, then ripped a board off.

That sounds simple, but you should have seen the board. It was a two-inch slab, twenty inches across, nailed solidly to sound beams. An ordinary man could hardly have shaken it. Smitty put two vast fingers through a knothole, heaved, and then regarded a splintered board at his feet.

“You’ll be using telegraph poles for toothpicks if you keep on,” Nellie said.

She stepped through the opening. Smitty laboriously, at the expense of some skin, squeezed through after her.

The yard was empty, save for a litter of paper and broken glass. To the south was the four-story, sagging building that had been used as an office and also for further junk storage, perhaps for the more valuable metals such as zinc and tin and copper. To the north was a big building having nothing to do with the yard. It was windowless on that side.

The river end of the yard was open. There was a tumbledown dock, and next to this was a rusted hulk of a boat that was too large to be a seagoing tug, too small to be a tramp freighter, but looked a bit like each. A mongrel of a boat, which had probably been towed here and beached, to be cut up for scrap, but had not been taken down before the yard went out of business.

All around, there was no window through which one could spy. It was a perfect set-up for shady business.

The shed into which Nellie and Smitty had stepped was open in front, with a clear view from it to the boat, so the two kept in a corner where a pile of used lumber offered a shield.

“If anyone’s on that old tub,” said Smitty, “they’re probably keeping a lookout.”

“Yes. How are we going to get to it without being seen?”

“We,” said Smitty, “are not going to get to it. I am. You are to stay here, ready to run like blazes if somebody comes, or to radio word to Bleek Street if I fail to come back in a few minutes.”

“Aw, Smitty—”

“Don’t be a dope. Why should you go on board when there may be fifteen or twenty guys with guns wanting nothing better than to cut you down?”

“Well, you’re going, aren’t you?”

“There’s maybe a pound difference in our weights, and an inch or two difference in our sizes,” the giant pointed out. “Here you stay!”

“Oh, all right,” said Nellie.

Smitty was suspicious of the obedience.

“And don’t try to pull any fast ones!” he warned.

Then he went to the boat.

If he had crossed the empty yard, in broad daylight, he’d have been sure to be seen, so he didn’t do this. He went to that four-story, empty building belonging to the yard, took out a pane of glass under cover of the shed’s shelter, and crawled inside.

When he emerged again, he was at the water’s edge, down the length of the building, right beside the boat’s rusty hull. A cargo door was open in the side of the iron cliff. He slid through that and into the thing.

There was a lookout, all right. It just happened that for a couple of minutes he had been engaged in loading and lighting his pipe, being careful to keep his head turned from the cargo door so smoke wouldn’t drift out and advertise that the supposedly abandoned hull was tenanted.

So he didn’t see Smitty. Not till too late, that is.

He turned with his mouth gaping in surprise so that the pipe dropped out; then he tried to yell as a vast and unexpected figure loomed between him and daylight.

Smitty hit him!

The giant’s horsepower was such that he didn’t have to bother to hit anybody with care or skill. He just hit. And the person on the receiving end stayed hit for a long time. A favorite blow of his was to smack straight down on top of a man’s head with his fist, like a sledge hitting the end of a stake. He did this, almost negligently, to the lookout. The man slithered to the rusted plates of the cargo hold and lay quite still.

Smitty went deeper into the gloom. Voices sounded from the stern. He groped back there. A bulkhead, closed, was between him and the voices. He could hear the voices, but not words.

He put the little pocket microphone of his belt radio to the bulkhead, clicked on a tiny amplifying combination, then was able to hear the words, too.

“No matter how you look at it, we have to get that crowd working for Benson,” somebody was saying. “We have to get Benson, too, before he gets to the Negro River.”

“Yeah?” came a sardonic reply. “That sounded easy when we were in Brazil. But we get up here and we hear a little more about the guy, and it don’t sound so easy any more. He’s a one-man army, I guess. And the gang working for him is no pushover, either. Even that little blonde gal is said to be a tornado when she gets going.”

“Hooey!” said the first voice. “Any time I can’t handle a dame, especially one no bigger’n a half-pint of beer, I’ll go into an old ladies’ home.”

Smitty growled deep in his throat. Whenever anything threatened little Nellie, the giant got as angry as an elephant defending its young.

“Well, there’s no use debating it,” came a third voice. “It’s got to be done. That crowd calling themselves Justice something-or-other could make a lot of trouble, so they have to be eliminated.”

“How about those damned little Indians?”

“We can handle them, all right. But we won’t even bother with ’em unless they get in our way. They’re after Benson, too, I guess. Maybe they’ll do some of our work for us.”

It was quite an interesting conversation, Smitty decided.

“Where’s this Heber?” growled one of the voices.

“He’s at Benson’s, now. Can’t get at him till he leaves the place. It’s harder to get into that Bleek Street joint than to break out of Leavenworth.”

A very interesting conversation, Smitty thought. But then came words that were much more interesting, but in a reverse kind of manner. Because they didn’t come from beyond the bulkhead.

They came from behind him!

“Turn around slowly,” said a voice. “Don’t try any funny stuff.”

Smitty disobeyed the first order, but obeyed the second. He turned fast—but then did not try anything.

The sawed-off shotgun was about a foot from his head. It was held in the hands of a big man who had a scar on the bridge of his nose and wore horn-rimmed glasses—the man that Bert Hatch had said was named Gleason. One of Gleason’s lenses seemed to be of plain glass, the other one was a reducing lens. That little tailor, Hatch, was an observant man.

With the big fellow was a smaller man who had dead-looking yellow hair. When he moved, he limped. Score another for Hatch’s description.

Smitty chewed his lips furiously. He was certainly caught off base. Unless that shotgun wavered a bit—

There wasn’t a waver in a carload, he decided, a minute later. The gun was rock-steady in a practiced hand. Smitty hadn’t a chance of trying a swift move.

The little fellow had opened the steel door by now.

“Back in,” ordered the big man with the glasses.

Smitty took a backward step.

The giant was perfectly familiar with boats, but in the stress of the moment he forgot the combing customarily at the bottom of nautical doors—a sort of six-inch-high sill of metal. He stumbled over that and fell straight back on his head.

The world blinked out like a light with the switch opened.

CHAPTER V

Souvenir

To give her credit, Nellie had really intended to follow orders when she was left in the shed behind the sheltering pile of lumber. She meant to stay there as a lookout while Smitty investigated the boat.

She didn’t want to stay. She wanted to be in with the big fellow. The tiny blonde, seemingly so fragile in her soft pink-and-whiteness, thrived on action that would have turned an average policeman’s hair gray.

But it was safer for Smitty to have a lookout here; and the safety of the looming mass of muscle was pretty precious to Nellie, though she’d have died rather than admit it openly.

However, circumstances combined to make her disobey.

First, two men stepped through the opening in the street side of the shed which Smitty had made by ripping the board off. Nellie had been apprehensive about that opening. It would have been better to shut the thing back up by replacing the board. But the plank had been too splintered by Smitty’s sinewy hands for that.

They’d had to leave the opening as it was, and now two of the gang had spied it and were prowling to investigate. One of the two was big, and had on horn-rimmed glasses. The other, smaller, was yellow-haired and limped. So Nellie spotted them.

The bigger man got out a shotgun as he climbed in, and he started grimly for the boat.

“So what do I do?” Nellie demanded of herself.

She could radio Bleek Street, but help couldn’t get here before those two got to the boat. She could yell a warning to Smitty, and probably get them both shot. Or she could tackle the two men herself.

In the little blonde’s purse, as in the pockets of the rest of Justice, Inc., were usually some of Mac’s anesthetic-gas pellets. These, broken at the feet of an enemy, put that enemy to sleep for several minutes. But this time Nellie did not have any of the pellets.

As she was wildly reflecting what to do, Nellie was tapping the little mike of her belt-radio.

“S . . . S . . . S . . .”

But Smitty didn’t answer his call letter. At that moment he was using his radio as a dictograph. But Nellie didn’t know that. All she knew was that he wasn’t answering, so she couldn’t warn him.

There was no help for it. She’d have to light into the two men, to stall for time, and almost certainly be captured. If they decided that she was the one who had, somehow, ripped the board off, they’d take her without caution to the boat, thus tipping the giant off and giving him a chance to knock them out.

The two men were almost out of the shed by now.

Nellie put her hand on top of the lumber pile for a fast start at them.

Then she jerked her hand away before contacting something there that was as hideous as a bad dream.

There was a spider on the pile of lumber. But what a spider! It was as large as a small saucer, covered with loathsome black hair, and with red streaks on its underside.

For a second she didn’t get the connection. Then she did. Another person might never have caught the real meaning of the presence of this spider here, but Nellie had a brain as quick as a steel trap under her silky blonde tresses.

A spider, bigger, more vicious-looking than any in this part of the world! Nellie remembered two tiny punctures, close together, on the creamy shoulder of the vacant-eyed girl at Bleek Street. She remembered the way the two punctures seemed to slant in toward each other.

She looked around the shed.

At the far end were two little monkeylike shapes, hardly to be made out in the shadows. Over them, on a rafter, was a third such shape.

She kept on looking. She spotted four more in the nearer rafters, and then—she jumped a foot—one lying like a snake on a beam almost directly over her head.

The two men she’d been so concerned with a moment ago were at the boat, now. They stepped into the cargo opening. But that was death at a little distance.

This other was death right at hand and immediate.

The little dark men, so skilled at concealment that in their native jungle a white man could go for days with dozens of them all around him and never see one, could perform almost impossible feats in civilization’s surroundings, too. They had slid in the opening, one by one, like shadows, without even Nellie’s hearing or seeing.

One of them had silently dropped that spider to take care of her. And it almost had!

The little monkey man above her had a bamboo tube to his lips. He’d seen her avoid the spider and was going to fix that up with a second form of silent death.

A poisoned dart!

Nellie made the leap over the lumber pile that she had intended to make a few minutes before. She lit on her small feet, and she lit running. Behind her there was a little tap as the dart hit wood beyond where she’d just been.

She ran straight toward the boat, zigzagging as she did so. Half a dozen deadly darts came within inches of her. Two she saw as they zinged beyond her, the rest she didn’t. She got to the boat, which was out of accurate dart range.

Behind her, in the shed, the little dark men swarmed to action. Like hopping apes, they came after her. Which was precisely what she had hoped for.

Already it had begun to look as though the Indians lurking so unaccustomedly around New York were the enemies of that other band of killers that had attacked Heber. So Nellie’s plan was simple: Set one gang against the other.

Of course, she and Smitty were apt to find themselves in the center, which wouldn’t be healthy. But it was the best plan she could cook up on the spur of the moment.

She swung into the ancient hull.

Smitty had done his back dive, and the two men had followed him in beyond the bulkhead. So, for the moment, Nellie had this space to herself.

Then the little monkey men swarmed in murderously. And silently. That silence was grisly. If only they’d made a noise, yelled or something. But they were as soundless as shadows and as purposeful as machines. They poured toward her.

A while ago Nellie had tried not to be discovered by the two white men. Now she wanted very badly to be discovered.

“Hey!” she yelled, as the little men swarmed in.

Beyond the bulkhead door, there was a smothered expletive. Then the big fellow with the glasses jumped back through the doorway, looking utterly amazed and completely savage. He jerked the gun toward Nellie, because hers was the first figure he saw.

He held the shot, while Nellie ducked frantically to the deck plates. Because by then he had seen the little men, too.

One girl. A lot of men. And now the men were streaming toward him, having instantly decided that he represented the greater danger. The man with the glasses instantly came to the same decision, and his gun went off, twice, with each barrel carefully aimed.

What happened to the two little monkey men, at whom the gun had been methodically aimed, is best left to the imagination. A shotgun at close range does ghastly things.

Nellie’s teeth ground on edge, and she looked toward the bulkhead instead of at the two who had been shot. She saw men tumble out from it at the sound of the shotgun, one after another, till the seven of them beside the leader looked like a regiment.

Men with poisoned darts faced men with guns! No one had time for the slender little figure of the girl who had drawn the monkey men here. She leaped for the doorway.

Behind her, shot after shot roared. She didn’t hear the response, but she could imagine it. The response would be the sinistering whispering of the tiny darts.

She almost tripped over Smitty in the uncertain light of a candle. But bent down over him, shook his vast shoulder, slapped at his cheeks to bring him out of it. He moved under his own power, or he didn’t move. Two men could hardly have carried his bulk, let alone one small girl.

Smitty groaned, and his eyes opened.

“Save me the next dance,” he mumbled. Then his eyes opened wider.

“Hey! What are you doing in here? I thought I told you— What’s all the shooting outside?”

“Stop the silly questions,” snapped Nellie, “and come on.”

“Where to?”

“Away from here, stupid.”

He got up, still reeling a bit. With her arm around him, they went to the door.

The space beyond was like a battlefield. Three of Gleason’s men were on the floor, with the dulling eyes of curare victims proclaiming their near-death. Five of the little dark-skinned men were with them.

The rest of the Indians must have slid out of the boat again, because the other gang were pouring out, too. They were shooting as they went, with no time for the two they left behind.

“I don’t get it,” said Smitty, going to the opening.

“Two enemies can be better than one,” said Nellie. “That is, if you can get them fighting each other instead of you.”

“Oh!” said Smitty.

He looked out. The little monkey men were worming through the shed wall with the others close behind. It was probable, after shots that would draw every cop for blocks around, that the gang would never use that abandoned boat as headquarters again, would never come back to the yard again.

“Okay to leave—” began Smitty.

“Look out!” Nellie cried.

Smitty didn’t know what it was he was to look out for, but he ducked instantly and instinctively. One of the now-familiar little darts ticked against rusted iron where his head had been.

Smitty jumped away from the opening. One of the Indians was moving; he had been knocked out, it seemed, instead of killed. He tried feebly to get away from the giant after having shot a dart at his back.

Smitty kicked the bamboo tube from his fingers and held him with one hand while he ran over his skinny but sinewy frame with the other. He found no more darts in the little quiver the Indian carried.

He picked the fellow up and held him under one arm.

“Beat it,” he said to Nellie. “We’ll take this one back to Bleek Street as a souvenir. It’d be a good idea to get out before the police get here. We’d just waste time in questions for which we haven’t the answers, yet.”

They rolled down the street in Smitty’s car a little before the first squad car arrived. They went to Bleek Street, with their apelike captive silent but squirming on the back seat.

“All that trouble at the boat just for this!” said Nellie, staring distastefully at the Indian.

“Oh, we got more than him,” Smitty said. “I overheard some things that might be useful to the chief. For one thing, that gang has set out to snuff us all out. ‘Eliminate’ us, was the nice word they used. It’s well to know ahead of time that you have such enemies. For another thing, they’re going to try to get Heber again. One of them said so. They seem to be dead set on killing Heber.”

“Why do they want to eliminate us?” asked Nellie petulantly. “What have we done to them?”

“I don’t think they want us to go to South America,” said Smitty. “They’ve probably guessed that’s what Heber came to ask us to do—go back with him. And the idea doesn’t seem to appeal to them.”

“It doesn’t seem to appeal to me much, either,” confessed Nellie. “What with poisoned arrows, gangs—white and Indian—thirsting for our blood, and a crazy kind of disease at the end of the journey that makes monkeys out of humans before finally killing them. I think I’ll learn to knit.”

“I can see you sitting domestically beside a lamp and tatting a sock, or whatever it is they do to socks,” jeered Smitty. “But I guess the chief will be only too glad to have you stay home out of trouble. That way he won’t have to detail two or three of us to keep you from getting into a jam—”

“Is that so!” flamed Nellie. “Who rescued whom from what, a few minutes ago on that boat?”

It was pretty hard to find an answer for that. Smitty was still trying, unsuccessfully, when they got to Bleek Street.

CHAPTER VI

The Antitoxin

All of Justice, Inc., knew of The Avenger’s anxiety to get to Brazil, to the aid of Stahl, in a hurry. Dick had said quietly that Stahl was an old friend. That was enough.

They all knew that the man with the thick black cap of hair and the pale, infallible eyes would stop at nothing to help a friend.

But all realized, of course, that it was senseless to start the trip before something had been done about that dread disease, the green killer, that lurked at their destination. Otherwise, they’d just go there and get it themselves, and that would be that. No help to anybody.

They confidently expected The Avenger to conquer the disease. But they couldn’t even guess at the probable time element. Maybe weeks. Maybe, with luck, only a matter of days.

Which proved that even Justice, Inc., was unable, sometimes, to comprehend fully the real genius of its leader.

Because the solution proved only a matter of hours.

Dick came out of the laboratory shortly after Smitty and Nellie returned to headquarters with their sullen, silent little captive. The Avenger carried with him a small vial which he handled very carefully. In the vial was a pinkish mixture.

“Ye surely haven’t found the answer so fast?” gasped Mac.

Benson nodded, face calm. “I found it. That’s a very odd disease, Mac.”

He stared with glacial, expressionless eyes at Heber, who looked back at him, and at the pinkish vial, with dawning hope in his eyes.

“It’s a filterable virus,” said Benson. “I had to use almost the full power of the electron microscope to see it. When I did see it, I saw something that I believe no modern eyes have seen before.”

He stared absently at the little vial.

“The germ causing this disease is so near the line of nonliving, inanimate matter, so crude and low a form of life, that I believe it to be prehistoric.”

“Gosh!” said Smitty. “You mean—a prehistoric disease?”

“Why not?” The Avenger was talking more to himself than to them. He was off in a realm of pure science where few could follow him, with the mundane affairs of an everyday world—even the predicament of his friend Stahl—for the moment disregarded.

“There have been animals, millions of years ago, such as no man living has ever seen. Plants, too. Prehistoric, we call them. If plants and animals—why not germs, bacteria?”

“Gosh!” breathed Smitty again. Then he tried to follow a little way into the tremendous vista this opened up. “A prehistoric disease that makes humans into monkeys. At least in body, if not in mind. Why, say—that opens up the whole question of evolution again. The theory that man is an ape who gradually evolved a bigger brain and learned to walk upright may be all wet. Perhaps it was man who started, not ape. Perhaps half or more of the original tribe got this sickness, turned from man to monkey, instead of the other way around, and stayed that way through all the centuries. Perhaps—”

“Loo,” came an impatient interruption. “If that pink stuff is the cure for what I’ve got, why don’t you give me a shot of it. I’d like to get well.”

It was Heber. He walked toward them, knees so gnarled and bent that his knuckles dragged the floor like an orangutan’s. His low forehead, with the coarse, flaming red hair an inch above the eyebrows, seemed even lower than it had been the night before.

“Of course,” said Benson. “We’ll start injections at once.”

“Mind telling me what that stuff is, exactly?” said Heber apprehensively.

“A simple antitoxin,” said The Avenger. “I used the principle already very familiar in disease preventives. From dead bacteria causing the disease, I produced this serum. It can be used to inoculate those who have not already had the disease. And injections of it should cure those who suffer from it already. So, if it is proved in a day or two by your beginning recovery, we’ll leave at once for the radium fields where Stahl is held. If he is still alive down there—”

As he spoke, The Avenger had bared Heber’s arm. He shot a bit of the pinkish stuff into the man’s veins.

Heber had come in after Smitty and Nellie entered. He had not seen their Indian captive, in his anxiety about the antitoxin. Now, for the first time, he saw the little monkey man.

He screamed like a maniac and ducked behind a chair.

“What on earth—” gasped Nellie, who had almost forgotten their souvenir. Then she saw what Heber was afraid of.

“He’s all right,” she said. “We searched him. He hasn’t any poisoned darts. He can’t hurt you.”

“Keep him away!” yelled Heber. “He’ll kill me. Or his pals will. Or that gang that almost got me in the truck. I want to get away from here!”

It was a surprising, and seemingly insane, tangent Heber had gone off on. A moment before, he had been fairly composed. Now, suddenly, all the fears he’d been running from came out on him like a rash, at sight of the harmless captive.

“I want to get out of here! They all know I’m here. They’ll bust in and murder me. I want to get away and hide!”

“That,” said Mac, “is the last thing you ought to want. To get away from here. This is the safest place in New York—”

“Let me out! Let me out!”

The Avenger looked at Josh. Such was the closeness of contact between the members of Justice, Inc., that the look was order enough for Josh.

He took Heber’s arm.

“We’ll go down to your suite,” the gangling Negro suggested. “You’re safe there. You can rest there. And we’ll be leaving for Brazil very soon now, anyway.”

Heber quieted a little. But his eyes were still wild with fright as he looked at the Indian. And he kept turning to look back at the silent, morose little native, till he had gone out the door, urged by Josh.

“That’s a funny one,” said Nellie. “All of a sudden he goes completely out of his head and wants to get away from here!” The Avenger’s face expressed no emotion, as usual. And, as usual, he did not waste words on idle speculation.

“Get that girl up here, will you, Nellie? I’d like to question her a little and see if she has recovered at all from the spider’s bite.”

The girl was so beautiful that it was heartbreaking that she should be such a moron—at least, for the time being, while the effects of the spider bite lasted. Nellie looked at her and shivered as she thought that she herself could have been in that condition if she hadn’t jerked her hand back in time at the junkyard.

At the same time, Nellie was perplexed by something she sensed rather than saw about the girl’s looks.

The girl’s skin was an extremely attractive, but rather unusual, shade of gold, like dark honey. Her reddish-brown hair had lighter streaks in it that enhanced its beauty, but, somehow, didn’t seem to belong there. She didn’t have muscles that stuck out to mar the symmetry of her body, but it was nevertheless plain at a glance that she had more muscle than most young ladies.

It all tried to spell something to Nellie, but she couldn’t guess what.

Benson took the vacant-eyed beauty by the hand and led her to a comfortable chair. Then he sat in front of her, staring into her eyes with his own eyes like polar ice in moonlight.

“There may be a hint of her identity that could be brought out by word association,” he said. So then he tried it.

“Jungle,” he said to the girl.

She didn’t say anything, just looked at him.

“Mine.”

“Radium.”

There, that had drawn an answer.

“Snakes,” said The Avenger.

“Uncle.”

Nellie looked at Smitty. That was pretty senseless. Unless the girl had an uncle she didn’t much care for.

“Guide.”

“Snake,” said the girl, vacant-eyed.

Now she was just parroting The Avenger’s previous word, Nellie decided.

“Distance,” murmured Benson, looking as if this was, impossibly, making some kind of sense to him.

No answer.

“Radium.”

“Towers,” said the girl.

Nellie gave up. But The Avenger didn’t, till he had asked two more questions—or rather, had uttered two more words.

“Letter.”

“Radium,” said the girl.

“War.”

“Home,” said the girl, like a phonograph that plays what it is set to play, but has no choice about it.

“I think she’s just a little bit better,” said Benson to Nellie.

“Doesn’t look like it to me,” Nellie said. “How much longer will she be like this?”

“Days. Maybe weeks. She’s lucky to be alive. The bite of that spider is fatal in two cases out of three.”

Nellie shuddered again.

“Take her to her room again,” The Avenger said.

Nellie went out, leading the girl. Smitty turned impatiently to the man with the deadly, pale eyes.

“We can start for Brazil right away, now, can’t we?” the giant said. “You’ve got the antitoxin ready. We don’t have to wait around here any more, do we?”

“We can start at once,” nodded The Avenger. “Heber can guide us—”

Nellie burst back into the room, blue eyes blazing, face showing excitement.

“Heber!” she cried. “He’s gone.”

“What?”

They all stared at her. Even The Avenger’s pale eyes were narrowed a bit, though that was the greatest extent to which emotion ever showed in his masklike countenance.

“He’s gone,” repeated Nellie. “And Josh— He hit poor Josh in the back of the head with a lamp base or something!”

That was enough for the pretty Negress, Rosabel. When something happened to Josh, she flew.

The rest followed out and down the stairs. She had her husband’s head on her knee when they got to the rooms Heber had had. Josh was just coming out of it, but he had a nasty gash on the back of his head.

“Heber?” Josh said, in a minute, looking around.

“He’s gone,” said Nellie. Josh groaned.

“Sorry. My fault. He acted like a maniac. I should have watched him. Turned my back just for a minute—”

“Hey, here’s a note,” said Smitty suddenly. He picked a folded sheet of paper from the bed and read it. It was from Heber.

“Sorry to run out on you after all you’ve done. But I have a hunch if I stay here another minute, they’ll catch up to me and kill me. So I’m going. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I can without being traced. The antitoxin is wonderful stuff. I’m much better already.”

Josh rubbed his aching head and nodded, when the giant read that part.

“He was better, too,” said the Negro. “He wasn’t walking so bent over, and he said his joints didn’t ache so much.”

“That would seem to prove it,” said Benson, pale eyes like diamond drills in his expressionless face.

Smitty thought of something. “Doggone it!” he said. “We were going to have Heber guide us to where Stahl is. Now the guy’s gone. How’ll we get to the right place?”

“We’ll have to wait till we get our hands on the mon,” sighed Mac.

But Nellie had another idea. “That little native!” she exclaimed. “He’s from the region we want to visit.” She looked confidently at The Avenger. “You know most dialects,” she said. “Maybe you can worm the location out of him.”

“That is possible,” Benson said. “I know most of the dialects of Brazil, at least. We’ll see what he has to say.”

What the native had to say was—nothing.

Smitty had thought he’d searched the little dark monkey man pretty thoroughly. But it seemed he hadn’t. There had been one more poisoned dart, not in the regular quiver. And while they were all down in Heber’s room, the bent little Indian had used it.

Calmly, stoically, he had pricked himself with it, and he died as The Avenger tried to inject some of the curare antidote into his veins.

“So it’s Heber or nothing,” said Mac.

The Avenger nodded. “We must find him. He must guide us. Otherwise, we might search the jungle north of the Negro River for years and never find a trace of Stahl. I have been through there. I know how immense and impenetrable that region is.”

“But where,” gloomed Nellie, “can we find the guy? He’s hiding in fear of his life. And there are an awful lot of places in New York to hide in.”

CHAPTER VII

Lucky Shot

The first thing they did was look all through the rooms Heber had occupied for twenty-four hours to see if there was a clue as to where he’d gone.

There wasn’t. And really none of them had expected to find one. It was probable that Heber hadn’t known, himself, when he clubbed Josh down in his terror and fled, just where he would go to hide.

They found several other things, though.

For one thing, he had taken that bottle of Pinkish stuff with him. But, then, it would have been funny if he hadn’t. Naturally, he’d want to keep up the injections till he was completely cured.

For another thing, he had cut off some of his hair, or something. On the dresser, The Avenger found half a dozen wiry, flaming-red hairs of about the length to have grown on the man’s head. Which seemed very odd.

“Where,” wailed Nellie, “could he be? We don’t even know where to start to look.”

“Yes, we do,” said The Avenger quietly.

“Huh?”

“He will not be hiding out,” said Benson.

“But—”

“If there is one thing certain, it is that this place has been carefully watched since Heber entered. He couldn’t get away without being seen. He won’t be hiding out. They’ll have got him by now.”

“So?” said Smitty.

“So they’ll be starting for Brazil as soon as possible and as fast as possible.”

Smitty nodded. “I get it. They wanted him for the same reason we did—to guide us to that place where all the radium lies around. That was why they tried to kidnap him in the first place at Mac’s store, instead of killing him as they did the Indian.”

Nellie said, “The fastest way is by plane.”

“Right,” said Mac.

“So if we watch the airfields—” Nellie began. Then her shoulders drooped. “But they could have a plane of their own, hidden anywhere within a thousand-mile radius. Looks to me like we can’t possibly locate them in time.”

Benson went to his big desk. He took out a map of the western hemisphere and drew a straight line from New York, U.S.A., to Manaos, Brazil.

The line went almost straight south—a little east of south. It passed near Trinidad and other former bases of the United States.

“They won’t try the airlanes close to army and navy airfields,” Benson decided. “They’ll probably ride the coast line down, and jump to Brazil from Florida or Cuba.”

“That takes in a lot of territory,” said Mac gloomily.

The Scot was the worst pessimist alive, except when circumstances would warrant pessimism. Then, when it looked inevitable that death or disaster should overtake them, Mac became so illogically cheerful that the rest wanted to crown him.

Dick didn’t answer. He said, “They’ve probably started already. We’ll take the big amphibian.”

“All of us?” Josh asked hopefully.

“Your head isn’t in shape for possible trouble,” Dick said, looking at the Negro’s bandaged skull. “You and Rosabel stay here. Smitty, you and Nellie and Mac will come. And the girl.”

“The girl?” said Nellie incredulously. “Why, she’d be just dead weight. She doesn’t know what it’s all about. Wouldn’t it be best to come back for her?”

“With luck,” The Avenger said, “we may not have to come back for her.”

They went for the plane. On the way, Nellie murmured to Smitty:

“I don’t quite get this. Why is the chief so certain that Heber has already been captured? Why is he so sure Heber will give in to that gang of cutthroats and consent to guide them to the radium field? How can he feel there is more than a hundred-to-one chance of locating the gang’s plane in all the empty sky over the Gulf of Mexico? And why is he taking the girl with us?”

“Ask the chief,” Smitty said sardonically.

Naturally, Nellie had no idea of doing that. When The Avenger was ready to tell why he did certain things, he told, and not before. If you asked him, he would say nothing. If you persisted, the calm, cold eyes would swing on you—and you would be quiet.

The big plane Benson referred to was a twelve-ton army type with two two-thousand-horsepower motors and a top speed that no one yet had been allowed to clock. The speed was sixty miles better than when it had left the factory, however, due to a revolutionary type of supercharger which The Avenger had devised, and plans for which were in the vaults of the War Department, now.

The Avenger took the controls. He swung south and a bit west. And he flew high. Thirty thousand feet. Then he set the robot control and began opening a crate which the rest had noticed when they entered.

He put together a thing that looked like a double gramophone, of the old-fashioned kind, with four oversized horns on it. Assembled, it filled the central part of the cabin.

“A sound detector,” said Smitty, staring at the horns and the complicated mess of amplifying tubes in the center. “But I’ve never seen one quite like that before.”

“It’s new,” said Benson.

“Yours?”

“Yes. It is particularly sensitive, but it’s a little better than previous types because you can tune out any noise you please. Such as your own motor and air-friction noise.”

Mac whistled. “I’ll say it’s better than previous types! If you can do that, you can cut out your own plane noise, and listen for other planes. And at a high altitude—”

“At thirty thousand feet,” said The Avenger, “we should hear another plane at a distance of more than four hundred miles. Unless its motor speed by chance is so closely synchronized with our own that it could not be tuned in as separate sound. To avoid that slight chance, we will cut off our motors at regular intervals and listen for the gang’s plane.”

Smitty looked at Nellie. One of the little blonde’s questions, at least, was answered—how The Avenger hoped to spot a plane in “all that empty sky over the Gulf of Mexico.”

The big ship, with The Avenger’s supercharger, was knifing along at least four hundred miles an hour. Even so, it is quite a distance from New York to Florida. There were a few hours with not much to do. In that time, Nellie reflected, looking around, that Benson had enough supplies in here to do the lot of them for a couple of weeks.

The supplies put the accent on tropical demand. There were sun helmets, back pads, specially canned foods for equatorial heat.

Mac spoke suddenly.

“There’s been a speck in the sky way behind us and a couple thousand feet below us for ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Huh?” said Smitty.

“Another plane,” said Mac, “following us.”

“It would take an awfully good plane to keep up with this job,” Smitty said. “You sure it isn’t just a spot before the eyes?”

“Look yourself,” snapped the Scot.

Smitty looked through binoculars. He could just make out that the speck was a plane.

The Avenger, without comment, veered far to the west. The speck behind did the same thing. He veered east again, saw a cloud, and plunged in. He spiraled in the cloud for two or three minutes and came out; and there was the speck, marking time in lazy circles till he should emerge.

“Following us, all right.”

“Look here,” said Nellie peevishly. “We’re supposed to be trailing the gang, not the gang trailing us.”

“It isn’t necessarily the gang’s plane,” said Benson evenly.

“It’s private. No military’s markings.”

Nellie made the next report. She stared through the plastic at the bow.

“Look there. Another plane, coming up ahead of us and swinging our way.”

The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes took in this second plane. It was climbing fast, and as it rose it darted straight toward them.

The combined speed of these two machines hurtling at each other approached the speed of sound. In seconds the plane ahead was on them. Eight little rosebuds of flame appeared at its wing edges!

“They’re firing at us!” Smitty yelled. “Why, the—”

Benson kept ahead till it seemed he must ram the plane. Then he pulled the nose of his ship up gently, and the two rocketed past each other.

But for an instant he saw the goggled face of the enemy pilot.

The face was dark, and the pilot’s body had been small, almost monkeylike. The pilot of that plane was one of the monkey men, not a white man from the gang that had Heber.

Smitty had glimpsed the dark, goggled face, too. He said to Mac, “What do you know? An Indian! Where’d he get the dough for a plane like that?”

“Where’d he get the skill to run it?” was Nellie’s retort.

“Remember what Heber said?” Mac joined in. “Heber said the leader of the natives in the spot where Stahl was captured was educated in England. That must be him, tryin’ to shoot us down before we can go to his jungle kingdom and ‘ruin’ his subjects with white mon’s ‘civilization.’ ”

“We don’t want his doggoned kingdom,” said Smitty. “All we want is Stahl.”

“Apparently, he can’t read minds enough to know that,” Nellie said. “Oh-oh! Here we go again.”

The ship with the little dark man at the controls had banked at maximum steepness after passing The Avenger and was coming back on their tail, little flowers of fire again twinkling from the leading edges of the wings.

There probably wasn’t a better pilot in the air than Richard Benson. Promptly, he fell off to the left, rose again in a steep loop, and reversed positions.

The Indian began frantically to wiggle out of the line of fire. And then Mac shouted, “The one behind! Watch it!”

The Avenger had already seen the new peril.

While the two planes had been maneuvering, the ship that had been following them had caught up. Now, both bored at them from each side.

Mac had started for the rear gunner’s blister with his first glimpse of the second plane. He had his hands on the machine guns there when The Avenger’s calm voice came through the earphones.

“No, Mac. I’ll handle this.”

Almost as he spoke, the steely fingers of the man with the cold, pale eyes worked the trips of his guns. One short burst. Nellie and Smitty saw the plane to the left, at which The Avenger had suddenly darted like a cobra from heaven, fall away in a spiral that didn’t straighten for thousands of feet. Then it flattened out into a limping but safe course and made for an emergency landing.

Like a supermarksman calmly shooting birds on the wing, Dick had managed to disable the tail assembly of the plane in that one short burst of gunfire, without rendering the ship utterly helpless and thus dooming all in it.

Nellie looked out at their right wing and saw holes leap into being in it. Then The Avenger dealt with that enemy, too. A swing that almost blacked them all out, another short burst, another wild spiral just managing to straighten.

Then The Avenger calmly tilted their nose down and circled to watch results. They saw both planes land. They were crash landings, but no one aboard either ship should suffer more than a few bruises and cuts. Indeed, through glasses, Nellie saw at the bottom of their swing that a tiny, monkeylike speck was out of one ship and shaking its fist up at them in miniature fury.

Benson went on, as though there had been no interruption at all.

They were a hundred miles farther along their course when The Avenger reached what he seemed to consider a good altitude—thirty-two thousand feet. Now, far below, like a map unrolled, they saw the south-center of Florida, like soft green velvet patched with silver. This was the swamp section with gloomy greenery laced here and there by water.

Here the man with the colorless, infallible eyes began circling like a waiting condor. Now and then, he cut the motors, gliding and listening to his new-type sound detector. He couldn’t cut the motors long; the modern precision engine would not stand much cooling off. But it was long enough to narrow Benson’s eyes tensely on the fourth try. He handed the earphones to Mac, who had come back from the rear turret.

Mac listened. After a while he nodded.

Motors had sounded faintly, and swinging the detector showed that the motors were east of them and behind them. Even with glasses, they couldn’t see the source of the sound.

Benson headed for another cloud bank. The plane circled behind this for half an hour. He flew out of it—and there was the other plane.

Eight or nine thousand feet below them, cutting south, was a good, but rather old, transport that, like the two attackers of an hour ago, had neither military nor airline markings.

It wasn’t half the ship The Avenger’s was. And the pilot evidently knew that, because when Dick swung his twelve-ton fortress toward the transport, the pilot dropped frantically like a wren trying to drop away from a hawk.

Smitty saw Benson’s hand go toward a button. The button was the trigger release for two 37-mm cannons with which the fast ship was equipped.

Smitty gaped at that. The Avenger hadn’t broken out with those cannons when two fast, last-minute-type fighters had attacked him at once. But now, against one old crate he should be able to lick with a sling shot, he prepared to fire the deadly things. The giant saw Nellie looking at the button with wonder in her eyes, too.

Diving straight down on the ship, The Avenger pressed the button. And now the three with him had even more occasion for wonder.

They’d have sworn Dick had made a direct hit with the two cannons. But nothing whatever happened to the other plane!

The Avenger’s plane seemed to falter, as if Dick were as surprised at this as the rest. Surprised and disconcerted. Instantly, the pilot of the transport seized what seemed an unexpected opportunity.

He nosed down, swung up toward the belly of the faster ship as it overtook him, and blazed away.

It was silly—one of those things that shouldn’t ever happen. This was no battler; this was an old transport, with one futile little machine gun installed crudely in its nose. But at the end of a burst from that one machine gun, amazing things happened to The Avenger’s big fortress.

It seemed to shiver like a stricken bird. Then it faded off to the right and went into a spin. Nellie and Mac and Smitty saw The Avenger fighting the controls. Then they saw something else.

A great and growing plume of black smoke billowed out from the fuselage behind them, near the tail!

CHAPTER VIII

Dark Water

There was a tense moment of speechlessness, after which Smitty burst out, “It’s impossible! That old crate can’t do that to us.”

“No?” said Nellie, staring at the earth, which was spinning like a plate in a kid’s game and rushing up toward them.

“No! Only a freak shot from that peashooter, only a thousand-to-one break could bring us down.”

“Looks like the thousand-to-one chance was given them by Lady Luck, then,” Nellie said. “Me—I’m strapping on a ’chute right now!”

The Avenger’s voice sounded, as cold as ice and twice as still.

“That’s not necessary.”

They stared at him. He stopped fighting the controls. The ship straightened. It kept on plummeting to earth, and the black smoke kept pluming out behind it, but The Avenger seemed to be having no trouble any more.

“You won’t need parachutes,” Benson repeated.

Coming up at them now with meteoric speed was one of the larger specks of water in the Florida swamp. Overhead, the triumphant transport circled and watched.

The smoke feather grew worse. The water jumped up at them.

“Brace yourselves!”

The Avenger set down the ship.

He set it down hard, with a great twin column of spray rising from her bows. Dick had judged to the last ounce the maximum strain the hull would take, and he had taken that last ounce. The smoke covered the plane, rolling up to the sky.

Far overhead, they saw the transport stop its circle and swing serenely, victoriously south again, like an eagle resuming its flight after an easy kill.

The smoke stopped after a moment, and Mac and Nellie and Smitty stared in increasing wonder at Benson.

“Weren’t we hit?” demanded Mac, after a moment.

“I presume we must have been,” said Benson indifferently. “At that range, it would be hard to miss. But we weren’t hurt.”

“Then why in the worrrld—” burred the Scot.

He stopped. The Avenger was obviously in one of his uncommunicative moods. He’d tell nothing till he felt like it.

Dusk was falling. While it fell, placid on the still surface of the swamp lake, they had a quick but excellent dinner that Nellie prepared over a chemical burner.

Then The Avenger took off again. He headed along the line followed by the transport after it had apparently shot them down in flames.

The chief put glasses over the glacial, colorless eyes that were scanning the world below. Only then did Mac begin to get it. The glasses had special lenses that made visible ultraviolet light.

The Avenger had the motors cut off and the plane was gliding silently down on a long slant. It was going fast, however. But even so, when Benson handed the glasses to Mac, it was several minutes before the Scot could see through them the thing The Avenger had already glimpsed.

Ahead, and below, he saw a faint patch of purplish-blue in the blackness of night.

The night was black, too. In that blackness it should be easy to get very close to something without being seen.

“So that was why you used the cannons,” said Mac.

The Avenger nodded.

“They were loaded with thin lead shells that splashed chemical on the plane. I didn’t want to hurt it. I just wanted to mark it so I could see where it landed after nightfall. Now, we can get hold of Heber.”

The whole scheme dovetailed, now, for all of them.

You can’t very well take a man out of a plane in midair. And if you shoot the plane down, you run the risk of killing the person you want. But you can fake a disaster; to throw the enemy off guard, you can mark his plane and then you can get your man when it lands.

Only how they were going to land in this pitch darkness was more than all but Dick Benson could figure out.

Then it developed that they weren’t going to try.

“Take the controls, will you, Smitty?” Dick said.

The giant did so. The Avenger put on a ’chute pack, and nodded for Mac to do the same.

“Hey!” said Nellie.

The calm, chill eyes swung her way. “You and Smitty will stay in the plane. Mac and I will get Heber. Circle back, Smitty, till you’re directly over them. Give us about fifteen hundred feet.”

“But the whole gang’s probably in that big transport,” protested Nellie. “What can you do against maybe fifteen men?”

The Avenger didn’t answer. The plane was gliding as slowly as Smitty could make it without fading down. Dick had the door open.

“We’ll radio results on the belt radios,” he said. “Their range is small, so keep close.”

Then he stepped out, with Mac close behind, right over the rather pretty, faint patch of purplish-blue that revealed where the transport lay in darkness.

The transport, as they’d noted before, was also an amphibian. And it had set down on a lake, too. This was a larger lake, with lights of cottages showing far off at one end.

The parachutes that lowered the two men were black, so there wasn’t much chance they’d be seen. There was going to be a splash, though; and Mac would have felt better about it if he’d known how near the transport was.

He hoped it wasn’t near enough so the splashes would give them away. But he didn’t know because The Avenger had the special glasses, and without them Mac couldn’t see the plane.

The water rose rapidly toward them like a dark mirror. There was practically no breeze, so the ’chutes gave no trouble. They slipped out of their harnesses just before they hit.

“All right?” came the calm, cold voice of The Avenger, in a tone barely audible.

“All right,” Mac reassured him in a half whisper.

Benson started through the water in an easy, fast crawl, with Mac trailing. They went about half a mile; then Mac sensed that Benson was slowing. At the same time he went more noiselessly.

The transport loomed ahead suddenly out of the night.

It was all dark, without even riding lights. But there was emphatically no sleeping being done aboard. The port over the wing was open, and Mac heard low voices come from it.

“If we take off about one in the morning, it’ll get us to where we want to go at about the right time.”

“Why’d we land on a lake where there are people in cottages around?”

“Only place I could arrange for refueling without the whole world knowing,” said the first voice. “The boat ought to be along any minute now.”

Far overhead and to the north came the drone of a plane’s motors for a little while. Mac nudged Benson. That was Smitty, circling up there, giving her the gun occasionally to keep altitude, gliding noiselessly the rest of the time.

“Hey,” came the voice from the transport, “what’s that plane?”

“Who cares?” was the indifferent reply. “We know that it’s not Benson’s plane. We saw him crack up in smoke.”

There was a pause. Then: “That guy has a bad reputation. I don’t know whether to trust that crack-up or not. If he was pulling a fast one—”

“Don’t be dumb. Of course he cracked up.”

The chugging of a slow, fairly large motor launch sounded from the north shore.

“That’ll be the boat.”

Mac was right next to The Avenger, as both trod water noiselessly a few yards from the transport. Mac felt Benson move toward the ship. He followed. As he did so, he shivered with more than the water’s chill.

There would be quite a crew for two men to take care of. A crew that would like nothing better than to bump them both off, once and for all.

Then Mac noticed that, while Benson had moved toward the transport, he had moved toward the sound of the approaching boat, too.

The boat came on, moving slowly, furtively. A long way off, the motor noise stopped. It was drifting toward the transport. There was the wink of a flashlight for an instant to guide it.

The bow of the boat loomed up, and Benson caught onto the blunt prow. So did Mac. The Scot was beginning to get the drift of this.

There were a lot of men in the transport, but there wouldn’t be more than three at the most on the gasoline launch.

There were two. And in the darkness, intent as they were on approaching the plane that wanted refueling, they were ridiculously easy to handle. They were aware of nothing at all wrong as Dick and Mac pulled themselves up and into the boat and padded toward them.

The Avenger’s hands shot out. His steellike fingers encircled a throat and felt for the nerve center at the back. As he did so, Mac’s fist looped forward.

The Scot had a fist like a bone mallet. It clicked against a jaw, now, with a heavy, muted thump, and the man went down. An instant later Benson’s man went down, too. He would be out for many minutes from that nerve pressure. But it takes many minutes to fuel a plane. So Mac tied and gagged the men and carried them to the tiny cabin amidships.

“Okay?” said The Avenger into the night, in a low, guttural tone.

“Okay at this end,” came the equally guarded response from the plane. “Pass along the hose.”

Men were on the wings, ready to fill the tanks there. You could see them as dark blobs only. Which was good, because that meant that Mac and Benson could only be seen as dark blobs, too.

The Avenger had passed the gasoline hose to the end man on the near wing. There was a moment’s fumbling.

“Let ’er go.”

The Avenger started the fuel pump. The stream would keep everyone occupied for several minutes before that tank was filled. Benson touched Mac, and they slid onto the wingtip.

They walked toward the open port, not fast, not slow, quite as if they belonged there. They were just two dark blobs among other dark blobs. They stepped inside.

Here they couldn’t see at all. Even The Avenger’s marvelous eyes couldn’t penetrate the blackness. But they could sense a lot of men in the cavernous cabin. Then one spoke.

“I don’t see why we couldn’t have just one small light,” came an irritable voice. “You can’t see your hand in front of your face.”

Mac stiffened and felt a slight tensing of the body beside him as The Avenger caught it, too.

It was Heber who had spoken. The man they were after. Benson started slowly toward him.

“Pipe down,” somebody said to Heber. “Why show even one small light for somebody to come and investigate? It’s a wonder we haven’t had ten yaps in canoes gawking around, anyhow, after the splash we made landing.”

“But just for a minute—”

Mac nodded. Heber, the captive, was trying to reveal the presence of the plane to anyone on shore who might be alert. That might result in an investigation and a chance for him to get free from the gang.

“No!”

“I—” Heber began.

That was all he said. There was silence. Then a slight flurry of feet. Mac began to sweat blood. The anesthetizing nerve pressure on the back of the neck was all right, but it didn’t work instantly. As plainly as though he could see, Mac knew what had happened.

Benson, not trying to communicate with Heber in the midst of this mob, had found his throat and pressed to put him to sleep. But in the meantime, Heber was managing to wiggle around a little in spite of the iron vise of The Avenger’s hands.

“Hey, what’re you making such a noise for?” came a suspicious voice.

Mac said instantly, “I’m only scratchin’. Can’t a guy scratch his back?”

“Sounds like you were scratching it with a boat hook.”

The flurry of sound had ceased. A hand touched his wrist, pressed it. The pressure told Mac that The Avenger had Heber and they could go now.

He edged toward the door.

Somebody said, “Maybe we better have a light, at that, for a second.”

And a flashlight winked on.

In that cramped space it could hardly fail to show what was happening. The ray, however, didn’t just hint at something wrong; it lit squarely on Benson, showing him with the limp Heber in his arms and edging toward the door.

There was stunned silence for half a second. Mac’s flying foot caught the hand holding the flashlight, and it winked out. And after that, about six platoons of men seemingly swarmed all over Mac and Benson.

CHAPTER IX

All Is Lost

The bony Scot uttered a war whoop and began to hit out with deadly fists. There couldn’t be any shooting or knifing in those cramped quarters. It was fists or clubs alone. His fists were as good as any club.

Beside him, Mac felt a one-man hurricane, which was The Avenger in action. And he heard a couple of shrieks as those iron hands fastened on someone. Then the Scot felt Benson’s steely fingers on his own wrist.

He was urged forward and down, cramped between a couple of the transport’s seats. But behind him, he heard the fight rage on just the same.

“Chief?” he whispered doubtfully to the man beside him, lips to ear.

Another pressure reassured him. This was Benson, all right. The Avenger had attacked several men from right and left angles that had drawn each to the other. They were now viciously and industriously fighting themselves.

“I’ve got one of ’em,” a voice ground out. “Club—”

The voice stopped with a thwack of something on bone.

“Get Heber! We got to have Heber.”

The voices were sounding a little behind them, now, for the reason that Mac and Benson were crawling over seats toward the rear of the cabin. They made it as the sounds of battle were diminishing.

The scrambling, striking men were beginning to wonder if everything was as it should be.

“Get that light, somebody,” bawled a man. “Maybe we’ve knocked ’em out. Or maybe—”

Mac felt the rear cabin door, leading into the baggage space in the tail, under his fingers. He opened it and stepped through with Benson, who had Heber effortlessly over his shoulder.

Mac shut the metal door and felt a slide bolt. The transport had been a passenger plane. The men’s lounge was back here, with a fastening bolt. They were safe in here for a moment. Nobody had a way to get in till they’d knocked that sturdy panel down.

But there was no way to get out, either. That is, there was no way till The Avenger reminded Mac of something.

“Got your little torch with you, Mac?”

“Whoosh!” said the Scot. “Of course.”

The thing he took from his pocket looked like a perfume atomizer that might have been found in a boudoir. Only in the belly of the little thing was not perfume, but acetylene. This, in special pellets, produced a flame equal to the best a large blowtorch could produce.

Mac lighted it and began applying the intense blue pinpoint of flame to the metal wall between ribs of the tail.

Duralumin will take a lot of punishment, but not too much heat. The little flame sliced along like a knife through butter. A section fell out, and cool night air came in. But Mac wasn’t quite through.

There was a furious hammering at the door, and thuds which told that any minute it would go down. But Mac had seen a cable in the light of the tiny flame. An exposed control cable. So he took time to play the flame on that.

The cable fell limply apart after a few seconds like a wet piece of spaghetti. And then he and The Avenger, carrying Heber, went through the uneven opening to the lake.

“The boat,” whispered Benson.

They paddled to it. There were shouts. “They cut out of here. They’re in the water. Light up! Get ’em!”

A flashlight began to dart around over the water. Mac and Benson hauled Heber into the boat. Heber was still out. The flash lit on them.

They ducked as shots began to splash around. Mac jumped to the engine and started it, and The Avenger shot into reverse. The gas hose was still trailing over the side to the transport wing, hooking boat and plane together for the moment. Benson severed the hose with a flashing stroke of a fire ax, kept handy on the gasoline launch.

Then they were gone with Heber. Luck is apt to favor those who have courage, strength, and wit, and once again luck had thrown her weight heavily in the balance in favor of The Avenger.

Dick, face as calm as if they’d just returned from a small fishing trip, said to Mac:

“Take the wheel, will you? Just circle the lake, slowly, out of range of those on the transport.”

“They can taxi after us,” remonstrated Mac. “They can’t take off with that control cable cut, but they can taxi over the water far faster than this tub can—”

“They won’t taxi anywhere,” said Benson evenly. “Before starting the gasoline pump to refuel them, I detached the hose from pump to boat tank and trailed the end over the side.”

Mac gaped. The hose was still trailing, from fuel pump to lake. The harder the pump had turned, the more plain, ordinary lake water had shot into a fuel tank.

The Scot laughed. “So ye filled them up with lake water! I’ll say they’ll not follow us.”

He began cruising in wide circles, and Dick took from its waterproof case the tiny microphone belonging with his belt radio.

“Smitty. Benson calling. Smitty.”

Instantly came the response. The giant was pretty near, too, from the volume.

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“We’re ready to be picked up, Smitty,” said Benson evenly. “I’m afraid you’ll have to land on this lake. There isn’t another landing place for too many miles for Mac and me to walk to. Watch out for the transport.”

There was a slight hesitation, then Smitty’s steady voice. “Right. Here we come.”

There was no sound from the sky, so he was gliding her down. Eighteen or twenty miles away, perhaps. From high enough, he could do that with ease.

Benson saw it first. Mac didn’t see a thing, though he was looking right at the plane. He didn’t have the powerful vision that belonged to the pale, infallible eyes of The Avenger.

“Hope the big fellow doesn’t hit that transporrt,” the Scot burred uneasily.

The Avenger said nothing. Seeing the approaching plane, he also saw that it was headed pretty directly for the dark transport where shots and yells had stilled, unfortunately, some minutes ago.

The plane could be heard, now, whistling through the air. And it was ruinously headed! It would hit surely!

Benson grabbed up a five-gallon can of gasoline from a stack of similar cans, smashed in the top with the ax, then touched a match to it. He tossed it over the side.

The flare came just in time. The plane lifted like a startled water bird, just cleared the transport—from which shots and yells began to sound again—and then settled.

Benson brought the boat to it, then hauled Heber aboard. Smitty took off again. And that was that.

“My golly, you got him!” said Nellie, staring at Heber.

Smitty stared at nothing. His voice was shaky. “Boy, I almost rammed that crate of theirs!”

“Why not?” commented Nellie. “As a pilot, you’re a good mechanic. When I’ve had time to give you a few more lessons, you won’t do so badly.”

“You? Me? Lessons?” bellowed Smitty, enraged.

While they were squabbling, Heber snapped out of it.

“Hey!” he said, looking up into the glacial, colorless eyes of The Avenger. Not an emotion was in those eyes, not a hint of whatever thoughts were in the marvelous, cold brain behind them. “Hey!”

Heber sat up and looked wildly around.

“Take it easy, mon,” said Mac. “Ye’re safe. We rescued ye from the skurlies.”

“Oh!” Heber relaxed. “Oh, that’s swell!” He closed his eyes.

The change in Heber in this short time was incredible. He didn’t look at all like an ape—his legs were pretty well straightened out; the low forehead was not so low because he seemed to have shed a fringe of hair.

Suddenly he struggled upright again as the plane winged along south.

“That antitoxin!” he said in anguish. “They took it. And my hypodermic needle!”

“That’s all right.” Benson’s basilisk eyes never left Heber’s agonized face. “You won’t need any more of it.”

“You mean I’m cured already? That’s pretty quick-acting stuff.”

“You’ll be perfectly well,” Dick said.

Heber sighed and once more closed his eyes. After a moment, the evenness of his breathing indicated that he was asleep after the strain he’d been through.

Smitty called from the controls, “Better have a little gas, chief.”

The Avenger knew approximately how much was left in the tanks without consulting the gauges. There was plenty for them to cross the Gulf.

“We’ll get it at Cayenne,” he said.

They took turns napping, then, taking turns also at the controls, and heading for French Guiana in the meantime.

The day was just being born as they got there. Benson took over in the pink dawn and headed for a spot near Cayenne where there was a dock with gas tanks on it. The Avenger had friends everywhere, in all stations of life, from prime ministers to stevedores. Among this motley and vast array was the proprietor of this maritime gas station.

They all stretched and rubbed their eyes as Dick scaled past a rusty tramp freighter and taxied up to a rotting wharf on the other side of which was moored an odorous banana boat.

“Welcome to South America,” said Nellie sleepily.

But it was the devil of a welcome South America was going to give to them!

Benson awakened his friend. The man had a shack on the land end of the wharf, where he apparently lived as well as worked. He was a big, greasy chap with a wide smile and eyes that were doglike in their honesty.

Hose went from wharf tanks to the wing tanks of the plane. And then the girl came to life.

In the beautifully equipped ship there was a small compartment near the tail, like one of the tiny private staterooms on a deluxe train. Into this, Benson had put the girl suffering from the spider bite.

Nellie had gone in from time to time to see how she was making out, or to feed her at mealtimes. Aside from this, they’d all pretty well forgotten her. And she had helped them to forget by just sitting in there, hour after hour, like an inanimate object instead of a living, warmly beautiful girl.

But now, suddenly, the girl reminded them of herself. She came out of the compartment as the high-test gas was pouring through the hose.

She was sniffing.

Smitty thought at first that she was smelling the gas—the raw odor was heavy in the air—and didn’t like it. But then he saw that she was paying no attention to that odor. She had her nose turned toward the wharf, beyond which the old banana boat was sending a stench to heaven.

Now, Smitty had noted that smell before, and he had done a bit of philosophizing about it. The aroma, he had decided, somehow compressed the whole of the tropics into one odorous bundle that you could comprehend with nose alone.

The girl was sniffing this symbol of the tropics. And it seemed to be doing strange things to her.

Smitty watched her perplexedly while he saw in her eyes the glints of some kind of emotion—the first she’d shown—deepen into small fires.

Nellie was with Smitty. Mac and The Avenger were out on the wing. Heber was out there, too, at the tip of the wing.

Nellie and Smitty saw the girl stand in the open door. They looked at each other, and then back at the girl. A sort of moan came from her lips.

“Somehow,” said Nellie, “the tropics mean a lot to that girl. Some memory is being brought back to her. I do believe she’s snapping out of that coma from the spider bite.”

Smitty nodded, looking uneasy.

“Looks like she’s going off her nuts,” he said.

“No. She’s just deeply affected by—” Nellie stopped, and her blue eyes widened. “Of course! I get it now!”

“Of course what? You get what?”

“She has been in jungle country before. A lot. I wondered about the golden color of her skin. That’s tan, deep tan, that has paled but never disappeared in civilization. And her muscular development—she has traveled like a man through wilderness.”

Nellie was getting pretty affected herself, and Smitty knew why.

Nellie’s father had been a famous archaeologist, and Nellie had accompanied him on many a trip through jungle and forest. So, in a way, this girl was like the girl Nellie herself had been, before Nellie’s father was killed by criminals.

The girl in the cabin doorway screamed.

It was an indescribable sound. Memory was coming back to her all right, with some kind of anguish almost too much for her to bear. Something terrible was pressing on her mind, now that that mind was beginning to function again.

She screamed a second time.

“Watch out for her—” yelled Smitty.

As he yelled, he leaped. So did Nellie. But they were too late.

The girl had jumped to the wing and from there had leaped straight into the water.

On the wing, Mac and The Avenger heard the scream and ran to the spot. They saw the girl clumsily splashing for the shore. She wasn’t much of a swimmer, just enough to stay afloat. She acted as if everything in the world depended on getting to the shore in a hurry and then departing for spots unknown.

“Get her!” snapped Benson. “She isn’t responsible. No telling what she’ll do.”

That was all Smitty heard. He dived and slid into the water with the last word.

He came up to hear a curious roaring, and to see that somehow the world had turned pinkish in the two seconds he’d been submerged. He looked back. A hoarse yell came from his lips.

Plane, hose, some of the surface of the water were an inferno! Somehow the gas had caught fire.

Smitty saw Nellie dive clean and saw Mac topple from the wing to join her. The giant didn’t see Heber. The Avenger didn’t dive.

Benson leaped through flame into the cabin of the plane, as if there were something he could do to save it. But there was nothing; the plane was doomed. Smitty knew that.

“Chief!” he yelled in horror.

Benson appeared at the opening. He had a parachute pack in his hands. He looked positively inhuman, because in all this inferno his eyes were as icily calm and his face as glacially emotionless as ever. Young, good-looking, but a machine instead of a man.

The Avenger threw the pack to the wharf and went back. Four more times he did this, retrieving five ’chute packs from the fire. Then he leaped himself, through flame that singed his thick black hair.

All were out of the fire, at least. So Smitty, hardly knowing what he was doing, but still obeying orders, turned to go after the girl again. She was almost ashore.

With a racing crawl stroke, he got to her as she was wading out. He held her by the arm, none too gently, and saw that she was watching the fire with eyes into which still more intelligence, and shock, had appeared.

So Smitty watched the fire, too. And he literally moaned as he watched.

The plane, the beautiful plane, was doomed! It was wreathed in fire there was no putting out. There was an explosion with fire hurled in all directions; then the plane sank, a total loss.

The silence succeeding this tragedy was broken by the yells of men trying to keep the wharf from burning, too. If those big tanks of high octane gas ever caught—

They extinguished that fire. Smoke in torrents rose to the sky. But the wharf was saved, though the plane was lost.

The plane lost.

The little group gathered at the land end of the dock—Nellie and The Avenger, Smitty and Mac and the girl. With still no sign of Heber.

“Marooned here!” mourned Mac. “Stuck! It looks like the search of yer old friend Stahl is indefinitely postponed.”

CHAPTER X

Double Trouble

The girl with the warm-brown hair, and the light of renewed intelligence in her lovely face, stared at Mac.

“Did you say Stahl?” she exclaimed. “You are going to the aid of Alden Stahl?”

The Avenger’s pale, calm eyes swung to her. They were still without expression of any kind. It looked as if the whole bottom had dropped out of his plan, but no disappointment, nothing, showed in his face.

“We are,” he said. “Stahl is your uncle, isn’t he?”

It was the turn of all of them to gasp at this. How had The Avenger known that?

The girl nodded. “I am Marge Stahl, his brother’s daughter. My folks died many years ago, and Uncle Alden has been all of my family. We have been very . . . close.”

“And you got a letter from him recently that upset you very much?”

“Yes.” The girl looked almost fearfully at the pale eyes. “How did you know? I’m sure I must have been unconscious or something, for days. I’m sure I couldn’t have told you.”

“You told me in a word-association test that you do not remember,” said The Avenger. “Heber mentioned Stahl’s name, and you promptly tried to kill him. That indicated that the name of Stahl, and also of Heber, meant so much to you that they penetrated for an instant even the paralysis of will and intelligence from which you were suffering. Which indicated that you were somehow connected with the affair we were beginning to investigate.”

Benson looked unseeingly at the spot where his plane had been. He was reviewing the word game.

“I said ‘mine’; you said ‘radium.’ I said ‘snakes,’ which symbolizes jungle; you said ‘uncle,’ which tied the two together. I said ‘guide’; you said ‘snake,’ indicating deep distrust. I said ‘letter’; your answer was ‘radium,’ meaning you’d heard of radium recently in a letter. ‘War’—‘home.’ All of which gave a fairly clear picture.

“Your uncle, Alden Stahl, was in the jungle looking for radium. He wrote you, probably just before leaving Manaos, and told you he was going. He must have expressed distrust of Heber, the guide, and said that if you didn’t hear from him by a certain time it would mean that something had happened to him. Probably through Heber’s untrustworthiness.”

“That’s right,” Marge Stahl said. “And I didn’t hear, so I knew he’d gotten into trouble through that unspeakable Heber. Oh, I wanted to go with him this time as I’d gone with him before on other expeditions. But he said with a war on and no one knew what forces in secret places in South America, I must stay home this time.”

“ ‘War’—‘home,’ ” mused Nellie, nodding. Now, with the key to the trend of the word-association test exposed, each word was part of a logical whole. But there were still a few unexplained.

“How was it that ‘radium’ and ‘towers’ were linked together?” Nellie asked.

“The mention of towers,” said Benson, “must refer to an ancient Indian city in the jungle which was Stahl’s destination.”

“But Heber said there was no city near there, that it was probably only someone’s imagination.”

“Heber said several things that were not quite true,” The Avenger retorted.

“That’s right—Uncle Alden mentioned the ancient city in his letter,” Marge said. “That letter! I was so afraid! I was on my way to get your help, Mr. Benson, when I saw a little dark man—from the Amazon wilds, I was pretty sure—right beside me near Sixth Avenue. It was strange to see a man like that in New York. It was even more strange because the little fellow looked so much like a monkey. Then something bit me, or stung me, and that’s all I know till now.”

“The little monkey man had friends,” said Smitty. “They paralyzed you with a spider bite and dragged you, a prisoner, into a joint they had as a hangout. I happened to blunder along and get you out.”

“But why would they capture me?” Marge said. “How did they even know about me?”

There seemed to be no answer to his, for the moment. But the rest was plain enough.

Marge, recovering anyway from the paralysis, had sniffed the scent of the tropics. Vaguely it had spelled terrible trouble to her. It had started her mental processes functioning again, and the shock of the fire had completed the recovery.

“Heber betrayed my uncle. I’m sure of it from his letter.”

Smitty started a little and looked around.

“And by the way—where is friend Heber?”

“Gone!” said The Avenger.

“Gone?”

“He set the gas afire, jumped for the wharf, and got away in the confusion. I heard the roar of a fast motorboat a minute later.”

“Heber started that fire?” roared Smitty.

“Yes. He is in with that gang on the transport. We didn’t rescue him last night; we just got him away from the cutthroats he leads.”

Smitty looked his stupefaction.

“It’s all fairly plain,” said The Avenger. “Heber wanted the treasure contained in the ancient Indian city in the jungle. But there were ‘two guards,’ as he put it himself. The two guards were . . . the disease called the green killer, and the Indians of the region who were grimly determined that no white man should live to bring other white men back to their realm.

“Heber and his men figured they could take care of the natives with grenades and machine guns. But the odd, possibly prehistoric, disease that makes men into apes was beyond them. He knew of my work with obscure diseases. He knew Stahl was an old friend of mine. He took Stahl to the place, exposed him to the disease, left him a prisoner to the natives. He came to me in New York, faking the disease, to get an antitoxin for it, knowing I’d work to help an old friend.”

“Faking it?” protested Nellie. “Why, he gave you blood from his own veins, and from it you discovered the remedy.”

“It was not blood from his own veins. Remember, he insisted on drawing that blood himself, alone? It came from some little container or bottle, not from his body.”

“He certainly looked sick.”

“Yes. He was clever. He walked like an ape and pasted hairs low down on his forehead. We saw some of the hairs in his room at Bleek Street after he’d gone.”

“But the blood—”

“It was the blood of the Indian who was murdered near Mac’s store. The natives around the ancient city have apparently had the disease for so many centuries that they are immunized to it, though it is constantly in their blood stream.”

“That’s why they cut his throat after killing him!” Mac exclaimed.

“Yes. Heber’s men did that. Then they gave the blood to Heber in the fake kidnap scene near Mac’s store. Heber must have carried the bottle under his armpit to keep it at body temperature. Thus he could give me a fresh sample of blood with the disease germs in it. But I analyzed some of the blood Josh washed from his shirt, from the gash on his head, and it tipped his scheme. It was an entirely different type from the blood he’d given me.”

“Then all he wanted was the antitoxin?” Nellie said.

“Yes. With that, he could go to the treasure spot and be safe from the green killer, inoculated against it. As soon as he got the little bottle, he left Bleek Street.”

“And you and Smitty got him back. But if you knew he was a crook—” Nellie frowned, bewildered.

“It was best to say nothing. We had to have him to guide us. As long as we let him think we suspected nothing, he would be more or less compelled to cooperate, lead us toward where Stahl is, for fear of tipping his hand to us. So I kept him with us, watching him every second to see that he did no harm.”

Marge Stahl gave a low cry of distress.

“Then this trouble we’re in now is my fault.”

Mac stared at her.

“I had to go and jump into the water like a maniac and distract your attention just long enough for Heber to be able to start that fire,” she said.

“I’m afraid that’s about the size of it,” said The Avenger. “But you weren’t responsible; you can’t be blamed.”

“Well, we’re sure licked, now,” said Mac pessimistically. “We have a million miles of jungle to comb through because we haven’t Heber as a guide any more. And we have no plane to comb with.”

The Avenger drew a bit of paper from his pocket. It was cheap yellow paper, frayed at the edges, dirty, finger-marked, covered with wiggly lines.

“We don’t need Heber any more,” he said quietly. “His inside pocket yielded this very interesting document last night while he was unconscious. I went over him to see if he had weapons of any kind with which he might catch us off guard. I wish I’d thought to take his matches, too.”

“Gosh, a map!” said Smitty, staring at the paper. “Negro River. Manaos. Line through the jungle, east and a little north. A big X. That’s where Stahl must be.”

Marge’s face was full of hope again. But Mac went on:

“All right. Ye have a map. But how can ye get to the spot except by air? In a hurry, that is.”

“We will go by air,” Dick said.

He looked around to make sure they were alone.

“A lot of people know of the army planes at Martinique which were ordered by the French Government before France fell. They know the planes have been rusting there ever since, because no one knows where to ship them or what to do with them. Not so many people know that there are fourteen similar planes, in exactly that same situation, here at a field near Cayenne.”

It was another instance of the vast fund of knowledge possessed by the man with the coal-black hair and the pale, infallible eyes. He seemed to know everything.

“They are at a little-known airfield about four miles from here. We will take two of those planes.”

That was a small statement, but The Avenger’s aides instantly knew, even if Marge Stahl didn’t, what a colossal feat it represented.

Those planes must be rigidly watched and interned. The United States didn’t want France to get them for fear they’d be turned over to the enemy. France didn’t want the United States to get them back for fear they’d be used eventually to bomb France. The enemy didn’t want either nation to get them.

All three would probably have guards near, if not actually in evidence.

In addition, the planes would be in no shape to fly. They’d be coated with grease, rusted where not coated, empty of fuel and gas, perhaps not even fully assembled.

But The Avenger talked calmly of taking two of them and flying off over the jungle!

“He’ll do it, too,” said Nellie in a low tone to the wondering Marge. “It’s impossible—but he’ll do it.”

The Avenger, meanwhile, had walked back down the wharf, to the wharf’s owner, his friend. He came back in a moment, colorless eyes calm and chill.

“A Frenchman is in charge of the field. A German ‘tourist’ is with him constantly. Every evening, a young fellow from the American consul’s office drops around just for a ‘chat.’ But the few mechanics and attendants marking time at the field are all French.”

Mac was still deeply pessimistic.

“Even if ye get two planes, Heber has a long start. The mon’ll no doubt be able to contact his gang. They’ll have the transport fixed up by now, and they’ll surely be ahead of us in the jungle and give us a hot reception.”

“It’s quite possible,” said Benson evenly. “You and Nellie and Miss Stahl stay here, Mac. Smitty, you and I will get the planes.”

He looked at his watch. It was six o’clock in the morning, although it seemed as if it ought to be late afternoon, so much had happened since they’d landed at dawn.

“At three o’clock, join us at the airfield,” Benson told them. Then he and the gigantic Smitty set off for the field.

Mac stared glumly at Nellie.

“Those will be military planes—if he can get them. Military planes have a small cruisin’ range. There’ll be barely enough fuel capacity to take us to where we’re goin’, with no chance of gettin’ gas at that end for a return trip. Also, they’ll not have pontoons, and there’s no place for wheels to roll in a jungle. So how can we land? And if we crash-land, how can we take off again?”

“Maybe we can grow wings,” said Nellie. “Like angels. You’d make a bee-yootiful angel, Mac.”

“ ’Tis no time for levity,” said the Scot severely. “Another thing. This Heber skurlie went off with the antitoxin. His gang’ll have it; we won’t. So we’ll get sick and be turned into monkeys, while Heber and his unholy crew will get off scot-free.”

“Are Scots ever free?” murmured Nellie, playing on the fact that Mac would almost sooner part with a toe than a dime.

“Ye jest,” retorted Mac. “But our trrroubles are just startin’. Ye’ll see.”

Marge Stahl spoke.

“With a man like Mr. Benson to follow, I wouldn’t care how bleak the future looked. I’d be sure everything would come out right. Though I’ll admit that right now the future looks very, very bleak!”

CHAPTER XI

“Secret Orders”

The airfield made no pretension at being secret, but it wasn’t right out in plain sight, either. A person would have to live around Cayenne to know that it was there, six miles off. All around it was thick tropical growth, not the impenetrable stuff of the jungle proper, such as was found south of here, but plenty thick enough.

The field was fairly good, leveled off, covered with crushed shell and fine gravel. Probably, it was the result of convict labor. Enclosing the field and a large space all around it was a high fence. A couple of birds lying near it told of electrically charged wires.

There was a gate, and at the gate sat two men. They were big fellows, sloppily dressed, with guns at hand. They looked mean.

The Avenger took a large wallet out of his pocket.

That wallet contained a great many fascinating things.

Smitty had seen some of them. But not even the aides of The Avenger knew all that was in there. Sufficient to say that in many a tight situation it had yielded helpful cards and documents.

Benson now took a large card from it. The card had the official German seal in the corner.

“You speak German, Smitty, don’t you?”

The giant nodded. “I have an accent, though.”

“I’ll do the talking,” Benson nodded. He seemed to speak all major languages without an accent. “This card was given me several years ago by a German military attaché in Chile. We’ll see if it has any effect on the gate guards. They’re French. I doubt if they know much German.”

The Avenger straightened his shoulders so they slanted almost backward. From another pocket he took a monocle, which he thrust into his right eye socket. Smitty marveled.

With these few changes, The Avenger had become a Prussian officer.

Benson marched rigidly to the gate. Smitty came behind, ramrod-straight, too, but not doing the impersonation The Avenger was. Benson stopped with a heel click at the gate. One of the two guards got up and came over.

The Avenger thrust the card arrogantly through the wire mesh, staring meanwhile through the monocle as though the guard were some peculiarly low form of insect.

“I desire to see Herr Wassmuller immediately,” he said. “You will open the gate, please.”

“We have orders not to—” began the man.

“Open the gate, please.”

“I’ll take your card in—”

The man quailed under the monocle’s icy glare. He meekly opened the gate, and Smitty and Benson walked in.

“Stay here on guard. Let no one in after us.” The orders clicked from Benson’s lips in Germanic French. He went toward the shabby little shack that obviously served as an administration building.

Behind them, the two guards still looked doubtful.

They approached the shack openly. And now they could see the planes, a long line of them, with canvas covers lashed over the cowls and motors, and most of them with wings off.

Also, through the window, they caught a glimpse of two men. One was lean, string-straight, with grim, thin lips and eyes almost as light as Benson’s. The other was heavy-set, lolling, gloomy-looking. The thin man sprang erect and snapped to the door as he heard steps.

He opened the door with his hand in his pocket. And more than just his hand bulked under the material. He was carefully dressed in civilian clothes, but wore them like a uniform.

“You are Herr Wassmuller?” said The Avenger in the man’s own tongue. “I am Ober . . . I mean Herr Drach. I would like to speak to you alone.”

Suspicion shone in the man’s eyes. But he was very sure of his ability to take care of himself in any situation. He started promptly for a small and disreputable-looking flat building that held shop equipment and spare parts.

Smitty looked at Benson’s right hand. The little finger was partly curled in the palm and the thumb stuck out. That meant: “Take care of the other one.”

The giant walked nonchalantly into the office and approached the seated heavy-set man as the latter stared in gloomy question at him.

The Avenger entered the shop with the thin man.

“I have been sent here on an important mission, Herr Wassmuller,” said Benson. With the last few words, his voice took on a curious monotone. And his pale eyes grew like diamond drills as they probed into the other man’s eyes.

“Yes?” said Wassmuller, still suspicious.

“I have been attached to the Chilean legation for some time.” The Avenger’s voice was as even as a slow-moving river. The pupils of his colorless eyes began to look enormous. “I have recently received a secret communication from home that sent me here to French Guiana and to you.”

“Y-yes?”

“It is in regard to two of these fourteen planes. There are plans for them.”

“Plans . . . for . . . them?”

Any pair of eyes that is unique has some hypnotic power, because any object that is unusual and draws a stare of deep interest relaxes the conscious will. The Avenger’s pale, terrible eyes, into which a person was sure to stare enthralled, were supreme examples of this. He was a hypnotist of rare ability.

“I have been ordered to condition two of the planes at once,” Benson said. “I have been instructed to go with them immediately to Paramaribo where four men from a U-boat are to be picked up tonight.”

“Orders to condition them at once,” the man said.

“You will please give such orders to the foreman here.”

“I will give such orders.”

Wassmuller went to the door. Benson hoped the foreman was not an observant man. The look of a person in a hypnotic trance is a giveaway to anyone in the least suspicious.

Wassmuller called, and from a door at the far end of the administration building a man came to them.

“You will prepare two of the planes for instant flight,” Wassmuller said.

“B-but . . .” the man stammered. “The orders! We have orders from everyone that they are not to be touched. And you are not my commanding officer.”

“At once!” repeated Wassmuller. “Select two that have least to be done to them.”

The man looked at him, and at Benson, who stood so straight and stared so icily through the monocle. He nodded and turned away. They heard his voice raised in rapid French as he called two men and told them what was to be done.

“You will stay here,” Benson said to Wassmuller.

Wassmuller just looked at him, vacantly, docilely. And Benson went to the administration building again. Inside, the giant Smitty sat grinning at the desk the heavy-set man had used.

At The Avenger’s look of inquiry, Smitty jerked a vast thumb toward a door.

“There’s a supply closet behind that. Our friend is in the closet. Somehow, I have an idea he wouldn’t care if every plane here was taken off and junked, just so his pal Wassmuller didn’t eventually get hold of them. But I didn’t take any chances. I taped him up like a mummy and gagged him.”

The Avenger nodded and went back to Wassmuller. A loud noise or some other unexpected happening could snap him out of his convenient trance. It was best not to leave him too long alone.

There followed some nerve-racking hours.

The two planes had everything to be done to them. The time dragged unmercifully as the two men and the foreman worked on them.

Meanwhile almost anything could happen to upset the apple cart. If someone in authority came along who would know that nobody by the name of Drach had any right here, Dick and Smitty would be washed up.

But no one came. The conditioning went smoothly. It began to be apparent that the two planes would be ready before three o’clock.

The Avenger came back to the office and took out his little microphone.

“Mac. Benson calling. Mac.”

“Yes, Muster Benson,” came the Scot’s voice.

“Come at once with Nellie and Marge Stahl. Bring the parachute packs.”

The Avenger put the microphone away—and then stiffened like a panther.

“Someone’s out with those planes who doesn’t belong here. I can hear him.”

Smitty listened till his ears hurt. But he couldn’t hear anything. The Avenger reached a window with a single move so fast that you could scarcely follow it with the eye.

He looked out, and at once his hand darted for the calf of his right leg.

Benson had two very curious little weapons which he carried with him as his sole arsenal. One was a slim, needle-sharp throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle which he called Ike. The other was an equally slim, streamlined .22 revolver with a silencer of his own invention on it. This was Mike. Both were holstered below the knee, where a casual search rarely was made by an enemy.

The Avenger whipped out Mike. He aimed through the window. Smitty was behind him, now, and saw what the commotion was about.

Stealing toward the plane was a little, dark monkeylike man. His face was twisted with savage hate, but there was enough sophistication and knowledge of the ways of the world of machines for the little native to have in his hands a sack. It could have only one meaning:

Sugar!

If that were slipped into the gas tanks without anyone knowing about it—

The Avenger seemed scarcely to have aimed at all. But Mike whispered something like phhhht! And the creeping little ape form suddenly stood stock-still.

Richard Benson didn’t take life. It was a cardinal principle of his career. What his aides had to do if they got in a deadly mess was their own business. He himself did not kill.

With Mike, he had attained such proficiency that he shot to crease a victim—glance a bullet off the top of his skull so that it knocked the man unconscious.

But even The Avenger was human. Now and then he missed. This was one of the times.

The little gnarled Indian was thirty yards away and was moving. When he suddenly stood still it was not to fall unconscious in the next instant. It was in extreme bewilderment, while blood spurted from his ear.

Like an animal, not stopping to wonder where the bullet had come from, only reasoning that unseen danger was near, the monkey man dropped his sack and ran. And now he was an utterly impossible target for that skull shot at that distance. Benson tried again—and missed again.

“Oh-oh!” Smitty said softly.

The giant knew the full significance of this as well as Benson did.

Where there was this one deadly little ape man, there would be more. Many more. Either the natives Benson had shot down had repaired those two fine planes of theirs enough to follow, or they had engaged others. They were here, in Cayenne; they had learned of the plans to get the army planes and were going to stop it—if they could.

The Avenger’s eyes were deadly pale holes in his immobile face.

“Go to the gate, Smitty. Tell the guards a band of jungle natives is about to attack. Warn them of poison darts. Stay there till Mac and the girls show up.”

The giant loped from the building and across the crushed shell and gravel of the field. The two guards jerked to their feet as he came.

Benson went back to the repair shop. The foreman came up to him and Wassmuller as he got inside. The foreman hadn’t seen the creeping Indian.

“The two planes are ready,” he said. “You know the cruising range is small—”

“I know,” said The Avenger rapidly. “Get guns. Warn your men that a band of jungle natives surrounds the place and may try to give trouble. If there are asbestos suits around for fire, put them on. The natives shoot poisoned arrows.”

The foreman stared with his jaws open in amazement.

“Jungle natives! Nothing like that has ever happened here.”

“It’s going to happen now,” said Benson. “Hurry!”

His pale, deadly eyes swung toward Wassmuller.

“You are armed, of course?”

“I am armed,” said Wassmuller, drawing an automatic from his pocket.

There was a lot of noise and shots sounding at the gate.

“Come along,” snapped Benson.

He and Wassmuller raced for the gate. Outside it were Mac and Nellie and Marge. And around them was a band of the little monkey men led by one a bit larger than the others and with a different look about the way he wore European clothes. This was the leader Heber had mentioned—the one strangely educated abroad.

Deadly bamboo tubes were being raised to lips to discharge their poisoned doom as Benson reached the gate.

“You!” The Avenger’s voice snapped out. And there was in it such dominance, such vibrant compulsion, that movement beyond the gate was frozen for an instant.

The Avenger’s word had been fired like a shot at the native who was obviously the leader. The man stared at him with sullen ferocity and no sign of understanding.

“What are you doing with my friends out there?”

The leader said nothing. He started to raise his hand in the death signal again.

“I know you speak English,” The Avenger’s voice cracked out. “But if you prefer, I will address you in whatever dialect you choose.”

Reluctantly, angrily, the monkey-like leader faced the colorless, awe-inspiring eyes again.

“Yes, I speak English,” he said. The syllables were meticulous in their pronunciation. His eyes were no longer deliberately uncomprehending. They flamed. And Benson knew suddenly that he had a high order of intelligence to deal with here. Now and then, a great brain is developed in a most unexpected place. There is a black Napoleon, a red Caesar—or a jungle Ghengis Khan.

This man was one of these.

“What are you doing to my friends?” Benson demanded again.

The bent little leader’s look showed that he wouldn’t have bothered to talk except that he knew he was master of the situation and could afford to take his time.

“I am going to kill them,” he said, meticulous English sounding bizarre and out of place from his lips. “I am going to kill you, too.”

“It is needless,” said Benson. Beside him Wassmuller, eyes no longer quite so dulled, was stirring restlessly; but The Avenger had no time for him. “I know your purpose. And I can sympathize with it. You want no white man to find your land and live to bring others to it.”

“That is right,” said the leader.

“It is not necessary to kill to keep us from exploiting your realm,” Benson said.

“I know that it is. No white man must know where our land lies, and what is in it. I had myself educated in your schools to make sure of that, and to learn how to prevent it. When the white man comes in, the native is dispossessed and dies. So I will kill you all.”

“You have one white man living with you now. A prisoner. He is an old friend of mine. I want him. When we get him, we shall leave your land and never come back and never tell any others where it is.”

The leader smiled. It was a fiend’s smile.

“We want that man. He is an engineer. We need his skill. But we learn that he wrote to his niece, this girl here. So we went north with a double purpose: to kill Heber and his men, and you and yours if Heber should succeed in enlisting your help, and to kidnap this girl and bring her to Stahl to help keep him contented in the jungle. All these we will now do.”

The bamboo tubes were rising again. Behind the fence, the men of the field were raising guns, but the guns would never get all the natives in time. Benson’s hand twitched and from his sleeve dropped something that no one noticed.

“Again, I say we want nothing from you but my friend Stahl,” The Avenger’s voice rang out. “I give you my word, and I do not break my word.”

In answer, the leader rattled out something in dialect that was known to Benson if to no others. It was the death command!

Benson’s hand flashed out, and from it went a shining thing about the size of a plum!

And suddenly the little monkey men began screaming, and Marge Stahl began screaming, too, and sagged toward the ground. Mac and Nellie suddenly had little clips over their noses.

“Mac—bring Marge in! And the ’chutes! Don’t forget the ’chutes.”

Benson jammed the gate open. The Indians were writhing feebly on the ground from the gas released by the broken grenade. It was one of Mac’s best knockout gases. Anyone whiffing it would be out for an hour after a painful sort of semi-strangulation. Mac and Nellie had instantly known to guard against inhaling it. Marge, of course, had not.

There was a snarl from beside Benson. It was Wassmuller. He had broken out of the trance, with the excitement and the noise. He backed like a leopard from Benson, hand jerking out his gun as he did so.

“You! Orders to take two planes and get men at Paramaribo! And you have two women to take with you! Get these men!”

The last order was bellowed at the men of the airfield. Their guns swung. Wassmuller’s gun cracked out, lined straight at The Avenger’s head.

Benson shot earthward, throwing another gas bomb as he did so. Wassmuller’s bullet plowed an inch over his skull. The Avenger spoke through the sleek little muzzle of Mike; and this was no thirty-yard shot at a moving target.

Wassmuller fell with a shallow gash in the exact top of his head. The field men began reeling and dropping from the gas.

“Planes!” ordered Benson.

Two minutes later two planes roared over the field and lifted. In one were Benson and Smitty; in the other, Nellie and Mac and Marge.

Each had a parachute firmly strapped on, because that was the only way they were going to be able to land when they reached their destination.

CHAPTER XII

Reception Committee

The Avenger had Heber’s map. That was fine. Maps are handy things to have around on a trip; but a homemade map through an impenetrable jungle is not of much use to anyone but an expert and a person who is already slightly familiar with the terrain it depicts.

Benson was capable of using this map. He had been in this territory before, prospecting for tin and rubber. And he had heard vaguely of the ancient Indian city in the jungle, the city Marge had referred to when she said “towers” in answer to the word “radium.”

The Avenger knew within several hundred miles where the city was supposed to be. He couldn’t have found it on that general knowledge, because jungle can do strange things in the way of covering old buildings; but with the map, the knowledge was enough.

With about three-quarters of the fuel in the army plane’s tanks gone, he saw a spot where the jungle seemed thinned out a bit and where, instead of constant great trees, there were thicker, almost as towering shapes that he knew were old buildings. But it would take eyes like his to spot them because they were completely covered with lush greenery and blended with everything else in sight.

Around these irregular shapes was a sea of solid jungle with the Negro River showing as a far silver thread to the south from their twenty-thousand-foot elevation. That is, in parts, the river showed; in others, it was grown so completely over that it showed only as a greener line in the green.

Benson dipped his wings as a signal to the plane flying just behind him. Mac acknowledged the signal with a dip of his own. The Avenger pointed the nose of his ship down.

In a few seconds before the hurried start, Benson had given all the orders there were time for.

They’d have to bail out and let the planes fly on to crash in the distance, since there was no way to set them down and take them off again. They were all to land in as nearly the same spot as possible, not scatter through the jungle.

Benson circled the green spires of the city. Even from here, he could see it was the shell of an entirely lost civilization. It was pre-Inca, looking like nothing he’d ever seen before. The Avenger looked back at Smitty and nodded.

The giant looked rueful. A standard ’chute lowered him a little faster than most men because he weighed half again as much as the average. But there’d been no opportunity to get his special parachute, so he’d have to chance this one.

He stepped out.

The Avenger circled, watched the white flower of the ’chute blossom, then stepped out himself. He saw the plane dwindle in size as he fell from it at about a thousand feet. It roared on over the green sea, unattended. Somewhere in the distance, it would crash. After it would come the plane Mac was in.

Benson felt no compunction about it. Better to use these two ships in a good purpose and crash them than have them lie and rot at Cayenne, useless to the world.

In Mac’s plane, Marge was first to jump. Nellie and Mac were experienced at this, but the Stahl girl wasn’t. And there was a chance that, if Nellie jumped first, Marge would instinctively balk; and Mac, needed at the controls, would have trouble.

So Nellie urged her out first. Mac circled. Nellie jumped. Mac circled again and stepped out, and the plane went on alone.

Mac hit farthest from the target. It was five or six minutes before he got to the group, after hiding his ’chute. All were okay save Marge, who was biting her lip with the twinge of a wrenched knee. The knee wasn’t bad enough to keep her from moving around, though.

The jungle was without a sound. The noise of the planes had stopped the myriad birds and small animals from their chattering for a moment, and there was no sign of larger life.

Smitty, for one, didn’t look reassured. He knew the subtle woodcraft of the jungle men. He knew there might have been a thousand close around him right now—and he wouldn’t know.

“This doesn’t look like pitchblende country to me,” said the giant. He spoke in a low tone.

Benson said nothing. He was looking at the rising remnants of ancient buildings ahead of them. He started toward them, with the rest following.

These buildings were of dressed stone, huge blocks of it. Nothing else could have endured for so many centuries. There were lusty trees growing out of walls and through the fragments of roofs, but, in the main, the buildings were whole.

They represented a high degree of culture, and ordinarily Dick would have dropped everything to go over them with a student’s eye. But he hadn’t time for such things, now.

“The native village will be about a mile away,” he decided. “As a rule, the natives hesitate to enter such ancient structures. Spirits are supposed to dwell in them.”

Mac looked at a towering crude stone figure that leaned perilously forward on its base. All the malignant evil of the universe seemed carved in the stone countenance.

“I could believe in spirrrits myself,” he burred.

Marge spoke. Her anxiety over Stahl gave her courage.

“Where do you suppose Uncle Alden is being held?”

“In the native village, probably,” Benson said. “They have constructed it so cunningly that I saw no trace of it from the air. We’ll have to find it from the ground. But first, it’s time to deal with the green killer. Line up, please.”

The Avenger took a flat hypodermic needle case from one pocket and a small vial from the other. He filled the needle, after plunging it through the cork of the vial, and lanced the sharp point into Smitty’s corded arm.

The giant stared at the vial with his mouth open in amazement.

Benson had come from his laboratory in Bleek Street carefully carrying a vial of stuff that was pinkish. This was the antitoxin he had given to Heber.

But this stuff he was now using, supposedly also the antitoxin, didn’t look like that at all. It was pale, muddy-amber in color.

However, The Avenger didn’t seem to feel like explaining, so Smitty didn’t ask the questions he was burning to ask. He stepped on, and Benson inoculated Nellie, Mac, and Marge, and then stuck the needle into his own arm. There was the usual burn of an injection, and that was all.

“Now,” nodded Mac, “we’ll be safe.”

Ironically, it was at this instant that the blow fell—when talk of safety came from Mac’s lips.

The jungle, of course, made a solid canopy over them here, as it did over all the earth for uncounted miles around. And from tree branches, like hideous rotten fruit, men came dropping!

But not the men you’d expect. These were not Indians; they were white men, and their faces were all too familiar.

Grinning at them a bit in the lead was Gleason, the big fellow with the horn-rimmed glasses and the scar at the bridge of his nose. Next to him was the smaller, yellow-haired man. The fellow to the right was Heber, malevolent-looking as a demon.

All held guns; most of them were sub-machine guns. Heber had an automatic in his right hand and a grenade in his left.

“Our smart friend, Mr. Benson,” said Heber, nodding to The Avenger. “And the big boy, Smitty. Walked into a trap as nice as you please.”

And Gleason said, “Did you think we’d stay back at that lake forever? A control cable isn’t so hard to fix. And even while you were on the boat gassing us up, one of our guys got to thinking there wasn’t enough smell of gas in the air. So we drained the tank and filled it with high octane. And here we are.”

“Yeah. Surprise, surprise,” said the fellow with the yellow hair.

The Avenger said nothing. His cold, pale eyes were as calm as glacier ice in moonlight. His face was so expressionless that it made the attackers a shade uneasy.

“Do you suppose he’s got something up his sleeve?” muttered the yellow-haired man to Heber.

“Nothing but his arm,” said Heber. “You know we’re really glad to see you, Benson.”

“ ’Tis not mutual, ye skurlie,” said Mac. “If we never saw ye again, we’d not mourn.”

“Aw, now, you hurt my feelings. But like I said, we’re glad to see you, because you’re going to do us a big favor.”

The Avenger’s colorless eyes were slightly narrowed. The natural thing for this gang to do would be to kill them at once. And with the grenades and guns, they’d have had a simple task.

But they seemed to want them alive. It was perplexing—and disturbing.

“Back up,” said Heber. His voice had changed. “Just step back till we tell you to stop.”

“And if we don’t?” Nellie said.

“You can back up and live, or stand still and turn into hash.” The grenade moved threateningly.

They backed.

The ground was covered with knee-high grass, the stuff in which lurked the grotesque disease germs that changed men to apes. But in the main, the ground was even enough. Probably, it had been part of a temple courtyard, centuries ago.

What was behind Benson’s deadly mask of a face?

The rest could only guess. Perhaps he was icily angry with himself for having been so absorbed with the inoculations that his marvelous ears had failed to warn him of movements in the trees overhead. Perhaps he was planning some way of escape where none seemed possible. It couldn’t be guessed from the look of him.

“Keep on backing.”

The five had backed past the perilously leaning stone statue. Four or five stories tall, it loomed above them, with the tops of the giant trees interlacing even above that.

“Back!”

“How far?” snapped Smitty. “I’m getting tired of this. Are you planning to back us clear to Manaos?”

“No, just into a nice tight stone room,” said Heber. “Keep on backing!”

Maybe it was a sheer hunch, or maybe a breath of air just a bit more chill than the humid air of the jungle blew upward. Anyhow, both Smitty and Mac got the same inkling of something very wrong behind them at the same time.

They whirled, but not quite soon enough. And as they did so, the two girls screamed.

They were on the extreme edge of a deep hole. Rather, it was a depression walled on three sides and open on the fourth, the far, side. That was all the two men saw. Because then the loose earth and vegetation under their feet gave way, and they began sliding backward, too!

Down. Down . . .

Heber and his men began yelling like maniacs. They began shooting till it sounded like an army. Some one of them threw a grenade, in addition, and the boom of this registered on Mac’s and Smitty’s ears even as they were sliding down.

The cliff was not sheer, so they did not fall. It was covered with creepers and vines, and now and then they could catch hold of one. But they never quite stopped; the vine always pulled loose before they could arrest their fall.

They got to the bottom, perhaps a hundred feet below the brink, at last. They were shaken up and scratched but otherwise unhurt.

They looked far up. Heber’s face showed small as he peered down at them.

“Just make yourselves comfortable,” Heber yelled down. “I’ll get the Indians here to greet you in a few minutes. Then, while they’re busy with you, I’ll have time to settle my own affairs here. That’s the favor that you’re going to do me.”

“Oh, yeah?” Smitty bellowed up. “Where’s Benson?”

“We’re holding him up here.”

“Sure, you’re holding him! We heard those shots. He got away, that’s what happened.”

Heber’s face changed. He snarled wordlessly, and his head withdrew from the brink.

“So the chief did get away!” said Nellie. But there wasn’t too much hope in her lovely blue eyes. What could one man, even The Avenger, do, surrounded by fifteen or sixteen heavily armed enemies?

The four turned to see where they’d slid to.

They stood on a broad ledge of stone with vegetation growing up between the cracks. The ledge was about thirty feet wide. At one side was the steeply slanting bank they’d come down; at the other was a pool of water they instinctively knew was very, very deep.

The pool went from side to side. Its other end, three hundred yards away, was at the foot of a gently sloping hill. It would be a cinch to climb that hill, so escape from the ledge seemed simple.

All they had to do to get out of here was swim the length of the pool.

Smitty looked sideways at Mac.

“Somehow,” the giant said reflectively, “I don’t feel like diving in there.”

“Neither do I,” confessed the Scot. And the two girls, white-faced but composed, nodded their heads.

“There’s a kind of smell around here, a little like the smell in an alligator pen,” said Smitty. “I wonder if—”

Ten feet up in the rotten, loose earth of the steep bank there was a scabrous stump. Smitty wrenched it loose. It wasn’t very heavy, so he swung it far out into the pool.

What happened then was something all four would remember in nightmares as long as they lived.

A wave gathered in the glassy surface of the pool. It seemed to hump up in the middle, with the wave racing from it in an agitated circle. Then, from the center of the disturbance, an arm rose!

An arm was about all you could call it. You wouldn’t call a thing as big as a large tree trunk, of a gristle-gray, with a horn spike in the end, a feeler or a tenacle. It was a colossal arm.

It rose fifteen or eighteen feet above the water, with its other end still too far down underneath to be seen. It hovered over the stump, tightened on it, then loosened as if in disappointment.

The arm slowly sank into the depths again, and after a moment the surface of the pool was again glassy still.

Smitty drew a long, ragged breath.

“What in the name of all the squid and octopuses that ever lived was that?”

“Neither a squid nor an octopus, I’d say,” was Mac’s shaken response. “It had a whole nest of those big arms; I could just see them under the surface. And the horn tips on the ends . . . If it wasn’t crazy, I’d say that was the prehistoric ancestor of all the present-day octopuses and squids.”

“Whatever it is,” said Nellie in a small, still voice, “it can have its old pool. All of it. I don’t want even a tiny part of it.”

The broad ledge on which they stood had meaning, now.

This was a sacrificial pool. Up that steep bank, at one time, there must have been steps. Down the steps, tier on tier, must have come misshapen black priests with human victims to cast into the water.

But Dick Benson had said this civilization was pre-Inca, went back thousands of years. Had that “thing” been alive in there all that time, growing a little each century as any sea-thing tends to grow? Or had there been a succession of them?

No matter. They were stuck on this ledge more securely, with that horror ahead of them, than if the pool had been a stone wall a hundred feet high.

CHAPTER XIII

Alden Stahl

On the top of the cliff, Smitty and Mac had turned as they sensed peril behind them, but just late enough so that the earth beneath them had given under their weight and let them down.

The Avenger had whirled, too, but had been just a bit quicker than his aides.

To one side, at the very brink of the cliff, a liana looped downward from a great tree branch that flung its length ten feet beyond the edge of the drop. The Avenger leaped forward from the crumbling brink and darted to the left.

It was at this instant that the shots and yells sounded, as every man in Heber’s crew shot toward the lithe, fast figure.

Some of the slugs hit, but none beyond the body area protected by bullet-proof celluglass. It’s a very difficult thing to put a bullet into a fast-moving, zigzagging figure.

Five yards from the looping creeper, Benson’s body left the ground in a long, flat dive. He hit the liana like a projectile and swung with the momentum a score of feet forward and a dozen feet up to the waist-thick branch beyond the one from which the trailing vine hung.

The Avenger didn’t stop there. His hands hardly seemed to touch when he was swinging on again to still another branch. This one he reached on his feet, in a pantherlike crouch. The next he leaped to was higher, as was the next.

Slugs were cutting around him and screaming as they ricocheted. A grenade tore great gouges from a tree bole, but Benson had seen the arm that tossed it, and the bole was between him and the thrower when the grenade went off.

He went on.

Dick Benson had the muscles of a giant, and only the weight of an average man. It was like powering a small fighter plane with the motor of a giant bomber. He could do things no ordinary man would dream of.

Certainly no ordinary man could have traveled even a few yards in the treetops forming the jungle roof. Dick traveled that way—and fast, in midair the pale, cold eyes seemed able to spot the right handhold for swing after next, so that at no instant did he stop between arial plunges to look for a place to light. His movement was an even, swift flow among the branches.

He flashed away from the gang below. They’d stopped shooting, now, not being able to see anything to shoot at, and they were fanning out in a wide spread to find him again.

Dick traveled in a big circle and came around behind them. From there, he could see over the cliff enough to view the pool down there, but not the ledge. However, his quick ears detected sounds of voices there, and he concluded that Marge Stahl and his aides were alive, at least.

So he concentrated for the moment on Heber and his choice crew of killers.

They searched for him for nearly an hour. Then they straggled back, furious, soaked with perspiration. They got together almost under the tree in which The Avenger crouched fifty feet from the ground.

“Missed him,” growled Heber. “But it’s all right. He can’t do anything against so many of us. And he can’t get far in this jungle. Eventually, the native boys’ll get him, and that will be that.”

“Unless they get us first,” said the yellow-haired man gloomily.

“I told you the answer to that,” snapped Heber. “The natives here are a bunch of dopes. The only guy with brains is that leader of theirs, and he isn’t back yet. Without him, they’ll believe what I tell them.”

“And what’s that?” said Gleason. The lenses of his glasses were steamed up now. He took them off and wiped them.

“I told them we were their friends. I said to prove it we’d give them a crack at some folks due to appear who were their enemies. Said we’d help capture these folks, and then they could toss them into that nice smooth pool. The old guy who leads them while the big shot is away said all right, if we do that we can have what we want and go free. If we don’t, they’ll get us with poisoned darts before we can get back to the Negro River.”

“The leader would never fall for that,” said the big fellow. “He’s smart. He’d kill us as fast as he’d kill the rest.”

“The leader,” Heber pointed out, “ain’t here.”

“We’d better see to it that we’re finished and gone before he is here!” exclaimed the yellow-haired man. “Which means no more stalling around after the guy that got away.”

Heber nodded.

“We’ll go to the village and tell the old boy that his sacrifice victims are at the pool just waiting to be shoved in. That’ll empty the whole village. They’ll all come to see the fun. With the place to ourselves, we’re all set.”

“Where’s the village?”

“South and east. Follow me.”

The group started, with Heber a few steps in the lead. For a few yards, they went along a kind of animal trail that was clear enough for them to progress if they bent down. But then it became the usual man-killing travel of the deep jungle: sidle around tree-boles, duck under creepers, climb over rotting logs eight and ten feet high, chop through vegetation too thick to be avoided.

The Avenger started south and east, traveling with the ease and swiftness of a bird when compared with the sweating, cursing work beneath. In five minutes Heber’s men were so far behind that he couldn’t even hear them any more.

The Avenger smelled the village before he saw it. Native villages are usually like that, though the stench of this one was not as bad as many Dick had encountered.

He went more slowly and a lot more cautiously, eyes and ears alert to spot possible monkey men in the trees nearby. There were none. And then he saw the village, a collection of huts that would look like animal lairs to most civilized eyes, but which The Avenger realized to be quite superior dwelling places, in their way. The educated leader of the monkey men was evidently raising the standards of living of his tribe.

Now, Benson went with the silence and caution of a great snake.

In the hard-packed open space in front of the biggest hut were half a hundred of the little black men. They were squatting with faces all turned toward the ancient city. They’d heard the shots and the noise there, but hadn’t slid up to investigate. It bore out Heber’s boast that he had come to an understanding with them.

In the entrance of the hut was an old native so withered and seamed that he looked to be a hundred years old. This would be the oldster who led them while the young leader was away.

Dick slid noiselessly out on a great branch, overhanging the spot. Above was solid jungle canopy, showing why he hadn’t been able to see the village from the air. And the usual mass of vines and creepers looped and fell from every spot.

The Avenger stopped at one of the thickest, which hung down like a handy rope to within fifteen feet of the headman’s hut. He had made no slightest noise so far. He grasped the liana and lowered himself.

He slipped down so swiftly that it was almost like a fall, but at the last moment he braked a little with his steel-strong fingers and dropped like a plummet, light as a feather, right in the middle of the squatting group, between the oldster and the rest.

He had outdone the natives themselves in junglecraft. He had arrived with not even their ears hearing his approach. The first they knew of the alien’s presence was when he appeared among them, and they were so stunned with surprise that they continued to sit there, staring at him with rolling eyeballs.

The old man slowly rose. And the rest, recovered now from surprise, reached furtively for their bamboo tubes.

Dick, as if by chance, moved so that he was in line with the headman and stood with his bare hands behind him.

One of the little black men just in front of him spoke.

“Is this one of the white men who came when the sun was straight overhead?”

“No, this is not one of them,” quavered the oldster.

Benson had the dialect, then. He knew it quite well, though it had been years since he had learned it.

“I am a friend,” he said. “Your leader, now up north after your white captive’s niece, would know that if he were here.”

There was a stir. The fact that this stranger knew of their absent leader was something to make the bamboo tubes in gnarled black hands pause a moment.

“The white men you talked to earlier are your true enemies,” said Benson. “They will be here again, very soon, and they will talk again. They will say that they can prove they are friends by giving to you my friends to be tossed into the pool.”

There was another stir. This man, who could move even more silently than they themselves could, seemed to know a great deal about them.

“I say—they are your real enemies,” The Avenger’s calm, cold voice rang out. “They want your treasure. They will bring others back here for more treasure, which is just what your leader works to stop. My friends and I do not want your treasure, and we will never return, once we have what we seek.”

The old man spoke, then, quaveringly. “What is it you seek?”

“Your white prisoner. He is an old friend. A blood brother.”

There was an angry stir among the men, and half a dozen of the bamboo tubes were used. Darts shot toward The Avenger! He stood perfectly still. If one pricked throat or face or legs . . .

But the men had aimed for the body, the easiest target. The darts hung there in his clothing, stopped by the celluglass. The natives, of course, knew nothing of that flexible fine armor underneath. All they knew was that the stranger was totally unmoved at the piercing of their deadliest weapons. They began to show fear.

“You must let your prisoner come with me,” Dick repeated. “He will sicken and die here. This is not his home. He must live in his own home, even as you must live in yours.”

“He was here before we captured him,” retorted the old man, with a touch of earthy common sense hard to beat.

“He was here on a visit, soon to go back home.” The Avenger raised his voice. “Stahl! Alden Stahl! Are you here?”

Off beyond the cluster of huts was another slightly larger one, almost as large as the headman’s. From this now stepped a scarecrow of a man, deeply burned by the sun, but obviously white. He stared at Benson, then gave a great cry and ran to him. Benson had to put his arms around him to hold him up.

“Dick! Dick Benson!” Stahl exclaimed. “I heard some of the monkey gibberish out here, but I’ve never understood it and just thought it was another native powwow. But it was you!”

He looked around, then, out of bleared gray eyes. His joy faded.

“But look here, you’re in a spot, my friend. How’d you get here? Don’t you know these lads kill every white man they catch, to keep their country for themselves?”

“I came with friends, and with someone else you’ll be glad to see,” Benson responded. His head was turned a bit to catch all sounds from the north and west. “We’ll get you away.”

Stahl’s knees sagged. He was in terrible shape from the monkey disease. The natives were twisted to ape form by it, but were otherwise unharmed by their centuries of immunity to it. Stahl was more grotesquely apish than they, and his tremors and color told that he was soon going to die of it.

Benson took the needle and the vial of amber-colored liquid from his pocket.

“Here—let me give you a dose of this, first thing. It’s antitoxin.”

Stahl bared his arm. And as The Avenger worked, he told a little of his capture and imprisonment.

“They haven’t hurt me. The leader is a smart little devil. He has picked my brains for my engineering skill. A bit of mining, among other things.”

“But not for radium,” said Benson.

Stahl swore. “No, not for radium. That fiend, Heber, told me there was radium here and produced a native with sores I thought were radium sores. But I got here and found what he really wanted.”

For minutes The Avenger had heard sounds in the jungle, drawing nearer. Now the source of the sounds reached the clearing.

Heber and his band of men stopped short, with eyes bulging at sight of The Avenger here ahead of them. Then, with guns out, they ran for him and Stahl.

Benson’s chill, pale eyes were on the oldster’s undecided face.

“If these men kill us, your leader will be very angry,” The Avenger said.

Heber’s gun barked, and Benson’s body jerked a little as a slug caught him in the chest. That was all the damage it did—jarred him a little.

The old man quavered a command, and fifty or sixty little bamboo tubes raised and leveled at the men. The tubes looked laughably crude and ineffective compared to modern guns. But Heber and his crew stopped stone still at the threat, and sweat poured out of their faces. They knew all about the tubes.

Heber used the dialect.

“Why are you now unfriendly to us?” he said plaintively. “We have done as we said. We have delivered these others, your true enemies, to you.”

The old man didn’t bite. He shook his head. “This man came to us freely. You did not give him to us.”

“I meant the others,” Heber said glibly. “His friends. We have them for you. They are waiting at the pool.”

There was an excited howl from the main body of the ape men. They began milling around like ebony monkeys. The old man scowled; then the scowl cleared. He had evidently come to a decision that appealed to him as being just about perfect.

“You may not kill these two,” he said sternly, pointing to Benson and Stahl. “We will hold them till our leader decides what to do. The others, we will throw into the pool now!”

“My men will help,” said Heber quickly. “I shall stay, with one friend, along with your men, to watch these two. The rest of my band shall go to the pool with you.”

The protest, when it came, was not from the oldster, who seemed carelessly content with the suggestion. The howl came from the yellow-haired man.

“Listen, Heber, if you have some idea of double-crossing us—”

“Use your head,” said Heber. “A couple of us must stay here. It’s what all the planning was for.”

“Well . . .” mumbled the yellow-haired man. He shrugged. “Okay. But see that you’re here when we get back.”

“See that you get back fast,” Heber countered. “I don’t want to be around when the little snake that leads this gang gets home!”

The scores of monkey men stood close to Stahl and Benson, covering them with their bamboo tubes so they didn’t dare move. The oldster then lashed the two men to two upright stakes, solidly sunk into the hard-packed ground. The presence of those stakes was grim. So were the dark splotches on them.

When The Avenger and Stahl had been bound so tightly that they couldn’t possibly get away from the stakes, the monkey men and the balance of Heber’s gang started for the pool. They were going to get back to the pool faster than Heber had come from it; the ape men knew dim native trails where they could twist along bent almost double but without having to chop their way through.

They hastened, eager on both sides to give the “thing” in the pool these white victims who had appeared so obligingly to feed it.

CHAPTER XIV

Search for Treasure

Only two of the ape men had been left to guard Stahl and Dick Benson. That was enough for Benson and Stahl, but it showed a mistaken trust on the old man’s part to leave just two with Heber and the big fellow with the horn-rimmed glasses.

The minute the rest were out of sight, Heber flashed Gleason a look, and the two came up to the little monkey men who squatted close to the pair at the stakes.

Heber smiled jovially at these two, but he had his hand behind his back. So did Gleason.

In unison the two leaped and slapped guns down hard on the two guards’ heads. The sound was pretty bad. The little men sprawled. And Benson knew that one, at least, would never move again.

“Well, that’s that,” said Heber jovially. “Get going, Harry. We’ll look through the huts. I’ll take the old guy’s big hut; you take the next one. Scrape around the dirt to see if the stuff’s buried.”

Like ferrets after eggs, the two darted into the huts. The Avenger’s glacial, pale eyes went to Stahl’s face.

“I almost hope they find what they’re after,” snapped Stahl. “They’d never live to enjoy it. The leader here would send a hundred men to the ends of the earth, if necessary, to kill them. Don’t they realize that?”

“Apparently they’re willing to take that chance,” said Benson.

He was working at his bonds. But he realized that he would not be able to work loose from them. There was very little slack to utilize.

Meanwhile, death was swiftly on its way for Smitty and Nellie and Mac at the pool.

Heber came out of the biggest hut looking furious and baffled. At about the same moment Gleason came from the next hut. They glared at each other.

“No luck?” Gleason said.

“No luck,” Heber cursed. “I’d have sworn it would be in the old guy’s place.”

The two bustled into two more hovels, then two more. They were getting livid with disappointment.

“What’s wrong?” came The Avenger’s calm voice. “Can’t you find the emeralds?”

“Who said anything about emeralds?” snarled Heber.

“You did. Some time ago,” The Avenger said. “When your men pulled the fake kidnap scene on Sixth Avenue, one of them apparently hit you harder than was necessary. Anyhow, he really did daze you for a minute. And you babbled of emeralds, among other things. ‘A bucket of emeralds.’ Later you denied it, but I’ve been sure ever since that your first statement was the correct one.”

“Yes,” said Stahl bitterly, “it’s emeralds. For a few miserable pebbles, Heber has done all this!”

Heber was struck by a dire idea. He didn’t go into another hut. He came up to where Stahl stood upright, bound to the stake, and stood before him.

“Sure!” Heber exclaimed suddenly. “Sure! Harry, we’ve been dopes. This guy Stahl will know where they’re kept. He’s lived here for weeks.”

The Avenger began straining harder at his bonds as he foresaw what was coming. It didn’t take long to come.

“All right, Stahl,” Heber ground out. “Where are they?”

Stahl shook his head. “I can see this is going to be bad, because I can see you won’t believe me. But I don’t know where the emeralds are kept. I’m not even sure there are any; I’ve never seen them.”

“You’ve seen the one the little guy at the head of the tribe wears, haven’t you? It’s as big as an egg.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that one.”

“It proves there are a lot more. Where are they?”

“I swear I don’t know.”

“Look.” Heber’s voice was like an animal’s growl. He took out a big knife and slowly opened it. “We’ve gambled all our dough on this. We’ve gone through hell for the emeralds. I’ll cut you up a piece at a time if you don’t come through.”

Stahl said nothing. Of what use to talk? But The Avenger lifted hard on his tiptoes, and suddenly his glacial, colorless eyes narrowed just a little.

Heber put the keen point of the knife to Stahl’s forehead.

“I’ll cut my initials here first,” he said. “After that, if you don’t get smart—”

“Heber! Watch out!”

That was Gleason’s amazed and anguished shout. With it, The Avenger straightened up like the uncoiling of a taut and powerful spring!

In moving just before, Benson had felt the stake move a trifle, too. So he had crouched, sliding his bonds down the shiny worn wood of the stake, grasping it as hard as possible between the backs of his bound hands, then had reared powerfully straight up.

The stake had left the ground and lay along his bent back like a log tied to the back of a beast of burden.

Heber was staring, stupefied, and had a knife instead of a gun in his hand. So The Avenger turned his attention first to Gleason. He sprang at the man with the glasses, head down, back almost horizontal with the ground.

Gleason saw his danger just before it hit. But he couldn’t move fast enough. Trying to jump, trying at the same time to put a slug into Benson, he was caught squarely in the forehead by the top end of that stake! It hit home like a battering-ram, and The Avenger didn’t have to worry about Gleason any more.

He swerved toward Heber, at the same time backing so the pointed end of the stake nuzzled against Stahl’s bound hands. Stahl had a fast brain, too. Instantly, his fingers curled on the thing; and Benson, with a forward jerk, slid clear along its length and was free of the stake.

Heber started warily toward him, face twisted with fear and hate, knife ready for a death plunge! He feinted, leaped to one side, and bored in.

The Avenger’s arms and hands were still bound, but the monkey men had not bound his feet, nor Stahl’s.

Why bother? The stakes would hold them.

Benson’s left foot shot out and up like a dancing master’s. It seemed barely to touch Heber’s wrist. But the touch was enough to send the knife flying a dozen feet away. When Heber howled and ran to get it again, The Avenger darted into the nearest hut.

He had the slack that had been taken up by the stake.

With that, he twisted his steely, supple hands free in a couple of seconds. And when Heber leaped furiously into the hut to knife a bound man, that was the last Heber knew for a long time.

The Avenger’s fist caught the side of Heber’s jaw with surgical precision, and Heber went down, and out!

Benson took Heber’s knife and slashed Stahl loose.

“Run!” he commanded. “Approach the sacrifice pool by a roundabout path so the men there won’t see you approach. We’ll join at the pool.”

Then the man with the thick black hair and the icy, pale eyes was gone. A leap up to a tree branch, the beginning of that smooth, fast flow of motion through the green jungle canopy, and The Avenger was off to the aid of his friends.

But the killers had a terribly long head start on him this time!

At the pool, The Avenger’s aides and Marge Stahl were getting pretty desperate.

They had tried a dozen times to climb the steep cliff at their backs. It was impossible. They could get eight or ten feet up by clinging to vines; then the vines would pull loose from the sliding earth and dump them back on the stone terrace.

“We’re hooked, all right,” said Mac. Then, hopefully: “Try that rock slab again, Smitty.”

They had discovered this rock slab about five minutes after landing here.

At the far end of the stone ledge, under the shadow of the side wall of the pit there, the remains of a stone wall showed. The stones were huge, tight-fitting. In the center of this thirty-foot section of wall was one rock bigger than all the rest. It was at the foot of the wall, and it suggested a door.

A rock slab, weighing maybe half a ton, that opened as a door and led into the bowels of the earth under the cliff.

But even Smitty, with all his giant strength, couldn’t move the slab. This was not so much because of its weight as because, with its smooth-fitting edges, he couldn’t get a handhold anywhere.

But the big fellow moved obediently toward the door—if it was a door—to try again. However, he never made this final try. The slab moved before he reached it.

Tense, desperate, they all stared at the thing.

It moved outward, swinging like any ordinary kitchen door, without noise and apparently with nothing to make it move. Some secret mechanism of weight and counterweight was working beautifully to move that ponderous slab. But what was working the mechanism itself?

They had the answer to that in about thirty seconds.

An old, old native came through the wide-open doorway. He looked to be a hundred. After him poured at least fifty of the little monkey men. They were absolutely silent. There was a businesslike air about them that chilled the blood of The Avenger’s aides..

“They’re up to no good,” said Mac.

“I’ll say they are.” Smitty jerked his head toward the pool. “They’re going to throw us to that fish—or whatever it is in there.”

It was obvious that the giant’s dismal guess was right. Every action of the monkey men proved it. And then the blacks were followed by a dozen or so white men.

“Where have we seen them before?” Nellie said bitterly.

It was Heber’s gang, under the direction of the man with the yellow hair and the limp. He leered at them. They were backed against the far edge of the terrace, with the monkey men slowly and purposefully approaching them.

As the yellow-haired man started that way himself, in the wake of the natives, it could be seen that his limp was more pronounced. For an instant the leer on his face changed to a worried look.

“Hey, my knees hurt!” he said. “I can’t seem to straighten them out. Do you suppose that antitoxin Heber gave us was on the up-and-up?”

“Of course it was,” said another of the men. But he spoke doubtfully, and it could be seen that he wasn’t standing quite straight, either.

“Oh-oh!” murmured Smitty, on whom a great light was beginning to dawn.

The old native ignored all this. His attention was on the little group huddled at the far end of the stone ledge. His gaze was without anger, which made it more sinister than if he’d been frothing with fury. He looked gravely at Mac and Nellie and Smitty and Marge. Then he looked gravely at the pool.

Possibly, there was some extra vibrant note in his voice that carried farther than its volume warranted. Possibly the intonation had been chanted so many times before that it automatically spelled food to what Smitty had called “the fish.”

Anyhow, there was a sudden commotion in the water at the end of the native’s intonation, and the horror in the pool appeared once more.

“Holy mackerel!” breathed one of Heber’s gang. “What is that?”

“D-damned if I know,” said Yellow Hair, in awe. “But I know one thing—when these nosy boys and girls are put in there with it, they’re going to stay put!”

The group of four toward whom the natives were walking were looking anywhere else but at the silent, waiting menace in the pool. Smitty and Mac stood in front of the two girls.

“So?” said Mac shakily.

Smitty’s arm and shoulder muscles knotted.

“We rush the monkeys,” he said.

“They’ll get us with those darts.”

“That’s better than the pool. Anything’s better than the pool. And maybe we can shove a few of them in first, though I’d rather shove Heber’s monkeys than these natives— Hey, the guy with the yellow hair looks nervous.”

The guy with the yellow hair was indeed looking nervous.

He said to the man next to him, “My knees hurt like hell. I’ll bet anything you like that Heber didn’t give us the real antitoxin to inoculate us.”

His pal’s face twisted with fear. “Then we’ll all of us have this disease! We’ll die in a few months and look like apes in our coffins! But Heber wouldn’t do that. Come to think of it, he took the same stuff himself.”

But Yellow Hair still looked nervous. “Another thing. I’m sure I heard a couple of planes awhile back.”

“Aw, you’ve been sayin’ that for two hours. You’re nuts.”

“All right, I’m nuts. But there’s still another thing—we were all nuts when we left Heber and Harry alone back in the village. If they ever get their hooks on the stuff, they’ll go off with it and maroon us here.”

“Now,” said the other man, while the rest looked disturbed, “you got something.”

The old native still was paying no attention to the white men at his back. Staring at the four ahead of him, he gave a curt order. The natives drew up for a rush. Apparently, they didn’t want to use their darts if they could help it. Maybe the “thing” in the pool preferred its victims full of life.

Nellie stirred suddenly. She had listened attentively to the ancient headman’s words. She nodded a little. She had been to this Amazon country three times with her archaeologist father before he was murdered by crooks. She knew a dialect so close to this one that she thought she might make herself understood.

“Wait!” she said, in the tongue that was kin to theirs.

The blacks stopped, more in surprise than obedience.

Behind them, the man next to Yellow Hair stared. “What do you know! The dame knows their lingo. Suppose she can pull a fast one?”

Yellow Hair shook his head. “Not a chance. These folks are dead, right now. So there’s no use sticking around. Let’s get back and see what Heber’s doing. Things don’t feel right to me.”

The men edged toward the rock door. The natives made no effort to stop them; they stared at Nellie.

“This girl, you must not kill,” Nellie said, shoving Marge to the foreground. “Oh, dear, what’s the word for ‘niece’?” She went on again. “This girl is of the family of the white man you hold prisoner. Your leader went to a far country to bring her back alive. He will be very angry if you kill her now.”

It stopped the headman for a moment, and that at least was all to the good. It was another moment of life for the trapped four.

The old man took it up with the two squat ape forms nearest him. Finally, he motioned for Marge to step toward them, away from Smitty and Nellie and Mac.

Marge got it then, and hung back.

“Oh, no!” she said, frightened but game. “I won’t get out of here on your necks, I’ll take what you do.”

“Don’t be a dope,” said Nellie out of the side of her mouth. “It won’t do us any good to have you in the pool with us. Look! Heber’s gang’s getting away.”

The last of the men was just slipping unobtrusively through the rock doorway. Nellie snapped to the native headman:

“Those men are your enemies far more than we are. Do they get away free? Why don’t you send them with us on the long journey?”

“Nice,” murmured Smitty, sensing the drift of the words. “I wouldn’t mind the dive nearly as much if those rats went with us.”

But the oldster couldn’t seem to make up his mind on this point. It appeared that the delivery of these four for sacrifice by those other whites had convinced him that Heber’s crew were friends.

Anyhow, there was no pursuit of the gang. And now the scores of monkey men started their advance on their victims again.

“Can you think of any other stall for time?” said the giant.

Nellie shook her lovely blonde head.

“I’m sorry, Smitty. You know, before they reach us, I’d like to say something. I’ve kidded around a lot, but I really think you’re pretty swell.”

“That goes double,” said Smitty huskily.

“Save yer wind for fightin’,” Mac interrupted. “We’ll need it to get out of here.”

The monkey men were almost near enough to spring, in their steady advance.

“Get out of here?” repeated Nellie, amazed even at such a moment. “You think we can—”

“Sure, we can,” said Mac, cheerfully. The cockeyed optimism of the Scot at moments of the most impossible peril was asserting itself. “We’re all born to be hung. We’ll not feed the beastie in the pool.”

The monkey men launched themselves in silent ferocity for the three who were to go into the pool. Marge Stahl was ignored; Nellie had saved her, at any rate.

Mac and Smitty sprang forward to meet them—and there were sudden shots and yells from the direction of the rock door!

CHAPTER XV

A Life for a Life

Back through the massive doorway poured Yellow Hair and his men. They ran as if devils were after them, and they looked the same way.

“Heber and his fine plans!” raved one of them. “We’re goners, that’s what we are!”

“Anyhow, we’re trapped here,” snarled another. “We should have fought our way down that tunnel.”

“Don’t be dumb!” Yellow Hair snarled back. “Those monkeys would have got us sure with their darts. And they’ve got their chief back to lead ’em. I knew I’d heard planes!”

Mack and Smitty got it, then. The little leader of this lost tribe had returned in repaired planes with the men he’d taken north. Or perhaps they had acquired more planes. They’d landed on the Negro River and just got here through the jungle.

And then he appeared.

The monkey man with the flaming intelligence in his fanatic eyes, who had almost stopped The Avenger’s band at Cayenne, came onto the terrace with his men. They were all still dressed in civilization’s clothing, and the garments looked even more bizarre on them here in their native haunt than they had up north.

The leader advanced on the cowering gang a little ahead of his men. He paid no attention to their guns, knowing that the quieter, cruder weapons of his men were more effective.

“So,” he said, his meticulous English sounding weird on his lips, “in my absence you thought to trick my people. It is well that I returned when I did. For now, you will all go to the god in the pool.”

“So we do have company,” breathed Smitty, almost contentedly.

“No company for me,” said Mac sturdily “I’m not goin’ in that pool, and that’s an end to it.”

“You’re crazy—” Smitty began. He didn’t finish, because the next act in the swiftly unfolding scene took place.

The little leader had underestimated the potentialities of desperate men, particularly men used to living criminally by their wits.

Quick as a snake, Yellow Hair darted forward! Before the little leader could leap back, he was caught.

Yellow Hair held him like a shield and, in spite of the native’s furious efforts, walked with him to the edge of the pool.

“There’s going to be a splash you hadn’t counted on,” Yellow Hair said to the others, “if you don’t let us go. All but the ones down there, that is.” He pointed to the Avenger’s aides.

The natives didn’t know the words; the leader was the only one who knew English. But they caught the meaning.

They drew back, chattering like the apes they resembled, and all undecided.

The leader screamed at them in their native tongue.

“He’s got crust,” said Nellie, listening hard. “He’s telling them to go ahead and kill the lot of us and pay no attention to him.”

“They’re not obeying,” said Smitty.

That was plain enough. No matter what the little man said, his people were not going to lose him. The monkey men stared at Yellow Hair, then moved away from him and his struggling captive—toward Nellie and Smitty and Mac.

They were going to take up the sacrifice ceremony where they had left off.

The little leader kept yelling orders till Yellow Hair clapped his hand over the writhing mouth.

And then lightning struck Yellow Hair! At least it must have seemed like that to all on the stone ledge—to all except The Avenger’s little band.

They knew the nature of that lightning.

A shallow gash suddenly appeared on the exact top of the man’s skull, mingling red with the blond hair. For an instant he stood there, holding the little leader, as if he had not been touched by anything.

But his eyes were already sightless, and next instant he folded like a wet sack and lay on the stone with one arm trailing almost into the pool.

For a second, all were stunned with the surprise of it. Then the others of the gang got back their wits. Three rushed for the little leader, to go on with Yellow Hair’s plan to hold him hostage against their release.

From the rock doorway hurtled a figure like something shot from a gun. He got to the leader first, and crouched between him and the men.

The Avenger was only of average size and weight, but he looked tremendous as he crouched there. The three stopped their rush and drew their guns again. The leader squalled an order.

Three slugs hit Benson’s body, jerked him with their impact, but didn’t pierce the bullet-proof celluglass. Then it was all over as the blacks obeyed that order of their leader.

Bamboo tubes whispered their death song. Three darts lightly pierced the three crazed gangsters. They screamed in their knowledge of inescapable death, and the rest stood in frantic immobility to keep from sharing their fate.

That held for a moment—the blacks’ masters of Heber’s cutthroat crew, The Avenger standing like the figure of Fate itself, Mac and Nellie and Smitty staring with dawning hope in their eyes, Marge off to one side, dazed by all that had happened.

Then the leader spoke to Benson. The fire had died from his glitteringly intelligent eyes, leaving them very thoughtful.

“You saved my life,” he said, looking down at the yellow-haired man. “After he had gotten to his plane at the river, if my people had allowed him to, he would have killed me.”

The Avenger said nothing. It was still a tense moment; they were all in extreme danger, hanging on the power of this incredibly educated little monkey man.

“You claimed at Cayenne that you were friend, not enemy. It is possible that your word can be believed.”

“It can,” said Benson, voice as calm as his glacial, pale eyes. “We want my old friend, whom you have held prisoner. That is all.”

“You are not after the treasure of my tribe?” said the little leader. “We have a great deal, you know. That is how we have the wealth for planes and anything else we need.”

“I know it is great,” said The Avenger. “And I know what the treasure is. Emeralds. But I already have more wealth than any ten men could spend. I don’t need yours.”

“There are many pounds of emeralds—big ones.” The little leader was craftily testing Benson. And it was a good, rough test. In spite of their deadly danger, the eyes of Heber’s men glittered like wet grapes with greed.

If there had been a single similar glitter in Dick Benson’s pale eyes, it would have meant his death. But there was, of course, no such glitter.

“I want only my friend,” Dick repeated quietly. “Then my friends and I will leave and never come back. Nor shall we ever tell others about your treasure.”

The little leader sighed. “I have sworn never to let a white man live to leave here, to come back with others,” he said. “But I think I believe in your word to me.”

The glare came back to his eyes.

“These men!” he spat at Heber’s cowering gang. “They must be punished. They shall go into the pool.”

The Avenger shook his head. “I have a better plan. They must all be criminals with police records.”

“Not a man among them hasn’t murdered,” the little chief said. “I have had them all investigated.”

“Good. Then they’ll bring their own punishment on their own heads. Free them. They will follow us in their transport plane to Rio. There, they will give themselves up to the police for whatever sentence may be meted out to them.”

“They will not live to fulfill their sentences, of course,” said the little leader judiciously. “They have the monkey disease. A glance tells that. They’ll die soon. But that is not enough for me! I want to see them die, now.”

One of Heber’s men recovered from the shock of this enough to gasp, “Hey! What d’you mean, we got the monkey disease? This guy Benson invented an antitoxin for that, and we all got inoculated with it.”

“I invented an antitoxin,” Dick said icily. “But Heber never had it. Knowing he was faking the disease, I gave him a harmless glucose solution, and he jumped to the conclusion that it was the antitoxin. I let him think so. That is what you were inoculated with.”

It was an explosion of dynamite among them. They changed from cowering men into crazed animals, for this was a hideous thing they’d heard. One of them jerked suicidally toward the pool, to leap into it and end his troubles once and for all.

The Avenger sprang to him and dragged him back. He said to them all, “I have the real antitoxin. It will cure you. I will inject each of you with it—in the Rio jail.”

It took a minute for them to get it.

“No one will guard you on the air trip to Rio. You will follow us in your plane. But anyone who does not report to the police and give himself up for past crimes will not get an injection!”

They all got it then, and in the faces of all was abject surrender. A dignified reflection of the same emotion was in the little leader’s eyes.

He nodded to Benson.

“Very well. You may all go. These men can have their transport at the Negro River. You and your friends may have one of two amphibians beside it, in which we came home. I would rather have seen them die, but . . .” He shrugged.

Dick knew when to let well enough alone.

“Thank you,” was all he said.

Smitty and Nellie, Mac and Marge Stahl came unmolested through the ranks of the sullen monkey men. They went, with the cowed gangsters, toward the rock doorway, and Benson came last.

“Wait!”

They all turned, half crouching. Was the little chief already regretting his gratitude for the saving of his life?

He went toward Dick Benson, tugging at the shirt he wore. His hand was inside it. But the hand came out with a thing in it that made them all gasp.

The huge emerald that the little man wore had been mentioned by Stahl and Heber. This was it.

The flashing green thing was as big as a pullet egg, set in heavy, dull gold, beaten into a circlet by some native craftsman.

“This I would like you to have,” he said to The Avenger, with as much dignity as if he’d been King of England.

Benson nodded. He slid the ring onto the little finger of his left hand, raised that hand in salute, and then all filed through the rock doorway.

There was a tunnel to a half-ruined temple far in the jungle, but Smitty and the rest were scarcely conscious of their way of exit. They’d had too close a brush with death to think of anything else. They all kept seeing the “thing” in the pool.

Near the mouth of the tunnel, Stahl joined them. And Marge and he silently embraced. They looked with awe and thanks at The Avenger.

They collected Heber and Gleason at the village and set out on the tortuous path to the Negro River.

In the air, in one of the astounding little native’s excellent planes, Smitty looked at Nellie.

“What were you saying at the pool, when we thought we were going to be fish food?” he said solemnly.

“Me? At the pool?” said Nellie, looking very innocent.

“Yeah. Something about your thinking I was all right, maybe, after all.”

“I said that? I don’t remember.”

“Sure,” complained the giant. “When you think you’re going to get knocked off, you treat me human. Otherwise, you wouldn’t give me a kind word if I . . . if I . . .”

“But I’ve given you many a kind word,” said Nellie. “Ask Cole Wilson.”

“Cole Wilson!” howled Smitty. “That unnaturally handsome dumbbell. What’s he got that I—”

They quarreled comfortably. The plane roared steadily. Behind them, docilely, piloted by men whose only fear was that they’d lose their captors and not get an injection of that antitoxin, the transport with all Heber’s gang hung close, on their way to face the results of their criminal careers.

Everything was fine. But on the calm face of The Avenger was no look of triumph. No expression of any kind. The restless, pale eyes looked unseeingly ahead. They were not viewing the landscape, those colorless, infallible eyes. Marge and Stahl, not as familiar with Benson as his aides, wondered what he was thinking.

Nellie could have told them. The Avenger had no sense of a job done, with the frustration and capture of Heber’s crew. His job would never be done, till death caught him.

That job was the fighting of all criminals, everywhere, to avenge the hideous thing that had seared his life and turned him into a crime-fighting machine.

This was why he had become, not a man, but a machine.

The Avenger.

THE END

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

THE GREEN KILLER

CHAPTER I The Apeman

CHAPTER II Poisoned Darts

CHAPTER III The Killer

CHAPTER IV The Purple Haze

CHAPTER V Souvenir

CHAPTER VI The Antitoxin

CHAPTER VII Lucky Shot

CHAPTER VIII Dark Water

CHAPTER IX All Is Lost

CHAPTER X Double Trouble

CHAPTER XI “Secret Orders”

CHAPTER XII Reception Committee

CHAPTER XIII Alden Stahl

CHAPTER XIV Search for Treasure

CHAPTER XV A Life for a Life