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

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

FIRST PRINTING: MAY, 1973

COPYRIGHT © 1940 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: 0-446-74-242-2

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

THE FLAME BREATHERS

CHAPTER I: Dreadful Night

CHAPTER II: Task for Justice, Inc.

CHAPTER III: The Dying Man

CHAPTER IV: Demon Speed

CHAPTER V: The Girl and the Gun

CHAPTER VI: Wrecked Test Car

CHAPTER VII: The Fourth Pole

CHAPTER VIII: Nitro on Tap!

CHAPTER IX: The Curious House

CHAPTER X: Bath of Fire

CHAPTER XI: Puzzle Pieces

CHAPTER XII: Company Shutdown

CHAPTER XIII: Rust-Red Lure

CHAPTER XIV: S O S—Stay Away!

CHAPTER XV: Singer and Death!

CHAPTER XVI: The Avenger Unmasked

CHAPTER XVII: The Secret Process

CHAPTER XVIII: Finger Of Doom!

THE

FLAME BREATHERS

CHAPTER I

Dreadful Night

In Paris they thought of him as a very queer duck, indeed.

Usually people came to Paris to have a good time, even when they come from Poland, as this man had come. Particularly when they come via the United States, which is a splendid place to make money, but where men tend to work too hard.

But this man, who had landed in Paris after a stay in America, had obviously not come to have a good time. It would seem that he had come to hunt a hole, crawl into it, and then pull it in after him.

He had been in the hotel for nearly three weeks, and only three or four times had he been out of his room at all. On those rare occasions, had he participated in the night life of the gay city? He had not. The concierge—the doorman-superintendent—of the hotel knew. He knew because he had been curious enough to follow this Polish guest.

The man had walked, just before dawn, along the Seine breathing in great gulps of fresh air. That was all. And as he walked he looked over his shoulder. So the concierge got a hint of it.

The man was a little afraid of something.

Had the man himself been able to read that conjecture in the mind of the concierge, he would have laughed like a soul in purgatory.

A little afraid! Is that what you say about a horror that rode your shoulders day and night? Is that what you would say about a terror that robbed you of all the pleasures of life—for fear they would end in the gurgle of death?

The man’s name was Wencilau. He had the air of being “somebody.” He walked and acted, in spite of the terror that warped his hours, like a man who had accomplished great things.

He was about forty, slightly bald, rather small, and wore thick glasses.

On that dreadful night, at a little after twelve, he was peering through those glasses at a newspaper clipping. He had studied it so often, with bated breath, that he knew it by heart, syllable for syllable.

The item was from a Berlin paper, dated nearly a month ago.

POLISH SCIENTIST DIES IN BERLIN

Herr Dr. Shewski, well-known Polish scientist, was fatally stricken in his Gartenstrasse apartment last night, shortly after twelve o’clock, by an attack of illness later diagnosed as acute indigestion. Dr. Shewski was dying before his servant could break down the bedroom door and come to his master’s aid.

The exact cause of death has physicians baffled. Though diagnosed as acute indigestion, it displayed none of the true symptoms of that ailment in a later autopsy. There was more than a suspicion of poison. However, no trace of poisoning appeared in exhaustive analyses.

Herr Shewski’s servant was questioned for several hours, following the man’s queer statement. That was that he broke into the bedroom in time to see his master breathe his last, and that Dr. Shewski’s breath was on fire. The servant has since been committed for mental examination, since, of course, such a statement must have resulted from an hallucination.

Wencilau put the item away in his wallet with trembling fingers. In his brain burned part of the item:

“There was more than a suspicion of poison. However, no trace of poisoning appeared in exhaustive analyses.”

Wencilau was very thirsty. And if his emaciated appearance indicated anything, he was also famished. But he was afraid to eat—and afraid to drink.

“There was more than a suspicion of poison.”

At seven o’clock that evening, Wencilau had had his dinner. He had eaten it in his room, where he took all his meals since crawling into this obscure hotel to hide. But the food was cold because it had been delivered at four thirty and he didn’t eat till seven o’clock. Wencilau had spent the two and a half hours examining the four simple items of the dinner for poison. All the resources of a brilliant chemist had been exerted to ascertain that there was no known poison in the stuff. After that, to make doubly sure, Wencilau had fed a morsel of each course to a canary, now singing blithely in the artificial daylight of the unshaded electric bulb. And the canary was still all right.

No poison in the food. And now Wencilau was thirsty. So he prepared to take a drink of water.

The preparations showed, once more, how fearful the Pole was.

There was water on tap at the washstand in the corner. There was half a bottle of mineral water on the table. He went for neither.

He took a new, sealed bottle of water from a case, and examined it carefully. The foil around neck and crown was untampered with, he could swear. When he opened the bottle there was the little sigh of inrushing air showing that the stopper had not been removed before.

A new, sealed bottle of pure, distilled water. He lifted it to his lips and drank.

For about twenty seconds Wencilau stood erect, staring at the innocent bottle of water with eyes that widened in growing horror till they seemed about to engulf the rest of his thin, sensitive face.

Then he caved in in the middle as if a large hinge had suddenly been substituted for his abdominal muscles. He fell slowly to the floor, writhed for a few more seconds and then lay still.

In the cage, the canary sang and sang, as if to the memory of the man who had fed him those morsels from his dinner, hours ago. Then the canary hopped to a tiny cup affixed to the bars and dipped his bill in water.

There was no more singing.

The canary fluttered a little and was still. Bird and man in stark death. Though neither had had any food not rigidly tested, and though both had drunk from a tightly sealed, foolproof water bottle.

It was the concierge who called the gendarmes.

The man had been waiting for Wencilau to take his late-night walk for a bit of fresh air. He had intended to follow him again, for he was very curious, indeed, and he expected, one of these nights, to trail the man to whatever it was that made him act so queerly.

When Wencilau didn’t appear, he finally opened the door with his passkey.

The French gendarmerie is one of the best police organizations in the world. An inspector looked at the body convulsed on the floor and said instantly, “Poison!”

Then the laboratories went to work.

They analyzed the stomach contents. They analyzed the bottled water and crumbs from the man’s dinner plate. They analyzed a sample of the room’s air. They inspected the water in the tap.

Since the bird was also dead along with its owner, they even repeated the same drawn out performance with the canary.

And they came to one absolute conclusion.

There was no trace of poison.

Monsieur Wencilau had died as if in the agonies of deadly poisoning, but there had been no poison in anything he ate, breathed or drank.

Next morning, an excerpt from a Paris newspaper read:

—Well-known Polish scientist, Monsieur Wencilau, died of an attack later diagnosed as acute indigestion—

Two days dater, in Montreal, Canada, a man paced the living room floor of a hotel suite and chewed feverishly on a long, black cigar.

The man was big, florid-faced, heavy-set. He had graying, shaggy eyebrows and looked like a swashbuckling fellow who feared neither man nor devil.

That is, normally he might have exhibited some such fearlessness. Right now he apparently suffered from hell’s own terror. His florid face was pale. The cigar bobbled and jerked between trembling jaws. He clenched and unclenched his hands as he paced. A big, burly man not even remotely like the dead Wencilau in appearance.

But he was like him in one respect. He, too, was from Poland.

And he acted similarly to Wencilau: he, too, was quite obviously hag-ridden by the terrible fear of death. In his movements could be read the whole thing. He knew he was going to die; yet he couldn’t quite accept the fact as truth and spent all his hours trying to shove the fatal moment further into the future.

There was a discreet tap at the door. The big man stopped his pacing as if he had been shot. He stood rigid, eyes flaming.

The tap was repeated, a little louder. He moistened his lips.

“Well?” he called, in a foreigner’s English.

“Package for you, Mr. Veck,” came the voice of the night man.

“Leave it at the door, please,” Veck said.

He stood there rigid, sweat streaming down his full, heavy face. He heard steps go down the hall, heard the clang of an elevator door. So he went to his own door—but not to open it.

He took from his pocket a little device like a stethoscope. This he applied to the panels. With it, he could have heard any sound in the hall—even one so faint as a person’s repressed breathing. He heard no such sound. The clerk had gone to the elevator and down, as his steps had indicated.

Veck relit his cigar. Then he opened the door, whisked the package in and shut the door again as swiftly as possible. He drew a long breath as he shot the bolt.

The package was bottle shaped. When he opened it, he saw a bottle of fine rye. There was a card in the wrappings.

“From a friend,” the card said simply. There was no name signed to it.

Veck laughed harshly. Of all the stupid moves! Did the person who had sent this package to a man in fear of his life actually expect the whiskey to be drunk?

He went with it to the bathroom, broke the bottle over the tub and watched the liquor drain away. He would take no such perilous chances as drinking from a bottle left at his door!

The liquor odor, however, suggested a drink of safer stuff to him. He went toward his bureau for the Scotch he kept in the top drawer.

For days Veck had literally lived on whiskey, trying to drink himself out of that awful fear and finding that the alcohol had no more effect than water on his over-stimulated brain.

He poured out half a tumbler of the stuff and gulped it. Then he clamped the cigar in his mouth again.

The time of Wencilau’s death was two days from that of Veck’s. The places were thousands of miles apart. The men were physically as different as two men can be.

But their invitation to the tomb was identical!

Veck stood stone-still for about thirty seconds after drinking the whiskey. His eyes widened with utter horror.

Then, as if suddenly hinged in the middle, he bent slowly over and fell to the floor. But there was more here than had occurred in the shabby little Paris hotel room.

Veck’s breathing did not stop for a moment or two after his fall.

And Veck breathed—fire!

From the man’s mouth and nostrils came pure, white flame in streamers a yard long. The flame seared the nap of the carpet, scorched the leg of a nearby chair. It came and went, as Veck’s breath came and went. It was like the legendary exhalations of a dragon.

The flame, gruesome, ghastly, streamed a last time and died. It made an audible hissing as it licked at the remnants of moisture on the man’s splitting lips. But it stopped when Veck’s breathing stopped.

Out of nowhere, it seemed, had come this flame of death; and Veck had breathed it and died!

CHAPTER II

Task for Justice, Inc.

It was probably the strangest drugstore in existence. It was the drugstore at Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue, in New York City, run by Fergus MacMurdie.

The store itself was small and looked like any other drugstore. It was the rear that made it unusual. The rear was twice as big as the front and was locked off from the store part by a heavy iron door.

In this big back room was a double laboratory. Along one side ran all the paraphernalia used by an expert chemist, which modestly described Fergus MacMurdie’s abilities. Along the other, was all the equipment needed by a first-rank electrical engineer. And this was used by Smitty.

In the front of the store was one customer, seated at the soda fountain, consuming his fifth maple-nut sundae.

The customer was a gangling, sleepy-looking Negro. He looked as if he didn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain—or to refrain from killing himself with maple-nut sundaes. Actually, Josh Newton was smart enough to be counted as one of the best aides of the odd, grim character called The Avenger.

In the dual laboratory, Smitty was working on his side. He was trying to perfect a television radio set that could be carried in a case the size of a small cigar box which, as any radio engineer could tell you, can’t be done. But the six-foot-nine giant thought he’d be doing it very soon now.

Smitty—to call him by his true name, Algernon Heathcote Smith, was to court annihilation—looked slow-witted but he, too, along with Josh Newton and the store proprietor, Fergus MacMurdie, was another of The Avenger’s aides.

The Scot wasn’t working on his side of the fence. He was looking through the evening paper. He had just finished concocting a little pellet which, when crumbled between thumb and forefinger, would form a dust that would blot up an incredible amount of poison gas, leaving the air fit to breathe again. The pellet would be useful in counterattacks.

Smitty laid down a miniature photoelectric cell and swore fervently. Mac stared at him out of bleak blue eyes.

“Tsk, tsk,” he chided mildly. “Such language, mon. Ye’re reddenin’ my poor old ears.”

“They couldn’t be any redder than they naturally are,” snapped Smitty.

“I judge ye’re havin’ difficulties with yon silly work,” Mac said.

“Silly, is it?” howled the gigantic Smitty.

“Of course,” burred the Scot. “Ye’ve already perfected little receiving and transmitting sets over which we can talk to each other and to the chief. Now ye want us to see each other while we’re talkin’. And all in the size of a coffee cup. ’Tis totally unnecessary to gild the lily like that.”

“Yeah?” said the giant morosely. “Sometimes a set gets into the wrong hands, and we think it’s one of us talking and get in a jam. If we could see the talker, as well as hear . . . But I’m not coming along so fast on the thing.”

“ ’Tis to your credit that ye keep at your toys so persistently,” said Mac tolerantly folding his newspaper and beginning to peruse the second page. “I admire ye, Heathcote.”

Smitty purpled. There were very few people alive who could call him Heathcote. There were even fewer who could call the results of his brilliant work in radio, toys. But a look at the Scot’s face stopped any wrathful words Smitty might have hurled at him.

“What’s up, Mac?” he said.

“A friend of mine died last night in Montreal,” the Scot said soberly. “A mon named Veck. We were classmates at college. I remember he could hardly speak English when he first came to this country from Poland. And marvelous he was in chemistry, too. I rrremember.”

“How’d he die?” said the giant, looking at the tiny photoelectric cell.

“Acute indigestion, the paper says. But there’s a curious hint—”

Mac stopped, and stared at the paper without really seeing it. He was silent so long that Smitty turned from his bench to stare at him again.

“Verra odd business, Smitty,” Mac said softly. “What would ye think if a mon was hinted to have died of poison; but there was no poison to be traced anywhere? And what would ye think if living flame had apparently come from the mon’s mouth and nose before he died?”

“I’d think the first was improbable and the second absolutely impossible,” said the giant. “What gives you that brainstorm?”

“The poison is hinted all through the newspaper item, Smitty, though they call it acute indigestion. And the fire? My friend was found lyin’ on his side, very soon after a mon in the room below heard him fall. From Veck’s mouth and nostrils, for a yard along the carpet, the nap was seared as if by fire. The leg of a chair at the end of the seared streak was scorched. And Veck’s flesh was blackened, as if the mon breathed out flame before he died.”

Smitty shrugged.

“Nobody can breathe flame; so it couldn’t be what it seems. Now if you’ll give me a lift here—”

“I’ll give ye no lift,” said the Scot. “Not till I have contacted the chief on that funny lookin’ black box of yours.”

The box in question was the main television set communicating from the store to the headquarters of Richard Henry Benson, known as The Avenger.

Smitty had already perfected television far beyond the accomplishments of the big commercial studios. It was condensing it in tiny form that was bothering him at the moment.

Mac stepped to the big set and twisted dials.

A curious sort of screen took up most of the front of the big cabinet. As the magnificent set warmed, a clouded appearance mottled the screen. Then the clouded look faded out, and a face appeared.

It was a face to make any man gasp, then turn to look again with a shiver compounded of awe and fear.

The countenance was as dead as the face of the moon, and as white and still. Over the face was a shock of snow-white hair; but its thickness and virility showed that the owner was still a very young man. In the face were set eyes that seemed to have no color at all. They were deadly, pale holes in the white flesh. Yet they flamed like ice under a polar dawn.

As though carved from white metal, with diamond drills for eyes, the face peered at the two men from the screen. And even these two, close friends and aides of The Avenger, felt a chill shock at the impact of the colorless eyes.

“Chief,” said Mac, “I contacted ye because I’ve just read a very odd thing. It’s about the death of a man in Montreal last night who . . .”

Words came from the awesome white countenance, though the dead flesh of the lips scarcely moved.

“The Polish scientist, Veck. Dead of poisoning, obviously, though the statement was otherwise. Apparently exhaled flame as he died.”

Mac had long since stopped being surprised when Benson seemed to know everything.

“That’s the mon,” said Mac. “Veck was a friend of mine, Muster Benson. We were classmates. I’d like ye to let me go to Montreal and investigate a little. He was a grrrand person, and I—”

“We’ll do better than that, Mac,” said the still, barely moving lips. “We will take this on officially. I suspect there is a task for Justice, Inc. here.”

“We will?” said the Scot, as surprised as he was pleased. “Splendid, Muster Benson. We’ll report to ye, at once. Smitty’s beside me, and Josh is out front—at his eterrrnal maple-nut sundaes.”

The sinister, dead face of The Avenger faded from the screen. And a mile or so from the drugstore Benson turned from his duplicate television transmitter-receiver.

The man whose white, emotionless countenance was the nightmare of every crook from Maine to California, was only of average size. But every move he made shouted the fact that he possessed, in that average-sized frame, a power such as is seldom seen in mortals.

“Flame, breathed from Veck’s mouth and nostrils,” The Avenger whispered to himself. His pale, infallible eyes were like stainless steel chips in his paralyzed face. “And flame, according to the servant, from the lips of the man in Berlin. Yes, it’s a case for Justice, Inc.”

Richard Benson’s life was devoted to the eradication of crime. Forced by his own personal tragedy—a criminal plot that had irreparably seared his soul—he had become The Avenger, the terrible enemy of the underworld.

Some of his battles were begun at the request of harassed individuals faced by dangers too great or subtle for the police to cope with. Some were begun as this one was—by the flaming genius of the man with the colorless eyes in picking significant bits from the news of the day.

A man had died in Berlin apparently breathing flame.

A man had died in Montreal apparently breathing flame.

The coincidence clicked over again and again in the mind behind the pale, deadly eyes. Benson walked, with his smooth stride hinting at great power, to the window and looked down at Bleek Street. There was nothing there for his unseeing gaze to rest on.

The Avenger’s headquarters was on a little back bay of a street in New York City that was only a block long. One side of the block was taken up entirely by the back of a huge storage building that was blank and windowless. The other side had a big vacant warehouse at one end, a loft building and a couple of stores at the other, and three old, three-story red brick buildings between.

The three buildings, though their exteriors did not show it, were thrown into one. And here, behind the middle door with the small sign, Justice, Inc., over it, The Avenger had his headquarters.

Benson had the vacant warehouse under lease and owned the other buildings; so that, with the opposite side taken up by the wall of the storage building, he literally owned the whole block.

In a corner of the huge room taking up the whole third floor of the three buildings, a teletype began its discreet clicking. Benson went over and watched the tape.

It was a wire-service dispatch. The associated news agencies always send a copy of events to the combined newspapers, the State Department—and Richard Henry Benson.

On the little tape words were forming that instantly riveted the pale gaze of The Avenger. For they had to do with the death of Veck in Montreal. The words clicked out:

Explosion – wrecks – Montreal – police – laboratory – samples – stomach – contents – Veck – being – analyzed – building – wrecked – three – killed.

Benson turned from the teletype with eyes as cold as a glacier in moonlight, and knowing more than ever now that the deaths of two men in far places were a thing for Justice, Inc. to look into.

The Avenger had received a little more news over the teletype than Mac had read in the paper. One bit of news relative to the persistent hint of poisoning, was that samples of the dead man’s stomach contents had been obtained, at once, and rushed to the police laboratory. All day Benson had been waiting for a report on the analysis. Apparently, the laboratory had been busy with other work and had not begun the Veck analysis till afternoon.

Then before the analysis could be concluded, the laboratory had been wrecked by an explosion!

The flame breathers! Explosion!

Had someone else, able to breathe flame but not die of it, furtively visited the police laboratory and destroyed it before Veck’s death could be investigated too thoroughly?

CHAPTER III

The Dying Man

Under the surface, the Montreal police force was seething over the death of Veck and the ensuing wreckage of their laboratory. The Avenger and his aides found that out in a hurry.

First thing in the morning Benson set down their fast cabin plane at the Montreal airfield, and they went directly to headquarters.

The police chief stared curiously at this man with the awe-inspiring face. Benson dressed habitually in inconspicuous gray. With the gray-white of flesh and hair, he looked like a figure made of gray metal rather than brawn and blood.

“We’ve arrived at a number of conclusions that we have kept from the reporters,” the police chief said. He was very respectful in tone. Every police executive on the continent knew about The Avenger. In addition, Benson carried letters of introduction from several State governors, the head of the F.B.I., and one short but very intimate one from the president himself.

“We haven’t let the papers in on this,” said the chief, “because we have no scrap of proof to back up the conclusions we’ve come to. Though the boys have guessed a little: the inference that Veck was poisoned was quite plain in their dispatches.”

“And your conclusions?” asked The Avenger quietly.

Mac tensed in his chair. The giant, Smitty, watched the Montreal police head with china-blue eyes that looked dull and were decidedly not.

“Veck was murdered,” said the chief. “There is no chance of natural death by acute indigestion. He was murdered in some way simulating poison. He was killed in some way by raw flame. Those things we’re positive of. Now, the wrecking of our laboratory: it is possible that the explosion, at just the time when our men were preparing to work on the dead man’s stomach contents, was a coincidence. But it is certainly not probable. Somebody knew that work was about to commence. Somebody got into the lab and threw a bomb—”

“You’re certain it was a bomb?” interrupted Benson.

The police chief shrugged, not realizing the significance of the question. But Smitty and Mac looked at The Avenger as men might look at a superhuman being. Dick Benson, they realized, was already formulating theories about this business far in advance of the wildest guesses of any of the regular police.

“We’re not certain,” said the police chief. “We found no fragments of bomb casing of any kind. But what else could have caused the explosion, save some sort of explosive in a handmade casing?”

The Avenger said nothing. His eyes took on their polar-ice glint. The man continued.

“As I said, we found no clues of any kind, either as to the cause of the explosion or the identity of the person or persons who killed Veck. But we’re sure of our deductions, nevertheless.”

“What have you discovered concerning the dead man, himself?” Benson asked.

“Very little. He was Polish. He has recently spent a good deal of time in the United States. He was a doctor or scientist or something of the kind. And he went in fear of his life.”

“The first you could find out from his effects, of course,” nodded Benson. “But how do you know he lived in fear?”

“From the testimony of the hotel employees. Veck almost never left his room. He ate in there. When anything was delivered, including meals, he had the messenger leave the stuff at the door. And only after a long time would he open up and whisk it into the room. Obviously, he was afraid of some such death as, in the end, he suffered.”

There was a little silence. The police chief stared at The Avenger as if debating whether or not to tell him one more thing. Finally he nodded a bit, and said,

“We may find out something on the explosion after all. One man in the laboratory at the time was not killed out right by the blast. In the lab when the explosion occurred,” said the chief, “was a plainclothes man with a bullet on which he wanted a simple ballistics test. He just happened to be there. The three men who work in the lab were all killed. But this man may not. He is dying now in Emergency Hospital, but he may regain consciousness and talk before the end.”

“The press dispatch—” Smitty began.

“I know,” the police chief nodded. “There was no mention of the dying man. But that was deliberate. We gave out the news to the reporters only of the three who died. We were afraid that if the world learned one man had not been instantly killed, attempts might be made to finish him off before he could talk.”

The man reached for his phone and gave a number. He talked for a moment, then said,

“Still no change in the man’s condition at the hospital, but there is hope that he may recover consciousness. May I suggest that you all meet me there in an hour, and we’ll wait, if you care to?”

“We’d care to very much,” said Benson. “In the meantime, I think we’ll have a look at the wrecked laboratory.”

The Montreal police laboratory was in a separate small wing of its own. It had been a fine one, well equipped and well staffed.

Now it was nothing but a pile of building debris with shining bits of metal and glass studded through it. Policemen stood around, guarding the wreckage from curious onlookers. They stood back respectfully when Benson showed up. And The Avenger began to walk through the piled wreckage, not seeming to stare hard at any one thing, but actually seeing all there was to be seen with his remarkable, pale eyes. They seemed to be both telescopic and microscopic.

“There was no bomb,” he said after a moment.

“Now how in the worrrld can ye tell that?” demanded MacMurdie. Smitty looked as though he was about to ask the same thing.

“A common type of explosion acts in the direction of greatest resistance,” said Benson. “In this case, it would expend its main energy downward. And this explosion did no such thing. It seems to have blown in all directions with about equal force. Some gases act that way, but no solids such as might have packed a bomb—”

He stopped and his eyes took on their diamond-drill look.

The police were doing a good job of keeping people back, but they seemed to have missed one person.

This was a little man with one outstanding feature: his ears. He had even bigger ears than MacMurdie, and they stood out at an even squarer angle from his head. They looked like rabbit ears, cut off and rounded a little.

Like an inquisitive rabbit the man was poking around the debris at the far end, and being careful to avoid the eyes of the cops.

Benson grabbed him by the arm.

“Ouch! Let me go!” the man said, in a foreign accent. “What do you want to squeeze my arm in two for?”

“What are you doing here?” The Avenger said.

“If you’re a policeman, I’m just looking around to get a souvenir,” said the little man with the big ears.

“And if I’m not?” said Benson, pale eyes seeming to go right through the man’s skull.

“Then I’m not a souvenir hunter,” admitted the man. He stared hard at the white, dead face. “I guess you aren’t a policeman. Don’t turn me into the regulars, please. Not, at least till I’ve had a chance to look around.”

“Why do you want to look around?”

“I want to clear up the death of Veck,” the little man said, with a purposeful look forming around his jaw. He had an amazingly forceful jaw. “I don’t think the police are ever going to clear it up; so I’m going to try it myself.”

“Why?”

The little man’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

“Because I thought Veck was the finest person who ever lived,” he said. “I used to work for him. He was a great man. Now I have just one desire in life—to get whoever is responsible for his death.”

“What did you expect to find here?”

“I don’t know,” said the man. “But I’m familiar with laboratories, having helped Veck in his for so long. I just thought I might find something out of the way.”

“And did you?”

“No.”

“What’s your name?”

“Xisco,” said the little man. “Pronounced Z, but spelled with an X. Charlie Xisco.”

Smitty and Mac looked at each other. There was a fishy smell somewhere here, they thought. But neither had a chance to say so. One of the guards came swiftly toward them, stared sternly at Xisco, but delivered his message without verbally chiding the little man with the big ears for being where he had no business to be.

“Just got a call from the hospital, sir,” he said to The Avenger. “The person there is regaining consciousness a little sooner than was expected. And he can’t last long because he was very badly hurt in the explosion.”

“I’ll go at once,” said The Avenger.

Xisco caught his arm like a drowning man.

“Somebody escaped from this wreck alive? Someone was here when it happened and may talk now? Let me go with you! Please! He’ll surely know something, and I must hear! Please!”

For about a second and a half the pale, deadly eyes raked the little man’s face.

“All right,” Benson said. “Come along.”

At the hospital there was feverish suspense. The chief of police was in the dying plainclothesman’s room. So were two captains and a lieutenant of detectives. When The Avenger came in with his two aides and Xisco, the room began to look like a convention hall. But it didn’t make much difference to the man in bed.

He was going to die anyway. The rattling of his breath and the terrible color of his face told that. The center of attention, with everyone staring intently at him, he didn’t know but what he was alone.

No man’s eyes were any more intent than those of Xisco, once Veck’s laboratory helper and now eager to avenge the scientist’s death.

“Has he said anything yet?” Benson asked the chief.

“No. He hasn’t really regained consciousness. He is delirious and very weak. He has rambled a little—”

“Water,” moaned the man in bed. “Water . . . that’s the stuff—”

“Does he want a drink of water, or what?” whispered the chief. Evidently the death of his man was cutting him all up. There was the look of a father in his stern eyes.

“But no . . . water could—” mumbled the dying man. “I don’t understand . . . nuts . . . if you can take time . . . this slug I picked up—”

“I told you he went there with a bullet for a ballistics test,” whispered the chief to Benson. “But the other words—about water—they can’t have any meaning. Unless he means that he’s thirsty.”

The man moistened his lips.

“I . . . but, water . . . no . . . look out!”

“Pass that pitcher,” said the chief, nodding to water on a night table. “If he’s thirsty he can have a drink. He won’t have many more.”

The man happening to be nearest the water was Xisco. He passed the pitcher. The police chief poured a glass and held it toward the dying man’s lips—

“No!”

The voice of The Avenger positively crackled with the monosyllable. In his colorless eyes was a pale fire of comprehension. His hand went out. He slapped the glass from the man’s lips before a drop could get to them!

The glass crashed against the wall near the lieutenant of detectives, who had been watching proceedings with a cigar clamped grimly between his lips.

They never heard the crash of the glass. It was drowned in a roaring explosion that took out that wall, brought down most of the plaster on the ceiling and stunned the lot of them!

The police chief’s hand was still shaped to the glass The Avenger had dashed from his fingers. His coat had been shredded, but he was all right.

“What—” he began, dazed. Then he bellowed, “Grab that pitcher!”

The man on the bed, far past realization of even such events as the explosion, suddenly writhed and was still. He was dead.

“Somebody was going to make sure he wouldn’t talk by poisoning him right in front of our eyes!” the chief barked. “Hold the pitcher. And that man who passed it. He must have put something in it. Hold him, too.”

The men stared at each other, bewildered. Then the chief grated,

“The man who passed the pitcher. Where is he?”

Xisco, the little man with the big ears, had vanished.

“Search the building. Get him!”

But Xisco was not to be found. He had sneaked out with marvelous rapidity during the after effects of the explosion.

The chief turned grimly to The Avenger.

“Sorry. You and your two friends will have to be held till we’ve analyzed the water in the pitcher. You and the others were the only men here not on the regular force.”

Benson’s paralyzed, death mask of a face was as unmoved as the still white face of the moon. Swift death had struck here. And an explosion where it would seem impossible for an explosion to occur. But his countenance was as expressionless as carved chalk. The rest stared at him in awe.

“Of course you must hold us,” Benson nodded, voice quiet but strangely vibrant with power. “I’d like to ask a favor, however. I am fairly familiar with routine laboratory tests myself.” Mac snorted. Benson was probably the world’s greatest chemist. “I would like to watch while the water is analyzed.”

The police chief chewed his lip and finally nodded. The man with the colorless eyes could be watched so that he’d have no chance of tampering with the work.

They went to the biggest industrial laboratory in the city, since the police lab was now in ruins. Every test known to science was given the water from the pitcher.

And all came out negative!

There was no trace of any kind of poison in the water. There was nothing whatever that should make it explode as it seemingly had when the water tumbler hit the wall. In conclusion, the testing chemist drank some of it, with a shrug, to prove his point. It harmed him not at all.

Benson had watched every test. He knew the verdict was right. The water was—just water.

“I guess I have no charge against you or your friends, Mr. Benson,” said the chief reluctantly. “Or even against the man with the big ears. Since there’s nothing in the water, he couldn’t have put anything there as he passed it. I suppose he ran because he knew he’d be suspected when the explosion occurred.”

The Avenger only nodded. But his eyes were flaring in their colorless depths with thoughts and conclusions known only to himself.

CHAPTER IV

Demon Speed

Only a few hours after the strange explosion in the Montreal hospital and the death of the plainclothesman, a driver warmed up a car on one of the big Utah salt flats where speed runs are so often made.

These salt flats are a favorite place for speed runs. Level as floors in all directions, extending for miles, the ancient shallow lake bottoms seem to have been designed by a tolerant Nature just to let speed demons have their precarious way.

To the eye, the run about to be made, so soon after The Avenger had dashed a glass of water from a dying man’s lips, didn’t look as if it would be an epochal event. The car being warmed up was of the best commercial make but was still standard. It was no special job, weighing many tons, with enormous tires and wheels, and streamlined to the last possible gasp. It was merely a big sedan. It had been tuned to the finest point of efficiency, and its tires were brand new and of the best racing variety. But these things weren’t noticeable.

A man, goggled and crash-helmeted, stood next to the car with the door open. With him was another man with a rifle slung in the hollow of his arm.

“I don’t get the idea of the gun,” said the driver.

“To keep any guys with long noses from buttin’ in and watchin’ this run,” said the man with the rifle.

“You guys are all nuts,” snorted the driver. “You have a gun. The two guys roaming around here in the old truck have guns. ‘To keep anybody from watching the run,’ you say. But who wants to sneak in and risk his life to see a stock car go maybe a hundred and ten over a salt flat?”

“You’d be surprised,” said the man.

“I don’t think you’d really shoot,” the driver said. He was a youngster with a reckless grin and a happy eye. He made his living by courting death—and showed it.

“Maybe we wouldn’t,” shrugged the man with the gun. “Start the run, will you?”

“O.K. Though what you expect is more than I can figure out. You get me because I’m supposed to be the best driver in the West. You pay me double what anybody else has ever paid me. And for what? To test out an ordinary stock job. I know to a fraction what these boats’ll do. A hundred and five is theoretically possible, but I’ll bet half the dough you’re to pay me that this buggy won’t hit a hundred.”

“Motor’s geared up,” said the man phlegmatically.

“So the motor’s geared up,” shrugged the driver. “So maybe it’ll do thirty an hour better than that. So what? When you gear up a car you lose power, and at high wind resistance the motor won’t take it any more. Your top speed isn’t much higher with a geared-up job than with ordinary ratio, unless there’s a special motor. And there’s no special in this crate. I got a flash at it when you raised the hood awhile ago.”

“You saw—” began the other.

There was a sharp, hard bark of sound off in the distance.

“Hey!” exclaimed the driver. “That was a shot! If you guys have killed anybody—”

“Keep your shirt on,” said the man with the rifle. “Just because you heard a shot don’t mean somebody got hurt.”

“I’m not working for anybody that might be a murderer,” said the driver, tugging off his crash helmet.

Over the rim of the flat appeared a truck. It was a closed van, fairly large. It came toward them with a swift silence, indicating an expensive make.

The man next to the driver of the van had a gun in his hands, too. The fellow beside the test driver stared at him as the van slid to a stop beside the big sedan. Stared and winked a little toward the angry young driver.

“Hi, George,” he said. “Heard a shot back there. What’s it all about?”

“Oh, that.” The man beside the driver laughed easily. “Just took a pot at a jackrabbit to kill time. Why?”

“Just wondered,” said the other fellow.

The driver stared from one bland face to the other, looked a little sheepish and put the helmet back on. He climbed into the sedan.

“I’ll make three runs,” he said. “One to warm her up good; one back against this little west breeze, and the last as fast as she’ll take it.”

“O.K.,” said the man with the rifle.

The big sedan slid off. And the man stared from it to the men in the cab of the van.

“The jackrabbit,” said the fellow called George, “is inside.”

The jackrabbit lay on the floor of the closed track—a thin, youngish chap with a sardonic look. He was a reporter from a Salt Lake City paper. He had gotten wind of a mysterious assignment given the well-known kid at the wheel of the sedan. Some speed test to be kept a deep secret. He had followed the youngster out here. He might have a wasted trip; he might get a scoop.

It had looked like a wasted trip when he came close enough to see the car on the flat. An ordinary large sedan. No sensation here.

Suddenly he was staring into a gun muzzle, and then at a hard face above it.

“Well, buddy?”

The reporter had tried a feeble grin but it hadn’t come off. There was death in this man’s eyes!

“I’m walking overland,” he had said. “Hitchhiking. Lost my way. If you can direct me to the nearest main highway . . .”

He had stopped. The man was looking at his shoes, which had only a little dust on them, at his clothes, which were too good for a hitchhiker’s.

“For heaven’s sake!” the reporter said hoarsely, when the eyes swung up to meet his gaze again. “Don’t—”

That was when the test driver had heard the shot.

If the youngster had stayed around just a moment longer he would have seen the first red trickle begin to drip from a spot on the van’s floor near the tailboard. But he had started the car too fast for that.

Behind the wheel, the first thing the kid noticed was the speedometer.

It could register up to four hundred miles an hour.

The next thing he noticed was the gear ratio.

The man with the rifle had said the car was geared up, but the test driver hadn’t expected anything like this. The lowest he could idle, even in first gear, was fourteen miles an hour. At that speed the car buckled gently with each slow beat of the motor.

At ninety, he stopped going in second speed simply because there didn’t seem any sense in going faster before shifting to high. But at ninety, in second, the motor under that standard hood was just beginning to turn over nicely. He could feel that.

“O.K.,” he said. “They’ve geared the living hell out of her. But wait till a hundred and fifty mile breeze pushes against her. The motor’ll stall then. It just can’t have the guts, at this ratio.”

So he stepped her up to a hundred and fifty miles an hour—and had a pickup left that threw him back in the seat. A pickup that slipped the car up to two hundred before he knew what had happened.

The test driver’s face began to take on an almost frightened look. Knowing cars and motors, he knew that this simply could not be. There was something of the supernatural about it!

He turned at the end of the flat, and came back. He stepped on it a bit more. The car hit two hundred and thirty.

The test driver had never before eased up on an accelerator. But at that speed, against the breeze he anticipated, he did now. This was a fine car but, after all, it was standard; and standard wheel-bearings aren’t made to take such speeds.

So he eased up and was angered beyond his fears when he passed the man with the rifle. The man was just a blur. But he could see the blur imperiously wave its hand for still more speed.

“Maybe he thinks I haven’t the guts,” gritted the test driver.

He turned at the opposite end of the flat. And on the last lap he really tramped down.

Two hundred and forty, two sixty, two ninety! With sweat-drenched white face he fought the wheel. Three—

The man screamed and slowly eased up on the acclerator. The car, skipping around like a bug on a pond, gradually slowed. Then it screeched to a stop near the man with the rifle. And the right front bearing made a sound like a bagful of gravel. One more second at that last speed . . .

“In Lucifer’s own name,” panted the driver to the man with the rifle, “what have you done to her? The way that motor’s geared, it oughtn’t to have the power to pull a kiddy car up a one per cent grade.”

“How fast?” said the man.

“I think I touched three hundred. I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t dare look . . .”

There was a second shot down by the salt flat. The driver’s reckless young eyes began to film. He stood upright for almost ten seconds, with a hole in his heart; then he fell!

The men came from the van. And the driver took out an automatic and fired at the hood of the test car.

There was a soft roar, like that of a volcano far underground. Then the car was the disappearing black heart of a white flame that blossomed like a great rose around it.

The men waited till the warped, fused chassis and motor block had cooled, then loaded them into the van. With them—and the body of the test driver and the “jack-rabbit”—the closed truck rumbled leisurely toward the distant city.

Hardly out of sight of the truck, over the rim of the horizon, another man-made thing of speed was hurtling through space.

This time it was a plane.

At four thousand feet, and against the same west breeze that the sedan driver thought would slow up his car, the plane streaked like a flash of light. Then it banked, dipped, headed up, and went through maneuvers no one ever saw a plane go through before.

To begin with, it didn’t look like much of a ship. It was a three-year-old small cabin ship with a single motor. It had just one feature that would have surprised a pilot, had one been around to be curious.

The single propeller was about three times too big for the motor, a pilot would have said. And it had a sharper pitch than any propeller ever had before.

The plane stopped its stunting and straightened out again. It went fast, faster. It began to look like a line in the sky instead of a plane. It was going—what? Five hundred miles an hour? Six? There was no way of knowing, save that the ship kept on disappearing into a dark streak in the sky.

The pilot eased up, face as white, bewildered and fearful as had been the face of the sedan’s driver at the car’s unbelievable speed. A little more, and the motor would be torn right out of this old crate.

He banked, whirled, headed up.

The plane began going almost straight up into the sky. It was a fantastic angle of climb. It simply couldn’t be done. Yet this plane, in no way remarkable, was doing it—and not stalling.

The pilot leveled out once more; then he saw the small dirigible far off to the east.

The dirigible was cleverly painted. Blue-gray, it blended with the sky so that only because of a flash of the sun was the plane pilot able to glimpse it at all. And of course, in those last seconds of his life, he wasn’t able to see the occupants of the dirigible.

A man in the small hanging cabin was watching the plane through a telescope. A little earlier, he had watched the car go at its terrific pace over the salt flat. He nodded now, hat far down over his face so that only his eyes could be seen.

“That’s enough,” he said.

At the words, a man near him, sitting at a small table on which was what appeared to be a telegraph key, pressed that key. It was a radio-control button.

And eleven miles off, the incredible plane suddenly was no more!

A blinding flash of light appeared where the plane had been. Seconds later the sound of an explosion was heard in the dirigible.

And that was all!

CHAPTER V

The Girl and the Gun

The police weren’t looking for Xisco. The Avenger was. And he found news of him at a private airport.

The little man with the big ears had taken off in a private plane for the Newark airport and New York City. But before that he had scanned all weather reports and copied one down. The traces of his words were on the sheet of paper under the top of the telegraph-blank pad he had used. Graphite dust brought out the words.

And the report could be of only one district: Salt Lake City. Not Newark.

In the middle of the night The Avenger had taken off in his fast plane with Mac and Smitty and headed south and west. But there was destined to be a delay before Salt Lake City was reached.

During the morning, when they were within a hundred miles of the spot mentioned, they received the news flashes on Benson’s radio.

A plane, ownership and identity of pilot unknown, had apparently burst into bits yesterday afternoon over Utah. At least, it was thought to have been a plane, though such was the force of the explosion that it might have been a small meteor exploding on contact with the earth’s heavy atmosphere.

A rancher, however, had testified that he had seen a plane near the place of the explosion just previously. He said the plane had been going faster than he had ever seen one travel before.

Benson headed for the spot mentioned in the report and started cruising in wide circles.

“What are ye lookin’ for, Muster Benson?” asked Mac.

“Evidence of the plane wreck,” said The Avenger.

“The news flash said no one had been able to locate a wrecked plane—”

“Perhaps,” said Benson quietly, “the searchers were looking for pieces larger than there are to find.”

The barren land turned a thousand shades as the sun climbed. The flats were like giant saucers set in the earth. Far off, to the west, the rim of the largest flat of all could barely be seen.

“There’s a funny looking spot,” said Smitty suddenly, china-blue eyes widening as he stared down.

There was a section almost half a mile in extent that, at first, looked like the rest of the earth beneath. Then, as you stared harder, you saw that it had the curious aspect of having been recently seeded.

There were scattered black specks all over the circle, as if a great hand had scattered them thinly.

The Avenger’s plane shot down, lit like a feather in the midst of the black specks.

Except that down here the specks weren’t specks any more. They were fragments of a plane!

The fragments were such as to send a chill to your spine. No one of them was larger than a man’s two fists. Most were smaller. And all were fused and torn and ripped in an incredible way.

“Whoosh!” said Mac somberly. “Explosion, was it? I’ve never seen anything that could explode a plane like this.”

Benson didn’t seem to hear him. When he spoke, it was as though to himself.

“In all directions again,” he said softly. “The explosive acted in all directions, like the one at the Montreal police laboratory. Not just in the line of greatest resistance.”

Smitty was ranging swiftly around, staring at the twisted fragments. To an ordinary man, those pieces would mean nothing at all. But to Smitty they spelled a message that was increasingly curious as it became clearer.

“Funny,” he said. “I don’t see pieces of anything that looks like a gas tank.”

Benson nodded, colorless eyes taking on their icy sheen. He had noticed that from the start.

“Should we gather up a few of these?” said Mac distastefully, staring at the fragments.

The Avenger shook his head. He walked toward the plane. The three got in. But they didn’t go far.

Benson had barely lifted her from the level expanse and hurtled a dozen miles toward Salt Lake City when his marvelous eyes caught sight of something else. And again the plane whistled downward. Down to the middle of the biggest flat in sight.

There, conspicious in the paleness of the flat, was a large blackened area.

The three poked around that too.

“Somethin’ burned or exploded here,” said Mac.

Smitty nodded. The Avenger stooped and picked up something.

It was a little nubbin of a thing that had once been a hub cap; but it was so run together now, melted in some terrific heat, you couldn’t have told what it was save for a bit of the center medallion that retained traces of two letters.

“A car!” exclaimed Smitty. “A car burned here! But there was nothing said of any car in the dispatches.”

Benson stared from black spot to salt flat.

“It’s pretty plain,” he said quietly. “Automobiles only come to these places for speed runs. Therefore, there was a test car out here in the near past. It made its run, and then was consumed by fire.”

“Caught while she was speeding along,” said Mac sagely. “Too much strain on a hot motor.”

“In that case,” said Smitty, “there would be a long black trail of fire. Instead of this one spot. No, the car caught while it was standing still. Then, later, somebody was interested enough to haul it away. It couldn’t have been for salvage. A fire like that wouldn’t even leave salable junk.”

“A plane destroyed and a car burned up, within twenty miles of each other,” mused The Avenger, pale eyes flaring. Then he added, in the same expressionless tone, “Apparently, others are interested in this as well as ourselves.”

A speck had appeared on the horizon. It came across country, growing rapidly. As it raced nearer, the speck could be seen to be a closed truck. There was one man in the cab.

The van came to a stop between Benson, Mac and Smitty and their plane. It looked old, but had moved with a swift silence indicating that it was of an expensive make.

The driver was a broad-shouldered, stubby man in dungarees. He had a grin on his face and looked friendly. But he also looked puzzled.

“Hello,” he said. “Are you the guys who phoned us to come out here and pick up a wrecked car? And, if so, where’s the car?”

Mac and Smitty went up to the man, who descended from the cab of the van. Benson stayed a little behind, hands in his pockets.

“We didn’t phone anybody,” said Smitty, looking dull-witted and slow. “When was it you got the call, and what was said about a wrecked car.”

He stopped then. And the van driver laughed a little. He was still looking amiable. But behind him, fanning out from the body of the van in which they had ridden here concealed, were eight men!

It had been cleverly done. They’d popped out like jacks-in-boxes. They’d spread so that no three men, even supermen, could attack them effectively before death came.

And that death was scheduled to come for The Avenger and his aides was quite evident!

The men, about as ill-assorted a mob of thugs as Mac and Smitty had ever seen, held guns with the loose efficiency of experts. And every gun trained at the three!

Mac growled deep in his throat. Smitty showed his teeth in a wolfish snarl. They didn’t like men who looked like rats, as these men decidedly looked.

But it didn’t seem as if they were going to be able to do anything about it here. Eight guns were leveled and, at any moment, they were going to belch lead. There was going to be no more parleying. Just execution!

The men, however, had reckoned without the man with the white, dead face and the icy, pale eyes.

Benson had his hands in his pockets, which was one of the reasons for the haste in which the gunmen obviously meant to act. But their haste didn’t match his.

The Avenger’s hands tilted forward a little, and tiny glints appeared through the fabric of his gray coat.

The glints were the points of little tubes hardly larger than hypodermic needles. But at the other ends of the tubes were syringes, and in these was a liquid of Mac’s contriving.

The Avenger pressed the syringes.

It had all been done much more swiftly than words would indicate: the appearance of the men, their plain intention to shoot, the press of the syringes.

Into the air spread a colorless gas. The liquid from the needles was so volatile that it spread like wildfire, and so powerful that at contact with human nostrils it numbed the brain.

Nine men felt their hands and bodies go numb before they could press triggers. Nine men sagged like cut grain. One managed to shoot, but his gun was hanging almost straight down and the bullet chewed harmlessly into the earth.

Mac and Smitty had whipped handkerchiefs out and pressed them over their faces. The cloths were satuated with a chemical that safeguarded them from the knockout gas; all their handkerchiefs were so treated.

The Avenger had his own handkerchief in service as a mask. He nodded toward the van and then toward the plane. The command was plain to his aides: search the van, then take off in the plane.

They leaped into the van. They had to work fast; the gas, a variation of twilight sleep worked out by Mac in his chemical laboratory, lasted only a few minutes. The very volatility, which made it act so fast, also caused it to dissipate harmlessly in a very short time.

Immediately, Benson saw something that interested him very much, indeed. Two dark spots on the floor of the van. Something had stained the wood there and had been painstakingly scrubbed away. But all the scrubbing had not quite cleaned the patches.

He took scrapings from each patch and put them in envelopes. Into a third envelope went a fused bit of metal. Then he was out and had the van’s hood up.

He took the distributor cap and raced for the plane, with Smitty and Mac close behind. The eight gunmen and the truck driver were already twitching a little with returning consciousness. Benson reached to open the cabin door.

And a voice said,

“No you don’t! Stay right where you are!”

The three whirled. The voice had been a girl’s. The owner was drawing nearer to them now, around the plane’s cabin. The gun in her hand looked like a cannon; it was a .45 automatic, and she was a small girl.

Beyond a wingtip, Smitty now saw part of a car. It was a roadster, cheap and old. In it, the girl had softly coasted to a stop behind the plane while they were in the body of the van.

“You took something from the truck’s motor,” said the girl. “I want it!”

She had large, snapping black eyes that might normally look beautiful; but now they were as cold as jet. She had ink-black, silky hair and was dressed in a rust-colored outfit. Altogether, she rather looked like a fashion model—somehow wandering loose on the salt flat with a cannon in her small hands.

“Give!” she said, extending her left hand.

Benson took an innocent step toward her, drawing the truck’s distributor cap from his pocket.

The girl stepped warily back, too.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t try to get within jumping distance. Just toss it to me.”

The Avenger stared at her with his paralyzed face as emotionless as a metal mask. But his eyes showed that he was considering the situation.

The girl could get at least two of them if they tried to charge her. And the look in her black eyes said that she would get them, too! Behind her, the men from the van were already feebly trying to get to their feet and were groping for the guns they’d dropped. In another half-minute they’d be in the picture again.

The appearance of this black-eyed, black-haired girl was as disconcerting as it was sudden. But, having appeared, it looked as if she would be top dog in the situation.

Benson tossed her the cap. There was nothing else to do. The syringes in his pockets were emptied of the knockout gas.

The girl began backing away, with the cap in her left hand. She turned a little to call over her shoulder to the men by the van,

“Come and get ’em!”

The thugs were willing. They swung unsteadily toward the plane. But with the girl’s gaze off him for a moment, Benson had acted.

His steely hand streaked down and scooped up saline sand from the flat. With the same continuing motion, the stinging stuff flew in a little shower toward the girl’s face. She gasped and choked, and wiped at blinded eyes.

“Into the plane,” snapped Benson.

They hadn’t time to get to the girl. Already, the men behind her were shooting dizzily. They had time only to get into the bulletproofed cabin of the plane.

Slugs spanged off it as Benson started the motor. They starred the heavy glass windows as the plane took its run. Then they were up, and the men were a milling little bunch of ants on the flat, far below.

“I wonder,” said Mac, “where they came from?”

The Avenger nodded downward.

The main highway to Salt Lake City spread like a ribbon below them now. Leading into it, from open earth, were several faint car tracks, made by the van.

The tracks curved onto the highway in the direction of the Pacific. There was only one place to go to, on that line. That was the city.

“The girl,” said Smitty suddenly, “was kind of pretty, wasn’t she?”

“Whoosh!” said Mac. “Nellie Gray should hear that.”

Nellie, diminutive blond bombshell now in New York holding down the Bleek Street headquarters, was another aide of the man with the white, dead face. It was suspected that she regarded the giant, Smitty, as strictly her property.

“I just said the girl was kind of pretty,” Smitty said, at the reference to Nellie Gray.

“So’s a diamond-backed rattler, if you like that kind of good looks,” said the Scot. “Me—I’d prefer the rattler.”

The Avenger said nothing. On and on, he sent the plane. And there was a glitter in his eyes, like ice under a polar dawn, hinting that he already knew many things from the scattered happenings of the past few hours.

CHAPTER VI

Wrecked Test Car

Dick Benson always carried with him a small but complete set of laboratory instruments so that, at a moment’s notice, he could conduct any but the most complicated tests.

To test for the presence of human blood is not very complicated. Nor is it complicated to test two specimens for similarity. At least, not to a genius like Benson.

Benson had tested the scrapings taken from the floor of the closed van where the wood was darkened in two different areas. Also, he had studied the bit of fused metal taken from the van; and he had decided that it was what was left of an upholstery button.

“The van,” he announced, “recently carried two bodies and what was left of that test car from the flat. These blood specimens are unlike, proving that they came from two people. So the two in the truck must have been badly wounded or they’re dead. Probably the latter.”

“ ’Tis nice work to decide all that, Muster Benson,” said Mac dourly. “But it doesn’t get us very far.”

The Scot was the most pessimistic soul alive. Unless he happened to be in a spot from which there seemed no possible escape from death. Then, with a crazy reversal of character, he was apt to be the most cheerful person on earth.

“We have no notion of who the two bodies in the van might have been,” he added gloomily.

“I think we have—on one, at least,” Benson said evenly. “The test car was wrecked deliberately. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that the driver was murdered to keep him from talking about the test. One of the bodies must have been that of the driver. The other? We can’t even guess, as yet. It couldn’t have been the pilot of the exploded plane. There were rather ghastly bits of evidence in the fragments I looked at that indicated the pilot met the same fate as his ship.”

Even Benson could not know of the newspaperman who had sneaked out to the flat and suffered the fate of the “jackrabbit.”

The Avenger picked up the phone and called the city motor bureau. Yes, they knew of a young fellow, test driver, who had been hired to drive a car yesterday. His name was Bud Reeder. He was good. No, they didn’t know if Bud had come back yet. They only happened to know about the test because the secretary of the motor club was slightly acquainted with him; the club had hired him once or twice to peg times and distances on advertised routes. He could usually be reached at Dutch Vassen’s garage.

Benson phoned the garage.

“No, Bud ain’t in,” came a coarse voice. “Yeah, he usually hangs around here, but I ain’t seen him since yesterday. He got a job yesterday, and mebbe he’s blowin’ his cash somewhere.”

“Do you know who hired him?” asked Benson.

“Nope,” came the voice. “But the landlady of his boarding house might.”

Benson called the number given. A woman answered in a vinegary voice.

“How should I know who hired him?” she shrilled. “He don’t tell me his affairs.”

Even over the telephone, The Avenger’s voice had the magic tone of authority. The woman calmed down after a moment.

“He might have gone to a place having something to do with somebody named Klaxon,” she admitted finally. “I heard him phone—just happened to, you understand. I ain’t the kind to listen to my guests when they answer the telephone. And I heard him repeat a name that sounded something like Klaxon when he first started talking.”

Smitty flipped through the phone book’s classified section of garages and automobile salesrooms. There was a Paxon Garage.

“We’ll try that,” said Benson, pale eyes like icy slits in his dead, white face.

It was approaching dusk. Paxon’s garage was a small building on the edge of town, designed to hold no more than twenty or twenty-five cars. It was a shabby looking place, and it seemed deserted at the moment.

However, Benson took no chances. He led the way to the rear of the building, moving shadowlike in the creeping dusk.

The garage was of planking, sheathed with imitation shingles of asbestos. Benson’s white, steely fingers ripped some of the asbestos pads off. Then he took two pellets from his pocket and a thing rather like an atomizer in appearance, save that instead of rubber bulb on it there was an open tube where a bulb should have been.

He partially crushed the two pellets together and dropped them into the receptacle of the atomizer. Then he put the end of the tube, opposite the small nozzle, into his mouth and blew.

The pellets began slowly to diminish in size as they gave off inflammable gases; and, with the oxygen of Benson’s breath mixing in, there was a spurt of blue flame from the nozzle. The apparatus was really a blow torch, so small that it could be carried, in parts, in two vest pockets.

Benson ran the intense tip of the flame in an oblong over the exposed planks of the garage’s back wall. The oblong tilted back in his hand like a door. It came out silently, and silently he laid it down.

Then he and Mac and Smitty stepped in.

Their wariness was justified. From somewhere in front of the dark building came a voice. A man was either talking on the telephone, or to some other person with him.

Mac’s hand suddenly found the arm of The Avenger. He pressed hard.

“Look, mon!”

Right next to where they had stepped in, at the rear of the little garage where it couldn’t be seen without a search, was a blackened twisted thing so fire-warped that you could hardly tell that it had once been chassis and motor block of an automobile.

“The test car,” whispered Benson.

He went to it, moving as only The Avenger could move, seeming to float swiftly over the concrete without sound. He started to examine it, but he seemed interested only in the rear end. His glance at the blackened motor block was very brief.

He was looking for traces of the car’s gasoline tank. And he wasn’t finding any. Yet there should have been traces. The metal shell of a tank shouldn’t disappear in even the hottest fire.

The three crouched quickly in the darkness. The voice of the man in front had stopped, and steps sounded. They saw him leave a tiny cubicle boarded off as an office. He came toward the rear of the place.

The three shifted a little as he came closer, trying to keep the test car’s chassis between them and him. He didn’t seem to suspect anything. He walked slowly, openly, toward the back, across the garage from them. Then he turned and seemed about to retrace his steps to the office.

There was a click and the garage was suddenly flooded with light! It struck the surprised three from every angle at once.

Smitty suddenly exclaimed aloud. He had turned, and had seen something.

“Oh-oh,” he said. “There’s that girl again.”

While they had watched the man drift aimlessly in their direction, another person had stolen silently toward them on the near side of the garage. They had been neatly flanked. And this other person, evidently the one to whom the man in front had been talking a moment ago, was the girl with the ink-black hair and the jet-black eyes who had gummed their play on the salt flat.

She stood facing them, in the glare of light, with the enormous gun in her steady small hand.

“Don’t move,” she warned. Then she raised her voice. “All right, Eddy, get the others.”

The man near the front reached into the first car at hand. He leaned on the horn button. Two short blasts and a long one resounded echoingly in the garage—and it also could be heard for some distance outside.

Benson’s hands commenced to stray innocently toward his collar. If a finger had touched a certain spot there, the garage would have been filled, in about four seconds, with an inky pall of smokelike gas that would have blinded the man and the girl. Most men would have allowed the move to be completed; you can’t hide a gun in a shirt collar.

The girl, however, was smarter than most men. Back on the salt flat, she must have seen that the collapse of the gunmen was preceded by an inconspicuous move of Benson’s hands.

“Keep your hands absolutely still,” she warned. “No, don’t even raise them over your head. Keep them absolutely as they are.”

Benson stayed as still as stone, eyes like chips of white steel. Mac and Smitty raged impotently beside him. And men began to pile in the front door of the garage.

There were about ten men. They came so quickly in answer to the horn signal as to suggest that their headquarters were in one of the buildings flanking the garage.

They glared at Mac and Smitty and Benson and began running purposefully toward them. Mac recognized half a dozen of the men they had gassed on the salt flat. The gunmen were pretty sore about that, it appeared.

However, this time the men did not attempt to shoot. With blackjacks and clubbed guns in their hands they prepared to surround the three and knock their heads out from between their ears.

The reason for the desire to avoid shooting was plain enough. This wasn’t deserted country; this was a city. And the noise of gunshots wouldn’t be easy to explain.

There is one thing about a large gang of men. They look imposing; but in such a number, there is always one chump who messes the works. It was so in this case.

A big fellow with a split ear was in the lead, snarling more ferociously than any of the others, eager to get in the first crack with the butt of his automatic.

He got there first, all right; half a dozen steps in the lead; And he swung at the first head to present itself—the sandy-thatched skull of MacMurdie.

At the same time, without realizing it, the man got between Mac and the girl with the gun.

It was the opening awaited.

With a snarl that made the gangster’s grimace seem like a weak grin, the Scot ducked the flashing gun barrel and surged forward. He got the gunman in the middle with a bony shoulder, and the man went flying back as if propelled by a giant sling shot. Went flying back, and caromed against the girl.

She cried, “Oh!” in a strangled way, as the breath was knocked out of her. And she dropped the gun.

From then on it was a shambles, with ten men against three, and all desirous of avoiding gunfire. The ten, of course, had no doubt as to the outcome. Not at first.

They were all over the three now! Mac went down with two men on top of him. Smitty, huge as he was, was knocked to his knees under the shock of a four-man wedge. The Avenger was the only one who remained erect, and he had a man clawing on his back and another trying to smash his white face flat with a blackjack!

The fight seemed over before it had fairly begun. Then, somehow, things seemed to happen!

MacMurdie could fight about as well on the floor as on his feet. His bone mallets of fists pistoned up at two savage faces. One suddenly sprouted a red mask and disappeared. The other was hidden abruptly in the crook of an arm to protect it from the Scot’s battering.

So Mac’s bony fingers got the throat under the face in a steel-cable sort of noose, and in a moment he was up and clear of the two.

Smitty hadn’t bothered to use his fists. On his vast knees, he was still almost head high with the men clubbing at him. He swept out his gorilla arms and gathered three of the four to him in an embrace that was an excellent counterpart of the embrace of an enraged grizzly bear.

With the three yelling against him and trying to keep their ribs from caving, the giant simply fell straight forward.

There was a squashing thud as one of the three broke the force of Smitty’s near-three-hundred-pound bulk as it smashed against the concrete floor. He didn’t move any more.

Smitty ceased his embrace and got an ankle in each hand. He swung, and the two remaining men did curious cartwheels sideways, smashing against the front of a car twenty feet away.

The fourth man was industriously clubbing for the big fellow’s head. He’d only hit glancingly, what with the fast shifting of bodies. But now he got a square sock on Smitty’s skull.

It should have felled an ox. The gunman stood expectantly, waiting for Smitty to fall. But, somehow, Smitty did not oblige.

Smitty shook his head, as if to clear it of fog, and blinked a couple of times. Then his face reddened.

He had been fighting almost impersonally till now, just doing a job in the most efficient manner possible. But that last crack had evidently made him very annoyed.

“Why you—” he bellowed.

At the look of him, the man screamed and ran. He scuttled between garage wall and the back of a big coupé and began clawing along cleaning rags and polish cans piled there in crazy disregard of all fire laws.

Smitty whirled to where Benson and Mac were.

The Avenger’s fists had accounted for two men. The man with the dead face and the icily flaming, pale eyes was standing almost erect, weaving like a dancer on the balls of his feet, with his fist licking out now and then like darting white flame.

When it went out, a man went down. Odds of ten to three, it seemed, were not enough. Not when the three were Mac and Smitty and Benson.

But, suddenly, the complexion of the struggle changed.

There was a sound like a riveting machine! Slugs screamed off the garage floor to plunk into the plank wall behind the three.

The man who had run yelling from Smitty and hidden between the wall and a parked coupé had picked a submachine gun out of the piles of rags. Throwing all desire for silence to the winds, he was intent on mowing the three down!

With clockwork precision, the three spread at the first deadly hammering sound. Benson leaped left, Mac to the right, and Smitty ahead—toward the sound.

The Avenger’s hand flashed to the little device at his collar. Through the knot of his tie, where something like a tiny jewel could be seen, came a thread-like squirt of liquid.

It didn’t stay thread-like. It became a stream of almost solid looking black as big as the jet of a fire hose. Then it became a dense small cloud which spread from wall to wall of the garage almost before the eye could follow its expansion.

The black ball probably saved Smitty’s reckless life, for no man can rush a machine gun and not get riddled.

Smitty couldn’t find the man any more. But that was not necessary. He was at the front of the coupé, with the gunner lurking between the back of the car and the wall. So Smitty put his vast hands on the front of the radiator and pushed!

There was a shriek from behind the car as a man was pinched like a bug between rear bumper and plank wall. The shooting stopped abruptly, and so did the shrieking. Then Smitty fumbled to the place in the back where The Avenger had burned a hole.

The other two were there. They identified each other in the blackness by an arm pressure they had worked out for such cases, and they slid through to the outside air.

“We’ll come back . . .” Smitty began ominously.

But the words had hardly left his lips when there was a soft roar from behind them and a sheet of pale, intense flame enveloped the place.

The garage had been set afire!

They heard the girl scream; heard the shouts of the men, fading toward the front of the building. Then all they heard was the crackle of flames.

It was incredible, the heat of that fire. It made a furnace of the garage building in three minutes. By the time the wail of approaching fire engines sounded, it was obvious that the buildings on each side of the plank structure were going to go up in smoke, too.

No one would ever investigate that garage or anything in it.

The Avenger and his two aides slipped off into the night, with Smitty rubbing an egg on his head and still muttering because he hadn’t gotten his hands on the man who slugged him.

CHAPTER VII

The Fourth Pole

The curious headquarters of The Avenger, on Bleek Street, did not often see the white-faced man and all his aides there, together. Usually one or more was out; there was a lot of work to be done by a little band like this who devoted their lives to crime fighting.

They were all there now the day after the burning of the garage.

Nellie Gray sat on a leather divan near the rear corner window, with sun highlighting her gold hair through slats over the casement that looked like the slats of a Venetian blind. They were not what they seemed, however. The slats were special alloy steel, set into the masonry at a 45° angle so that light could come through but bullets could not.

Nellie, barely five feet tall, with soft blue eyes, was the most diminutive, feminine looking young woman you’d ever want to see.

But large men had been known to fall on their surprised faces when they tried to lay hands on her, for Nellie Gray could surpass the skill of most men, with her hands as well as with a gun.

Near Nellie sat Rosabel, the pretty Negress who was Josh Newton’s wife. She stared at her sleepy-looking husband with fond eyes.

Josh, Mac and Smitty stared at their chief, and wondered what lay behind the pale, death mask of a face in which were eyes as expressionless and glittering as chips of stainless steel.

The Avenger was waiting for a report. The report, if it came, was to be about a fourth gentleman from Poland.

Wencilau, tragically dead in Paris; Shewski in Berlin; Veck in Montreal. And in each case were similarities that simply could not be coincidence.

Investigating authorities had found each time that the dead man had lived in fear of immediate death. They had found that each man was a scientist of some sort. They had discovered, of course, that each was Polish.

Three men, of the same profession and nationality, hiding in far places! The first thing The Avenger had done, of course, was to try to link the three together.

Dick Benson, in the course of an adventurous career, had made thousands of friends all over the world. He had set some of his friends to work on this.

From Warsaw, Poland, had come the report that Veck and Wencilau and Shewski were old friends and coworkers. From Berlin had come the news that just before the death of Shewski, a little man, with ears so flat to his head that it didn’t seem as if he had any ears, had visited him. The man, it was thought, was an old employee of Shewski’s.

From Paris, The Avenger had gleaned the news that a small man of about the same description had tried to get into Wencilau’s room the day before the murder. He had told the concierge he was Wencilau’s laboratory helper at one time.

And from Montreal, after exhaustive investigation and questioning, a chambermaid had been found who swore she saw a little man with outstanding ears talking to Veck, through his shut door, on the day of Veck’s death. That, it would seem, would be Xisco, who had said he once worked in a laboratory with Veck.

Three men, close friends, dead. And, in each case, a former laboratory helper had been around shortly before death struck.

Then from Warsaw had come a final report that was the most vital to date.

There had been four close friends and scientific co-workers. Four Polish scientists, scattered and hiding from something.

The fourth, a man named Sodolow, had come to the United States with the other three, and from there had gone to Algiers, North Africa. Miracles of tracing had been necessary to establish that fact, because Sodolow had made it a business to move there without leaving any clues behind him.

Algiers. But he wasn’t there now. A salesman of farm machinery whose life Benson had once saved in Fez, had reported that the man named Sodolow—using an alias at his hotel—had left the Mediterranean city. A hundred dollars had brought the guarded information that he was en route to New York.

There the trail had stopped, till Benson had talked to a stevedore who knew a steward who had smuggled a man ashore who looked much like this Sodolow. That had been four days ago.

Benson’s private exchange telephone had emitted a discreet buzz. When that phone rang, it was important.

The Avenger picked up the instrument in his slim but steel-strong hand. His face, as always, was as emotionless as a wax mold. But his eyes took on their chill glitter as he listened to brief words from one of his countless friends who were only too glad to act as agents for him, when circumstances compelled Benson to ask their help.

Benson nodded and hung up.

“They’ve found Sodolow,” he said. “He’s at a Polish boarding house near Third Street, plainly hiding out as the others did.”

“The fourth Pole,” said Mac somberly.

“Yes. The fourth of the little squad of scientists who came here to the United States for a while, and then scattered in far places to hide as if the devil himself were after them.”

The Avenger hadn’t seemed to move fast. But in an incredibly short time he was at the door.

‘‘Smitty,” he said, “come with me. And bring a stomach pump.”

“Stomach pump?” repeated the giant, perplexed.

“Three men have died of something like poisoning,” said Benson quietly. “Quite possibly, this fourth man may have a similar attack while you’re guarding him.”

“Guarding him?”

“ ’Tis parrot blood he has in him,” observed Mac dourly.

“You’ll stay with this man, Sodolow, constantly,” said Benson to the giant. “He is in deadly danger. But even with constant vigilance, he may suffer the same fate as the other three. In which case you will use the pump on him instantly.”

Smitty nodded. It was one more indication of the method and foresight The Avenger used in his work.

The obscure boarding house in the shadow of the El tracks, where Sodolow was hiding, looked innocent enough. But Smitty felt a prickle of foreboding, like goose flesh all around him, when he stepped inside. He could fairly smell danger around. He felt as if eyes were on him as he followed the gray steel figure of The Avenger up the dim stairs to a room on the top floor in the rear. However, stare around as he would, he could see no door open nor any person on stairs or in halls.

He wondered how Benson was going to get in to see Sodolow. A man hiding in horror is not apt to open up. Not even when the magic name of Benson was given. There were too many chances that the name could be used by someone else.

The giant got the answer in the next moment.

Benson took from his pocket a thing like a crochet needle save that its slim length was split into two slivers. Then he knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” came a voice inside.

“A friend,” Benson called through the panels. “We must see you on a very important matter.”

There was a silence. Then the voice said bitterly,

“I have no friends. Whoever you are—go away.”

“Won’t you at least look at us and judge for yourself if you’ll receive us?” said Benson.

The Avenger had noted in advance that there was no peephole arrangement in the door. It was that which had guided his plan.

There was the sound of the lock being reluctantly opened. Then the door went back about an inch.

In the crack, Smitty saw a face. But the face was merely a reflection in a hand mirror. Sodolow was taking no chances. He wasn’t showing himself at that door. He stared at the two in the hall with the aid of the mirror, meanwhile, keeping safe himself. And Smitty saw, near the reflected face, the tip of a gun muzzle the Pole held for further protection.

“I don’t know you, sir,” Solodow snapped. And he shut the door.

Benson had the slim, slit length of steel in the lock. The Pole turned the key, and there was a clicking sound. But the bolt did not slide into place. It was caught by the steel. The click was caused by the sliding of one half of the slim steel against the other. It perfectly imitated the sound of a thrown bolt and would have fooled anybody.

Benson opened the supposedly locked door and stepped into a shabby room.

The man inside screamed and whirled. The Avenger’s hand flashed out and wrested the gun from Sodolow before the frightened man could pull the trigger.

Sodolow glared at the white, dead face and the pale, deathly eyes.

“All right,” he said. “You’ve got me helpless. Go ahead and kill me.”

Benson snapped the cartridges out of the revolver and handed it back.

“I’ve told you we were friends,” he said quietly.

Sodolow sneered. He was a chubby man with a face ordinarily cast in cheerful lines. But it was bitter, frightened, cynical now.

“Fine friends, who force their way into a man’s room!”

“Only because there was no other way to see you,” Benson said. And such was his tone, and the look in the colorless, glacial eyes, that Sodolow relaxed a little.

“What do you want with me?” said Sodolow resignedly.

“We want some information, if you will give it. And we want to help guard against a certain danger that hangs over you. A most peculiar danger.”

The effect on Sodolow was remarkable. His face paled, then purpled. He raised quivering hands.

“You know . . . the nature of . . . that danger?” he panted.

“Poison—that later shows no trace of itself in laboratory tests,” said Benson evenly. “Or—the white flame, coming from a man’s lips and nostrils. Of course I know the nature of the threat.”

Sodolow drew a deep breath.

“Who are you, anyway?”

“The name is Benson. Richard Henry Benson.”

Into the Polish scientist’s eyes came profound respect.

“The inventor of the alpha lamp, which produces light without heat!” he breathed. “I am honored, Mr. Benson. I have studied many of your formulas.”

Sodolow reached for a small tin on a nearby table. There was a well-known brand of headache tablets in the tin. He took one up, started to put in his mouth . . .

Benson’s hand flashed out and knocked the tablet from his fingers.

Sodolow exclaimed at the suddenness of it, then shrugged and smiled bitterly.

“Of course. It may be the death of me, Mr. Benson. But I have taken three of those tablets already today, with no ill effects. And, after all, a man must swallow food and wine or water. That is my vulnerability to the fiends—”

He stopped. Benson said,

“It is a very great thing you have discovered, isn’t it?”

“So great,” said Sodolow, in a hushed tone, “that I dare not tell even you. Though it sounds as if you have guessed a little—”

“You brought it to this country some time ago?” said Benson. “And then you left the country hurriedly?”

“That’s right. Veck and Shewski and Wencilau and I. A tremendous discovery. We brought it to America for financial backing. Poland is poor and the United States has great wealth. But we intended to use our brain child to benefit mankind. And, instead, we found that mankind was to be exploited. Shewski and Veck and Wencilau have died, though they hid at the ends of the earth. So I came back to see the cold-blooded fiend who ordained their deaths and plead with him—”

Sodolow stopped. His mouth suddenly twisted with pain.

“To plead with him—” he repeated, almost stupidly, as if not knowing that he was speaking aloud.

He screamed.

Smitty felt like putting his hands over his ears to shut out the sound. It was the shriek of a man who suddenly discovers that, beyond all hope, he is doomed! It was the cry of a man already dead, and terribly aware of it.

“Smitty! The pump!” Benson snapped.

Sodolow had taken nothing into his mouth since the two had been there. Hence, unless the poison had been swallowed previously and was just beginning to work, he could not have been poisoned.

Yet he was acting like a man who had been.

He doubled in the middle, and fell to the floor where he writhed in agony! Foam flecked his lips. His teeth were so ground together that even The Avenger’s iron fingers were put to task to get them apart so the pump could be used.

Benson drained the stomach contents and put them into one of two vials he took from his pocket. The vial was tightly stoppered, was absolutely airtight.

Not half a minute had elasped between the time when Sodolow fell to the floor and the time when his stomach was emptied. But even The Avenger’s foresight and swiftness had not been enough in this case.

Sodolow was dead, struck down as if by lightning!

“Good heavens,” breathed Smitty.

Benson looked down at the dead man, the fourth to go in so short a time. His paralyzed, emotionless face was like a mask. His eyes were like polar ice. Yet Smitty knew there was plenty of emotion under the surface.

The death of this man, whom Benson had come to try to save, was a major defeat. It was all the more of a defeat since Benson had had no time to get real information from him. But the white, still face, of course, showed none of that.

Benson put the bottle with the stomach contents in his pocket. The other, identical vial, he filled with wine from a bottle on the table. He put this into his pocket, too, and beside it the little tin box of headache tablets. There were two left in the tin.

“Police?” said Smitty, glancing from the dead man to his chief.

“We can notify them later,” said Benson. “We had better get away from here as soon as we can—”

The door smashed open!

“You had that idea a little late, buddy,” grated a man at the door.

His scarred, crafty face snarled at them over the sights of a .44. He shot twice at Benson and twice at the giant Smitty.

Both fell without sound!

The man took the aspirin tin and the vial from Benson’s pocket, and left.

Smitty was the first to get up. He rubbed his vast chest. Over his torso, and Benson’s, was a special type of bulletproof vest, recently perfected by The Avenger. Made of interwoven strands of a marvelous substance which Benson called celluglass, and the formula of which was known to him alone, it could turn anything up to a .50-caliber machine gun bullet.

But a .44 slug at close range kicks like a mule, even if it doesn’t penetrate. And both Benson and Smitty had been struck twice from less than five feet away.

“I think a rib’s gone,” complained the giant. “Why didn’t you let me take him, chief? I played dead because you did. But I didn’t want to.”

“If he had shot at our heads, the bullets would have hit no friendly shield,” Benson pointed out. “And head shots would have been next if we hadn’t let him think the first were successful. Besides, he got only what I wanted taken—in case we were attacked on leaving here—which was to be expected.”

“He got the tin of headache tablets,” said Smitty.

“I know what that would have yielded under analysis,” Benson said unemotionally. “Traces of the same thing we will find in the stomach contents of Sodolow. So the loss of the tin box means nothing.”

“But they got that vial, too!”

“They got the vial with ordinary wine in it,” said The Avenger. “The other, from the dead man’s stomach, is safe in my pocket. If he had started to take that, there would have been action! But he didn’t. So we now have it for laboratory analysis—though I doubt if any man alive can accurately analyze, part for part, the chemicals in it.”

CHAPTER VIII

Nitro on Tap!

Up along the Hudson there is an estate, several acres in extent, worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the center of this show place, there is an appropriately palatial home. That is, there was a home there! It existed up until two days after a speed plane and a test car were destroyed in Utah. Then it disappeared much as the plane and car did.

The home was the property of Lorens Singer, which was a name to conjure with. A millionaire by stock market transactions before he was twenty-three, Singer had swelled his fortune ever since, up to his fifty-first year, by financial dealings, business promotion and factory ventures. He was mentioned in almost the same breath with the country’s leading financiers. Like them, he seemed very conscious of the great power of his wealth and endowed colleges and charity foundations with millions.

He was big-framed, still husky, with shrewd but kindly brown eyes. His manner was habitually courteous to all—servants and manual workers as well as his financial equals. He had business enemies, of course; but no personal enemies that anyone knew about.

That was what made the thing so inexplicable.

It happened, fortunately, at 5:30 in the afternoon. Fortunately, that is, for Singer. It was unfortunate from the standpoint of his servants.

At 4:30 on most afternoons, the servants were all in the house busy with preparations for the cocktail hour and dinner, at which Singer usually entertained at least half a dozen friends in his huge bachelor hall.

At that same hour, the financier himself was accustomed to looking over his famed formal garden. He was so engaged on this particular day, which saved his life.

The afternoon was still and tranquil. The blue Hudson flowed a hundred feet below the terrace wall with scarcely a ripple. The early summer air was hazy and windless.

The great house, of granite and marble and looking like a European castle rather than an American building, spired up into the blue with an appearance of eternal solidity.

Then—it wasn’t there any more!

There was the most peculiar sound Singer had ever heard. It was not exactly like an explosion. It was a soft roar, only on a tremendous scale. It was like the eruptive rumble deep in the heart of a volcano, or like the bellow of a landslide. It didn’t come from any one part of the big house. Lorens Singer could swear to that. It came from all over the building. And later investigation bore out his statement.

Anyhow, there was this soft but colossal roar, and then what had been a million-dollar castle was a steaming, smoking heap of rubble and debris.

Singer was thrown flat on the ground. A gardener, working near him, was similarly knocked flat by the concussion. He was up first, and he helped his employer to his feet.

Singer’s first words indicated the caliber of the man. They weren’t about his house or his loss.

“The servants,” he faltered, face as white as death.

But the people working in Singer’s home were beyond all hope or care.

The fire department, screaming up from half a dozen local stations, and the score of policemen, arriving almost simultaneously in squad cars, found that out.

There had been eighteen servants in the house, from Jasper, the sixty-four-year-old dignified butler, down to Agnes, the newest maid. The only thing they would need, from now on, would be eighteen coffins.

Police there. Fire department there. And within forty minutes—The Avenger.

Just a hint of the curious nature of the catastrophe had come out in the first hurried news dispatches on his private teletype. But even the hint was enough to send the man with the dead face and pale, icy eyes to the scene.

So the explosion had seemed to come from all parts of the house at once! It indicated a multiplicity of bombs—or else something much more odd.

Benson found that it was the latter.

He looked for something, anything, whose nature might indicate that it had packed explosives. Finally he found something. But it was not a bomb casing.

It was a length of copper water pipe. Quite a long length.

He kept on looking, and he found some more pipes with the same appearance; they were blasted and burst and twisted like flattened ribbon. He also found bits of standard water faucets blown to pieces.

It was as if someone had filled the entire water system of the mansion with TNT, and then set it off. But you can’t fill the water pipes of a big house with nitro. Or can you?

The idea that the police are dumb is held by many people. They are wrong. There are sharp brains in the police forces of America. The sharpest, in this case, belonged to a young patrolman scarcely out of the rookie class.

The young cop knew all about the almost mythical character known as The Avenger, though this was the first time his awed eyes had rested on that paralyzed, deadly face and the pale, infallible gaze. So it was to Benson that he went with his deductions.

“The explosive,” he said, “was in the water pipes. I’m sure of it, Mr. Benson.”

Benson looked at the young patrolman, with his earnest, intelligent face, at the length of copper pipe at his feet which he had just been inspecting, at the prowling cops and detectives all around them.

“How can you be so sure?” Benson asked expressionlessly.

“The look of the pipes for one thing. But for another—something even more important. Look here, sir.”

Benson followed him half a dozen steps to where the young cop had heaved aside some beams. There were more of the burst pipes and an electric cable, shredded of insulation but otherwise intact.

The end of the cable was scraped bare. Marks of the scraping knife were there, bright and recent.

No bared cable like this had any business in a house.

“That cable,” said the cop, “must have been wired to the plumbing. Then, at a given time, a spark was switched into the water system, and the thing blew up.”

Benson had been so sure there was some such arrangement in the wreckage that he hadn’t even taken the time to look for it. But he didn’t tell the rookie that. The youngster had done a good job, even if the genius of The Avenger had beaten him to it by a considerable margin.

“It looks as if you might be right,” said Benson, pale eyes like ice chips on the cop’s face. “What is your name?”

“O’Shawn, sir,” said the cop, repressed excitement in his tone. He was going to have something to tell about in the locker room for a long time: a face to face talk with The Avenger himself!

“Thank you, O’Shawn,” said Benson.

There was going to be a swift promotion here. A word from Benson would take O’Shawn out of harness for his quick wit and keen eye.

The Avenger sought out the gardener who had been with Singer at the time of the explosion.

The gardener was foreign born, but had evidently been in the country long enough to master perfect English.

“Nope, there wasn’t a thing to warn a guy of what was goin’ to happen. It just goes up in dust and smoke. See? Not a very loud boom. Mr. Singer was about twenty feet from me, lookin’ at delphinium sprouts. See? We both got knocked flat.”

“You and Mr. Singer were pretty scared?” said Benson.

“I’ll say! I know I was. And I never saw a guy look more scared than Mr. Singer. He was white as chalk and shakin’ all over. And then he got mad. ‘The servants,’ he says. ‘My heavens, the servants!’ And, running toward the rockpile with me, he says, ‘It’s murder. Murder of eighteen people. If I ever find out who did this I’ll kill him with my own hands, so help me.’ And Mr. Singer could still do it, too. He’s got muscle in that frame of his.”

“There was no hint of how the building went up?”

“Nope, Not a thing.” The gardener’s eyes became doubtful as he stared into the pale, icy orbs of the man who was questioning him.

“But mebbe I’m talking’ out of turn. Mebbe you better see the boss himself.”

Benson nodded and went toward the big front gate of the estate.

Lorens Singer was there, sitting in a deck chair that had seen far out on the lawn and hence had escaped the wreck. The chair had been dragged to the gate; and the millionaire was surrounded by police to guard him from intrusion by the curious.

He sat in the chair, puffing slowly on a thin brown cigar, staring with unblinking eyes at what had been his home. The unblinking eyes looked up to meet Benson’s dead face and flaring, pale eyes as The Avenger walked up to him. Singer’s eyebrows raised a little at the way this man could walk through a cordon of cops without a move to stop him; but that was all.

“A pretty complete disaster,” said Benson, standing easily beside the financier.

Singer nodded. “It is.” His voice was as steady as his hands. But it was harsh, and his eyes were as hard as brown crockery.

“My name is Richard Benson,” said Benson evenly. “You may know the name—”

“I know it well. Half my friends seem to be acquainted with you. And I got to know the name quite well, indeed, over an oil deal in Venezuela, years ago. You won some concessions there against me and several other men. But there’s no grudge.”

“I’m not dealing in oil now,” said Benson.

“I’ve heard about that, too. You tackle crime as a business, I hear. Laudable, but hardly understandable. You could be the richest man on earth if you’d stick to straight business.”

Benson’s pale eyes didn’t flicker. It was possible that he was already the richest man. Down in Mexico was the vast hoard of gold the Aztecs had hidden from the invading Spaniards. Benson knew where that was, and drew on it when he wished, as on a bank account. But no one outside his small circle dreamed of that.

“In connection with my new pursuit,” he said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“As many as you like, young man,” said Singer, whose straight gaze had at once noted that The Avenger’s snow-white hair had nothing whatever to do with age; that the gray steel figure of a man was very young, indeed.

“Have you any idea who did this?” asked Benson bluntly.

“None at all.”

A trace of bewilderment mingled with the cold rage in Singer’s rocky face. He was looking back at the great pile of debris, again, with flinty, unblinking eyes.

“You have enemies?”

“Certainly! But they’re on Wall Street. They’d cut my throat on the market, but they aren’t bomb throwers.”

“You can’t think of any personal enemies who might have done this?”

“I cannot.”

“You are usually in your gardens at that time of day—the time of this explosion?”

“Yes.”

“Is that fact widely known?”

“Well—I’d never thought of it before. But I guess it isn’t. There’s a pretty high wall around this place. All any spy would know is that I usually get here from my office at about four o’clock, and come in this gate. They’d probably think I went into the house and stayed there; they couldn’t see that I was in the garden.

“What do you intend to do about this, Mr. Singer?”

Singer’s agate-brown eyes moved slowly from the debris to Benson’s dead countenance again. His hands clenched and were no longer steady.

“Plenty, Mr. Benson!”

His voice was as still and even as calm water. He still drew small, deliberate, leisured puffs from his thin cigar.

“There are about fifty private detectives in and around New York City who are really good. They’re all hired, right now, to drop whatever they’re doing and concentrate on who blew up my house and why. I don’t care what they charge to begin immediately. Besides, I can swing a little authority with the police. A great many city detectives will work here for some time to come. If all this doesn’t do the trick, I’ll import the cream of Scotland Yard and the best of the Paris gendarmerie. The loss of my house isn’t much. But eighteen people, working for me, died in that stone pile.”

He showed how he had made his big success. Courteous and kindly in normal pursuits, Singer was as ruthless and grimly persistent when aroused.

It was obvious that he didn’t know how or why this had happened. The Avenger’s infallible eyes caught that. But it was equally obvious that he was going to make it his business to know—and damned soon.

Benson turned to go to his car and return to Bleek Street.

A car was just pulling away from the many parked by curiosity seekers. There was just one man in it, at the wheel. The man seemed rather small, though you couldn’t tell from his sitting posture. He was bareheaded and had a rather average face but curious ears. They were decidedly pointed, almost like the ears of a trimmed show dog.

The man drove away toward Manhattan Island. On his face, Benson saw, was a fleeting look of anger and apprehension. But those emotions might have been merely the expected ones of any honest citizen at the sight of such an outrage.

CHAPTER IX

The Curious House

In Fergus MaeMurdie’s drugstore was one of the few remarkable, large television sets designed by the giant, Smitty. In Bleek Street headquarters there were two. But one of them was for very local reception, indeed. Its activity was confined to the building housing Justice, Inc.

There was a large screen on the front of the cabinet, as on the other one. But this screen was active all the time because the set was constantly warmed up.

It caught activities in the tiny lobby of the place.

There was a soft buzzing sound now. Josh and Mac went at once to the second television cabinet. On the screen was reflected the doorway of the building, two floors below.

A man had just come in that doorway. Josh and Mac watched. No one had any business in that entire short block unless the business concerned The Avenger, because The Avenger was the block’s sole tenant.

The man in the vestibule was burly, dressed in good but ill cared for clothes that bulged at the armpit. He looked searchingly around him, aware that he was being watched, but unable to find anything to confirm the hunch.

He went to the inner door and pressed the bell set there over a small nameplate that repeated the inconspicuous slogan over the doorway:

JUSTICE, INC.

Mac looked at Josh, who shrugged and nodded.

The door downstairs swung silently open in front of the man. They saw his startled look, then saw him doggedly ascend the stairs.

Josh and Mac met him in the small anteroom between the stairs and the great top-floor room which took up the whole of the third stories of the three buildings. Few people ever got past the anteroom into the big chamber.

“I want to see Mr. Benson,” the man said, staring from Mac to Josh.

The Negro spoke.

“Mistuh Benson ain’t heah, jus’ now,” said Josh. “I’m ’spectin’ him soon, though.”

Always with strangers, Josh Newton talked as folks expect a Negro to talk. It was protective coloration, he always said.

“We’ll take a message for him,” said Mac.

Their caller fidgeted a little and glanced nervously at his watch.

“I can’t leave a message, and I haven’t time to wait. This is very important. You’re sure he isn’t in?”

Mac nodded. Benson was at the wrecked home of Lorens Singer. The pale-eyed man might be back here in an hour—or not for several days.

“This is very important,” mumbled the man. “And I can’t hang around, or come back again, because I’m sure I’m being watched, and—”

He didn’t finish that, but switched off on another tack.

“I wanted to see Mr. Benson about the Singer explosion,” he said.

Behind Mac’s homely Scottish face and behind Josh’s sleepy-looking mask were tense reactions, but neither showed them.

“Look here,” said the man, with the air of one making a quick decision, “you two are supposed to be close to Benson. And anybody close to that guy must be good. I’ll spill my song to you and maybe you can look into it.”

“We’re listenin’, mon,” said Mac.

“The song’s short, and sweet. I think there’s a hot lead to what happened at Singer’s place in a house in New Jersey, near Milford.”

“What kind of lead?” snapped Mac.

“I don’t know,” said the man, looking so honest that it was incredible he could be lying.

“How did you find out there might be one?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Who are you?”

“That doesn’t make any difference.”

“I suppose you know,” said Mac, “that ye’re being kind of suspicious not wanting to tell us about yourself.”

The man shrugged.

“There’s your tip. Take it or leave it. In a house near Milford, New Jersey, called the old Carp place, you might find something that’ll tell a story on the Singer explosion.”

“The directions are pretty vague but—”

“Oh, I’ll go with you, if you decide to act on the tip,” said the man. “I’ll direct you to it.”

Not even a glance passed between Josh and Mac. But with perfect teamwork, each knew the other’s decision.

“Ah’ll get our hats, Mistuh MacMurdie.”

“Are you going, too?” said the man, staring at Josh with impatience in his eyes. It was habitual for people to underestimate the Negro’s ability.

“Yas, suh. I’se important aroun’ heah,” said Josh, managing to sound so vain and silly that the man underestimated him still more.

“Suit yourself,” shrugged the man. His face tightened. “Easy on leaving this place. I think I might have been trailed here.”

“And if you were? And if your trailers catch up with us?” said Mac.

“Maybe none of us would stay on living’ much longer,” replied the man grimly.

They went with the man to the basement. A dozen or more cars, each unique in its way, were garaged there for The Avenger and his aides to use on various purposes. Mac and Josh took a sedan that didn’t look like much but was armored like a tank. And it could do over a hundred an hour.

They drove up a ramp that no one would ever see unless searching specifically for it and swung down Bleek Street.

Behind the sedan came a car without lights. It was a cheap, shabby roadster. In it was a girl with ink-black hair. The girl had jet-black eyes that were beautiful but cold. Had either Mac or Smitty or Benson seen her, they’d have recognized her at once. They had seen her twice before—behind a .45 automatic that looked like a cannon in her small but steady hand.

In this instance, Mac didn’t see her. Nor did Josh. The man leading them, however, did spot her. His hand moved in a small gesture at his side. And when the sedan moved off with Mac at the wheel, the girl followed in the roadster, without lights, far behind.

The house near Milford, called the Carp place, was ablaze with light. Light showed from every window. Mac turned to the man who had guided them there.

“There’s apparently a gang in yon home,” he said. “How can we go through it secretly, as ye say we must, when there’s a crowd around?”

“There’ll be no crowd,” said the man. He had dragged out a stubby old pipe and was lighting it. “Unless I’m much mistaken, there won’t be a soul in the place.”

“But all the lights—”

“That’s part of the lead you’ll find in there on the Singer business,” said the man.

The three got out. Mac and Josh walked a few steps toward the house.

“You’d better be the one to go in,” Mac began. But he stopped in a hurry.

He and Josh had turned a little to look at their guide while Mac addressed him. But the man was no longer with them.

The roadside where they’d stopped the sedan was clear in both directions. There were woods, though. The man could have ducked into these and hidden. But—why would he?

“The slinkin’ skurlie,” muttered Mac. “ ’Tis a bad conscience he must have, to lead us out here and then sneak away.”

“Or else,” Josh pointed out, “he may be afraid of whatever is in the house.”

“True,” Mac sighed. “A house all lit up and with not a soul in it would be a queer kind of place, indeed. Shall we go in without yon sneaker?”

“Of course,” said Josh, without hesitation and without fear. Josh had as much courage as any man on earth, white, red or brown.

They went on to the house.

Lighted from basement to attic it might be; but there wasn’t a sound coming from any part of it. No flickering shadow on the windows evidenced any movement within it, either. Apparently, their disappearing guide had been right; it was deserted.

They stepped up onto an old porch. Josh tried the front door. It opened to a touch, as if it had been set to welcome hospitably any person desiring to enter.

But Mac wondered dourly if the hospitality might not be akin to that offered to flies by spiders.

They went in. They could see now that the light had an odd quality. It was whiter than usual light—and softer. And at first they couldn’t spot where it came from.

Josh pointed suddenly toward the molding in the hall.

“This place may be old,” he said, “but it has certainly been modernized. Concealed lighting! What do you think of that?”

It was indeed true. Along the molding in the hall—and in the room next to them, into which they could see a little—was a narrow strip of ground glass. And from behind this came the pure, soft illumination.

“They must be tryin’ out a new kind of electric bulb,” ventured Mac.

But Josh abruptly pointed out another strange little fact.

There weren’t any electric light switches on the walls.

They went from room to room of the house. Nowhere did they find a switch. And now they noticed that they were perspiring a bit, though the early summer night was rather cool.

“There’s heat on, and plenty of it. Notice that all the windows are wide open?”

Josh nodded. And as one, the two started toward the basement.

Down there was a rusty old furnace of a common make. From its closed firebox came a soft roar, barely to be heard when you put your ear right next to it.

A half-inch iron pipe led from the base of the furnace to the end basement wall, and went out through a hole there.

“Oil burner,” guessed Mac. “Say!”

He stared around with widening eyes. The basement of any house is its key, mechanically. And in this basement the usual key was missing.

“There’s no electric meter in here, Josh,” Mac said.

“Maybe it’s upstairs—”

“Now that I think about it—there was no electric light poles leadin’ in here from the lane.”

“The wires could be buried to avoid poles,” Josh said.

“Say they’re buried,” nodded Mac. “Then the main wire’d come in through the basement wall, like yon oil pipe. In which case, why would the meter be in an upper floor? And where’s the main cable comin’ in?”

They combed the basement and confirmed the fantastic fact: there wasn’t an electric wire entering the house; there wasn’t a pipe, save the one leading to the furnace alone, through which gas could come.

But with no electricity and no gas, the house was being lavishly lighted and warmed.

There was a slight sound over their heads.

Josh and Mac raced for the stairs, went silently up. At a nod from Mac, Josh slipped out the rear door, around the house and in the front door. From opposite directions they converged on the doorway from which slight noises were still coming.

The sounds of paper rustling.

Mac leaped in and to one side to duck any bullets. Josh followed him two seconds later, leaping to the other side. All very efficient, and all designed to conquer any man or men lurking within the room with guns.

But there weren’t any gunmen in there.

There was one small man with outstanding ears seated in an easychair reading a newspaper through horn-rimmed glasses. The man blinked owlishly, peaceably at them over the specs.

“For Heaven’s s-s-sake,” stuttered Mac, feeling about as foolish as he ever had in his life. Then he stared harder.

“Xisco!” he said, recognizing the little man they had met in Montreal.

“Why, hello,” said Xisco, beaming at him. “I remember you now. You were investigating the death of Veck. A great man, Veck. But what are you doing here in my house?”

“Your house?”

“Yes. You’re welcome of course. But just why are you here at this hour of the night?”

“Wheah was yo’ a few minutes ago?” asked Josh, looking sleepy and dull. “We was all through de house and we didn’t see nobody.”

“That must have been when I stepped out to look at my water pump,” said Xisco. “Annoying things, pumps. Always breaking down—”

“How,” said Mac bluntly, “d’ye light your house—and heat it—without gas or electricity?”

“Without— Oh, you must be rather mistaken. I have the usual—”

The scream came then!

It was a cry of agony, eerie, sending shivers up and down their spines. It came from near the road; and if it wasn’t the call of a dying man, then Mac would never trust his big, homely ears again.

The three raced out of the house and toward the sound. The maker of the sound could be seen plainly. All too plainly, in the darkness of surrounding night!

He could be seen because something like an intermittent halo of soft white fire surrounded his head where he lay on the ground.

The man was the fellow who had anonymously guided Mac and Josh here, and he was almost dead. He had doubled in the agony of a man poisoned. But from lips and nostrils, with each last breath he drew, came fire!

It steamed out as if the man had been turned into a wick. It hissed in the dew-wet grass. It blackened and curled his lips.

Then it stopped—because his breathing had stopped. The man was dead!

The sound of a car being driven stealthily but rapidly away was heard. Mac started to run toward the sound. The shrill cry of Xisco whirled him back again.

“My house!” the little man screamed. “Look what’s happened! Look at that! My house!”

They had left the place seemingly in perfect shape. But now, so rapidly that it could scarcely be credited, the whole building was being enveloped in flame!

Streamers of fire shot four stories high. It was as if the structure had been soaked with gasoline and ignited in a hundred spots at once.

“My house—fire! Put it out!” wailed Xisco.

Mac and Josh raced toward the line of dense small trees marching in a rather sloppy line across open fields. The line indicated a creek. They got to it, splashed in it, turned to call to Xisco for buckets.

But they saw that water on that flame would be even more futile than it looked at first. A fire brigade could not have handled it.

Then there wasn’t any more flame to fight. There was a soft, roaring bellow, and the house went up in a thousand pieces. It settled down, the flaming fragments darkening soon.

Josh and Mac looked at each other and started back toward the road. Josh tripped, looked down. His exclamation drew Mac’s attention. And Mac, too, went rigid with surprise.

The two went back to pick up Xisco and take him to Bleek Street. The Avenger wanted to talk to the man who had passed the water pitcher in the Montreal hospital.

But Xisco wasn’t anywhere around.

“Wonder where he went?” Mac mused.

“I wonder, too, who was in that car we heard sneak away?” said Josh.

The car that had sneaked away had carried the girl with the ink-black hair and the cold black eyes. But even if they had known that, Mac and Josh wouldn’t have been as impressed as they were by the strange discovery at the creek.

The thing Josh had tripped over had been a half-buried length of half-inch iron pipe. Exactly the kind that had led into the base of the rusty old furnace. And this pipe had seemed to go on and on toward the house.

A pipe leading, not from furnace to oil tank buried in the yard, but to a meandering little creek.

Both decided the pipe was just a loose length that happened to be lying here. That’s all it could be.

CHAPTER X

Bath of Fire

It began to look, with the second violent attack on a man of great wealth, as if some force had arisen in New York that was determined to wipe out the city’s magnates.

First Lorens Singer, then Pratt Henderlin.

Pratt Henderlin was a heavy-set man with grizzled eyebrows like little cupolas, an oversized jaw and a mole on the left side of his fleshy nose. The domineering, fighting face had often been pictured in the newspapers.

He was almost as wealthy as Singer, being head of the Henderlin Holding Corp. that owned about a third of the nation’s oil fields and the pick of the coal mines.

Henderlin was not in a garden, at a distance, when catastrophe hit his place!

The coal and oil baron lived in a large apartment building that was one of his many real estate holdings, and atop which was his penthouse. That is, he lived there till the evening of the day Singer’s home went up in smoke. At that time, early, because he was tired from an extra-heavy day at the office, the rich man unfortunately decided to take a relaxing bath before going to bed at half-past nine.

That was his last known act. The next thing to occur was a soft but frightening roar, a sheet of white flame! Half the penthouse was blown off the roof and most of the floor beneath destroyed.

Roar and flame came from the bathroom into which Henderlin had gone to relax.

They extinguished the fire pretty fast, but that didn’t enable them to collect any of Henderlin. There just was no trace of the magnate at all among the heaps of debris, in which it seemed all the cops in the word scurried around.

All the cops in the world. And The Avenger.

Many people could be found who would swear that the man with the pale, deadly eyes and the white, still face was the more to be feared!

The whole rooftop was a mess, of course. But the thing most terrifically battered and burst was Henderlin’s bathtub. It was as if that had been the focal point of the whole thing.

If the tub had been filled with high-test gasoline, for instance, the result would have been much the same.

Benson went up to Henderlin’s valet. In this case, the results of the Singer affair had been reversed. There, the master had lived, and the servants died. Here, Henderlin’s quarters had demolished, including the room in which his wife had been sitting, while the servants’ part of the penthouse remained intact.

Henderlin’s man was shivering as if with a chill, and was being kept from collapsing by a hypodermic shot given now and then by the medical examiner. But he managed to talk fairly coherently with Benson.

“You say Henderlin came home exhausted from the office and decided to retire early?” Benson asked, voice quiet but vibrant with power and authority.

“Yes, s-sir,” chattered the valet.

“And he thought a warm bath would help him to get to sleep more quickly?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was this a usual procedure of his?”

“N-no, sir. Usually Mr. Henderlin took a shower. But now and then he felt his age. He was sixty-seven, sir. It was his habit, sometimes, to soak in a warm tub and go to bed early. Th-that’s the way it was tonight.”

“You drew his bath?” said The Avenger.

When the police had asked the man that, they had barked it out with the plain suspicion that the valet had something to do with the explosion. Flustered and frightened, he hadn’t managed to give very clear responses. This man was different, the valet thought. His eyes were cold as ice, but fair. His face was a thing to haunt your dreams, but it was not suspicious. He opened up to Benson.

“Yes, sir, I drew his bath.”

“Everything seemed perfectly in order?”

“Perfectly. I filled the tub to the usual level, and the water was the exact temperature Mr. Henderlin liked best. I used a bath thermometer to be sure.”

“I’d like to see that thermometer,” Benson said evenly.

The man shook his head.

“The police said the same thing. But they’ve been unable to locate it, sir. I guess it was blown to tiny bits when the place went up.”

“Very well. Henderlin got in his bath. Then what?”

“I went back to my room to read for ten or fifteen minutes. I knew from past experience that Mr. Henderlin wouldn’t be wanting me for at least that length of time. He would be lying there, smoking, perhaps reading a little with a magazine or paper spread above him on the tub rack—”

“Smoking?” said Benson. His face, as always, was as dead as the cold, bare waste of the moon. But his eyes seemed to glint a little like ice under a polar dawn.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Henderlin smoked a great deal. His own brand of cigar. He had smoker’s articles in the bathroom—racks with humidors and so forth.”

“Go on. What next?”

“I had just gone into my own quarters when the lights went off.”

Benson’s pale eyes flared more brilliantly. This thing of the lights going off and been brought out several times in the past half-hour of feverish investigation.

“All the lights in the penthouse went off,” the valet went on. “But none of the lights in the building below. Just the penthouse. I understand the police found that the switch controlling the penthouse lights had been thrown—though they could not be sure if the switch was turned by somebody, or was jarred off circuit when the explosion occurred.”

“I think we can say that it was thrown,” said The Avenger quietly. “It is the only thing that would explain the failure of all the lights in the penthouse and none in the rest of the building below. Then?”

“Then the thing happened, sir. About four minutes after the lights failed.”

It was all the valet knew. Benson nodded permission for him to leave. A captain of detectives came up to The Avenger, face respectful and manner almost subservient.

“What does it look like to you, Mr. Benson?”

“That is easy to answer. What it looks like. What actually occurred may not be so simple.”

“Well, sir, what does it look like?”

“It looks,” said Benson expressionlessly, “as though Henderlin’s tub had been filled with explosive instead of water. It then looks as if the lights had been turned off deliberately so that Henderlin would light a match in the bathroom to see to get out of the tub. It seems that he kept matches, among other smoker’s articles, in the room; so it was certain that there would be a match at hand. When he lit the match, the explosive in the tub went off.”

“But,” objected the captain, frowning, “if some explosive had been substituted for water, why wouldn’t he have found it out? There’s no explosive that looks so much like plain water that it could fool a man into taking a bath in it.”

“That is correct. There is no such explosive,” said Benson.

“But you said—”

“You asked what it looked like,” The Avenger pointed out, eyes like diamond drills. “So I told you. That seems to be exactly what happened. Yet no sane man would believe that another man could get into a tub filled with explosive and think it was water.”

“In other words,” said the captain of detectives, “this even stumps you?”

“I have no more provable information than you,” said Benson. Which was a slight evasion. You can know a thing surely and without doubt, even if you can’t prove it at the moment.

The men were searching everywhere, as they had been before, for bits of evidence that might help explain the mystery. But now Benson noticed that their actions seemed to have slightly more purpose than before.

“What are they after, specifically?” he asked.

“That bath thermometer the valet spoke about,” replied the detective captain. “I’ve got an idea on that. Those things have thick wooden cases, you know. There might have been enough explosive in it to do this.”

“There might,” nodded The Avenger.

He went to where Henderlin’s butler shakily smoked a cigarette between police grillings.

The butler was a paunchy man with pouches under his eyes and a gouty look. As often is true, he had more the appearance of the traditional wealthy man than his master had had. The Avenger fixed him with those colorless, icy eyes of his.

“A man came to see Mr. Henderlin a short time before this happened,” Benson said quietly. It was not a question. It was a statement, uttered in a tone of absolute certainty.

The butler’s eyes flickered under The Avenger’s pale, direct gaze. Then his eyes went to his cigarette. The smoke from the cigarette jiggled as his hand twitched.

“Oh, no, sir,” he said. “N-no one called on Mr. Henderlin this evening. His secretary came with him at five o’clock, from the office, and left well before dinner. Save for that, not one soul was in the penthouse except Mr. and Mrs. Henderlin and we servants.”

“The man who came to see Mr. Henderlin,” Benson said, as if not even hearing the denial, “possibly has visited him before. I can’t be sure of that. He is a rather small man with peculiar ears. He has a faintly foreign look. He was here no earlier than an hour, at most, before the explosion.”

“I swear—”

The butler’s voice cracked and broke at the sudden, appalling look over the brilliant, pale eyes. No muscle of The Avenger’s face had moved, naturally; never could the flesh shape itself to an emotion. And yet that countenance was suddenly so dreadfully threatening that the servant almost cried out and flung his hand to shield his eyes from it.

“You saw this man, perhaps?” said Benson, softly. “I . . . I—”

The cigarette had dropped and was smoldering on the carpet. The butler wasn’t even aware that he was no longer holding it. Then he gave a great sigh, like a thing breaking. It was a sigh of cringing surrender.

“Yes. There was such a man. He was under average size. He looked like a foreigner. His ears were peculiar—so flat to his head that it almost looked as if he had no ears at all. He came secretly while Mr. Henderlin was disrobing for his bath; and, to my surprise, the master said he’d see him. I was not to let anyone know he had called.”

“And he has been here before?”

“Once. Several weeks ago. From a conversation I overheard between him and Mr. Henderlin, I gathered that the small man had seen him at least once before that—at the office.”

The butler moistened his dry lips.

“H-how did you know about him, sir?”

Benson said nothing. He was in the habit of asking questions, not answering them. There was a kingly arrogance and air of surety about the man with the dead face and the stainless steel eyes. It was in large measure responsible for the air of complete authority which so few people, from millionaires to busboys, could resist obeying.

He turned and left the scene of disaster. And with him, he carried but one thing. That was a square of blotting paper with which he had blotted up moisture from what remained of the bathroom. An analytical sample from which he could glean a few drops of the fluid that had been in the magnate’s tub.

CHAPTER XI

Puzzle Pieces

In the Bleek Street headquarters of The Avenger was probably the world’s finest laboratory. Certainly the work done in there, and the products that periodically issued forth, were beyond those boasted by any other, no matter how huge.

Benson went into the laboratory on his return from the Henderlin penthouse. It was there that he received Mac and Josh and heard their story of the New Jersey house. He was now conducting a few tests so simple, to him at least, as to be child’s play.

He had extracted the traces of Henderlin’s bath water from the blotter. A dozen or so drops. He had analyzed it thoroughly, with Mac, himself a brilliant chemist, watching him.

“ ’Tis just plain water, Muster Benson,” said Mac. “H_2O. That’s all. With a tiny trace of rich man’s epidermis and very personal dirt in it. Coal and oil barons, ye’d gather, sweat just as hard and get just about as dirrrty as ordinary folk.”

Benson said nothing. Apparently, he had not yet even heard. He began doing a curious thing with the drops of water.

He put them in a small steel shell with a tiny hole in one end. Through the hole he inserted a wire. Then he put that shell inside another, larger shell of the marvelous, unbreakable celluglass from which their bulletproof shirts were woven.

“Ye’re thinkin’ maybe that stuff will explode with an electric spark?” asked Mac. “But, mon, how can it be? Tis ordinary water.”

Benson moved to the small switch controlling current in the wire.

“Henderlin’s bath water apparently exploded,” he said, throwing the switch.

Nothing happened after that. The movement of the switch had produced a small hot spark in the metal shell containing the bath water. But there was no response to the spark.

Benson nodded, and took the shell out. He got another, identical one. Then he took from the laboratory safe the vial containing the sample of Sodolow’s stomach contents.

The Avenger brought out a thin sheet of rubber about a yard square. In the center of the sheet, the rubber went down to form fingers. It was like a pair of rubber gloves on the same gauntlet, that gauntlet being a square yard in size.

The Avenger put the vial and the new metal shell in a bag formed of the thin rubber. He sealed the bag with swift moves of a little vulcanizer he had recently perfected, and exhausted most of the air from the bag with a vacuum pump. Then he put his hands in the glove part.

Now he could handle the vial and the shell, by touch, in a fairly airtight compartment.

Inside the bag, he withdrew the vial’s tight stopper and poured a little of its contents into the shell. Again he inserted the wire, cramming it in so that it stopped up the small hole completely.

He slit the bag open, took out shell and vial, and put the vial back into the safe. The shell he put once more into the larger celluglass container in which the shell with the bath water had been a moment before.

He threw the switch a second time.

There was a soft, roaring explosion that seemed to make the whole building quiver. The metal shell with the teaspoonful or so of stomach contents in it had burst into a thousand pieces with such violence as to seam the unbreakable celluglass in myriad places.

The fluid from Sodolow’s stomach had gone up in white flame. The sample from Henderlin’s bath had not. That was all that Mac, watching the work, could gather. It was amazing, of course, that the second shell had exploded. But what it all meant, he could not guess.

The laboratory door opened, and Nellie Gray came in. She looked as dainty and fragile as a Dresden doll in that masculine place of retorts and paraphernalia.

“We just got a report on the man Mac and Josh saw die, breathing flame, at the New Jersey place,” she said.

Benson waited in silence for it, brilliant, pale eyes half closed. He had anticipated a fast report when the fingerprints of the dead flame breather, turned in to the police when Mac got back, were looked up.

“The man was Robert Kohuen,” said Nellie, reading from a piece of paper ribbon on which, teletype fashion, all conversations of any of The Avenger’s telephones were mechanically recorded. “He was a private detective, rather prosperous. His last job was with the Henderlin Corp.; nature of the work unspecified.”

“The police are sure his last work was for the Henderlin coal and oil interests?” said Benson.

Nellie nodded. “They are quite sure. It was easy to find out. Kohuen’s secretary took the orders, from Mr. Henderlin himself only a week ago. She told about it.”

Benson left the laboratory with Mac and Nellie and went to the huge third-floor room. There, he seated himself thoughtfully at his desk and stared with pale, unseeing eyes through the steel slats over a window.

The Avenger began to talk slowly, vibrantly to Nellie and Mac, Smitty and Josh and Rosabel. Every now and then it was his habit to list verbally the points of a case brought out to date. He was talking to himself, really. But his aides always listened enthralled. For always, crystal clear, they defined the method, motive and leading forces in the case at hand.

As a rule, however, it was only later that they could look back and see that definition. At the time, they seldom were able to follow Benson’s mercurial thoughts to the goal that was no less certain for being, at that stage, without definite proof.

“There are four Polish scientists,” said The Avenger. “They are friends and co-workers. They have made a great laboratory discovery. Being decent people, they desire to use this great discovery to benefit mankind. But they must have money before they can do anything at all with it. Do they try for financial backing in their own country, Poland, first? Quite possibly. That will be something to investigate—”

Nellie Gray had pencil and notebook in her hand. She took the words in shorthand, as usual in such soliloquies. The purpose was to note later just such “possibilities of investigation” as these, and set wheels in motion in the next few minutes.*

* (An incidental, secondary purpose has been fulfilled by the notes: from them a great deal of the data contained in my accounts of Dick Benson’s work—after I had wrung from him a grudging consent to publication of those accounts—is continually being gathered. Kenneth Robeson.)

“The United States is vastly wealthy,” the clear but dreaming voice of the scourge of the underworld went on. “The four finally came here. Sodolow’s last words hint that they received their financial backing, all right. But it would seem that their ideas of benefiting mankind were out of order. Their backer, or backers, wanted to exploit mankind, instead.

“The four Polish scientists left. They fled from some ruthless, deadly force. They hid from it—Shewski in Berlin, Wencilau in Paris, Veck in Montreal, Sodolow in Algiers. Three died, terribly—the death of the flame breathers, though not in every case was the flame apparent on their dying breaths. Sodolow fled back to New York, probably to plead for his life with whatever force had relentlessly killed his three associates. But that can never be definitely known. Anyhow, he came back and suffered the same fate, shortly.”

Nellie’s pencil flew in the hushed silence of the group. It was maddening. Each felt that he should know, from the things said, all the answers. Yet none did.

“In each case,” Benson went on, “a former laboratory helper of the dead man was seen by someone just before the murder. For, of course, each was murder. A league of four ex-laboratory workers, it would appear, conspired in the deaths of the four scientists. After that, the scene shifts entirely to this country.

“On a Utah salt flat, a car was burned and the wreckage carefully hauled away in a closed van and hidden. The car must have been at the flat for a test of some sort. The test must have been a remarkable one, which certain interests wanted to be sure would be kept forever secret. So the test car was blotted out. Also, it is almost certain, the driver who conducted the test was killed to stop his tongue, forever.

“Quite near the salt flat, at about the same time, a plane was similarly being put through tests. A rancher has reported that he thought he saw a plane fly at a faster speed than he had ever seen one go before. And shortly after that, the plane exploded and rained to earth in unrecognizable bits—some of them stained with the blood of the pilot. Again, a test so remarkable must have been performed that certain interests utterly destroyed the plane and test pilot to insure secrecy.”

Smitty cleared his throat. It sounded like the rasp of a sandblaster. Mac and Nellie glared at him. The giant colored a little and spread his huge hands in an apologetic way.

“The four scientists, to get back to them, seemed to have been poisoned. Yet no laboratory has found a trace of any known poison. This poison, it seems, is explosive. At least, the sample taken quickly from Sodolow’s stomach exploded at a spark, in my laboratory. And the sample from Veck’s stomach may also have been, because the Montreal police laboratory went up in smoke and rubble about the time the lab men were due to work on the sample. But—how could any man with a normal sense of taste be induced to swallow enough of any known explosive to be burst like a bomb by it later? And why is the stuff they seem to have swallowed sometimes explosive and sometimes not explosive?”

Benson’s voice grew softer and yet, in a curious way, even more grim.

“Three more pieces remain to the puzzle bits, each containing smaller riddles:

“First, Lorens Singer’s home is utterly destroyed by something seeming to have filled every water pipe in the building, and eighteen people are killed. Singer was not in the building; so he was uninjured. He did not know who annihilated his home in an effort to kill him. He did not know why. I am certain he did not know. I have never seen such ruthless, cold anger as he displayed when he swore to get the people responsible.

“Second, a house is discovered in New Jersey that is elaborately heated and lighted, yet into which seems to run neither oil lines nor electric cables. Josh and Mac saw a half-inch pipe leading into the base of the furnace, but it would not seem to have been an oil line. Oilburners need electric motors to function, and there was no apparent electricity in the house. Josh later saw a similar pipe at the bank of a near creek, leading back in a way suggesting that that was the pipe that entered the house. During their search, they meet Xisco—a former laboratory helper of the late Veck—who says it is his home. Later, after the house is destroyed by fire, Xisco disappears. At the same time, the private detective, hired recently by the Henderlin Corp., who guided Mac and Josh there, dies with flame coming from his mouth and nose. And a car, occupants unseen, is heard driving away.

“Third, Henderlin’s bath is blown up in a manner to suggest that he had been soaking in gasoline or nitroglycerin instead of water and that a match had ignited the stuff. But a sample from his bath is—plain water.”

The dominant, cold voice stopped. Benson turned back from the window.

“Get me Warsaw, Poland, on the phone, Nellie.”

The musing of The Avenger was over. It was time for action again.

His aides were sure that behind the pale, awesome eyes of their chief the puzzle pieces were all neatly in place. But to them they were still only puzzle pieces.

CHAPTER XII

Company Shutdown

There was quite a little bustle and activity in the offices of the Henderlin Corp.—offices which took up four and a half floors in the Henderlin Building, down in New York’s financial section. But even a man unfamiliar with offices would soon have sensed that there wasn’t as much routine commotion as there should have been.

Even up here on the top floor, where the big offices of the corporation executives were maintained in a discreet hush, you could soon ascertain that only a skeleton force of clerks and secretaries was present.

The first guess, of course, would be that the place had shut down because of the death of its president, Pratt Henderlin. But that first guess would have been wrong.

A battery of afternoon newspapers on the anteroom table told the story.

HENDERLIN PROPERTIES CLOSE

FOR INVENTORY

Mines and oil fields of the Henderlin Corp. have been ordered closed for a mid-season inventory, the vice president, Walter Gaffney, confided to the press today. Off the record, it was hinted that surplus stocks of coal and oil have piled up until it is advisable to close the collieries and wells and allow the stocks to be used up before more are added. The shut down, Mr. Gaffney insisted, would only last a few weeks—

A man passed the huge anteroom table and approached the girl at the information desk.

“Mr. Richard Benson to see Mr. Walter Gaffney,” the man said quietly.

That was all. Manner and tone were as quiet as could possibly be. But the information girl, glancing up at the caller’s face, could not suppress a start that was born half of fear and half of something like awe.

The girl was well informed. Girls at information desks of large corporations have to be. She knew the other, whispered name of this Richard Benson.

The Avenger!

She phoned instantly to the office of the vice president, Gaffney. And the vice president, figuratively speaking, threw from his office at once a person in his estimation far less important than the almost fabulous individual waiting in the anteroom.

The person leaving Gaffney’s office was a raven-tressed girl. She had jet-black eyes that would have been lovely if it were not for their almost metallic hardness.

“Yes, Mr. Benson?” said Gaffney, rising respectfully from his ornate walnut desk as The Avenger strode into his office. “What can I do for you?”

The diamond-drill eyes stared down at him with basilisk lack of expression till Gaffney swallowed nervously. He was a person who looked as important as he was—a big man with aggressive paunch. He seemed to shrivel a little under Benson’s quiet stare.

“I came to see you,” said Benson, “about this shutdown of yours. I find it very interesting in view of certain other circumstances. The news story is true?”

Gaffney cleared his throat.

“Yes, Mr. Benson. It is quite true.”

“And the reasons?” inquired Benson.

Gaffney’s large fingers fidgeted nervously with a gold pencil.

“The papers gave the reasons. We stopped producing until a rather dangerous surplus can be taken from our yards. Much more than we usually have on hand.”

“I glanced over your stock statements before coming here,” said The Avenger, voice even but cold. “I notice that you have, in coal yards and oil tanks, about enough fuel to meet average demands for four to five months. I recall that in the past it was your custom to have an eight-to ten-month stock on hand, to guard against strikes. Half the usual reserves on hand do not sound like a dangerous surplus.”

Gaffney colored a little, then went a little pale.

“Those figures—” he rasped. “No one is supposed to have access to those figures—”

“Nevertheless I saw them. And they disprove the surplus claim. The story of closing down for inventory will probably not fool even the average newspaper reader. May I ask the real reason for this sudden decision to produce no more coal and oil for a while?”

“If you would see our production manager—” murmured Gaffney miserably.

“I have no intention of seeing your production manager. You know the answers as well as he does. I would appreciate hearing them.”

“I . . . I can’t say any more than I have, Mr. Benson,” the corporation vice president almost pleaded. “I really can’t. It is . . . er . . . possible that some other reason has influenced the board of directors—some reason having to do with Henderlin’s unfortunate death.”

He drew up his too fleshy shoulders and tried to crawl behind a shell of bluster.

“I refuse to be pilloried, Mr. Benson. No man can come into my office and hector me. No one can . . . can—”

He shriveled again under the calm stare of the pale, deadly eyes. But those eyes calculated the man’s fright-and-nerve shock. And he estimated that Gaffney was, at the moment, too upset—too difficult a subject for a certain experiment Benson had decided upon.

“You are right, of course,” he murmured. “The business of the corporation is its own. Good day.”

The Avenger went out—but not far.

There was a lounge room outside the door of the vice president’s office. Beyond that was a slightly larger room, the office of Gaffney’s secretary.

The secretary was a bony man of middle age with almost as dour a look on his face as that habitually on the freckled face of MacMurdie.

“Mr. Gaffney was too busy to talk to me as extensively as I could wish,” Benson said to the bony man. “So I have come to ask you a few questions.”

The secretary’s thin lips seemed to button themselves like a clasp purse.

“Of course,” said Benson, “anything I ask that is in confidence between you and your employers, you have the right to refuse to answer.”

To the bony secretary, Benson’s voice seemed merely a little more quiet and monotonous—almost musical—than that of most people. But any of Benson’s aides, hearing that vibrant but almost metronomic tone, would know what was in the wind.

“I have read newspaper accounts of the corporation shut down,” said Benson, smoothly, soothingly. “Is that the true version?”

“Of course,” said the bony secretary.

But his lips were relaxing a little, and his eyes seemed unable to leave the icy pools staring at him from the dead, white face.

“Is it because of inventory?”

“Yes.”

“And surplus stocks?”

“Y-yes—”

The cold, colorless pools seemed to be engulfing him. The bony man was staring almost breathlessly now.

“You will answer truthfully, as far as you know, whatever I ask you from this moment on, won’t you?” said Benson in the monotonous, flatly musical tone.

The bony man was done for. Gaffney had been plunged into a state of nerves that would have made hypnotism difficult. The secretary, relaxed when Benson walked up to him, had been quite easy.

He was entirely mesmerized, quiescent, now. Benson spoke.

“What is the real reason for this shut down? You must have talked it over with others in trusted places. And you must have done some guessing.”

The bony man answered almost like a machine.

“I have talked it over, and I’ve thought about it a lot. There is something brewing that I can almost—but not quite—guess at. Something tremendous! Then there is another thing that has been whispered around the office that no reporter has yet learned.”

“And that?” came Benson’s hypnotic voice.

“There is a rumor that the control of the entire corporation is to change hands. Everything sold, lock, stock and barrel for ninety million dollars. That would explain the shut down and the mid-season inventory.”

“Who could swing such a deal? A financial group? Another corporation?”

“No. Just one man. The name that is connected with the rumor is Lorens—”

There was a sharp, harsh spangggg! The sound was made by a single bullet when it hit a knob on the door leading from the secretary’s office to the big general office. By then it had already drilled the bony man’s skull, clean, from back to front.

The man sagged at his desk, passed from a hypnotic trance to the permanent trance of death. And The Avenger, leaping into action a tenth of a second after the clang of lead on bronze, was springing for the door he had entered, a few minutes before.

The slug had come from the direction of vice president Gaffney’s office.

The Avenger seemed to flow, rather than run, through the next room and into Gaffney’s place, so swift and smooth was his motion. Not two seconds passed from the time of the shot till he was in the vice president’s office.

But there was no one in there but Gaffney. And Gaffney could not have been responsible for the shot.

Gaffney was dead!

A trace of concluding motion at a side door caught Benson’s pale, flaring eyes as he leaped in. He went on to that door, jerked it open. He was looking into a file room. The door across from it was just closing, and he caught the whisk of a skirt as it smacked shut. The dress was of rust-colored linen.

He reached the door. It was locked.

Incredibly powerful muscles bunched at Benson’s average-sized shoulders. His rather small hands took on the look of steel hooks rather than things of flesh and blood. Knob and lock tore from oak under his pull—which was bad luck. It took nearly thirty seconds of fishing for the lock bolt in the ragged hole before the door came back.

He stared into a corridor, down which the person in the rust-colored linen dress had long since fled to safety and secrecy.

Benson went back to Gaffney.

The vice president had slumped forward till head and shoulders lay on his elaborate walnut desk, with red staining the desk blotter. A hole was in his skull like the one through his secretary’s, to insure against his ever talking too much. This hole went in one side and out the other, instead of from back to front, but that was the only difference.

Some fact of vast import had been about to leak here, either from the vice president or from his secretary. That fact would never come from those lips now!

CHAPTER XIII

Rust-Red Lure

Richard Benson knew most things superlatively well. On financial matters and set-ups he was particularly well informed.

The rumor given him by the bony secretary, before he was shot, was the truth as the man saw it. Benson knew that. The bony man had been talking from a hypnotic trance, without the wit to withhold things or distort them.

He had said the rumor was that the vast holdings of the Henderlin Corp. were to be sold for ninety million dollars.

That struck a very false note to The Avenger.

Ninety million dollars? The sum was colossal to the average man. A tremendous sum of money. But for the Henderlin holdings it was ridiculous.

Those coal and oil properties, the many refineries and collieries, the distribution system formed all over the world were worth a sum almost beyond calculating. Three hundred million dollars would have been a low price. Why, then, should there be talk of selling the thing for a paltry ninety million?

The bony secretary, just as he had been giving a name, had met his end, the name as far as he had uttered it, had been “Lorens—”

There was only one Lorens in high finance. Lorens Singer.

The Avenger went to see Singer.

With his home blown to atoms, the financier had taken the top floor of a Fiftieth Street hotel which he owned. There was an elevator turned over to his exclusive use. A guard in plain clothes stood next to the door in the lobby, and another stayed next to the top-floor door, constantly. The other elevator doors, on the top floor, had been walled over, and the stairs had been locked off. Singer, after one attack, was taking no chances on another that might be more successful.

The man at the lobby door of the private elevator stood aside as Benson approached. He didn’t ask names or anything else. He was a veteran private detective in New York City and, as such, he knew a great deal about the man with the dead face and stainless steel chips of eyes.

Benson nodded to him and went up. The guard on the top floor went into the barred foyer; came out at once.

“Mr. Singer will see you immediately, sir. If you will step in here, please—”

“Here,” was a small room off the foyer. Benson went into it. In half a minute or so, he heard steps.

There are qualities about footsteps, almost as there are about faces, that tell a great deal to an observant person. These told Benson a lot.

The steps were hurried, and they were furtive. Very furtive! An ordinary person might not have heard them at all.

Benson shot from his chair in a fast, silent move and stood so that he could see into the foyer through a half-inch crack between door and jamb. He saw the man making the fast, secretive steps.

He was a small man, rather smaller than The Avenger himself, with curious ears. They were almost as pointed as the trimmed ears of a show dog.

The Avenger had a memory like a filing cabinet. He had seen this man before. He placed him in a second or two.

He had seen him driving away from the wreck of Lorens Singer’s home, alone in a sedan, with a look of apprehension and anger on his face.

The elevator door softly clanged, and the guard came to the room in which Benson had reseated himself in his chair.

“All right, sir.”

Singer was in the biggest of the suite of rooms. He had a desk there. He sat behind the desk, with papers piled high, taking up his work where the explosion had interrupted the routine.

His stern brown eyes lightened as they rested on The Avenger. He didn’t look as coldly furious, as ruthlessly intent on vengeance as he had that day beside the smoking ruins of his house.

Benson brought up the subject that had brought him here. The sale of the Henderlin holdings. Singer’s mouth opened a little with surprise.

“Me? Buy the Henderlin set-up? For ninety million? It’s ridiculous! It would be a great bargain at that price. But I don’t want it, even at a bargain.”

“There is no truth in the rumor, then?” Benson said evenly.

“Not an ounce of truth.”

“You could easily swing such a deal,” said Benson quietly.

“Oh, yes,” shrugged Singer, “I could swing it. But I don’t care to. I’m over fifty, Mr. Benson. I’m engaged in narrowing my business contacts so that I can go into semi-retirement. I wouldn’t dream of taking on a job like the ownership of the Henderlin Corp.”

The phone on his desk rang. Rather, one of the phones. There was a battery of them all along one end. Singer picked it up, spoke a few words and smiled when he hung up.

“It seems that rumor has been heard by others besides yourself, Mr. Benson. That was Roger Bainbridge, second vice president of Henderlin Corp. I’ll bet a hat he has come to me with the proposition that you just asked about. He had a please buy expression in his voice.”

“But you’re not going to?” inquired The Avenger, tone as expressionless as his dead, white face.

“Not a chance!”

Benson went out. There was no sign of the little man with the pointed ears, either in the foyer or in the hotel lobby downstairs. But he saw Roger Bainbridge as the man got into the elevator.

The Henderlin executive looked badly worried; looked as if he had indeed come to plead with Singer to buy, rather than put it as a straight business deal.

Benson walked out of the hotel—and the first thing his pale eyes rested on was a rust-colored dress!

There are always thousands of rust-red dresses being worn in a great city, at any season of the year. But The Avenger had an eye for color that was like an artist’s color chart. The exact shade of this dress was subtly different from that of most. Without making the move obvious, as if he had intended to go in that direction, anyhow, he walked toward the rust-red garment.

The wearer of the dress was walking quickly toward a roadster parked at the curb between two taxis. She was a pronounced brunette, with deep-black eyes and ink-black hair.

She was the girl who had faced Benson and Mac and Smitty at the Utah salt flat and again in the Salt Lake City garage.

She was also the person who had slammed and locked a door in The Avenger’s face when he raced toward it from the body of a freshly murdered man.

She drove off in the roadster, and Benson followed in a cab.

The girl had been coldly, murderously calm when Benson encountered her before. She did not seem that way now. Her face was paler than it should have been, and her black eyes were wide. She had been biting her red underlip when she got hastily into her car.

She had looked, indeed, as if she were terribly afraid of something; had looked as if she were in trouble.

The roadster went east, nearly to the East River. It was a section of warehouses and storage buildings, with not many people walking around.

The girl’s car stopped in front of a wholesale paper office. The driver of Benson’s cab stopped half a block behind, with a shrewdness indicating that the man had often trailed people.

The Avenger sat very still, eyes like polar ice. The girl had turned and was walking back along the sidewalk, toward his cab.

The taxi driver turned in the front seat, and grinned back at Benson. But under the grinning face, hidden from passersby by the man’s body, a gun poked over the back of the front seat! And the words that came from the man’s lips had nothing to do with his disarming grin.

“Listen, you, and listen hard, if you want to keep on livin’. Get out of the cab and walk to the nearest doorway, there. The storage building doorway. Don’t try to run away, and don’t try to yell for help or I’ll drill you. I’ll be at the wheel here, and I’ll have this rod on you every second. Understand?”

“I understand,” said Benson evenly.

The driver suddenly looked a great deal less sure of himself. He had seen many men with guns threatening them—death threatening them. The men had looked either scared or angry. Usually scared to death. But this man didn’t show any emotion at all.

His white, awesome countenance was as unmoved as a thing of wax. His eyes were as empty of human emotion as pools of ice water. His voice was even and calm.

The driver began to sweat a little. It was as if the man had some help near at hand—or some hidden source of strength that the driver didn’t know about. To hide his sudden fear, he snarled more savagely:

“Remember, one funny stunt and you get six or eight slugs around the spine!”

“Of course,” said The Avenger, voice seeming almost indifferent.

He got out of the cab and walked across the concrete to the designated doorway. The girl with the black eyes and hair got to him just as he did so. She didn’t look troubled or frightened any more.

She looked triumphant!

“Open the door,” she said, with a sweet smile for the benefit of any pedestrians who might glance their way, “and go in. I have a gun in my purse, and my hand is on the gun. I’ll shoot through the purse in a minute, if I have to.”

Benson only nodded. He opened the door and walked in as commanded. And, smoothly, the girl’s gun covered him as his movements took him out of range of the cab driver’s automatic.

The girl slammed the door. Benson was in the dimness of a huge room with no windows to let in daylight, and with only a few electric bulbs giving illumination.

The room was the receiving chamber of the storehouse. Here, furniture was covered and papered before being sent upstairs to rest in cool darkness till its owners wanted to get it out of storage again. There was a long, low workbench, among other things. Lined along this bench, grinning at the white-haired, dead-faced Avenger, were a dozen men.

Several of the men Benson recognized as among the gang in Utah. Notably the one who seemed to be the leader—a man so thin and tall and smooth-moving that he looked like a snake. He looked so much like a snake that you expected him to hiss instead of talk.

“Good work, kid,” said the man at the thin fellow’s right, directing his words to the girl with her purse jammed against Benson’s back.

The thin, snaky fellow nodded.

“As easy as that,” he murmured.

“Yes,” said the girl triumphantly. “As easy as that. I let him see me with a worried look on my face, and he came right after me—in the planted cab. I don’t think he’s so very smart.”

Benson stared at the men. They all had guns out. He couldn’t make a move, now.

However, he could have, either in the cab or on the way across the sidewalk.

The Avenger knew a trap a mile away. He spotted them infallibly.

And he usually walked right into them.

It was an axiom of Benson’s that in traps you often learn valuable things. Therefore, he rather sought traps than avoided them. Of course, it was a foregone conclusion that some day he was going to get into one he couldn’t get out of. Some day a trap would kill him.

It looked as if this might be that day!

The warehouse wall would cut off the sound of shots from people in the street. There were twelve or thirteen guns covering him. There’d be a chance if they left him Mike and Ike. But if they didn’t—

“Stand facing the wall,” said the thin, snaky thug. “Back to the room.”

Benson did as directed. Steps sounded behind him. Then a hand felt over him.

Out of the corners of his pale, deadly eyes, The Avenger saw men moving to right and left to cover him at all angles, so that the person searching him could not be held suddenly as a shield.

The searching hand covered body, throat, thighs—and kept on going down. And they found Mike and Ike!

Benson had two of the world’s oddest weapons.

One was a small throwing knife of his own design, with a point like a needle and an edge that could shame a razor for sharpness. It had a hollow tube for a handle so that it hurtled point-first like an arrow when he threw it. This was Ike.

The other was a little special .22 revolver, silenced, so streamlined that it looked like a slim bent length of blued pipe rather than a gun. The handle was the bend. The cylinder held only four cartridges. This was Mike.

He kept the two little weapons holstered at the calves of his legs, for the reasons that few searchers ever felt for guns below a man’s knees.

But this man had; and he had found the two.

“A pea-shooter, and a knittin’ needle!” the man said, staring at Mike and Ike. “What’s this guy think he could do with those, in a real battle?”

He’d have been surprised could he have seen some of the things The Avenger had done with Mike and Ike. But naturally Benson didn’t choose to enlighten him.

“So now what?” said the man who had searched.

“Toss him into the tank and leave him there till the big shot comes and tells us what to do with him,” said the man who, in his dark suit, looked like a particularly vicious black snake.

Every large storage building has a disinfecting tank. It is a steel chamber usually about six feet by twelve, with a hermetically sealed steel door. Into this are put pieces of furniture that are upholstered. Then poison gas is shot into the tank under great pressure, to kill moths and other vermin.

“That’s airtight,” pointed out the man who stood with Mike and Ike in his hands. “He’ll croak, without air.”

The black snake actually seemed to hiss it.

“So what? Maybe that’s what the boss intends. Maybe he’ll fill him full of chlorine under sixty pounds pressure. Who knows? And who cares?”

The safe-like door of the disinfecting tank was opened. Benson was thrust in. The door clanged, and he heard half a dozen big wingnuts screwed down hard on heavy bolts.

You learn a lot in a trap, sometimes. But there is always the chance that a trap will beat you, some day—

Benson’s slim, steel-strong hands went to his belt.

Smitty, radio electrical engineer par excellence had designed tiny radio receiving-and-transmitting set for The Avenger and his aides.

They were in thin, curved cases that fitted the waist.

The most observant eye could not discern them under normal clothing.

But a searching hand would be sure to feel one.

The man who had searched Benson had been astute enough to cull Mike and Ike from their hiding places. Yet he had not investigated the curved metal length under Benson’s belt. It seemed odd. You’d have thought he would at least have investigated it.

To The Avenger, the answer seemed plain enough, however. The gang wanted him to retain possession of the radio. They wanted him to call for help.

It would be an excellent way to trap not only The Avenger, but all his helpers!

CHAPTER XIV

S O S—Stay Away!

In the Bleek Street headquarters of Justice, Inc., the giant Smitty suddenly began fumbling at his belt.

“What’s wrong with ye, mon?” said Mac dourly. “Is it wee wild life ye’re entertainin’ now on that overgrown carcass of yours?”

“Wild life, nothin’!” snapped Smitty. “There’s a radio call. From the chief, most likely.”

He tuned in the ingenious little belt set.

“Smitty talking.”

The voice that came was as calm and cold as glacier water.

“This is Benson, Smitty. Listen carefully and get everything right the first time, for I may not have a chance to talk long or to repeat. I’m in the disinfecting tank of a storage warehouse on Second Avenue near Thirty-fourth Street. A white stone-front building next to a wholesale paper office—”

“You’re in what?” yelled Smitty, quick brain taking in at once the dreadful possibilities of such a prison. Then he bellowed, “We’re practically on our way. We’ll be there in ten minutes, chief—all of us—”

“No!” The voice of The Avenger seemed to crackle like an electric arc. “That is precisely what I do not want you to do. I believe the gang here has planned just such a move. Instead, you are to go to the hotel where Lorens Singer is temporarily located. You are to find a man I have reason to believe lurks around there a lot. The man is small, has peculiarly pointed ears. When I saw him last, he wore a dark-brown suit, light-brown felt hat and dark-tan shoes. His tie is wine-colored, with a slightly larger knot than most. Get that man and bring him to the warehouse. Keeping him covered, but keeping out of sight yourself, make him command the men here to leave. Then—and not before—open the tank and let me out. Understand?”

“Sure, I understand,” said Smitty breathlessly. “But who is the little guy with the sharp ears?”

“I don’t know his name.”

“Is he in with this crew? Would a command of his make them obey?”

“I think so.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“Not entirely,” came the quiet, emotionless voice.

“Sweet Samuel, chief! If I show up there with my gun on a guy that gang never even saw before and try to make the stranger tell them what to do—”

“It will be unfortunate,” said Benson crisply. “But it is a chance we must take. My calculations indicate that this man can make the gang do as he says. If my calculations are wrong . . . Bring him here as swiftly as you can, Smitty. And Smitty—bring my kit.”

The clever little radio went dead.

“My kit,” Benson had said. There had been no need for further explanation, such was the swift coordination between The Avenger and his aides. Smitty went into Benson’s office and grabbed what seemed to be an ordinary overnight bag.

He raced out bareheaded and got into Benson’s special sedan, which was usually at the curb waiting for anyone needing particularly fast transportation.

The sedan looked like a sedate old thing that should belong to some elderly couple from a tank town where twenty miles an hour was real speeding. But the car actually was armored like an army truck, and had well over a hundred an hour in its purring motor.

Smitty got to the hotel in ambulance time, parked half a block from it and entered a drugstore. He walked in leisurely and sat at the soda fountain.

“A coke,” he said, staring not at the clerk but out the window. The window let him see the hotel entrance.

Benson in a steel tank, helpless, as subject to death at the whim of a murder gang as any chained prisoner lying helpless under a guillotine! And all Smitty could do about it was hang around here and watch for a man with sharp ears! The man might or might not show up within the next twelve hours. He might or might not be able to save Benson. It was a thousand to one that the pale-eyed Avenger had come to the end of the trail—

Smitty was off the stool and out the door. He could move like a flyweight boxing champion when he had to, for all his great size.

A man had left the hotel doorway. The man, had Smitty known it, was Roger Bainbridge, of The Henderlin Corp. He had been with Lorens Singer for over an hour.

The man had stepped into a limousine. The sleek car had rolled off, and a taxi had suddenly darted after it. Smitty had one glimpse of a man in the cab—a fellow who looked small, though it was hard to tell because of the sitting posture, and who had queerly sharp ears.

The man the chief wanted was trailing this other fellow, who had been one of dozens going in or out of the hotel entrance and who looked like a perfectly respectable citizen.

Smitty started to hail another cab, saw the lights at the near corner go red and changed his mind.

He walked toward where the cab had stopped, three cars behind the limousine, getting there as the lights went green again.

The giant timed it beautifully. The little man’s cab was just beginning to roll when Smitty jerked open the door and slid in. He grinned at the driver, who turned when he heard the door slam. The driver, sure the giant was a friend of his passenger, turned front again and kept on going.

“Hello,” said Smitty, to the man with the pointed ears.

Then the giant dropped the persiflage. A gun had suddenly appeared in the man’s hand. But even more swiftly Smitty’s vast paw went out and grabbed the wrist behind the gun.

In such cases, Smitty had a very simple way of disarming a person. He just squeezed!

He did so now with his left hand darting out and over the man’s mouth to shut off the resultant yell of agony.

The gun dropped cozily into Smitty’s lap. He pocketed it and stared into the little fellow’s raging eyes.

“I usually take somebody as near my size as I can find,” he said. “But this time has to be an exception. Tell your man to go to Second Avenue near Thirty-fourth Street.”

“Who are you?” panted the man with the odd ears. “By what right—”

“Give him that address,” snapped Smitty, turning on the pressure again a very little.

The man hastened to obey. The cab was redirected after a shrug of the driver’s shoulders.

“What’s on Second Avenue near Thirty-fourth?” said the little man, looking so perplexed that Smitty’s heart sank.

Had The Avenger’s apparent stab into thin air about this man having something to do with the warehouse gang been a wrong one? Was the fellow merely some innocent bystander who could do Benson no more good than any other casual taxi fare in the big city?

True, the man had a gun and had drawn it. But lots of people having nothing to do with gangs carry guns; and any one of them would draw if a stranger forced a way into his cab. Even the fact that the man had been trailing somebody, might mean nothing; he could be a private detective on some job having nothing to do with Benson’s deadly dilemma.

“What’s on Second Avenue?” the man repeated.

“A storage warehouse,” said Smitty. “In it there’s a bunch of guys I don’t like. You’re to tell them to go home or to Coney Island or any other place a long way off.”

“You must be crazy,” said the little man. “I don’t know any men in a warehouse at that address. What kind of men?”

“Very competent killers or I miss my guess,” said the giant.

The little man’s mouth twisted.

“Oh! But look here! If I go in and try to tell such men what to do, they may . . . they may shoot me!”

“They may,” said Smitty. “Step on it, driver.”

“But my dear sir! You’re exposing me to death! You’re the same as murdering me.”

The cab raced down Second Avenue into the Thirties. Smitty’s eyes roamed over the cluster of buildings, looking for the storage warehouse with the white stone front. He spotted the wholesale paper office—and the warehouse next to it.

“Stop here, driver,” said the giant.

The cab stopped before the storage building. Smitty took a gun from his pocket. He seldom used a gun; his fists were preferable. But he had to act unsuspicious in the sight of the many people around. He held the gun well concealed.

“Walk ahead of me to the door,” he said. “When you get to it, just walk in. Order the first man you see to collect the others and leave. If you don’t—” He jabbed the gun hard.

“If I die it’ll be your fault,” wailed the man with the pointed ears.

But he went to the door and tried it. It wasn’t locked. Evidently the men inside were only too anxious for it to open hospitably to an intruder. The little man went in. His heel snapped against the door in a fast effort to slam it in Smitty’s face.

The effort did not succeed. Smitty’s foot was a lot larger. The giant shut it himself, softly.

There was a door leading into a darkened little office with grimy windows on the street. Smitty ducked in there.

“Stand right there,” he whispered, “in this doorway. Call to one of the men. If you don’t and if you try to leap out of range, I’ll make a sieve out of you.”

The little man was sweating. But there was raw murder in his eyes now—no longer any trace of perplexity.

However, the big fellow had him, and he knew it.

“Jake!” he called.

There were steps. Smitty crouched back farther in the shadows of the office. He saw a man who looked uncannily like a snake come up to the little fellow. Furthermore, he came up to him as if he knew him. Smitty drew a deep breath of relief. Once more The Avenger had been right in a assumption whose foundations were a complete mystery to everyone else.

“Jake,” said the little man, voice almost natural, “get the others and take them out of here for about half an hour. I want to be alone.”

“Take them out? You want to be—” exclaimed the snake-like individual. “Hey, that ain’t what I thought was to happen—”

“Take them all out! Don’t come back for half an hour. That’s an order!” said the little man crisply. He started to turn his head a bit, longingly, as if contemplating an attempt to glance at the giant concealed behind him and thus tip the gangster to his presence. But he didn’t complete the move.

“O.K., if you want it like that,” said the snaky one dubiously. “Though it looks damn funny to me.”

He went back toward the big receiving room, calling as he went. In a few minutes men began to file past the little man. And past, if they had guessed it, a giant with a gun in his hand who was the real commander behind this maneuver.

Smitty gave the gang three minutes. Then he picked the little man up by the scruff of the neck, as he’d have picked up a kitten, and carried him at arm’s length into the receiving room.

He opened the tank. Benson walked calmly, emotionlessly out. The big fellow drew a great breath and dropped his squirming burden.

“Chief—”

The little man deemed it a good time to run. He made a mistake.

He had taken three long, running steps, when a gray streak seemed to blur beside him. The Avenger’s fist went out with delicate exactness and power. It got the little man under the ear, and he went down. And out!

CHAPTER XV

Singer and Death!

The little man with the odd ears was propped against the wall of the dim receiving room. Propped next to him was a most peculiar case.

It looked like an overnight bag; but its contents were such as no overnight bag ever held.

In the top tray were dozens of fragile, tissue-thin semispheres with different colored pupils painted on them. They were tiny cups which The Avenger could slip over his eyeballs to change their flaring colorlessness when wanted.

Under the top tray were all the known make-up aids, plus a few of Benson’s own designing, which could be utilized to change the man’s gray steel appearance.

The case was laid so that a small mirror was on a level with the little man’s face, and right next to it, Benson was seated before the two, looking into the mirror one second and at the man’s face the next.

When the face of Richard Benson had been paralyzed by the terrific nerve shock that also whitened his thick, virile hair, something had happened to the facial muscles that even the doctors couldn’t explain.

The facial flesh had not only gone dead, from the standpoint of no longer responding to nerve impulses, but it had also lost all natural elasticity. It was like dead wax. Where it was put, it stayed, till it was put carefully back again into place.

The Avenger, with about eight minutes to go before the gang should return to the building, finished shaping his dead face to match the face of the man with the queer ears. He pinched his own ears into points to correspond with the others, put on a brown wig over his white hair, slipped eye-cups with brownish pupils over his pale orbs, and stood up.

He wasn’t Benson any more. He was the other man, line for line.

He put on the other man’s clothes, compressing his shoulders to resemble the narrower shoulders of the other.

“Take him to Bleek Street,” Benson said to Smitty, nodding to the unconscious man.

The giant held the little man up with an arm under his shoulder as if he were drunk instead of unconscious and walked him toward the door. Benson followed him soon after and climbed into a cab.

He went again to Singer’s hotel suite.

When The Avenger made up as another person, he always, if possible, studied that person’s walk and mannerisms, too, because a man is known by his gestures as well as his face.

In this case, he’d had no chance to do that. He could only trust that the amazingly accurate facial imitation would be enough. It looked as if it were going to be.

The man guarding the lower elevator door nodded to him on sight. He didn’t say a word, just passed him to the elevator. It appeared that the little man whom Benson was replacing had the run of the place.

Benson went up to the top floor and was similarly passed by the foyer guard. He walked into the big room where Singer had his desk.

Singer was seated there. He looked up at Benson, at the brownish pupils, hair, and the rest of The Avenger’s disguise. The financier’s eyes were keen. Would he—

“Well, Rann,” Singer said to the man he saw entering.

And Benson knew it was all right. At least for a little while.

He went on to the desk. And Singer stared with coldly smoldering eyes and a face that was frightening in its wrath.

“I’m glad you came, Rann,” Singer said, voice too smooth to be comforting. “I’ve come to a nasty conclusion in the last few hours of thinking things over. The conclusion is—that you’ve been double-crossing me!”

Benson shook his head in a bewildered, too-innocent manner.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“No?” snapped Singer. “I think you do. Your face gives you away. There was no surprise or any other emotion on it when I said that. I was watching. It only confirms what I’ve been thinking.”

“But—” faltered Benson.

“I’ve got the wrecking of my house all figured out,” said Singer. “The private detectives I hired have helped a little. I guessed the rest.

“You went to the Henderlin coal and oil people with that damned process of yours, after getting into my confidence. Highest bid to get it—and to the devil with me if I wouldn’t pay as much as they offered. You gave them a small sample, to prove you had the goods. They tested it, and it worked as miraculously as it had when I tested it. They believed you and gave you a figure. You did not accept—thought you could get more. They tried, of course, to analyze the sample. It defied analysis, as you knew it would. Meanwhile, they learned that I was tied in with you, after the run-out the four Poles took on me. So they tried to kill me by blowing up my house. You were directly responsible for that, and it’s only luck that I’m alive.”

“But Mr. Singer,” said Benson, “you’re letting a lot of guesswork condemn me in your mind as guilty of—”

“Even your voice is different,” snarled Singer. “Your guilt shows in everything you say and do.”

“Look at all I’ve done in the interests of the two of us,” said Benson, stabbing in the dark. “That should prove—”

“It proves nothing, Rann. What you’ve done was in my interest as well as yours—only if you did not freeze me out. Which is precisely what I believe you have in mind, right now.”

“If you’ll give me a little time, I think I can make you understand—”

“I’ll give you time, my friend,” said Singer. “I’ll give you plenty of time! I’m through with this fooling around.” He pressed a button on his desk. “You’ll be taken to a little factory that I own outside Newark. It’s abandoned at the moment. No one will interfere. There, you will give me every detail of that process. You might not do it in a day or a week. But eventually, after enough persuasion, you’ll come through. Then I won’t be dependent on you any more.”

“But, Mr. Singer—”

The door opened and two men came in. They were not of the type thought of as normal employees of a respectable businessman.

“Take him to the Newark flats,” said Singer, lighting a thin brown cigar.

“Please! Give me a chance!” Benson put all the acting he could into his voice, since, even now, he could not express anything with his face. It was fortunate that Singer was looking at his cigar instead of the man he called Rann, or he might have noticed that lack of expression in spite of his anger.

“Take him out,” Singer repeated.

One of the two men stepped up to Benson and his fist smashed out.

The fist got The Avenger just under the heart, in a blow that had knockout power behind it but still should not leave a mark where a casual observer could see it.

Benson slumped. The two calmly propelled him toward the elevator.

“Had a heart attack or somethin’,” one of them said cheerfully to the curiously staring operator. The operator, a direct employee of Singer’s, nodded indifferently.

The two got Benson through the lobby and into a big car. The car headed for Newark—for an abandoned building where The Avenger was to be tortured into giving up a secret he did not have, or, if discovered in his true identity, was to be slaughtered outright.

Smitty, in the cab that had recently left the warehouse bearing him and the unconscious little man with the pointed ears, suddenly went for his gun. He was too late!

The move that had caused the grab was so deftly performed that it was over before he realized it.

The driver of the taxi that had conveniently picked him up with his burden near the warehouse door, had swirled the cab into a one-way street going east and stopped. Just like that. Smitty had been thrown forward, which had delayed the gun-grabbing. And now he couldn’t draw because he was looking into a gun muzzle himself!

The gun was one that swung its yawning muzzle toward him before. A .45 looking like a battleship cannon. It was in a hand that had wielded it before—a small hand, but one that held the big gun very competently, indeed.

The driver was the girl with the coldly beautiful black eyes and the ink-black hair. The hair had been tucked cleverly into her driver’s cap; but Smitty felt like a fool, nevertheless. He should have spotted something funny the instant he looked at the figure at the wheel.

Trouble was, he hadn’t looked. Waiters and taxi drivers are people you don’t tend to notice individually without reason. And there hadn’t seemed to be any reason for Smitty’s giving an inquisition to a casual cab driver.

“You again!” he said bitterly. “And I once said you were kind of pretty. You’re no more pretty than a Gila monster—”

“Get out!” said the girl.

“Huh?” gasped the giant. The last thing he’d expected was to be captured by this gummer-upper of well-laid plans and then be turned loose again.

“I said, get out!” she snapped.

Smitty started to gather up the little man.

“Oh, no. Leave him right where he is.”

Smitty said things under his breath that would have burned the dainty ears off the girl if they’d been a little louder.

“Stop mumbling,” said the girl. “Get out of this cab, at once, or I’ll shoot.”

She would, too! There was no hesitancy in those jet-black eyes.

Feeling as impotent as three hundred pounds of angry jellyfish, Smitty clambered out of the cab. It sped off with a scream of tires. There were no cabs around here in which the giant could follow.

As easily as rolling off a ridge-pole, the girl had rescued the little man Benson had ordered taken to Bleek Street.

But it seemed that rescue was the wrong word.

The taxi went along for only half a mile or so; then it stopped in front of a loft building, each of the five floors of which was taken up by a small manufacturing company.

The girl stepped back to the body of the cab. The little man was stirring now, and moaning. She held an opened vial of ammonia under his nostrils. He coughed, looked up dazedly.

“Hello, Mr. Rann,” said a man in janitor’s clothes as the little man went into the door with the figure in cab driver’s worn garb beside him.

Rann bit his lips, said hello stiffly and went on in and up the stairs. There was a gun cleverly concealed, poking against his ribs.

He stopped on the top floor and opened a door marked: Krakow Distillate Co. He went in, with the girl behind him. The girl shut and locked the door without taking gun or eyes off Rann.

It seemed there was nothing to the Krakow Co. but several chairs and a bed. There were no machinery, no light workbenches, as on other floors of the loft building. It was only a hide-out for the man called Rann.

The girl took off her man’s cap and shook out her thick, black hair. She looked like an avenging fury, in worn black whipcord and with gauntlets disguising the telltale feminine daintiness of her hands. “This is what I’ve waited for,” she said. And with the words, Death fanned the air of the big, almost empty room with sable wings!

CHAPTER XVI

The Avenger Unmasked

Benson hadn’t even been carried to the factory when it became known that he was not Rann. The discovery was made through the thing that was at once one of his greatest crime-fighting aids—and his most dangerous weakness.

His face!

That dead, white countenance of his could be prodded into any shape desired. And that was a potent weapon.

But it could never express emotion; and, if pressed out of shape, it stayed that way—which was a constant menace to The Avenger when he went disguised.

It gave him away when the car he was in drew near a one-story brick building a half an acre in extent, with broken, boarded-up windows and an air of desolation. It was when the car crossed interminable tracks on a cinder cross that it happened.

“Seems to me this guy has been out a long time from just one poke,” said the man in the back seat with Benson.

“It was a good, hard poke,” said the man at the wheel.

“Yeah, but even at that—” muttered the other.

Benson hadn’t been out at any time.

The average man has a very thin sheet of muscle over his ribs, under the slab of the breast muscle. It offers no protection at all from a hard blow under the heart. But The Avenger was not an average man.

In any part of his body, Benson could make hard muscle lump and writhe at will—even in that normally unfleshed section. So that when the man’s fist had smashed there, it had crashed a sheath of iron-hard flesh ridged to meet it and hadn’t even staggered The Avenger. Benson had pretended unconsciousness to find out more of Singer’s plans.

It was about time now to open his eyes unexpectedly and overpower these two. Then he could wait here for Singer, and confront him—

His head rocked from a blow as unexpected as it was terrific. The man muttering beside him had suddenly, without a word or move of warning, crashed his fist against the side of Benson’s jaw.

It was like clubbing a man in his sleep. So unprepared was he for the cowardly, treacherous blow that even Benson found himself almost knocked out by it.

He swayed dizzily, rallying his strength—

But more damage than the impact of the blow had been done. He saw the man staring open-mouthed at his jaw. Then Benson’s brain, flash-quick even after such a blow, got the meaning of the look.

The blow had flattened and distorted the dead flesh around his mouth. And the flesh had stayed that way, like putty. A complete give-away!

His gray steel body snapped toward the man. But the unlooked-for smash in the jaw had undone him. With a yell, the man brought the barrel of a gun down over Benson’s head.

The car went on into the factory yard. Benson was carried into a gloomy den of rusting machinery and desertion. Five minutes later another car turned in, with five men in it.

Nearly an hour later, a third car came, and from it stepped Singer.

Benson wasn’t aware of any of these things. He was still out. The first thing he heard, long after that, was a voice that was strangled with fury.

“If you’ve killed him, you confounded fool—if he never comes out of this—well, you won’t be able to run fast or far enough to get away from me!”

“He ain’t dead,” came another voice, whining, placating. “I felt his ticker beat a minute ago.”

“It looks to me as if he’s going to pass from unconsciousness right into death. And then, where’ll I be?”

Benson lay just as he had been before returning consciousness sent the voice to his brain. He breathed shallowly, but often, getting back his strength. Power began to flow slowly back into his lax, sprawled limbs.

“I’m tellin’ you,” said the whining voice, “this guy ain’t Rann. I’ve told you a dozen times now—”

“Not Rann? Nonsense! You can see he’s Rann.”

“The way his face stayed lopsided where I hit it—”

“Rann’s face must have some peculiar quality we never suspected before, that’s all.”

“O.K.,” said the other voice, with less whine in it, “Let’s find out, right now!”

Steps neared Benson. He still lay with closed eyes.

A hand touched his head. Then a slight release of pressure told that the wig had been jerked from his thick, white hair.

“So now what?” said the man, excitedly.

“Good heavens,” came Singer’s amazed, appalled tone. “It isn’t Rann! It must be that man Benson—” His voice cracked with frustration and fury. “And I thought we had Rann and that my troubles were over. Kill that man! Kill him at once!”

Four men drew guns and shot. Four shots drilled into grease-soaked floor-planking—and nothing else!

The Avenger could move, when necessary, so fast that it made the moves of others seem like the dance of a sloth. He moved that way now.

Before the guns spoke, he had writhed a yard to one side. With their futile roar, he doubled legs and arms under him and sprang still farther aside on all fours, like a gray lynx. That move left him on his feet—to Singer’s swift discomfiture.

For the final move found Singer clamped in the vise of The Avenger’s steel-strong hands and held between the cursing men and Benson.

“You fools!” shrieked Singer. “You clumsy fools—”

Benson looked at the men through his brown-pupiled eye lenses, over Singer’s quivering shoulder. Some of the men from the Utah flat were there; some from the warehouse. A definite gang, working for Singer on tasks normally far outside a businessman’s sphere.

“Tell them to leave,” he said to Singer.

“Rush him, you fools!” screamed Singer. “He hasn’t a gun. Rush him!”

Benson’s knee was abruptly in the small of Singer’s back. Benson’s slim, steel-strong hands brought the financier’s shoulders back a little.

“Do you want a broken back?” he asked quietly.

Singer was silent, face suddenly turning the color of ashes.

“Tell them to leave,” The Avenger repeated. “Go clear away. And remember you can see a long way across this filled-in marshland; so it will be easy to see if they do drive clear away.”

“You heard him,” said Singer, after a long time.

“But look, boss—” said one of the men.

“Go!” howled Singer. “If I die, the whole thing’s off!”

Reluctantly, fingering their guns, the men filed out the front entrance of the abandoned brick shell. They piled into two of the three cars and drove off. The Avenger watched them cross the flatland, Singer still helpless as a child in his slim but powerful hands.

It took a long time, but finally the cars, tiny because of distance, passed behind a clump of factory buildings.

Benson released Singer.

“There are some things I want to know from you—” he began.

He turned and stopped talking as well as moving.

A silent, deadly group had crept up behind them while they stood at the front entrance. There were seven or eight, with guns in their hands.

They were as like the thugs who had just left as eight peas are like eight other peas. But they were different individually. This was a gang—but it was not Singer’s gang!

“Kinda dumb, ain’t you?” sneered one, to Singer. “You think a bunch of monkeys like them that just left is enough protection so you don’t have to have anybody watch the back door. You let us walk up to this joint and stay at the back, just waitin’ for a chance like this.”

“Aw, cut it,” growled another. “Give it to ’em and let’s get on our way.”

The guns were held a little more tightly in eight murderous hands. With no more talking, with just this un-revealing, brief prelude, Benson and Singer were going to die—

There was a crash from the rear as if the whole back wall of the factory had collapsed. As the men found out when they whirled in alarm, in a sense it had.

A yawning hole had been battered in the rear wall. Plugging this hole was the thing that had made it—the battered nose of a truck.

Bricks were sliding down the mashed hood of the truck. In an instant something else was, too. A man who looked to be ten feet tall and six feet broad.

The gunmen by the front entrance yelled and fixed. But by the time their bullets were spanging into the hood of the battering-ram vehicle, the giant was behind a rusted machine, ten feet to the left.

The factory had originally been used for sash and door work. The machine behind which the big man was now crouched was a light milling machine. But it was “light” only in trade terms. The thing, with its solid metal slab of milling platform, probably weighed nearly half a ton.

The machine began to rock, as the men stared at it. Anyway, it seemed to rock, though of course that wasn’t possible. It was bolted down to the floor, wasn’t it? So how could it rock?

One of the gang kept his head a little.

“You damn apes!” he yelled. “Let that guy alone till you do what you came for. Take Singer and the guy with the white hair!”

The thought, while eminently practical, came a bit late. Singer and the guy with the white hair were behind another machine. And the gun in Singer’s hand spoke when two of the thugs started toward the shelter.

Again a crash interrupted a mass attack on the two. The crash was caused by the toppling on its side of the milling machine. It had been rocking on its bedplate, just as it had appeared to be.

The floor was of grease-soaked, old wood. But even at that, the strength that could rip out the heavy bolts and tip over the machine was phenomenal. More of it was displayed in several seconds.

The machine had barely hit on its side, when it began inching toward the gunmen.

The giant behind it was pushing its bulk over the floor, a half-foot at a time, using the ponderous metal bed of the thing as a shield.

Bullets rained on the bed of the milling machine. They were as ridiculous, against the two inches of steel, as peas against plate glass. The ponderous shield came on, like the great rawhide and timber shields pushed before an army squad by the elephants in Hannibal’s day.

A man raced to get around to the side of the incredibly moving mass of steel. Singer’s gun, now in the hand of The Avenger, spoke briefly. The man fell with a bullet in his leg.

It finished the gang. They were caught between a gun that prevented them from flanking the moving milling machine and a colossus who could shove half a ton of metal over a rough-plank floor. Besides, the sounds of so many shots must have been heard over the marshland in spite of the distance to the nearest buildings, and, soon police would come to investigate.

The gang broke and ran to the door.

Singer’s car was still there. They piled in. The howl of an expensive motor, raced in first gear far beyond its usual limits, sounded as the car fled over the cinder road.

Smitty came from behind the milling machine, and Singer and Benson met him.

The Avenger had the eye-lenses off his colorless, deadly eyes. Those eyes, like diamond drills, were on Singer’s face.

The financier bit his lips and reddened.

“All right,” he said. “I was going to have you killed. And you saved my life. Naturally I feel like the devil in such a situation. But the stakes were so vast that I’d do it again if we had it to do over.”

“The stakes?” repeated Benson, tone as enigmatic as his dead face.

“Yes. The process known to Rann. The product of the four Polish scientists.”

He mopped at his face, which was still clammy with the sweat of deathly fear.

“Wencilau and Shewski, Veck and Sodolow, managed to synthesize a life-saving drug from a coal-tar derivative. Marvelous stuff; brand new in principle. They came to America, and to me, for financial backing. I promised it. But the four were silly dreamers. They wanted to practically give the stuff away for the benefit of humanity. I’m not a philanthropist; I’m a businessman. I wanted a reasonable profit. The four ran out on me. They hid in distant places—and died! Then this Rann showed up. He claimed he knew the drug process, too. I offered him a tremendous sum for it; then he went to the Henderlin people to see if they’d give even more. Double-crossed me. I brought you here, thinking you were Rann, to get his secret in any way I could. So now you know everything.”

“Yes. I think I do,” said The Avenger slowly, after looking at Singer for a long time. The financier was greatly relieved when the pale, infallible eyes swung away from his face.

“Your arrival was appreciated, Smitty,” Benson said to the giant. “But how is it you’re here?”

“That girl!” said Smitty. “The black-eyed one. She’s responsible. She got the man you call Rann away from me. Left me stranded in a one-way street and drove off. But she didn’t notice a delivery boy’s bicycle at the curb. I followed on that to a loft building. She and Rann went in. After a while, Rann came out alone. I trailed him, instead of picking him up, to a tough cafe on Third Avenue. Right after he went in, a bunch of hoods came boiling out with blood in their eyes; so, on a hunch, I followed them here.”

“Your hunch,” nodded Benson, “was pure gold—”

He stopped, and his fingers went to his belt—to the tiny radio there.

“Nellie, chief,” he heard Nellie Gray’s delicate voice when he answered. “Warsaw, Poland, wants to talk to you. Something pretty important, I guess.”

CHAPTER XVII

The Secret Process

At Bleek Street, the call from Warsaw was put through to The Avenger, on his return, with a swiftness that no ordinary person could ever experience. They dropped everything else on the big board when Benson had a long distance call.

The caller was an American newspaper correspondent in Warsaw. Benson had saved his life once in Albania. He had been only too glad to volunteer to help when Benson called some time before and asked his aid. He had a report now.

“On Shewski, Wencilau, Veck and Sodolow,” the man’s voice came across the Atlantic. “They were four screwballs—but excellent chemists. It is known around here that they discovered something very important, but no one knows what. People around their little plant knew how they kept their secret, though—even from each other.

“They had a four-story building. Each put together a part of the finished product on one floor. Then they shot it down a floor to the next associate, who added his ingredient. When Sodolow, on the fourth floor, poured his work down a pipe to the third, it blended with what Shewski had mixed up and went down to the second floor where Wencilau had his own stew worked out. Then the product of the three went on down the pipe to the first floor and mixed with what Veck had produced. The final result was their product—whatever that could be. Crazy, huh?”

“Cautious, to say the least,” said Benson. “So the blending of the work of the four made the finished article. Is their little plant occupied now?”

“No. It stands empty. There are a row of drums on the first floor, where they’d been put to receive more of whatever stuff it was that they concocted. Everything just as they left it when they went to America nearly a year ago.”

“The drums are empty?” said The Avenger. His voice was as even and quiet as usual, but his aides could tell that the question had grave importance.

“That’s a queer thing,” said the man in Warsaw. “They aren’t empty. Not quiet. I tilted one, to see if there was a label of any kind on the back, and I heard a swishing sound. I opened the drum. There was about a half an inch of some dark liquid just covering the bottom. It was the same with all the drums. I don’t know if it means anything.”

“That was very thorough and very clever work, my friend,” said Benson. “If there’s any way I can show my thanks—”

“You just have,” said the man in Warsaw. “It means a great deal to be called your friend. If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”

The Avenger hung up, and Nellie Gray signaled him to a front window.

The fragile looking blonde who could toss men around like Indian clubs, had been staring out for several minutes. When Benson joined her, he saw why.

Bleek Street normally had no one on its walk at all. Now, it was relatively crowded. There were twelve or fifteen men standing unobstrusively around in plain sight. Anyone standing in Bleek Street would have to be in plain sight, no matter how little they cared for it; there weren’t any doorways to loiter in, save the one under the Justice, Inc. sign itself.

“The warehouse gang,” said Benson, nodding, pale eyes like ice in a winter moon.

He had recognized the man who looked like a black snake, the dull-eyed fellow who had taken Mike and Ike from him, and half a dozen of the others.

“Apparently,” said The Avenger, “Singer’s gratitude for having his life saved lasted only till he could get his crew of thugs together again. There are over a dozen, aren’t there?”

“Fourteen,” said Nellie. “I counted while you finished phoning.”

“Fourteen,” mused The Avenger, pale eyes glittering. “And there were eight in the gang that nearly did in Singer and me—I’m going out, Nellie.”

Nellie only nodded, exhibiting no concern at all. That was because the guarding of the Bleek Street place was apt to be a complete joke, from the standpoint of those within. There were exits out of that place that only a crystal-gazer could have found.

Benson took one of them now.

Elevator to the basement garage. Basement passage all along the block to the vacant warehouse he secretly owned at the corner. Then a tunnel under the street, crowded with electric cables, through which Benson could move because of his modest size, and an exit half a block deep in the next square.

But The Avenger didn’t use the electric company’s tunnel under the next street at once. Instead, he peered between the boards over the warehouse door into Bleek Street for an instant.

As he had remembered, one of the men was lounging against the building wall within a yard of this boarded-up door. Benson softly opened the portal.

Nail heads, boarding, everything else moved on oiled hinges without a sound. The gray steel figure of The Avenger stood for an instant behind the back of the man.

Then the man felt something like a metal bar hook under his throat from behind and felt himself drawn back into a door he had thought so nailed up that it would take dynamite to open it. None of his pals down the street saw the flashing move; and none could hear because the man could not utter a sound with that throttling arm around his neck.

Benson’s fist licked out, precisely, accurately. The man sagged. The Avenger went through his pockets.

His memory had, as always, served him faithfully. This was the man who had searched him at the warehouse. And the fellow had the results of the search still in his pockets.

Mike and Ike, the ingenious little throwing knife and the special little .22.

Benson holstered the weapons at the calves of his legs, opened the “boarded-up” door, and rolled the man out onto the sidewalk while the eyes of the other men still kept glued to the Justice, Inc., doorway, in the other direction.

The Avenger went on to the loft building Smitty had spoken of.

A glance told Benson which of the five floors was unused for regular loft-building purposes: the one with the cleanest windows; since the smoke of industry stains windows swiftly, and one seldom bothers to wash the windows of a small factory.

The top floor was his goal, he decided. He went up to it, to the door marked: Krakow Distillate Co.

The door was fastened with the largest, most modern of locks. But to The Avenger, locks were only something that took a little time—not a real hindrance. This one might have taken fifteen minutes to pick, and he didn’t care to spend that much time on it; so he took out the little object like an atomizer with which he had burned a way into the Salt Lake City garage.

He torched the lock out in about three minutes; toward the end, it would not have been noticed. A sound from within would have drowned it.

That sound was a muffled screaming. A girl’s screaming.

Benson opened the door and stepped, as soundlessly as a gray shadow, into the big room. Two figures were at the far end, struggling. One was the girl with the black eyes and ink-dark hair. The other was the man with the sharp ears—Rann.

Rann, smirking, half angry and half entertained, had his left hand over the girl’s lips to muffle her cries and was drawing her close to him with a rough right arm. Benson stooped. Mike and Ike seemed to leap into his hands of their own volition.

“Rann,” Benson said.

The man with the pointed ears sprang from the girl as if she had burned him. Springing, he drew a gun. With the swiftness of long practice, he leveled it at The Avenger.

But the practiced swiftness was a slow thing compared to Benson’s move. His left hand had lashed out—and from it, like a tiny arrow from a bow, had lanced Ike.

The little knife sliced across Rann’s knuckles, and, with a gasp, he dropped the gun. Raging, he stooped to pick it up again, and a slug whispered from Mike’s silenced little muzzle.

Rann went down and stayed down. Blood came from his head.

The girl’s reaction to the downing of the man who had recently been her captor, was strange. She turned, raging like a tigress, toward Benson.

“You’ve killed him!” she panted. “How dare you kill him! All I’ve done—everything—done for nothing—”

She cracked, and began to laugh and cry in hysteria. Benson had a quick method for that. His hands seized her slim shoulders with a force that shocked her out of the attack. His eyes, like pools of ice water, seemed to drown her like a glacial flood. She shuddered a little and relaxed.

With Rann motionless on the floor, she seemed to have lost the mainspring of all her resolution. She answered dully, lifelessly, when The Avenger asked her name.

“Diana Borne,” she said.

“Why are you in this affair?”

“Because that man killed my brother.”

“Your brother?”

“Yes,” said Diana. “By brother is—was—a newspaper reporter. He got wind of a speed test to be made on a salt flat near Salt Lake City. He went out to it—and never came back! His body was found that night in a ditch, and there was a gun in his hand that spelled suicide to the police. I went to that flat and waited. I went alone, because the police were all through with a ‘suicide.’ My object was to kill the man who had murdered my brother, if he should come back to the murder scene. But finally you and your friends came down in a plane, and then a lot of other men—”

“So, to ingratiate yourself with the gang, you tried to turn us over to them?” said Benson.

“Yes. And it worked. Even if you got away. I told them I was sent by their superior—not knowing who this superior of theirs might be. And it worked. They took me as one of them. Then my plans were changed. I knew if one of a gang like this had killed my brother, it was simply at the orders of a higher-up. I meant to get that higher-up. I came east with the gang, worked with them, all to the end of learning that this man”—she stared at Rann—“was the superior in question. I got him here to kill him, after taking him from your colossal friend in a cab. But he got my gun and held me prisoner. Just the same, I’d have gotten him, if you hadn’t killed—”

“He isn’t dead,” said The Avenger.

“Not— But you shot him! In the head!”

“I creased him,” said Benson. “A shot on the top of the skull, placed just right, will knock a man out with its glancing blow; but it will not kill him.”

“Then give me that gun—” stormed Diana, reaching for Mike.

She was stopped first by the icy glitter of refusal in Benson’s pale eyes, and second by the sound of steps.

The steps came from outside, on the stairs.

Like a gray flash, The Avenger was at the door. He peered out the hole made when the lock was burned out.

The man who made the sounds was one of those who had attacked Singer and himself at the abandoned factory after Singer’s men had left.

Softly, silently, Benson slid the inner bolt on the door. The man was knocking before he had finished the move. He tried the door, knocked again and finally left.

The girl drew a deep breath. She had looked through the hole over Benson’s shoulder.

“I’m glad he left,” she whispered. “That’s one of the crew working for the Henderlin crowd. They’re all killers.”

Benson had his tiny radio out, and was signaling Bleek Street.

“Smitty? You and Josh and Mac come here at once. The loft building, Smitty, where you trailed Rann. No, don’t take the secret exit. Come right out on the street. The armored sedan will keep the bullets of that gang outside from you. Come at once!”

He turned back to the girl.

“How do you know about the coal and oil crowd?”

“I trailed Rann to the Henderlin place several times, after I’d found out he was the man I wanted. I never could get quite near enough to use my gun. Or rather, my brother’s gun. I almost got him the day he killed the vice president, and the secretary. And you almost got me! I thought I might get him the night I drove the Henderlin detective to Bleek Street to lead your men to that house in New Jersey. Instead, some other man named Xisco showed up and killed the detective.”

“That was your car my men heard drive off, then.”

“I guess so.”

“After that?” said Benson, cold eyes like stainless steel chips in his paralyzed face.

“I found Rann again. He was apparently playing both Lorens Singer and the Henderlin Corp. I just watched both places till I picked up his trail. But the gang was getting suspicious. To allay that suspicion, I lured you to the warehouse for them. You were just another person to me. I didn’t care much what happened to you if I could get the man who got my brother.”

Benson looked at the black hair and eyes.

“Indian blood?” he said.

“Yes,” was her proud reply. “I— Oh! Stop him!”

Rann had come to. Suddenly he was on his feet and racing for the door. But The Avenger had caught the slight difference in breathing a minute ago and was ready. He simply put his foot out. Rann smashed to the floor again, sat up rubbing his shoulder.

And at the door, a stealthy finger was poking like a small snake through the hole where the lock had been burned out. The finger felt inquiringly for the inside bolt The Avenger had slid.

But the man with the white hair and deadly, pale eyes had turned his back by then, so that the finger wasn’t in his range of vision!

CHAPTER XVIII

Finger Of Doom!

“For a man who has murdered so many of his fellows,” said Benson, staring at the little fellow who sat on the floor and rubbed his shoulder, “you don’t look very impressive. Yet you’ve certainly earned the chair. Veck, Wencilau, Sodolow, the Henderlin detective, the vice president of Henderlin Corp. and his secretary—”

“What are you talking about? You’re crazy!”

“You’re the laboratory worker who killed the four Polish scientists, disguised as a different person each time. One of the disguises carried with it the name Xisco. Your ears give you away. There are other Bertillon measurements besides the ones for ears. Didn’t you know that? You shouldn’t have pinned such faith on four completely different sets of ears. The very coincidence of four small men with extremely distinctive ears gave you away.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

At the door, the questing finger came within a quarter of an inch of finding the bolt, missed, explored again. The Avenger, pale eyes flaring at Rann, went on.

“Four of Poland’s greatest scientists discovered a new product. A ‘life-saving drug,’ as Singer said? Hardly! It was bigger than that. They discovered a substance which would make fuel out of water. Some substance which would break down the hydrogen and oxygen of H_2O and make them explosive. Ordinary water! They would be the world’s greatest benefactors, producing light and heat and power almost for nothing. They came to America for money, and they got a promise of it from a wealthy New Yorker. But the man wanted to exploit humanity by charging high prices, and they wanted to benefit humanity by very cheap ones. Because he wouldn’t change his mind, they simply went off again and hid.”

Rann rubbed his shoulder and sneered. There was an odd air of triumph in his eyes.

“You came along. Disguised four ways, you had served as helper for each of the four men. You knew the share each had in the final product. You said you could produce it—and would sell the secret for a big price. But first, the four originators had to die. While they lived, they could always undercut the market by manufacturing the stuff themselves. So you murdered them!”

“I seem to remember something about indigestion in the death of each,” said Rann silkily.

“Yes. Caused by the very product they had invented. Water, made explosive by the chemical, became a poison as well as a fuel. You alone, knew the four scientists. You saw to it that some substance they took into their systems contained some of the chemical, of which you had a small supply. Tested for poison, the substances showed negative, because the chemical by itself isn’t poisonous. But combined with a glass of water, or wine, it became highly explosive in a man’s stomach. He dies in convulsions. If he chances to be smoking at the time, the fumes ignite and he breathes flame. And yet so volatile is the fuel that it loses all its combustive properties when exposed to air. So stomach contents of the dead man showed no trace of what happened unless tightly corked the instant they were withdrawn—as I corked the sample from Sodolow’s stomach, and as the Montreal police evidently did with Veck.”

The finger in the lock hole touched the bolt.

“You’re mad,” said Rann, voice tinny with excitement. He could see the finger even though Benson could not. “The discovery has nothing to do with fuel—”

“A car tested and destroyed. A plane tested and destroyed. A house heated and lighted with a pipe running to the clear water of an ordinary creek. It was obvious enough. The things that happened at the house told a lot about you, by the way, Xisco, Rann, whatever your name reaily is.

“You took your secret to Singer. You also took it to the Henderlin group. They promptly shut down—no use producing oil and coal when water might come in as universal fuel. They also tried to eliminate Singer. Till the end, you played them both. Meanwhile, you proved the value of the chemical to both. One proof was the house. At that time the Henderlin group thought you’d definitely rejected their offer. They wanted the discovery publicized and investigated. They couldn’t go to the police; so they sent a man to lead my group to it. They went—and then you decided to switch to the Henderlin interests. You raced there, killed the detective and burned the house.”

There was a click as the door bolt completed its opening, and a heavy voice spoke as the door snapped open.

“Quite interesting, Mr. Benson,” the voice said. “So interesting that I think it very fortunate you will not be left alive much longer.”

“Singer—” cried Diana, whirling as Benson did.

But it wasn’t Singer.

The man standing in the doorway with hands unexpectedly empty of all weapons, had heavy eyebrows, like little cupolas, a too-heavy jaw and a mole on the left side of his nose.

“My heavens, it’s Henderlin,” whispered the girl. “But Henderlin is dead—”

“Not in the bathtub when it exploded,” said Benson, eyes like ice in a polar dawn. “Rann went to kill him, when Singer guessed Henderlin was behind the wreck of his home. And it was then that Rann finally decided to throw in with Henderlin. A terrific price must have been offered. Rann helped Henderlin fake his own death; then he went to the New Jersey house. But he still, for the sake of appearances and to keep Henderlin informed, hung around Singer. And he trailed any Henderlin men he saw approaching Singer, to be sure he wasn’t double-crossed.”

“Quite fortunate that you won’t live much longer,” murmured Henderlin. “You know too much. Or can guess—which is just as bad.”

The Avenger’s eyes were bits of ice. His face was as expressionless as the frozen wastes of Antarctica.

“Too bad you weren’t astute enough to know that Rann did not know the final and completed process, Henderlin,” he said.

That was a bomb in the tense air. It jolted both Rann and Henderlin. They snarled together.

“You’re mad!”

“In the bottom of the vat in which was blended the work of the four men,” said Benson, “there was a certain amount of some unspecified chemical—before the four ingredients were mixed! You didn’t know that, did you?”

Rann and Henderlin stared at each other with slack jaws. Then Henderlin snorted:

“Rubbish! Rann does know the completed process and he and I will be the richest men on earth when you’re dead.”

“So?” said Benson softly. “And why don’t you kill me, Henderlin?”

“I ordered the removal of the four scientists, and of anyone interfering with the tests of the car and the plane,” said Henderlin. Diana cried out in quick fury at that. The coal and oil baron didn’t even look at her. “But I do not kill myself, Benson. Thus the electric chair will never get me. I—”

There was suddenly pandemonium on the stairs. The sound of blows and shots.

“What’s happening?” yelled Rann, paling. “Henderlin—trouble—”

The door snapped open and Josh, Smitty and Mac leaped in. Josh had a puffed eye that would have showed black around it. Mac had a lump on his jaw. Smitty was unmarred but ripped of coat and collar.

“Bunch of eggs on the stairs tried to stop us,” Smitty said. “So here we are. We’d better get out—”

Mac’s yell cut across his words. Mac was staring at Henderlin with popping eyes.

“Whoosh! It’s a ghost we have wi’ us! That mon’s dead—”

“I told you there was trouble,” wailed Rann to Henderlin. “Benson’s won—”

And Henderlin smiled.

“Oh, no! He hasn’t won. The men on the stairs had orders to let these three through.”

“They—what?”

“I had an idea Benson might send for his helpers,” said Henderlin. “So when a man of mine, warned by the hole in the door where a lock should be, reported to me, I got all the others and brought them here with me. They’re on the stairs now. And in here are the four men who are all that stands between us and the biggest fortune on earth.”

His eyes, under the cupola eyebrows, rayed over Mac and Josh and Smitty and Benson.

“You are going to call those men in to shoot us down?” said The Avenger evenly.

There were scuffing sounds and subdued steps in the hall.

“I am,” said Henderlin, quite calmly. “Lives are cheap when a billion dollars is at stake.”

“I wouldn’t call them if I were you,” said Benson.

Henderlin stared, then laughed.

“Every super-murderer I’ve encountered,” said The Avenger, eyes as cold as glacier ice, “has destroyed himself when thinking to destroy me. I would advise you to bolt that door and keep everyone out.”

“Do you think I’m a child?” jeered Henderlin.

He raised his voice in triumphant command. “You—out there in the hall—come in and get them!”

Thirteen men came into the room. Eleven had automatics in their hands. The other two had submachine guns.

“Make sure of all four of them,” Henderlin said. “And take the girl, too—”

His voice died as if it had been stuck back down his throat. He stared at the men, and the vein in his forehead pulsed like a living thing.

The two machine guns were trained on him. Not on the other four.

This was the wrong gang. These weren’t Henderlin’s men; these were Singer’s men!

“Help!” croaked Henderlin. It was meant for a shout. It came out as a whisper. Then the vast chatter of the machine guns roared out.

They roared only toward Henderlin. But Rann, crazed with fear, leaped the wrong way, and the slugs sliced into him, too.

Benson and the rest were next. They knew that even as Henderlin and Rann were falling. The gang couldn’t leave them alive as witnesses, even if they’d wanted to.

The Avenger’s aides moved with the prompt and wordless efficiency that made them the greatest little fighting unit on earth.

They scattered.

Smitty leaped for the machine gunners, calmly pouring more lead into the dead men. The Avenger shot three times—the three slugs left in Mike’s tiny cylinder. Then he began clubbing, leaping from side to side like a shifting gray shadow.

Mac took a man with a bony right fist just as a bullet from the man’s gun creased his outstanding left ear.

Two of the men fired point-blank at Josh, from opposite sides, and got each other in the stomach and throat instead, as the Negro danced to the right and swiftly crouched.

Smitty had the two machine gunners, with a neck in each vast paw. They were jabbing at him with the guns, letting off short bursts of slugs when they thought the line was right, missing each time by a scant inch.

The Avenger ducked, bored in as a bullet went over his head. The room was a shambles, with the gang already half down, and the rest unable to fire freely for fear of killing each other—as two men already had.

Benson got a red-headed killer with a blow that must have broken his jaw.

Then it was suddenly over.

There had been a sound like two ripe melons hitting. That was when Smitty knocked the heads of the two machine gunners together. He stood, with one of their deadly guns in his big paws, weaving the muzzle slowly from side to side.

“It’s all up,” he bellowed. “Unless some of you want a taste—”

One man shot at the giant. And then he went down with six machine gun slugs through his thigh. The rest let their guns drop.

“Take them to the hall, Smitty,” said Benson. His dead, white face, expressionless even at this moment, was something from which the cowed gangsters shrank. His eyes were unholy, unhuman, in their colorless, cold ferocity. “You will find others there—the men Henderlin thought would come in when he called.”

In Smitty’s eyes a light dawned.

“That’s why you wanted us to leave Bleek Street openly! So this gang would trail us here—and tangle with the other—summoned by the guy who was tipped off by the hole burned in the door!”

“That’s right,” said Benson. “Fourteen men against eight—thirteen, taking out the one I hit on Bleek Street. The scuffling in the hall and on the stairs a while ago was when thirteen men sneaked up and slugged eight who had their backs turned, waiting for the call Henderlin gave.”

The girl with the black eyes, which were softer and more beautiful now stared at the white, still face with a look of awe.

“You worked it out that way!” she breathed. “You planned, like a chess player with death as the queen, to have that man destroy himself when he called for men to come and destroy you.”

Benson shrugged, eyes pale holes in his white face.

“I do not kill, myself. So I make the men I fight annihilate themselves. It saves the State the cost of fighting great wealth; yet it puts no blood on my soul.”

Smitty had the men herded to the stairs by now. The others, a few dead, the rest with cracked heads, were out there as The Avenger had predicted. Smitty felt as if ice were being drawn up and down his backbone. Long as he had worked for Benson, much as he esteemed him, The Avenger’s uncanny mastery over men and events was more than the giant could ever accustom himself to.

Benson stared at Henderlin’s corpse.

“A billion dollars! It was enough to make Henderlin forget everything else on earth—including his wife, killed in that faked-up explosion. Enough to make Singer quite willing to have done as much, save that Rann gave his enemy the upper hand. Enough for Rann to be a murdering monster for whom the chair was too good.”

He shook his head a little.

“What Rann knew, plus the secret chemical in the bottoms of the vats in Warsaw, could turn water into explosive fuel. With Rann’s death, a great invention dies. Light, heat, power, from water! The loss is a colossal defeat for mankind.”

Diana eyed him with a look that many women wore when they finally came to know this man a little. A baffled but breathless look.

“It is a great triumph for you, though,” she said. “You have brought to justice a man too powerful for any man-made laws to convict. And you saw the end of the murderer, Rann, too. A great victory, Mr. Benson.”

But The Avenger said nothing. It was doubtful if he heard her. Certainly in his pale, icy eyes there was no look of triumph.

No victory over the great crime syndicates he fought could bring him a sense of triumph. There was no room in his life for anything but more crime fighting—and more—till at last some super-killer should defeat him at his own game.

Meanwhile he would continue to be—The Avenger!

THE END

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

THE FLAME BREATHERS

CHAPTER I Dreadful Night

CHAPTER II Task for Justice, Inc.

CHAPTER III The Dying Man

CHAPTER IV Demon Speed

CHAPTER V The Girl and the Gun

CHAPTER VI Wrecked Test Car

CHAPTER VII The Fourth Pole

CHAPTER VIII Nitro on Tap!

CHAPTER IX The Curious House

CHAPTER X Bath of Fire

CHAPTER XI Puzzle Pieces

CHAPTER XII Company Shutdown

CHAPTER XIII Rust-Red Lure

CHAPTER XIV S O S—Stay Away!

CHAPTER XV Singer and Death!

CHAPTER XVI The Avenger Unmasked

CHAPTER XVII The Secret Process

CHAPTER XVIII Finger Of Doom!