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

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

FIRST PRINTING: AUGUST, 1973

COPYRIGHT © 1941 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: 0-446-74-261-9

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

HOUSE OF DEATH

CHAPTER I: The Gold Coin

CHAPTER II: Nemesis

CHAPTER III: Death in Her Hair!

CHAPTER IV: The Shining Clan

CHAPTER V: The Former Great

CHAPTER VI: Haygar from Turkey

CHAPTER VII: Jailed for Murder

CHAPTER VIII: Double Kidnap

CHAPTER IX: The House in the Sea

CHAPTER X: Answer in Arabic

CHAPTER XI: Wholesale Disaster

CHAPTER XII: Dead Men’s Bones

CHAPTER XIII: Nellie Horns

CHAPTER XIV: Reunion

CHAPTER XV: The Night Cries Out!

CHAPTER XVI: From the Tomb!

CHAPTER XVII: Hell’s Host

CHAPTER XVIII: Bent Walls

HOUSE

OF DEATH

CHAPTER I

The Gold Coin

It was not a very attractive neighborhood.

Off to the east were warehouses, loft buildings, poor-looking brick structures in which families lived two to a room, and, finally, second-class apartment houses. To the west, only a block or two, the dark dock areas began, and from the Hudson River came hoots of foghorns as the mist of midnight deepened over river traffic.

The street was more like an alley than a street. The man walking down it seemed to have a tendency to walk on the street rather than on the sidewalk. The sidewalk, his movements made it appear, was much too close to dark doorways from which trouble could come.

Altogether, the man acted as though bearing something very valuable. And yet his looks did not confirm such a supposition.

He looked almost like a bum.

He wore a serge suit that had once been fairly good but now had spots where the process of fraying had gone beyond the shiny stage and into the condition where loose threads showed. His shoes were scuffed and thin of sole. His felt hat was as shapeless, and his shirt was not too clean and had frayed spots at the collar.

The man himself looked more presentable than his clothes. He was young—about twenty-six. He had a determined jaw, eyes that were level and decisive, though inclined to remain half-closed in a secretive way, and a square-shouldered build that spoke of strength.

But no matter what way you looked at him, he didn’t seem the sort who would be carrying anything so valuable as to make him beware of dark doorways. You would think that only a yegg very down on his luck indeed would bother with such prey.

Milky Morley just happened to fit into such a category.

Milky, so-called because he had skin as white, and hair as light almost as an albino’s, was indeed down on his luck. He was a second-story worker, as a rule. He had the neatest kit of burglar tools in New York, plied his trade with skill and discretion, and bothered nobody as long as he himself was let alone.

But now he was in a position that was going to make him the joke of Manhattan if he couldn’t remedy it swiftly.

Milky had lost his kit.

That swell little jimmy, made to his own specifications by the underworld’s best mechanic; the spring-steel blade, hardly thicker than a hair, with which he forced reluctant window catches; the tiny battery-coil indicator which graciously indicated the presence of unfriendly burglar alarms—all his precious tools were gone.

They had been, moreover, taken from him on a subway train by some damned crook, blast his soul. So there was Milky, an established second-story man, robbed of his kit by a crook. It was intolerable. If the boys ever heard of that—

He had to get a new kit fast. To do that, he had to have money. To get money, it seemed to him, there was only one course: sink a few grades in his own professional self-esteem, and pull a stick-up job.

Pull it on that shabby-looking guy, for example, coming down the dark, narrow street.

Milky pulled his hat farther down over his betraying, light blond hair and turned up his collar to hide some of his pasty face. His albino characteristics made him all too easy to describe to the cops.

He walked innocently toward the man, neither fast nor slow, both hands hanging openly by his sides—but with a sap stuck up his right sleeve. He got to the man, passed him, turned on his heel.

The man had one instant in which he suspected something wrong and tried to duck. But it didn’t do. The sap caught him on the back of the head!

Milky went through pockets and felt for a money belt.

In the pockets he found two one-dollar bills and some change. About two seventy-five altogether. Under the shirt, at the waist, he found a flat packet that bulged satisfactorily with bills.

He grunted.

“Hm-m-m! Had a hunch the guy wasn’t as broke as he let on. The idea—these punks puttin’ up a show of bein’ broke and then havin’ a flock of dough under their belts—”

A firm step came to his ears from the east.

When you fight the law for as long as Milky Morley had, you develop a psychic sense about cops. Just the sound of a step tells you whether the person is a cop or an honest man.

This was a cop. Milky straightened in midrun and faded down the block. He emerged at the corner and almost fell into a squad car, parked near the corner while the two occupants listened to the radio.

Milky felt persecuted. What business did cops have, parking and listening to radios, anyhow? They ought to be on the move, not lurking at dark spots for guys to stumble over.

It was too late to pretend he wasn’t in any hurry, so he veered left and kept on running.

A gun banged behind him. There was a thin whine as a slug went past his cheek. The bullet went into a cigar-store window and raised a small fountain of cigars from a ruined box on display.

Milky doubled his speed. Steps pounded behind him just as fast, however. There was an areaway. Milky ducked into it and paused.

The totalitarian so-and-so who had nipped his kit on the subway hadn’t gotten his gun. Milky snapped it level and fired.

After that, Milky ran faster than ever, for on the dark sidewalk behind him a cop lay clutching his stomach! Now he’d had to shoot a bull! And it wasn’t his fault at all! Why did hard luck do these things to a harmless fellow who didn’t want anything out of life but to be let alone in his pursuit of liberty and happiness?

Milky was beyond cursing, however, a little while after that. He was speechless with indignation. For, in a quiet spot with the law left far behind, he was examining the packet taken from the slugged guy’s waist.

It was a wallet—a big wallet—juicily filled with money. But it was funny money.

Milky stared at the stuff with red in his eyes. Hundreds and hundreds of zlotys or dinars or some other kind of foreign money were represented in those beautifully engraved notes. But he had a dreadful hunch they meant not one thing in good old U.S. dough.

For a pile of funny money he had slugged a guy, shot a cop, and run till his breath scorched his throat . . .

A faint rift of light appeared as he looked a second time at the handful of loose change he had taken, with the two one-dollar bills, from the man’s pockets.

Among the coins, which were American, was one that was neither copper, nickel, nor silver.

It was gold.

It was a thing about as big as a quarter, though perhaps a shade thicker. It had the figures 29 32 at the top and the letters H H at the bottom. In between was a thing like a castle.

No, it was obviously only part of a castle. The up and down edges of the represented structure were rough, while top and bottom were smooth and finished.

The medallion, or coin, was the same on both sides. Letters, numbers, and part of a building or wall.

Resignedly, Milky Morley wended his way toward the abode of Simon the Grind.

Simon the Grind was a fence. He had a pet shop on Eighth Avenue; but the cats and canaries, dogs and rabbits he sold during the day were only a blind to cover the things he bought at night.

In the evenings, from about eleven o’clock on, an odd parade of objects came into his possession. Diamonds and emeralds and rubies, banknotes too large to have been easily and immediately passed without serial numbers being noted, bonds that would have to cool a while, antiques of the small and easily transportable kind which a certain type of dealer would later buy for a certain type of collector.

Milky had done a lot of business with Simon the Grind. Not that it made Milky love Simon very much. Simon was a person Milky could have seen ground under the wheels of a truck with perfect calmness—except that then he’d have to go to the trouble of hunting up another fence.

Milky scowled as he tapped at the door over the pet shop.

There was a massive sound of bolts being thudded back from sockets. Heavy bolts, thick sockets, with electrical controls. The bolts only moved when the right tap was given.

“Come in.”

Milky went in, and the heavy door, looking deceptively cracked and fragile on the outside, closed by itself behind him.

“Oh, it’s you, Milky.”

Simon the Grind looked smoothly at Milky. He was a smooth guy, anyway, though he didn’t look too prepossessing.

Simon had one gray eye and one green eye. The green one had a disconcerting trick of wandering off out of line of the gray eye. The gray one would drill you like a cold gray stone while the green one stared pensively up at the ceiling, down at the desk top, or off at the wall. He wore glasses of the half-oval type, so that when he wanted to examine something he stared down through the glass, and when he was observing people he did so over the flat tops.

Simon smiled as he looked at Milky. But then, Simon was always smiling. A smile was permanently set on his thin lips like the meaningless painting of a bad theatrical backdrop.

“What can I do for you, Milky?”

“Got some dough,” said Milky, tossing the thick wallet on the desk. “It ain’t American, but it’s worth a lot.”

Simon the Grind didn’t even pick the wallet up. A corner of one bill was protruding a little, and he looked at that corner. He smiled, neither more nor less widely than the usual.

“It not only isn’t American, it isn’t worth a lot,” he contradicted.

“Huh?” said Milky, all surprise on the outside while inwardly his heart descended the scale of emotions.

“Czechoslovakian,” said Simon the Grind.

Even Milky had a vague idea of what that meant. He didn’t read a newspaper once a month, but that was enough. Czechoslovakian! Well, there wasn’t any such country any more. The government that had issued those bills was now in the vest pocket of a larger and hungrier government.

“It would have some value to a collector, though, huh?” he said hopefully.

Simon, in answer, nudged the wallet back toward him. Milky took it, and then drew out the gold coin, or medal.

“This’ll be worth something, though.”

Simon took the medallion. He wasn’t very enthusiastic about it. He stared down at it through the bottom of his half glasses. His body and hands still held in different lines, and his eyes were so languidly heavy-lidded that they nearly closed. It looked as if he were going to sleep right under Milky’s gaze.

“Gold, I guess,” he said, ringing it. “What’s this stuff on it?”

“I don’t know,” confessed Milky. “Numbers and letters and part of a building. Maybe it’s a life-saving medal or something. What’ll you give me on it, Simon?”

“Ten bucks, I guess,” shrugged Simon.

“Nuts to you,” grated Milky. He picked it up and started toward the door. Simon waited till his hand was on the knob.

“Make it fifteen,” he said indifferently. “I guess I can get twenty by weight for it.”

Milky, a disappointed and frustrated man, came back and tossed the coin on the desk. Fifteen dollars, plus two one-dollar bills! It was hardly a beginning on a new kit. If he ever got hold of that crook on the subway . . .

Simon handed over a five and a ten-dollar bill, and lit half a cigar, carefully laid in an ashtray on the desk.

“So long, Milky.”

As Milky went out, he carelessly raked the gold coin into the top drawer of his desk and went back to a newspaper he had been reading when Milky entered.

It was the best, and the hardest, acting Simon had ever done. As soon as the door had closed, he dropped the paper. His hands began trembling, and his eyes began to glitter feverishly.

He jerked the top drawer open and picked up the gold medallion with eager fingers. Then he snatched at his phone with his right hand, while his left began riffling the pages of a small secret book of addresses and numbers that never left his person.

CHAPTER II

Nemesis

For a man who had never harmed anyone—except, of course, that one who had had the bad taste to resist being robbed and the cop who had insisted upon chasing him—Milky Morley had had very bad luck.

It was due to pursue him, though he did not know that at the moment. In fact, it was due to hand him the worst pill bad luck can hand a man.

Which, it is generally conceded, is death!

Milky lived in an odorous first-floor room in a boardinghouse about a mile from where he had slugged the seedy-looking young fellow with the battered hat.

There was a handy back entrance down a short hall, in case the cops came. And he could leave through the window in front if he wished to depart in that direction in a hurry.

Because he might want to use that out, Milky did not have any window catches or other contraptions to keep people out. After all, burglars don’t get burgled—much.

He went into this room, shoved a dirty shirt off a rickety chair, and sat down. He stared bitterly at the wad of foreign money, then cursed and threw down the wallet. His eyes went from the wallet to a pair of feet that had appeared soundlessly near the window, where no feet should be, and through which they had just come.

Milky didn’t even start to reach for his gun.

He figured that anyone getting in that furtively and standing there staring down at him would be in too strong a strategic position to pull a gun on.

He was right, as he found when his eyes went a little farther up.

Feet, legs in shabby blue serge, then a face with narrow, determined-looking eyes under a shapeless hat brim.

What was more to the point, in a poised right hand there was the shiniest, sharpest-looking knife Milky had ever seen. It appeared positively to yearn for Milky’s throat.

Milky was so impersonal a robber that for a moment he didn’t recognize the fellow. Then he did. It was the shabby-looking owner of the Czech money and the gold medallion.

“You will turn around,” said the man evenly. There was a foreign inflection to his words and hesitations between them which indicated that his English vocabulary was not large.

Milky turned around. He knew shivs and shiv-bearers. The hand holding that murderous blade would be practiced in throwing it.

The man came up behind Milky. Hands went over his frame. Milky cursed as his gun was taken from him, howled when strong fingers ripped a pocket out of his clothes—taking some skin with it—and then shut up as a voice growled, “Silence!”

The man had his knife back in its sheath when Milky next saw him. In its place, he held the gun. Milky’s gun.

“Where is the gold coin?” the man demanded, voice calm but eyes hot.

Milky rather idiotically tried to lie.

“I don’t know nothing about a gold—”

“The one you took from me, you swine! Where is it?”

Milky moistened dry lips.

“I want that coin back. The rest,” the man waved his left hand, “that matters little. But the coin!”

“I ain’t got it any more,” quavered Milky.

The man glared at him.

“Then that other must have it. The one you visited.”

“How’d you know—”

“I got my senses back two, three minutes after you hit me. I was getting up. I look the other way from the one you had been going. At the corner, I see you again.”

Milky was beyond curses. In his chase from the cops, he had eventually doubled back around the block. So this monkey had seen him when he’d completed the circuit!

“I follow you to a place where animals are kept for sale. I could not get in there, so I wait and follow you again, back here to where you live. And you say you have not the coin?”

“I swear it,” said Milky eagerly. “The other guy—I sold it to him.”

“Turn around,” said the man.

Milky turned, reluctantly, hoping for the best. If he had seen the change in weapons the man made behind his back, he’d have gambled everything on a leap. But he did not see it.

The man put the gun in his pocket and took out the knife again. Knives are excellent for one prime reason. They make no noise to speak of.

“What you goin’ to—” began Morley.

That was all he ever said. After the interrupted words, he grunted.

That was when the knife went into his back! It slipped in as if into butter, testifying to its infernal sharpness as well as to the man’s expertness. And Morley sagged. He was as motionless as any man is with a blade squarely through his heart.

Milky would never need a kit of burglar’s implements again.

The man wiped the knife on Milky’s coat and went over his frame once more, this time in an even more thorough search. There was no gold coin.

Snarling under his breath, in a perfect frenzy, he ripped the room apart in a search. Rugs up, bedding off, mattress cut to pieces—all on the chance that Milky had managed to hide the coin in the short time between his entrance through the door and the man’s entrance through the window.

There was no coin anywhere around.

With his face a mask of hate, the man in the battered hat slid out of the window again and into the night.

The man standing before Simon the Grind’s desk was old. But he was one of these tough old men whose gray hair and lined face inspire no respect for age.

He was thin and stooped and wiry, with overlong arms and legs and a small round belly that stuck out of his thinness in a most unexpected way. He looked like a spider.

His features were no more prepossessing than his body.

His eyes were watery blue. His nose had an eagle jut to it, over a mouth that didn’t seem to exist at all till the old man spoke; then words split the invisible lips apart, temporarily, just about enough to wedge a knife blade between them.

“You came fast,” nodded Simon the Grind. His nod was contented. Such speed, he thought, meant a degree of interest that would permit him to charge a high price for the object that had called it forth.

“The medallion,” snapped the old man, lips a sixteenth of an inch apart to get out the words. “You phoned you had it. Where is it?”

Simon the Grind took his time. He had observed that keeping folks waiting sometimes added dollars to an article’s value.

“Where do you come in on this, anyhow? And how did you know a guy like me might some day have it pass into his hands?”

“I made that medallion years ago,” said the spidery old man. “That’s how I happen to know about it. I’m a jeweler and engraver. I knew it might be stolen some day because I know about the history of the medallion.”

“What is the history?” Simon the Grind invited.

“None of your business, my friend,” said the tough elderly man. “If you really have it, name your price.”

“Did you leave your phone number with a lot of other guys?” inquired Simon.

“I left it with about every fence in New York. If such a coin got to them, they were to phone me and get a good reward for it.”

“Fence?” complained Simon the Grind. “I’m a buyer and seller of valuable goods. I’m no—”

“All right, you’re a fine, upstanding, respectable pillar of society. Where’s that medallion?”

Simon the Grind decided there was nothing to be gained by whetting the spidery man’s appetite any more. He dipped into his desk drawer and produced the coin.

The old man practically pounced on it. His eyes were gem-bright as his clawlike fingers turned it over.

He bit it. He rang it gently on the desk. He looked at it through a jeweler’s lens.

“You don’t think I’d try to ring in a phony on you, do you?” said Simon the Grind, in a hurt voice.

“All right, what do you want for it?” said the old man, ignoring the plaintive tone.

“Ten thousand,” said Simon, on a wild guess.

The old man laughed. “You have queer ideas. I want this, yes. But it has no such value as that. I’ll give you five hundred dollars.”

Simon the Grind was a mind-reader when it came to asking prices. He smiled comfortably, serenely.

“Ten thousand dollars. That’s the first word—and the last.”

The spidery old fellow sighed. Then he shrugged.

“You’re a smart man, my friend. And a hard one. All right. You win.”

He put his hand into his breast pocket.

It came out with a gun in it.

“Turn around in your chair,” he said.

“Hey, wait!” bleated Simon the Grind. “You can’t do this to me! Why, you—”

“Are you going to turn around?” said the old man, very softly.

Simon the Grind swiveled around in his chair. He heard a step behind him as the old man reached the desk. Then Simon didn’t hear any more, but he saw a whole constellation of brilliantly colored stars.

That was when the gun cracked down on his head.

He slipped down in the chair, hung over the left arm for a moment, then went on with a thud to the floor as his lax weight overbalanced the thing.

That was the way he lay when the young fellow with the frayed, blue-serge suit and battered felt hat got back from Milky Morley’s room, still on the trail of the gold coin.

The door—that is, the fact that the door was slightly open and offered no difficulty of entrance—gave the man the first warning that all was not well here.

The sight of Simon the Grind, unconscious on the floor, confirmed it.

With his teeth gritting audibly in his rage, the man leaped to Simon’s side. Words chattered from his trembling lips. The words were gibberish to an American, but in the man’s native tongue they meant that some fiend from Hades must certainly have come first and taken that coin.

But the man looked through the place.

The room resembled Morley’s room before he was done—which is to say that it looked like a place where an unfriendly tornado had decided to take over and stay awhile.

But there was no sign of the gold medallion.

Curiously, the man made no effort to steal anything, although there was much of portable value around.

He did come across a bundle of banknotes, and almost absent-mindedly put a dozen or so twenties in his pocket. But he left far more than he took, and altogether his manner was that of a man anticipating a few expenses and abstracting just enough money to cover them.

Simon the Grind was conscious by then. Conscious, and sly as ever. That was too bad for Simon.

There was a gun under his desk, next to the right leg. He had found long ago that a gun in a desk drawer is not much good in emergencies, but that a gun on the floor can often be reached by some subterfuge.

Now, pretending still to be unconscious, he slid his left hand cautiously toward the gun. The man in the battered hat was putting money in his pocket at the moment.

Simon the Grind got the gun. He was transferring it from his left hand to his right when the man whirled and saw him.

With no more compunction than if Simon the Grind had been a horse with a broken leg, the man shot him.

Milky Morley’s gun thundered out; Simon relaxed on the floor with a hole over his heart. And that was that!

The man wiped his prints from Milky’s gun, tossed it to the floor beside Simon’s dead body, and went out.

A man had been slugged and two men had died, in a few short hours, because of that small and not very valuable-looking medallion with the figures 29 32, the letters H H, and the likeness of part of a building on it.

CHAPTER III

Death in Her Hair!

She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl.

Her hair was raven-black, but with lustrous highlights in it like the burnished feathers of a blackbird’s wing. It was rolled at the sides, presenting a look not unlike that of a coronet on her head. And, indeed, she was of the stuff from which princesses are made.

Her features were small and regular and regal, and her smooth skin had an olive tint. Her figure was slim but flawless in line and curve. A proud, fiery aristocrat from some Mediterranean country, you would have said. And that would have been correct.

The girl was from Spain. Her name on the register of the quiet little East Side hotel was Carol Haynes. But that was not the name she had been given at birth.

At the moment the girl was looking at a small gold medallion, about the size of a quarter but a shade thicker.

Since this was the night after the man had been slugged and robbed and then had killed two men in an unsuccessful attempt to get his medal back, it might have been assumed that this was that medal.

However, it was not. A close examination would have revealed that.

The gold medallion that had been taken from the man in the battered hat had the letters H H on it. This had the letters F H. That other had the numbers 29 32. This had 19 33. Both had likenesses of parts of a building; but that medal showed a larger section of wall than this one.

Otherwise, they were identical.

On impulse, the girl jumped up from the table at which she had been sitting and went to the door. The door was already locked as well as the standard hotel arrangement allowed: night-bolt thrown and regular lock secure.

In addition, tugging and hauling because of its weight, she dragged a bureau in front of the door and wedged it there.

Then she went back to the coin.

That gold medallion was beginning to represent death to her! Some powerful force wanted it; wanted it so badly that her life was of small consequence.

Carefully she put it in the coronet-like roll of her hair.

Four times in two days she had been attacked for it. Once it had been a simple purse-snatching; but, of course, she didn’t keep it in a place that could be easily rifled. Twice her room had been gone over while she was out. Last night two men had waited for her at the hotel entrance; she had barely escaped by leaping back and running, deer-fleet, down the avenue, to return with a policeman.

She caught her red lower lip in white, even teeth.

Four attempts. There would be more. And sooner or later, one would be successful.

Unless she had help.

She had no friends in New York City that she dared contact; there was too much chance that one of them might be secretly in with the crooks after her. But there was one source of help, she had heard, that was accessible to anyone in dire danger.

She reached for the telephone.

On lower Manhattan there is a street that, till a few years ago, was unknown to most native New Yorkers. That was because it was so short—only a block in length—and because there were so few addresses on it: a couple of stores, a warehouse, and three narrow three-story brick apartment buildings.

Then the street leaped into such prominence that few in the great city hadn’t heard of it. That happened because of the caliber of the man who took over the block.

The man’s name was Richard Henry Benson. But to an increasingly alarmed underworld he was better known as The Avenger.

Dick Benson took over this block, Bleek Street, by buying the three old buildings and leasing the warehouse and the stores under other names. The north side of the square was entirely taken up by the windowless back of a great storage warehouse, fronting on the next street.

The three old buildings, behind their unimposing facades, were thrown into one, which was outfitted with the quiet elegance of a very wealthy man. The entire top floor was one vast room. And it was in there that The Avenger and the little band who worked for him were usually to be found when not engaged in fighting crime.

They were in there now. At least, four of them were.

At a big desk near the rear sat The Avenger, himself, a figure calculated to give more and better nightmares to more and more criminals as the months went on and the results of his constant unpaid battles against the underworld piled up.

Benson was not a large man, no more than average size, but he seemed to own a rare quality of muscle that more than made up for quantity. He was as fast as light, as powerful as a cougar, and as deft in movement as a gray fox. You sensed this even on seeing his body in repose.

Dick Benson sat at his desk now, with his colorless, awesome eyes intent on a police report.

In one corner of the room was a teletype. All the world’s news flowed over this, and in addition there were complete police reports from the major cities. The report that held The Avenger’s interest right now had to do with events of last night.

A policeman, shot by a fleeing man, had gained consciousness hours later in a hospital to hazard the guess that he had been drilled by a second-story expert known as Milky Morley.

But Morley couldn’t be questioned because police, at his room, found him dead. He had been stabbed in the back, straight through the heart.

Morley, if indeed he was the one who had shot the cop, had slugged a fellow down the avenue. There was a wallet with Czechoslovakian currency in Morley’s room, which, it would seem, had been taken from this man.

Then, after that, police had found a suspected fence named Simon Hertziff, better known as Simon the Grind, dead in his room with a gun beside him that was later traced to Morley. There were no prints on the gun.

Four of Dick Benson’s six aides were here at headquarters. Fergus MacMurdie, the eminent Scotch chemist, was probably tending his Waverly Place drugstore. Probably. Most likely, he was to be found in the rear of the very same drugstore, in The Avenger’s crime laboratory, busily creating some advanced lethal gas or a new anesthetic, as yet unheard-of.

Another aide, Cole Wilson, the newest member of Justice, Inc., was in Detroit, acting as consultant on an important engineering task with which he had been associated before joining The Avenger’s crew of crime-fighters.

Beside The Avenger, as his pale, icy eyes studied the composite report, stood one of his aides.

This man was christened Algernon Heathcote Smith. But few people attempted to call him that because they knew it annoyed him, and he was a poor person to annoy.

Smitty, as the world called him, was a giant. He looked like something out of a heroic world of thousands of years ago.

He was six feet nine inches tall and weighed nearly three hundred pounds. The barrel of his torso was so muscled that his arms couldn’t hang straight, but hung crooked from his vast chest like the arms of a gorilla.

A keen brain resided in that huge bulk; Smitty was one of this world’s best electrical engineers.

“See any connection in those reports, chief?” the giant respectfully asked The Avenger.

“I don’t know,” said Benson slowly.

“Morley’s gun, found at Simon the Grind’s shop after Morley was discovered dead, would seem to be a connection.”

“But Morley’s gun had no prints on it,” a third speaker put in. “Morley wouldn’t have shot Simon dead, wiped his gun, and then left it there beside the body for the police to find.”

This third speaker was Nellie Gray.

Nellie was as valued an aide of The Avenger as Smitty himself. But at first glance a person would be apt to wonder why.

She was as slim and dainty-looking as a Dresden doll. Actually, she had been known to throw large men around like Indian clubs. She was past mistress of jujitsu, skilled at boxing and wrestling, and an expert marksman. Furthermore, she had more cold nerve than most men.

The Avenger’s black head was nodding at her words.

“It would look more as if the man who had killed Morley had also killed Simon,” Dick said, voice quiet but vibrant.

“It might have been this way,” mused Nellie. “Milky Morley robbed a man. He got something pretty valuable, and took it to this fence, Simon the Grind—shooting a policeman in his getaway. We’ll say he was followed. The follower broke into Simon’s after Morley had gone, killed the fence, and hunted for whatever it was Morley had taken. He didn’t find it; so he went to Morley’s place and killed him, too. Maybe he got the thing he was after there, maybe not.”

“Except for one nice big hole, that might be the way of it,” said Smitty, his tone condescending.

The giant held the diminutive blonde in very high esteem. It was suspected, indeed, that he was pretty crazy about her. To disguise it, he usually spoke to her as if she were a dull child of twelve.

In return, Nellie, who often gave indications of having a secret soft spot in her heart for the mountainous Smitty, addressed him as if he were an overgrown babe with only half a brain.

“What,” demanded Nellie, “is the hole?”

“Morley’s gun,” said Smitty, still condescending about it. “If the same guy killed them both, he must have killed Simon last, not Morley. Because he probably got hold of the gun off Morley’s dead body.”

Nellie shrugged alluring shoulders. “Morley first, Simon first—what difference does it make?”

The Avenger’s calm, compelling voice stopped the incipient argument as a window shade, suddenly drawn down, stops a glare of fight.

“Phone headquarters, Josh. See if there are any developments not yet put on the teletype. I have an idea this business might conceal something interesting.”

Josh Newton was the fourth of the little band at present in the huge room. Josh was the longest, lankiest, sleepiest-looking Negro in New York City.

When among friends, Josh talked as crisply and precisely as any college professor. An honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute, as was his attractive wife, Rosabel, Josh was as alert and quick as a steel trap.

Josh was over near a desk on which sat a battery of telephones. He picked one up, started to dial headquarters, then set it down as a soft buzz and a little light showed that somebody was trying to get them on another phone.

Josh picked up this phone.

Over the doorway downstairs was a small black sign with faded gilt lettering on it. The sign said:

JUSTICE, INC.

A small sign, inconspicuously lettered, but mighty in its import. Justice, Inc. Here, ye who are in need may receive help. Here, ye who are in peril may apply for safeguarding.

Josh quoted the sign: “Justice, Inc.” into the phone, as a telephone switchboard operator might have said, “A. B. Richardson Co. To whom do you wish to speak?”

A girl’s voice came over the phone, agitated and tense, yet cultured and pleasant.

“I would like to speak to Mr. Richard Benson. Is he there?”

“Yes,” said Josh pleasantly. “Just a minute, and he—”

There was a scream over the phone! It ripped into the transmitter at the other end with such frightened, horrible shrillness that Smitty and Nellie and Benson heard it twenty feet away.

Then there was silence. Josh jiggled the receiver. The line was dead; only the dial sound could be heard.

Without one word spoken, the four went into action.

Josh got the location of the phone over which the call had been made: a small hotel over near Gramercy Park. Nellie called headquarters to have a squad car rush there and place a man at front and back to guard the place and see that no one got away. Smitty and The Avenger raced for the automatic elevator and went to the basement.

A fleet of fifteen or twenty cars was there, each designed for a different, specific use. They got into a coupé that could do a hundred and twenty miles an hour and shot up a ramp and over the sidewalk.

The dark beauty, registered as Carol Haynes in the small hotel near Gramercy Park, had dragged her bureau across the door before phoning The Avenger. She had forgotten the window.

It is a common thing for people to forget windows when they are on the third floor or higher. And yet more windows than not have ledges or ornamental brickwork under them which make it quite easy to climb in, whether they are on the third floor or the thirtieth.

A man had climbed in the girl’s window while she was at the phone!

The man moved with a skill that would have been admirable in any other line of endeavor. He slunk up behind the girl at the phone with a silence unbroken even by the rustle of his clothes; he took good care that there was no such rustle. He even watched his breathing, making it slow and even, to avoid giving his presence away.

If it hadn’t been for just one thing that he forgot to watch, the girl would never have known what struck her.

That one thing was his shadow.

There was a lamp on the table near the window. It was by its rays that the girl had been studying the gold coin. That lamp, behind the skulking man, gave him away.

The girl saw a moving shadow, screamed wildly, and tried to turn. His hand snaked down with a blackjack, and she fell! The man picked up the phone and set it in place. Then he went to the door, rolled the bureau back, shouldered the girl, and went to the freight elevator.

Not for six minutes did the squad car, summoned by Nellie, get to the hotel. By that time, the man was four minutes gone, driving off with another man in a dimly lighted black sedan with the limp body of the girl in the rear.

And by that time Dick Benson had reached there, after a faster trip than any ambulance or police car could have made.

“Find out who called from what room,” he said to the giant. “By this time, whoever she screamed at is gone. Find out what you can.”

Smitty went into the hotel. Benson went to the curb east of the entrance. There was no doorman at this hotel, but a cab sat there at the curb with a driver in it.

“A car may have come out of this driveway, after picking up something brought down in the freight elevator back there,” he said.

The man looked at the small police insignia on The Avenger’s car, and then stared into the glacial depths of those colorless eyes. He was an intelligent man, and he promptly decided that this was a time to come clean.

“Yes, sir,” he nodded, “four or five minutes ago a car came out. Black sedan, Connecticut license, not going very fast. It went over to Fifth Avenue, and I just happened to see that it turned north. Two men in front, nobody in the rear as far as I could see. Right rear fender dented.”

The man earned a twenty-dollar bill for his fast description.

Dick Benson stepped to the man at the wheel of the squad car.

“Phone the bridges. Stop any black sedans with two men riding, Connecticut license, dented right rear fender.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man. But it is doubtful if Dick heard him. He was already stepping into the coupé. And at seventy miles an hour he headed north.

He had reserved for himself the most probable way out of the city to be taken by any car with a Connecticut license. That was via the Henry Hudson Parkway, which was reached at the north end of the Express Highway.

There is a toll bridge up there. Benson got to it in eighteen minutes. Not for another five did a black sedan, as described, show up. The driver handed out his dime and slowly, innocently, drove on with doom behind him in the guise of The Avenger!

CHAPTER IV

The Shining Clan

It was about one-thirty in the morning, now. But it was such a pleasant night that there was a good deal of traffic on the wide new road leading north. It helped Benson disguise the fact that he was following the black sedan.

Not that such help was imperative. The Avenger could trail a car so that the car’s driver had scarcely a chance to suspect. First on one lane, then on the other, with cowl lights, then brights, then back to cowl lights, first near and then far back, and then letting a red light get between.

The chase went on for about fifteen miles, with the sedan going at a decorous forty miles an hour.

Once Benson saw the man beside the driver slither over the back of the front seat of the sedan and drop into the rear. He stayed there after that, as if something back there had suddenly made his attention vital.

Then the car abruptly swerved to the right, off the main road and down a rutted area that was lined with dump trucks and steam shovels and would, in the near future, be another new road feeding off to the east.

Benson went past this and came back across open land on foot. It was all parkway along here, dark with lusty new-planted trees, and with no one at all around. He was puzzled as to the move. This was a blind alley for a car. It had a dead end. Why . . .

The answer came in a moment. There was another car in there. It had been waiting for the first. In it were six men. They were piling out as Benson got to a clump of trees about twenty yards from the cars.

The eight men began talking together in low tones; then the two from the sedan reached in and dragged out the body of a girl.

Some of these eight had flat, Slavic faces; some had fair hair and almost Prussian characteristics. But they all had one thing in common. They were foreign-looking.

The two started to load the girl into the larger sedan that had been there first. And then it developed that this meeting place was an unfortunate idea.

Still another car whirled into the wide dirt plateau destined to be a road and traffic circle.

Dick had noticed a car ahead of the one he had trailed. It had occurred to him that perhaps this car had something to do with the chase; you can trail from ahead as well as behind. Then, when the black sedan swirled in and he himself stopped, he had seen the other go peacefully on and decided that he was wrong.

It seemed he had not been wrong. The other car had simply sped to the next crosscut, or perhaps cut right across the center parkway to get on the backtrack, and had returned here as fast as its driver could take it.

From the car suddenly lanced red streaks, and there was a sound of submachine guns. Three of the men from the first two cars fell. The rest dropped and began pouring back lead. Evidently, the third car was not bullet-proofed, for the men in it got out in a hurry.

Benson was in a position to see them, even though the others could not.

These men, too, were foreigners. But of a different brand. They were Orientals. The Avenger, able almost always to pick a man’s race, saw Mongol cheekbones, Eurasian blends of feature, and several Arabs.

It developed into the most vicious fight imaginable. The two gangs blasted away at each other with the abandon of two patrol parties on a battle front. Now and then, a man yelled, or moaned, and sagged out of the fight; and the cars, used as barriers by the combatants, began to resemble perambulating Swiss cheeses.

Benson was undisturbed by the slaughter. It was gang against gang, with plenty of time before a patrol car could hear, or be summoned, and interfere.

He hoped the mutual massacre would be complete. But in the meantime there was a point to rectify.

That was the girl.

The car into which she had been loaded was down on four flat, bullet-drilled tires. Behind it was a man carefully firing first from around the front end, then from the rear; another man lay with sightless eyes turned up to the stars, not doing anything at all.

Benson reached to the calf of his right leg and from a slim holster, there, drew Mike.

Mike was a special little .22. It was so streamlined and sleek that its butt was more like a slight bend in a length of blued pipe than a handle; and its cylinder held only four bullets, for smallness and compactness. Mike was silenced so that its report was only a whisper from a deadly small muzzle.

Mike whispered now, and the man left alive behind the car went down. But he was not dead.

Richard Benson did not kill. With Mike, he knocked out his adversaries by “creasing” them: glancing a bullet off the exact top of the skull, so that the man was knocked cold instead of dead.

It was an eighth-inch shot that perhaps no other marksman on earth could have duplicated. He made it now.

The man dropped; there was no sound of Mike’s whispered spattt over the other noises of battle. Benson went to that side of the car, opened it, and took from the rear the body that had been placed there.

The girl was still alive. Her breathing fanned Benson’s cheek. He started to his coupé with her, and then saw something in a reflection of a headlight glare that made him pause.

The Oriental-looking crew was getting ahead of the other gang. It looked like sure success for them; there were five of them left and only three of the other band.

What Benson saw that made him halt with the girl in his arms was the action of one of those three survivors.

The man took something out of his pocket, held it to his lips, and then, with an effort obvious even at that distance and in dim light, swallowed it.

Benson laid the girl down and went back.

The Avenger habitually wore inconspicuous gray suits, which made him look more like a gray steel bar than a human being. But in dozens of pockets and compartments of those suits he carried an assortment of weapons and devices that did not show from the outside at all.

He whipped one out now, a thirty-foot length of some kind of shiny cord that looked as if perhaps it had been made from piano wire. It was not metallic, however. It was a thin line of a material made of a plastic that was Benson’s own discovery. It would hold three hundred pounds and was as pliable as silk.

This went out in a long, graceful loop.

The loop bit around the neck of the man who had put on the swallowing act, and in about six seconds the man was at Benson’s side, still trying frantically to get the thing off while he was being reeled in. A fist smashed his jaw.

The shots stopped. Two of the fighters had seen the man stagger swiftly backward into the night, with a suggestion of a line or something taut behind him. Something was very strong . . .

The Avenger was only an average-sized person, but he put the girl under his left arm, picked up the man by his belt with his right, and ran—not walked—to his coupé.

He was driving off when the survivors of the two gangs, working in unison now, poured bullets after him.

MacMurdie’s drugstore, on Waverly Place, looked like an average drugstore, but emphatically wasn’t. Behind the ordinary-looking store, there was a back room twice as big. A steel door cut this room off.

In the room were two laboratories. Along one side was electrical apparatus used by Smitty in his experiments and new discoveries. Along the other side was a chemical set-up not to be outclassed in even the big commercial labs. And on this side, Fergus MacMurdie worked.

He was working there, now, on an anesthetic that would kill pain instantly by local application without—as it did now—killing the flesh it touched, too. He had been working on it for a long time.

Mac’s tragedy—a criminal tragedy which had irreparably seared his, like Benson’s, life—showed in his bleak, bitter blue eyes. He had feet almost as big as Josh’s, bone mallets of fists, a sandy-red hide with big dim freckles just underneath, and ears that stood out like sails.

“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac aloud, after putting a drop of the unfinished anesthetic on the tail of an experimental rat and watching the tail shrivel. “‘Tis a fine substitute for sulphuric I’ve got—but no anesthetic. The devil take it!”

He started to work on a beaker of the stuff, then turned with a scowl. The big cabinet in the rear of the room was buzzing.

That cabinet, on Smitty’s side of the lab, was the last word in television sets, better than any the big corporations had yet produced. The buzz told that somebody wanted to talk to him on it.

Mac switched it on. In a big screen over the front of it a face formed. A full-moon face with wide, naïve eyes.

“Smitty!” snapped Mac. “Ye mountain of meat. D’ye know it’s after two in the mornin’? What d’ye mean by—?”

“Better get over to headquarters, Mac,” said Smitty, from the screen. “Looks like something’s breaking. The chief is out, but I’ve a hunch he’ll be back soon.”

“That’s different, mon,” said Mac. “I’ll be over at once.”

He reached there as Benson was rolling his car down the ramp to the basement garage.

Up in the big top-floor room, he looked at the girl, and at the Slavic-looking gangster snaked by the thin line from the middle of the gunfight.

The girl was moving under her own power, now, but the man was not. It seemed that Dick had struck a little harder than he intended, in the necessity for quick action back there off the parkway.

“Concussion,” judged MacMurdie.

Benson, an unparalleled physician himself, nodded.

“I’d judge so, too. I’m glad you’re here, Mac. I want you to work on him.”

“I’d rather work on the girrrl,” burred Mac, with a twinkle in his eyes that brought an answering wan smile to the lips of the dark-haired beauty.

“The man swallowed something,” said Benson. “Get a stomach pump and see what it was.”

“I can tell you that, I think,” said the girl. “It was a gold medallion.” She pointed to the coronetlike roll of her black hair, disarranged over the right ear. “I had it in my hair. While I was being driven in the car I felt a hand take it.”

“Gold medallion?” said Benson, turning his pale, agate-bright eyes on her.

“I—yes.” She stopped. “It was for the medallion that I was kidnapped, I think. It’s death! I had death in my hair.” She finished with the dramatic sense of her Latin ancestry.

“Why would the gold medallion be so important?”

The girl bit her lip.

“Will you think it terrible? I do not want to tell you. Not even you, Mr. Benson. Oh, I thank you so much for the quickness that let you trace me, and the cleverness that enabled you to rescue me.”

“You don’t care to tell me about the gold medallion?”

“Please. No. I tried to telephone you to ask you to hide me from death for forty-eight hours. Only that. Then I am to meet other members of my family, and I shall be safe.”

“Your family?”

The girl’s dark head went up and back.

“Very, very pretty,” whispered Smitty to Nellie.

The fragile-looking little blonde shot the girl a nasty glance and the giant a venomous one.

“Hm-m-m!” was all she said.

“I am from Spain. My name is Carmella Haygar,” the dark beauty said.

“Haygar?” repeated The Avenger, his eyes like chips of stainless steel in his calm face. “Of the international business-and-banking family of that name?”

“Yes.” There was regal bearing to Carmella’s head.

“A shining clan,” said The Avenger softly.

Some of the proud lift went from the dark head.

“It was a shining clan. Cut now—broken. Ruined! My branch of the family, the one that has lived in Spain for two hundred years, is typical. My father and brother were killed in the revolution there. Our fortune and lands were expropriated. I am the only one of the great Spanish Haygars left. I escaped to this country barely with my life and with a few meaningless keepsakes, such as the gold medallion I spoke of.”

“So meaningless,” snapped Nellie Gray in an aside to Smitty, “that men kill each other like flies to get it.”

The Avenger did not dwell on that fact.

“You are to meet others of the Haygar family in two days, you say?”

“Yes,” said the girl.

MacMurdie came in.

“Mon, even unconscious, he was reluctant to give it up,” he said. “But here it is.”

With an eager cry, Carmella took possession of the disk in Mac’s hand. The little gold medallion.

“May I see it?” said Dick, voice calm but compelling.

“Yes.” Carmella handed it to him. “Just a keepsake, as I said. But it is very valuable to me for . . . for sentimental reasons.”

The eyes of The Avenger expressed nothing as he examined the gold disk. They were as blank as bits of glacier ice, and as cold.

CHAPTER V

The Former Great

The building was on a shabby street just off Eleventh Avenue. On one side was a rope-and-cord factory, on the other a cheap candy company whose odors were guaranteed to make the passers-by decide never again to eat anything sweet.

The two-room space on the second floor in the rear of the building got the noise of the rope shop and the smells of the candy factory all day and most of the night. Now, at four o’clock in the afternoon, both were at their peak.

The name under the bell of the two rear rooms—a bell that had not been in working condition for at least ten years—was Harlik Haygar.

The occupant of the rooms was inside. He was dragging two chairs from the cubicle used as a bedroom and extending a broken-down studio couch to accommodate more people. He was preparing for company.

It was the man who had been slugged, about a half-mile from this spot. He didn’t have on the battered hat, but the frayed blue suit and his decisive but secretively narrowed eyes branded him.

The man who had been slugged, it seemed, was this Harlik Haygar.

About the time he had finished fixing the cot, there was a tap at the door, after a fruitless pressure on the bell button had disclosed the fact that it didn’t ring anything.

The man opened the door.

On the threshold was a heavy-set fellow of forty-five who took off a stiff-brimmed felt hat to disclose stiff, close-cropped gray hair. The man’s head had practically no back to it. He stood ramrod straight, and wore silver-rimmed spectacles with lenses so thick that it made his eyes seem enormous.

“Harlik Haygar?” this man said gutturally.

“Yes.”

The man with the Prussian head extended a hand with a jerky, precise gesture.

“Cousin!”

Harlik Haygar was not impressed.

“You are?”

“Von Bolen Haygar, Essen, Germany.”

“Ah, yes. You can prove that?”

The Prussian smiled stiffly.

“Yes. By this.”

He produced a small gold disk, about the size of a quarter but a bit thicker. On it were the letters v B H.

Only then did Harlik Haygar relax a little.

“Cousin,” he nodded, “come in.”

Von Bolen Haygar entered the room, set his stiff hat precisely on a table, and seated himself precisely in a chair next to it.

“My German is poor,” said Harlik. “My English is not much more better, but I would suggest that we speak in that tongue.”

The other man nodded. Then he looked long at his host.

“From Czechoslovakia,” he mused. “You are the last.”

“Yes,” said Harlik, with not much emotion on his face, “I am the last to have been dispossessed. But your turn was almost as recent, I believe.”

Von Bolen nodded.

“In September of 1939 the German government confiscated the Haygar estates. Our assets had long been listed, but we had hoped to be immune, since the German branch of the family was most influential in helping Der Fuehrer in his rise to power. But there was to be no immunity after all. And the government was to be in war in a month. So all the Haygar wealth was seized.”

Harlik nodded.

“Our branch, near the Skoda works, fared the same. When Munich gave part of the country to Germany, we feared for the worst. Two months ago it came. I am the sole Haygar left from Czechoslovakia, and all our assets have been taken over—”

There was another tap at the door.

This time the man who came over the threshold was slim and dapper, though elderly, with a small, neat mustache and a tiny spike of a goatee. He looked like a doctor.

“Harlik Haygar?” he said, voice high and reedy. “I am Sharnoff Haygar of Moscow. But this, perhaps, will speak more loudly than words.”

He extended a gold medallion, but kept it carefully in his own hand while Harlik examined it.

“Cousin,” said Harlik, pointing out a chair. The man already seated, von Bolen Haygar, introduced himself.

“You have been an expatriate for some time, have you not, Cousin Sharnoff?” von Bolen asked.

“For seven years,” replied the Haygar from Russia. “In Paris, Basle, and Alexandria. Then here. It was in 1933 that the Bolsheviks took the last of our estates from us.”

The three men stared uncertainly at each other for a moment. All of the same family—but the beginning of that family dipped back in the centuries, so that still they were utter strangers to each other.

There was another tap. The man who entered this time did not look Caucasian at. all. He wore ordinary clothes—pretty shabby ones, too—but you could fairly see a turban on his head and a voluminous robe on his strong body. He was almost as dark as a Negro, with dark eyes, squinted and surrounded by lines from peering into the desert.

“Shan Haygar, Turkey,” said this man, showing his gold medallion.

Again there was a silence, as each looked at the other. It was the dapper little Sharnoff who broke it. He was more urbane and courteous than the others.

“A unique occasion, gentlemen,” he said. His voice had almost a purring quality. “We represent, here, a family that has probably never been surpassed in its influence over the affairs of the globe. Perhaps it has been equaled by the famous Rothschilds, but certainly not surpassed. And now-—we are the poorest of the poor. Unless Shan Haygar—”

He peered questioningly at the latest arrival.

The man who was a Turk in spite of English clothes smiled wryly and shook his dark head.

“Year by year,” he said, “the regime of Kemal Pasha in Turkey has drained the resources of the family there. Now they are entirely gone. Entirely! I came to America in the steerage class of an Italian boat so filthy that none of you would have spat upon it.”

Again they were silent, these survivors of a once-great house. Branch by branch, they had set up shop in various countries. They had intermarried with the natives there, becoming German, Russian, Turkish—yet still Haygar.

“There should be a fifth,” said von Bolen Haygar at length. “All our clan is not yet represented.”

Sharnoff nodded.

“Francisco Haygar of Spain. Where is he?”

“Surely you gentlemen know,” shrugged Shan. “Francisco Haygar and his son were murdered in Valencia. Only the daughter, Carmella, is alive. But she is in the city, I understood. Why is she not here, now?”

“She is to meet us later,” said Harlik smoothly. “She it is who was responsible for having this meeting held today instead of several days ago.”

“Perhaps she has gone directly to the island in Maine,” murmured Sharnoff, with a sudden tightening of bland eyes in his neat, small face.

“If she has—” exclaimed von Bolen gutturally, his fists clenching.

“But, no,” said Shan. “It would do her no good to meet alone with him. We are all to meet, which is why we all came here. We judged it wise to go there in a group—”

There was another tap on the door.

In the room a surprised silence held the four. Then von Bolen whispered, “It is this Carmella, perhaps. Yes?”

Harlik shook his head, looking worried.

“She was not to be here so soon. We should be prepared, I think.”

They all understood that.

Von Bolen took out a Luger-type automatic, which he held with the easy assurance of a military man. Sharnoff produced a small derringer, as neat and miniature as himself. Shan drew a revolver.

Harlik Haygar took out the knife with the infernal glint of razor-sharpness on its edge. And then he opened the door.

A spidery old man stood there, regarding them out of watery blue eyes. He had an eagle beak of a nose over a mouth that didn’t seem to exist at all until he spoke, when knife-thin lips parted a fraction of an inch.

“Gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself. I am Harlik Haygar!”

It was a bombshell. The three with guns leaped to their feet with faces going either pale or red according to their blood-reactions to shock. They stared at the spidery old man with death in their eyes.

“You can prove that, perhaps?” said Shan softly.

“Certainly! By this.”

The spidery old man took out a gold medallion.

“This is all a lie!” panted the Harlik Haygar who had been playing host. “This man is an imposter! I swear it! I am Harlik Haygar!”

Von Bolen, gun steady in his right hand, reached for the medallion with his left. He looked at it, stepped with it to the table where his hat reposed, and dropped the coin on the hardwood surface. Its clear ring sounded.

“That is my medallion,” panted the man in whose rooms they stood. “It was stolen from me. That is the truth. On the street I was robbed. I got the man who robbed me and the man to whom he sold the medallion. But I could not recover the gold coin itself. But that is mine—”

His voice died as he stared from face to face of the four men.

In Shan’s eyes was almost a dreamy look as his dark finger tightened a little on the revolver’s trigger. Sharnoff’s eyes were like small stones as his derringer shoved forward a little like the head of a snake about to strike. Von Bolen’s eyes held no emotion at all, but the gun in the Prussian’s hand settled back a fraction of an inch.

“This man is the imposter,” pleaded the younger Harlik, pointing with a shaking finger at the spidery old fellow. “He holds a medallion stolen from me. Believe me! Say something!”

The four were closing in on him. The latest comer, coin still in his hand, had a gun out, too, now. He was grinning just a little, knife-edge lips showing a thin glint of yellowed, snaggly teeth.

“Help—”

Just the one cry ripped out. Then four guns spoke! And each was pressed tight against the victim’s body. Four reports, sickeningly muffled.

“There has been noise,” suggested Sharnoff, blowing lightly over the muzzle of the little derringer.

“Better to go,” said von Bolen in his guttural tone. “We know where next we shall see each other. It seems that this imposter who had everything but his identifying medallion”—he looked expressionlessly at the dead man—“got in touch also with Carmella Haygar. So, doubtless, she will join us at our final destination. Shall we leave—and separate for the moment?”

The four filed out, walking calmly out at different times and taking different directions.

CHAPTER VI

Haygar from Turkey

Nellie Gray seldom made a mistake.

Smitty, always safely out of earshot while he did the praising, for he rarely gave the diminutive bombshell the pleasure of praising her to her face, insisted that she never made mistakes.

It was a question whether she had made one now. But she thought she had and was all broken up about it.

“Why I ever let her out of my sight, I don’t know,” she wailed.

She was referring to Carmella Haygar of Spain, who was not among those present at Bleek Street any more.

“You’d think,” Nellie went on, “that anybody coming here and begging to be allowed to stay for forty-eight hours so she could be ‘protected’ would stick around. So I didn’t guard her or anything like that. And now she’s gone.”

“Naturally you had no reason to suspect she was going to sneak out,” said The Avenger quietly. He looked again at the recorded phone conversation that had preceded the girl’s swift exit.

Every phone call in Bleek Street headquarters made an automatic record of itself and stamped the time on that record. This was stamped 4:10 p.m. It was certainly short.

“It has been decided to go to the island a bit sooner than previously planned. You may travel with us if you like.”

There was no identifying name in the words. Somebody had phoned for Carmella, told her that “they” were going to some island or other and she could come along. That was all.

“And right after that, I came up from my suite downstairs, and she was gone,” said Nellie. “I’m so terribly sorry! I—”

The tiny red light in the wall near the door glowed. It was a silent announcement that somebody downstairs in the vestibule wanted to come up.

Smitty went to the small television set that was constantly turned on. It gave a picture of whoever was in the vestibule.

“Sheiks of Araby and stuff,” he said.

The next instant, the person who had prompted the comment was among them.

He was taller than average, hard and fit-looking, with very dark skin and eyes that were squinting and keen. Those eyes instantly singled out The Avenger, as any eyes would in any gathering.

“You are Richard Benson?” he said in good English.

“Yes.”

“I have heard much of you,” said the man. “That is why I came here. Your name is known in the Orient.”

“I have had a little business there,” said Benson, pale eyes like diamond drills on the dark face.

“More than just a little,” said the man, showing white teeth in a smile. “My family has had dealings all over the Orient for years. They have reason to remember the man who, among other things, opened up the Mosul oilfields.”

“Your family?”

The man straightened up, much as Carmella had done.

“The family of Haygar. Turkish branch, in my case. In fact, I am the last of that branch.”

Smitty started a little, as that once-great name was sounded a second time in here.

“I am Shan Haygar,” said the man. “I have no wealth, now. I have no friends in New York that I can trust implicitly. And I need your help. So I came to you.”

“Justice, Inc., has helped a few persons, now and then,” said Benson.

“That,” whispered Nellie to Smitty, “is what you’d call a miracle of understatement.”

“The affair in which I need help does not sound important, but to me, it is—very,” said Shan. “As I said, I have no money. I escaped Turkey only with my life and a few keepsakes relative to the power my family once enjoyed. Principal among these was a small gold medallion that has been stolen from me in the last few hours. I want to beg your help in getting it back. It has no real value, but it has great sentimental attachments.”

“Where have I heard that before?” whispered Nellie.

The Avenger’s basilisk eyes were still on the visitor’s face.

“You have an idea who stole the coin?” came his calm, vibrant voice.

Shan nodded, face dark with anger.

“An old man whom I befriended. A spidery old fellow. I am sure he took the medallion. I know where he lives. But I have hesitated to call the police because I do not want it known that I am in this country. Where once we were able to go anywhere on the strength of our name, now we are fugitives who hesitate to reveal our identities.”

The Avenger’s head, with its thick, black hair, nodded.

“I will help you. You wish to go to this man’s place and see if he has the medallion?”

“Yes,” said Shan eagerly.

Nellie Gray seldom remonstrated with the chief, no matter how worried she might be over the insane chances he took. But this time her worry overcame her discretion. She drew him aside.

“Chief,” she whispered frantically, “you aren’t going with him, are you?”

“Of course,” said The Avenger.

“But the man’s story sounds phony from start to finish! It’s probably nothing but a trap of some kind!”

“He mentions a medallion,” said Benson calmly. “So did Carmella Haygar. Now Carmella has been foolish enough to go out. She may be in great danger. This may be a lead to her whereabouts.”

“Take Smitty or somebody with you—”

“Better to go alone with him,” said Benson, whose motto seemed to be: always walk into a trap, because within it you might learn something.

Shan Haygar’s dark face expressed thanks and anxiety as the coupé bore him and The Avenger toward the East Side address he mentioned. Benson’s pale, deadly eyes raked level along the street as he swerved the powerful car an inch here or there to weave through traffic.

“This medallion,” he said finally. “Will you describe it, please?”

Shan nodded, dark eyes furtively sliding to Dick’s impressively calm face and away again.

“It is a gold coin about the size of your twenty-five-cent piece. On it are the letters H H, the numbers 29 32, and a sort of coat of arms of the Haygar family.”

“I see. And the meaning of the numbers and letters?”

“I really don’t know,” said Shan apologetically. “I suppose there was a meaning at one time, but it has been lost to memory now.”

They got to the address he had given.

It was a moderately good building near Sixteenth Street with about a hundred apartments in it. Shan Haygar traced names at the bells with his forefinger. He swore fluently in Turkish, seeming utterly outraged, as he stopped at one of the names.

It was Harlik Haygar.

“The swine!” he snarled. “Taking the family name! He is no more a Haygar than I am a Mahatma. He steals my keepsake and also my last name!”

The Avenger’s voice was as cold and even as an icy sea.

“Why would he do that?”

Shan shrugged. “I don’t know. Unless he thinks he can trade on the Haygar prestige by use of the name and the keepsake.”

Dick’s steely forefinger was pressing the bell.

“Are you just going up openly?” said Shan, looking surprised.

“Yes. Why not?”

“He will hardly turn over that medallion merely on demand!”

“We can try open methods first,” said Benson.

But it seemed they were not to be able to try them. For there was no answer to the bell’s ring.

“Good! He’s out,” said Shan. “We can go over his rooms, if you can get in.”

“I can get in,” said Benson.

His aides would have looked surprised at all this. It was not like The Avenger to enter such enterprises without more investigation and study. It was not at all like him to be so pliant to the requests of a man who was hardly more than a stranger wandering in off the streets.

The vestibule lock took about twenty seconds. Then they were in an automatic elevator, having seen no one in the small lobby.

The door of Harlik Haygar’s apartment was opened in about a minute and a half.

“So this is why the bell wasn’t answered,” said The Avenger, voice as glacial as his pale eyes.

Did Dick Benson have a psychic sixth sense, whispering to him facts that other people must first see before they knew about them? Some people thought so; and in this case it almost looked to be true.

For death was the reason why the bell had not been answered, and it seemed as if The Avenger must have sensed that in the vestibule and broken in to verify it.

On the floor not far from the door lay a man such as Shan Haygar had described: elderly, thin, spidery-looking. He had been shot in the side of the head and lay with weak-looking blue eyes wide and blood dabbling his thin gray hair.

Nothing in the place, from the orderly appearance of it, had been touched.

Shan’s face had fallen.

“We’re too late,” he mourned. “Someone has been here first. The medallion will be gone.”

“We will search and make sure,” said Benson. It was eerie to observe the expressionlessness of that calm face in the presence of murder. In places where other men would register horror or fear or hysterical anger, Benson continued to hold perfect control over his emotions.

The Avenger searched the three small rooms of the apartment.

There is a science to searching a place, as any cop can tell you, particularly when the article searched for is as small as a quarter. It was an eye-opening thing to watch the swift efficiency with which Dick went over the place. In fifteen minutes it was possible to say absolutely surely that the gold disk Shan wanted was not there.

“What do you think we should do now?” asked Benson, still with that curious pliancy to another man’s suggestion.

Shan bit his lips and looked frightened and uncertain.

“Er—nothing. This murder . . . Horrible! I’m going to drop the whole affair.”

“The police should be notified,” said Benson. “This is murder.”

Shan shook his head urgently.

“As I’ve said, I don’t dare reveal my identity. I have powerful enemies. It would mean my death. Surely we can just drop this?”

He laid his hand on Benson’s steel-cable arm.

“I wanted my keepsake back. I came to you for help, and you kindly granted it. But now we find it is too late. Heaven knows who has the gold disk, now. It is gone beyond recall. Accept my thanks—and forget the rest.”

“There is still a murdered man to report.”

Shan sighed.

“Very well, then . . .”

The two of them left, Shan in the rear. At the curb, Shan opened the right door of the coupé and got in. His hand fumbled in the side pocket of the door.

Benson went around to get in behind the wheel. Shan jerked open the door, when the car was between the two, and leaped out. Like a streak of dark light he was gone up the street.

“Stop!” Benson cried. He took a few steps after the running man and then halted.

That would have puzzled his aides, too. The man who could beat The Avenger in a footrace probably didn’t live. And yet he didn’t pursue. He stood a moment on the sidewalk, then got into the coupé and drove off.

Shan, however, did not go far. He was back again before the car had gone four blocks. Back and entering that building again.

When his hand had fumbled in the car’s pocket, it had emerged with a glove. He examined it, now, and was glad to see that it was a unique glove indeed. It was made of some rough fabric, very strong, with what seemed to be fine wire woven through the stuff.

He did not know that it was asbestos and that with it The Avenger could plunge his hand into the heart of the hottest fire to retrieve objects there. All he knew was that there probably wasn’t another glove in the city like it. Which was even more than he had dared hope for.

Shan went back into the building and up to the dead man’s apartment.

He did this easily because of a simple precaution he had taken on the way down. He had put part of a match folder in the apartment door and again in the vestibule door, to keep the locks from clicking completely closed when the doors were shut.

They opened now for him at a touch.

Shan took the glove and placed it near the dead man’s body, so that the bloody coat half hid it. Then he left the building a second time, speedily, quietly. And this time he didn’t bother to keep the locks from closing.

Shan had had a coldly logical thought a few hours ago.

He wanted a gold medallion that was in the possession of another. The old boy who owned it was a tough customer. Therefore, he would get the aid of an even tougher one. It ought to be a cinch to go to The Avenger—known as a person who gave help to those in need—misrepresent a few facts, and have him be the cat’s-paw who got the gold coin.

The Avenger was unsurpassed when it came to handling tough guys and was without parallel in searching premises. The old fellow calling himself Harlik Haygar would come through with the medallion, all right.

Well, he’d enlisted Benson’s powerful aid with almost ridiculous ease and then gone with him to find the old guy dead. Which ended that.

So then Shan Haygar had had another coldly logical thought.

The Avenger’s abilities as an investigator, were of no further use to him in a search for the medal. But Benson might want to go on in the business of the gold disk and get to be a dangerous nuisance. Or he might insist that Shan give himself up to the police for long and exhaustive questioning. Either was not to Shan’s liking. So it had occurred to him to put the lid on The Avenger at once!

If Benson could be linked definitely to murder, even his reputation would not save him from detention, if not actually from a murder trial. He would be nicely out of the way for quite a while.

The linking, Shan thought, had now been done. At least, it would be as soon as he took the final, easy step.

He entered a phone booth and called police headquarters.

“A man named Harlik Haygar has just been murdered in Apartment 4b—” he gave the address, talking in a disguised tone. “I have reason to believe he was murdered by Richard Benson, known to many as The Avenger. I say this because I saw Mr. Benson drive up in his coupé, saw the light in Harlik Haygar’s apartment go off after something that sounded like a gunshot, and then went up to find the man dead. Benson drove rapidly away in spite of the fact that I called after him.”

“Wait a minute!” came the voice of the police sergeant at the other end of the line. “Who is this? Anybody accusing a man like Benson—”

Shan hung up, with a thin smile on his lips.

CHAPTER VII

Jailed for Murder

Benson had hardly gotten down the ramp at Bleek Street and into the basement garage when Smitty ran up to him.

“Chief! I’ve been waiting for you. We just got a call that you were to be held for murder. The tip came from Sergeant Marcy at headquarters.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes were as expressionless as glacial ice, and with much the same sheen.

“Mark Marcy down for compensation,” he said quietly. “A friend with such implicit faith as Marcy seems to have in me is worth rewarding.”

“But what’s this goofy murder charge about?” insisted Smitty.

“The man Shan Haygar and I went to call on is dead,” said Benson. “Shot through the head.”

“So you’re accused of it! But that’s ridiculous. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, it does,” said Benson, colorless eyes glinting. “Just a minute. I saw Shan fumbling at the pocket of the car—”

His hand, not large but powerful as steel, dipped into the pocket. It came out with a glove. One glove.

“I see,” said The Avenger.

“Where’s the other glove?” demanded the giant anxiously.

“Probably,” said The Avenger calmly, “it is near the corpse of Harlik Haygar. I was a little puzzled by the actions of Shan, but it becomes clearer, now.”

The pale eyes regarded the glove.

“Shan wanted us to help him get a gold medallion that was not his—”

“How do you know that?”

“The gold disk Carmella has is lettered F H. Probably for Francisco Haygar, her father. Shan said the disk he wanted back had H H on it. He insisted that the letters had no meaning. But it seems they have. A very simple one. They’re the initials of the person who really owns the disk in question. H H would stand for Harlik Haygar—not Shan Haygar. So the man came here to get us to help him lay his hands on property not belonging to him. Then it developed that his victim was dead and the coin already taken when we got there.”

“So Shan tried to play you for a sucker,” snapped the giant. “But why try to frame you on top of it?”

“To keep me out of the rest of the play. He must have figured—which was correct—that I wouldn’t drop the matter there, but would try to follow it up. I couldn’t follow it very far in a jail cell.”

“Oh, well,” shrugged Smitty, “it won’t get far. Just a glove. The way you’re known at headquarters, that’s pretty unimportant—”

“There will be more than a glove to incriminate me,” said Benson. “Just what, I don’t know yet. In addition, the name of Haygar is still one to make news. When it comes out that a Harlik Haygar, ostensibly of that famous family, has been murdered, it will be on the front pages of all the papers. There will be heavy pressure on the police to arrest somebody.”

“It won’t be you,” said Smitty. “I’ll just take this glove and put it where no one will ever find it—”

“You will leave it in the coupé for the police to find when they come,” contradicted Benson.

“But they’ll pick you up!” protested the giant. “They might hold you for days!”

“I won’t wait to be picked up.” The Avenger’s pale eyes had lambent glints in them. “I’ll go down to headquarters myself.”

“For heaven’s sake—why?”

“Shan wants me in a jail cell out of the way. All right. When Benson is behind bars, and Shan is perfectly free to come and go as he pleases, he may do something very interesting.”

“You want Mac or me to trail him—”

“No! I’ll take care of that.”

It was beyond Smitty. He shook his big head helplessly when The Avenger went back out, in another car. That glove connection with murder wasn’t so good. Now if something else, even more incriminating, turned up to link Benson with the murder, even the chief might find himself in very hot water, indeed.

And he was going right to headquarters instead of lying low for a few days! Well, perhaps he had an ace in the hole somewhere that Smitty didn’t know about . . .

But it would seem that there was no ace in the hole.

About an hour later the commissioner looked up from his desk with a little grunt of surprise as a man with thick, coal-black hair and pale, dangerous eyes came in.

The man was escorted by a cop at each side.

“Well, Benson,” said the commissioner, after an awkward throat-clearing, “I see the boys got hold of you promptly.”

“He came in under his own steam,” confessed the cop on the prisoner’s left. Both were watching The Avenger closely.

“He did?” exclaimed the commissioner. Then he stared almost regretfully at Benson. “I’m almost sorry you did that, Benson, because the charge against you is pretty thick. You know what it is, of course?”

Dick nodded.

“Yes, I know. Murder! But naturally it is a charge that can’t be made to stick. That’s why I came to see you and to straighten it out—”

“I’m afraid it can be made to stick,” sighed the commissioner. “If only you hadn’t been a known enemy of Harlik Haygar, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Known enemy?”

“Yes! The dead man’s cousin, Shan Haygar, has told us that. He told, before reporters, how you had threatened that man. And, of course, many people know by now that your life is a violent one, and that it’s quite in the cards that you should . . . er . . . liquidate a man if he gets in your way.”

“The Avenger never takes life,” was the quiet answer. “You know that.”

“I don’t know anything of the kind,” said the commissioner. “I know that you’ve said you never take life. But I don’t know that it’s true; nor do I know that you wouldn’t, in some personal emergency, even if it had been true so far.”

There was silence for a moment, colorless eyes staring deep into determined brown ones.

“Do you want to tell us your side of it, Benson?”

The head crowned by the thick, black hair shook a calm negative.

“Perhaps I’d better say nothing till I’ve talked to one of my lawyers.”

“Maybe you’re wise,” grunted the commissioner. “In the meantime I’m sorry, but—” He nodded to the two cops. “Lock him up!”

The two went off with the pale-eyed man, being very wary about it because they knew the almost legendary prowess of The Avenger.

They had scarcely gotten through the ponderous wall of bars off the jail anteroom on their way to a cell when the reporters were swarming in.

Hot news, here! Haygar was a great man. So was Benson. And Benson was being held for the murder of a Haygar!

“They can’t hold a guy like Benson long,” said one of the reporters confidently. “Hell, it’d be like holding the governor of the state. Only, if anything, Benson has more pull. And he has all the money in the world.”

They buzzed around.

“Have you any statement, Mr. Benson?”

“Was that really your glove they found next to the dead man?”

“Did you know they are to hold you without bail?”

“Give us a few words, Mr. Benson—”

The pale, infallible eyes stared calmly through the bars at the reporters. They scarcely blinked when the flashlights went off. There were photographers there, too.

A commotion in back of them made all turn. Two men were coming through. One was the commissioner; the other was a dark man who seemed to have come to civilization straight from desert spaces. He was Shan Haygar.

“Yes, that is the man my cousin, Harlik Haygar, feared,” Shan said, nodding to the commissioner, after a long stare at the virile black hair and pale eyes—a stare in which his own eyes rested on the accused man absolutely devoid of recognition.

“You say there were threats?” said the commissioner, scowling. Plainly, he didn’t like this at all; but equally plainly, it was beyond his power to do other than hold The Avenger.

“Yes, there were threats,” said Shan. “I can swear to that, with witnesses, if necessary. I can also swear that this man was the last to see Cousin Harlik alive, and there was the sound of a gunshot from the apartment while Benson was with him!”

The dubious reporter shook his head, wide-eyed.

“Well!” he breathed to the photographer next to him. “I guess they can hold even Benson on that!”

The photographer nodded and took one more exposure. Then he turned and walked toward the exit, head down, fooling with his camera as he went.

The other photographers and reporters crowded past ahead of him at the street door. They galloped for their home offices to amplify the news already phoned in. Richard Henry Benson, famous in almost every field of human endeavor, held for murder of one of the internationally known Haygar family.

Quite a while later, Shan Haygar came out.

The man with the keen, squinted eyes was highly satisfied with himself.

He had perhaps been a bit reckless in attempting to enlist the aid of a man like Benson in the effort to get that gold medallion from the old boy who looked like a spider—an effort that had turned out so disappointingly. If so, the recklessness was more than made up for now.

By giving up just a few minutes of his time to hammer home the murder frame started by the glove, he had put The Avenger on ice for an indefinite number of days. Certainly for a time amply long enough for him to do what he pleased in the affair of the golden disks.

He would be untroubled now by any apprehensions of interference by Benson. The police? He scarcely thought twice about them.

He walked in a leisurely fashion toward a cheap rented car, parked half a block away.

The photographer who had been fooling with his camera, head down, as he made his exit, threw flashlight kit and camera into a trash box and followed.

Camera and kit were dummies, stage props.

The eyes of this man, as his head went up a little, were seen to be pale, deadly. His hair was thick and black.

The Avenger had thousands of friends in all walks of life. Among them were many actor friends.

Now, one of those friends, with thin colorless eye-cups over his own blue eyes, and with a heavy black wig pulled over his own brown hair, and with a face made up with putty and grease paint, was in a jail cell being addressed as Richard Benson.

In the meantime Benson, himself, trailed Shan Haygar, having by this somewhat elaborate process thrown the man completely off his guard.

CHAPTER VIII

Double Kidnap

Shan didn’t seem to be in any hurry. In fact, he gave the impression of a man killing time. He drove slowly south and east till he came to a hotel that was little more than a flophouse. He went in, and Benson waited in the cab he had picked up a little way from police headquarters.

There wasn’t any rear entrance to the hotel; so The Avenger passed several hours quite calmly, sure of his man. And eventually, with dawn not far away, Shan came out again.

He had a suitcase with him, now; he was evidently leaving the city. He got into the car again and resumed his progress south and east. The river eventually stopped him.

There, Shan went gingerly out almost to the end of a dock. Two hundred yards out in the river a boat swung with riding lights all too dim in the darkness. From their position, the boat was a fairly large one, probably of the cruiser type.

Leaning over the side of the dock, Shan called a name softly. In a moment a head showed over the massive wooden stringers.

Shan talked for a moment, then handed down the suitcase and bent to climb down after it. There was a ladder there, it seemed.

Meanwhile, at right and left, more heads showed. There were two at the right and three at the left. These were furtive, and their owners crawled over the stringers like snakes. They leaped toward Shan!

The fight that followed was as fierce as it was short and relatively silent.

Shan had been crouching down when they jumped him. But far from allowing that to be a handicap, he made it a help. He shot upward with all the power of his bent thighs, and his head came up under a man’s jaw.

The man staggered back six steps and sat down. Then he went farther and lay down. And stayed there. He was knocked so cold it would be some time before he came to.

One of the others struck at Shan with a thing so short and unobtrusive that it couldn’t be seen in his fist. A sap. Another of the remaining four got his hands around Shan’s throat in a good, homey grip.

Shan ducked the blackjack and brought his knee into the strangler’s stomach.

The man’s breath whooshed out, and he doubled up and hugged himself with agonized arms while he fought for breath. Shan polished him off with a blow to the jaw.

Three against one now. And Shan was fighting like a wildcat—fighting the way a man fights when he sees death as the price of defeat.

One of the three got Shan down by lunging low against his legs. Shan brought his hand down on the back of the man’s neck in a rabbit punch, dazing him for a moment. The boot of another of the three cracked against Shan’s ear.

Shan was nearly stopped by that one, but he had sense enough left to grab the ankle over the heavy shoe and pull. There was a splash. The kicker was now kicking in the water.

Two to one. Admire Shan or not, you had to admit that he was putting up a vicious fight. But it was just about over.

The man to whom he had handed the suitcase came back up over the edge of the dock. It was complete treachery, for Shan had obviously trusted the fellow.

He came back over the stringer while Shan was looking the other way. There was a club in his hand. He walked up to Shan and socked him in the back of the head.

Then he lowered him into the boat.

It was almost as big as a lifeboat, instead of being a standard small dinghy. Besides Shan, the other five men, one still as unconscious as if dead, were crowded in. Then the boat pulled for the cruiser swinging idly out in the river.

The cruiser weighed anchor and split the pre-dawn darkness on its way to the open sea.

It was a boat built more for solidity than swank. It made about fourteen knots, was broad of beam, and was about sixty feet over all. There was a big cabin, a small deck forward, and a larger deck aft. Four men joined the occupants of the small boat on this afterdeck.

All ten of the men could, now, in the dimness of the running lights, be seen to be Oriental in type. There were several Arabs, several with Mongol cheekbones and eye-pits, and the rest with a Eurasian blend of many races.

But there was one thing all had in common. They looked as though they’d murder a blind cripple for a ten-cent piece.

From the cabin came still another man. This one was a cut above the crew. He was tall, fairly well-dressed, with an air of authority. He went to where Shan lay, beside the fellow whose jaw he had butted with his head.

He stood looking down for several moments, then looked at the nearest crew member.

“Bind him,” he said in Arabic. “Make sure the dog can not slip free.”

The man nodded. The tall leader turned.

And Shan leaped.

The man who had lied The Avenger into a murderer’s cell may have still been unconscious when he was carried aboard. He had been faking unconsciousness for some time while he lay there. He lit into the leader of this band with almost the ferocity and freshness he had displayed on the dock.

He seemed to know this man and to hate him as one man seldom hates another.

There was an insanity of rage in his dark eyes as he brought down a knife that the crew had carelessly neglected to take from his limp body. His mouth writhed like a thin red serpent in his distorted face.

The other man seemed almost as hate-filled. He ducked forward; the blade whistled down over his shoulder, and he caught Shan’s right arm. He brought the arm down hard over his upflung knee, as a person attempts to break a tough stick of wood.

Shan’s arm would have been broken like a stick, if he had not managed to jerk it half loose from the other’s grip before the vicious move could be completed.

Meanwhile, with the eyes of all busy with the fiercely fighting two, a hand came slowly up over the rail at the bow. It was not a large hand, but it gave an impression of being made of pale steel. Just the hand would have identified the owner to a great many people who had been unfortunate enough to feel its strength.

The Avenger had slid into the water and started swimming silently out to the cruiser the moment Shan handed his suitcase down, back at the dock.

The riding lights of the boat were the only ones around.

The cruiser was bound to be Shan’s destination; so Benson had decided to share with him his ride out to sea.

From the water he had stared back, with the pale eyes that could see so much better in darkness than those of most men, and he had caught glimpses of the fight. That was all right, too. There were few things that left The Avenger more indifferent than the murderous fighting of crooks among themselves. The more they killed each other off, the better he liked it. And regardless of the outcome, the survivors would almost certainly wind up in the cruiser.

Benson had reached slowly up and caught the flanges of the anchor at the bow, after the crew had raised it when the small boat was swung up. He had hung there while the cruiser made for the open sea, taking a good long time, so that his clothes would dry a bit and not betray him by dripping too much when finally he did come aboard.

Then the fight had broken out, and the sounds indicated a disturbance in which he should be able to get aboard without being observed.

Over the low rail his face could be seen, calm, crowded by the thick, black hair. His eyes were like narrowed chips of stainless steel. Then he was lying on the forward deck with the low front of the cabin hiding his lithe body.

On the afterdeck, the fight was, of course, once more going against Shan. He wanted to fight the leader alone, but naturally the gang wasn’t permitting that. And no man can face, bare-handed, odds of eleven to one.

Shan was bare-handed, now. A man with a broken nose and only half an ear had kicked the blade from Shan’s fingers when he overreached the leader and stabbed only empty air beyond the other’s shoulder.

The knife lay along the rail near the stern, glittering neglectedly as the men circled to get Shan without accidentally getting their chief first.

It was at this moment that the light rayed on.

The thing could not have been timed worse for The Avenger. He was crouched on the top of the cabin, making his way toward a boat swung between its davits. The boat had been covered with taut canvas, and he intended to get in it and lie hidden till the cruise, whatever its destination, was over.

But now this searchlight glared out, and squarely in its blazing white circle was Dick Benson.

He crouched there, frozen into immobility. And two of the men on the rear deck yelled. At the same time, still another dark-skinned, grinning murderer came from the cabin itself.

There had been a man at the wheel during all this. He had seen the figure rise over the bow, had watched through a darkened pane while Dick climbed to the cabin’s top, and then had switched on the searchlight. With the wheel hooked to keep the boat on its course, he joined the others.

Half the gang turned toward Benson. But then Benson wasn’t there any more.

One swift leap had taken him back where he came from, on the foredeck, where just his pale, deadly eyes showed over the cabin’s top. He took out Mike, the little silenced .22. And into his left hand slid Ike, the tiny gun’s companion in war.

Ike had been holstered below The Avenger’s left knee. It was a small throwing knife, blade-heavy, with a hollow tube for a handle. The point could have compared with the point of any needle, and you could shave with either razor edge. With it Benson could pin a fly to a wall twenty feet away.

The Avenger leveled Mike for a shot. And the leader’s voice cracked out.

“Wait! Let the man alone. It is only this one we fight.” The words ended in a yell, in some choice Arabic profanity, and then came the order: “Get this dog. But quietly.”

Blood streamed from a gash on the right side of the leader’s throat. In the distraction of Benson’s appearance, Shan had managed to get his knife from its resting place near the rail. He had made one last attempt on the leader’s life. The knife barely missed the big vein in the man’s throat when he frantically jerked aside from Shan’s rush.

It was literally a last attempt.

The men had fought to overpower Shan before. They waded in with knives and clubs. Shan kicked one in the jaw in a manner suggesting a broken neck, but then it was over. He fell with half a dozen blades in his body, and with his head clubbed almost out of human semblance!

The leader pressed a handkerchief to his bleeding neck and stepped over the dead man toward the cabin.

“Come aft,” he called in English to The Avenger. “You may keep your weapons. We have no quarrel with you—unless you were working for our enemy, here.”

Benson, not unnaturally, stayed where he was, cold eyes expressionless, features emotionless in the face of danger.

“You might as well come aft,” said the man, without apparent anger. “If you jump overboard, we can run you down or shoot you. If you put up a fight, eventually we can overpower you.”

The Avenger made no move to holster Mike and Ike, although the logic of what the man said was apparent. Benson had another weapon with him: small glass capsules of a powerful anesthetizing gas of MacMurdie’s devising. But the gas would be futile, used on the open deck of a boat at sea. The fumes would be blown away before the men were even made groggy by it.

“You may not have a quarrel with me,” came Dick’s voice, calm, even, icy. “But you would have an excellent reason for not wanting me to live. I have just seen your crew stab and club a man to death.”

“You have,” said the leader. “But you did not see a murder, as you are probably thinking you did.” He dabbed at his neck. “My men killed him before he could kill me. And they killed no honest man, but a criminal and an imposter.”

“Imposter?” repeated The Avenger, tonelessly.

“Yes. That man claimed to be Shan Haygar, of the Turkish Haygars. He was not. I am Shan Haygar!”

The other men were listening, some intently, showing that they understood English, some indifferently, indicating that it was an unknown tongue to them.

The Avenger holstered Mike and Ike.

If it occurred to him that these Haygars were about the hardest people to put a finger on that the world had ever seen, his eyes gave no sign of it. Haygar, Haygar, who’s a Haygar? It seemed as if dozens of people were running around calling themselves by that name, and then getting bumped off by other dozens insisting that they were genuine and the first ones frauds.

Benson went forward over the cabin’s top. It was quite true that, with a dozen men against him and no chance to use any of the weird devices he carried with him to fight crime, he was trapped. And even if he could have fought free, his main purpose of being aboard—to see where the boat was bound for—would be hopelessly frustrated.

While The Avenger was approaching, the leader was bent over the dead man with his hands flying over his stark form. He straightened up, and there was a glint as light touched a gold medallion in his dark hand.

He smiled at Benson.

“It looks pretty grisly, doesn’t it?” he said. “But believe me, justice has been done. And to show you how firmly I am convinced of that, I am now going to radio the harbor police.”

He stood aside, wordlessly taking it for granted that Dick would jump down beside him.

“Will you come into the cabin with me?”

Without waiting for an answer, he ducked and strode into the cabin. And Benson, not seeming to move swiftly, and yet covering space like flowing light, leaped featherlike to the deck and strode into the cabin.

It was the sort of thing he had waited for.

In that enclosed cabin with the man, he could use one of the glass capsules, if necessary, or capture him and hold him as hostage.

Benson stopped abruptly just inside the threshold. His icy eyes widened a little at the sight presenting itself.

Four men lay in there, bound and stacked like cord-wood. They glared at the man in front of Benson and strained wildly at their bonds.

Heavy arms encircled The Avenger from the rear, and the leader whirled and got him from the front.

For once, the man with the calm face and the thick shock of coal-black hair had been outmaneuvered. For a fraction of a second, all his attention had been riveted on the unexpected sight of the four bound men. And the leader of this crew of cutthroats had looked forward to that fraction of a second, counted on it, and stood ready to utilize it.

Benson’s arms strained swiftly apart, flinging the two clinging men off him as if they had been children. But it was too late.

A club in the hands of someone behind him caught him on top of the head, and another got him on the side.

He was bound hand and foot when his eyes opened. He was next to the rail; and the leader of this band, who insisted he was the genuine Shan Haygar, sat on that rail and stared down at him.

“Coming out of it, eh?” he said, in almost a conversational tone. “I didn’t think you would regain your senses quite so fast. You are going over the side with a hundred pounds of iron tied to your feet! Would you like to be hit on the head again? It might be easier for you.”

The Avenger’s voice was as calm as though he were seated in his own headquarters with nothing on earth to fear. His face, dreadfully calm even at a time like this, made several of the cutthroat band back away a step, as if they feared the man even when he was securely bound.

“I’ll face it conscious,” he said.

The leader nodded. “But of course your courage is well known,” he shrugged. Then: “Oh, yes, I recognized you at once! I recognized you and realized that, while we were sure to overpower you in the end, a man like you might kill many of my men first. And I need them all. So I tried a little trickery.”

A brawny fellow was lugging a section of iron rail toward them. Benson said evenly, “So the man you killed engaged this boat first. And you took charge, bound his crew, and laid in wait for him.”

“That’s right,” nodded the leader, swinging his long legs a little as he sat on the rail. The boat was making her full fourteen knots, but the water was calm.

“There seems to have been a great deal of murder over a few small gold coins,” observed Benson. The man was tying the iron rail to his bound ankles.

“It would seem so,” nodded the leader. “But then, we Haygars attach a great deal of sentiment to our small possessions. We have so few left, you know.”

“Does the gold medallion you took from the dead man have the letters S H, or H H, on it?” asked Benson.

The man frowned a little and got off the rail.

“You know too much, my friend. It is indeed well that you try a sea cure for knowledge. One that will last a long time—till that rope rots and lets your unidentifiable body float at last to the surface. Over with him!”

Even bound, The Avenger made trouble for four of them. But finally his body was poised on the rail and pushed over.

The splash was deadened by the throb of the propeller and the rush of water past the hull. He slid along like a surfboard with the momentum for a second, then sank like a stone.

“The other, too, but don’t bother with iron,” said the new Shan Haygar.

The dead man was given to the sea. The boat went on, with the first pink of the new day just dappling the water’s placidity.

CHAPTER IX

The House in the Sea

The island was nearly six miles off the Maine coast. It was fairly large—about twenty-five acres in extent. It was wooded, with a large cleared space in the center which rose a few feet above the rest of the terrain.

In the cleared space was a big house. And from a little distance, the house seemed to be rising from the sea itself, instead of having its foundations on dry land.

The place looked a little like an old-world castle.

It was of dark-red brick. There was a central turret, and then a slightly smaller turret at each end. They were flat-topped and looked like crenellated watch towers. There were few windows, and these were small and had heavy bars over them. Under the central turret was a big, blank door of ponderous oak.

The house must have been elaborately kept up at one time; the layout of the grounds suggested great wealth.

But now the grounds were overgrown with weeds and young brush, and the building itself was in bad repair.

It was late night, but the moon was bright and bathed clearly the stained, badly kept old building. Stretches of unhealthy ivy made splotches on the walls.

Into the moonlight, at intervals, from the wooded sections around the once-lovely formal gardens came animals that at first appeared to be calves or ponies—they seemed far too big to be dogs. However, that was what they were: the most ferocious mastiffs, trained in killing, that the present owner of the island could lay hands on.

These four-legged, fanged pets of the devil aided the six miles of open sea in keeping intruders off the place.

Perhaps the man steadily forging through the water in a slow, tireless crawl stroke from the mainland did not know of the existence of the dogs. At any rate, he kept coming on, with singularly little in the way of equipment to protect him from a dozen of the brutes if they ever winded him.

At the moment, whether or not he knew of the dogs, they did not know of him. Nor did the two men in the grim, eerie-looking house.

These two men were in the unkempt vastness of what had been a drawing room. They were the master of the island and his one servant.

The master was a huge man, over six feet and weighing well over three hundred pounds. He had small, rhinoceros eyes, a hide that looked as if borrowed from the same animal, and a small head half buried in his ponderous neck.

The servant was a wisp of a man, harassed-looking, meek, the type of human rabbit who would jump if a small boy looked angrily at him.

“Our visitors will be coming along sometime in the next twenty-four hours,” growled the master.

“Yes, Master Goram,” said the wisp of a servant. He had a high-arched nose, a long, narrow jaw speaking of feebleness of will, and a skin that was too white and too thin. He looked like a cartoon of an aristocrat gone to seed.

“Fix some of the bedrooms so they can at least be camped in,” grumbled the huge man. “Damn it! This house will fall down around our ears soon, if it keeps on going to pieces. But then, it’s only sharing the fate of all the other possessions of the Haygars.”

He picked up a cracking leather case with the initials G H on it and stared at it moodily. The G H stood for Goram Haygar, only living member of the American clan of Haygar.

Goram Haygar was the son of Wendell Haygar. Wendell, of the American branch, had, at one time perhaps, been the strongest and wealthiest of all the strong and wealthy clan. But that was long before this house had been built.

The house had been erected on the island when the family fortunes had almost sunk out of sight. Old Wendell must have designed it as a retreat in which to end his days in comfort, if not in luxury. But even the comfort had disappeared before his death, a few years ago.

In country after country, the Haygars had gotten into desperate circumstances because of things beyond their control. War and revolution had taken their estates.

To one after another old Wendell had poured out financial help, draining his own resources, vast as they were. Lower and lower had sunk his own reserve.

Then he had bought this island and built this home, a sort of castle to guard his old age. But hardly had it been built when he was forced to let servants go, one after another, and was forced to watch the building, still quite new, fall into disrepair because there wasn’t money to keep things up.

At the end, he had been absolutely alone, no servants at all, when death took him. Then the estranged son had come back. The huge man had come to the island announcing that he, Goram Haygar, would take over. And one old servant had come back—the wisp of a man with Goram, now—to help.

The servant didn’t look as though he got much fun out of working for the human elephant who stared at a cracked leather case and grumbled about the way things were going to pieces.

“Are all the dogs unchained?” asked the big man. His little eyes seemed never to blink, but to remain glassily open at all times.

“Yes, sir,” said the servant.

“The doors are all bolted?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. There is always the chance that someone other than the visitors we are expecting may come to see us. And in that case . . .”

The huge man chuckled, and it was not a humorous sound. In fact, the wisp of a servant shivered a bit.

The big fellow caught it.

“You’re a timid soul, Morgan,” he grinned. “I sometimes wonder why you work out here for me. Certainly, the pay is low.”

The servant shrugged deferentially.

“It is not too easy to get other places, sir. And this place, decayed as it now is, represents a lot to me. I have known the Haygar family since babyhood. Where they are, there is my home—all the home I can ever expect.”

“I sometimes wonder just how much of that is truth,” said the huge man phlegmatically. “You certainly didn’t remember me when I came home, Morgan.”

“You left home when you were a child, Master Goram, to live with your aunt in Hungary. The man is often so different from the child as to be quite unrecognizable—”

Morgan stopped. Both men lifted their heads suddenly. Then they stared at each other, the servant pallid, the master grim-faced.

“Sounds as if the dogs had found something, Morgan.”

The man swimming from mainland to island did not know of the dogs. That was apparent the moment he set foot on the shore. If he had known of them, he would have climbed a tree at once, or gone along a small stream flowing from a spring on the west slope to the sea.

At least he would have taken some precaution about his trail. And he took none.

He pulled from the water and lay in darkness on the handiest flat rock while he rested. The best of swimmers feel a six-mile drag.

After a moment he got up and dressed, taking clothes from a roll in a waterproof sheet that he had carried tied to his neck. Then he started toward the house.

He was a solidly built fellow, and the clothes he had put on were quite good. But there was a practiced furtiveness in his movements that hinted that he might not be unknown to the police.

He had gone a hundred yards toward the clearing in which the sinister-looking house squatted when there was a sound from the spot where he had come out of the water.

The howl of a big dog.

The man’s face whitened. He drew a gun, which had been in the waterproof roll along with the clothes. The gun had a silencer on it. While he had had no chance to case the island and didn’t know of the mastiffs, he had come quite prepared to meet a dog. Even two dogs.

There was a faint sound from behind. The man whirled. A huge brute was just taking off at him, seeming to soar rather than leap. Slavering fangs showed as he drove without a sound for the intruder’s throat!

The man gasped in fear and fired. The dog veered as the slug hit his massive shoulder, but kept coming on. The man fired again, and again whirled as behind him came the howl of the dog that had caught his scent on the flat rock.

Able to deal with a dog, or even two dogs. But the man hadn’t dreamed of the mad pack of brutes on this island.

Two more dogs closed suddenly in on him from the right, and there was an approaching howl from the left.

The man shot the one following him from the sea, then screamed as the two from the right got him and dragged him down. He had a chance to snap one more shot, which missed, and then paralyzing jaws closed on his gun wrist!

The screams that split the silent air were hardly human. They seemed as alien to human lips as the roaring snarls of the great dogs as they jammed together in a knot over a thing that finally was silent and finally became a welter of bone and flesh and shreds of cloth which the mastiffs were still worrying when the huge man and the wisp of a servant got there from the building.

“I don’t think we . . . we will ever know . . . who that was,” chattered the servant, pale as death, trembling all over, as he stared at the welter.

The big fellow nodded. He had a thick whip hooked over his heavy wrist by a thong. He cracked this once or twice, and the dogs, recognizing the vicious crack of it as well as the scent of the man, slunk back.

“See where he came ashore, Morgan. There may be a boat.”

The servant went toward the sea on spindly, tremulous legs. Soon he was back with the waterproof sheet in his hand.

“He must have swum out,” he said. “There is no boat, and there is this cloth in which his clothes were kept dry. That makes three that have swum out to only two who came in boats.”

The big man stared at the flattened heap that had been a human being. His cold little eyes did not blink.

“So many men loving the beauties of island scenery by night,” he chuckled, “that they will even face a six-mile swim to enjoy it. Put what’s left of the fellow in this nice waterproof sheet, Morgan.”

The wispy servant looked as if actually about to defy his master at that dreadful order. But after staring at the fat, hard face, and seeing the bullet head sink down a bit farther into the ponderous neck as rebellion was sensed, he didn’t.

He edged the mess into the waterproof fabric, then tottered aside a few yards, and was sick. The big man chuckled. He picked up a dead dog by the hind legs and started toward the house.

“Bring our visitor,” he called back over his shoulder. “We’ll put him in the usual place.”

The servant could barely drag the body, but he managed it. He followed his master around the house to a stone enclosure in the rear. From this came grunting noises. It was, apparently, “the usual place” referred to as the destination of unwanted visitors.

The big man opened the stout oak door of the enclosure, threw the bundled waterproof cloth in, and quickly closed the door again. That was so the things in the enclosure couldn’t get out. They might raise hell if they did, killing even the great dogs.

They were pigs, giants of their kind, three years old and more. But they were not as fat as swine usually are. They were kept a little starved, for just such emergencies as this. Just pigs. But any farmer would rather face a mad bull than a dozen huge hogs in savage semi-starvation.

“You can take care of what is left later,” said the master of this house of terror.

“Yes, sir,” whispered Morgan, licking pale lips. In a little while he would have to fish over the enclosure wall for a few bones and then bury them.

The two went into the house.

“Anything else, M-Master Goram?” asked the servant.

The grim fat man shook his head.

“No! Good night.”

Morgan went to his room, to wait till he should go back out to the enclosure. But his master did not go upstairs.

He waddled downstairs to the moldering basement of the house, instead.

The cellar of this deathly place was almost as elaborate as the upstairs. There were wine cellars with vaulted roofs, with only a few bottles in them, now. There were crypts behind heavy metal doors, in which valuables had once been stored, but which now were empty.

The place was almost like a catacomb. As the fat man waddled, eyes unblinking, with a slow movement like that of a tank, his footsteps rang emptily from vault to vault of the dank and cobwebbed labyrinth.

Yes, like a catacomb, a place of death. So much like it, in fact, that it was only with a sense of horror, and with scarcely any surprise at all, that an observer would have followed the fat man to—an occupied coffin!

It was on ebony trestles in the farthest crypt from the stairs. It was quite an elaborate thing, of polished grayish metal with bronze, or gold, handles. At each end burned a taper nearly six feet tall and six inches through—the kind designed to burn uninterrupted for many months.

In this low but steady light could be seen, through the glass lid, the occupant of the thing.

It was an elderly man, small, delicate, with a skin even more wax-white than dead skin usually is. The eyes were closed and sunken deep; but otherwise, so perfect a preserving job had been done that the body looked more like that of a sleeping man than a dead one.

The heavy owner of the house waddled deliberately to the side of the coffin and stood staring down.

“Hello, father,” he said.

There was a faint, far echo: “. . . lo f . . .”

It was almost as if the stony lips in the casket, four years dead, had really replied. And with callous humor the grim fat man played up to the fantasy.

“I trust you are well this evening?”

The far echo whispered, “. . . well . . . eve . . .”

“That’s fine. Did you know we had another visitor?” The elephantine humorist waited an instant as if the corpse had spoken. Then he went on: “Well, we did. A fellow managed the swim from the mainland again. I guess you weren’t as smart as you thought, when you bought this island. It would have been better to get one twenty or thirty miles out, instead of six, in spite of the difficulty of getting monthly supplies.”

He paused again, quite as if carrying on a conversation with the corpse.

“I know,” he nodded gravely. “You thought you were acting for the best. But you weren’t. If you had been, you’d have left something better than those damned medallions. A fine heritage they are.”

He hesitated, then shrugged.

“Oh, you think they are a good heritage! You would, revered father. But then, you quite evidently had a screw loose. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have insisted on being put here in the vault in an open coffin instead of being decently cremated or buried. Did you think you’d come to life again, with about six quarts of embalming fluid in you?”

The gross figure laughed, then turned and waddled back toward the stairs, unblinking, phlegmatic, moving like a tank rather than a human being. He left behind him the unburied corpse of Wendell Haygar, once the greatest of them all, builder of this house, father of what, it would seem, was a most irreverent son.

CHAPTER X

Answer in Arabic

The second Shan Haygar, who had had the first clubbed and stabbed to death under The Avenger’s cold, pale eyes, was not at all a fool. Before binding Benson, he had had a man search him.

The man, gingerly going over the average-sized body that had proved so amazingly strong, had come across Mike and Ike.

The two little weapons, so deadly in Benson’s slim, steely hands, did not look like much by themselves.

“Nothing but a funny little gun,” said the searcher, sliding Mike back into the slim leg holster, “and a small knife with a peculiar handle.” He slid Ike back, too. “Want me to—”

“Leave them in place,” said the tall leader indifferently. “We might as well throw them overboard on him as by themselves.”

For, after all, what could a man with his hands bound behind his back do with any amount of queer small weapons?

Probably no other man could have done much. But the moment Dick hit the water and was dragged under, he bent his strong body backward like a spring.

He could touch the back of his head with the soles of his feet, like a contortionist. But he didn’t bend that far. He arched his spine till his bound hands could touch Ike, below his left knee.

All this time he was being dragged swiftly down by the section of iron rail. There was already a drumming at his ears and a tight feeling like a band around his head.

Thirty-five or forty feet, he judged it, from an adventurous past in which, for a time, he had been a pearl diver. He sawed at the tough rope from ankles to iron.

At sixty feet, there was a sensation of colored lights bursting behind his eyeballs, and his body ached. Even he could not take much more . . .

The rope parted, the iron went on down, and Benson began slowly to rise. He was not yet in distress for oxygen; he could hold his breath a little over three minutes, if it were imperative.

He did not try to accelerate his rise to the top, just went up at the slow pace, natural to a sunken body with air in it. And meanwhile he worked at the rope around his wrists.

He held life literally by a hair in his fingers in the shape of the little throwing knife. If he ever dropped Ike from his awkward clasp, it was the end!

He didn’t try to saw through the cords. He maneuvered the knife till he got the point and then the edge up under the bonds and between his wrists. After that he just pressed, and was thankful for the hair-splitting edge on the fine steel blade.

He was beginning to want air, so he kicked his bound feet to speed his ascent a little before cutting the rope from his ankles. He sheathed Ike, saw dim pink as the surface was almost reached, then saw it blotted out, and felt his head strike something firm but yielding.

His pale eyes probed the water. It was a body. A blue and mottled face peered at him with sightless orbs, and he recognized the features of Shan Haygar—or at least the man who had called himself that before being killed by another who insisted that he was Shan Haygar.

The Avenger caught the body by the shoulders and eased it slowly up till his own head was hidden by its bulk. He could feel as well as hear the throb of the boat’s propeller and knew it was not too far off.

He waited there in the growing dawn till he couldn’t hear it any more, then looked over the sodden bulk of the dead man.

The boat was a speck far off. Benson swam toward shore, towing the dead man with him.

He came out at Governor’s Island. He searched the dead man. The other fellow had left little in his pockets. The only thing that seemed to have any significance was part of a newspaper page, with a faint mark at an ad.

He left the body to be found by the regular police. A night watchman at a nearby dock greeted him sympathetically when he said he had fallen off a boat and had to swim to shore. There was a little stove in the watchman’s shack. The Avenger dried his clothes, took a ferry back to Manhattan, and examined the bit of newspaper again.

It was from an Arabic paper. The ad marked was that of an enterprising boat concern that rented cruisers of all types for special trips.

He phoned it, as soon as the morning was advanced enough for places of business to begin opening.

“Yes,” said whoever answered the phone at the boat firm, “a fellow such as you describe rented a boat yesterday. A Turk, from his looks and name. We get a good many customers from our ads in foreign-language newspapers—”

“Did the man say where he wanted to go?” Benson interrupted the flow.

“Who did you say you were?” said the voice cautiously.

“Police calling,” said Benson. That was true enough. He held a special badge. Probably, with this murder charge hanging over him, it had been recalled. But there was no need to go into that here.

“I got an idea that the man was going to some island off the coast of Maine,” the voice replied. “He kept mentioning the Maine coast and looking at a chart we have. But he didn’t say which one. So that is only a guess.”

The Avenger thanked his informant and hung up, pale eyes glinting as they stared at the scrap of paper with the strange Arabic characters printed on it. An answer in Arabic? It might very well turn out to be.

That early morning light found the giant, Smitty, and the diminutive blond bombshell, Nellie Gray, trailing a taxi out through Newark toward, apparently, the airport.

Neither of them had had breakfast, and they were a bit snappish about it. Smitty usually ordered breakfast eggs by the dozen; and Nellie, for all her dainty smallness of size, could do a fine, thorough job on a rasher of bacon and a pile of toast.

They hadn’t had breakfast because, in turns, they had been watching an entrance way all night—one dozing beside the wheel while the other, ready for instant motion, glued his eyes on the door.

It was the door of a second-rate building in which resided a person named von Bolen Haygar.

The Avenger had come in direct contact with persons calling themselves Shan Haygar, Carmella Haygar, and Harlik Haygar. As the woods seemed to be so full of Haygars, he had decided to look around and see if there were still more.

Benson had a private espionage system that was unparalleled for efficiency. Clerks in rental agencies, men in stores, boys at newsstands, subway workers—a host of people, following occupations that exposed them to the public, did occasional searching for The Avenger. He had thrown this machine into gear and had come up with some additional facts.

There were more Haygars.

There was a Sharnoff Haygar, described by a delicatessen-store owner in lower Manhattan as a customer. There was a von Bolen Haygar.

Also, from an old Who’s Who came the information that there had been a Wendell Haygar; and following that lead had been unearthed the story of old Wendell’s death, the return of an estranged son, and his residence on a Maine island.

Benson had shelved that for the moment and set Nellie and Smitty on von Bolen’s trail and Mac and Josh on the trail of Sharnoff.

Von Bolen was now on his way somewhere with a suitcase in a taxicab, with Smitty and Nellie faithfully behind.

“You know,” said Smitty sourly, “this is one of the goofiest affairs yet. It didn’t look like much of anything when it started. A girl comes and says somebody is out to kill her and asks us to guard her for forty-eight hours. She has a gold metal for which, it seems, she was kidnapped, and there are a couple of other unexplained murders. Then zing! We’re in it up to our necks. And we still know nothing at all about it.”

“We know there are other medals besides the one Carmella had,” said Nellie. “I believe the chief is working on the theory that another one of the things was the motive for the murder of Milky Morley and Simon the Grind.”

Smitty thought hungrily of about eighteen fried eggs reposing on half a dozen pieces of ham. Large pieces.

“We wouldn’t be in this at all,” he grumbled, “if that nitwit Carmella hadn’t sneaked away from Bleek Street. Now the chief is afraid she’s in danger.”

“We’d be in it without Carmella,” contradicted Nellie. “The chief wants to know the secret of those golden disks. It’s something pretty big, and pretty dangerous, which is exactly the kind of thing he takes on.”

“I wonder what is the secret? What do the gold medallions mean?”

“They’re just keepsakes,” mimicked Nellie. “They mean nothing; have little value. We Haygars treasure them because they have sentimental value. Bah! If—”

The taxi ahead of them turned into Newark Airport, as they’d had an idea it would.

Smitty stopped their car at the gate, and he and Nellie walked in. Ahead of them, they could see von Bolen legging it for one of the small hangars at the east end of the field. Apparently he had made all arrangements in advance for a plane.

They hurried a little, and then it commenced—an apparent attempt in broad daylight, on a field swarming with attendants, at either murder or kidnapping.

Four men had been talking together, apparently on some business matter, next to the hangar toward which von Bolen had been hastening. They turned suddenly and raced up to the Prussian-looking gentleman.

“Smitty!” gasped Nellie.

But the giant was already moving—and moving fast. He weighed nearly three hundred, but he could move like a slim kid if he had to. He got to von Bolen almost as soon as the four surprise attackers.

He would have gotten there equally soon, but he had to duck back for an instant to avoid being run down by a car, and that cost him a couple of seconds.

There was a man with a tense face at the wheel of the car, and he stopped his vehicle a few feet away and waited with motor racing.

Meanwhile, the four had von Bolen down, and two were trying to boot him on the head while the other two tried to get into his pockets. Von Bolen was squirming to avoid being brained, and the squirming also made a search impossible.

That was when Smitty got there.

With a growl a little like that of an annoyed grizzly, the giant plucked two men away from von Bolen and slammed them together. They smashed into each other chest to chest! They smashed so hard that they seemed to merge into one another; both slumped to their knees, gasping, when the vast hands released them.

One of the others was swinging a gun like a club at the huge fellow’s head. One of the blows landed slantingly, and Smitty got mad!

Paying no attention to the banging gun, he caught the man’s arm, swooped down for his left ankle, then straightened up. The fellow hung yelling for a instant. Then the huge shoulders heaved, and the man landed over twenty feet away!

The driver was racing the car motor in a wordless plea for escape. Von Bolen had torn from the grip of the fourth man and was beating it toward the hangar. Attendants from all parts of the field were running up.

The two who had been smashed together crawled weakly into the car. The one Smitty had thrown got in, too, dragging a crooked leg behind him. The fourth fellow turned from the giant with a scream; then the car door slammed, and the car was in motion.

It slammed through the airport gate and on down the wide road while Smitty ran after von Bolen with Nellie Gray close behind.

About ten airport attendants got in between.

“Out of the way!” roared Smitty, charging.

Four fell, but the other six got him, and he was handicapped by the fact that he didn’t want to hurt these guys.

Three clung to each leg, which slowed him a little, and then three more got to him and climbed his vast frame. Finally a small army of attendants managed to get him off his feet and swarm over him like ants over a caterpillar.

A plane came from the hangar at a fast clip and took off. Von Bolen was in it!

Smitty stopped fighting. The attendants warily let him up.

“And this,” said Nellie, when her dainty voice could be heard, “is the way we get thanked for saving the life of a stranger.”

“Huh?” said one of the attendants suspiciously.

“Four men tried to kill that man who just left in the plane,” said Nellie, her blond loveliness playing havoc with the attendant’s sense of justice. “We happened to see the attempt and drove the men off. Then you come and pile on my friend.”

“Look here—who was fighting who?” snapped another of the men.

“I just told you.”

“But if you saved the guy’s life, why did he buzz off without thanking you?”

“I don’t know,” said Nellie. “He’s a stranger to us.”

“If you didn’t know him, why did you—”

“We were just doing our good deed for the day,” said Nellie sweetly.

The men looked rather foolishly at each other. There was no one around to complain against the giant they gingerly held. There seemed to be no charge against him save that of disturbing the peace—a charge which apparently was never going to be pressed by anybody. And the little blonde with the appealing blue eyes certainly did not look like a crook.

They took Smitty’s name, and Nellie’s, and then let them go. There seemed nothing else to do. And the two went out fast enough.

The morning papers had all details of the chief’s being held in the clink for murder. The names of Dick Benson’s aides would be publicized, too. It was no time to get picked up for anything—even for disturbing the peace.

They started back to Manhattan with long faces. They had watched all night, gone without breakfast, and taken on a gang of crooks—with no other result than to inadvertently help the man they’d been trailing get away from them.

“Everything’s wrong!” wailed Nellie. “And on top of that, the chief is behind bars for maybe weeks or . . .”

But they found out that was a mistake when they got to Bleek Street.

“Well, for—” gasped Smitty, as the man with the colorless deadly eyes walked toward them in the huge top-floor room.

Nearby, Josh and Mac grinned at their confusion.

Josh and Mac had reported on Sharnoff, after being equally surprised to find The Avenger here when the papers all gave his pitcure behind bars at headquarters.

Nellie told what had happened.

“The plane was heading north, last we saw it,” she concluded.

Dick’s black-cropped head nodded.

“North. And Josh and Mac say Sharnoff Haygar also took a plane north—an amphibian—after mentioning an island off the Maine coast. The men I tangled with were going north by boat. And there seems to be a Goram Haygar, of the same mysterious clan, living on an island off Maine. So our next step is pretty clear.”

Smitty nodded his somewhat battered head.

“Haygar’s Island,” he said. “It looks as though there is to be a kind of family reunion up there, and I, for one, want to be in on it!”

CHAPTER XI

Wholesale Disaster

The next night, after the moonlit one in which a pack of dogs had reduced a man to a quivering mass of meat, was cloudy and dark. There was wind, and the sea was choppy.

Nevertheless, ten miles south of Haygar’s island, at about ten o’clock at night, a plane began gliding down with the clear intention of landing on the treacherous cross waves.

The plane was very high. Its pilot cut the motor and began using it like an overgrown glider, settling on as long a slant as possible, soaring up now and then as an air current could be taken advantage of.

The pilot was The Avenger. In the cabin with him were Smitty, MacMurdie, and Josh.

The Avenger had been zooming around in the plane half the day, about fifty miles to the south where they would be over the horizon from the island.

They had been waiting for that boat from which Benson had been callously tossed with a hundred pounds of iron as an anchor.

The boat had finally showed, and the plane had gone out to sea till darkness came. Then The Avenger had calculated its speed, waited till it was about due to dock, and turned back.

Now, he was gliding silently down, without lights, from a great distance, to land near the island at about the same time.

“I wonder if the other Haygars are already here,” said Smitty, peering down and ahead through night glasses to get a glimpse of the boat’s running lights.

“Probably they are,” came the calm voice of the man with the flaring, colorless eyes. “They came by plane, as far as we know.”

“And Carmella Haygar?”

The Avenger shrugged a little.

“There is no telling whether she is here, too. She dropped completely out of sight after leaving Bleek Street.”

MacMurdie was frowning and peering out into the darkness with bleak blue eyes.

“What d’ye suppose is behind this gold-medallion stuff?” he ventured.

“Remembering the former greatness of the Haygar family,” said Benson, “it is pretty easy to guess the nature of the thing behind the golden disks.”

Mac subsided into puzzled silence. It might be easy for Benson to guess; it certainly wasn’t easy for Mac!

The Avenger’s infallible pale eyes kept the lights of the boat far on his left. He saw that the plane was going to land before the boat quite reached the island. But that was all right.

He coasted, with a soft air song over the wings, to a point beyond the island, whereas the boat was heading toward the center of it, the dock being there on the sea side.

The plane ripped softly over the tips of the waves, then settled. The shore of the island was quite close. The wind was steady from the southwest—a factor The Avenger had counted on.

“Stay with the plane, Josh,” Benson said. “Let it drift north and to sea until the island is at least five miles away. Then take off and stay around the mainland, nearby, till you get a radio message from us.”

Josh Newton’s dark face registered disappointment at leaving the place where a great deal of excitement was probably going to occur. But The Avenger’s orders were obeyed to the letter by his indomitable little band.

Smitty and Benson and Mac stepped on a wing, put most of their clothes in waterproof bags, and slid into the water. They started swimming toward the dark shore while the plane, already only an indistinguishable dark patch in the night, began drifting slowly north and east till it should get out of earshot.

The three waded silently ashore and put on their clothes. Dick began walking down toward the dock. Smitty’s vast hand suddenly clutched his arm.

There had been a faint sound behind them.

They turned, and the sound continued and became louder. It was a scratching noise, and then it was followed by a snarling to make a man’s hair stand up on the back of his neck.

“Dogs,” whispered Mac.

The owners of the snarls came into view.

“Not dogs,” Mac corrected himself in a low tone as he got a good look at the two mastiffs racing over a clear bit of beach at them. “Mon, they’re prehistorrric monsters!”

The Avenger whipped Mike out of the slim leg holster. But he didn’t think he’d have to use the little special gun, for Mac’s bony right hand was fishing in a large coat pocket.

The two dogs were near enough to leap. Mac made two quick, deft casts. With each flick of his hand something small and shining shot out, to burst on the ground just ahead of the two dogs.

The things were lead-foil capsules containing the deadliest gas Mac had ever contrived. Considering he had invented over fifty quick-dispersing gases of varying deadliness, this was saying a great deal.

One of the dogs stopped as suddenly as if he had run into a stone wall. His barrel-like head went up, neck straining back in silent agony as his wet muzzle picked up the gas and death filtered swiftly into the brain. Then the dog dropped.

The other came on. The gas capsule hadn’t burst in quite the right spot to get it.

Smitty came a step ahead of the other two. He waited, great arms spread, and the dog leaped.

Hands like steam dredges closed on the dog’s throat. Arms like walking beams held the writhing canine body out straight.

The mastiff’s clawing paws ripped up and down in an effort to disembowel this grim enemy, but they couldn’t quite reach. The muzzle quivered and strained, but no sound came out.

Smitty held the violent hundred-and-forty-pound bundle of four-legged death at arm’s length for over a minute, long past the point where the struggling had ceased. Then he dropped it.

“Poor devils,” said Mac, gazing at the two dogs.

But it had had to be done.

The four went on down the shoreline toward the dock.

The dock jutted from the shore at a point where there was only a five-yard strip between the water, at high tide, and a cliff that went up fifty feet or more like the side of a house. There was no chance to get near the dock without being seen, so The Avenger began climbing the cliff two hundred yards above the dock.

The boat was just drifting in when they reached the top, next to a zigzag flight of steps leading from the water to the top of the cliff. They could barely hear the boat bump and see men leap out and secure her.

The things that happened in the next few minutes had the unexpected and dreadful qualities of a nightmare.

The men got off the boat peacefully enough, about a dozen of them, all moving as silently as possible. They started along the short dock toward land. And then, abruptly, they found themselves confronted by an even larger band.

No place to hide in the open little flat strip between dock and cliff? Well, that was true enough. And yet there had been a place to conceal men. Quite a few men. That was, under the dock itself.

Before the men could get on land from the dock, another body of men emerged dripping from under the thing. They charged forward in silent savagery. The men from the boat, unable to get back and able to get to land only by overcoming these others, rushed forward to meet them.

They began to fight like two packs of wild animals, save that animals would have made more noise. These whirling figures were as silent as was possible. There were no gunshots, no yells, just the sound of bone or club on flesh and the gasps of men using all the strength they had.

Two burst from the group and raced to the stairs. Three others detached themselves and ran after them. The five, pursued and pursuers, began coming up.

“Back down, the way we came,” said Benson in a low, calm tone.

They went back to the spot, two hundred yards north, where they had climbed the cliff. They descended again.

“We’ll go closer, keeping out of sight by staying flat against the foot of the cliff.”

“You figuring on interfering?” whispered Smitty, quite willing to do so.

“No,” said The Avenger. “Let them fight. The more killers turn their attention inward and murder each other, the better for society as a whole. But I want to keep an eye on the one who claimed he was Shan. If he is downed, we’ll try to take him out of that mess. He has at least one of the gold disks—”

Benson’s calm voice stopped. His hand, sliding along the flat rock of the cliff, had touched a curious thing. A small, round hole in the stone. He bent to look closer in the darkness. Then, with his coat around the spot so that the light could be seen by no one but himself, he snapped on his small but powerful flash.

The tiny beam showed a hole about an inch and a half in diameter that was too regular to be natural. It had been drilled there.

The Avenger snapped off the flash and felt along the cliff. There were three more holes in the direction of the dock. Presumably they went on and on, a hole about every two yards.

He back-tracked, with Smitty and Mac watching him in the dimness and wondering what on earth had attracted his attention. They couldn’t see the holes.

The regular line of holes stopped with the fourth one toward the north.

“Come on,” said The Avenger. “Back!”

He led the way thirty yards past the last hole, and they crouched there.

“What—” began Mac uncertainly.

“Blasting holes in the cliff face,” said Benson. “They seem to run from that jutting boulder down there, clear south past the dock. No telling how far.”

“Blasting holes?” repeated Smitty, mystified.

“Yes. Someone has undermined the whole face of the cliff behind that dock. And recently—those holes look quite fresh. I don’t like the appearance of the thing, so we’ll stay behind the line of blasting holes for a little while.”

Mac nodded. “You think it might be some kind of trap.”

“Yes,” said The Avenger, pale eyes lambent in the darkness. “We know the owner of this island doesn’t encourage visitors. The dogs prove that.”

Mac and Smitty, through the darkness, could barely see the struggling knot of men about halfway up the stairway. But Benson’s hawk eyes could make out more detail.

The three pursuers had caught the first two, and there was a life-and-death struggle going on. The two Orientals from the boat were putting up a good show against the three.

While Benson peered, he saw one of the three arch backward suddenly, under a treacherous kick. The man grabbed for the rail and missed. His body went head over heels through thin air for thirty feet and slammed on the rock next to the water.

Then it was two and two, and the fight became even fiercer! But for a moment The Avenger’s pale gaze was drawn down to the dock again. Drawn by the entrance of a new element into the battle.

That was dogs!

Seven or eight of the same type of huge brute as the two they had been regretfully forced to dispose of suddenly came lunging along the water from the south. With slavering jaws, they flung themselves against the men, indiscriminately, leaping for the throats of attackers and attacked alike.

But this didn’t last long, either. For it was at about this time that the full nightmare quality of the fracas came clear.

Benson’s gaze had been jerked to the stairs again by a low but agonized cry. He just caught sight of another man flying over the stair rail to fall toward the water’s edge.

But this one hit something on the way down—hit it and broke it.

The Avenger thought he saw something like a thick black fishline break as the man’s body scraped along the cliff wall. He thought so, but even with his marvelous eyesight he could not be sure.

The next moment he knew what it was.

There was a low, but tremendous roar. Then the entire face of the cliff at that point seemed to surge sullenly up a foot, to subside again with another roar that was more long-drawn-out.

That black length had been a wire, broken by the man’s falling body.

The men at the foot of the cliff were no longer trying to keep silent. They were all yelling, with their screams almost lost in the racket of falling rock and earth and trees. And then the mass, thousands of tons, hit them!

Men, dogs, dock, and boat disappeared.

It was as if a blanket had been thrown over a heap of puppets on a miniature stage set, covering them carelessly for the ensuing night. Only these puppets were men, and the night would be the long one of death!

The sullen rumble of the last falling rocks died away. The quiet that followed seemed even more breathlessly still than before.

“Whew!” breathed Smitty, wiping cold sweat from his forehead.

Mac said nothing. He stared in awe at The Avenger. Once again this man had saved their lives by his marvelous powers of observation. Who but Benson would have seen those little holes, read their meaning, and acted with such methodical precaution? Those blasting holes might be freshly drilled and loaded. They might be part of a trap that might be sprung while the three were in a bad place for it. So The Avenger had led them back from the line of holes. And they were living, now, instead of sharing the fate of the others under the grinding mass of rock, trees, and earth.

“Hold on,” Mac whispered. “One of the skurlies got clear, after all. See? He must have been beyond the blasting line in the other direction from us.”

The Avenger’s colorless, telescopic eyes finally made out the figure even at that distance.

“Shan!” he said in a low tone. “He let his men fight for him while he kept safely out of range.”

“Say—two got away,” said Smitty, pointing.

The man he pointed to was not far ahead, at the edge of the rock slide. They went to him.

They found that two had not gotten away. On the body of this man was a rock weighing several hundred pounds. What it had done to that body in its fall was something Mac and the giant found their eyes shuddering away from. But there was still a spark of life in the fellow.

“Russian,” said The Avenger, bending over the suffering face.

“Yes,” the man whispered raggedly. “White . . . Russian . . . Sharnoff! Shar—”

That was all. He was dead.

“So Sharnoff Haygar came with his gang,” said The Avenger. “He, or his men, lay in wait for Shan. Sharnoff’s gang jumped Shan’s—and both perished. As so often happens in the chess game of life, the board is swept clear of pawns, but the leaders remain.”

“All but Harlik Haygar,” said Mac, reminding Benson of the murder charge over his head.

“All but Harlik,” nodded The Avenger. “Some one of the others murdered him. Some one of them almost certainly has Harlik’s gold medallion, as well as his own.”

Benson stared toward the spot where Shan had last been seen. The tall, dark leader of the Oriental cutthroats was no longer there. He had gone up the cliff, low down there, and was in the shadows of the woods.

“Now?” whispered Smitty of Benson.

“To the house we saw from the plane, in the center of the island,” said The Avenger. “And—I think—to the secret of the golden disks.”

CHAPTER XII

Dead Men’s Bones

With the silence of trained woodsmen, the three men slid among thickset trees toward the center of the island.

“I still don’t get that set-up back there at the dock,” Smitty said. “All the Haygars decided to meet on this island at the home of Goram Haygar. All right. Sharnoff came with a gang of white Russians, probably concealing them from Goram when he landed. Shan came with his own gang. The Russians jumped the Orientals, probably to get Shan’s golden disk, since everybody seems trying to get everybody else’s medallion. All right. But what precisely brought down that cliff?”

“The owner of the island, as proved by the dogs,” said The Avenger, “discouraged visitors. One of his little discouragements was the undermining of that cliff. Then the explosive was wired to the house, so that from there, at a touch, Goram Haygar could destroy a young army attempting to land and attack him. When the man fell from the stairs his body happened to break that wire, short-circuiting the current and setting off the explosive.”

Smitty nodded, and they went on now in silence, since they were nearing the black hulk of the house itself.

They kept a sharp lookout for more dogs. Had they known that there was now only one mastiff left alive on the island, and that that one was across from them on the mainland side, they would have been relieved.

Had they known, however, what the dog was doing at the moment, their relief would have died a sudden death. In fact, their hair would have stood straight up on their heads!

But they didn’t know; so they went on to the house.

Mac touched Benson’s shoulder and pointed to something. It was a thing they had seen a lot since leaving the shore.

There was a regular trench dug through the woods in front of them. It was about four feet deep and looked as if it had been dug for a pipeline. But there was no pipe in it.

There had been more of these trenches through the woods, criss-crossing each other in a regular pattern. Just empty ditches. They seemed senseless; yet that regularity of pattern hinted at a purpose.

They strode across this last ditch, went on a few steps and reached the clearing. They paused a moment to look over the house with the three turrets.

The place was not as big as it looked. The turrets gave it an appearance of hugeness; actually, there were probably not more than fifteen rooms in it.

There weren’t many windows. The windows were heavily barred, save for a small one high up in each turret. These were without bars and probably gave on little rooms that had no purpose at all; there was no excuse for the turrets in the first place, save for decorative reasons.

The Avenger nodded, and the three men ran lightly and soundlessly across the clearing to the house wall.

There was a basement window at the side, also barred.

Smitty went to work on it.

Sitting down, he braced his feet against the wall and took a bar in each vast hand. Then he heaved.

The necessity for making as little noise as possible hampered him. He couldn’t jerk; he had to exert a steady, even pressure. It was four or five minutes before outraged steel began to give.

There was a thin squeal, and the casement came loose. A little more pulling, and Smitty leaned back with the whole grating, somewhat out of shape, in his huge right hand.

He laid it down and slid downward into blackness. Mac and Dick followed him. As they did so, the wind suddenly increased its intensity from a moan to a low, but rising, howl.

A storm was coming up.

Mac’s flash lanced out briefly. It showed that they were in a small vault with an open door. Through this they could see still another door, partly closed.

“Try to find stairs leading up,” said The Avenger, voice low and vibrant.

They went through the two doorways and into a cell from which three doors opened. From the low, arched ceilings, moisture oozed, turning the atmosphere clammy. Festoons of cobwebs hung everywhere, beaded with moisture. Scurrying sounds on all sides indicated armies of rats, and several times the little red eyes of the loathsome rodents appeared in the distance like evil jewels.

“Mon, ’tis a ghastly place,” whispered Mac.

“Yeah, like a lot of burial crypts,” agreed Smitty, who had to bend his head low to keep it from scraping the cement ceiling.

They opened two of the three doors and saw only other vaults. The third showed a corridor. They started down that.

Dick’s arms swung wide and back, crowding Mac and Smitty backward again into the room they had just quitted. They shut the door save for an inch and peered through this crack, not yet knowing why The Avenger had retreated.

They heard steps down the stairs, then saw a light. The light was in the hands of a man so fat it appeared that he must weigh over three hundred. Beside him came a little wisp of a fellow who seemed to cringe with every step he took.

Obviously the big man was master and the little one servant. They went down the corridor.

“That fat boy must be Goram Haygar,” whispered Smitty.

Mac nodded, but did not speak. Another door had been opened far down the corridor, revealing light. The light was not intense, but it was steady.

They stayed there for perhaps five minutes before the man who looked like a rhinoceros and the servant who looked like a rabbit came back and went up the stairs. The Avenger started down the corridor, with Mac and Smitty following.

They came to the vault at the end, in which the two had gone for a moment. At the doorway, The Avenger stopped for an instant. His colorless, infallible eyes had picked out something in the wall of the corridor.

There was a line there, and when he looked harder he saw more like it. The line was about six inches across and went all along the corridor wall. Somebody had trenched out both walls and ceiling at regular intervals—just as trenches had been dug all through the woods. Then the trenches had been filled with cement again.

It took sharp eyes to see the difference in texture of the fresher cement. But once seen, it was easily distinguishable.

The three went on in, and Smitty gasped.

Two great tapers, burning on and on and filling the vault with an eerie, yellowish light. Between the tapers, an ebony trestle. On the trestle—a coffin with a glass lid revealing a corpse.

They went to the coffin and peered down. The dead man seemed rather asleep than dead. He was a dapper little elderly gentleman with a thin, high-arched nose and a thin line of gray hair on the upper lip forming a neat mustache.

Benson had studied a lot of old records on the American branch of the Haygar family and had seen pictures.

“Wendell Haygar, father of the present owner of this place,” he said. “There was an account of his eccentricity in choosing to be laid to rest in his own vault in an open coffin rather than buried.”

“Maybe he was afraid of being buried alive,” mused Smitty. “You know—lots of people fear falling into a cataleptic trance and then being buried for dead and coming to in a coffin six feet underground.”

“Looks almost as if he could get up and walk,” Mac whispered. “But he won’t—not with embalmer’s fluid in his veins.”

“What was that?” It was Smitty’s startled whisper.

“What was what?” said Mac peevishly. The giant had scared him into jumping a foot.

Smitty didn’t answer. He thought he had heard a low laugh in the corridor outside the vault.

The Avenger went toward the door, not seeming to strive for fast movement, but getting there in an incredibly short time. He knew he had heard a laugh. No question about it.

Mac and Smitty crowded after. And then, where there had been solid floor, there was only emptiness, and they were falling!

“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac.

He had bumped so hard it had knocked the breath half out of him. He got it back and stood up and looked around.

The Avenger was on his feet and raying his flashlight around.

Smitty was sitting on stone floor rubbing his head. Above them where a section of the floor had swung to plunge them down into a subcellar, was now, apparently, solid rock.

The three men abruptly stopped their methodical survey of their surroundings and their own injuries.

All round the floor, at the base of the walls, were ragged little holes. And these holes suddenly began spewing things out.

Rats!

Hundreds of rats, gaunt, starved-looking, black, brown, big, little. In a swarm they made for the men.

“Whoosh!” breathed Mac, beginning to do a sort of Highland fling as he tried to step on some and still avoid the others. He was joined by Benson and Smitty. The three seemed to be executing a weird waltz. But there was nothing funny about it. It was a dance of death!

Smitty yelled as a rat found his ankle in spite of the frantic stamping and jumping. The pale eyes of The Avenger were little chips of stainless steel. They’d be fleshless skeletons in a very short time if they couldn’t escape.

“Smitty, give me your hands. Mac, keep the rats off Smitty as much as possible.”

The Avenger leaped from the giant’s cupped hands to his vast shoulders. Standing there, he was about four feet under the ceiling. He crouched with bent legs while his pale eyes sought the crack around the stone block that showed which square of floor they’d fallen through.

Smitty moaned a little as tiny teeth ripped at his legs.

“Mac, you Scotch squarehead, keep those rats off!”

Mac, jumping and stamping and swinging at Smitty’s legs with his coat, let go a large, round oath.

“What d’ye think I’m tryin’ to do, ye ten-foot dimwit!”

The Avenger’s eyes had stopped at a certain spot in the line around the stone block. The thing swung on a pivot in the middle, evidently. That meant there had to be a steel bar at one side to catch the block and keep it from swinging when it was not supposed to. He thought he had located the significant bolt.

“I’m sorry, chief,” moaned Smitty, “but I’m not going to be able—ouch!—to take this much longer. Mac, gas the damned things.”

“Sure, and gas us, too,” snapped Mac. “Shut up and stand still.”

The Avenger whipped out a thin blade, toothed like a hacksaw but much thinner and finer than any regular saw ever was. He hadn’t used this on the basement window bars because the rasping noise might betray them. Now noise was meaningless; it was speed that counted. With all the phenomenal strength that lay in his average-sized, slim fingers, he leaned on that saw.

Three terrible minutes passed. Terrible for Smitty, anyway, and only to a slightly lesser extent for Mac.

“Chief—I can’t . . . much longer,” panted the giant. His ankles were something to keep from looking at.

“All right, Smitty.”

Benson pocketed the fine saw. He put his shoulders up hard against the block at the catch side.

“Heave!”

The Avenger’s body became a bent gray steel bar. His wrists went chalk-white with effort. And under him the huge Smitty pushed, too.

There was a loud crack as a partly sawed bolt gave. And then the stone block pivoted in the middle, with no catch to keep it secured any more.

Benson was up through the opening in one fast move. Smitty, hanging onto arms that were not overlarge but had all the strength of steel cables, followed.

“Hey!” yelled Mac, leaping up and down. “Me, too!”

Smitty’s hamlike hand came within reach, and with one arm the giant hauled him up so fast that he popped out of the hole in the floor like a jack-in-the-box.

They stood there, panting. Then they forgot the rat bites and the nasty death they had just escaped and all the rest of the deadly dangers of the night, forgot them in a sudden glimpse of something supernatural.

Ahead of them, down the corridor from the vault of death in which was the coffin of old Wendell Haygar, was a tenuous, dim white figure that seemed to waver like mist.

“ ’Tis a ghostie,” whispered Mac, appalled.

“It can’t be!” Smitty whispered back. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Try an’ disbelieve that one away!” Mac rapped out. “Look, it’s movin’—and it wants us to follow.”

“I’m following—the other way!” Smitty vowed, whirling.

But behind them was only the end wall of the crypt. They could only go ahead, toward the white thing.

The Avenger had already stepped across the hole in the floor and was going down the corridor. With their flesh crawling, Mac and Smitty followed in his wake.

The misty white thing had a face. They got glimpses of it as they caught up to it a little. It had a face, and a purpose. They found out the purpose in about twenty seconds.

The white figure stopped at a section of corridor wall. One misty arm went out toward a certain spot in the wall. So that was the purpose—they were to look here for something.

Then they really saw the face.

“Land o’ livin’!” jerked out Mac. “ ’Tis old Wendell Haygar, risen from his coffin!”

There was the delicate, small face, with a neat gray line of mustache. There were the sunken eyes, open now, and the dapper body.

Then there was nothing. The white shape disappeared utterly.

“Smitty, after him,” snapped The Avenger.

The giant raced on down the corridor, flash boring a thin white line into darkness. But only darkness. The white figure had vanished like mist, though it would seem there was no place to vanish to.

With the giant’s footsteps hastening down the corridor, Benson turned to the spot in the wall indicated by the white thing. He saw one of the many trenches gouged from the concrete and later replaced by fresh cement.

But this spot, for six feet, was larger, almost two feet wide instead of six inches. And it was cracked a little as if the base for the cement had settled behind the stuff.

The Avenger took out Mike, and four slugs whispered from its silenced little muzzle. The impact was not very heavy since the caliber was so small, but the cracked cement did not need much of a kick to break loose.

Half a dozen small fragments fell out, revealing the reason why it had cracked in the first place.

Back in there, a part of a bone could be seen. At sight of it, Mac looked significantly at The Avenger.

“Human tibia,” said Mac.

They knocked out a few more chips, and more bones were exposed, some not completely bared. The shriveling of a body had cracked the concrete. A few wires were exposed, too.

“A dead mon’s bones,” whispered Mac. “Pointed out by a ghost of Wendell Haygar, or else by his perambulatin’ corpse—”

He stopped. Down the corridor Smitty’s little flash was waving a come-on sign.

“Smitty’s found something,” said the Scot.

They joined the giant at the end of the corridor.

“I’ve located the stairs,” said Smitty. He gestured with the light. “See? There. Through that one door—”

Too late. The Avenger noticed that the roof of this low vault was not arched as the others had been; it was flat. Also, that it was constructed of dull metal instead of stone, and that there was a line all around the edges of it.

The two doors—one to the stair well and the one through which they had just come—banged shut with a sound like vault doors. There were heavy clicks as big bolts crossed outside, where they couldn’t be reached.

Then the ceiling jerked a little and began coming down!

Smitty banged one door and then the other. Neither moved a fraction of an inch. The ceiling lowered a foot.

“Out of the rat den into the wine press,” said the giant with grim humor.

His smile was only too apt. This cell was like a giant wine press, with the three men like grapes, to be squeezed practically into nothingness when roof met floor!

CHAPTER XIII

Nellie Horns

In Nellie Gray had been left out of this. The Avenger, with a theory about the affair of the golden disks already complete in his coldly flaming brain, had looked forward to too much violence on Haygar’s Island to want a girl—even the amazingly capable Nellie—to experience it.

So he had left Nellie out of it. And Nellie didn’t want to be left out.

In the first place, she thought Carmella was on that island. And she had not yet gotten over her self-fury for allowing the regal brunette from Spain to give her the slip at Bleek Street. The chief had put Carmella in her charge. She had let Carmella get loose.

All the other Haygars seemed to be bound for that island. Probably Carmella was, too. Nellie wanted to take up her charge over the girl again, particularly in case danger threatened.

In the second place, Nellie just wasn’t used to being left out, and didn’t like it at all. So she was horning in again.

She had taken a small fast plane to Maine, waited for night, then slipped into the water and headed toward the island six miles away.

Nellie was an expert distance swimmer, and she reached the island, scarcely breathing hard. She slipped fairly dry clothes over her swimming costume, which consisted almost entirely of her own lovely white skin, and started for the house in the clearing.

She almost fell into one of the innumerable trenches crisscrossing the island, leaped the next, and then became the reason why the one mastiff left on the place had not scented The Avenger and his two aides.

It was because the brute scented Nellie first.

It was when Nellie crossed the second trench that she became aware of that and froze in her tracks.

There was a whipping of underbrush, a snarl that chilled her blood; then she saw a dog that looked, in the dimness, as big as a lion.

Nellie knew dogs. She could see at a glance that this one had been trained to kill—trained for that and nothing else. No one but its master could ever approach the brute; probably even the master would have to depend on clubs and whips.

It was less a dog than a man-killing machine!

Nellie took to a tree with a promptness of movement that The Avenger himself could scarcely have beaten. From a branch fifteen feet up, she stared at the mastiff.

The dog was making no outcry. Only the low, hideous snarling came from his throat. Nellie didn’t know whether she was glad or not for the silence.

She was glad because there wasn’t a commotion letting everyone on the island know that a stranger had landed. She was dismayed because it is about the worst sign of all when a dog attacks silently: it means that nothing but a ripped throat will make him go away again.

Nellie was as good a woodsman as any of the men in the little crime-fighting band. She had accompanied her father, murdered finally to get his secret of the hiding place of a great store of gold, on many of his archaeological expeditions into jungles. She began to travel as only a supreme woodsman can.

That was ape fashion among the tree limbs.

The trees were close enough so that she could leap and clamber and swing from one to another on overhanging branches.

It was a perilous task, not nearly as easy as it seems in the movies, where an aerial path is selected before the camera turns. She had to descend in places to a point where the snarling brute beneath could almost leap up and get her. In others she had to climb high, hold her breath, and swing for ten feet through thin air.

She reached the clearing around the house, and there she seemed to be all through. She sat in an uncomfortable fork and considered.

She had a gun, but she couldn’t shoot the dog without rousing the island. And she didn’t know what that might do to the plans of The Avenger, who, she was sure, was on the place. But she couldn’t stay here all night, either.

A dangerous native trick occurred to her, one she had seen a guide in Central America work on a jaguar.

In a belt under her trim dress, Nellie carried a little knife. She got it out and cut two short branches about an inch thick.

With her two shoelaces tied together, she fastened one short wooden length to the other, making a T. The handle of the T was about a foot long, and the top of it about six inches. She sharpened one end of the top to as fine a point as the wood would take.

She tossed the leafy end of the limb she had whittled to one side. The mastiff, snarling, swung to stare as it landed, and Nellie leaped down.

“Oh, dear!” she said. “If this doesn’t work—”

The dog was already springing toward her. If it did not work, she would have a hand chewed to a mess of bone and flesh. But then, if it didn’t work, she wouldn’t care what happened to her hand because she wouldn’t be around to use it anyway.

The dog left the ground and seemed fairly to soar at her in one long, bloodthirsty leap! She extended the T.

Into the gaping, slavering jaws she jammed the top of the T, sharp end up. She could feel the froth from the brute on her fingers as the jaws snapped like the jaws of a steel trap; the dog’s breath was hot on her wrist!

And it worked!

The sharp point burst up through the roof of the brute’s mouth and into the brain with the savage force of the jaws. The mastiff fell without a further move or sound, with the end of the stick protruding from its clenched fangs.

Nellie sat down for a minute, feeling sick and shaking all over. Then she got up and went on toward the house, a lovely, flying wraith as she crossed the clearing.

A little while before, the wind had begun to rise, and a storm had started growling in its beard out at sea. It struck, now, with all the fury of a summer squall, only with a steadiness that indicated much more persistence than a squall.

Screaming wind almost knocked Nellie flat, but she reached the house wall. And, there, she was glad for the racket of the gale.

Up the side of this repulsive-looking, decayed building were splotches of vines. Light as she was, she could climb them; but without the wind the sound might have been heard by those inside.

Now she could make as much noise as she pleased. She started climbing, with the right-hand turret window as her goal. There were no bars over that window.

She found that she could probably have made it even without the vines, for the bricks of the house wall were set in uneven rows to make a tapestry design, and her fingers and toes found good holds.

The first gust of rain batted down at her as she reached the window. Torn by wind and beaten by rain, she stared in.

And the first thing she saw was the person she’d had principally in mind on coming here.

Carmella Haygar.

The girl was lying on the floor of the otherwise empty little room in the turret. She was bound, but not gagged. A single candle in a bottle illuminated the room.

The place wasn’t empty long. Another came in—a dapper man with a tiny gray mustache and a trim little goatee. It was Sharnoff Haygar, though Nellie didn’t know that.

What she did know was that she hated this man on sight, and that he was precisely the type to whose extermination she had dedicated her life. She knew that by the way he approached Carmella.

He had a little bottle in his hand. Evidently, he had gone out to get the bottle, which was the reason he had not been in the room when Nellie first looked in.

With her tiny knife, Nellie had pried up the window an inch. She could hear through that crack as she clung to the brick ridges outside.

“Now,” said the man with the trim goatee, “I think you will talk. This, my dear, is sulphuric acid! It does curious things to faces. As you shall certainly find out if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

He shook the little bottle, then drew out the moistened stopper.

“First,” he said, almost gently, “we’ll press this to your right cheek. Then just a drop on the left. After that, if you are still stubborn, there will have to be a bit of attention paid to the eyes—”

Nellie dropped the knife, not having time to put it back in her belt. She snapped out her gun and smashed the window with it. Sharnoff whirled, hand going for his pocket. But the hand stopped and stayed very still as he saw the gun.

Nellie did not dare come through the window. She stayed where she was for a moment, gesturing toward Carmella, whose black eyes were enormous with horror—and relief.

“Untie her,” Nellie said, cold fury in the tone that came through her small, set teeth.

Sharnoff turned to Carmella and untied her. He didn’t even try to stall. The acid vial, which he had set on the floor to work on the bonds, was his death warrant, Nellie’s flaming blue eyes told him, if he didn’t obey implicitly and swiftly.

Carmella stood up, rubbing shapely ankles and flexing slim arms.

“Now tie him,” said Nellie, nodding to Sharnoff. “But keep behind him! Don’t let him grab you and use you as a shield.”

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned—or a woman whose beauty has just been wantonly threatened. The blaze in Carmella’s black eyes matched that in Nellie’s blue ones. By the time Sharnoff was tied, the cord bit into his flesh so deeply that he sunk his teeth in his upper lip with the sting of it. But he made no sound.

Nellie knocked jagged glass out of the window sash and crawled into the room at last. The storm outside was at its height now, with wind howling, rain hitting like bullets, and occasional thunder rattling the universe. Nellie had to pitch her voice high to be heard.

“He was after your medallion?” she said.

Carmella hesitated. Gratitude to her rescuer fought with reluctance to say anything about the golden disks.

“In a way,” she said finally.

“What do you mean—in a way?”

“He wanted to know the message on the medal.”

“Well,” said Nellie, annoyed by all the mystery in the affair of the golden disks—a mystery which she still couldn’t make head or tail of, “what is the message?”

Carmella pretended not to hear because of the storm. Nellie said something to herself, shrugged, and went to the door.

“What are we going to do now?” Carmella said.

“Is everyone in this house your enemy?” asked Nellie. “Or only this rat here with the acid?”

Carmella hesitated again, but this time in real, instead of pretended, indecision.

“I think they’re all enemies,” she said at last. “But they pretend not to be. And this one is the only one who has openly attacked me.”

“We’ll have to take a chance on the others and go downstairs,” said Nellie over the storm’s roar. “Can’t roost up in this turret forever.”

And besides, she added to herself, she wanted to see how things went with Mac and The Avenger and Smitty.

The turret room was a full four stories from the ground. They went down a lot of stairs. Then Nellie thrust out her small white hand to make Carmella stop.

Nellie had heard voices in a room to the right. She went to the door.

The room was a sort of library, but there was a hole in the floor at the moment. Down through this was peering a monstrous fat man. He had a smile on his face that the devil himself could have been proud of. His puffy, huge right hand was on the lever at the side of the hole, and he was slowly pressing the lever down.

Nellie hadn’t any idea what this sight meant, but she was willing to bet it meant trouble in some fashion. She was debating what to do, when the sound came.

It was a very peculiar sound, barely to be heard over the storm’s roar outside, and yet unmistakable.

The sound of pigs. But not just a barnyard noise; it had a quality, somehow, to chill the blood!

Nellie saw the man’s huge head jerk up as he listened, saw him scowl instead of smile. Then he waddled toward the door, and Nellie ducked across the hall and into an opposite room.

He was hardly out the front door of the place when she was back in that library, jerking up the lever. She still didn’t know its meaning, but she could look down the hole in the floor and see something like a moving platform that had still been settling downward when she got in, and which stopped when she threw the lever back up.

It began to rise again. There was a momentary lull in the gale outside, and she heard a voice clearly under the movable platform.

“It’s stopped!”

Smitty’s voice!

Nellie raced to find stairs leading down.

CHAPTER XIV

Reunion

A grin was on Nellie’s lips. For once, it was not Nellie who had gotten into difficulty and had to be rescued. It was the other way around. If she hadn’t taken matters into her own hands and come to the island, and if she hadn’t thrown that lever upstairs, Mac and Benson and Smitty would have been pressed flowers by now.

But she did not rub it in; and The Avenger only thanked her profoundly with his colorless, icy eyes, and that was that.

She had unbolted a door under what she judged was the location of the library, and the three men had hastened out, with the ceiling rising behind them. Then Mac had stopped, with an exclamation, and turned his flashlight on a section of wall near the door.

When that metal ceiling had come down, it had caught on a slight projection formed by one of the innumerable fresh strips of cement lacing through all these walls. It had broken out some of the stuff and revealed human bones!

The bones of dead men! Was this whole house built on dead men’s bones?

They went to the stairs. Nellie told of what had happened since she had set foot on the island, ending with the account of the fat man rushing out into the night after the sound of—of all things—pigs.

“Pigs?” repeated The Avenger. His icy eyes were almost frightening as they rested on Nellie. “Pigs!”

Upstairs, he raced for the front door, with Smitty and Mac after him. The two didn’t know what had put that extra grim light in the basilisk eyes, but they knew Dick Benson had sensed some occurrence of great importance.

Nellie stayed in the hall. Carmella came from the rear stairs, where she had been hiding since the little blonde had thrust her back wordlessly on hearing the voices from the library—voices filtering up through that dreadful moving ceiling.

The two girls waited tensely for Benson to get back.

Out in the night, The Avenger circled the house till he saw the hulking owner of the island. The fat man was up on a ledge peering down into an enclosure and fishing for something with a rope that had a running noose on the end of it.

Benson leaped up on the ledge, too, having decided that since their presence was known, now, anyway, there was no use in trying to remain out of sight any longer.

The mountainous master of Haygar’s Island did not even look at him. Benson peered down.

There were the pigs mentioned—gigantic hogs, gaunt, hungry, fierce, as no purely wild animal could ever be fierce. They were mauling something it was best not to look at. But a glance showed that the fat man had better hurry and get that loop on arm or leg or neck or there wouldn’t be anything left to get it on.

He caught an ankle with the noose and hauled. The hogs followed ferociously, leaped as high as they could at the rising thing, then subsided with furious grunts.

The fat man drew the thing over the wall and let it rest on the ground under the ledge he stood on.

“Von Bolen Haygar!” said Smitty, staring down.

It was just possible to recognize the Prussian with the straight-backed head. But the fat man didn’t waste much time on looking. His hands were darting over the mutilated form, and in a moment he grunted, not unlike the huge things in the enclosure, and drew out two gold medallions.

Two! Not just one. There was a flashing glimpse of them as he played his light on them. Then he had calmly pocketed them.

But not before The Avenger’s camera-quick eyes had seen the letters H H on one of them.

H H. Harlik Haygar. The spidery old fellow for whose murder Benson had been named. Von Bolen Haygar had done that bloody little job. But he would never answer for it now. Somehow, perhaps in an effort to get into the house unseen, he had sneaked onto the island and had blundered into the sty. His death had been worse than that dealt by any electric chair.

For the first time, the fat man seemed really to look at Benson.

“Who the devil are you?” he said. “And what the devil are you doing on my island?”

“The name is Benson,” said The Avenger, his voice for once expressing a shade of emotion—the emotion of irony. “Though the name was unknown to you, I’m sure the face is not. Since you tried twice to kill me and my two friends.”

“Kill you?” The fat man’s face was as blank as a sheet of fresh paper. His heavy-lidded eyes were stone-dull.

“In the rat pit,” reminded Benson, “and in the comfortable little vault with the falling ceiling.”

The fat man shrugged.

“Oh, I see! You must have been prowling my basement. Too bad! My father, when he built this house, put in a lot of curious traps. Evidently valuables were kept here at one time, and that was his idea of protecting them. Of course, I knew nothing of your presence in the basement, or of your near accidents.”

“Oh, of course not!” said the giant Smitty, sarcastically. The fat man paid no attention to him.

“I believe I have heard of you, Benson. Informally with the police, are you not? So I presume you are here to investigate something or other.”

“I’m here on the trail of several murders,” said Benson, eyes as unrevealing as the fat man’s own.

“I see. Well, I’ll be glad to be of any service I may.”

“Smooth as the grease he’s made of,” murmured Mac to the giant, glaring at the hulking owner of the island.

“What would you suggest doing now?” the fat man said.

“We should get in touch with the police,” Benson replied.

The fat man shrugged.

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to do that. This storm must have put the communications system out of order for the time. Yes, I can see the radio tower is down.”

“Radio is your only way of talking with the mainland?” said Benson.

“Yes.”

“Then if the tower is down, I suppose we are marooned until the storm lets up.”

Mac kept his face straight. There wasn’t a radio repair known to science that Smitty couldn’t make with a couple of hairpins and some wire. And Dick Benson was a genius at it when he chose to exert his mind. Dick was only being marooned because he wanted to be.

“There’s no sense in staying on out here in the gale and the rain,” said the grossly fat man phlegmatically. “Shall we go in? I’ll send my servant out to tend to Cousin von Bolen.”

Such was the Prussian’s epitaph.

They went in.

The Avenger had left two girls in the hall. Carmella and Nellie Gray. There were four people in there, now. Shan Haygar and Sharnoff, whom Shan had evidently found in the turret room and untied, were with the girls.

The two men had guns out and leveled. Carmella was cowering, face ashen; Nellie was standing small and straight, with eyes blazing.

“You’re just about courageous enough to shoot down a couple of women,” she was saying when the door opened.

The opaque eyes of the fat man didn’t blink as he took in the scene. He waddled toward the four, not fast, not slow.

“No one will shoot anyone!” he said. “That would be a mistake.”

“This girl,” snarled Sharnoff, gesturing toward Carmella, “is an imposter! She—”

“We shall soon see who is or is not an impostor,” the fat man cut in. He nodded his heavy head toward Benson. “This man is unofficially with the police. So, I judge, are the two men with him. We are all very glad to have the law with us during this trying time. You understand?”

Shan and Sharnoff glanced at each other with veiled eyes. There was hatred for each other in their eyes, hatred for the dark girl from Spain and for the fat man. But there was truce in their eyes, too.

“About impostors,” Shan said, as he and Sharnoff put away their guns. “You were saying?”

“That it’s time we judged identities once and for all. Come along!”

He started toward a front room.

“We, too?” blurted Smitty, amazed.

The fat man shrugged. “Yes, if you like. We are all honest men here. We have nothing to hide from Mr. Benson.”

“Chief!” cried Nellie. “Goram Haygar—he’s the man who was pressing that lever down to kill you.”

“You must be mistaken, miss,” said the fat man, heavy eyelids raising just a bit. “I didn’t even know that anyone was downstairs.”

Biting her lips in anger and perplexity at Benson’s odd impassivity in the presence of a murderer, Nellie went with the rest into the room.

It had been a drawing room and still held tarnished traces of magnificence. The fat man went to a cabinet, opened a drawer, and took out five small pieces of metal.

They were little tuning forks. With them came a stand a bit like a cribbage board. The fat man thrust the five little tuning forks in this and set the whole on a table.

Benson’s colorless eyes glittered a bit. There were tiny letters at the base of each fork. They were, in order:

H H, v B H, S H, Sh H, F H

“Gentlemen, your medallions,” said the gross host of this uneasy meeting.

The men hesitated a long time. Then, wary as hawks about it, they reluctantly handed a gold disk apiece to the fat man.

“You, too, Cousin Carmella,” said the fat man.

Carmella turned bright pink. There was an Oriental screen at the end of the room. She retired behind that for a moment. There was a rustling sound of dainty silks. She came back and handed a gold disk to the fat man.

He placed them in a line on the table. And, now, some of their meaning could be instantly seen.

Each disk showed, in addition to letters and figures, a part of a wall. It could be seen now that that wall was the front one of this house, itself.

The disk lettered v B H showed the left-hand turret; H H, the wall next to that; Sh H, the central turret; S H, the ensuing wall; and F H, the right-hand turret.

The fat hand picked up the disk with F H on it, which was Carmella’s. The coin dropped ringingly on the table.

All the little tuning forks vibrated a bit, but one echoed the tone of the ring quite distinctly.

That was the tuning fork with the same letters, F H, on its base.

One by one, the fat man dropped the coins. And one by one, each rang just a little differently from the rest and set its particular tuning fork droning.

The fat man nodded, and handed the disks back, each to its owner. The dead von Bolen’s and Harlik’s medallions he kept himself.

“There will be a final metallurgical analysis of each coin,” he said expressionlessly. “But already I am satisfied, and I imagine each of you also is, that medallions and owners are all genuine.”

“So then?” said Mac, sensing that this was all there was going to be, and outraged by it.

“Why, then,” said the fat man, giving the Scot a heavy-lidded stare, “the family of Haygar is provenly reunited. We have never seen each other before, so we had to devise a proof that each representative of a Haygar branch was what he seemed to be. The proof has been met.”

The Avenger’s cold, agate eyes silenced Mac. The fat man turned with indifferent politeness to Benson.

“There will be no possibility of contacting the mainland till tomorrow, possibly not even then,” he said. “So, meanwhile, we might as well get what rest the elements will allow us.”

And, as emotionlessly as though The Avenger and his three aides had been invited guests, he led the way upstairs to rooms for them all.

CHAPTER XV

The Night Cries Out!

“Am I nuts, or are these assorted Haygars?” demanded Smitty. He and Mac and Dick were in the room turned over to The Avenger. Nellie was down the second-floor hall in a room with Carmella.

“Murder has been done for those medallions,” the giant went on. “Everybody killing everybody else. Torturing, as Nellie saw Sharnoff start to do to Carmella. Everybody lifted heaven and earth to get the things. And what good are they? They prove that the holders are—or ought to be—members of the Haygar family! And the Haygars are all as poor as church mice! It’s insane.”

“It does seem insane, stated like that,” said Dick Benson evenly.

“Five gold coins, and they all ring different,” Mac mused. “They must each be of a slightly different run of metal.”

“They are,” nodded The Avenger, “so they will ring just a little differently. And a metallurgical analysis, such as our host referred to, would also yield five slightly different results. A clever way to insure against a forged medallion.”

“And all that is cooked up for the same crazy reason—to prove membership in a family that has lost all its power and wealth in country after country,” Smitty said. His ponderous shoulders moved as he gave up the problem. “Another thing: Why this hospitality on the part of a man who tried to kill us and can’t help but hate our guts for being here?”

“It’s the easiest way to dispose of us for the moment,” said The Avenger, pale, flaring eyes like polar ice. “He tried to kill us and failed. It will be harder, now that we are on the alert. The next attempts will have to be more studied and carefully timed.”

“Funny he didn’t try to lock us up, at least.”

The Avenger’s black-cropped head shook.

“You saw the expression in the eyes of all. They hate each other, cousins or not. So our fat host would hesitate to jail us for the simple reason that one of the others, wanting to enlist our aid, would release us again.”

“Enlist our aid for what?” said the giant.

The colorless, deadly eyes were narrowed.

“That will come out, unless I am mistaken, very soon.”

Mac said, “There’s one thing. Goram Haygar might have turned polite and given us rooms because there was nothin’ much else for the mon to do at the moment. But he certainly doesn’t intend to let us go on livin’ any longer than he has to. If he didn’t mean for us to be buried on this island, he wouldn’t have let us see that rigmarole with the medals and the tuning forks. Though I must admit that I didn’t get any meanin’ out of it—”

It was then that the shriek came!

From out in the black storm, just riding over the scream of the gale itself, came the cry: long, tortured, as if the night had cried out for help.

That one long shriek—then silence.

The three stared at each other with bated breath, then ran out and down the hall and into the darkness. That cry had come from someone in the last extremity of despair.

The gale had now settled down into the worst storm in years along the Maine coast. They could hear the roar of the surf, even feel spray at that long distance. The trees were bending double under the burden of the gale. It was hard to stand up under its violence.

The three battered through the storm to the edge of the clearing, in the direction from which the one tragic cry had come.

And they found the crier.

Sharnoff Haygar would never again try in his daintily fiendish way to apply acid to a girl’s face. It was Sharnoff who had screamed.

The man lay on his side in the mud, with the wind and rain lancing at him out of the blackness. He was dead—must have died almost as he was crying out. For he had been shot squarely in the heart.

Shot, but not by a gun!

Protruding from his chest was a thing carrying one back to the days of the early settlers when stockades were the only barriers against constantly threatening death. An arrow!

There the simile ended, however. For this was not an Indian arrow. It was a modern archer’s shaft, designed for hunting, that had come from some fine sporting-goods store. Though the maker could not, of course, have had human quarry in mind when turning out the thing.

“Somebody,” said Smitty, speaking loudly to be heard above the wind, “must be an excellent hand with a bow. There seem to be no prints in the mud anywhere near the guy except our own. So he was drilled from some distance. And with only lightning to reveal him, that takes some shooting.”

The Avenger nodded, colorless eyes like ice chips.

“He was shot from the direction of the house,” he said.

They turned back that way, and after a little while they found where the archer had stood. The footprints were quite distinct. But they could never be used for identification. The rain had made them only ragged little pits.

“After our archer shot, he ran,” said Smitty, pointing to the wide spaces between the ragged little prints that led back to the house from the clearing. “The prints seem to go around the house, so I guess he beat it for a rear door— Hey! What’s this?”

“More trouble,” said Mac.

Another body lay out there in the rain. This one was right against the house wall, at the foot of the turret that Nellie had climbed to enter the house.

But this man was not dead. As they went toward him, they heard moans.

They hastened their pace and knelt beside the man.

It was Shan Haygar, dark eyes glazed with suffering, face almost green in the recurrent lightning flashes.

“Broken back,” whispered Mac.

Smitty nodded. Even he, unversed in such things, had known that.

He had seen a dog run over once. After the truck had rolled on, the dog had lain in the street with hindquarters down and forequarters up, muzzle pointing rigidly to the skies, and yelping out howls as sharp and staccato and regular as something ticked off by a metronome.

This man lay like this. From the waist down, he was turned sharply sideways. From there up, he lay on his back, face up.

“The skurlie must have fallen off the turret,” said Mac. “Or else, he jumped—”

Benson threw out his hand for silence. The man’s lips were moving, trying to say something. The Avenger bent low to hear, his face within a few inches of the lips, pale, deadly eyes intent.

“Didn’t jump!” gasped the man. “Ghost led me to turret. Said . . . ‘Lead me to that . . . which I desire—’ ”

The lips stopped while tortured breath panted out. Then:

“ ‘That which I desire’ . . . led me to death . . . instead—”

That was all. The eyes closed and the words stopped.

“He’s done for,” said Mac to Smitty. “He might live for hours like this, but we could never move him. The least jar to that broken spine might be fatal—”

The end came even as he spoke.

Evidently a paroxysm of unendurable pain swooped on Shan Haygar, for he twisted convulsively on the ground. The convulsive move stopped; then he screamed and died.

He had killed himself with that uncontrollable spasm.

The big front door opened as Mac and Smitty and Benson reached it. Light streamed out, silhouetting the huge figure of their host.

The fat man stood blinking and looking sleepy as they entered the hallway.

“What’s all the commotion?” he asked. “There have been yells outside and the sound of this door banging. And, just now, there was another scream. What—”

“Two of your cousins are dead!” said Dick.

“What?” exclaimed the fat man.

“Somebody shot Sharnoff with an arrow,” blurted the giant Smitty. “And either a little before or a little after that, somebody led Shan Haygar to the top of one of the turrets by a ruse and shoved him over. He broke his back when he landed.”

The gross owner of the island didn’t blink. He just stood there, staring with heavy-lidded eyes at the three who had come in out of the night.

“I will go with my servant and bring the two in,” he said at last. And that was all. He faced the stairs.

“Morgan!” It was unnecessary to call twice.

The servant had evidently been on his way down. He appeared at the upper landing, looking hastily dressed, and came on down as fast as uncertain legs would carry him.

He stared fearfully at The Avenger, then turned quickly away again. He went out the front door with his hulking, phlegmatic master.

“Shan dead,” said Smitty somberly. “Sharnoff dead. That leaves only Carmella and Goram of the once-great and once-numerous Haygar family.”

“My bet is that Goram killed those two,” ventured Mac, looking sideways at The Avenger as he spoke.

“Well, they certainly didn’t kill each other,” was Smitty’s retort. He stared at Dick, too.

But Dick Benson did not have much to say at the moment, it seemed. He only said, “Back upstairs. Smitty, your room is next to the girls’ room. Keep a sharp watch. As you have said, of all the owners of the gold medallions only Carmella and our host are left alive. I would not like to be Carmella at this moment.”

Smitty went upstairs in a hurry, not so much because of danger to Carmella—though of course that entered his thoughts, too—but because of accompanying danger to Nellie.

Where the five-foot-nothing blonde was concerned, Smitty was a three-hundred-pound mother elephant.

He tapped on the girls’ door before opening his own. It was Nellie who poked her pretty golden head out.

“Smitty! I was waiting for some news. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Carmella, I’d have gone out and dug up my own news! What happened? We heard screams.”

“Sharnoff and Shan,” said the giant somberly, “have met with—accidents.”

In the room behind Nellie, he heard Carmella gasp.

“Don’t go out of here for any reason whatever,” Smitty said. “And don’t open the door to any one but one of us. Promise?”

“I won’t open the door for any human being but you,” promised Nellie.

She didn’t know how that promise was going to fail to bind her, a little later.

“Good night, then. Try to get some sleep.”

Smitty went next door to his own room, with some of his fears laid at rest. At a single word from Nellie, he could be there. He could hear a call easily through the wall.

Even knowing Nellie as well as he did, it did not occur to him that there might not be a call to hear!

CHAPTER XVI

From the Tomb!

The two girls had been far from sleeping when Smitty knocked. They were even farther from it afterward.

Carmella was scared to death but kept it under fair control, helped by an aristocratic ancestry and a goodly amount of personal fortitude.

Nellie was consumed by curiosity and a baffled anger that this confounded brunette who had caused them so much trouble didn’t seem disposed to spread knowledge.

After Smitty left, she tried to get information from Carmella by apparently thinking aloud to herself, meanwhile looking sideways at her roommate once in a while to see if any of her shrewd guesses hit home.

“Let’s see,” she said, “five members of your family came to this country, one after another, after being dispossessed in their own, from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Turkey, and Russia. Each had a gold medallion, proving that he really represented the Haygar family.

“There was some murdering done over Harlik Haygar’s gold disk, and it finally wound up in von Bolen’s pocket—after Mr. Benson had had a murder charge thrown at him by Shan Haygar. Incidentally, you have sweet cousins, Carmella.”

The dark girl stirred as if in protest, but said no word.

“You were kidnapped as you phoned us for help. Mr. Benson rescued you and recovered your medallion from a thug who had swallowed it for safekeeping. The gold medal, you say, is only a keepsake, with only a sentimental value.”

Carmella’s lips were tight and her face as expressionless as she could make it.

“All of you Haygars met here at the island of still another cousin, the last member of the American branch of the family,” Nellie went on. “The island has trenches all over it as if Goram means to fight a war.”

There was a noticeable glint in Carmella’s dark eyes at mention of the trenches, but her mouth remained stubbornly closed.

“It seems as if Sharnoff came ahead of time with his gang, and hid them,” mused Nellie, eyes sharp. “Shan followed, and he had a gang, too. There really was a war, though the trenches didn’t play a part because the war was at the dock. Then a dynamite trap was sprung—set by Goram to protect himself against just such invasion—and the two gangs were wiped out. But Sharnoff and Shan got clear.

“And this Shan, now—he was interesting. He was not the original Shan. That one, the first one, was captured and killed by our present Shan, who claimed he was an impostor. And yet the first one had the medal. How would you know, if a person had a medal, whether he was an impostor or not?”

There was still no answer. Nellie went doggedly on.

“Our little crew reached here and was almost wiped out, too. But now, all is sweetness and light as far as Goram is concerned. He put everybody up for the night, and is the perfect host. However, three more died in this little island paradise: von Bolen, Shan, and Sharnoff.”

Carmella was looking at her blood-red nails in the dim light of the room. Nellie could have choked her.

“A young army of men, dead—fighting, murdering, lying, framing people into prison! All, apparently, for the golden disks! Yet everybody insists that they have no value other than a sentimental one!”

“You can see how true that must be,” murmured Carmella. “If one of the medallions were melted down, there wouldn’t be more than twenty or twenty-five of your dollars’ worth of gold in it,”

“But they could mean something,” said Nellie, exasperated.

Carmella shrugged. “It is hard to see what. In each country, our family has lost all estates and possessions. That is a matter of record.”

“Could I see your medallion?” asked Nellie, biting back a few choice, impulsive remarks.

Carmella hesitated, then got her golden disk from its hiding place next to her skin. It was warm from her body as Nellie took it.

Nellie examined it.

Same on both sides. Part of a wall, that now could be identified as the wall of this very house. The letters F H. And the figures 19 33.

“The letters, of course,” said Nellie, still in that musing tone and still watching Carmella out of the corners of her eyes, “must be the initials of your father, Francisco Haygar. But what do the figures mean?”

“They could be a date,” murmured Carmella.

“Sure, they could be. They could be just what they seem, and indicate the year 1933. But if that is so, why is there a gap between them—19, space, then 33?”

Whether or not Carmella might have answered the direct question will never be known. Because it was at that moment that the tap sounded at the door.

It was a very light tap, hardly to be heard. Indeed, it was more of a scratching noise than a tap, as if perhaps a dog were sniffing around the door out in the hall.

Nellie went to the door, gun in hand. And she saw the dim light under the door suddenly vanish. The light in the hall had been turned out.

“Don’t open it!” whispered Carmella frantically, hand on Nellie’s arm.

Nellie considered. She had given her promise.

“Who’s there?” she asked in a low tone.

In an even lower tone came a muffled answer. In fact, it was so muffled that you couldn’t understand it at all. At least, Nellie was sure she hadn’t understood it. For the sound she had thought to hear was, of course, fantastic.

She thought she had heard the name, Wendell Haygar!

She smiled at that one. How silly! Wendell Haygar was a corpse, four years dead, lying in a coffin under their feet, according to what Smitty had told her.

Wendell Haygar, indeed!

“Who did you say you were?” she asked.

There was no answer at all this time.

“Don’t open it!” pleaded Carmella.

But Nellie, gun alert in her hand, snapped back the lock and opened the door a few inches. No one could shoot her or otherwise try to murder her without rousing the giant next door and getting nailed for it.

She looked into darkness that was only intermittently broken by lightning, playing in the window at the end of the hall. An empty darkness. There was not a soul out there.

Then another of the lightning flashes occurred, and she changed her mind. And behind her, peering fearfully over her shoulder, Carmella moaned in superstitious horror.

There was a vague white figure in the darkness. It looked almost like mist. It was about the size and shape of a small human being. A man.

“It’s a ghost!” moaned Carmella. “Back! Lock the door—quick!”

“If it’s a ghost,” said Nellie reasonably, “it could come through a closed door.” And she stood her ground, even when the wavering white shape came closer.

The white mist had a voice, it seemed. Low words came, muffled, that could barely be heard.

“Follow me. I will show you that which you seek.”

Nellie heard Carmella say, quaveringly, “If it’s me you are talking to—I know what I seek.”

Nellie reached back and grabbed Carmella’s wrist till the tall brunette gasped.

“I don’t know what you seek,” she said, lips to Carmella’s ear. “And, anyhow, I want to nose into this a little. Shut up!”

The figure was slowly fading down the hall. Nellie took a step after it.

“You are going to follow?” panted Carmella.

“Bet your life!” said Nellie. “I might find out something important.”

“You told your big friend you wouldn’t leave the room.”

“I said I wouldn’t for anything human,” Nellie pointed out. “This is a ghost. It practically says so, itself. So I can follow it and still keep my promise. It may be twisting a promise a little, but you couldn’t sue me for it.”

“How can you be so frivolous at such a time?”

“I’m doing it to keep my knees from knocking together,” Nellie said, starting on tiptoe down the hall after the ghostly shape. “You stay in the room.”

“Alone?” whispered Carmella. “Oh, no!”

She came with Nellie down the hall, staring with wide, terrified eyes at the weird white shape, ever-receding before them.

Down the hall to the stairs. Up these to a third-floor corridor that was dusty and never used. Toward the front of the house, to the left—

“He’s taking us to the turret on the opposite wing of the house from the one you were held in,” Nellie whispered to Carmella.

The Spanish girl only trembled and hung on to Nellie’s left arm; the blonde still had her gun in her right hand.

There was one more short staircase, ending in the door to the little room in the left-hand turret, four stories up from the ground.

It was too bad Smitty had been so brief in mentioning the “accidents” occurring to Shan and Sharnoff. He had done so only to spare Nellie’s feelings. But he had unwittingly failed to give information that might have helped her now.

Had Nellie known that the accident that took Shan’s life was a fall from the other turret and that he had died mumbling of something leading him to that which he desired, she might have been more cautious now.

But she did not know, so she followed the white wraith up the stairs.

During the whole follow-the-leader game, the wraith had periodically disappeared. Then it would appear again, as if it had trouble in keeping materialized, only to fade back into the land of the spirits now and then.

At the door of the turret room, it disappeared once more.

But this time it stayed that way.

The two girls went on up the last few steps in total darkness, with Nellie cursing the fact that she had no flashlight. They halted in front of the door, which was closed.

Nellie was waiting for the wraith to appear once more. Carmella, meanwhile, was tugging at her to get her back down the stairs.

The wraith refused to lead any more, and Nellie refused to heed Carmella.

“Whatever this is all about,” she said to Carmella in a low tone, “the answer must be behind that door.”

“You’re not going in?” gasped Carmella.

In answer, Nellie tried the doorknob, found that it was open, and swung the door back.

Lightning flashed and revealed the small room. It was about ten feet square, and it seemed to be absolutely bare. No furnishings in it, no people, nothing. The floor was not dusty, however, as the stairs and third-floor corridor had been.

“You see?” chattered Carmella. “There is nothing in there, no reason for going into the room.”

Nellie gripped her gun tight and went through the doorway; Carmella, fearing nothing so much as being left alone in that storm-tensed, frightening darkness, crowded close on her heels.

It was Carmella who screamed!

Her cry ripped through the night, echoing through the big house over a sudden, grinding crash.

There wasn’t any floor where a floor had just been!

It had collapsed under their feet and taken the floor beneath in its fall and the one beneath that. In a thundering pile of wreckage, all plunged into the basement fifty feet below, with Carmella’s screams sounding over all!

CHAPTER XVII

Hell’s Host

Carmella’s screams kept sounding because she and Nellie had not plunged down with the rest of the stuff. And that was due to Nellie’s almost superhuman agility.

As had been demonstrated when she outwitted the mastiff, she was trained in traveling high among branches of trees. The cardinal principle of such training is this: if a branch cracks or sags beneath you, get to another one fast.

That training had developed into an automatic instinct with the high-powered little blonde.

With the first quiver of the collapsing floor, she had leaped for the window, straight across the room. No time to turn and try for the door again, but there was a good chance of reaching the window.

She did, just as the bottom seemed to drop out of everything. She caught the sill in straining fingers, her feet found an inch of protruding beam with a broken end, and she hung there.

And an instant later, Carmella’s wildly clawing fingers caught her!

The Spanish girl’s hands fastened around Nellie’s slim ankles like leg irons; her hundred and ten pounds became an appalling death weight.

Nellie knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep this up very long. But she didn’t scream. She decided to save her breath, because Carmella was doing enough screaming for both of them.

“Somebody better come in answer to those screams pretty fast,” she thought, as her fingers slipped a hundredth of an inch on the sill.

Somebody did!

There was a kind of bellowing like that of a mother elephant suddenly aware that its offspring had fallen into danger. There was a trembling of stairs, and a flash shot its beam over the two girls.

“Nellie!” yelled Smitty in anguish.

Nellie didn’t say anything. It was not a question of saving any breath any more; it was a question of not having any breath to save. Her whole body was trembling with the frightful strain of supporting Carmella. Her fingers were slipping with slow but relentless steadiness over the sill.

Carmella kept on screaming and Nellie kept on fighting to hold on just a little longer, and Smitty turned and went down the turret stairs in two jumps.

Nellie wondered dreamily what he thought he was going to do now, but couldn’t guess, and relapsed into a kind of pink fog where time stood still.

Fifty feet beneath was a jagged pile of beams and debris. Well, that was too bad. No matter how far the drop or onto what, she couldn’t hang on any longer.

With a tired sigh, she relaxed her grip! And through the window, a vast hand lunged and grabbed her by the right wrist as she was falling. Smitty, unable to get to her from the door, had raced outside and climbed the wall to the window.

“You big dope!” whispered Nellie. “You do have your uses.”

That was all she knew till she got to the drawing room on the first floor. She regained consciousness as Smitty carried her in. Carmella, on the giant’s other arm, was still out.

“You little feather-brain!” Smitty was raging in a trembling voice. “You haven’t any more sense than a telephone slug. You said you wouldn’t leave your room.”

“I said I wouldn’t for a human,” defended Nellie, feeling pretty much a fool. “And I didn’t. I followed a ghost.”

“Ghost?” snapped Smitty, putting her into a chair. “Ghost? What the devil—”

Into the room barged their grossly fat host, waddling like a human tank, eyes heavy-lidded and stone-dull.

Nellie glared at him. She didn’t like this man, to put it mildly. She would have liked nothing better than to pin the collapsing floor and the ghost business on him. But she didn’t see how she could. Their will-o’-the-wisp guide would have been swallowed up in this man’s bulk; he could have had nothing to do with the wisp.

He had heard her last words. He echoed them along with Smitty.

“Ghost?” he said. “You mean to say you think you have seen a ghost in this house?”

Carmella was stirring, but was not yet out of her fainting spell. Nellie looked at her, then at the fat man.

“Would it be impossible to have a ghost in this house any more than in any other house?” she snapped.

“I suppose not,” said the fat man. “In fact, this house has been said by many to have a ghost. But naturally I never took any stock in the tale.”

“What do you mean—supposed to have a ghost?”

The fat man hesitated a moment. Then, before speaking, he spread his pudgy hands deprecatingly as if apologizing in advance for talking at all.

“As you perhaps know, my father was eccentric on the point of burial. He insisted that, when he died, he was to be placed in an open coffin in the cellar vault. So it is to be expected that rumors would get around that he ‘walks’ now and then.”

“And you believe that?” snapped Smitty.

The fat man shrugged.

“I never have.”

“You’re implying that you do now?”

“Well—” began the fat man.

Carmella came out of it. She regained consciousness with a cry that was almost as lusty as her former screams. She stared up wildly, then sank back as she saw where she was.

“The ghost!” she whispered.

The fat man looked at Smitty.

“You see? Your little blond friend says she saw a ghost. This girl says she saw one. Perhaps there is something to the tale, after all—”

He stopped, and became very still, staring unblinkingly past Smitty. The door was in that direction. The giant turned.

In the doorway stood The Avenger.

His black hair seemed to crackle with electrical force. His eyes were like colorless holes in the depths of which were fog and ice—and doom.

Over his arm, Dick Benson had a curious garment. And it was at this, more than at the man himself, that the fat man was staring.

The garment was a sort of rain cape with a hood. Cape and hood were black. But down the front of it had been roughly sewed a wide, uneven strip of white rubber from another raincoat.

Benson spread the cape wide. The white strip assumed the approximate shape of a small human. He turned the cape and revealed a similar strip on the other side. The whole garment, by the way, was streaming wet.

Dick’s voice was calm, vibrant, certain. He stared at the fat man as he spoke.

“Yes, it seems there is something to the ghost tale. There was a ghost. But not from the land of the dead. The ghost was you!”

The mountainous master of the island didn’t make a move. His face was almost as impassive as Benson’s. His eyes, heavy-lidded, were blank.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you, Benson.”

“Nellie,” said The Avenger, “when you and Carmella saw this ghost, did it seem to appear and disappear?”

“Yes,” said Nellie, nodding slowly.

“Of course!” Benson’s tone was as cold and calm as his colorless eyes. “From front or back, you could see a white strip on the black cape. But when the ‘ghost’ turned sideways, the cape disappeared into the blackness of the night, and you saw nothing.”

“That would be a silly business to go through,” said the fat man. “Easier to wear a white coat and be done with it.”

“That would have given you away because of the size,” said Benson. “You are not small. Your size, by the way, brands this cape as yours, and yours alone.”

He spread the thing. It looked like a tent.

“You’re accusing me of trying to kill my cousin, Carmella, and your friend, Miss Gray,” complained the fat man mildly. “Why would I want to do anything like that?”

“For the wealth of all the Haygars,” Dick said. “For that, you would kill Carmella. For that, you killed Shan and Sharnoff and would have killed von Bolen if he had not removed himself from the game by blundering into your sinister hog pen.”

Benson turned to Nellie.

“Apparently the same ruse tried on you and Carmella was worked on Shan—successfully. He was led to the turret and pushed over. But the thing that led him said it was leading him ‘to that which he desired.’ Did your ghost say anything?”

Nellie nodded. “Why, yes. It said about the same thing to us. Carmella said she knew what she desired and didn’t need to be led anywhere, but I told her to shut up because I wanted to follow and—”

She stopped. The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes were like burnished agates.

“Carmella said that? That she needed no guiding?”

“Yes,” said Nellie. “Something like that. But—”

“Good! I needed very much to know that. Till now, I have not been sure.”

He didn’t say what it was that he hadn’t been sure of. The fat man, in a milder tone than ever, went back to the former theme.

“You mention the ‘wealth of all the Haygars,’ Benson. I repeat, there is no such thing. In country after country, our family had everything taken from it. Everything! Indeed, only one or two in each country were left alive. Revolution and war have beaten us—”

“In revolution and war your family lost what each had in its country at that time,” corrected The Avenger. “Eh?” The fat man’s eyes were not quite so blank. “Branch after branch of the Haygar family,” said The Avenger, “foresaw expropriation. Branch after branch, before the start of violence, shipped all their liquid wealth, in the form of gold, to the American Haygar, old Wendell. Then they stayed on till their tangible possessions—lands, factories, and securities—had been seized. After that, they meant to come to America and claim their gold. But they never reached here.”

Carmella said cautiously, “What makes you assume there is gold?”

“The golden disks,” said Benson. “There was mention of metallurgical analysis. For what reason? There could only be one: for comparison with a similar analysis of other gold. Each Haygar, on presenting his medallion and having it checked, was to be able to claim the gold hoard from which it had been run. A sure scheme, since no two runs of metal would be quite the same: the gold from Turkey would be just a little different in analysis from the gold from Germany, and so on.”

“You say the Haygars never reached here,” said the fat man, looking honestly bewildered. “Shan and Sharnoff and von Bolen and Carmella reached this island, and Harlik got as close as New York—”

“All were impostors!”

They all stared at him.

“Every one of them, save Carmella, was an impostor,” Dick said. “That is proved by the fact that no one of them knew exactly what the treasure was that he sought, or where to find it. Only Carmella did not need to be led ‘to that which she desired.’ The rest only knew that the medals were priceless, without being able to decipher their meaning.”

“So I was taken in by pretenders!” scowled the fat man. “I called them cousins. I, Goram Haygar, was about to accept—”

“Don’t concern yourself so much,” said The Avenger, glacially. “After all, you’re an impostor, yourself. You’re no more Goram Haygar than I am. You, too, are in ignorance of the hiding place of the gold. You methodically trenched the island trying to find it. You sounded all through the basement walls to dig it up. Perhaps the bones concealed down there could tell where the real son of Wendell Haygar could be found—”

The lights snapped out!

It had been superlatively done. The fat man’s calmness, which hadn’t really deceived anyone there as to the logic of his guilt, had finally thrown them all just a little off guard. His mildness had given him just a half-second head strart. And it was enough.

A sudden kick at a lamp wire, a break and a short circuit—then darkness.

Darkness, and the slam of a door as the fat man shot sideways into another room.

“Whoosh!” came Mac’s voice from somewhere near the rear. Then there was the sound of a fall and the slam of a back door of the house.

“After him!” bellowed Smitty, racing through the side door with his flash splitting the darkness.

He got into a small rear hall, through a butler’s pantry, and into the big kitchen. Mac, posted as guard there, was just picking himself up off the floor.

“The skurlie jumped me so fast and so hard that I missed stoppin’ him,” he said shamefully to The Avenger.

Then he went out into the night with Benson and Smitty after the fake Goram Haygar.

They didn’t go far.

The stone enclosure for the hogs was back there. And, suddenly, from the opened door of the enclosure, the giant, half-starved brutes surged forth! A fortunate lightning flash revealed that. The fat man had wrenched the pen door open as he dashed past it.

It was a deadly mess!

The big beasts were berserk in the darkness. And when four or five hundred pounds of maddened boar rushes you, there isn’t much to do but try to keep out of the way. If you can!

It began to look as though Mac and Smitty and Benson couldn’t. There were too many of the brutes. Mac managed to shoot two, and Benson one, and then they were surrounded.

The Avenger’s voice rose in a piercing yell. He rushed toward the converging ring of death and leaped. He reached a tablelike back, feet barely missing gnashing tusks, and leaped toward the enclosure.

The hogs streamed after him, all of them drawn by the outcry, and stampeded by a running quarry into a deadly chase!

Dick raced into the empty enclosure, and the hogs crowded ferociously after him.

“The chiefs a goner!” yelled Mac in anguish.

“No, he’s not,” corrected Smitty, who had seen the head with the shock of black hair for an instant above the ten-foot edge of the enclosure.

The giant rushed to slam the pen door shut and shoot the staple home. Dick swung down from the top of the wall, to which he had leaped a bare inch ahead of a dozen savage sets of tusks.

Benson’s face was unbelievably calm. He had just undergone an experience that would have twisted any normal face into despair, horror, hopelessness, triumph. His countenance made a beholder shiver at its entire lack of any of these expressions.

He didn’t give Smitty or Mac time to reflect on the weirdness of it, however. His slim forefinger pointed.

“There! Going back into the house!”

Mac and Smitty turned in time to see the elephantine mass of their host just disappearing back through the rear door. And in there alone were Nellie and Carmella!

CHAPTER XVIII

Bent Walls

Fast as The Avenger was, he did not quite catch up to Smitty as the giant bellowed and raced for Nellie’s side. Smitty was sure that this time it was curtains for the little blond bombshell. It looked to him as if the sole purpose the big man had had in mind in letting the hogs loose was to create enough distraction for him to get back in and kill off Carmella, undisturbed.

Which would have meant killing Nellie, too.

But when Smitty reached the front hall, he was amazed to see the fat man shoving out the front door and into the night once more. He was also thankfully astounded to see the faces of the two girls at the hall doorway of the drawing room.

“I thought you’d be dead,” he said, running his flash over them. The Avenger and Mac came up.

“He didn’t do a thing to us,” said Nellie. “I’d have shot him, of course, if he had tried.” She was calmly waving her gun. “But he didn’t even try. He jumped into the hall and threw something in that big vase down there. I couldn’t see what. I wouldn’t even have seen that he did anything at all, except that a flash of lightning—”

“Out!” Dick said, voice, positively crackling. “Out of here at once! He must have set a time switch!”

Fast as Nellie’s brain was, this left her flat-footed for a moment. The Avenger didn’t stop to repeat.

His steel-cablelike arms went around the girl, and he raced for the door. After him came Smitty, with Carmella, and then Mac.

They got outside, ran about twenty-five yards, and then were thrown in all directions.

The thing that had scattered them was the apparent splitting in two of the whole island in an appropriate chaos of sound!

An explosion that made even the collapse of the cliff by the dock seem small. It had come from the house; looking back, they could see the grim and ghastly place doing a kind of ponderous dance in the glare of beginning flame.

Cracks spread all through it, from foundation to turrets as they stared. And then the walls collapsed!

The walls came down very curiously indeed. So oddly that everyone of them noted it, at least subconsciously, even at such a moment.

The walls were of brick and should have broken into a million fragments, with stray bricks flying every which way. And they did not. Instead of breaking, the walls bent! They fell to the ground, not in a heap, but in cohesive sections each of which was many feet square.

But, regardless of manner, fall they did. The house of Haygar literally had disappeared, as figuratively the House of Haygar had. That was why the fat man had maneuvered to get back into the house alone. It was not to get at Carmella, but to set a time switch of some kind that would bring the house down on all of them at once. Smitty remembered the wire exposed in the cellar wall next to the dead man’s bones. All the foundations, tunneled every few feet in a search for treasure, must have been studded with explosives when the concrete was replaced, so that the fat man could destroy the building whenever he felt too hard pressed by enemies.

“Curious,” Dick Benson said calmly. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a person with treasure in mind has only one thought: to dig for it.”

Carmella stared wildly at him. She was almost over the edge of hysteria, but the calm tone was helpful. Nellie was nearly as shaken, but had a much better grip on her nerves. The leaping flames from the ruins threw red on their faces.

“The fake Goram Haygar dug for the treasure he knew was somewhere on the island,” The Avenger said. “It never occurred to him that it was, in a manner of speaking, right out in plain sight—in the exposed walls of the house itself.”

“The walls?” said Mac.

“Yes! You saw how they fell, with the bricks clinging together in large sections, and those sections bending rather than breaking. Come, I’ll show you the reason for that.”

The group went back to the ruins, as close as the flame would allow. A large section of the wall of the right-hand turret had been flung far in its fall. In looking at it, they saw what Benson had meant.

The wall was made of a double layer of brick, with a space between about four inches wide. And that entire inner space, the whole inner wall sandwiched in between brick layers, was of gold!

The Avenger knelt, apparently to look more closely. His right hand touched the calf of his right leg.

“As each branch of the international Haygar clan sent a great gold shipment to America ahead of the political storm foreseen in its own country,” he said, “old Wendell Haygar secretly melted the bullion and poured it between the outer and inner brick walls of a new wing added to this house. Then he had a medallion made showing that wing, the amount of gold represented, and the date received. To that branch of the family was sent the medal, as a sort of deed to that amount of gold and as an identification disk for the bearer. Many of the clan had never seen the others and didn’t know them by sight.

“It was a positive method of identifying gold hoards with medallions, since each metal would have precisely the same ring, and precisely the same analysis, as the bigger bulk from which it was taken. Thus, no forged disk could ever go undetected. But it was a very poor method of identifying the bearer of the coin. Because anyone getting hold of a medal could claim to be the member of the Haygar family whose initials were on it. Could and did! Four out of five medal-bearers who got through to the island were impostors, and no one will ever know how many other impostors were murdered by those four before the medals came into their hands.”

“Wait a minute!” gasped Nellie. “You say the amount of gold and the date received here were lettered on the disks. Carmella’s, for instance, has 19 and then 33 on it. The 33 would probably be the date. You mean the 19 has to do with the amount?”

“That’s right,” said Benson, pale eyes going to the Spanish girl’s face. “Nineteen tons of gold, received in 1933.”

“Tons?” said Nellie faintly.

“Tons,” said The Avenger. “The other disks call for quantities ranging from that up to thirty tons. Isn’t that right, Carmella?”

Carmella was still shivering, but was fairly calm, now. She nodded.

“Yes, that is right. You have guessed everything. There is no use trying to conceal things from you any more.”

“In addition,” said Benson, “there must be some of old Wendell’s wealth here. It could not have evaporated as completely as it seemed—to the point, indeed, of leaving him in absolute poverty in a decaying estate. Perhaps the side or rear walls are his. In any event, there must be close to a quarter of a billion dollars here—the entire wealth of a family almost the equal of the Rothschilds. And it is all yours, Carmella—”

Something like a human tank waddled around a blazing, head-high clump of debris to their left. A last flare of lightning whitened the red glare that illuminated the big bulk.

It was the phony Goram Haygar. In his hands was a submachine gun, and in his stone-dull eyes was coldly triumphant murder!

Smitty rumbled an exclamation of complete disgust. He had felt safe because of the clearing around the debris. He had thought it impossible for the gross fat man to get near them unseen. It hadn’t occurred to him, or apparently to any of the others, that the hulking killer had ducked to left or right on leaving the front door, instead of going straight ahead, and that as a result he had been nearer the ruins than they, when the explosion occurred.

But it seemed he had tricked them in this way, and had hidden to one side of a blazing barricade till they came within a few feet of his gun.

Mac and Smitty and The Avenger stayed stone still. Nellie was foolhardy enough to let her hand drop an inch toward her belt. The muzzle of the submachine gun swayed a very little. Her hand froze.

The Avenger was still on one knee, hands on the ground to support his weight. The fat man grinned coldly at his tense, strained position, which he was aware The Avenger knew without words he’d better keep if he didn’t want to be instantly annihilated.

“I heard your neat explanations,” the fat man said. “They sound pretty correct, in the main. The location of the gold is particularly interesting. I should have thought of the upper walls myself, but I was too intent on looking underground. If I’d known it was the walls, I would have blown up the place long ago.”

They all stared, rigid, breathless, at the death represented by the machine gun. Whether it would speak at once or would delay its deadly chatter a few more seconds, there was no telling.

It seemed there was to be a delay. Apparently, it gave the hulking murderer a fine sense of power to hold them moveless here, and he didn’t want to lose the pleasure too soon.

“You were wrong in only one particular,” the fat man went on to Benson. “That was in saying the gold belongs to Carmella. It doesn’t. It belongs to me—as soon as I rid myself of a few witnesses, as I have rid myself of intruders before now.”

Smitty and Mac glanced swiftly at Dick Benson.

There was only one thing to do. That was for all to rush at once. Certainly most of them would die before they could get to the gun. Probably all of them would. But such a course was better than simply staying still and taking it.

So they flicked a glance at the man who was chief, to get his imperceptible nod that should start them all jumping forward at the same instant.

And they saw that The Avenger was staring past the fat man instead of at him. Staring with agate eyes that seemed to have little lights smoldering behind them.

Behind the gross killer, another figure had appeared from around the blazing ruins and was creeping close. And at sight of this, Mac and Smitty breathed raggedly and felt their jaws go slack in astonishment.

It was the figure of the man in the coffin. It was the corpse of Wendell Haygar, who had chosen to be placed in a crypt in his own estate rather than be normally buried—

Either that or a ghost of mist and shadow.

But in the right hand of the creeping thing was held a most material object. A knife! And as the figure stole ever closer to the fat man’s back, the knife raised inch by inch for a downward stroke.

A croaking moan came from Carmella’s lips.

The ghost they’d seen in the hall had been explained away as the fat man himself, in disguise. But here were both the fat man and the ghost. No explaining away that ghastly white figure, now!

The fat man heard the moan and saw the appalled expression in the girl’s dark eyes.

The trick most to be expected in such a situation was that some of this group would try to make him turn around on the pretext that someone was behind him. So the man only grinned coldly, while his finger tightened on the trigger.

Not till the final leap of the figure behind him did he start to turn. And then it was too late!

Carmella screamed, and Nellie cried out. The men stared with dilated eyes.

And the knife went home!

A roar came from the fat man like the bellow of a mortally hurt beast of the jungle. But it seemed he had vitality like that of a jungle beast, too.

A running man has been known to go on for fifteen feet after a bullet has lodged in his heart. With cold steel in his, the fat man dragged the gun around. Red flame lanced from its muzzle at the white figure, then went on for a second in a rising arc before dead fingers fell from the gun.

And if a corpse or a ghost cannot feel bullets, then this sheeted form was neither ghost nor corpse. For it lay writhing on the ground with red coming from its middle.

The Avenger slid Mike back into its holster.

Before the fat man had rounded the corner, Benson’s miraculous hearing had picked up the sound of a step. Kneeling and ostensibly looking at the gold, he had drawn the little silenced revolver so stealthily that even his own followers hadn’t known. And over the fat man’s head had hung that whispering menace all the time he had the machine gun on them.

But The Avenger had delayed till the last because of his tremendous desire never to kill with his own hands.

From a kneeling position, and without aiming, even he could not have suddenly snapped a shot at the fat murderer with any assurance of the eighth-inch accuracy that creased instead of killing. He could have hit the head, yes. But he had been delaying such outright execution—

And then the figure had appeared and made unnecessary the gamble of such a shot.

The others were crowding around the figure now and staring at the chalk-white, ghastly face. Benson joined them.

It was a person every one of them had almost forgotten existed, in the crowded last minutes.

“Morgan, the servant!” said Smitty.

The man’s lips moved as if he were smiling. The Avenger said gently, “Not Morgan, the servant. But the real Goram Haygar, son of Wendell and owner of this island. His features prove it.”

The dying man nodded.

“That is right,” he whispered, with the subsiding wind and the crackle of flames making it almost impossible to hear. “Wendell’s son. I came home after . . . absence . . . to find my father dead and the servants missing. I managed . . . get employed by that man as servant. I meant to expose or trap him.”

He closed his eyes, seeming to try to gather strength out of darkness.

“I am a . . . coward. I was afraid of the man. I didn’t dare to tell authorities of men he killed who sneaked to island . . . fear he’d kill me. When you . . . caught in rat pit . . . I went down to release you. You were out . . . I played ghost and led to bones of victims.”

“Why didn’t you kill the guy when you found what he’d done?” said Smitty. “No one would have blamed you.”

“Too afraid—” whispered Wendell’s son. “So . . . played ghost . . . easy because I resemble father if expression right. Just now . . . all lost if couldn’t overcome cowardice. I got the knife and . . . and—”

He fought suddenly for air.

“Knife—”

He was dead!

“The one I could really call cousin,” said Carmella softly. “The only one. And he—”

Tears dropped from her dark eyes. Nellie put her arm around her. She blinked rapidly and looked at The Avenger.

“If it is true, the hugeness of the amount of gold here that you say, you shall have as many millions as you like for what you’ve done.”

The rest knew the answer to that, but Carmella didn’t. So The Avenger patiently replied.

“We need no money. We have all we can use. You are welcome to the help, because that is our job.”

The wind had almost gone down. The clouds were breaking in the far sky. The fire was dying. There would be a residue of gold from the flames as big as a mother lode.

“I’ll use it to help others like myself,” said Carmella, like a person taking a vow. “It will feed and clothe refugees of all nations.”

The Avenger nodded and went off a few paces to be alone. His own vow he did not speak of.

The vow to fight on and on against crime, wherever it reared its hideous head. The vow to go on, till death stopped him—The Avenger!

THE END

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

HOUSE OF DEATH

CHAPTER I The Gold Coin

CHAPTER II Nemesis

CHAPTER III Death in Her Hair!

CHAPTER IV The Shining Clan

CHAPTER V The Former Great

CHAPTER VI Haygar from Turkey

CHAPTER VII Jailed for Murder

CHAPTER VIII Double Kidnap

CHAPTER IX The House in the Sea

CHAPTER X Answer in Arabic

CHAPTER XI Wholesale Disaster

CHAPTER XII Dead Men’s Bones

CHAPTER XIII Nellie Horns

CHAPTER XIV Reunion

CHAPTER XV The Night Cries Out!

CHAPTER XVI From the Tomb!

CHAPTER XVII Hell’s Host

CHAPTER XVIII Bent Walls