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

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

FIRST PRINTING: JULY, 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: 0-446-74-260-0

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

THREE GOLD CROWNS

CHAPTER I: Death’s Doorway

CHAPTER II: Murder Frame

CHAPTER III: Councils of War

CHAPTER IV: Shadow at Night

CHAPTER V: Buried Clue

CHAPTER VI: Fiery Baptism

CHAPTER VII: Over the Rails

CHAPTER VIII: Money or the Chair

CHAPTER IX: The Curious Key

CHAPTER X: Blank Paper

CHAPTER XI: Brother and Sister

CHAPTER XII: Stubborn Facts

CHAPTER XIII: Two More Crowns

CHAPTER XIV: Death’s Sting

CHAPTER XV: Dead Dentist

CHAPTER XVI: Meet the Gang

CHAPTER XVII: The Perforated Ball

CHAPTER XVIII: The Rusty Nail

THREE

GOLD CROWNS

CHAPTER I

Death’s Doorway

You don’t put the name “Death” under a doorbell. How could you collect the rent from Death? What would you confront if you rang the bell—and the door beside it was opened?

No, you can’t have Death on your tenants’ list. But just the same, the name under the bell beside that particular door should have been I.M. Death.

Instead, it was A.A. Ismail.

The doorway was in a dilapidated building. The building was in a slum-and-warehouse neighborhood. The street lights around the neighborhood were scarce; in fact, they were practically nonexistent.

In these shadows, toward this dilapidated building, a stoop-shouldered, smallish man of late middle age made his plodding way.

The man looked to be about sixty. His shoulders were set in the slouch of years of clerical work. His eyes were brown and blinked in a watery way, as if he should have worn glasses all the time instead of only when he was poring over musty books.

The musty books of the law. For the man was a law clerk.

John Smathers, the stoop-shouldered, watery-eyed fellow poking along the dark street toward the dark doorway, worked as clerk in the law firm of Markham Farquar, which was a small firm but a well-known and respected one. He was an old employee of the firm. He was a timid man, and he looked highly uneasy as he went along this noisome neighborhood.

A.A. Ismail. Whoever Ismail was, he certainly lived in a squalid district.

Smathers stopped at the street sign, set in the corner of a building that was old when he was a boy. He adjusted pince-nez on his nose and looked at the street number of the building itself. He was near the address of Ismail.

A drunk staggered toward him. “Got time to buy . . . hungry man a cup o’coffee?” he whined.

Smathers walked past. The man lurched toward him.

“Hey, you! I as’ a civil queshun.”

Smathers almost ran to get away. A very timid man, and he’d be glad to get out of this section.

Here was the address. Smathers stared at the door for a couple of minutes and at the windows around the door. There was no light showing in the building, which was a small, ancient frame house, set between two big brick structures whose function could not be made out at all in the night.

Smathers shivered and his finger trembled when, at last, he hesitatingly poked at the bell.

The faint peal sounded through the house as if it were empty. Sound makes a different impression on an empty house than on a full one. But the place must be occupied. Otherwise, why would he have been sent here?

The door swung open slowly, as if by itself. Smathers’s collar felt too tight and he looked wildly around. There wasn’t a soul in sight on the sidewalk. Only the raucous singing of the drunk, around a corner now, came to his ears.

Then he saw that the door had not opened by itself. In the little hall behind the door, a hall sunk in such deep shadow that he could only guess it was a hall, was a deeper shadow. It was about the size of a man, and it was coming slowly toward Smathers. The elderly little law clerk got out just one sentence.

“Are you M-Mr. Ismail?” he quavered.

And then he screamed!

It was a horrible sound in the dark, deserted street. It was like the high scream of a rabbit when a weasel leaps upon it. Or the shrill neigh of a horse when a mountain lion lands on its neck.

Just that sound, suddenly aborted, and then Smathers was lying on the threshold of the little house at the feet of the shadow—if the shadow had feet; you couldn’t even see that in the dimness.

The top of Smathers’s head was a dreadful thing, and it was just as well that darkness hid it. But even if it couldn’t be seen, the way the body lay, like an emptied sack, told that he would never move or speak again. It had been Death’s door to which he had come!

The shadowy figure caught the inert body by the right arm and dragged it down the hall to a rear room. Into this room, faint light came from a street light, which shone down a two-foot crack between two buildings. The light was too dim for the shadowy figure to become anything but a shadowy figure. But there was enough illumination for the figure to do its grisly labor.

The shadowy figure bent over the dead clerk’s head.

It made several violent motions, then reached for a rubber blanket in a corner.

The rubber blanket was the only thing in the room. The place was as bare as a grave; dust inches thick showed that it had been vacant for months.

The shadowy figure placed the body in the blanket and rolled it up. Something slipped from the dead law clerk’s pocket. Something so dimly to be seen that you couldn’t tell if it was an envelope or not. But it seemed to be an envelope, long, the size to take standard-size letter paper.

The figure was too engrossed to see that envelope, if that’s what it was. The figure only gathered up the slight body of the dead man, rolled in the rubber blanket, and took it down the hall again.

About twelve minutes passed when a small sedan, of a common type, stopped next to the high board fence of a New Jersey freight yard.

The figure driving the sedan was still only a shadow. The darkness caused by simply turning out a dashlight is quite concealing. And at the point where the car stopped, there was dimness because the street lamps were far away.

The body in the blanket looked like a roll of carpet when the shadowy figure took it out. Displaying a good deal of strength, the figure managed to hoist the body up head-high, and let it fall on the other side of the fence. There was a sickening thud as it hit.

The nimble figure followed it over the fence, picked it up again, and went across the tracks.

Across many tracks, to the double-tracked main line that ran through the big freight yards.

Far down one of these tracks sounded a whistle. The track itself was thrumming with the approach of heavy wheels bearing hundreds of tons of weight.

The shadowy figure laid the bundle squarely on this track and went back to the fence. Over it like a shadow, a catlike landing on the sidewalk, and the sedan drove off.

But now there was a spectator!

While the shadowy figure was over the fence, another car had driven up. It had come slowly up the dark street, along which ran a railroad track lined with freight-loading platforms.

Then the driver had seen that sedan and stopped in deep shadow. When the sedan rolled off with the shadowy figure at the wheel, this car followed.

The trailing car was skillfully handled. At least to the eye, there was no sign that the driver of the sedan knew there was anyone after him.

The sedan went at a decorous pace, through the tunnel to Manhattan, stopping for all red lights and otherwise obeying the rules. It went to the vicinity of the little house with the name Ismail on the doorbell, but stopped a block away.

The shadowy figure got out and made its way, head held down, to a dark alley entrance. And—this seemed to be a night of grim, dim figures—a second shadowy figure climbed from behind the wheel of the trailing car.

This second dim figure went into the alley about fifteen seconds after the first, moving catlike in an effort to remain unseen.

Then there was silence.

Silence in the place of blackness, with the sedan and the trailing car a half-block apart like patient steeds waiting for their masters.

But it was soon apparent that one of the masters was not going to return!

In the blackness of the alley, if you’d been close enough to listen, a sound could have been heard. It was the heavy, muffled smack of something hitting a skull, followed by the scraping of shoes on cobbles as the victim collapsed.

And then just one shadow came back out of the alley. It got into the sedan, indicating that it was the trailer who remained in there. The sedan drove off, melting into the night.

A grim night of shadows—and of screams.

For suddenly out of the alley, which looked like a hole bored in darkness itself, came a woman’s shriek!

Dainty high heels had borne her to the sprawl which was a dead man. A dainty toe had touched the inert mass.

Then the scream.

But just before all this, right after the two had entered the alley, still another unidentifiable figure had searched through the sedan. It had gone over it swiftly but carefully, then had run off, a little before the one shadow came back from the alley. It had turned left around the first corner, and the street was again still and deserted.

Murder and sudden death had rippled the black surface of the night like stones thrown into a grim pool. Now the ripples died and the night was calm.

CHAPTER II

Murder Frame

The man walking along the avenue near the south end of Manhattan was truly a giant. A bad man to pick a fight with. Yet his face indicated that he was good-natured, and his china-blue eyes beamed affably on all comers.

The name of the giant was Algernon Heathcote Smith. But few ever dared call him Algernon or Heathcote. The name was Smitty, if you wanted to stay healthy. He was the valued aide of the almost mythical crime fighter known as The Avenger.

“Gosh! It’s sure warm for November,” said Smitty, wiping his forehead and paying no attention to the people who stared after him because of his size.

“It sure is,” agreed the giant’s companion, squinting his eyes against the morning sun.

Smitty’s companion was worth a second glance, too. He was not oversized, about five feet eleven. But he moved with a litheness indicating compact power, and he was very good-looking. Dark brown hair, high off his forehead; black eyes, blazing with vitality and alertness.

This was Cole Wilson, who had recently joined the indomitable little band who, under the direction of Dick Benson, The Avenger, made fighting crime a full-time occupation.

“For once I’m glad we’re not working on a case,” confessed the giant, Smitty. “I think I’ll—”

The thin, shrill noise past his ear was like the hum of a mosquito, magnified a thousand times. But it was not a mosquito. It was the unmistakable and terrible whine of a high-powered bullet! And it had come so close to Smitty’s head that it had nearly parted his hair for him—low and on the side.

For all his bulk, Smitty could move like a streak when he had to. But alert as the giant was, The Avenger’s latest recruit, Cole Wilson, was even more wary. Before Smitty could leap forward and to the side to put the bulk of a parked truck between him and the source of the bullet, Cole Wilson had shoved at his arm and reached the protection first.

Both had moved far faster than ordinary men. That was because their reactions were habitually timed to beat that fast mover, Death. The two crouched behind the solid bulk of the truck.

There was a second whine, and then a spang as if a gong had been struck. The old-style water-temperature gauge sprouting from the radiator cap of the truck disappeared as it was blown in a hundred pieces.

After that there were no more shots. Smitty looked at Cole, china-blue eyes as perplexed as Cole’s blazing black ones.

“Now what in the world’s behind that?” rasped Smitty. He looked irritated, and he was irritated. He was used to being shot at. But, being a reasonable man, he was annoyed when the shots came for no apparent reason.

Cole shrugged compact shoulders.

“I don’t know. We’re not working on any case just now. We were just taking our time walking to the Bleek Street headquarters through a nice fall morning. We were talking of nothing but the weather? And bam! Somebody tries to kill us from a block or two away with a high velocity bullet.”

“Think the guy’s still watching for us—whoever he may be?” said Smitty.

Cole Wilson shrugged again, and didn’t venture to put his head above the nose of the truck.

Some people had seen the odd way in which the motometer of the truck had exploded. They were watching the even odder way these two men were acting. They didn’t know anything about the bullets, since they’d come from too far away to hear shots.

“Let’s have a try,” said Smitty.

Cole was bareheaded, but the giant wore a hat, a gray felt. He thrust it up above the snout of the truck, as a man might thrust his helmet up above the side of a trench.

And about the same thing happened to it.

The hat jerked in his hand, and a hole appeared.

A couple of the people nearby yelled and were joined by a growing crowd.

“Let’s get out of here,” snapped Cole.

Another truck was coming up the avenue. The two let it pass, then with a quick dash caught up with it. For several steps, from their cover to the moving vehicle, they were in the open. But if more shots came, they weren’t close enough for the two men to know.

The truck was going in the direction from which the shots were coming; so the two men rode the tailgate, meanwhile staring around and trying to spot the marksman.

“No soap,” sighed Cole, after they’d gone two long blocks. “He might have been in any one of those windows.”

Smitty nodded. There were hundreds of windows in the distance they had covered. It would take a squad of police to track down the spot from which the shots had been fired. And by that time the rifleman would be miles away.

The two simply hopped a cab, went around a long circuit, and approached Bleek Street from the south instead of from the north.

Bleek Street was where The Avenger had his headquarters.

Dick Benson, figuratively, owned the whole short block that was all there was to Bleek Street.

On one side, the back of a windowless concrete warehouse took up the whole block. On the other were several stores and small storage buildings, under long lease to Benson, and in the center were three narrow old brick buildings that had once been shabby rooming houses.

Behind their dingy facade, these three narrow buildings had been thrown into one, and luxuriously fitted up.

The top floor was all one vast room; and in here were to be found almost any of The Avenger’s aides when they were not out on a case.

They were all here, now, when Smitty and Cole Wilson stepped in.

There was Fergus MacMurdie, a dour, bony Scot with sandy hair and sandy ropes of eyebrows over bleak blue eyes.

There was Nellie Gray, beautiful small blonde with a look of being more fragile than porcelain but actually able to handle most stalwart men.

There was Josh Newton, a sleepy-looking black who seemed dull-witted but was actually an honor graduate from Tuskegee. With Josh—always with Josh—was Mrs. Josh: Rosabel Newton, also a college graduate; a beautiful Negress who had performed more than one perilous task against the underworld.

And then there was The Avenger.

Dick Benson sat behind his big desk as Wilson and Smitty came in. If ever a man was a dynamo of power, regardless of his average size, it was this young man with the pale, deadly eyes and the thick, close-cropped black hair.

“Trouble?” said Dick Benson, the instant Cole and Smitty put in an appearance.

“How did you know that?” demanded Smitty.

Benson didn’t even bother to shrug. His almost colorless eyes dwelt on the giant.

“You went out with a hat; you came back without one.”

“Well, you’re right,” said Smitty. “I left it in the street because it’s not the fashion to wear hats with bullet holes in them.”

“Bullet holes!” gasped Nellie.

The diminutive blonde always kidded the giant, but the rest of the little band knew that she had a large regard for him. The report of bullets coming close enough to him to drill holes in his hat made her pale a little.

Smitty told what had happened, and The Avenger got up from behind his desk and walked abstractedly to the nearest window.

Even that move, not intended to be particularly fast, spoke volumes about the man’s great physical power and miraculously fast coordination of thought and action. Movement was a swift, smooth flow with him.

He looked out between slats of nickel-steel, tinted to look like ordinary Venetian blinds, but more bulletproof than blinds. And as he looked out the window, Smitty stared at him.

Not so long ago Dick Benson, who was only in his twenties, though few men of middle age had done the things he had, had appeared to be almost elderly. That was because his hair had been white and his face paralyzed.

A great personal loss through the machinations of crime had turned Benson into a cold, crime-fighting machine. That same loss, by a tremendous nerve shock, had whitened his hair and paralyzed his facial muscles into a sort of white wax death mask.

Then recently, a nerve shock of a different sort had tingled the facial flesh back to life and had caused all his thick white hair to fall out. And when the hair had grown back in, it had taken its first color—black.

“We’ll have a visitor pretty soon,” Dick Benson prophesied.

The rest looked at him—a man so youthful, who was known in financial, crime, and professional circles throughout the nation.

“But there wasn’t any sense in anyone’s trying to kill Cole and me,” protested Smitty.

“That’s just it.” Dick’s gray eyes, so pale as to seem like holes in his straight-featured, dominant face, still were staring down between the slanted nickel-steel slats at the street. “There was no reason for it. Yet there must be one, even if we don’t know it. Murders aren’t attempted for no reason at all. It must be, therefore, that someone is coming to us for help, and somebody else knows that and wants to warn us off.”

The pale eyes narrowed as they focused on something down in the street. Dick walked back to the big desk and sat down.

“And here,” he said, as a pinpoint of light glowed red in the wall beside the door, “is our visitor. Show him up, Smitty.”

The pinpoint of red light had resulted when a finger pressed the bell in the downstairs lobby—the bell over the small but mighty legend “Justice, Inc.,” which was the official name of The Avenger’s crime-fighting band.

In a moment the man who had pressed the bell was on the threshold. He looked around from face to face, but almost at once his gaze centered on the countenance of Dick Benson. Dick was obviously the leader here; he would have looked like the leader in whatever group he might be seen.

“Mr. Benson? My name is Markham Farquar. I’m a lawyer.”

Farquar was a man of fifty, with a direct gaze that was pleasing in its openness. He had thick gray hair and gray eyes and looked more youthful and fit than his years would warrant. He was nearly six feet tall and had a commanding presence.

“I’ve heard of your firm, Mr. Markham,” replied Dick Benson with a nod.

Markham permitted himself a wan smile.

“It’s fairly well known. And I’ve handled the troubles of clients fairly well for some years. Now I’m in trouble myself. I decided finally to come here because I’ve heard of the miracles Justice, Inc., has performed in helping people who were beyond the aid of the police.”

They all looked at him, Nellie and Smitty, Cole and Mac, Josh and Rosabel. But the coldest eyes in the room were those of The Avenger. Dick’s face was also the calmest. Only that face had been expressionless because it was paralyzed. Now, though able to express emotion as any other man’s face could, it seldom did. Dick held it immobile to guard against betraying his thoughts.

“I am being blackmailed,” said Markham Farquar, with a slight break in his voice, though he kept his countenance fairly well under control. “That’s why I came here.”

“The police are equipped to handle that,” said Dick quietly.

“Not this type of blackmail,” said Farquar bitterly. “You see, the blackmailers are too powerful. They are rich, respected, with fine business backgrounds and not a shadow against their names. The police can’t fight that type of criminal. Only you, as far as I know, can fight that kind.”

Dick said nothing. His colorless, infallible eyes were like drills on the troubled gray eyes of the lawyer.

“You’ve heard perhaps of Robert Beall, owner of the Beall Paper Manufacturing Company?”

Dick nodded.

“And Fredrick Salloway, of Salloway and Burke Contracting Corporation?”

“Yes.”

“And Iando Cleeves, the art collector?”

“Yes. I have met all three. You mean to say those men are blackmailing you?”

“Yes.” Farquar smiled crookedly. “You see what chance I’d have of help if I went to the police. The mention of blackmail in connection with three such respected men makes even you look questioning.”

“Go on,” was all Dick said. “What’s the foundation for their blackmail?”

“Murder!” said Farquar.

The pale diamond drills grew sharper yet.

“I have—or had—a clerk by the name of Smathers in my employ,” said Farquar. “A trusted man. He has been with me for over twenty years. Three nights ago he disappeared. He ran off, or wandered off; perhaps he died somewhere of a heart attack or an accident. I don’t know. There has been no news of him since. And Salloway, Beall, and Cleeves claim I murdered him.”

“They must have something to back up such a claim,” said Dick Benson.

Farquar nodded. “They have. At least, they claim they have. Each of the three claims to have a clue that will nail the murder of my clerk to me and send me to the chair. I don’t know what trumped-up evidence they have, but I am afraid it might be something pretty serious. Otherwise, three such men would have never made it the basis for blackmail for such a large sum.”

“A large sum, Mr. Farquar?” said Dick.

“One million dollars,” said the lawyer, with a great sigh. “I haven’t quite that much, but I could raise that amount if I had to. And I’ll have to if you can’t help me.”

“You don’t know the nature of the fake clues they have?”

“No,” said Farquar. “I do know this, though. Beall keeps his in a jewel case that belonged to his wife. Salloway has his in a cigar case that never leaves his person. And Cleeves keeps his in a small dispatch box. Which means that the clues are pretty small objects. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.”

“And you want us to get these things from the three men for you?”

“Yes,” said Farquar, with a quiver in his voice. “Yes! If only you could get the phony clues away from them—I’d be saved. And I’d be almost willing to pay you the sum of the blackmail demanded.”

“We don’t work for money, Mr. Farquar,” said Dick crisply. He didn’t bother to add that they didn’t have to work for money because the great gold hoard of the ancient Aztecs, in a secret spot in Mexico, was theirs to draw on any time they needed funds.

“Will you help me?” pleaded Farquar.

The Avenger didn’t give an answer yet. His pale eyes were incandescent with thought.

“Did anyone know you meant to come here and ask for help?” he said.

“Why . . . no,” said Farquar slowly.

“You didn’t tell anyone of your intention?”

“As far as I can recall, I didn’t tell a soul,” said Farquar slowly. “No—I’m sure of it.”

“We’ll do what we can to help you,” said Dick.

Farquar drew a deep, ragged breath.

“Thank heaven for that!” he exclaimed. “And thank heaven you saw fit to believe me, even though the men I named are so far, apparently, above suspicion.”

“We have a good reason for believing you,” said Cole Wilson impulsively. He was the most impulsive of The Avenger’s aides, the swiftest to act on lightninglike intuition.

When Farquar had gone, after leaving his home and office addresses and phone numbers, Cole turned to The Avenger.

“That’s the reason Smitty and I were shot at,” Cole said. “Somebody knew Farquar meant to come to us for help and wanted to prevent it. The simplest way seemed to remove all of us, one by one, from the land of the living. A pretty grim way, but a sure one.”

“It looks like it,” conceded Dick, pale eyes already glittering in a manner showing that the golden genius in the brain behind them was working on this problem. The rest stared expectantly at him. They knew how fast that brain worked and that there’d be small delay before The Avenger began outlining a course of action.

CHAPTER III

Councils of War

There was no delay at all. Dick Benson sat behind the great desk like a staff officer. His pale eyes stared toward a window as if they were seeing, not the bulletproof nickel-steel slats, but into the future itself.

And The Avenger gave his orders for the preliminary actions.

“We have a well-known lawyer framed with murder and blackmailed by three men almost equally well known and respected. Each of the three, Beall, Salloway, and Cleeves, has some object that can be used as evidence damning Farquar. So our first object is to get those things, whatever they may be.”

“We’ll have to get the containers Farquar mentioned,” said Nellie Gray brightly. “The cigar case, the jewel box, and the dispatch case. When we get those, we get the clues—if what Farquar said was right.”

“Yes,” said The Avenger, his close-cropped head nodding. “Get the containers. Cole, you will take Beall. Try to find where he keeps that jewel case. But also delve into the man’s past and try to find out all you can about his present activities.”

Wilson nodded, black eyes blazing. Cole Wilson had a strong streak of Robin Hood in him. Indeed, it was in an effort of his to help an old friend, in somewhat violent ways, that The Avenger had met him and invited him to join the crime-suppression gang. An assignment like this was just what Cole wanted.

“Smitty,” said The Avenger, voice quiet but vibrant as always. “Do the same with Salloway. MacMurdie, you take Cleeves.”

“Hey, how about me?” said Nellie disappointedly. “Don’t I get a job?”

Barely five feet tall, slender and fragile-looking, the little blonde lived for dangerous assignments as much as any of the men. And she was as effective as any of the men, too.

But Dick Benson shook his head slowly.

“There’ll be plenty for you to do later, Nellie. Just now—”

The warning light next to the door showed its pinprick of red. Smitty stepped to a small box on a table near the entrance.

The little black box was a miniature television set, designed by him, which constantly showed the street vestibule—and anyone who happened to be in that vestibule.

“There’s a girl down there,” he said. “She looks nervous,” he added.

Dick Benson signaled to let her up; so Smitty pressed the release button.

“She’s mighty good-looking, too,” Smitty said.

Nellie’s gaze snapped toward the giant. Her eyes blazed.

“You big dope,” she said. “Any time a pretty face comes along, you’re a pushover—”

She stopped. The rest were grinning at her, and the giant was looking much too solemn.

“But it’s nothing to me how pretty she is or what you may think of her,” she said, trying to cover up, and not doing as good a job of it as she usually did.

The door opened, and the object of conversation stepped into the huge top-floor room.

She was taller than Nellie, and a shade more curvy. She had reddish hair and light brown eyes, and wore a tweed suit in keeping with the unseasonable weather. And she was really something to look twice at.

She stared around at those in the room, then went up to the big desk behind which The Avenger sat.

“I . . . I have something important to tell you,” she faltered. “If we could just be alone—”

“These are my close friends and valued assistants,” said The Avenger; and you forgot his youth, as usual, in the measured authority in his face and tone. “They can hear everything I can.”

The girl hesitated, then sighed.

“All right. If you’re sure they— My name is Harriet . . . Smith. I came here because three nights ago I stumbled over a dead man, and since then my life has been in danger.”

“That’s not very clear,” said Dick Benson.

“My mind isn’t very clear at the moment, either,” said the girl, with an appealing smile.

Nellie suddenly looked as if feminine intuition were advising her to distrust the helplessness and the appeal of that smile. The moonface of the giant Smitty, however, was all sympathy. Harriet Smith was very eye-filling.

“Where did you see this dead man?” asked Dick, face as expressionless as it had been in the days when it was paralyzed from nerve shock and couldn’t show emotion.

“In the alley off Ninth Avenue nearest Canal Street,” the girl said.

“That was three nights ago? What time of night?”

“It was nearly midnight.”

The pale, all-seeing eyes went over her. Expensive suit, stockings of the two-dollar variety, shoes that had cost close to twenty.

“What were you doing in such a neighborhood at such an hour?” Dick said evenly.

“I . . . I just happened to be there,” the girl said.

“You work near there, perhaps?”

“I . . . yes.”

“What do you do?”

“I can’t tell you that. Anyhow, I’ve quit my job. I had to. You see, I’m sure I’ve been followed since then, and I haven’t dared go out on the streets much. I came here to ask you to protect me. If it isn’t too much—I’d like to stay here for a while. I’ve heard this place is a regular fort, and that no one under your protection has ever been hurt.”

Dick Benson’s colorless, brilliant eyes were as expressionless as agate.

“Tell me a little more about this dead man.”

“There’s not much to tell. I was near this alley. I saw a man go in, and another man follow him. I couldn’t see the faces of either of them. They were more like shadows than men. I waited a minute, then went in myself, keeping to the dark places”

“Why did you go in?”

“Well, I thought there might be trouble. Anyway, I went in, and I saw one of the men lying on the cobbles. The other was going through his pockets, I think. It was too dark to be sure. Then, all of a sudden, the man who had been lying down got to his feet. I guess he had been playing possum. He did something to the other man, and slid past me without seeing me—anyway I thought he hadn’t seen me—and ran down the street to a sedan. I went to the man now lying in the alley, and he was dead! I think I screamed. Then I got out of there myself.”

There was a short silence, in which the eyes of The Avenger and the others rested on Harriet Smith, whose story seemed to have so many large holes in it.

“I’d heard of you and how you helped people a long time ago,” Harriet went on. “But I wouldn’t have come here just because I happened to see a dead man. I came because I’m sure I’ve been followed since then. The man who passed me in the alley must have seen me, after all. I guess he is afraid I could identify him in court. I couldn’t—I never did see his face—but he means to kill me to shut me up.”

“So you want protection here.” Dick nodded. “All right, you shall have it.”

He looked at Nellie, but didn’t seem to see the signals of warning which the clear-witted little blonde was trying to wigwag.

“Take Miss Smith to one of the guest rooms downstairs, Nellie,” was all he said.

Mac and Smitty and Cole were gone on their assignments when Nellie got back to the big room.

“That girl’s a fake, chief,” Nellie said anxiously. “She knows a lot more than she has let on.”

The Avenger nodded calmly. “Yes, I think so, too.”

“She came here for more than just protection!” Nellie snapped. “She may be part of a trap of some kind.”

“On the other hand,” Dick said evenly, “she may be in desperate circumstances and want our help very much. But she may be afraid to trust us by telling everything till she has a chance to see for herself if we can be so trusted. We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”

From the big television set at the end wall of the headquarters room came a burr of sound. Then Mac’s voice. Mac was talking through the tiny radio each member of The Avenger’s band carried in a small metal case under his belt. Another marvelous device of Smitty’s, who had no peer as electrical and radio wizard.

“Muster Benson,” said Mac.

“Listening, Mac.”

“The trail starts with yere three skurlies all togetherrr,” burred the Scot. “Cleeves and Salloway and Beall are at the Eighth Avenue office of Salloway this minute. ’Tis a conference of some kind. I’ve radioed Smitty and Cole Wilson to come and start their trailin’ from this point. I’ll get in touch with ye if there are any developments.”

“Right,” said Dick, pale eyes lambent. “Try to catch what they’re talking about.”

This, however, was impossible. Mac couldn’t get near enough to Salloway’s private office to overhear the conference. And that was unfortunate, because he’d have found it most interesting.

There was no longer a Burke in the contracting partnership of Salloway & Burke. Salloway was sole proprietor, and a lucrative business he found it.

Salloway’s office was big and expensive, and so was Salloway himself. He was over six feet tall, heavily built, with a florid face. He sat at a polished teakwood desk that was studded with push buttons.

Robert Beall, of the Beall Paper Manufacturing Co., sat tensely in a chair at the end of the desk. Beall was a smaller man, though also rather heavily built. He had light brown eyes and graying brown hair—and beads of sweat on his forehead.

Iando Cleeves, the art collector, was at the left end of the desk. Cleeves was a small man, slenderly built, and as dapper as a Malacca cane—an excellent example of which he held over his knees like an unsheathed sword.

The conference between the three who had sent Markham Farquar flying in fear to the Bleek Street headquarters of The Avenger was not a long one.

“You’re sure Markham went to see Benson?” Cleeves was saying, hand tightening on the cane. It was a white, slim, almost feminine hand.

“Yes,” said Salloway. His voice was heavy, harsh.

“He couldn’t have had a very convincing story to tell,” said Beall.

“We can’t take a chance on that,” Salloway rumbled. “Even the ghost of a chance that The Avenger, as the fellow is sometimes called, may come in on this case is too much of a risk for us.”

“What do you propose?” asked Cleeves.

“I don’t know what to suggest,” shrugged Salloway. “All I know is that Benson simply must not be allowed to range himself on the side of Markham Farquar. We’re beaten, if that happens. And, gentlemen, you know what will happen to us if we’re defeated in this matter.”

The three of them were silent over that. They knew, all right!

“So?” said Salloway grimly.

“We’d better close down on Markham fast,” said Beall, clenching his hands.

And that, in essence, was all there was to the conference: a resolve on the part of three powerful men that a fourth must not enlist the aid of The Avenger—and that the fourth had better be squeezed hard and fast.

CHAPTER IV

Shadow at Night

In Dick Benson’s top-floor room was a news teletype, over which all the world’s news constantly flowed.

An item came in at about nine o’clock that night that instantly caught The Avenger’s eye.

The item said briefly that, as yet, there had been no identification of the tramp found ground almost to bits in a Newark freight yard.

That was all, but it was enough to make Benson peruse the items of the previous few days.

He hadn’t seen the announcement of the tramp’s death in the first place. After all, that was a small item; the teletype was filled with vaster news these days. But he found it now.

An unidentified tramp had been found in the freight yard, cut to ribbons by car wheels. He had died, the police thought, in the late night of November 3.

That was three nights ago.

And it was three nights ago, according to Farquar, that his clerk, Smathers, had disappeared. The clerk for whose murder the lawyer was now being threatened.

There was nothing on earth to connect the unidentified tramp with Smathers. In fact, there was nothing to connect the tramp with anything—no labels in clothes, no other marks of identification had been found. But there was just a chance that there might be some connection; so The Avenger prepared to act on the news.

And at the same time, a floor below, the pretty guest they’d put up at Bleek Street earlier in the day was apparently prepared to act on something, too.

She seemed ready to go out somewhere.

But she wasn’t going out because, standing at her door and listening, she could hear Nellie Gray moving about in the next room. And the door of that next room was open so that if Harriet Smith went down the hall, Nellie would be sure to see her.

Then there was a buzz from the next room. The signal was to summon Nellie up to The Avenger’s desk. Harriet didn’t know that, but she did know that after the signal there were steps, and Nellie was out of the way.

The coast was clear. Harriet went down the hall to the stairs and down to the street. And Nellie, on the top floor, faced The Avenger.

“Nellie,” Dick Benson said, “I think it might be a good idea if we tried to trace Smathers, Farquar’s clerk, from Farquars office. None of the lines I’ve put out have yielded any information about Smathers after he left the office three nights ago. He may have gone home, and then out, or he may have gone directly to his death somewhere. It’s possible that he left some clue to his destination in Farquar’s office; something that Farquar himself has been unable to turn up, or, if he has uncovered it, something whose meaning he can’t read. You go to Farquar’s office and see.”

“I’m on my way,” answered Nellie, smiling. “But, chief, that girl—Harriet Smith—I’d been sort of keeping an eye on her.”

The Avenger’s pale, icy eyes considered that.

“We have no right to hold her here if she wants to leave. But I’ll set this telltale to inform me if her door opens, and I’ll have Josh trail her if she goes anywhere.”

His steely hand flipped a small switch. The little switch looked like the kind on two-phone systems, but actually it had nothing to do with the phone. It flashed a tiny blue light if the door of Harriet Smith’s room was opened.

This movement was too late, had Dick Benson only known it. Harriet’s door would not open because it already had opened—to let Harriet out into the night. But The Avenger could not know that, being no magician with a crystal ball, even if he was a genius in his way.

He had no way of telling that Harriet Smith, even at that moment, was stepping into a cab at the avenue end of Bleek Street.

“Go to Eighth Avenue,” she said. “Just cruise down it, toward the Battery, till I tell you to stop.”

When Nellie had guessed that Harriet hadn’t told all she knew, when she asked for protection, she had guessed exactly right. Harriet apparently knew lots more.

For one thing, it seemed that she somehow knew where the clerk, Smathers, had gone on that night so fateful for him.

“Stop here,” she said to the driver when the cab was a little more than a block from the door which bore the name A.A. Ismail.

The driver stared. This was not only a swell-looking girl in her own right, but also a well-dressed girl. It was plain that he was wondering why she wanted to stop on a dark street like this one.

But he stopped. And Harriet paid him. And then Harriet stood right where she was until the cab got out of sight. Only then did she go on in the dimness caused by insufficient street lighting.

It took all the courage Harriet had to wait like that. It wouldn’t have taken a psychologist to divine that she would much rather have had the driver wait for her. Or even go with her. For she was almost uncontrollably frightened.

But some vital urge drove her on up the dark and deserted street to the fateful door.

A.A. Ismail.

She looked at the name as if she had known it before, but had located the house by its appearance alone. And then she looked at the house.

Not a light showing. No more than there had been on that night of death for Smathers. Empty and ominous, it loomed before her; a shabby frame shack set between two high brick commercial buildings, waiting to be torn down for a newer, larger building to take its place.

Harriet tried the door, flinching at the noise made when the rusty knob creaked around. The door was locked, naturally. She stepped to a window and tried to look in.

If she’d thought the street was dark, she knew better now. The street blazed with light compared to the pitlike blackness beyond the window.

She shivered again but pried at the window. And it went up.

Anyone practiced in that type of entrance would have paused a long time on finding that window unfastened. Because it shouldn’t have been. Empty houses are locked and shuttered as tightly as possible, normally, to keep out vandals. The fact that Harriet seemed to feel no emotion but relief indicated that she was an amateur at burglary.

She stepped soundlessly into the blackness beyond the window, and she did have sense enough to almost close the sash behind her so that an illegal entrance wouldn’t be guessed by the first person to walk past.

Then she stood there, letting her eyes become accustomed to the darkness. And gradually forms became visible.

There was a great, tattered sofa abandoned by whoever had moved out of here last. There was a double doorway leading, evidently, to the old living room and to the next room toward the rear which, correspondingly, must have been the dining room or library.

There was a smaller door to the hall on which the street opened. And eventually Harriet went for that.

She moved like a frightened rabbit, with feet as light as her fear could make them. She took seconds for each step. But finally she reached the hall. She listened, and then jumped a foot.

From down the hall to the rear, it seemed she could hear a sound.

It was a faint, rasping sound. It might have been made by the dry rustle of scales as a big snake moved. It seemed to have nothing human about it.

Then Harriet decided it was her imagination, because minutes of wary listening didn’t bring any more sound to her straining ears.

There was something frightful about this empty place in the blackness of the night. But she flitted silently across the hall and went up the stairs.

This was a true ordeal. Because half the steps made a squeaking sound under her weight. It was like the squeaking of a flock of bats.

When she reached the top, she took a tiny flashlight out of her purse; and now it became evident that she had come here to search the place where Smathers had died.

There were four small rooms upstairs, and she went over each, foot by foot, with the little light held so that no one outside could catch its glow through a window.

She tiptoed to the low, unfinished attic and looked into that.

Then she stole down the stairs again, with the treads making the little batlike squeakings under her feet.

She turned at the foot of the stairs and went toward the rear of the house on this, the ground floor. And as she drifted noiselessly down the narrow hall, something detached itself from the shadows at the front door.

The thing seemed to be a shadow itself—a human-sized shadow that had leaned back against the closed portal and watched from its cave of blackness while Harriet descended. Now, still like an insubstantial shadow rather than a human, it followed after the girl.

After her, down the hall!

Harriet got to the end door and opened it. Cracked plaster showed in the walls; cracks in the dingy ceiling. The floor was inches deep in dust.

But there was a long smear in the dust, almost like a path, streaking from the center of the room to the threshold where she stood. Her little flash showed that.

Harriet seemed to forget some of her terror in this discovery. She bent low over the line where the dirt had been brushed aside. She went along it inch by inch, with the flash busy every instant.

She saw that, in patches, the floor was actually clean; had been recently scrubbed. And then she saw one ragged round dot in the dirt. And she knew why the other patches had the scrubbed look.

That little dot was the rusty brown of dried blood.

The tiny flash started on. It stopped within a foot of the object that had slid from Smathers’s pocket when his body was dragged through here three nights ago. But the flash never quite reached the object.

Just then she snapped it out!

Harriet held the darkened little tube with ice-cold fingers while her heart pounded in her ears. She thought she’d heard a sound again—behind her.

When she whirled, she could see nothing. Small as the light from the flash was, it had broken that accustomed-to-darkness phase of her eyes, at least temporarily.

She couldn’t see a thing in the direction of the doorway. She couldn’t even see the door itself. Thus, she didn’t see that shadow that was only vaguely of the shape and size of a human being; didn’t see it reaching toward her! Reaching—

If the shadowy figure had gotten her at that moment, she might have had some small chance. Because she was facing toward it, and she might have beaten it off long enough to at least scream.

But at that moment her nerve cracked, and she decided to try a dash for the side window.

She took two steps toward it, and hands got her by the throat!

She did try to scream then—tried wildly, horribly. But the iron fingers choked back sound as well as breath. Her body writhed convulsively, and then she was still.

She could see again, a little, when her eyes opened once more. She didn’t know how long she had been unconscious, but she had an idea it was at least five minutes.

She came back to a full horror of her position, with no merciful seconds in which to wonder where she was or why she was there.

She came to with the realization that she was tightly bound, wrists and ankles, and that the rope smelled of kerosene.

And she realized instantly why she could see a bit now, where she hadn’t been able to before. Now there was light.

It came from little tongues of flame, very small and feeble tongues of flame! They were flickering up from little piles of rags, which also gave off the odor of kerosene; and the little piles were around the walls of the room.

Sound from the doorway drew her gaze. Her eyes turned in that direction just in time to see a kind of shadow drifting out of the room.

Out and down the hall. And then she faintly heard the creaking of the front window, rising and lowering, as the shadow left the building.

She shrieked and heard the sound only as a mumble against her gagged lips. She stared at the flames, leaping high now, about to make an incinerator of the room in which she lay helpless; of the whole house, in fact, in about five minutes.

CHAPTER V

Buried Clue

When Nellie started out to do The Avenger’s bidding and look through the office of Markham Farquar for clues as to Smathers’s destination three nights ago, she had every intention of being quite peaceful and law-abiding about it.

Nellie was always peaceful. At least, that is what she herself always claimed. If you asked anyone else, however, Smitty for example, he’d have told you that Nellie lived for excitement and never was peaceful if she could possibly help it.

Nevertheless, she had every intention of being peaceful in her methods this time.

She started by phoning around to find Farquar and have him meet her at his office and open up for her to make a search.

And she couldn’t find him.

He wasn’t at the office. He wasn’t at his home on Riverside Drive. So she just went to the office building housing the suite in which he worked, intending to have the building watchman admit her.

The building was a small one in the upper Fifties; one of those buildings that had been turned from a tall private home to apartments, then to office suites with a remodeled front. It was too small, she found, to have a night man. There was just the building.

Nellie started to hunt up a pay phone and try again to contact Farquar. But then, as she was turning from the place where she could see across the street to the entrance, she saw a light in the third-floor window.

It was just a glint of light, and it moved. It was as if a big firefly were imprisoned up there. But it was a flashlight.

What was anybody doing prowling in there with a flashlight?

While Nellie was thinking this over and drawing the inevitable conclusions, a man came from the street door. The man wasn’t hurrying or acting suspiciously. The fact that Nellie couldn’t see him very clearly and that he was more an unidentifiable shadow than a man was due to the dimness of the street lighting around that particular entrance.

A hunch tingled along Nellie’s spine that this man ought to be trailed. And the hunch grew when the next few minutes showed no more glints of flashlights in that third-floor window.

But by the time she was sure of it, the man was out of sight. And, anyhow, she had been told to prowl the office of Markham Farquar; she couldn’t do two things at once.

She sighed and went to the building. She didn’t feel like taking time, now, to try to phone Farquar again. So she turned burglar to the extent of picking the lock of the building door and sliding in. Any of The Avenger’s aides could make locks do tricks.

There was a lobby that was really no more than a wide hall, a stairway, and an automatic elevator. Also, next to the elevator, there was a small building directory.

There were only twelve names on it—four tenants for each of the three floors. And Markham Farquar’s office, as she’d surmised, was third floor front.

The office in which that light had showed.

Nellie went up the stairs as soundlessly as a pretty ghost. The lock on Farquar’s door yielded to her touch, too. She went inside, with her own flash working, now. But this time light didn’t show at the window, if anyone had been outside to watch. Nellie was either more careful or more skillful than whoever had been in here before her.

Looking around, she was puzzled. It was almost certain that someone had been in here, searching, just a minute ago. But the place didn’t look it. Everything was perfectly in order.

She began poking around, looking for a possible indication as to the place Smathers had gone three nights ago. The chances were that no such thing was around here to be found. If even Farquar didn’t know where his clerk had gone, it was pretty certain that no hint existed in the office.

There were two rooms to the suite. A big office, the luxurious fittings of which showed that it was Farquar’s own, and a big law-library room with a desk in it that must have belonged to Smathers.

Nellie went to this desk and looked through the drawers. She flipped through names on a phone pad—all names of large, well-known companies. And then she noticed that the big desk blotter was brand-new and clean.

She lifted it, and the old blotter was underneath. She played her light close to it, with a hunch that she was getting warm.

There were many blotted ink lines on it—so many that they were like a bunch of hen tracks. It would have taken all night to decipher them and try to pick one or two full words out. But there was also something that caught the little blonde’s sharp eyes at once.

Slight, regular depressions in the blotter, that crisscrossed over the hen tracks, in a way showing that they had been made later than the tracks.

Nellie took a little tube from her purse, opened the end, and made sprinkling motions. Powdered graphite sprayed over the slight marks. Then she tilted the blotter pad, and the graphite filled them in.

Now she was definitely alert. It began to look as if she’d come out of this with something after all.

Smathers, or someone at Smathers’s desk, had recently penciled an address. The pencil had borne down heavily enough to mark the blotter underneath.

The powder showed a full address, and part of a name. The name was A . . . I . . . ail. That was all she could make out—

Nellie suddenly snapped off the light and sank behind the desk. Her quick ears had caught a sound at the hall door. And in a minute, in the gloom, she saw the door opening!

A man came in, so shrouded in darkness that she saw only a big moving blur.

To repeat, Nellie had felt quite peaceful when she set out that evening. But she was annoyed at the popularity of this office. You’d think it was the Grand Central Terminal. This was the third prowler to enter in the space of a half-hour, counting herself.

She waited behind the desk only till the moving shadow was within reach—then she reached it!

Burly gunmen had been reached by Nellie’s small, white hands. And they had regretted it. This man regretted it, too.

A startled grunt came from his unseen lips. He struck out wildly, a blow that would have knocked Nellie’s blonde head half off her shoulders if it had landed.

But it didn’t land. Instead, she caught the wrist behind the clenched hand, bent her shapely back a bit, and hauled forward, and the man made a neat pinwheel over her shoulders. He was so enthusiastic about it that his feet knocked a bulb out of the chandelier on their way.

The building seemed to jar when he hit; and Nellie, who knew the results of that particular throw, turned her back to him calmly and went to the door. There she turned on the lights.

A bulky man in a shapeless gray suit, with a smashed straw hat on his head, sprawled feebly on the floor and looked at her with glazed eyes. Nellie picked up the phone and called the police.

“Hey!” the man said thickly, making an effort to get up and sinking dizzily back again. “This is no place for cops. I’m a private detective. I got a right to be here.”

“You have a search warrant, of course?” said Nellie.

The man bit his lip and glowered. His hand darted for his shoulder, and sank back again as Nellie came up with a trim, small automatic.

“All right, so you call the cops,” he grunted. “What are you doing here? Are you Farquar’s sister or something?”

“You never can tell,” said Nellie sweetly.

And then the police came. And, surprisingly, the man had told the truth. He was a private detective. One of the cops knew him. The cops knew Nellie, too, when she identified herself as working for Dick Benson. And it was a commentary on The Avenger’s power that they hauled the private dick off, for being where he had no apparent business to be, but not Nellie.

The man reverted to silence as he went. He refused to tell who he was working for or why he was here. He just went along with the police, glaring murder at Nellie on the way. So Nellie decided to follow at once the possible lead from the blotter rather than look around for more traces.

The address might mean nothing at all. It might have been pressed in there weeks ago—though Nellie didn’t think so, because the marks were too perfect. Anyway, she thought she’d look into it before searching further.

There was no way for her to know that the decision was a life-and-death matter; she just made it.

A dingy, apparently long-vacant frame house almost in pitch darkness between two bigger, newer buildings. The name could be filled out now! A.A. Ismail.

Nellie looked at the place and shivered. It was murderous-looking, all right; easy to believe that this was the last place Smathers had visited alive. Though, of course, the mention of it on his blotter in reversed letters didn’t prove definitely that he had come here—

Nellie gasped suddenly. Through a front window she had suddenly seen a warm, pinkish glow. Rather beautiful, in its way; but it sent her fingers flying at the door lock in double-quick time.

For that pinkish glow was the reflection of a beginning fire in the frame house. Fire! The place would go up like a matchbox if a fire got started.

She jammed the door open and leaped into the hall. No need to use her flash here. The fire was leaping incredibly high and fast. From a rear room. She ran there.

Great, frantic eyes glaring at her over a gag; bound wrists and ankles of a writhing body—a girl’s body.

Harriet Smith’s body!

And around the walls of the room, an almost solid ring of fire was crackling and sending off thick black smoke indicating kerosene.

Nellie’s hand ripped into her purse and came out with a half-dozen small gelatin pellets. She tossed these at the ring of fire, one at a time, as if tossing pennies at a crack.

The gelatin melted almost instantly in the heat, and the pellets released their contents: a new kind of smother gas turned out by the eminent chemical genius, MacMurdie, in his drugstore-laboratory. The fire turned a sick yellow, sputtered and went out.

Nellie unbound Harriet, and ripped the adhesive tape from her lips.

“You’ve saved my life,” gasped Harriet.

“Looks like it,” said Nellie. “What on earth are you doing here?”

But she didn’t wait for Harriet to answer. In the rosy glow from the fire, when she first leaped into the room, she had seen something that remained printed on her memory.

She went to it and picked it up. A long envelope, bulky with paper contents. She put it in the front of her dress—

Nellie was almost caught off guard.

She had assumed that whoever had started this fire had gone away from here as far and fast as possible, before the blaze should draw crowds and the fire department. But it seemed this was the wrong assumption. The fire starter had waited a block away for flame to billow up. When it hadn’t, he had returned to investigate, and he had brought a pal with him!

Harriet’s swift scream as she saw twin shadows glide through the doorway whirled Nellie around in time to get her hands up.

Her small arms were rigid as bars. The charging shape couldn’t change direction. The blur that was its face banged into the heels of her pretty palms. It was a notable straight-arm, and the shadow sat down with a most unshadowlike thump.

“Harriet!” Nellie called. “The door! Run!”

But Harriet couldn’t run because the other shadow had her in a fierce grip. So Nellie tended to that, too. Just a little maid of all work, she thought grimly, as she leaped.

She was on the back of this second man like a panther. He released Harriet, who streaked for the door, and turned his attention to Nellie.

He got her by the throat! But first her trained fingers had caught folds of flesh under his arms, high up.

It became an endurance test. But the man weakened first. The hold Nellie had found was excruciating torture.

Just as stars were beginning to explode behind her popping eyeballs, Nellie heard him groan and felt his grip slacken. Her hands drove up between his wrists, breaking his hold. Then she was at the door, moving like an uncoiling spring. She had felt a key in the lock when she entered. She flipped this around, heard banging on the locked door, and joined Harriet on the street.

“I won’t be able to swallow with comfort for a week,” she mused, feeling her sore throat and at the same time slipping a hand under Harriet’s shaky arm.

But she was well content. They’d be gone from there in her car before the men could break out. And they hadn’t gotten that envelope from her. It crackled reassuringly in the front of her dress.

CHAPTER VI

Fiery Baptism

Robert Beall had a rather magnificent home out on Long Island. It was set on an acre of ground, and the acre was mostly shrubbery and rare plants.

Which made it tough for Cole Wilson.

Wilson had picked up Beall’s trail at Salloway’s office on Mac’s radioed information of the conference there. He had followed Beall to his home, and lurked around here ever since.

Wilson had done an excellent job of trailing. In fact, it looked as if Wilson could do an excellent job with most anything. That was why he had been invited to join Benson’s little crime-fighting band.

Wilson was so fast with his compact muscles and so swift of brain that he had almost beaten The Avenger himself. So Benson had welcomed him as an aide.

But Cole Wilson was to find that all his powers were needed on this job!

It was just about dusk, and the thickly covered ground of the estate made his investigation difficult. A young army could slink around between those bushes, in this light, without being seen.

So Wilson decided to get closer.

He was sitting in his car a block away, under a drooping willow. He was leaning far back with his blazing black eyes almost closed. Anyone passing would think he had merely pulled up for a nap. Now he abandoned those tactics.

He got out of the car, moving swiftly, almost as compact and powerful a figure as The Avenger. He went toward the Beall place.

He pulled himself up and over the high iron fence, as quickly and easily as an athlete scaling parallel bars, and dropped on the other side.

He went toward the house.

Twice since he had been parked back there, he had done this. He had prowled the bushes; had even peered in cautiously through the windows. He had seen nothing. Beall had apparently just gone in—and buried himself. There hadn’t been a sign of the man, of a servant or anyone else.

Cole went through the procedure again, looking in all reachable windows, prowling through the shrubbery. It was nearly dark when he got around the house to the rear. And there he swiftly slunk back out of sight as he saw his first sign of life.

There was a four-car garage back there. And a man was at one of the doors.

The door was open. The man, in chauffeur’s rig, was bending over the hood with a watercan in his hand, filling the radiator. He didn’t see Wilson. And Wilson got out of there fast, back to his car.

It looked very much as if Beall, or somebody, was about to drive out, and his job was to follow if it was Beall.

Down the line was a big house with a “For Rent” sign on it. Wilson started his motor and rolled the car toward the driveway of that house. He intended to back in, and from there he could follow no matter which way a car from Beall’s place went. Where he’d been, he’d have had to take time to turn around, if the chauffeur had driven by him instead of away from him.

A methodical man, Wilson. And a good watcher. He could be morally sure that no one had entered the Beall estate since he’d been there.

What he couldn’t know, of course, was that there had been visitors before he got there. And that these visitors had heliographed a message to others, over four blocks away, before the sun went down.

Just before Wilson got to the driveway, he saw a light go on in an upper window, and then wink out again. His wary black eyes narrowed.

It had been a regular electric light, regularly turned on, and then turned off. But it could have been a signal—

The instant he heard the motor roar behind him, he twirled his wheel to get his car up over the curb. But he wasn’t fast enough. Just after the front wheels bounced over the curbing, the car behind him rammed into him, viciously, deliberately!

Wilson’s head was jerked back on his neck, but he had the car door open and was out on the strip of lawn between the street and sidewalk in a second. And in that second he had his gun out.

Four men were piling from the car that had rammed his. His gun spat! One of them staggered backward with red streaming from his shoulder. Only his shoulder. The Avenger had told Cole the code of Justice, Inc.: “Try always not to kill.” Though the telling hadn’t been necessary. Cole, too, would do anything rather than take life.

So one was out, wounded, but the other three were very much alive. And as their guns leaped in their hands, Cole had to jump sideways and back to get the bole of a tree between him and death!

He had to perform this maneuver backward, with his eyes on the guns. So the first thing he knew of men behind him, at that tree, was when a clubbed gun raked down on his head, and another whistled an inch from his ear as he ducked.

He heard the scream of another car’s tires as they whirled out of Beall’s driveway, and saw the car as it came toward him. The chauffeur was at the wheel, and there were two men in the rear.

One of the two had adhesive tape over his lips.

The three men with the guns had turned on their heels and were racing for their machine again. But the two with Wilson were bending all their efforts toward killing him.

Cole managed to roll from another blow; then two shots from the other man caught him squarely in the chest. He cried out, swayed, and fell. So the two men raced for the car that had rammed Cole’s, too.

The car wasn’t damaged too much to run. It roared around in a U turn, straightened out, and trailed the other machine—the one with the gagged man in it—down the suburban street.

But on the back bumper, clinging hard to a taillight on a nickel standard, was Cole Wilson!

About the first thing The Avenger had done when Cole joined up was to hand him a bulletproof garment and insist that he wear it always. It was fashioned of a substance of Benson’s own invention, called celluglass.

The two slugs fired point-blank at him had made bruises he’d have for days, but that was all. However, it had seemed like a good idea to Cole to play dead, and then try to grab onto the rear of the ramming car when it turned to speed after the chauffeur-driven one.

So now he knew what it meant to have a bull by the tail!

Cole hung on with one hand and with the other felt for the tiny radio at his belt. He began tapping a message, over and over, with his fingernail?

“On gang car going north from Beall’s. On car going north from Beall’s. Following kidnaped man. Following kidnaped man. Wilson.”

He hadn’t tapped this many times when the car slowed. It turned right, then left, then into a junkyard.

The instant the car had stopped, Wilson hopped off the rear bumper and slid behind a head-high pile of scrap iron. And it was lucky he did so, for hardly had the car ceased moving when a man appeared near where Wilson was hiding, and closed the swinging gate in the high board fence around the yard.

It was quite dark now. But in the light from the cars, Wilson saw the men drag a form from that first car. The man who was bound and gagged. He saw them lay this man on the refuse-littered ground. And in the meantime he was tapping on the tiny radio transmitter again.

He had seen a street sign two blocks before the car reached the yard. He gave this street over and over. And then he followed the men when they carried their victim, whoever he was, into a low shed without windows and half falling apart.

Wilson went to the rear of the shed. He was wondering who the kidnaped man was. Beall? It didn’t seem likely. Beall was one of the blackmailers. A visitor to Beall’s house, then?

Cole started a little as the possibility occurred to him that the man might be Farquar himself. But as he thought these things, he was working at a loose plank in the rear of the shed.

The men hadn’t bothered to pick a sound building to toss their victim into, because he was bound. Their carelessness made it easy for Cole. The shed was about ready to tumble, anyhow. He got two wide planks off almost without noise, let alone effort.

He went into the shed. The form of the bound man could barely be seen on the floor. Cole put his lips close to the man’s ear.

“Don’t yell. It’s a friend.”

Then he untied the man’s bonds, and took off the gag.

“Farquar?” he whispered, trying to see the man’s features in the darkness.

There was not to be an answer to that question.

A yell came from the rear of the shed, close.

“Cover the front, you guys! There’re planks off the back! Somebody’s in there!”

Cole leaped to the front door, which wasn’t secured because the prisoner had been bound and helpless. He opened the door a crack, and hastily shut and barred it. Three men were running toward it with drawn guns.

Cole went to the rear and stuck his head out the slot where the planks were out. He stuck it back again even more quickly as a shot spanged next to his nose!

He had loosed the bound man, and thought everything under control. And now it was all haywire. He crouched in the darkness, listening to the rescued man’s breathing—and to words from outside.

“Who’s in there?”

“How would I know? How’d he get in? That’s the question.”

“Must be he slipped past Fritz at the gate. But that ain’t the real question. Question is—what do we do with him?”

Somebody laughed without mirth.

“We give him a hunk of lead and send him home in a special car, of course.”

“No, I know he has to be rubbed out, but how do we do it without gettin’ the cops around? It was a boner to fire those shots. We better not fire any more.”

“We do it like this—” There followed a buzz that Wilson couldn’t hear, strain his ears as he would.

He heard steps, heard one of the cars start, heard it come in fast toward the shed.

There was a sudden splintering grind, and half of one wall was out. At the same time, light swept on from a dozen arc lamps in the yard.

In the white blaze, Cole looked into the muzzles of half a dozen guns.

Short and sweet, was Cole’s grim inward comment. I just start with The Avenger—and I’m stopped almost in the next minute.

Because, of course, no one could get to him fast enough to help him out!

One of the men with the guns did a surprising thing. He cried out suddenly, threw up both arms, and slumped to the ground with his gun sagging from his fingers as he fell.

The others—including Wilson—stared in open-mouthed, amazement. Nobody was around save the man’s own pals. Yet he looked as if he had suddenly been clubbed down. And to bear out that impression, there was a shallow gash on the top of his head from which blood dripped lightly.

Before the paralysis of surprise could break, another man fell to the ground, flat on his face. And then a third man screamed and grabbed at his ear. The ear was half gone, as if a knife had appeared out of thin air and sliced it in two.

“The rest of you,” came a calm, icy voice, “put your hands up. Drop your guns.”

Instead, the survivors made a wild dash for another shed, twenty yards off. And Cole heard the voice again. The Avenger’s voice.

“Cole! Yard gate!”

Cole looked around for the ex-prisoner of this crew and couldn’t see him. The man, it seemed, had gone out the back where the planks yawned wide, clipped a man with a gun on the way, and was now free.

Wilson sprang for the gate. It was The Avenger. He still couldn’t believe it.

“Did you fly?” he gasped. “I can’t see how you got way out here so soon after I radioed the location of this yard.”

“I was beginning an investigation of my own,” said Dick Benson, pale eyes cold as polar ice. “I was in a fast car when I got your first message. I started for Beall’s estate immediately, and went on past and here when your second message came. I was within five miles of this spot when you gave the exact location.”

Dick Benson was looking at something in his right hand. It was a weapon, the strangest Cole had ever seen. It was a streamlined little .22 revolver, equipped with a silencer of The Avenger’s own invention. In Dick’s eyes was something nearer to anger than Cole had seen there before.

“Missed!” Dick said. “I aimed to crease that third man; glance a bullet off the top of his skull and knock him unconscious instead of killing him—and I missed. I hit his ear instead.”

Cole followed him into a car, a big, rather shabby-looking coupé that looked like an old lady’s car; but it had a power plant like that of a locomotive under the innocently worn hood.

“I don’t think you have any complaints about missing,” Cole said. “Shooting at that range, by electric light, you could hardly expect to make an eighth-inch shot like that, three times running.”

“I have to make them every time,” said Dick, colorless eyes somber. “If I miss once in a while, I might kill a man. And I missed back there!”

Cole could only stare at the almost legendary figure at the wheel of the speeding coupé. So feared by the underworld, famous in so many branches of activity, and yet so young! Bitterly self-reproaching himself because he could not perform a miraculous feat of marksmanship ten times out of ten, instead of only two times out of three.

He stared sideways at the pale, icily calm eyes and was almost afraid. To hide it, he began telling what had happened: the watch on Beall’s home, the brush with the gang, the kidnaped man, whose identity he still did not know.

CHAPTER VII

Over the Rails

The Avenger had started out on a personal investigation of the death of that tramp in the Newark freight yards.

Then, just as he was rolling out of Bleek Street, he had received the message from Cole Wilson: “On gang car going north from Beall’s . . . Following kidnaped man . . .”

So Dick had turned his car north instead of south and streaked for Long Island at a pace seldom duplicated in New York. Such a fast pace that he had been able to get to the junkyard in time to save Cole’s life on this, his first job with Benson’s band. Kind of a baptism of fire, that had been for Wilson.

Now The Avenger was ready to start the investigation of that freight yard again.

He went through the tunnel under the river to New Jersey. Quite a distance from the freight yard, he parked the ancient-looking but unbelievably powerful coupé.

It was getting on toward midnight. There was no one around this warehouse-freight-yard section save a few watchmen. But The Avenger acted as if there were squads of enemies lurking nearby to watch him. As indeed there might be; hidden by darkness. Dick Benson never took chances if he could help it, which was one reason why he had lived so long with the whole underworld after him. The man with the thick black hair and pale, deadly eyes, and the regular featured face held habitually so expressionless as to seem like a good-looking mask, could move down a crowded street in broad daylight in such a manner as not to be noticed at all.

Here, in staggered darkness from the lights, with plenty of cover around, he could become practically invisible in his passage.

At one moment he was in the shadow of a loading platform, looking down the street at the high fence that walled off the freight yard. Then he was across the fence and dropping onto ties on the other side. And no man could have said just how he traversed the distance.

Dick had looked up everything the police had on the death of this tramp on the rails.

It had been very little.

A man’s body had been found on the through-freight track. Rather, pieces of a body had been found. The head could hardly be recognized as a head. There were no labels in the man’s worn clothes; nothing in his pockets. Nothing strewn along the track could point to name or address.

An elderly tramp, in a drunken stupor, had somehow gotten into the yards and had perished under the wheels of a freight train. That was all.

The spot where he had perished, as nearly as The Avenger could place it from the accounts he had read, was about a hundred yards down and eight tracks over from where he had dropped lightly over the fence.

The Avenger had formerly moved like a gray fox—gray-white of paralyzed face, white of hair, pale-gray of eye, habitually wearing dark-gray clothes.

Now he moved like a black panther, clad in black to blend with the night, and with his thick hair like a black cap on his head.

And he moved, not across the tracks, but along the fence.

There were lights all through the freight yards on poles. But he managed to elude most of the rays by hugging the fence. And this precaution also gave him a break. For next to the fence, some fifty yards from where he had climbed over, he came across something for which he might have hunted deliberately for hours and never have found.

A glint of light from the ground caught his colorless, infallible eyes. He bent down and picked up the thing that glinted.

At first glance it looked like a pair of pliers, dropped from some careless mechanic’s pocket. But a second look told that they were very odd-looking pliers; in fact, that they were not pliers at all.

They were dentist’s forceps.

Shiny, nickel-plated forceps of the type used for yanking molars while the man in the white coat says: “Now this isn’t going to hurt a bit.”

If a dentist had sneaked into the freight yard with one of the tools of his trade in his pocket, at just this point, the tool might have slipped out when he dropped to the ground.

But what would a dentist be doing in a railroad freight yard?

The Avenger slipped the forceps into his pocket and went on toward the place on the tracks where the mangled body had been found. The tracks thrummed and a glare split the half-darkness of the yard. He sank down behind a pile of ties. A switch engine jerked past, bunting freight cars into a side track.

Then Dick Benson went on, pale eyes alert. He had an idea he had already found the most important thing he was apt to pick up in here. But it was the course of method to go on and cover the rest of the ground. There might be some slight clue that the police had not found when the tramp’s death was reported.

Suddenly Dick stiffened and stood still, face as emotionless as ever, but with all his compact body tensed for instant and powerful action if necessary.

A man had appeared behind him so suddenly that it seemed that he must have materialized out of thin air.

The man made no effort to keep from being heard. He walked along a line of sidetracked boxcars toward Benson with normal steps, feet scraping on the cinders and gravel. Dick turned.

The man wore blue overalls and a blue shirt of denim. He had a striped railroader’s cap on his head and there was a red handkerchief loosely tied around his throat. He looked like an engineer walking through to report for the midnight shift. He was swinging a lunchbox in his left hand. In his right was a rolled newspaper.

“Well!” said Dick evenly. “Where did you spring from?”

The man looked friendly but curious.

“I didn’t spring from anywhere,” he said. “I was cutting across the yards and came out from behind that string of empties, and here you were.”

His face got a little less friendly.

“What’re you doing in here? Trespassers in the yards get pinched if the railroad dicks catch ’em.”

“I’m investigating the death of that tramp three nights ago,” said Dick, truthfully enough.

“Got credentials to show you have a right to do that?”

“You want to see credentials?” countered The Avenger, colorless eyes like ice in moonlight.

“Me? No. I’m no road cop. But if any show, you’ll have to—” He broke off and looked up the track. “Get out the credentials, pal. Here they come.”

“Who?” said Dick.

“Four—no, five cops. They’ve been heavy since that tramp got in here.”

Dick had seen the five men before the man beside him. And he had surmised that they must be yard detectives: A lot of valuable stuff was in these hundreds of freight cars waiting to be shunted onto private sidings. But just to play it safe he’d acted a little dumb with the man beside him.

He waited for the five to come up to him. They did in a hurry, flashing lights into his face and with their right hands near either hip pockets or armpits.

“Who you got here, Fulton?” one of the men asked harshly.

“I don’t know,” said the man with the lunchbox. “Says he’s investigating the death of the tramp a couple nights ago.”

“So?” The man’s voice changed subtly.

And so did Dick Benson’s manner.

These men were not road detectives. Three of them might have been mistaken for such. But the other two gave the lot of them away.

One of these two had the cold dull eyes of a lizard, sunning its torpid length on a wall. The other had the hot eyes of a maniac, with pupils standing in a manner suggesting dope.

Two types of eyes characteristic of killers!

“Newshawk, or cop?” snapped the spokesman for the five, edging a little closer to Benson. “Working on some paper, or for the city?”

“Neither,” said The Avenger quietly, face never showing his thoughts. “I’m a private investigator.”

“Got papers proving that?”

“Of course,” Dick said. And at the look in his pale, awesome eyes, the man seemed less arrogant.

“Come along, then,” the man growled. “We’ll take you into the shed and have a look—”

It was as if the words were a signal. Perhaps, indeed, they had been. Anyway, the five all jumped for him without warning of any kind.

And The Avenger leaped to the left and backward like the black panther he resembled. Five to one. But the men would not shoot unless they absolutely had to. For it would be embarrassing for them to be found here by the yard employees they were impersonating.

Dick leaned down. This was one time he would have to ignore his code.

Below his right knee was holstered the special silenced little .22, which he called Mike. The Avenger whipped out Mike and the unusual little weapon whispered once. With deadly accuracy, it spat its lethal slug into the neck of one of the gunmen. The phony yard detective screamed; then sickening gurgling sounds came from his blood-spattered lips. He fell to the ground. He was dead!

Given an opportunity, the man with the icy eyes and thick black hair could have made those odds of five to one look sick. But he wasn’t given the opportunity.

He had discounted the sixth man, the one in overalls and denim shirt. Faced with such odds, you have to take a chance somewhere. And this, it developed, was the wrong chance.

The sixth man had circled behind Dick and climbed into the open boxcar. From the doorway, directly above The Avenger, he struck with the rolled newspaper in his hand!

Inside that paper there was a length of pipe, making a most efficient blackjack which could stun without breaking skin or flesh. It landed on the back of Benson’s head.

Dick fell forward on his face. He writhed to get up again, in spite of the shock of the blow; so the man swung his deft club a second time. And after that, The Avenger lay still.

He came to with a kind of singing in his ears, and lay without attempted movement for a moment. From the way his head hurt, and from that whining drone in his head, he realized he must have been out for quite some time.

When the bursting lights in his skull died down a bit, he tried to move—and couldn’t. At the same time, he was aware that he was lying with something painfully obtrusive humping up under the back of his neck and the backs of his legs.

The two painful things were rails. He was bound to them! Tied on his back, across one of the railroad tracks.

At the same time, he made another discovery.

The singing in his ears was not inside his skull; it was not the result of that blow to the head.

It came from the tracks on which he lay—a steady, tremulous thrumming that made the roadbed under him seem to quiver.

A train was grinding down the track on which he lay!

On The Avenger’s forehead appeared slight drops of moisture. But otherwise his face didn’t show any more fear than it had before he made the discovery. He knew, of course, that he’d die someday in these perpetual brushes with supercrime. He was constantly ready for it. Maybe this was the time.

But a Richard Benson doesn’t die without trying to beat Death first. So Dick began a sort of rhythmic convulsion on the track, as if he were trying by main strength to break his bonds.

But that wasn’t what he was attempting. One sharp effort had told him that was impossible. He was trying to get his hands to a certain spot between the lowest and next-lowest of his vest buttons.

Dick’s hands and arms were bound to his sides by coils of rope around his body, so that it was a tremendous task for him to work his hands over. But he made it, with the whining of the rails under him increasing by the second.

His left forefinger found a small loop and pulled hard.

The edge of this vest was just a little stiffer than the fabric would warrant, as were the edges of most of his other vests. This was because through the edging, concealed in the material, ran a length of very thin wire.

The wire, under a low-powered microscope, would prove to have numberless little teeth in it, making it into a tiny hack saw. You could saw through steel bars with it, given time.

Benson held the wire taut by pulling at the little loop into which the lower end was twisted. Then he expanded and contracted his chest muscles rapidly.

In a few seconds the slim, barbed wire had frazzled through the fabric of the vest; and in not many more it had parted the coils of rope. But the train was very near now! Light from its single glaring eye was beginning to touch Benson.

He snapped to a sitting position and his hand flashed to his left leg.

Ike was there. The throwing knife, needle-pointed and razor-edged, was in its holster. Benson had the twin holsters below his knees because a search seldom gets down that far.

The engine behind the glaring light began shrieking like a frightened monster as the brakes ground on. The engineer had seen the body on the tracks and was trying to stop the countless tons behind his locomotive before reaching the spot. A hopeless job.

Dick’s hand swept over the cords at his ankles and they parted. He had just time. The train ground by, with sparks streaming from the iron shoes of the brakes, hardly a second after he had flung himself off the rails.

But a danger past was a danger forgotten. Dick raced by the spot where the battle had taken place and recovered Mike. The little gun was laying on the cinders, in front of the boxcar, where it had fallen from his hand. Then he sped for the fence with no sign in his pale eyes that he realized how close death had been; sped for the fence before the six men, who had trapped him, should learn that their trap had failed.

He just made that, too. Startled yells, shots in the night drowned by the train’s roar, whispering slugs near his head, told him that the gang had discovered the impossible escape and were trying now to set it right with bullets.

Like a huge black cat, The Avenger swung over the fence and was safe. They’d taken those forceps from him; a pat at his pocket proved that. But they hadn’t taken his life, and they’d live to regret that failure.

CHAPTER VIII

Money or the Chair

“I’m certainly glad to see you.”

Markham Farquar’s face showed that he meant the words with all sincerity. The lawyer had leaped from his chair when The Avenger entered his office and had caught Dick Benson’s hand in both of his.

“I haven’t been able to find out a thing about the frame they’re holding over me, Mr. Benson. Not a thing. Have you turned anything up?”

The lawyer ran a hand distractedly through his thick gray hair, and there was something like frenzy in his gray eyes. But Benson didn’t answer that latter question for a moment.

“You say you haven’t been able to find out anything,” he repeated. “You’ve been trying?”

“Yes,” said Farquar. “I’ve been all over the lot, trying to find out where Beall and Cleeves and Salloway keep those fake clues of theirs. Also, I’ve been trying to trace any previous connections of my clerk, Smathers, to see if I can find a hint of what happened to him.” He sighed. “I’ve drawn a blank all around.”

“Smathers’s friends or family know nothing?”

“Smathers, it seems, didn’t have either family or close friends,” replied Farquar irritably. “The man was practically a hermit. I finally located the employer for whom he worked before I hired him, years ago. That man had never heard of any relatives either.”

“Where did Smathers live?” asked Benson, eyes like ice in a polar dawn.

“In a boardinghouse up near Columbia University,” Farquar said. “I’ve been there twice, checking on things. He didn’t show up there before he disappeared. He left the boardinghouse at eight o’clock in the morning, as he always did, and that was the last anyone saw of him. He never came back.”

“And he had no friends there?”

“No. The landlady said he didn’t do more than nod to the rest, although he’d lived there for years. I tell you, the man was a hermit. We’ll never find out anything through his past. And we don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”

“We know that, all right,” said Dick Benson, face as moveless as a mask. He was many years younger than Farquar, but he looked twice as calm and three times as competent. “He’s dead.”

“He— How do you know?” gasped Farquar.

“There was a tramp ground to bits in the Newark freight yard. That unidentified tramp was Smathers, I’m sure.”

“What in the world was he doing in a freight yard?” exclaimed Farquar. Then he shrugged resignedly. “But no matter why he was there. He was there, and he was killed. I’ve felt right along that he was dead. And now there is a definite murder charge against me any time those three blackmailers want to press it. Did you find out anything else?”

“Nothing of importance,” said The Avenger.

Farquar’s shoulders slumped.

“I guess I’d better just bite the bullet and pay the blackmail demand,” he said slowly. “I’m as sure as I am of sitting here that the clues those three men hold will really put me in the chair. And they’re getting impatient. Look.”

He tossed a sheet of paper over to Benson. The Avenger stared at it. Crudely printed words leaped out at him.

IT IS THE MONEY OR THE CHAIR.

MAKE UP YOUR MIND. AND QUICK.

The note was unsigned.

“If we could only get something on the three,” Farquar said. “Something to tie them in with this.”

“One fact about Beall has come out, in the short time we’ve been trying to help you,” said Benson. His eyes were basilisk on the short printed note. “His paper company is in financial difficulties.”

“Of course!” said Farquar with an explosive breath. “There we have the motive, anyway— Say, did you know someone was in my office last night?”

“Several people were in your office last night.” Dick told what had happened to Nellie Gray. But in line with his usual reticence when he hadn’t yet gathered all the facts, he did not dwell on Nellie’s discovery. He didn’t describe the place where, it was pretty positive, Smathers had died.

“We ought to have something more on Cleeves or Salloway or Beall soon,” was all he said. “My men are working on them right now.”

But they were not going to get anything on Salloway.

Smitty was on Salloway, trailing him if he went anywhere, watching what he did and to whom he talked.

Above all, he was trying to get his hands on the cigar case Salloway was said always to have on his person, in which it was said he carried the trumped-up murder clue against Farquar.

Smitty had had no luck so far. He’d found out nothing suspicious about the well-known contractor.

He was in a stairway at the moment.

Salloway lived on the fourteenth floor of an East River apartment building. He had a home in Connecticut, where his family and servants stayed; he himself used this four-room bachelor apartment when he was in New York.

All last night Smitty had lurked on the stairway just the other side of the fourteenth-floor door, ready to trail Salloway if he came out, ready to eavesdrop if anyone went in. But neither had happened.

The giant was sleepy. He had taken several cat naps in early morning, propped against a stair, trusting to his hearing to wake him if sounds of steps down the hall indicated movement at Salloway’s door. But that was all. Now, in the middle of the morning, he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

Throughout, he had stood ready to step into the four-teenth-floor corridor on the rare occasions when anyone used the stairs. He was pretty sure no one knew of his all-night vigil.

But he was so sleepy—

Smitty’s head jerked up on his drooping neck muscles. There had been a step outside the stair door, in the hall.

There had been frequent steps there as tenants of other apartments came and went. He opened the door a crack to see if this was just another.

He just caught the movement of a door closing down the line. And it was Salloway’s door.

Smitty went to the door. The mountain of a man moved as silently, almost, as the wraithlike Avenger himself.

Yet he moved fast. The door hadn’t been closed more than thirty seconds when he reached it.

He listened. He heard a voice call out something but couldn’t catch what was said. He tried the knob.

The door was not locked. It had not been closed tightly enough for the automatic latch to catch.

The giant’s eyes looked puzzled—and more than that. It didn’t take much of a slam to close doors of this type. The fact that the door had been closed so lightly that the catch hadn’t worked hinted that whoever had entered had tried very hard to avoid the slightest noise.

Smitty pushed open the door, ready to duck or fight. But he opened the door on an empty room.

It was a large living room, expensively furnished, bare of occupants. Smitty crossed the room toward another door, and midway he heard a groan!

It was more a hard exhalation of breath than an actual groan. But it acted like a knife stuck in him.

He crossed to the door in two long jumps, swung that open—and went to his knees as three men in a group slammed into him!

A fourth man lay on the floor.

A hard grin formed on Smitty’s lips. The giant had been framed into a jail sentence, once, by a crook. It was that episode which had made him devote his life to other criminals, working under the genius of The Avenger. Now he lived to get his hands on the rats in human form who make up the world’s underworld element.

And here were three of them confidently barging in to give him just such an opportunity. It was, Smitty decided, perfect.

He had been knocked to his knees. Gun butts and barrels were clubbing at him from all directions, it seemed. But they were only lighting glancingly on his ponderous left forearm, thrown up to protect head and face.

His right arm contracted and lashed forward.

His fist clubbed past the jaw of one of the three men glancingly, or it would have broken the neck behind the jaw. But that touch of power was enough. The jaw’s owner went back four steps and tripped over the body on the floor.

Then Smitty got a wrist behind a swinging gun. He twisted, not much, and the man dropped the gun and screamed. That was after there had been a muffled snap as bone gave way. The third man wanted to run, but there was no place to run. Smitty was in the doorway.

Smitty started for him—and a voice behind him said: “Put your hands up! And keep ’em up!”

Smitty turned, raging. He’d had things so completely his own way, till now.

A well-dressed man stood in the middle of the living room. He held a gun on Smitty, and the gun was trembling in his excited hands till the giant felt cold chills constrict his stomach.

“Who are you?” he rasped.

“The building manager,” said the man. “No, you don’t! Keep those hands up!”

“Turn your gun the other way,” said Smitty. “Keep it on these three men behind me. They broke in here and—”

The three men filed past him into the living room, with the manager uncertain as to where to point. One of the three was all right. Another had a blue swelling on his jaw. The third held a broken right wrist.

“Keep him covered!” snapped the uninjured one, jerking his head at Smitty. “We came to visit our friend Salloway, and this guy broke in and tried to hold us all up.”

“Why, you cockeyed liar!” raged Smitty. “You”

“Don’t you move!” squealed the manager.

The gun was trembling, and the trigger must have been within a hair of being pulled in the man’s agitated clasp. And the gun was pointing at Smitty’s head, not at his body, where the celluglass garment would stop the bullet.

“Hold him here,” said the man. “My friends and I will go out and get the police, and then go on to some doctor’s office. That big killer hurt two of us pretty badly.”

“Surely,” said Smitty to the manager, “you’re not fool enough to believe”

“You stand perfectly still—and keep your hands up!” squeaked the manager. “All right, you three, get the police here as soon as you can. I’ll keep him covered.”

“Why, damn it—” bellowed Smitty. Then he stopped. There was no arguing with the man; he was crazy with fear.

He had to watch, gnashing his teeth in impotent rage, while the three left. And then he relaxed. His chance to capture the three had gone.

“You’re going to have a lot of fun explaining to the police why you let three murderers get away,” he said.

“You’re the m-murderer, if there’s been any murdering done.”

“I think there has been,” said the giant. “There’s a man in that bedroom lying awfully still.”

“Salloway, you mean?” The manager took a step toward the door, then stopped with a cunning look in his eyes. “You just want me to get near enough so you can jump at me. I’ll wait till the police come.”

But they didn’t come. Half an hour passed, and still they didn’t show up. Even the manager got it through his head that the men who had left had assuredly not notified the police, and he let his shaking gun sag out of line of Smitty’s skull.

As it would do no good at that late stage of the game to throttle the dope, Smitty let him alone. He picked up the phone and called Bleek Street Then, after speaking with Benson, who had just returned from Farquar’s office, Smitty telephoned the police.

And the building manager tried to stutter his way out of his mule-headed mess.

CHAPTER IX

The Curious Key

The Avenger, as was to be expected, reached the apartment long before the police did. The cops could move fast, but Dick Benson could move faster.

He came into the place, seeming to glide like a black panther in a hurry rather than a man. He paid absolutely no attention to the numbed building manager; The Avenger had a sort of sixth sense telling him when people did or did not count in the scheme of things.

He went directly to the other room, with Smitty on his heels.

This next room was a bedroom. In it there was a double bed, a dresser and highboy, and several chairs.

And a corpse.

The body lay next to the dresser, and it was clad in pajamas. It was Salloway, the tenant of the place, all right. The wealthy contractor was sprawled on his face; and from his back, between the shoulder blades, stuck up the handles of a pair of shears.

Someone had grabbed the shears from dresser or highboy and jammed them into the man’s back. Chances were he never knew what hit him.

“They must have done it just as I stepped in the door,” said Smitty. “I heard a kind of groan about that time.”

Dick Benson nodded. That thick black hair of his made his pale eyes seem even more colorless in contrast. They were brilliant agates now, as he looked at the dead man and the room.

“Almost noon,” he said, “and Salloway was here, in night clothes. It looks as if he had been staying very close to home lately. Afraid of just this, perhaps.”

He did not mention the thing that both he and the giant Smitty were thinking of.

The cigar case supposed never to leave his person.

In the cigar case, Farquar had been sure, was the fake murder clue Salloway was holding over the lawyer’s head. But one doesn’t carry cigar cases in pajama pockets. At least there was none in the single pocket of the dead man’s pajamas jacket. A glance told that.

Salloway’s fists were clenched hard. The Avenger bent down and opened the right hand. It took a bit of effort.

“You can’t do that!” bleated the house manager. “The police— No one is supposed to touch”

“Pipe down!” growled Smitty, “or you may get into even more trouble than I think you’re due for.”

The manager shut up. Dick saw that the right hand contained nothing; so he opened the left. And this did reveal something.

A queer-looking key.

It had a curved flange instead of a straight one and had more indentations than most keys. It evidently fit into a very complicated lock.

But what lock?

“Did Salloway have a strongbox or small safe installed in here since his occupancy?” Benson asked the building manager.

He got no reply.

“You’d know of such an installation, as manager here,” Dick said.

Still the man’s lips were obstinately sealed. And then he gasped suddenly.

Two hands like steel vises were on his cringing shoulders. Pale eyes like the eyes of Death itself glared into his.

“Well?”

Dick’s voice was almost gentle, but by now the luckless manager was shaking all over and his forehead was dewed with sweat. It was a frightening thing to look into The Avenger’s eyes when he was coldly annoyed.

“Y-yes,” he said, moistening dry lips. “Behind that dresser, I think.”

Dick pulled the dreser from the wall. The wall seemed unbroken, but tapping produced a hollow note. He pressed on an area where several slight smudges told of other finger-pressures, and a section swung out. It revealed a steel box front like that of a safe, but with a bent slot for a key instead of a combination knob.

Dick inserted the odd key, and the box opened. There were no papers, money, or other standard valuables there. It held only one thing—a silver cigar case.

As The Avenger picked it up, something rattled—something like a pebble in the case.

He started to open it, and nine men poured into the room like water pouring through a pipe!

It had been well done. The men must have literally held their breaths as they crept in from the hall and crossed the living room. Otherwise, The Avenger would have heard them. As it was, he’d have heard even the rustle of their clothes, with those keen ears of is, if he hadn’t been so intent on the cigar case.

But he hadn’t heard, and here they were, flying at him and at Smitty like so many leaping cats.

The cigar case went into a pocket, and Benson went behind the dresser he had pulled out from the wall. Two men slammed into the dresser as they tried to change their course and couldn’t quite make it.

And then the quaking building manager saw a sight that made his eyes bulge out.

Dick Benson was only average in size and weight. Not at all a big man. But now and then men appear whose muscle seems to have three times the strength of ordinary muscle. And Dick was one of these.

At any rate, the manager saw this average-sized man raise the big piece of furniture a foot off the floor, with the two men still draped over it so that over half their weight was lifted, too. Then he saw the man with the pale eyes half thrust and half throw dresser and men and everything else, with a furious burst of power. The tangled mess slammed into some more of the men four feet away and sent the whole group to the floor.

After that, the manager saw only a whirling kaleidoscope of movement as he shivered in a corner.

The three who had raced out when Smitty interrupted them had come back with these six more—to get that cigar case. That was evident. And they were certainly trying, now.

They couldn’t shoot, because there were so many in the room they’d have fired at each other. But nine to two, they must have thought, were odds enough to insure success.

That thought was soon altered.

Dick Benson followed the powerful thrust of the dresser with a flashing charge at the men. One, already up, got a blow to the jaw as scientifically administered as an anesthetic, and acting in the same manner. He crumpled and fell. Another, lunging for Dick’s knees, felt iron fingers press at the back of his neck in a nerve pressure—and then didn’t feel anything else. For that, too, could act as an anesthetic, putting a man out for half an hour.

Meanwhile, Smitty had swung his vast fists four times. The result was: one man doubled over and trying to get back the breath knocked out of him when knuckles apparently went from his stomach clear to his backbone, two men on the floor with cracked jaws, and one man over against the wall who would not move again. The giant had broken necks before by hitting just a little harder than he meant to. It was difficult to gauge his gigantic strength in the heat of battle.

There were only three left on their feet and these three wheeled for the door to get away, eyes glazed with fear at these impossible things. But Benson and Smitty had no idea of allowing this.

The two men had been in here a little over five minutes—an incredibly crowded five minutes—and the police, called by Smitty only a little while after he had contacted The Avenger, were due any second.

Smitty and Benson were determined that they’d arrive to find nine prisoners. Rather, eight battered prisoners and one dead one.

Smitty was as fast on his feet as a boy, in spite of his near-three-hundred pounds. He reached the bedroom door almost as quickly as Dick. He saw Benson get a fleeing man by the throat and haul him back as easily as if the fellow had been a child. Then, at the hall door, Smitty reached the other two.

He grabbed a neck with each hand, then brought his hands together. That was all.

But that was plenty!

Two heads tried to occupy the space required by one. There was a hollow thud. Smitty dusted off his hands and looked hungrily around to see if anybody was up and asking for more.

And then there was the clang of the elevator down the hall and a city detective and a uniformed patrolman galloped in.

“Hey!” said the detective, looking at the bodies strewn around the place like leaves in autumn. Ten of them in the two rooms. “Hey—”

He looked at Benson and Smitty. So did the patrolman.

“Jumping Judas!” said the cop. “You two did this?”

The detective drew a deep breath. He also drew his gun, fast!

“We’ll have to take you in, and I don’t want either of you within arm’s length. Not when you can clean up a mob like that, between the two of you— Wait a minute—”

He looked at Benson, staring into the pale eyes and at the thick, coal-black hair and the impassive, regular-featured face. Then he rubbed his jaw with his left hand while his right let the gun sag a little.

“Would you be Richard Benson, by any chance?” he asked.

Benson nodded.

“Aw, he can’t be Benson,” said the cop. “Benson has white hair. I know all about him.”

The detective shook his head. “There was a report a while ago on him,” he said. “He had some kind of accident in a factory in Detroit. It made all his hair fall out and it came back the color it had been before—black. And look at the big guy. That’s Smith, who works for Benson. There aren’t two other guys in New York that big! And look at the ones they laid out. Nobody else could do that”

“Here are my credentials,” said Benson quietly.

The detective looked at them: Letters from the governor of the state, from the President, from the New York police commissioner. Credentials proving Benson a member of the FBI and an honorary member of the city detective bureau.

“What has happened here, Mr. Benson?” he asked, very respectfully.

Dick told him.

“Salloway murdered, huh?” The detective looked at the dead man in pajamas with the shears in his back. “And one of these guys did it, huh? Well, we’ll take ’em to headquarters. A little persuasive talk will turn our murderer out.”

Benson doubted that. He doubted that any of these men, all hard cases from the look of them, could be made to say a word. He believed that they’d be sprung in an hour. He was sure they weren’t working for themselves, but for some man of wealth and respectability who could hire the best of lawyers.

But he didn’t say that. Nor did he say anything about the cigar case, which he had whipped into his inner pocket when the gang made their surprise entrance.

He took the case with him when he and Smitty went back to Bleek Street, after a lot more questioning.

There, on Dick Benson’s big desk, they opened it. The thing that had rattled around inside like a pebble fell out on the desk top. And Smitty breathed hard with astonishment while The Avenger stared with his icy pale eyes glittering like stainless-steel chips.

The thing was a gold crown, torn from a human tooth.

CHAPTER X

Blank Paper

Everyone was gone from the Bleek Street headquarters save Nellie and Harriet Smith and Rosabel, Josh Newton’s pretty wife. They were all out working on the Farquar blackmail case.

And now, on the murder of Salloway. One of the three big-time blackmailers was dead, leaving just the two to cope with in Farquar’s defense. But who had killed Salloway? And why?

Nellie and Harriet were talking that over. But they were really more concerned with another thing.

That was the bulky white envelope Nellie had brought back from the house in which Harriet had almost been burned like a piece of scorched toast.

The name A.A. Ismail, and the address, was on the envelope in pencil. Perhaps the writing of that very address was the one that had left its impression on Smathers’s desk blotter at Farquar’s ofice.

A name written outside. But that was all.

Presumably, Smathers had taken that envelope, secretly and late at night, to Ismail’s house. Possibly, it was for this that he had been killed, after which his body had been taken to the freight yard.

Presumably, it was to retrieve that envelope, suddenly remembered, that the killer had returned to the house and caught and nearly killed Harriet Smith.

All these things in the envelope. And there was nothing in it! Nothing, that is, but a thick sheaf of blank paper folded to resemble, from the outside of the sealed envelope, a lot of documents.

Just blank paper. The Avenger had tried every test known to science to see if invisible writing came out on the paper—and a few tests known to no one but himself—and nothing had appeared.

Worthless blank paper in a sealed envelope, with murder and sudden death inexplicably revolving around it.

Incidentally, investigation had disclosed that there was no such person as A.A. Ismail. At least, not at that address. The house was owned by a bank which had foreclosed a mortgage. It had been lived in for many years by a Mr. Watkins, who had gone away some months before. No one in the neighborhood or connected with the bank had ever heard of anyone called Ismail.

“It’s crazy,” said Nellie, staring at the envelope. “People don’t kill for nothing. And this seems to be nothing.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Harriet suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

The two made an attractive picture—Nellie, dainty and small and blonde, Harriet taller and more mature but almost equally pretty.

“I think I’ve seen envelopes like this before,” said Harriet.

“You have?” Nellie’s eyes flashed. “Where?”

Harriet seemed to think that over a long time, as if wondering whether to say it or not. But finally she did.

“I think I’ve seen that kind of envelope, with that kind of watermark, at the offices of the Beall Paper Manufacturing Company.”

Nellie’s keen brain caught several curious hints in those words and promptly came out with them. After all, none of them knew anything to speak of about this girl.

“How is it you know anything about watermarks?” she demanded. “Usually only people in the business, and the police, know anything about such an obscure subject.”

“I was in the business,” said Harriet, after another hesitation.

“And how do you know what kind of envelopes there are in the Beall offices?”

“I . . . I worked there for a while,” said Harriet. “That’s where I learned something about watermarks. And I really do remember these envelopes. They have a special watermark that was used in all the company stationery.”

“Maybe we’re beginning to get somewhere, then,” said Nellie, eyes kindling again. “After all, Beall is one of the three we’re fighting, one of the blackmailers”

“He’s not a blackmailer!” Harriet snapped.

Nellie looked at her curiously. Harriet’s eyes had a glary look in them, and there was angry red over each cheekbone.

“He’s blackmailing Farquar,” Nellie said. “That’s the case we’re all working on. You know that.”

“Mr. Beall is no blackmailer. He’s an honest, decent man. I know! After all, I worked in his office, didn’t I?”

“I don’t think a mere stenographer in a large office could give a very accurate character description of the big boss,” said Nellie. She shrugged. “Have it your own way, though. The important thing is the envelope. That will have to be checked. We’ve got to know whether this is from the Beall office.”

“There’s one way to find out,” said Harriet, a bit breathlessly. “We can go there, right now, with this envelope and compare them.”

Anybody else would have replied that this was no work for a couple of girls. It was dark out. To prowl through a large factory office at night was a job for men.

But Nellie grabbed at the suggestion.

“Swell! We’ll do it!”

Thus she confirmed once more the perpetual wail of the giant Smitty: That Nellie hadn’t enough sense to stay in out of a rain of machine-gun bullets; that she was always taking on work that should have been assigned to two large policemen, and that someday she was bound to have her pretty little head knocked off her slim shoulders.

Nellie did leave word with Rosabel where they were going, as a precaution. But that was all. The two girls barged out the door, down to the basement where The Avenger’s fast cars were kept, and rolled up the ramp in the sleek coupé that Nellie usually drove.

“I hope,” said Nellie, “that nobody else has had the sudden idea, too, that the envelope supply in Beall’s office should be investigated.”

“Why would that happen?” demanded Harriet.

Nellie took a corner on two wheels.

“Somebody remembered the envelope might be in the house with the name Ismail on it,” she pointed out. “That person didn’t get the envelope. He may feel now that we will be able to trace it—and he may try to get there first.”

“M-maybe we shouldn’t go on,” Harriet said.

“Why not?” Nellie said. “I’m just pointing out that we’ll have to be on guard, that’s all.”

The Beall plant was up the East River, on the Queens side. From the car, Nellie looked over its five-story bulk, dark in the night.

“Thank heaven for fire escapes,” she said.

She drove the coupé into an alley beside the building and stopped under the drawn-up lower stair of the escape.

“Get on the top of the coupé and swing up to the first platform,” she directed. “Then lower the thing for me.”

Harriet dutifully climbed to the top of the car and then to the escape. Nellie drove back and parked her car innocently down the block. Then she joined Harriet on the iron rungs.

“Office?” she whispered.

“Top floor,” said Harriet, through chattering teeth.

“Watchman?”

“He stays on the ground floor except when he’s making his rounds.”

The two girls, like a pair of lovely burglars, crept to the top of the fire escape. The iron escape door was locked, of course. With a sideways leap to a narrow ledge that would have done credit to a cat, Nellie got to the nearest window, which was not locked. In a moment she had gone in through it, out to the hall and back. The door was opened from the inside and Harriet went in.

“I’m s-sorry I suggested this,” she chattered.

Nellie gripped her arm a minute. “Shh! Buck up.”

With eyes accustomed to the dimness, they got the layout of the top floor—though Harriet moved with a certainty indicating that she’d had the layout firmly in mind.

There was a general office, taking up most of the floor, and private offices along two walls, partitioned off with paneling and frosted glass.

“Would all those desks have the envelopes in them?” Nellie whispered, pointing to dozens of stenographic desks and chairs in rows in the big office.

“Probably,” Harriet whispered back.

Nellie went to the first desk in the first row and opened the drawers. It seemed that Harriet had guessed wrong. There were envelopes—but none of that type. The second desk had none, either. Nor the third—

Nellie was moving cautiously, senses tuned to the slightest breath of sound. And this was fortunate, for it allowed her to hear the barest perceptible scrape of a shoe.

The sound came from one of the walls along the private offices. Instantly she sank behind a desk, drawing Harriet down with her.

The last door along the line of private cubicles opened. A dark figure, looking more like a slinking shadow than a human being, slunk out of the office. And Nellie felt the hot blood buzzing in her ears.

There was no way of telling whether or not Harriet recognized the slinking figure. But Nellie recognized it—from the way it moved and from its general size and shape. Recognized it, and reached for the tiny gun in her purse.

It was the man who had been at the house of Ismail!

The figure came slowly toward where the two girls were crouching. Under its arm could be seen a large package. Then the two could make out what the package was.

Envelopes, tied tightly with string, but not wrapped.

“He c-cleared out the desks before we looked—” Harriet whispered.

‘Shut up!” breathed Nellie, fingers biting Harriet’s arm.

It was apparent enough without a whisper from the girl. This man was here after the envelopes, too. He had cleaned all the desks in the general office, and probably the private offices, too, since he had just emerged from the last in the line. They were all in that package under his arm.

And now he was coming directly toward them! Did he know they were there?

It was with difficulty that Nellie repressed a sigh of relief that would have been profound enough for the shadowy figure to hear. It had turned, and was going toward a blank wall at the rear.

“What’s there?” breathed Nellie, when she judged the figure was far enough away not to overhear.

“The vault the office things are kept in,” Harriet whispered softly. “I guess he’s going to get the envelopes in there, too.”

Nellie pressed her arm to remind her against unnecessary words. But she was thinking triumphant thoughts.

Vault! Oh, boy! Steel walls; steel door—better than any prison cell!

She stole after the figure. Harriet hesitated, then crept after her, scared to death of the wraithlike figure, but even more frightened to stay alone. The two saw the man working at the vault door. It was so dark, and the figure was so perfectly blended with the darkness, that they wouldn’t have seen it if they hadn’t known just where to look.

Nellie was wondering how he expected to open the vault. How would he know the combination?

Then she heard a slight creak as the door swung open, and she figured she had the answer. And at the same time, an almost certain answer for the blackmailing case.

This must be Beall himself. No one else could get the door open so easily and quickly. It was a regular safe door. An outsider would have to blow or drill it.

Beall himself, suddenly worried about the envelope; Beall, who had sent Smathers to that house of Death with an envelope containing only blank papers—

This thought ran against a wall of uncertainty. Why would Beall, in blackmailing Farquar, feel that he had to get rid of Farquar’s veteran clerk?

While she was thinking so furiously, Nellie was still moving toward the vault where the office supplies were kept. She could see the white blur of the package of envelopes the shadow-figure had set down outside the vault. She could see the door, half open.

The plan was as simple as it was certain. All she had to do was bang that door shut on the man inside. That solid steel door.

Then they had the murderer of Smathers and the key to the whole affair they were working on. And Nellie, singlehanded, would have wound it all up.

They reached the wall near the door. Nellie crept along that. She could hear the man inside the vault, rustling through papers. There were probably many boxes of the envelopes. But, methodically, he meant to collect them all.

She got to the door. Harriet was right behind her. Nellie could feel her trembling, and she felt like trembling a little herself.

Everything seemed to be going well. In a second they’d have their villain trapped. Nothing could possibly happen to upset the plan. Yet she felt cold chills running up and down her back. The vast, black expanse of the general office seemed like a great tomb in its desertion and eerie silence.

Nellie’s hand went to the door to slam it—

It was as if she had thrust it into a bear trap that suddenly clamped shut on her wrist!

Crushing fingers gripped her. A powerful arm jerked her forward. She half fell the length of the little steel room and smashed against steel filing cabinets. She had half turned when she was smashed back again by Harriet’s hurtling body. There was an almost animal snarl of triumph from the door.

The shadow-figure! The killer! He had known they were there, after all; had known and baited a trap by letting them think they had him bottled in that same trap.

Nellie’s little gun spat once, twice. But the bullets only flattened on steel as the vault door swung ponderously on them. It clanged shut. And then there was the silence of death in their ears!

CHAPTER XI

Brother and Sister

Nellie’s tiny flashlight rayed out. She flipped an electric switch and a single unshaded globe bathed the vault in yellow light. They could hear no sound from outside, but Nellie knew the shadowy figure was well on his way to escape, with all the incriminating envelopes in his possession.

The vault was crowded. There were filing cases in which the more valuable of the firm’s correspondence was kept; there were boxes of paper and carbon paper; there were quart bottles of ink—all the paraphernalia needed to run a big office.

Terribly crowded. There was hardly room for the two girls, even though Harriet wasn’t taking up much room at the moment. She was flattened back against the filing cases with her eyes as big as saucers and her face white with fear.

She tried to talk big.

“All we have to d-do is wait till morning and someone will open the vault. They open it at eight thirty, as soon as the office is filled.”

But Nellie shook her head.

“No use kidding ourselves,” she said. “They’ll open it in the morning, all right. But they won’t find us. They’ll just find a couple of bodies! We’ll suffocate in here in an hour or less.”

For Nellie knew something about the cubic feet of air necessary to sustain life in a human for a given length of time. And there were precious few cubic feet in here.

“We’ve got to get out right away,” she said.

“How?”

“You would ask that,” said Nellie. “I don’t know how. I only know we have to.” She stared tensely around the vault. “Say, they use a lot of sulphuric acid in making paper, don’t they?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Harriet. “Why?”

“Sulphuric eats through metal. If we could pour some around the combination knob of—”

“There’s no acid in here,” said Harriet. “They keep only office stuff in here. The acid would be down in the plant.”

Nellie relaxed. It had been a good thought, but it didn’t mean anything. Then she brightened up again.

“The watchman. Do you happen to know when he makes his rounds?”

“Yes,” said Harriet. “Every hour on the half-hour. He takes about thirty minutes to do it and just stays on the first floor the other thirty minutes. He is due on the top floor at about ten forty.”

Nellie looked at her watch, and then her hand jerked to a metal desk lamp that someone had put in here because it wasn’t being used for the moment. It was ten forty-four.

“He may be out already!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t I think of it at once! He may—”

She was unscrewing the single light bulb.

“He turns on the lights at each floor as he makes his rounds, doesn’t he?” she snapped.

“Why, yes,” said Harriet. She was making a great effort to keep from hysteria, because already it was hard to breathe. “He turns on the lights while he goes over the floor, then turns them out when he—”

Darkness in the vault. Nellie had unscrewed the light bulb. A flash of blue. She had shorted the socket with the metal desk lamp. Then there was deafening thunder in the vault as she battered on the door with the lamp’s heavy base.

And the door opened.

“Come out with your hands up!” barked a truculent voice. “Why—it’s only a couple of girls—”

The watchman, an elderly fellow with stooped shoulders and a drooping mustache—and with a large gun held menacingly in his competent hand—gaped at the two, then stared hardest at Harriet.

“What are you doing—” he began, stupefied. But he stopped. “What are you two doing here, I mean?”

Nellie’s quick eye went from him to Harriet, and she was just in time to see Harriet’s finger come from her lips in a gesture of silence.

“We got locked in, Mr. Harris,” Harriet said.

“You’ve been in there from five o’clock to now? And you ain’t dead of suffocation?” he said. Then he shrugged. “Well, it’s no business of mine. I came onto the fifth floor, turned the lights on, and half of ’em shorted out. Then I heard a banging from inside the vault. That’s all I know, Miss—I mean, that’s all I know. Can I do anything for you now?”

“No,” said Harriet, teeth chattering. “We . . . we just want to get out as fast as possible.”

Nellie said nothing till they were in the coupé. Then: “That watchman certainly acted like you were the queen of the May,” she declared. “Just who are you, anyhow?”

“Harriet Smith. I worked there, as I said. So the watchman knew me.”

“You don’t happen to know Mr. Beall, the owner, himself, do you?”

“Of c-course not. I’m a girl— You aren’t going toward Bleek Street.”

“No,” said Nellie. “I’m not. I’m going toward Long Island. To Beall’s home. I want to see if Mr. Beall has been there all evening, or if he has been sneaking around his own office stealing his own envelopes and locking girls in his office vault!”

“I’ve told you before,” said Harriet hotly, “that it just isn’t possible for Mr. Beall to be mixed up in anything criminal.”

“We’ll see,” said Nellie. “If he has been at home all the time, all he has to do is say so.” They sped out the Long Island pike. “After that, we’ll go to Bleek Street and get some rest. We’ve had enough danger for one night.”

But if Nellie thought that, fate, it seemed, thought differently. There was to be still more danger before they hit the pillows.

Nellie kept an eye out for Cole Wilson’s car as they neared the Beall estate. Cole was on Beall’s trail. She saw no sign of him, and that looked bad for Beall: It looked as if Beall had indeed been out, and was now being followed at a distance by Cole.

Nellie didn’t attempt to sneak up on the house. She drove openly up the lane from the suburban street and stopped openly in front of the door. She and Harriet got out. Nellie rang the doorbell. The door was opened and Nellie stepped in.

And twenty-eight men fell all over her!

At least it seemed like twenty-eight. Actually, afterward, it came out that there were only four. But Nellie decided each must have had as many arms and legs as a hundred-legged worm.

The diminutive blonde went down under that rush. And the men separated, two grabbing Harriet and two continuing to maul Nellie. Which was a mistake. The separation, that is.

Anyone, of course, would have thought two men could handle a one hundred-pound slip of a girl. But this was not just another girl. This was Nellie Gray.

Nellie’s pink little right hand got a grip on an arm just above the elbow. Thumb and middle finger pressed hard there. The owner of the arm yelled and tumbled clear backward in an effort to get away from the resulting blaze of pain.

Nellie let him go and turned her scientific attention on the other. She was on one knee now, with the man locked close to her because he had his right arm crooked around her dainty neck.

It was a bad hold, but she knew all about what to do with it. She caught the wrist of the choking arm, turned sharply in a kind of unwinding movement, and then the man was sliding on the floor a yard away on his face. His own weight, expertly aided by Nellie’s move, had dislocated his arm at the shoulder.

“Well, for—” snarled one of the two men with Harriet, as he saw the girl knock the spots out of two thugs. He charged toward Nellie, leaving Harriet with just the one guardian. At the same moment, in a doorway down the hall, a man appeared.

The man looked pale and dizzy. He was in slippers and robe, proving that he belonged here. A lump on his forehead testified to recent violence. He tottered toward the group in the hall.

The man who had left Harriet had a gun in his hand. He wasn’t going to monkey around any more. He was going to club that gun down on Nellie’s head! He raised it high—

Nellie was watching the two men she had downed, and didn’t know about the man behind her. She’d have been cracked on the head by the gun barrel, only the man in slippers and robe acted.

He had an inkwell in his hand. He threw it, and luck favored the throw. The heavy glass cube hit the man behind Nellie in the biceps on the right arm. The man gasped and his arm sagged.

“Scram!” snapped the man with the dislocated shoulder, suiting the word with action by running for the door.

Then Harriet and Nellie and the man in slippers had the hall to themselves. Nellie cried out in angry disappointment and chased after the men. She wanted them prisoner. But they were too fast.

She heard car doors slam, the whine of a motor from the rear near the garage and the shriek of a motor going thirty or thirty-five in low gear. A fender clanged on the gatepost at the street, and car and men were gone.

Nellie drew a deep breath and looked at the man in the dressing robe. He was young, and his features seemed just a little familiar.

“Thanks,” she said. “That fellow would have conked me if you hadn’t thrown the inkwell.”

The young fellow waved his hand vaguely to dismiss the thanks. He was staring at Harriet, and staring quite angrily.

“Sis!” he said. “What the devil have you been doing lately? Where have you been?”

Nellie whirled on Harriet. Once more the girl had a finger to her lips for silence, but it hadn’t worked this time as it had with the watchman.

“Sis, huh?” said Nellie slowly. “So she is Beall’s daughter.”

“Sure!” said the young man sourly. “Who was she supposed to be?”

Harriet was biting her lips and looking frustrated and angry.

“She said her name was Harriet Smith,” Nellie said.

“So it is,” the man replied. “Harriet Smythe Beall. I’m Johnson Barr Beall; she’s my sister. And Dad and I have been hunting all over for her. We thought she’d been kidnaped, too.”

“Too?” said Nellie. Then she remembered Cole’s report of a man being driven from this house with adhesive tape over his mouth. A man who had later got away in a scrimmage and never had been identified.

“You’re the one the gang took to the junkyard,” she said.

He nodded, still glaring at Harriet.

“And these men were here to kidnap you again tonight?”

“I guess so,” said young Beall. “They came into the library before I knew anyone was in the house, and one of them blackjacked me. I came to to hear fighting in the hall and came out with the inkwell.”

“Is Mr. Beall in now?” asked Nellie.

Harriet tried to wigwag her brother not to answer, but he paid no attention to her signs.

“No, he’s out. Been out all evening. Trying to locate his runaway daughter, I guess.”

“Or—” Nellie started to say. But she didn’t finish the thought: Or else cleaning his own office of envelopes that might be incriminating.

If that were true, it meant that he had locked his own daughter in a vault to suffocate, which didn’t seem a possible act for even the most desperate criminal. But then Nellie reflected that it had been too dark to see faces. All the man could have known was that two girls were after him.

“Harriet, where have you been?” snapped Johnson Beall.

“At the Bleek Street headquarters of Mr. Benson,” Harriet said. “I told you I was going to ask his help.” She turned to Nellie. “Dad’s in some kind of terrible trouble. Something connected with this man Farquar. I wanted Mr. Benson’s help, but at the same time I didn’t quite know whether I could trust him entirely. So I gave a fake name and a few of the things I knew.”

“Well, you’re going to stay home where you belong, now,” snapped young Beall.

“No, I’m not,” Harriet contradicted quietly. “I’m going to Mr. Benson’s place again.”

Nellie stared at Beall. “There are probably many things you could tell us that would help. Will you?”

“I’ll tell you nothing,” growled young Beall. “You and your gang are in with Farquar. That crook! That’s enough for me.”

“Well, let’s go then, Harriet,” sighed Nellie.

Young Beall stepped between the two girls and the door. But at the steady look in Nellie’s eyes, and the determination in his sister’s, he bit his lip and stepped aside.

The two went out—and to Bleek Street.

CHAPTER XII

Stubborn Facts

The Avenger had a flock of facts by now, but none of them seemed to weave into a pattern that made sense.

He had started on what seemed a simple quest. He was to help a man in trouble by collecting three phony clues by which blackmailers could send him to the chair on the charge of murdering his clerk.

The simple quest had become mighty complex.

Dick Benson walked back and forth in the vast top-floor room, thinking things out, eyes as pale and bright as bits of moonstone, face alert but utterly expressionless.

Seated in the room, their puzzled eyes following each lithe move of the famous Avenger, were Nellie and Harriet, Smitty, and Josh and Rosabel Newton.

“Beall, Jr., was kidnaped,” said Dick slowly, going on with his train of thought. “The first attempt would have been successful, save that we intervened and he got away. So the kidnapers tried again. Very stubborn and determined about it. But why kidnap him? For money? We have a report that Beall is in financial difficulties. In fact, his paper company is on the verge of bankruptcy. So the kidnapers can’t be after ransom; there’s no money to get.”

He paced the floor, seeming to flow rather than walk, like a tense black panther.

“Farquar didn’t know what clues were held over his head by Beall and Cleeves and Salloway as the blackmail foundation”

“My father is not a blackmailer!” said Harriet.

“You mean you think he isn’t,” said Nellie gently. “But, don’t you see, he would hardly take you into his confidence in such a matter. You just don’t know.”

The Avenger seemed not to have heard.

“All Farquar knew was that the three men had something that would incriminate him. We got the cigar case from Salloway and found a gold crown in it. How would that incriminate anyone?”

“And who killed Salloway,” interrupted Smitty, “and why? Where does that fit in?”

Josh Newton’s quick dark eyes went to the giant’s face.

“It could mean that Beall and Cleeves thought it better to split the demanded million in blackmail two ways instead of three. So one or both of them sent those gangsters there to kill Salloway and get his clue.”

Harriet’s eyes flashed; but at a sharp glance from Nellie she kept silent.

Again Dick Benson seemed to pay no attention. He went on: “The dead man in the alley—the one Miss Beall saw—has been identified as a private detective. There is no proof of who hired him or whom he was working for when he met his death. But on his customers’ list is the name Iando Cleeves; so it’s logical to suppose he was working for Cleeves when he was murdered. Where would that fit in?”

“Maybe it was that night when the clues against Farquar were trumped up,” said Nellie. “Maybe the dead man in the alley had something to do with that.”

“It’s possible,” Dick agreed. “The alley isn’t far from the house in which Smathers was killed. And that brings up the envelope.”

He stood still, and his almost colorless eyes went to Harriet’s face.

“Nothing but blank paper was in the envelope. It seems to me that tells a positive story. The envelope existed only as an excuse for Smathers to go to Ismail’s house. He was sent there on a fake errand only to be murdered. The type of envelope says Beall sent him. But why did any one want to kill Farquar’s man?”

Harriet was fighting against tears. And she blurted something she hadn’t admitted before.

“My father did not send him there! He had nothing to do with it! The clerk left from Farquar’s office that night. I know because I followed him from there—”

She stopped, and looked as if she were sorry she had said so much; then, after having said that much, she went on.

“I’d felt for weeks that Dad was in trouble. I wanted to help him. I got an idea that the man who was bothering him was Markham Farquar, because Dad always seemed terribly upset after seeing him. So, on my own, to try to help, I began watching Farquar. Nothing happened till that night—”

She drew a deep breath and terror was reflected in her eyes.

“I was watching Farquar’s office building from across the street. I saw Smathers come out. I knew him by sight, by then. I didn’t know whether to follow him or wait for Farquar. But finally I followed Smathers.

“I’m not a good trailer, I guess. I saw him go into that seemingly vacant house—and then I didn’t see anything more. If he was killed in there, his killer must have brought him out, because you say the man found in the freight yard was Smathers. But I didn’t see them leave.”

The Avenger’s eyes were pale diamond drills on her face. How much of her final frankness was due to their hypnotic power and how much to growing trust in him, no one could say.

“I realized finally that I’d been given the slip,” she went on. “I started to go to my car, parked several blocks away. I saw another car stop, not far down the street, and I recognized it as a sedan I’d seen around the corner from the Ismail house. I got behind a trash basket and watched. And I saw a trailing car. Both had come from the direction of the Holland Tunnel.

“A man got out of the first one and went into this alley. I couldn’t see his face, he seemed to be just a moving shadow. A man got out of the trailing car, and went into the alley too. In a minute one came back out. The other—stayed in. I went in to investigate, and found the second man lying there dead. And then I screamed—”

She put her hands over her eyes.

“After that, I came here for help.”

“You weren’t very helpful yourself, were you?” said Benson quietly. “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

Harriet spread her hands miserably.

“I come for help, and what is the first thing I find? You are working for Farquar; for the man I feel is Dad’s bitter enemy! I didn’t know whether you were really in with him, or were being hoodwinked by him. I gave you the benefit of the doubt by staying here, but I didn’t dare tell all I knew till I’d found out more about you.”

“You’re not telling all you know, even now,” said The Avenger, face as calm as his voice. “There’s something more. What is it?”

“There isn’t any more—”

“What is it?” said Dick inexorably.

So Harriet, after a pleading glance, gave in.

“While the two were in the alley, I saw still another man appear from somewhere and do something to the first car—the sedan. He might have been searching it, I don’t know. I was watching the alley more than the car and only saw the man out of the corner of my eye.”

“For goodness’ sake,” said Nellie impatiently. “I don’t see why you should be so careful to keep that to yourself!”

“I think I do,” said Benson quietly. He was still staring at Harriet. “You felt you knew that man searching the car, didn’t you?”

“Why, I . . . I—”

“You thought it was your father!”

And then the little pinpoint of red showed near the door, in warning that someone was in the vestibule downstairs. Josh went to the tiny television set that revealed anyone there.

“Markham Farquar,” Josh said. And he pressed the admittance buzzer at Benson’s nod.

“Farquar?” cried Harriet wildly. “Let me out of here! I don’t want to face that man!”

Nellie looked at The Avenger, and Benson nodded again. So Nellie took Harriet out and down to her room on the second floor.

“You know what I think?” said Smitty. And the giant said it regretfully because Harriet was a very pretty girl and Smitty was susceptible to such. “I think she’s in with her father on this blackmail plot. I think she’s hanging around here, trying to spy on us, and ready to throw a monkey wrench in the gears if we begin to really threaten Beall’s safety.”

Then the door opened and Markham Farquar came in. The man whom Harriet Beall didn’t dare face.

Farquar looked like a sick man. Gone was his imposing carriage and his air of authority. He seemed less than life-size, shriveled, defeated.

“I just came to tell you,” he said dully, “that I’m giving up the fight on this affair. I’m licked. I’m going to scrape together the blackmail sum, pay it, and get some peace.”

“Oh?” said Benson, face impassive. “You’ve had more trouble lately, then?”

Farquar laughed a little wildly. “Trouble! Four times in ten hours I’ve missed being killed by a matter of inches! Somehow, someone has rung a gang of killers or racketeers in on this. I think the attempts on my life were deliberately meant not quite to succeed. Just to show me on how slim a thread my life hung if I didn’t surrender! So—I’m giving in.”

“Well, I’m not.”

Dick Benson’s eyes were like cold wells of pale ice in his expressionless face.

“There has been murder. There have been attempts at kidnaping. Such things are my business, Mr. Farquar. I intend to go ahead.”

Farquar’s shoulders straightened a very little. He looked hopefully at The Avenger.

“You think we have a chance to beat them?”

“I do,” said Benson.

“You give me new courage,” said Farquar, voice a bit tremulous. “Very well, then, we’ll try a little longer.”

“Would you like to put up here at Bleek Street?” asked Benson. “It would stop these attempts on your life.”

Farquar shook his head.

“I’ll stay for a while to throw possible trailers off my track; then I’ll go home and lock myself in. You have my number. You can tell me any developments over the phone.”

“I can tell you one now,” said Dick. “We have reason to believe that your clerk, Smathers, did not go home or anywhere else from your office, the night he died. He left for Death’s address, direct from your place.”

“From my office?” Farquar said, with panic in his voice. “That’s bad. That’s very bad! It would look in a law court—if this ever gets to court—as if I sent him on that last errand of his! You’re sure of this?”

“Reasonably sure,” said Benson, not giving the source of the information.

Farquar drew a deep breath.

“I’ll still put my faith in Justice, Inc. I still believe that you can get hold of those three bits of fake evidence held over me, and I’ll hang on till then.”

He left with a different gait from the one with which he’d entered, after waiting a while, as he had said, to throw possible trailers off his path.

“Scaring him physically as well as mentally,” mused Smitty. “The blackmailers must be getting desperate, chief. Suppose one of those near-attempts on his life should accidentally succeed? Then there wouldn’t be any Farquar left to pay out the money.”

The Avenger nodded, eyes pale and icy, face impassive.

CHAPTER XIII

Two More Crowns

Cole Wilson had hung on Beall’s trail like a shadow. But even a shadow can be given the slip occasionally—in the darkness, for instance.

Beall had managed to lose Wilson for several hours the night Harriet and Nellie had been shut up in the office vault. Then Wilson had picked up the trail of Beall again, and had kept to it.

Now, at a little after noon of the next day, Wilson had again taken his station outside the Beall grounds.

But he hadn’t left his car where he’d parked it before. Car and place had proved to be well located, by the ramming the gang had given it when they came out with the kidnaped son of Beall.

Wilson’s car was five blocks away, this time—another car. Wilson himself was hiding in weeds along the iron fence where it came closest to the house.

And he was damned tired of it.

“I’m going to bust this stalemate,” he told himself rebelliously. Wilson was always impulsive. “I’m going to get in that house and see what goes on.”

Beall had not moved out of the place since coming in late last night, either to go to his office or anywhere else. Neither had Beall’s son.

Wilson looked around. There was no one near enough to see him, he judged. He reached up, caught the top of the iron picket fence, drew himself over, and dropped inside.

He did it just about that swiftly, too, vaulting the ten-foot height rather than actually climbing it. The compact power of this man, and his daring, made him a very able henchman for The Avenger indeed.

Inside the grounds, Wilson crept toward the house. The way his dark hair grew back from his forehead made him look slightly Indian. He moved in a way reminding one of Indians, too.

It was broad daylight, of course, but so deftly did Cole slide from bush to tree bole, and then to the yews next to the house wall, that he had every reason to believe that no one in or near the house could have observed him.

He crouched among bushes near a window. Then he pulled a trick The Avenger had taught him. He drew a slim length of wire from an inner pocket. It is amazing what a complete kit of tools a ten-inch length of wire can be.

He bent the two ends in opposite directions till the wire looked like a tiny periscope. Then he raised the wire till one end pressed against the bottom of the windowpane and put the other solidly between his teeth.

For a long time he stayed like that. Any sound in the room would subtly vibrate the windowpane, which would in turn impart tiny vibrations to his jaws.

There was no sound; so Wilson raised his head and looked in.

There was a glimpse of a fireplace flanked by books, several leather chairs almost like club chairs, a small table on wheels with luncheon things on it—scraps of food told that lunch had just been completed—and paneling around the walls.

There was no one in the room.

Wilson bent his wire again and thrust it between the sashes in the middle, first on one side and then the other. That there would be a burglar catch on this first-floor window, he assumed.

His wire caught the tiny obstruction, turned in his hand as he slowly raised the lower sash, and held the catch while the window slid by.

He stepped into the room, thanking his stars that there wasn’t a burglar alarm as well as a catch; or, if there was one, that it was turned off in the daytime.

He started toward the door opposite the window, and then stopped, motionless. There were steps out there, and they were nearing that door!

Wilson could have gotten to the window and out, but he didn’t want to do that. He stared swiftly around.

The fireplace would just about hold him, and it had a fancy tip-screen in front of it of inlaid wood. He raced to it, crammed himself in with the andirons, and drew the big wooden plaque back in front of the fender.

He’d just gotten his hand away from the base of the screen when the door opened and a servant came in. He went to the wheeled table, obviously having come in to get the luncheon things.

He was a middle-aged man of the professional-servant type, looking rather sour of face. He started to wheel the table toward the door, when it opened again and another man poked his head in.

This was not a servant. At least, if he was, he did not look it. He looked like an old-time rumrunner. Or perhaps a modern one; since rumrunning is a long way from being stopped, in spite of the death of prohibition.

The man had a gun in his hand, and his not-too-intelligent face was viciously pugnacious. He handled the gun quite expertly.

“Oh!” he said, and the gun disappeared. “It’s you, huh? I heard a noise in here, and that dimwit cook said she thought she’d got a gander at some guy comin’ over the fence; so I shoved in to investigate.”

“Yes, it is I,” said the servant with dignity. “That dimwit cook happens to be my wife.” The servant’s face twisted with fury. “How much longer are you, and the rest like you, going to stay in this house? And why are you here, anyhow?”

The gunman shrugged, grinning.

“I wouldn’t know, pal. Your boss is playin’ some kind of a game where he thinks he needs guys like us. Ask him the questions you just asked me. It might get you more dope than I can give you.”

He went out, swaggering. The servant, still fuming, took the wheeled table away. And Wilson came from the fireplace, with his pants pretty laden with ashes.

Wilson had noted the servant’s voice particularly, for he had an experiment in mind that might require the man’s intonation.

He resumed his interrupted journey to the front hall, on which this room was located. He peered from the crack between door and jamb, saw the coast was clear, and started along the hall toward stairs. And he had another bad break.

There was a phone on a small table near the stairs. And it began to ring.

Wilson looked around for another hiding place, and didn’t see any save the partly opened doorway from which he had just come. He ducked back to it, but first lifted the phone off its cradle. The ringing stopped.

For quite a while there was silence. Wilson’s luck was in. He had gambled on the fact that in a house with many around, everyone waits for someone else to answer a phone. And he had won.

He went out, put the phone back on its cradle, and jumped as a voice came from the head of the stairs.

“What was the call, Baker?”

Wilson kept the voice of the servant firmly in mind.

“I don’t know, sir.” It was quite a creditable imitation. “The connection was broken almost as soon as I took up the phone, sir.”

“Oh!”

Sweat stood out a little on Cole’s high forehead. He thought this was Beall himself; he had heard the man talk several times in his trailing. If Beall stepped close enough to the head of the stairs to see who was impersonating the servant, Baker, and if he then called his tough-looking bodyguard—

But tight as the squeeze was, Wilson couldn’t resist trying an experiment that popped into his mind.

“I think, sir, it might have been Mr. Farquar,” he called. “It sounded a bit like his voice—the few words I heard.”

“Oh!” This was a different “Oh” from the first.

Wilson made sounds with his feet as if he were going down the hall toward the kitchen in the rear. Instead, he went back to the room he first entered. And he got a bite from his clever bait-casting.

Quite a while passed; then there were furtive steps on the stairs. There was a dialing sound, then Beall’s voice out there at the phone.

“Hello. Farquar? You know who this is, I think. I called to tell you something, and I’m going to tell you just once, so don’t interrupt and don’t miss any of it.”

Beall’s voice was as harsh as sandstone, though like his steps, it was made furtive so no one in the house would hear.

“You have gotten the aid of the man called Richard Benson. I want you to stop that. Do you understand? I want you to call off all investigation instantly. If you do not, I will at once turn over to the police the evidence I have against you on a certain matter very relevant to your safety.”

There was a click as Beall hung up. And Wilson’s black eyes blazed. After that threatening little conversation, there was no longer much doubt as to Beall’s guilt! And now for the second trick—the one Cole had had in mind when he made such a careful note of the servant’s voice.

He went swiftly to the window.

“Mr. Beall!” he called, in Baker’s tone. “Quick! Men are coming up the drive! A lot of them! I . . .”

He let his voice die as he leaped out of the window. Then he crouched just under the sill.

There were pounding, frantic steps in the room. He ventured to peer in. Beall had galloped in there and was fussing frenziedly with a section of paneling. It was that paneling that had given Wilson the hunch that this would be the room where things would be hidden. Nothing like paneling for concealing things. And again he had been right.

Beall fairly ripped a hidden door out from the paneling, with the false alarm still ringing in his ears. He took something out of a wall safe with trembling fingers. And Wilson’s black eyes took on even greater brightness as he saw what it was.

A small woman’s jewel case. And it was in a jewel case that Farquar had thought Beall held the blackmailing murder-frame evidence.

Beall started to run for the door with it, and Cole said: “Stand where you are. Don’t turn around.”

Beall’s back showed such trembling agitation that it seemed the man must be ready to drop in his tracks. He stood still.

“Drop that jewel case,” said Wilson, as if he had six guns pointing at Beall instead of none at all.

A sort of croaking sound came from Beall, but he dropped the case.

“Just stand there,” said Wilson, getting back in the room.

He took the jewel case and started backing to the window.

Sheer animal terror did for Beall what courage could not do. He leaped galvanically for the door and out. He slammed it as he passed, and Wilson heard a key turn.

“Baker! Leary! Everybody!” screamed Beall outside. “Man escaping from the breakfast room window! Get him!”

So Wilson didn’t tackle the window. He stepped to it, closed it, and went to the door. The wire did one more service, by picking the lock. He walked into the hall. There was one man there, at the front door, looking out, evidently with orders to guard the house while the rest chased around the side and rear outside.

Wilson went up to him. The man whirled as he finally heard him. Wilson clipped him neatly and the man went down; then Cole walked out the front way with the jewel case.

Fergus MacMurdie, on Cleeves’ trail, was not having such luck.

Cleeves’s art gallery was on upper Fifth Avenue. The man had made enough money out of it, according to report, to be able to retire. But he had not done so. It pleased him, instead, to keep on with the activities of his gallery, although he was now more art collector than vendor.

He was at the gallery whenever he wasn’t at his big apartment in the Seventies. He was there now, and Mac was having a difficult time about it.

In the first place, the street, of course, teemed with people. That made it easy for Mac to hang around and not be spotted in the crowd. But it also made it easy for a person to slip from the doorway of the gallery into the mob without being seen.

In the second place, Mac had methodically found that the big art store had a rear entrance. A nasty one, too—for his purpose.

At the back of the store was a small door, leading to the crowded lobby of a big office building, on the ground floor of which was the gallery. Cleeves could slip out there any time he liked and not be seen by Mac in the street.

In the building lobby, not far from this door, was the usual magazine and newsstand. Mac had given the young fellow in charge a dollar to report to him if Cleeves left that door; but the boy had crowded moments at his stand during which he couldn’t have kept a good watch.

Cole Wilson was just arriving at Bleek Street with the jewel case when Mac got alarmed.

Cleeves had gone into the gallery at nine o’clock that morning; and at nearly three in the afternoon, he hadn’t come out yet—not even for lunch. That is, Mac hadn’t seen him come out, which made the Scot think his man might have left without his knowing it.

“Whoosh!” said Mac to himself. “If I’ve lost him, the chief—”

He pictured himself looking into the pale, inexorable eyes of The Avenger and reporting that he had fallen down on the job. Dick Benson wouldn’t say anything; he never did. He didn’t expect his aides to be supermen. Nevertheless, Mac shrank from the thought of making such a report.

He had to know if Cleeves were still in there; so he went about it openly. He didn’t think Cleeves had spotted him hanging around, or knew him by sight.

He walked into the store. A handsome young man in a cutaway, ascot, and wing collar came up to him.

“I’d like to see Mr. Cleeves, please,” Mac said.

“I’m sorry, sir.” The clerk’s eyes traveled leisurely over Mac’s bony frame, and he made the “sir” into a lazy insult. The Scot never could wear clothes so they looked like anything. “Mr. Cleeves left word that he was not to be disturbed.”

“He’s in, then?” said Mac, feeling relieved.

“Yes, sir. In his private office in the rear. He went in there at eleven o’clock with a new picture—a very rare painting by one of the Flemish masters. I expect he wanted a long, close look to see if it was genuine. That’s why he left such positive orders to let no one or nothing disturb him.”

Mac’s satisfaction suddenly was jolted.

“Whoosh, mon!” he said. “He went in at eleven? But that’s four hours gone. Would he spend four solid hours lookin’ at a picture?”

“It appears that he has,” said the clerk indifferently.

Mac sighed.

“I’ll have to come again,” he said. “There’s a door in back, leadin’ to the lobby, isn’t there?”

“Yes, sir. Right back there.” The clerk pointed, then went toward the street door again, to stand critically inspecting his nails while he waited for a bona fide customer.

Mac reached the lobby door; then, in a soundless leap, he sped from it to the door across the narrow corridor marked: “Iando Cleeves, Private.” The clerk didn’t notice.

Mac tried the door. It was locked. The Scot pulled out a big jackknife, put it in the crack near the lock, and pried. The knife was as ungainly as the man himself, but like the man, it was capable.

There was a creak, the door opened, and Mac slipped in.

He took one long look around, then leaped for the phone on the desk and dialed Bleek Street.

“Hello, Muster Benson? This is Mac. Can ye come to Cleeves’s art gallery at once? There’s a dead mon ye’ll want to see. Yes, ’tis Cleeves. Lyin’ on the floor of his private office with his face as blue as ink an’ his hand swelled up as big as a kid’s football.”

Mac hung up; then his quick eyes spotted something half out of a desk drawer. It was a dispatch case.

Mac opened it. One thing, it held, and one thing only.

A gold crown!

The gold crown looked as if it had not had time to chew much food with the support of the molar beneath it, and it looked as if it had been ripped quite recently from a human jaw.

CHAPTER XIV

Death’s Sting

On The Avenger’s way uptown to the Cleeves Gallery, Mac radioed to him the layout of the shop: small rear door into the lobby, Cleeves’s private office door almost directly across the narrow corridor from that. And Mac knew that Benson would want to get into that office, unobserved, for a good look around before clerks or police discovered what had happened to the employer who had locked himself into his office with strict orders “not to be disturbed.”

Even knowing that The Avenger would come in quietly, Mac was unprepared for his entrance.

The Scot was looking at an oil painting just taken out of its wooden crate—evidently the painting that Cleeves had immured himself to examine in solitude. And a voice spoke at his side.

“Quite a bizarre painting, isn’t it, Mac?”

Mac whirled, and stared into the pale, deadly eyes of his chief. Dick had come into the room so soundlessly, flashing across from lobby door to office door, that the Scot hadn’t heard a thing.

“Whoosh!” Mac said. “Ye’re here five minutes faster than a mon could possibly get here from Bleek Street. An’ ye appeared out of thin air like a ghost.”

“Not quite a ghost, Mac,” said Benson, face as expressionless as his chromium chips of eyes. “I see you’ve turned up a curious mess here.”

The Avenger went ahead to untangle the mess.

He started with the painting.

It was a bizarre thing. The clerk had said Cleeves entered with a painting by a Flemish master. But this had no Flemish touch.

It was a modern painting of a jungle. It was done in violent blues and reds and yellows. Nothing was in scale—birds were as big as trees and insects scattered through the scene were as big as birds. It was a kind of jungle nightmare.

In the lower lefthand corner was a big spider. It looked as lifelike as if it were really there, instead of just painted on. And in the center of the spider there was a wet patch.

Dick Benson touched the wet patch and it came off greenish brown. He wiped the speck of moisture off his finger carefully, and turned to the corpse.

Cleeves lay in a tumbled heap, as if caught in a big hand, crumpled, and thrown away. And his face was literally blue, as Mac had said over the phone. As blue as blue clay.

His right hand was swollen three times the size of a normal hand and was also bluish. The ghastly tint was deepest around two angry-looking little punctures at the base of the thumb.

Dick’s pale, all-seeing eyes swept over the floor and saw a moist patch near one of the dead man’s feet. So Dick looked at the soles of Cleeves’s shoes.

On the right sole was a queer thing. It looked as if the man, just before he died, had stamped on a wet mustache, and strands of the mustache adhered.

“About as sly and nasty a piece of killing as we have bumped into,” said The Avenger. “Someone sent this exotic painting of birds and trees and jungle insects to Cleeves. He locked himself in here to examine it. But over one of the painted insects was a real one, numbed by being chilled, probably, and lightly glued to the picture. Cleeves put his hand on it, the spider bit—and death came! But before he died, Cleeves had stamped the thing to death after his touch brushed it from the canvas.”

Mac nodded somberly.

“Death must have come within a few seconds,” he said. “Otherwise Cleeves would have had a chance to get help in here. As it is, even the clerks don’t know their boss is in here dead.”

“Two of the three men pitted against Farquar—dead,” mused Dick, pale eyes like slits of stainless steel in their hard, cold brilliance.

“Leavin’ just the one—Beall—to collect the whole million in blackmail from Farquar,” said Mac.

But The Avenger shook his head.

“Not any more. Not if he relied on those clues, one of which was held by Cleeves, one by Salloway, and the third by himself. We have them now—all three of the bits of evidence which Farquar thought could put him in the chair for the murder of his clerk.”

He laid the gold crowns taken from Beall and Salloway beside the gold crown Mac had found in Cleeves’s dispatch case. Three gold crowns.

“How would those three things prove murder on anybody?” asked Mac, puzzled.

The Avenger didn’t say anything. He was looking at the crowns, as he had looked before. On each were the marks of the forceps that had pulled them. Possibly those forceps had been intended to pull tooth and all; but a yank on a crowned tooth will practically always take the crown before the tooth comes. Then a second extraction must be made.

“Say they were in the mouth of the murdered clerk, Smathers,” went on MacMurdie, more puzzled than ever. “That would be likely, since ye found forceps near the place where Smathers’s dead body had been laid on the tracks. So what? All that’d prove would be that the dead man was Smathers. It wouldn’t point out a killer, unless there are prints on them to show who pulled them.”

The Avenger’s head, with its heavy, close-cropped black hair, shook a little.

“There are no prints. They must have rubbed around loose in someone’s pocket before they were put away so carefully in a dispatch box, a jewel box, and a cigar case. Anyhow, there are no prints.”

“Then—” Mac stopped. This was no time to chase up blind alleys.

He looked expectantly at Benson. He himself hadn’t the faintest idea what ought to be done next. But he was sure the chief would know. Dick did know; and it was so simple that Mac almost blushed for not thinking of it himself.

“The crate around this picture,” said The Avenger calmly, “is marked as coming from Warehouse Nine of the Gallic Importing Company. That may mean something, it may mean nothing. We’ll go to the warehouse and have a look.”

“Whoever put the bug on the picture,” said Mac sourly, “might have done so anywhere along the road.” Dour Mac! Always pessimistic, unless he was in a jam where death seemed absolutely certain. Then, for no known reason, it was his habit to turn brightly optimistic and insist that all was bound to end well.

“Of course,” said Benson, “there’s only one chance in ten that the warehouse will provide any information. But it wouldn’t be sensible to overlook that chance.”

The Avenger dialed police headquarters on Cleeves’s phone, eyes as steady and calm as his voice.

“Benson talking, commissioner. There has been a murder at Cleeves’s Fifth Avenue Art Gallery. Yes, Cleeves himself; bitten by a poisonous spider placed on a new canvas. Yes, I have looked around all I need to. I have disturbed nothing.”

Which was a slight indication of the high regard with which The Avenger was viewed by the New York police force. If anyone else had dared to look around a corpse before calling the cops, he’d have been behind bars so fast it would have given him spots before the eyes. But Benson could investigate, and the fact was conveniently forgotten on later reports. That was because The Avenger had solved so many crime cases for the police that no one in the department could quite remember them all.

Mac and Dick went to the door, and there was a scurrying sound in the narrow shop corridor outside.

It had sounded like a rat—a rat of human size, say, walking on its hind legs.

Mac had the door open and was glaring up and down the corridor. But he saw nothing. To the rear was only dimness. Toward the front, against the big plate-glass show windows, he could see two clerks, moving indolently, still unaware of the hours-old murder in the private office. Either might have been eavesdropping—or neither.

“Come along,” The Avenger said quietly.

It was much more sensible to go at once to that warehouse than to monkey around trying to find out what clerk had been at that door, and what he had heard.

The Gallic Importing Co. didn’t have nine warehouses. It looked more imposing on a letterhead or a crate to print nine than one. For all they had was one warehouse, and that one wasn’t very big, and it was in an unhandy location near the East River.

However, the company didn’t need more than one storage space. Their business was bringing paintings, jewelry, antiques, and relics, in questionable ways, from war-torn Europe. Those things don’t bulk large, nor are many employees necessary to handle them. In fact, the fewer the better.

There didn’t seem to be anyone at all around the shabby brick building, with its windowless facade, when Mac and The Avenger reached it. And when Benson softly tried the door, leading into a little office, he found it was locked.

There was a steady rumbling of trucks and cars in the street along here, for this was a loading section. But there were few pedestrians on the narrow sidewalk. The Avenger drew Mike, the little streamlined silenced .22 revolver, from its leg holster.

With his body hiding the gun from those behind him, Dick emptied the gun at the lock. There were only four slugs in the cylinder, which had been kept small to streamline the gun. But after Mike had whispered four times, in just the right spots, the door opened with no further trouble.

Mac and Benson entered a place as cool and dim and high-arched as a cave; for even a comparatively small warehouse, if it consists of one big space without floors from street level to roof, looks as big as a cathedral.

The two got past the bulk of the little front office, which was like a small box set within a big one, when Mac, just as he was getting out his flashlight to look more easily into the gloom, almost stepped on a hand!

He rayed the light down at it, bleak blue eyes coldly angry. Murder of innocent people could still make MacMurdie icily furious, even with all the examples of it he had seen since joining The Avenger.

Here was an obviously cold-blooded killing!

The man attached to the dead hand was a middle-aged fellow in blue overalls, with wide-open gray eyes and a gentle face, relaxed in death so that it looked almost restful. And precisely over the man’s heart was a narrow slit.

There were blood stains in the rumpled slack of the blue overalls, showing that his murderer had callously drawn the knife from the man’s heart and wiped the bloody blade on his victim’s own clothing.

“The warehouse mon here,” said Mac. “Why, the murderin’ skurlies—”

There was a series of thuds, like the simultaneous dropping of windblown ripe fruit from a tree. But this was strange and evil fruit!

The ceiling of the little office was about nine feet high, and above that extended empty space to the roof of the warehouse building itself. The men had been on this office top section. They were the fruit that had thudded to the floor.

Seven or eight of them— With blackjacks and clubbed guns!

“Chief!” yelled Mac.

But there had been no need to yell. Benson had heard the slight sounds the men had made in squirming to the edge to drop over. Less than a second of warning. But it was enough.

In The Avenger’s right hand was Mike, reloaded after shooting the lock out. In his left was the almost as deadly Ike, the throwing knife. Two of the world’s queerest weapons.

Mike whispered and one of the men went down with a little hole in his shoulder, again conforming to Benson’s refusal to take life, for he could have hit the heart just as well.

Mac wasn’t fighting for the moment. With men clawing for him, his hands were fiddling with his belt, as if he had an arsenal there. One man had a blackjack lifted over the Scot’s head.

Benson’s left hand flashed out. The Avenger was able to use either hand at all forms of fighting. Ike flashed from his fingers, sliced agonizingly across the back of the hand that held the sap, and went on to fall in shadow. Mike spat again, and a man went down with a gash on the exact top of his head, stunned but not killed. And then the rest were on Mac and Dick.

Mac’s hands weren’t at his waist any more. They were clenched into bone mallets of fists, and they began to do excellent work. Two men went down. Another yelled as The Avenger, unable to use the gun at close range, got a nerve pressure on the fellow’s thigh that made him think his leg was coming off at the hip.

This second time, Mac had no chance to yell to his chief, as he’d done when men thudded from above the office. He didn’t see the newcomers himself till a gun was swinging at his skull.

They’d come from behind a pile of crated furniture and sneaked up behind Mac and Dick. And they turned the odds into something unbeatable.

Mac went down from that clubbing gun. And the last thing that registered on his consciousness was the sight of another man clubbing down with a gun at the head of The Avenger.

CHAPTER XV

Dead Dentist

It is advantageous to have buildings on rivers, but their basements are usually a drawback because water seeps in. There are two ways to overcome this: spend some money and make the walls watertight, or spend a little less for a pump to pump out the seepage.

The basement of the Gallic Importing Co.’s warehouse was armored against the seepage from the East River by the pump method.

But the pump was not working now. It had been switched off, and the water was rising in the basement.

It was the cold water, up to Mac’s ankles, that finally brought consciousness back to him. He opened his eyes, batted them in bewilderment, then realized all that had happened.

“Chief!” he barked in sudden apprehension.

There was no answer. In anguish, Mac tried to get up, and found he was tied hand and foot. He looked around the place. In the light of a couple of little twenty-five-watt bulbs, he saw Dick Benson.

The Avenger was still unconscious, slumped against the wall. Blood was matted in his close-cut, thick black hair from that crack on the head. Mac felt a gripping fear, but then the pale, deadly eyes opened.

Benson had a wild animal’s ability to regain consciousness fully alert. When he woke, no matter how sound the sleep, he woke all over, at once. It was the same on coming out of unconsciousness.

The colorless, composed eyes turned toward Mac’s anxious face.

“So they trapped us,” Dick said quietly.

“It looks like it,” said Mac. “The skurlies! If I ever get my hands on them—”

“Water from the river?” said Benson, staring at the rising flood in the basement.

“Yes,” said Mac. “Risin’ pretty fast. But I guess it’ll be a couple of hours before we have trouble. And long before that we’ll get out.” Mac’s cockeyed philosophy of being a shining optimist when trouble was worst was coming to the fore.

This time, however, Mac had a real basis for it.

Benson was trying to get the trick sawing-wire in the edge of his vest working. But, by chance, the gang had bound him so that he couldn’t quite get his fingers on the end loop.

“The rats—to leave the lights on, so we could see the water risin’, said Mac bitterly. “The skurlies! The—”

There was sound above. There was commotion, as of heavy things being thrown down violently. There were yells and a shot or two!

Benson looked quickly at Mac. And the dour Scot displayed one of his rare grins.

“That,” Mac said contentedly, “will be young Cole Wilson. And it sounds like he’s as good a scrapper as I had an idea he’d be! A bonny boy, Muster Benson.”

“Wilson?” echoed Dick.

“While you were shootin’ the lock out with little Mike, I was tappin’ the street address of this warehouse to Cole. When the men jumped us, I had just time to tap one SOS.”

And Mac had just time to finish that, too, when the racket upstairs suddenly died down.

There was the creak of a door, fast steps on stairs, the splash of hurried feet through almost knee-deep water, and then Cole Wilson’s blazing black eyes took in the spectacle.

“Good!” Wilson said, running his powerful hand through his dark hair. “I don’t feel so bad about that one with the red mustache.”

He sliced ropes from Benson and Mac and helped them up. Mac had a shrewd idea that the chief would never have been drowned down there; that he would have come out somehow without aid. But it would have been unkind to mention it in Wilson’s hearing. Cole was too tickled with himself for having come to the aid of The Avenger.

“Thanks, Cole,” said Dick. And Wilson flushed with pleasure. This was rare praise, just the thanks.

“What are ye talking about—one with a red mustache?” said Mac, stumbling through the water to the stairs with the circulation slowly coming back to his cramped limbs.

“Some of the gang who put you down here were on duty up above,” said Wilson. “Guess they were going to make sure the water got you, and then float your bodies down the river so it would look like natural death from drowning. I had to tangle with them. I hit one too hard—a fellow with a red mustache and a scar under his left ear. I was kind of sorry about it till I saw what they’d done to you.”

Wilson looked rather apprehensively at The Avenger, but Dick Benson said nothing. He himself never took life if it could be avoided; but if an aide, in the thick of battle, happened to strike too hard, that was one crook less and it couldn’t be helped.

“How many of them were there?” said Mac.

“Only four,” said Cole with a shrug.

“Child’s play,” said Mac solemnly.

Meanwhile, Dick was looking around with those pale, clear eyes of his. Those eyes were like microscopes when the occasion demanded, or as telescopic as a hawk’s eyes when there was distance to pry into. He picked something up off the water.

It was a match folder, empty, crumpled in an impatient hand when the owner of the hand started to light a cigarette and found no matches there. On the folder was an advertisement for the Pair-O’-Dice Café. The folder claimed it to be fifty minutes from Times Square, dine and dance, fine food, fine music.

“Someone in the gang searched us carefuly,” said The Avenger, his calm, pale gaze on the sodden folder. “They got the three gold crowns from me.”

Mac exclaimed in dismay and anger.

“We must get them back,” said Dick. He held out the folder. “Whoever dropped this folder might have gotten it at the café mentioned, and hence be able to be traced through it. Or he may have picked it up somewhere else, in which case it would be a blind alley. But I want you two, and Smitty, to try it and see. Go to the Pair-O’-Dice Café and look around. I have another job to do.”

Obedience without question to command. That was the watchword of The Avenger’s compact little crime-fighting crew. No word on the subject was ever mentioned; the obedience was simply there. Dick Benson was a born leader.

The two went out of the warehouse with Benson, called the nearest cop, and put him in charge of the four men who had been surprised up in the warehouse by Cole. One dead; three still unconscious.

It was a move that The Avenger felt somberly was useless. He had long ago learned that the hirelings in the battles he waged against supercrime had a curious immunity. Jail them, and almost invariably their powerful, hidden leaders had them sprung.

Often, Dick didn’t even bother to turn the underlings over to the law. He vanquished them in the pursuit of whatever object he had in mind at the moment, and went on till the leader was found and bottled up. Then the underlings found themselves abruptly in a trap from which there was no escape, and they paid the penalty.

Benson had said he had a job to do. The job was to have a little talk with one of New York’s thousands of dentists.

A look through the city directory had disclosed to The Avenger that there was a dentist in the small building in which was also Markham Farquar’s office. The dentist’s name was Dr. Alonzo Louis. Dick wanted to ask him if he knew anything about three gold crowns that had apparently been in Smathers’s mouth.

As it was after regular office hours, Dick first phoned the residence number under Louis’s name in the phone book. It was a hotel, he discovered, on dialing that number.

“Dr. Alonzo Louis? No, sir. He isn’t in.”

“When do you expect him back?” asked The Avenger. Even over the phone, his voice had such authority that it roused the receiver to extra activity.

“Just a moment, please.”

There was silence, then the almost mechanical voice of the hotel switchboard operator. “Dr. Louis left no word at the desk, but he is away on a trip. He has not been in for two days.”

“He left a forwarding address?” asked The Avenger.

“No, sir. Do you wish to leave a message?”

Dick said he didn’t and hung up. Louis, away on a trip. It had an ominous sound. Either the man had fled guiltily or else—

Benson rolled the powerful coupé that was his personal car toward the building in the Fifties where Farquar had his office. He stopped down the block; The Avenger rarely went directly to a goal, even when he had no reason to think danger might lurk nearby.

A bit of his marvelous blending with shadows, people, and objects, and he was at the building door. And no one not watching hard for it would have noticed his approach.

He jammed the lock with a hard twist of his tremendously powerful fingers, heard a strained click, and opened the door. It had taken no more time than opening it with a key; a watcher would have been sure he belonged in the place and had an office there.

Dr. Louis’s office was on the first floor in the rear, to the right, down the hall. The Avenger walked toward it.

Dick Benson had made his first fortune in the wilds of back-country Australia. He had made more fortunes in Borneo, China, South America, and Africa. Always in the wild places; the deadly places.

He had trained his reflexes and instincts till he could fairly smell danger.

Now, in the dark hall, with his body outlined dimly against the glass in the street door behind him, Dick suddenly leaped to the left and forward, sliding like a ball player for home.

He couldn’t have said why. He really didn’t know why.

He suddenly knew there was danger and acted! That was all.

The move saved his life.

Before he had quite hit the floor in his long slide, there was the muffled report of a shot from a silenced weapon, and then a spang as the bullet hit the bronze frame around the glass of the street door.

The slide took Benson fifteen feet down the smooth marble of the floor, and he was up before the momentum had stopped. Up and leaping along the hall toward a rear window, high up from the floor. He could see that the window was open and could also see a human form scrambling frantically to get through it and out.

The Avenger got there just in time to catch the tail of the figure’s coat as it slid outside. That would have been enough if the coat had held. But it didn’t.

There was a sharp ripping of fabric, and Benson staggered backward from the force of his pull. There was a whole side of a coat in his steely hands—but there was nothing in the window.

He jumped to it and started to swing over. A bullet smacked the brickwork within two inches of his head. There were running steps as he ducked back in, and then the sound of a car.

With no emotion on his face, Benson turned from the window. The chase was over, with the sound of the car. He turned his flashlight on the piece of coat.

It was the left side of the garment, containing the inner pocket. And in this inner pocket something crackled. Benson took it out.

It was a plain envelope, empty, of the size to take a standard letterhead, folded lengthwise.

It was an envelope similar to that from the Beall Paper Co. which Smathers had taken to his death.

Benson didn’t go to the door of Dr. Louis then. He went up to Farquar’s office first. And he took the stairs three at a time.

He opened the door, pale eyes glittering at the discovery that it was not locked. He stepped in and took just one look at the floor in front of the entrance. Then he stepped to the phone.

On the floor were ragged spots of dried blood.

He called the lawyer’s home. A worried-sounding servant said that Mr. Farquar hadn’t been home since he left for the office that morning. And the man’s tone implied that the household had tried to reach Farquar at various places and couldn’t locate him.

Benson went back to the door, looking at the spots of grim reddish-brown, and returned to the first floor and the door of Dr. Louis.

This was not unlocked. It was barred securely. So securely that it took him about six minutes to pick the double barrier. Then he walked in, his flashlight ray stabbing the darkness.

The first thing the beam spotlighted was a face. A face, however, on the floor, instead of being up where a face should be.

The face was hideously contorted, dark, like a mask of horror. The lips were slackly open and the eyes glared. But the eyes did not see anything, for they were dead eyes in a dead face.

The corpse was clad in the white of a professional man. It was Louis; fixed so that no one would ever interview him.

Beside the dead dentist lay a small, oddly shaped hammer with blood on it where it had bitten through the skull. It was the type of little mallet used in oral surgery with a bone-cutting chisel, in major operations.

The Avenger looked at the desk clock. It had run down. He examined the coagulated blood on the skull. Long dried. He tentatively flexed a dead leg. It moved easily; had already reached rigor mortis and passed into limpness again, hours ago.

Dr. Louis had been dead several days.

Benson searched the place. His deftness made a thorough search of a room possible in a few minutes. At the end of this particular few minutes he had found no tangible clue.

He had failed to find something that should have been there and wasn’t.

Benson was, perhaps, as brilliant in oral surgery and advanced dentistry as he was in general medical practice. So a glance at the cabinet in which Louis had kept his equipment had told his trained brain what was missing.

A pair of forceps—the next-largest of the line of many forceps, all a little different from the rest for separate purposes. The forceps he had found at the freight-yard fence—and lost again to the men who had thrown him in front of a train to be ground to pieces—had come from this office.

The Avenger had looked particularly for the usual appointment calendar kept by doctors and dentists, in order to see if Smathers’s name was on it. But there had been no such patients’ list. It had been taken by the murderer.

The Avenger dialed police headquarters, his pale eyes meanwhile resting enigmatically on the dead man’s twisted face.

CHAPTER XVI

Meet the Gang

If the Pair-O’-Dice Café was fifty minutes from Times Square, then Smitty, the giant decided, was a monkey’s great-aunt.

It took Smitty, in one of The Avenger’s fastest cars and driving as The Avenger’s aides always drove, fifty-eight minutes to get there. Which meant about an hour and three quarters for the average motorist.

The roadhouse was about sixty miles from town, in a part of New York State curiously wild-looking and sparse of inhabitants when you remembered the metropolis was so comparatively close. There are parts of the State like that—unbelievably back-country, though within driving range of millions of urbanites.

The Pair-O’-Dice was not an impressive-looking place.

It was a three-story structure about as big as a large six-room house, covered with rough slabs on the outside to resemble a log cabin and not doing a very good job of imitating. Woods surrounded it on three sides and picked up again across the smooth highway on which it squatted.

A lot of jalopies around testified that the place was popular for the countrymen around, if not for the city folks. There was a good deal of cheerful noise floating from the barroom, too.

So Smitty and Wilson and Mac didn’t pay any more attention to the bar section. Cheerful noise; innocence. What they were after was a window shaded against light, or whispered secrecy, or stealthy movements.

A powerful sedan was parked in among the jalopies, like a sleek Great Dane among mongrels. Cole looked at the car and then at his two companions, who nodded. It was logical that somebody from New York—from the Gallic Importing Co.’s warehouse, to be exact—had just rolled up in that sleek job.

The three men went around to the back of the place. They looked in a window—the kitchen, with a guy in sloppy whites indifferently frying hamburgers on a big griddle. They looked in another window—storeroom.

There was a shaded window on the second floor. Cole pointed up to it. Smitty knelt down and Cole climbed onto his shoulders. The giant grasped Cole’s ankles in vast hands, and then straightened up. He did it as effortlessly as though there were two pounds of feathers on his back instead of a hundred and eighty-odd pounds of muscle and bone.

Cole could reach the sill from that height. He drew himself up a couple of feet by taut fingertips and looked in. Then he motioned to come down, and Smitty lowered his vast bulk again like a docile elephant.

“It’s all right,” whispered Cole. “Two men in that room, wondering why the four left in the warehouse haven’t reported about the two left to drown in the basement.”

Mac clenched his fists and made low growling noises deep in his throat. Smitty’s gigantic shoulders bulged with cold anger.

“So?” whispered Cole.

“So we meet the gang,” Mac whispered back. “We pay them a little visit. I remember the face of the skurlie who clubbed down the chief. I think he was the leader of the rats. A heavy mon with a paunch and a face like the top of a pail of lard. With luck, he’ll be here.”

There were only two men in that upstairs room, Cole had said. And he told Mac that the man with the lardy face was not one of them. So almost certainly a lot more of the gang must be circulating around down on the main floor.

The three went around to the front, opened the barroom door, and walked in.

There were fifteen or twenty men lined up, with beer, for the main part, in front of them. They were husky men, mostly quite young, with the look of the outdoors that comes to farmhands. They looked indifferently at the door when it was opened, then gaped in awe at Smitty’s enormous bulk.

Mac looked wistfully around for the man who had clubbed the chief but didn’t see him.

“See you at the bar in a minute,” Smitty said to Mac. Then, to the bartender: “Washroom?”

“Right back there, end of the hall,” said the man, jerking a thumb toward the door leading into the central hall of the place. On the other side of this hall was another door, leading into the café. Patrons could come in there, put their feet under tables, and be waited on. Café on one side of the hall; bar on the other.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mac saw Smitty and Wilson pass the other door after a quick stare into the café. The Scot heard the sound of steps down the hall, but he had a hunch that the progress was faked; that Smitty and Wilson were staying right next to that door, out of sight of the folks in the barroom.

“Beer?” said the bartender to Mac.

The Scot reflected sourly. He had to buy something to make it look natural. And beer was the cheapest.

“Yes,” he said reluctantly.

He grudgingly got out a purse with a tight clasp on it, opened the clasp, and drew out a quarter. This he even more grudgingly laid on the bar. There were unlimited funds at the disposal of The Avenger’s men. They could throw it around in thousands, if necessary. But Mac would never get over his hatred of spending a nickel on anything not vitally necessary—

Mac heard a curious little sound from the hall. It was a bit like the squeak of a mouse, and there was a scuffle like that of a frightened mouse; then no more sound.

The whole thing had been so faint that no one in the barroom paid any attention to it—if, indeed, anyone had heard it, save Mac.

The Scot lifted the beer glass to his lips and pretended to drink. Actually, Mac had never touched a drop of anything. There was another sound in the hall.

This time it was not a squeak and a slight scuffle. It was a padded little thud, as if someone, far off, had hit a mattress with a stick. Mac almost grinned, with a bleak, cold light in his baleful eyes.

But that was the end of the odd sounds. A call from the café that drifted in to his ears.

“Mike! Bring some cigarettes back with you.”

Then silence. Then a louder call: “Mike!”

So Mac edged along the bar toward the hall door. The caller in the other room was going to see why Mike hadn’t answered. The fact was in his tone.

Mac reached the barroom entrance onto the hall just as the caller got to the café door. And the two looked at each other—the man with the face graying as if he saw a ghost, and Mac with a frightening small smile on his freckled, homely face.

The man tried to turn and race back into the room, but the Scot got a bony hand on his shoulder from behind and jerked him back. And that was the end of the silence.

Two men lying peacefully on the floor at the feet of the giant Smitty showed the meaning of the small sounds. The giant and Cole had waited flat against the wall next to the café door and silently and cheerfully knocked out the men leaving the room, one by one.

But this had torn it!

With all the power of his shoulders and arm, Mac sent a fist into the putty face of the man who had called for Mike. It was the guy who had hit Benson; and all the loyal Scot’s allegiance to his grim master, The Avenger, was in the blow.

“Wow!” said Smitty, as he ran past. He had never seen even Mac strike such a blow. Nose, mouth, and eyes seemed to be blotted out by the big bony fists and then reappeared again, all scrambled, as the man with the paunch sagged without a move to the floor.

Now guns roared! Smitty and Mac yelled as bullets raised welts under the bulletproof celluglass garments that shielded their bodies; yelled and raced for three tables next to the orchestra dais.

This was the main body of the gang, all right. There were ten men at the three tables. Rather, there had been ten places set. Seven were filled, the other three represented by the men lying like cordwood in the hall and the fellow with the mashed face in the doorway.

Almost all the seven had their guns out. So Smitty threw a table at them.

Simple? Sure. He just threw a table at them. But when it is pointed out that the tables were of the rustic type with young logs for legs and thick slabs for tops, it becomes not quite so simple. Try throwing a hundred and twenty or thirty pounds sometime.

The table only hit two of the group of seven because their chairs were so scattered. But these two stayed hit, and the rest had instinctively ducked when the ponderous object sailed at their heads, ruining their aim.

And then the three attackers were too close to be shot at.

Smitty socked a man who had managed to get to his feet. The man had had his fists up, with a gun in one, in a pretty good guard. But guards didn’t bother the giant any. He had never learned to box, simply because he didn’t need to.

He just hit at a man. If the man had his body or face guarded, the power of the giant’s blow was enough to drive the man’s own fists against him with knockout force. It did so in this case.

Cole landed on another; Mac swung and missed and was clouted glancingly with a gun butt.

Mac came up from the floor with a chair in his hands. Then his hands held only the splintered back of a chair, and bits of leg and seat spread between the prone bodies of two men the chair had reached.

Smitty suddenly bellowed “Ouch!” and whirled like a maddened bull elephant. In the doorway were the two men Cole had seen upstairs, drawn down by the commotion. Behind them, crowded at the barroom door, were the men from the bar.

One of the two had shot the giant in the back, and shield or no shield, it had hurt.

Smitty had happened to be engaged in swinging one man by the ankles like a club at two more men, when the shot got him. So when he turned, he stood, furious, with a leg in his left hand and the body of the man dripping down from the leg. It was like a child standing with a doll in its hand. And the sight, like a movie set of King Kong on a rampage, was a little more than the nerves of the men in the doorway could stand.

One of them yelled quaveringly. The other tried to yell and only gasped like a fish. Then both turned and ran for their lives, with Smitty bellowing after—forgetting till he reached the doorway to drop the leg he held.

There was the scream of a car engine, like that of a horse roweled beyond endurance. And Smitty turned back into the café, growling like a frustrated grizzly bear who had just had a hunter “that big” get away from him.

There was nothing left to do in the café. Mac and Cole were the only two standing. Except Mac wasn’t standing. He was going through the pockets of the paunchy man—who was going to need a new face when he came to.

Three little gold things glinted for an instant in Mac’s hand.

“Okay,” he said, straightening up.

So they went out to their car, with no one in the bar making a move. It wasn’t their fight; they were just customers here. And even if it had been their fight, the sight of Smitty dangling a man carelessly from his hand by the leg was one to linger long.

The three headed back to the city. They were as purry as cats after cream. Not for weeks had they had so satisfying a fight, with bare hands against the hated rats in human form they lived to attack.

“Nice,” said Mac with a sigh as the lights of New York glowed ahead. “We’ve got the three gold crowns back; the chief can release Farquar from the blackmailin’, and the case is closed.”

But The Avenger didn’t act as if the case were closed when they had returned to Bleek Street and turned in the crowns. He took a few thoughtful steps up and down the vast top-floor room, pale eyes burning like ice with light behind it.

And then the three remembered that there was more than blackmail to clear up, now. There were some fancy and assorted murders, too.

Salloway and Cleeves dead.

It looked as if one man held the solution to everything. Beall.

It looked as if Beall had killed the two, to get all the blackmail money; had sent Smathers to his death; had locked the two girls in the office vault to die; had done all the dirty work, with the aid of a hired gang.

But one queer thing couldn’t be explained by that.

If Beall was the power behind this, why had his son been kidnaped? Where did that fit in?

The Avenger dialed a number. It was Farquar’s number. Farquar still hadn’t come home; no one knew where he was. And there was that blood on his office floor!

It looked as if the lawyer, victim of blackmail, had been caught up with at last and was either dead or in peril.

CHAPTER XVII

The Perforated Ball

“We’ve got to get hold of Farquar—and fast!” said Cole Wilson anxiously.

“And of the mon Beall, too!” said Mac grimly. “He’s at the core of this thing.”

Dick Benson said nothing. He slowly paced the floor of the big headquarters room, like a thoughtful panther.

The red speck of light by the door warned that someone had come in the vestibule downstairs. But there was no buzz for admittance; so whoever had come in belonged here.

It was Nellie Gray and Harriet and the mountainous Smitty. The Avenger had sent Smitty and Nellie to pick up Beall and his son and bring them to Bleek Street at once. Harriet had tearfully insisted on going, too.

But they had not brought back Beall and his son.

“Neither of them has been home since late last night,”

Smitty said. “And nobody in the household knows anything about them.”

“I’m sure something terrible has happened to Dad and my brother,” Harriet cried.

Nellie looked sympathetically at her. Nellie was very sorry for Harriet, whose father was up to his neck in blackmail and murder—probably to save his firm which was on the verge of bankruptcy—but whom Harriet firmly believed to be an innocent man.

“There was no trace of them at all?” Dick asked the giant evenly.

“No trace at all,” said Smitty. “But we didn’t really turn the heat on and put out the kind of dragnet we can throw. Want us to go back and do that?”

Benson nodded. “Question everyone near the Beall place—newsstands, filling stations, local police. Comb the neighborhood. I want that man. It is vital that I get my hands on him. You, Nellie, might try the office angle. There is just a chance that Beall has been in touch with someone there this morning.”

The two went out again. Harriet went down to the exquisite boudoir assigned to her on the second floor. And The Avenger began his slow pacing again, with his pale thoughtful eyes like agate.

It was midmorning of the day after the Pair-O’-Dice episode, which had been so disruptive to the roadhouse. It was a gray, cloudy day, with moisture particles combining with the soot of the city to form a depressing pall.

The phone buzzed. The Avenger got to it so swiftly that it had been hard to see his separate moves. It was as if he had streaked there like an electric arc.

The rest in the room—Mac, Wilson, Josh, and Rosabel—watched him tensely, and they all gave a start at the name Dick dropped.

“Hello. Yes, Farquar! We’ve been trying to find you. There’s good news for you. All three clues. Yes, I have them all— What?”

The Avenger nodded for Mac to take the second phone, on which all conversations could be recorded.

Mac picked up the instrument and heard a frantic but low-pitched voice. As if someone were desperately afraid for his life, but in a place where he dared not let himself be heard by anyone but the person to whom he was phoning.

Which, it turned out, was precisely Farquar’s position.

“—got me!” Mac heard Farquar’s frantic whisper. “I’ve been a prisoner since last night. Two men came to my office. They shoved in, and before I could realize what was happening, one clubbed me down. A gash on my head has been bleeding a lot—”

But that wasn’t a patch on what Farquar really had to say.

“The two men were Beall and his son! So you see, I knew already that you’d somehow got hold of the three gold crowns again. Oh, yes, Beall told me what they were, when they had me prisoner. And told me my life would be worthless if I didn’t see to it that he got them back again.”

“Yes, yes,” said Benson urgently. “But where are you being held?”

“My own home,” said Farquar. “My country place in New—”

He gasped then, and the phone was clicked down at his end. Something had happened to prevent him from talking any more.

Mac was wild. Farquar’s country home—where? He had said in New— Might mean New Jersey. But that’s a large state. It would take time to look it up.

He had forgotten The Avenger’s method.

“We’ll go to him at once,” Dick said, voice as calm and cold as his icy eyes. “His country home is near Remington. I looked it up several days ago.”

Josh went with them; there might be trouble and Dick needed all the brawn he could muster, and Josh was an excellent fighter. Gangling, looking as if a breath would blow him over, he was in reality as tough as a goat and could battle like an infuriated tiger.

On the drive out from New York, The Avenger had placed the lawyer’s secluded country home on a real-estate map. There was a great stack of maps in each of Dick’s cars—maps showing, section by section, the property locations of the states fringing the great city.

“Turn here.”

Mac was at the wheel of the armored sedan. He looked in doubt at the turn indicated by The Avenger after his map study. The side road was little more than a grassy lane, and it had a sign:

PRIVATE

PROPERTY OF ARTHUR C. WALLACE

Josh and Wilson looked puzzled, too.

“There is no Wallace on the real-estate map,” said The Avenger, divining Mac’s thought. “This is Farquar’s place, all right. He must have put up another name to protect his seclusion. Or perhaps in the last few days, to help keep unwelcome trespassers away.”

Mac turned into the lane. The lane wound through a belt of woods along the road a hundred yards deep; then at the fringe of the woods they could look ahead and see glades and meadows and, about three hundred yards off, the old house and barn, remodeled.

“He’s got a huge acreage,” commented Mac. “Do we stop here?”

“Yes, of course,” said Dick.

Mac nosed the sedan into a thicket, and the three men got out. They went to that woods fringe again, and Josh said, suddenly:

“Look out! Wasps’ nest!”

But the icy, colorless eyes of The Avenger had already seen the thing that had drawn Josh’s exclamation. And Dick went slowly up to it, instead of avoiding it.

For it was not a wasps’ nest.

The thing was a large rubber ball, a little bigger than an indoor baseball, of the type used on beaches. What had made Josh think it was a wasps’ nest was that it had a lot of holes drilled in it.

There were at least twenty holes in the ball, small toward the house, larger on the side away from the house. And in addition the sides of the ball were all notched up till the circumference had a queer, saw-toothed look.

“What in the worrrld—” breathed Mac.

The ball had been there, hanging by a few inches of wire, for some time. The rusted condition of the wire and the weathered look of the ball told that. Several weeks at least, the signs said.

Benson turned away from the ball with just the remark: “I see.”

The Scot, wild with curiosity, ventured to say, “Ye see what, Muster Benson?” But the answer wasn’t very revealing.

“Many things, Mac. Come on to the house. We’ll go along the edge of the woods to that big beech tree, and then get to the side of the place from there. That line of trees, along with the fact that it’s such a gloomy day, should keep us from being seen.”

A barn, in good shape but unused. A house that was small, considering the size of the farm, but well kept. Just those two buildings.

The house was on a hillside. The lower end of the basement had been remade into the garage space, leaving six or seven rooms of actual living space. A humble but comfortable layout.

“The garage?” whispered Cole, black eyes like burnished jet.

Benson nodded.

The garage door was open a foot. There would doubtless be a doorway from it into the house proper. The four slid to the corner of the garage like four shadows. They went inside, convinced they were unseen.

“Phew!” muttered Mac. The rest felt like holding their noses, and they could only breathe with difficulty.

The garage was commodious, with no car in it. The smell came from a pile of five-gallon cans along the end wall. They were gasoline cans, and one of them had sprung a leak, it seemed, and lost all its contents on the floor.

It was lucky that none of the four had had a cigarette in his mouth; a spark would have been enough to blow them all off the earth, so terrific were the fumes.

“ ’Tis verra high-test stuff,” said Mac, sniffing and making a face about it. Mac was a great chemist. He had once worked on a radically new petroleum-refining process; so he knew petroleum products inside and out. “The mon must have a private plane. Ye don’t need gas like that for a car.”

The Avenger did not reply. He was swinging back a little steel door high up in the wall between the garage and the basement. Behind the door was a fan. Dick shut and secured the little steel cover very carefully.

Then he looked at the partition wall.

The wall was double-thick, of concrete block. And the door, leading from garage to basement proper, was of heavy iron. The place would have satisfied the fire insurance underwriters’ idea of garage safety, all right, though of course they’d have turned thumbs down on that supply of gas stored loose in the garage.

The iron door was open a crack. Benson went toward it. Next moment, Wilson and Josh and Mac were crowding on his heels.

A groan had sounded from in there.

Mac and Wilson and Josh got in first because, at the very doorway, Benson paused.

Paused and did an odd thing.

There was a rusted nail sticking out of a beam overhead, in the garage, to hang a chain or whatnot on. Benson reached up to it.

His fingers, as steely-strong as pliers, turned the nail twice and then drew it out with a slight creaking sound. Then he put the nail in a crack between two concrete blocks at the side of the iron door, bending the end of the nail around a little toward the door itself.

Then he followed his three men into the basement.

The fumes in here were, if anything, worse than in the garage. All four gasped in them. Benson went to where Mac and Josh and Wilson ringed around something on the floor. Mac’s flashlight was playing on it.

They wouldn’t have to search for Beall any longer, it seemed. Here he was, eyes dull, face white; red streaming from between the fingers of the hand clutched to his abdomen.

“He got me,” Beall panted, words hardly audible. “Farquar. Stabbed me with shears.”

“So, now ye’re tryin’ to drag Farquar into this!” grated Mac, with no sympathy whatever in his homely, freckled face.

“No,” whispered the man resignedly. “No. I’m dying. Might as well come clean. Farquar knew . . . the whole thing. He got me in self-defense. Got away.”

The four had to bend closer to hear the faltering words.

“Cleeves and Salloway and I were blackmailing Farquar. Not succeeding. His clerk, Smathers, knew too much. I put blank paper in an envelope . . . sent him to a phony address. There I met him . . . killed him. Took him to freight yards so his body would be mangled beyond identification. Pulled three gold crowns from his mouth to keep dental work from identifying corpse . . . also to hold over Farquar as murder frame. Thought the threat would work this time, but he went to you for help instead of paying.”

“We ought to get him out of here,” said Mac thickly, the fumes making him cough. “Fresh air”

“No,” whispered the man on the floor. “I’ve got to tell quickly. Won’t last long. The envelope slipped from Smathers’s pocket at Ismail’s house; so I had to get all of them from my office or it might be traced to me. Then I got to thinking I could use all the million from Farquar, so I killed Cleeves and Salloway. I did it . . . All—”

He gasped and began writhing, with the red stream growing and flooding over his clutching hand.

“You’re alone in the house?” asked Mac.

“Yes,” came the whisper. “Farquar got away . . . my men trying to locate him— Better go to his aid or they’ll kill”

“Quite interesting,” came The Avenger’s cold, calm voice, like an icy stream across the faltering words.

His three aides turned swiftly to look at his face and stared in amazement. For Benson, in spite of his invariable cold control of emotion, was a kindly person. It was certainly not like him to speak in that tone to a dying man.

The dulled eyes of the man on the floor stared at him, too, a bit less dulled.

“Most interesting,” said The Avenger. “Except that it hasn’t a grain of truth in it anywhere. Beall didn’t do these things. Markham Farquar did. And you’re not Beall—you’re Farquar!”

CHAPTER XVIII

The Rusty Nail

The men in the basement almost forgot the fumes that clogged their breathing, at that unexpected and ringing statement.

Then the man on the floor whispered, “I . . . I don’t understand—”

“Smathers went to his death directly from Farquar’s office,” snapped The Avenger, eyes dreadful in his calm, cold face. “That makes it probable that Farquar himself sent him on the fake errand to his death. Why was he killed? Because he had learned that you, Farquar, were blackmailing the three men, not the other way around. But that murder, done to save your hide, was your downfall instead.

“Cleeves had a private detective on your trail. The detective trailed you to an alley, and you had to kill him. While you were doing that, one of the three—Beall, I think—got from your car the three gold crowns you’d yanked from Smathers’s mouth to hide identification. They each took one and held a threat over your head: You and you alone knew he’d gone downstairs to the dentist, Dr. Louis, for the work. Also, the three men probably made you believe that your prints were on the crowns. It would not be impossible.”

“You’re mad!” gasped the man on the floor. “Mad—”

“You killed the dentist to prevent questioning, and you felt safer. But you wouldn’t really be safe till you had those crowns back. You came to me with crocodile tears to fool Justice, Inc., into doing your dirty work and getting the crowns back. But at the same time you kept after them yourself, with a hired gang of killers. You murdered Cleeves and Salloway and didn’t get the crowns. You had Beall’s son kidnaped to exchange for Beall’s crown, and he got away with our help. Did you get the combination of the Beall office vault from him, so you could destroy the envelopes?”

“You’ve got . . . a direct confession,” panted the man on the floor. “I don’t know what more you want.”

“A confession framing an innocent man,” nodded The Avenger, eyes like pools of doom. “You made some bad slips, Farquar. As a blackmailer, you might have been expert. But as a killer, you’re clumsy. It was careless of you not to see that the envelope—the first one at hand in your office, chancing to have come from Beall some time ago with a memorandum in it—had fallen from Smathers’s pocket. It was equally stupid to pull those crowns. You should have left them in Smathers’s mouth; the law couldn’t have pinned the murder on you if he had been identified, if you’re half as smart as I think you are. And you shouldn’t have come to Justice, Inc., with your lying plea for help. Also, and above all, you shouldn’t have left that ball hanging in the edge of the woods. I suppose you forgot all about it.”

“Ball?” said the man. His tone was slightly different.

His eyes didn’t look quite so glazed. Mac and Wilson and Josh watched the unfolding play breathlessly.

“Remember when two men of mine were shot at near Bleek Street, and nearly killed, with a high-powered rifle from a distance?” said Dick Benson evenly. “That was clever. An attempt on the lives of my aides, just before you showed up and asked for help, would make it seem that your plea was very urgent and genuine, and that death was stalking you and trying to prevent us from helping. But it took fine shooting, to miss that closely from such a distance. However, you’re an expert marksman, and had practiced a lot lately. You’d shot from the house window at a ball hanging three hundred yards away at the edge of the woods, and—”

The man’s eyes were like the eyes of a snake.

“Let’s get that plastic and stuff off your face, Farquar,” said The Avenger, hand going out.

“Keep your hands off me!” snarled the man so venomously that the four stepped back a pace. He stood up, and his hand left his “wounded” abdomen and dropped a red-soaked sponge. It was Farquar, all right. Even before he clawed at the make-up, they could see that.

“All right,” he snarled. “You’ve stumbled onto a few things, and made a few wild guesses that could never be proved in a court of law. All right, it’s true! I was after Cleeves and Beall and Salloway. I got Beall by getting myself retained to look after his interests in the bankruptcy his company is going through any day now. The company is low on cash but rich in assets. I was going to pick it up myself, at about five cents on the dollar.

“Salloway came to me for help against a city clerk who had trumped up a street-paving scandal in a contract of his. I just took that little scheme over myself. Cleeves played into my hands by coming for help on finding a will his great-uncle had made, which left him a million dollars. I found the will, the sole copy, and kept it; so Cleeves would have to pay plenty, or I’d destroy it. But my damned clerk, Smathers, got wind of this and I had to kill him to shut him up. So it was really all Smathers’s fault. Every bit of it; Smathers’s fault.”

Even at that moment, Mac could reflect on the odd psychology of the average criminal. Every crime committed is the fault of someone else. Some other person made it impossible not to commit the crime; so the criminal, in his own mind, is cleared. He wouldn’t have stolen, lied, or murdered if he hadn’t been forced to, would he?

“Well,” said Wilson, drawing a long breath, “it looks to me as if you’d doublecross your own mother if there was a nickel in it. But you’re through now. We’ll turn you over to the police—”

But Farquar was laughing. It brought Cole up short.

“You fools,” said Farquar. “If you’d been stupid enough to believe my yarn about Beall, you could have lived. I’d have let you go, to testify against a man who would later be found dead and clear me. But you were too smart for that. So smart that now you’ll have to die. How about it, men?”

He was looking over their shoulders toward the door. The four hastened to look, too.

There was a compact group of men with guns in the doorway to the garage. They were grinning at their victims.

One of them said, in answer to Farquar’s question: “I’ll say they got to die, boss. But you’d have had a time persuadin’ us to let ’em go even if they had fallen for your line about Beall. Every right guy in the United States would give statues and medals to the ones who rubbed out The Avenger.”

“Why, the skurrrlies—” burred Mac, more outraged than frightened by the sudden trap.

The Avenger said nothing. His calm face and his colorless eyes did not show it, but he must have been less surprised by the sudden closing of the death trap than his men were. Because his ears were keener. Few men on earth had hearing like The Avenger’s.

So he must have heard the slight opening of the big garage door a few minutes ago, and then its slow closing after these men had squeezed in.

“Yes, you’ll have to die,” repeated Farquar, seeming to savor the fact. “All of you! And Beall and his precious son upstairs. Oh, yes, and a couple of others. I saw to it that word reached the blonde girl who works for you and the overgrown clown you call Smitty. They were allowed to ‘discover’ where Beall and his son were; so they came down here in a hurry and got caught. They’re upstairs, too.”

There was a light in Farquar’s venomous eyes that was close to madness. A dangerous animal, forced to kill in self-defense. And finding, under the stress of necessity, that he liked it.

“You may have noticed the cans of gasoline on the floor in the garage,” said Farquar. “And you could hardly have helped noticing the gas fumes in here. Aviation gas, Mr. Benson. Decidedly explosive. I’m going out through the garage, with my men. I’m going to close that iron door. Protected by that, and the double-thick wall I had installed recently for just such emergencies, I am going to throw the light switch in here. There is no bulb in the socket, however; there is a bit of metal instead. It will short-circuit with a nice big spark. This fume-filled room will explode like a bomb—with you in the center! Then, when the fire spreads and gets to the gasoline in the garage, this place will be a pyre for The Avenger and all his gang, and for Beall and Beall’s son.”

It was Wilson who made the fast leap for the stairs. And Farquar laughed again and threw his hand up quickly to stop his men from shooting. It wasn’t necessary, it developed.

“The door to the first floor happens to be of metal too,” the renegade lawyer said. “You can’t get up that way.”

Wilson came slowly back. There was no fear in his face, or in the faces of Josh and Mac.

On the face of The Avenger, far from fear, rode something inexplicably like triumph. A cold and dreadful triumph. It was as if he had sprung a trap, not Farquar.

“I wouldn’t try that little scheme, if I were you,” Dick Benson said to Farquar. His voice was calm, even.

“Any reason why not?” sneered Farquar.

“A very good one,” said Benson. “If you try it, you will only succeed in killing yourself and all of your men.”

“Not a very successful bluff, under the circumstances,” Farquar said, moving toward the doorway but keeping out of the line of the guns so that his men could pour lead at the victims if they made the slightest move.

“It’s not a bluff.” The Avenger shook his head a little. “Strange. It is well known that I never take life. It is well known that I endeavor to trap the smart men who think they are beyond the law, into annihilating themselves if they try to annihilate me. Those things are known; yet never can I save a man by warning him, as I’m trying to save you, now.”

Farquar was even beyond sneers. There was incredulity, amazement, a little amusement, in his eyes.

“You’re phenomenal,” he said. “Without a chance, with death coming surely in a few seconds, you can pull a bluff like that, in a perfectly calm way!”

“Hey, look, boss,” said one of the gangsters at the door nervously, “this guy with the black hair talks awful big. I don’t like it. He acts too certain.”

The others looked uneasy, too. It was not the first time armed men, apparently holding The Avenger absolutely at their mercy, had been disquieted by the man’s utter self-composure; his manner of acting as if an unseen army were behind him to back him up.

There was such an army, of course. The army of pure genius. Often a more effective army than one with guns and tanks.

“He acts as if he has a pineapple up his sleeve,” said one gunman plaintively.

“Don’t parade your ignorance,” said Farquar coldly. “What could he do? The short circuit explodes this fume-jammed room. You are all out of the garage by the time I snap the light switch, and I am protected from the explosion by the concrete wall. Then I’ll have ample time to join you outside before the fire starts. It will be one inferno of a fire, when that gas catches!”

He was at the door by now.

“Back away, keeping your guns lined up,” ordered Farquar.

The men backed into the garage room, which was dimly lit from a small side window—not, of course, by electric light. Farquar smirked at Benson in the doorway, hand on the door to bang it shut.

“Any last words, Benson?” he asked suavely.

“Only one,” said The Avenger. “Good-by.”

Farquar laughed, stepped back two more paces, and slammed the heavy door shut.

It was as though a door had been opened instead of closed; opened into a hell of sound and fury!

There was a roaring explosion like the blasting of a mountainside. The whole house leaped and tilted with it. The solid earth under the basement quivered like jello in the hand of a nervous giant. Part of the floor over the heads of The Avenger and his aides sagged down.

There was a scream from the garage. Just one, which went on and on in a terrible, inhuman way, like a siren.

Only one scream, although Farquar and all his men had been in the garage when the iron door was banged.

“Upstairs quickly,” cried Benson.

Mack and Josh and Wilson picked themselves dazedly off the cement floor. The Avenger’s loudest yell had come to their stunned eardrums only as a whisper, but it was enough.

They leaped for the section of sagging flooring and caught hold of it. The section crumpled downward in their hands, and they passed up through the ragged hole to the first floor.

Smitty and Nellie were in the kitchen, furiously fighting their bonds—lengths of chain in Smitty’s case; the gang had taken no chances with ordinary rope.

Beall and his son, with horror in their eyes as fast flames licked up at them from the shattered floor over the garage, were in the next room.

The Avenger didn’t take time to free these two as he had Smitty and Nellie.

“Out!” he said, with awful urgency in his tone.

Smitty threw the bound body of Beall over his shoulder and galloped out the main door. Wilson followed with the son. They had all gotten about thirty yards when the high-test gas let go.

There was a thundering sheet of flame over a hundred feet high where the house had been. Then there was only a soft roar as the house became the center of petals of fire.

They cut the cords binding Beall and his son. Wilson, newest member of The Avenger’s grim band, couldn’t keep his eyes off the calm face of his young chief.

“I don’t get it,” he said finally, as they walked toward the woods and the parked sedan. Behind them, even the one scream had died with the last explosion. Nothing remained alive back there. “I don’t see how it worked out like it did.”

“The nail,” said Benson.

“The what?” Wilson was almost dazed. He hadn’t seen the man with the deadly, pale eyes at work as often as the rest.

“The rusty nail I wedged next to the door, on the garage side.”

That didn’t mean anything to Cole.

Benson went on: “The trap was pretty obvious. Gasoline and gas fumes—explosion. Where? In the other basement, not the garage, because there was a ventilator in the wall with the blades inverted, which would draw fumes from the garage into the basement instead of, as normally, the other way around. And there was the wall, twice as strong as necessary, to protect anyone in the garage from an explosion in the basement. It was as clear as print what Farquar had in mind when he drew us out here.”

“But the nail—” persisted Wilson.

“The gas-filled air in the garage would explode as readily as the gas-filled air in the basement,” said The Avenger. “It would merely depend on which room produced the necessary sparks. I fixed it so it would be the garage. I wedged the nail next to the door and bent it, so that when the door was shut, its iron edge would strike against it”

“Good heavens! Of course,” said Josh. “But it had me going, too. I’ll admit it.”

Wilson said nothing. He stared with frank awe at the man who could devise such a thing. The cold genius who could trap a supercriminal and destroy his whole gang—with a rusty nail!

Benson said no more. The pale eyes were almost dull, as they always were at the conclusion of a battle. They wouldn’t brighten till the next battle loomed.

For the only thing The Avenger lived for was these deadly bouts with crime. That was the sole reason for his existence: the stamping out, wherever he possibly could, of the slimy creatures who injured society and innocent individuals in their murderous greed for power or wealth not rightfully theirs. He was more of a machine than a man—young and good-looking in spite of his perpetual icy calm, but old in crime-wisdom and resolve.

That was why he was called The Avenger—and would be called that till some day a deadly risk turned against him. And even then, that would be his epitaph—

The Avenger!

THE END

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

THREE GOLD CROWNS

CHAPTER I Death’s Doorway

CHAPTER II Murder Frame

CHAPTER III Councils of War

CHAPTER IV Shadow at Night

CHAPTER V Buried Clue

CHAPTER VI Fiery Baptism

CHAPTER VII Over the Rails

CHAPTER VIII Money or the Chair

CHAPTER IX The Curious Key

CHAPTER X Blank Paper

CHAPTER XI Brother and Sister

CHAPTER XII Stubborn Facts

CHAPTER XIII Two More Crowns

CHAPTER XIV Death’s Sting

CHAPTER XV Dead Dentist

CHAPTER XVI Meet the Gang

CHAPTER XVII The Perforated Ball

CHAPTER XVIII The Rusty Nail