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

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

FIRST PRINTING: APRIL, 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: 0-446-74-134-5

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

RIVER OF ICE

CHAPTER I: Gale!

CHAPTER II: River of Ice

CHAPTER III: Priceless Manuscript

CHAPTER IV: The Far Cry

CHAPTER V: Sign of the Skull

CHAPTER VI: Falling Death!

CHAPTER VII: The Alibi

CHAPTER VIII: Icy Prison

CHAPTER IX: Four Into Three

CHAPTER X: Death’s Hammer

CHAPTER XI: Disaster Calls

CHAPTER XII: Mysterious Cauldron

CHAPTER XIII: The Missing Needle

CHAPTER XIV: Forced Landing

CHAPTER XV: Master and Slave

CHAPTER XVI: Master of Mastodons

CHAPTER XVII: End of the Line

CHAPTER XVIII: Death For All

RIVER OF ICE

CHAPTER I

Gale!

The three Indians were afraid. The one with the flat face and the pointed head kept sniffing around like an animal trying to catch a death scent.

The big one with the scar under his left ear was rolling his eyes and jumping whenever a twig cracked in the virgin fir forest that surrounded the group.

The third, a man so lined with age that he looked like a nut-brown monkey, yet with all a monkey’s lithe activity in spite of his years, was chattering something to the other two.

Indians don’t show fear. That is the legend, at least. They are stolid, concealing all their emotions. Maybe so. But these Indians weren’t concealing their emotions! They were scared stiff, and they showed it very plainly.

“What do you suppose it is?” said Brent Waller. Brent was a husky fellow in his middle twenties. He had black hair and snapping black eyes, and thick pads of fur on the backs of his fingers and hands. Dressed in high boots, mackinaw and woolen shirt, he looked like a chap who could take care of himself. Yet he found himself being a little uneasy too with Chinooks chattering around like a trio of frightened children.

“I can’t even guess what ails them,” answered his sister, Lini Waller. Lini was a very attractive brunette, on the small side, with a firm, round chin that hinted that she too could take care of herself. In most cases, anyway. Of course, if something was going to threaten them that had even the Indians buffaloed . . .

She and Brent were north in British Columbia, on the shore of the Pacific. They were scores of miles from any human being, in virgin groves of trees that towered over them like skyscrapers. They had come up here primarily on a vacation, but also to look over the timber situation. Brent worked for a lumber company and was a valued man.

The oldest of the three Indians, the little dried-up monkey of a man, chattered harder and grabbed the biggest Indian by the arm. He made gestures seeming to say: “Let’s get out of here.”

“I don’t understand this at all,” said Brent Waller to his sister. “It’s certainly quiet and peaceful enough.” It was quiet enough, surely. At the moment not even a breeze blew. The late sun sank as if into a sound-deadening blanket of fleecy cotton. High up, in the tips of the trees, there was a sort of constant moan, as a slight wind stirred through the giant firs.

“The sunset looks red enough for a good day tomorrow,” shrugged Lini. She was cute in pants and boots.

“And yet,” said Brent somberly, “there is something wrong, somewhere. There’s not one sign of it that you can put your finger on, but I smell a storm.”

“Maybe that’s what the Chinooks are worried about,” nodded Lini.

At that moment the biggest of the three came toward the brother and sister. Behind him trailed the monkeylike little old man and the fellow with the flat face and the pointed head. The big Indian had a few words of English. Through him, Brent had conducted the preparations necessary to retain the three as guides for their trip. “We go,” said the big Indian.

Not much trouble in understanding that. But its clarity didn’t make the brother and sister feel any better. “Go?” snapped Brent. “But our trip isn’t half done. We need you.”

“We go!” repeated the Indian, looking north, south, east and west, as if calling on all the spirits to back him up.

“Go where?” asked Lini, not unreasonably.

The Indian pointed. The direction of his none-too-clean index finger was south and east. Vaguely, it was pointing toward an Indian settlement about fifty miles down the coast and inland, the last sign of human habitation they’d seen.

“Why do you want to go?” demanded Brent. “Aren’t we paying you enough?”

“Bad danger here,” said the Indian. And the other two, sensing the meaning in spite of their lack of English, nodded vigorously.

“What danger?”

The big Indian rolled his shoulders uneasily.

“You mean, you think there’s a storm coming?” said Brent, feeling pretty important that he had sensed a weather change even before these natives had. But he was disillusioned by the response.

“Oh, storm,” said the Indian scornfully. “Sure, storm. Big storm he come. But we not care storm.”

“Hang it, what is the matter then?” said Brent in exasperation.

“Bad danger.” Lini and Brent stared at each other, baffled. From their right, a little up the coast, came a chill, dank breath like a breeze from the tomb. A small glacier was up there. It was tiny as glaciers go; but even a tiny glacier holds millions of tons of ice and can throw out a lot of cold air.

“Is it the river of ice you fear?” said Lini, inclining her pretty head toward the source of the tomblike chill.

The Indian showed indifference again. “No, not that.” The aged Indian was trying to break through the barrier of language. He screwed his face up hideously, half-raised his arms, and called: “Whooo. Whooo!”

“Owls?” said Brent politely.

“Spirits,” said the big Indian. There was a tone of triumph about it. He had evidently been trying a long time for that word. “Bad spirit. Old, old spirits.”

“He’s n-u-t-s,” said Lini impatiently, spelling it out to keep the meaning from Indian ears.

“Nevertheless, he’s in earnest,” said Brent.

“You really mean to go and leave us stranded up here?” Lini demanded angrily.

The Indian got the drift, if not the words. He nodded vigorously. Nothing, it appeared, would change him.

Brent looked at his sister. She was as good as a man in the woods. “Well?” he said.

“Well, yourself,” sniffed Lini.

“These duffers have some supernatural fear on the things they call their minds,” he said. “They’re going to beat it, all right. Do we get out too?”

“No!” said Lini. “We’re not children, and we’re not tenderfeet. We can get along by ourselves. Or, if we can’t, we can easily find our way back to that last Indian settlement. Let them go.”

Brent turned back to the Chinooks. “Make camp,” he said. “You can go in the morning if you like.”

The Indians grunted. The three of them efficiently and swiftly made camp. They pitched the tent, and Brent noticed that they secured it extra tightly. They started a fire. And then, suddenly, they were gone! Just like that. At one moment they were flitting around like red-brown gnomes among the giant tree trunks. Then there wasn’t anything flitting any more. “The dirty dogs,” said Lini indignantly.

Brent shook his head. “According to their principles, they were pretty fair about it. They fixed us up comfortably before they blew. Why do you suppose they were so scared? That flat-faced guy was positively green.”

“ ‘Old spirits,’ ” Lini thoughtfully repeated the words of the big Chinook. “Does that mean the spirits of old men? Or of a race that is old? Or just spirits themselves that have gotten old?”

“I think it’s the latter,” said Brent, laughing. “Spirits that have gotten old and maybe a little mildewed around the edges. They’re like children, these Chinooks—afraid of shadows.”

Lini cooked a camp meal. They had plenty of flour and salt and the rest they could get from the woods and ocean. The moaning they had heard in the treetops grew louder. And the motion of the air began to penetrate lower, so that gusts of wind kicked against the embers of their fire. “Sleep with your boots on,” said Brent. “There is a storm coming, all right. Just a squall, I think. But these short ones can be violent up here.”

It hit them about eleven o’clock and there was no sleeping after that. It was the heaviest wind Brent had ever experienced in the Northwest. It made mountains on the ocean so that they could hear the pound of the surf like a constant roaring in their ears. It bent the great fir trees like a child’s bow. The tent held, thanks to the extra precautions of the Indians. But the flapping would have ruined slumber even if the noisy majesty of the storm had not.

Along about midnight there was a sound that overtopped all the rest. And was different from all the rest. There was a gigantic boom, as if a hundred sixteen-inch guns had been fired in exact unison. Then there was a bellow like that of a million bulls. And finally a mighty spouting sound, as if about a square mile of ocean floor had risen from the bottom, looked around and sunk in a welter of tidal waves again. Brent looked toward Lini. He couldn’t see her, couldn’t see his hand before his face. “Earthquake?” he shouted above the wind.

“I don’t think so, or we’d have felt it,” she shouted back. “Landslide?”

“Maybe. Or maybe the glacier.”

In the morning, tired but otherwise unharmed, they looked on a wind-scoured world. Many of the trees were down. Scarred logs were washed a hundred feet above normal water level on the shore. They went to the glacier as soon as they’d eaten. It was a pretty impressive sight—a river of broken glass penned between two high hill ranges and opening onto the ocean. The two saw a field of great ice lumps over the ocean’s surface for what seemed miles. And across the foot of the glacier, there was a sharp cliff, as if someone had sliced the ice river off about four hundred yards from shore with a great knife.

“That was it,” nodded Brent. “A chunk of ice bigger than an ocean liner—bigger than fifty ocean liners—broke off in the gate— Hey! That’s funny.” Lini followed the direction of his gaze, her own brown eyes looking puzzled.

The height of the wall of ice at the foot of the glacier was a good twenty stories. Under it, as if it had been squeezed flat during countless centuries by the great weight, was a low cliff of black rock. “I’ll bet it’s the first time that rock has seen the light of day for a good many thousands of years,” Lini said. “The ice would normally come far over it. How square that one center part is, Brent.”

Brent Waller nodded. It was that squareness which had attracted his eyes too. Part of the low cliff was as smooth and flat as if hewed that way by human hands. They went to it. As they approached the low cliff, they instinctively cowered and looked up at the ice wall. The glacier’s foot seemed actually to lean over them a little, so sheer was the solid ice mass. It looked as if it would fall on them if they breathed hard! But the thing in the center of the flat section of the rock took their minds off the ice. “Looks like a door,” said Brent.

“It is a door!” gasped Lini. “Who would cut a door in there—in a place no man could get to for hundreds and hundreds of years?”

“Maybe the cliff hasn’t been buried as long as we thought,” said Brent. But both of them knew otherwise. They were sure that this cliff had not been exposed to daylight since long before the most ancient memory of tribal man. Yet what they were looking at was undeniably a door!

The cliff was perhaps twenty feet high, stretching from one of the glacier-confining hills to the other. And in the center, where the face of the cliff had been cut so that it was as smooth as a brick wall, was the eight-by-five slab, obviously separate from the surrounding rock.

A door—but with no convenient doorknob on it. “How would it open?” mused Lini.

“Woman’s curiosity,” said Brent, jeeringly, yet with an undertone of uneasiness. “Who would want to open it? What could it open on?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out,” said Lini. She bent close to the slab, set flush with the smooth black cliff. With sharp, young eyes she went over it. “Here’s a spot that’s smoothed inward, as if a lot of fingers had rubbed at it,” she announced. She pressed hard. Nothing happened.

“Silly,” said Brent. “Expecting some kind of secret spring when this door couldn’t have been built by any but ancient Indians without even Stone-Age knowledge—” He stopped. The door was swinging on a central pivot. Lini screamed. She had pressed at that smoothed spot with her right hand, and then her foot had slipped so that her left hand thrust, for support, against a section of the slab in about the same location on the left side. “Brent!” She was falling inward through the opening. Her left hand clutched at the edge of the door, slipped from it.

“Brent!” She banged her head. And it was lights out!

CHAPTER II

River of Ice

Lini Waller recovered quickly. She had only fallen on level rock floor, and her right arm had partly broken the fall. There was an egg on her forehead, but that was all. She sat up, rubbing the bump, and looked into her brother’s frightened eyes. “I’m all right,” she said. “Where are we? This looks strange. Oh, we’re behind the door!”

“Behind the door,” nodded Brent. “And all there seem to be in here are a lot of other doors. I can’t figure it out.”

Rubbing her head, Lini looked around. They were in a cave about forty feet across, and quite low. Set at widely spaced intervals around the cave were doors just like the outer one through which she had fallen: heavy rock slabs set flush with the rock around them. And that was all. The cave was empty.

A very peculiar thing suddenly struck Lini’s consciousness. “Why, Brent!” she gasped. “It ought to be dark in here! And it’s not. There’s just the one opening made by that door swung open on a center pin. We shouldn’t be able to see ten feet away. Yet we can see this whole big place as if it were clear daylight all the way back!”

“By heavens, we can!” said Brent. “We can. That is funny, Lini.” They began looking for the source of the light. It simply couldn’t be daylight coming in from the comparatively small door. And they noticed at regular intervals around the walls that the light was a little brighter. Brent went to the nearest bright spot. Up above his head there was a rock shelf. Light streamed up and out from this. He reached high, and felt. The ledge was hollowed out into a deep niche and the source of the light was down in that. “For the love of Pete!” said Brent excitedly. “If this isn’t indirect lighting, I’ll eat the glacier over our heads!”

“You mean electric lights?” said Lini, incredulously.

“No, certainly not. How could there be electric lights in a place like— Here, give me a knee. I’ll hang onto the rock ledge so you won’t have my whole weight.” Lini knelt on one shapely knee, with the other leg out. Brent stood on it, holding most of his weight with his hands hooked over the ledge. He could see into the niche now. He continued to look as puzzled as before. “There’s something here like a glass rod,” he said. “It’s fiery white, gives off a sort of fluorescent glow. No, it’s not glass; it looks like fused quartz.”

“Any wires or anything like that to it?” asked Lini.

“Not a thing. There’s just the rod.” Brent touched it with a fast stab of his finger, then laid his whole hand on it. “There’s no heat in it. I never saw anything like it in my life.”

Lini was losing interest in the flaming white rod. “Come down, Brent. I want to look behind these other doors.”

“Think that’s wise?” said Brent, stepping down.

Lini got to her feet. “Why wouldn’t it be wise?” she demanded.

“There might be danger behind the doors.”

“Pooh! This cave layout has been buried under ice for thousands of years. What could be dangerous down here?”

Brent shrugged. He didn’t know. And while he was pondering it, Lini went to the first of the doors. There were, he counted, seven of them.

“I’ll bet they all open the same way the outside door opened,” said Lini, looking for worn spots where the press of many fingers had hollowed hard stone. “Yes! See?” The door opened as she pressed a spot on the right and another on the left of the slab.

“We ought to have flashlights,” mumbled Brent, forgetting about the strange light in this cave which was a sort of anteroom for the others. A flashlight wasn’t necessary. The opening door revealed another cavern, as well lighted as the previous one. And the light shone down on—

“Brent! Look! Gold! We’re rich!” At a glance the yellow gleam of the stacks of metal objects was unmistakable. But in a moment the two saw that none but vandals would ever utilize this metal for the gold itself. For the shapes into which it was molded and bent and hammered were too rare. There were golden masks of hideous but strangely lifelike faces. There were golden bells, golden ornaments, and a host of golden statues. There must have been a ton of the stuff.

But more remarkable than the quantity was the art with which it had been worked. “It’s Indian in type,” said Brent thoughtfully. “But the finest work I’ve ever seen. There’s culture showing in this work, Lini.”

The girl nodded. “But whose culture? We know something of Indian history in these parts. There has never been a tribe able to turn out stuff as fine as this. And remember, that river of ice over our heads has hidden this for a long, long time.”

They were weighted down by the deepening conviction of antiquity. Of aeons unguessable. Then Lini screamed. But it wasn’t at anything so intangible as thoughts of time. “Brent! A man!” Brent had seen the thing almost as soon as his sister had.

Off in a corner of the treasure cave was a seated figure. There was a spear in its hands, and an elaborate headdress, looking vaguely Egyptian, was on its head. It was mummified, ancient. But it seemed to keep vigil there. A sentry, dead for no one knew how many thousands of years, holding its spear and defying anyone to touch the gold.

They crept closer to the thing. The features of the dead face were Mongoloid, with a hint of the Negro race as well. There was a majesty about the intelligent spread of forehead over the sunken eye sockets. The embalming process had been marvelous, aided by the frigid preserving power of the glacier overhead. The body was only a little shrunken. “He’s alive!” Lini cried suddenly, leaping back.

“Nonsense,” said Brent. But his own tone was shaken. It certainly looked as if that spear had moved a little. But that of course was impossible. Could any embalmed thing, thousands of years old, be alive? “Let’s see what’s in the other caves,” Brent said.

Actually, over half of his desire to look into the other six caves opening off the central one consisted of a tremendous urge to get away from that grim, seated figure. But the two found that they weren’t getting away from death by leaving this cave. In the next one were piles of what at first seemed to be parchment, bound into volumes as if done by an expert bookmaker day before yesterday. But when they investigated, they found the parchment to be thin, wonderfully tough and pliant sheets of some hide. “This is their library,” said Lini. She almost whispered it. And as she did, she stared at the far corner of this second cavern.

In here was a long-dead, seated figure too! It held a spear, and seemed to stare at them from eyeless sockets, cursing them for disturbing this tomb. A tomb, all right. More and more it became apparent just what this was.

The tomb of a whole race, a race that had died out far back in the mists of the ages. This room was indeed their library. There were records in here that must have described every activity that long vanished tribe indulged in, such was the number of stored “books.”

The third room was turned over to implements which Brent and Lini soon figured out. They were agricultural implements; and they indicated a race greatly superior to any the Wallers knew of among the Indians. More advanced even than the Aztecs or Incas; people who had developed rough farm machinery to do the work of reapers and harrows and combines. And from a corner, gaunt and grim, a sentry peered from eyeless sockets, while dead hands clasped a smooth and polished gold-pointed spear.

In the fourth cavern were other machines. These were industrial—for weaving, foundry work, woodworking and pottery. And again they showed a culture far exceeding anything known on the American continent in prehistoric times.

The fifth cave held garments and costumes, all preserved perfectly by the glacial ice above. The sixth and seventh caves were different.

In the sixth cavern was just one machine. But it was an object so big that it filled the cave: a complicated looking device of the fused-quartz rods—or whatever they were—only without light flooding from them. Then there was a central cauldron, in the bottom of which were more of the glassy rods that were bent into coils. Seated so that he seemed to be looking over the rim of the cauldron was the inevitable sentry.

The seventh cave took them right off their feet. It had a higher ceiling than any of the others. And yet, lofty as it was, the thing it housed almost scraped the roof. “An elephant!” gasped Lini.

But Brent shook his head soberly. This was no elephant. It made an elephant look like a pigmy. The great bulk, the tremendous, downcurving tusks, the flattish head and oversized ears . . . “It’s a mastodon,” said Brent, in awe. It was. As perfectly kept as if it had died yesterday and had been set up in here. Almost under its mighty trunk, sat the dead guard whose post was this seventh cave.

Around the rock walls of this place were painted pictures in a continuous frieze. “It shows them hunting,” said Lini, after a look.

“And how they hunted!” exclaimed Brent. The strip of pictures showed men with features like those of the ancient sentries, going after animals, the likes of which modern man has never seen. And it showed them mounted on mastodons. As men now ride horses to hunt the fox, according to these breathtaking pictures, the men of this ancient race rode mastodons to hunt the boar, the elk, and the saber-tooth tiger. And as there is now a master of hounds, that race had a master of mastodons. And it didn’t take much imagination and investigation to decide that the master of mastodons was also headman of the tribe.

“A little dictatorship even then,” observed Brent, looking at pictures showing the master directing the others in various hunting activities and, also, as the end of the frieze indicated, in a strange kind of worship.

“You know something?” whispered Lini. “I think this goes back even beyond the last ice age.”

“Don’t be foolish,” remonstrated Brent. “That was fifty thousand years ago. How could things last for fifty thousand years?”

“Things—even bodies like those of the sentries and the mastodon—could last for fifty million years, covered with ice all the time. Yes, I’ll bet the race that left this goes back before the ice age!”

Brent didn’t think so. But he went on with the fantasy. “And maybe they saw their doom coming,” he said, “and left this stuff here for the future to find. You know, we have done the same thing. It’s some university in Carolina, isn’t it, that has buried a lot of stuff to tell future ages what we were like? You know, one of everything—books on metal pages, drawings of skyscrapers, all the rest.”

“I actually think that’s what this is all about!” said Lini. “Think of it, Brent!”

“There’s one thing I’m thinking of even more,” said Brent promptly. “That is the value of all this to us. We have something here that we could sell for millions of dollars to a museum or to some foundation in New York.”

Lini nodded. Both of them were dazed by the magnitude of what they had found behind the seven doors. “We’ll have to act on it fast,” she said. “The glacier is constantly inching along over the cliff outside. Only a few inches might be enough to overbalance that two-hundred-foot ice wall so that some of it would crack down and bury this thing for another fifty thousand years.”

“Right,” said Brent. “We have to act fast. Yet we must guard it too. I’ll stay here and do that. You go to New York as fast as you can make it, with a sample of something to prove your story. Arrange to sell all this stuff.”

“Brent! You can’t stay here!” Lini looked at the legs of the mastodon, like gnarled and wrinkled tree trunks. Above them flooded the queer white light from the mysterious rods that looked like fused quartz. And over all presided ancient death, with one of his mummified minions as guard in each cave. “You’d go crazy in here!”

“Not with the thought of a couple of million dollars to keep me company,” said Brent. “Go along. You can find that last Indian settlement and get a guide there to hurry you to the railroad. Then down to Vancouver, and you can move fast from there on in.”

“You’d freeze—”

Brent pointed to a gorgeous fur costume. The pictures on the wall showed that this was the traditional costume of the master of mastodons. “I’ll wear that,” he said, “or one of the fur gowns in the wardrobe cave. I’ll be all right.”

“It’ll be a month, at least, before I can get back here with a boat and people to transport the things from the caves. In that time, the ice outside might fall and bury you alive.”

“I’ll have to take that chance,” said Brent. “Anyway, I can stay outside a lot at night, when no one can see me and get curious as to what’s keeping me hanging around here. Go on, Lini, and good luck.”

So Lini left, with many a backward glance at the sheer wall of ice towering up above the one way out for Brent. So many forms of danger threatening her brother . . . Intelligent as she was, it didn’t occur to her then to think that she herself might travel in danger just as imminent wherever she went with her bizarre secret.

CHAPTER III

Priceless Manuscript

Most people have heard of the Wittwar Foundation. Toward the end of the last century Phineas Wittwar made countless millions in steel. He died in 1917, and his will directed that twenty million dollars be set aside for the purchase of ancient Americana: Indian relics, fossils of an even older period, everything pertaining to the North American continent from 1500 A.D. backward.

The twenty million dollars was still intact, with several more millions having accumulated in interest from the trust fund. The sum was handled by Frank Wittwar, Phineas Wittwar’s son. Frank Wittwar owned a big meatpacking company and was a large investor in public-utilities stocks.

The advisors and fellow directors of the board, which had been set up to administer the Foundation funds, were three shrewd businessmen—Mortimer Werner, Roland Mallory and James Conroy. The Foundation had its own offices on the top floor of the Kembridge Building, on Lexington Avenue in New York City.

About three weeks after Lini Waller had apprehensively left her brother at his dangerous guard post, the four men who directed the destinies of old Phineas Wittwar’s millions sat in the conference room of the Foundation’s office suite. They were looking at the sample Lini had left with Frank Wittwar four days before.

That sample was a marvelous thing. It was one of the bundles of records from the library cave. The four men, all expert at ancient documents, had been over it fifty times, searching for indications that it was a phony. And they had been able to find none.

“The incredible thing about it is its apparent age,” said Frank Wittwar. He was a stocky man of fifty-five, with a firm jaw, clear if rather hard gray eyes, and a habit of clearing his throat brusquely before speaking. “If it is what it seems to be—and we are all pretty well agreed on that point—it must be at least fifty thousand years old.”

“And that girl said there were caves full of stuff from the same era and produced by the same ancient race!” exclaimed Conroy, who was reddish-haired, heavy-featured, blue-eyed. “Seven caves full, to be exact. And she said that in one of the caves there was actually a mastodon—not just the fossilized bones—but a full-fleshed mastodon.”

“I can’t swallow that,” grunted Mallory, who was thin and stooped. He had dark, sharp eyes that bit through horn-rimmed glasses at a world he evidently regarded very pessimistically. “Mastodon, indeed! Seven caves full of stuff from the ice age! After all, now—there are limits.”

“There’s this book to prove it,” pointed out Werner, who was a rotund, smiling man with the appearance of a cherub—till you looked closely at his jaw, like a steel trap. “If that bundle of hide were preserved, why couldn’t other things have been preserved?” They were silent. There wasn’t any answer to that logic.

“Did you get a chance to decipher any of the picture writing?” asked Mallory, dark eyes gloomy behind his lenses.

Wittwar brusquely cleared his throat. “A very little,” he said. “As I told you, this bundle of manuscript has a key to the hieroglyphs on the first page. A language key. And the first thing said in the book is that in each of the other volumes there is also a language key. That is so that any one manuscript, found by itself, could be deciphered no matter what the language of the discoverer. This indicates that there are many other volumes, just as the girl says. A whole cave full of them. It also indicates that this ancient race did try to leave a record and a physical specimen of everything that touched their lives.”

“Fancy!” beamed Conroy, running thick fingers through his stiff, reddish hair. “The entire archives and culture of a race going back fifty thousand years! We should not hesitate, gentlemen. Someone else will buy this priceless store if we don’t.”

Werner nodded, steel trap of a jaw firm in his cherubic face. “We have been fooling with Indian relics going back, at the most, three thousand years. Now we have this ancient museum thrust at us—at least fifty thousand years old. I say grab it.”

Wittwar cleared his throat. “At the figure suggested, gentlemen?”

“Sure,” said Mallory.

Wittwar rubbed his hands together. “Two and a half million,” he said, frowning. “That’s more than my packing company makes net in two years.”

“This isn’t out of your packing company,” Mallory said. “It’s out of the Foundation funds. And we can easily afford it. Don’t try to be too shrewd with the girl. We might lose the thing.”

Wittwar pressed a bell. His secretary came in. “Is Miss Waller outside? Send her in, please.”

Lini Waller came into the conference room and looked at the four men.

Wittwar cleared his throat briskly. “We have decided that—as far as can be humanly judged—this bundle of thin hides you brought is indeed an ancient manuscript, and that there is probably a store of other relics such as you describe. Therefore, we have decided to meet your price. We shall place two and a half million dollars in escrow with any bank you care to name. The money will become yours the instant we enter the seven caves you mention and get the things ready to transport back to New York. Is that satisfactory?”

Lini sat down abruptly. She had known the things she had seen under the glacier were worth that. She had been sure she would get her price, huge as it was. But the definite statement that she had won left her weak for a moment. Two and a half million dollars! “That is q-quite satisfactory,” she said. “I’ll go with you and show you where the caverns—”

Wittwar’s secretary opened the door and poked her head in. Wittwar frowned. She wasn’t supposed to come unless rung for. At her words, however, his frown swiftly disappeared. For the secretary said, “He is here.”

“Oh!” said Wittwar. “Oh, yes! Splendid. Bring him right in.” He turned to Lini. “There is one final test which your sample manuscript will have to pass,” he said. “We are all fairly expert at judging such things. In addition, I have showed the bundle of skins to three museum heads. There is one authority on such matters who goes beyond us all. That is a man named Benson. Richard Henry Benson. If he O.K.s this, the deal is set.”

Lini nodded. And the door opened once more. A man came in at whom she found herself staring with profound awe. He was not a big man, yet there exuded from him an aura of tremendous power. He was obviously young, though his hair was snow-white. His face was equally white, utterly lifeless, like a death mask in white wax. His flaring gray eyes were so pale that they seemed to be colorless holes, set deep in his emotionless face.

He strode in with swift, flowing movements; and the four men, each wealthy and authoritative, treated him very respectfully indeed. He didn’t waste time in greeting them, merely nodded brusquely.

“Here is the object I spoke of over the phone, Mr. Benson,” said Wittwar. Benson’s pale, infallible eyes studied the bundle of hide. For about fifteen minutes he looked at it. The rest noted that he began by studying that first page, containing the language key. Then he turned to other pages and seemed, incredibly, to read them off almost as swiftly as if they were written in English. Evidently the one long glance at the symbol pictures had told him more than most language students could have learned in a week.

“This is interesting,” he said, closing the bundle, but with his steely forefinger holding a place. “This is evidently the record of surgery and medicine of the race that devised the manuscript. One surgical operation they performed, in particular, is unique.” The pale, deadly eyes swept the face of each, impersonally and swiftly. Yet, each felt an almost physical shock at the impact of the colorless gaze. “It tells how they made slaves—by a simple and quite devilish brain operation, robbing their victims of conscious will. Their captives in war and the malcontents of their own tribe were treated in this way and made into robots.”

He opened the page he had kept with his finger. The rest looked at it. There was a drawing and diagram of a skull on that page. At a point roughly halfway between the left ear hole and the top of the skull, there was a line drawn. That the spot was to be exactly located was evident from the fact that a quarter-circle went over the skull at that point, curving from the ear cavity to the top of the skull. This was divided into eight segments. The line touched the skull about three and a half segments from the ear cavity. “They operated there,” said Benson, “and the one operated upon became an automation. Amazing! Modern surgery has not discovered the seat of conscious will that definitely.”

“You are convinced this is genuine?” said Wittwar, after his inevitable little throat-clearing.

“Definitely,” said Benson, pale eyes intent on the ancient bundle of thin, pliant hide with the picture writing on it. “I would hesitate to say how many thousands of years ago this was drawn up. But a great many. Till now, humanity has come across no such record of a recognizable culture that far back in antiquity. It is beyond price, gentlemen. And you say there is more?”

“Seven large caves full,” Lini spoke up.

“A truly wonderful discovery,” said Benson, colorless eyes leaving her with the breathless impression that diamond drills had probed her brain to its depths.

“It’s a deal,” said Wittwar to Lini Waller. He gave her his hand on it, and Lini was breathless with knowledge of a sure fortune. The four directors of the Wittwar Foundation smiled at her benignly.

But Richard Henry Benson, known to the underworld by the grim title, The Avenger, continued to stare at the ancient bundle of hides making up a book. One of the first of the thin hides—a page if you wished to call it that—was missing! Swift as his inspection of the bundle had been, it had told him that definitely.

One of the first pages was gone! And the bundle was secured by thongs as strong and tough as they day they were made; also the thin skin pages were too tough to tear easily. The thing could not have been lost by mere handling; it must have been deliberately taken out! That was more than odd, thought The Avenger.

CHAPTER IV

The Far Cry

Between the conference room and the small outer office where Wittwar’s secretary stayed when the four directors were in meeting, was a connecting room. Benson caught up to Lini Waller before she walked through this into the anteroom. “Just a moment, please, if you don’t mind,” he said. His tone was low, almost mild. But there was an authoritative quality in it that made the girl instinctively halt.

The pale eyes looked deep into Lini’s own. And though they were piercing eyes, they expressed nothing but concern now. “You know, you have a tremendously valuable secret,” The Avenger said. “The caves full of relics are the biggest discovery of the century. There are many gold ornaments, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said the girl, beginning to frown a little. She didn’t know what business this was of the young man with the white hair and dead, white face.

“Of course,” nodded Benson. “And the gold alone would be a tempting prize to a criminal. Whom have you talked to concerning the seven caves?”

“Only those four men in there,” said Lini, pointing to the closed door of the conference room where the directors still sat. “But really, I—”

“You have told no one else where the caves are?” asked Benson.

“I haven’t even told them,” Lini said. “I am to lead them, or any men they desire, to the caves personally.”

Benson nodded. “That’s good. A wise precaution. But just the same, you are in danger.”

“Why on earth would I be in danger?” demanded Lini, frown deepening.

“Because you have a priceless secret. It is my business to know when danger may be expected. And you—”

“Just what is your business—all of it?” asked the girl frostily. “Why do you horn in on this?”

Benson hesitated. If there was anything he hated, it was autobiographies. Particularly in his own case. Because the reasons for being what he was sounded so confoundedly noble. To say that he was a man who fought crime simply because he had suffered from it personally in the past and wanted to save other people similar suffering, sounded silly, to one who knew nothing about him. But there were times when he had to talk of himself and his work, and this seemed one of them. “Sometime ago,” he said, eyes like pale ice in his paralyzed face, “my life was irreparably damaged in a crime plot. Since then, I have devoted most of my time to fighting criminals as a sort of revenge on the underworld. I need no fees for it. I am quite well established financially. That is, as you put it, my business.”

“There’s no crime in any of this matter,” said Lini, face unfriendly.

“There could easily be,” said Benson. “So I would like to offer my help.”

Lini started toward the outer door again. “I’m sure you are all you claim,” she said, with cool politeness. “But I don’t know you, or anything about you. As you say, I have a priceless secret. Its very value makes it impossible for me to put blind trust in strangers.”

Benson’s steely hand touched her arm, and she stopped. “Stay at my headquarters,” he urged. “A girl who helps me in my work can look after you there. The police, or anyone else in New York in a position of authority, can assure you about me if you’ll take the trouble to phone. You will be safe—”

The conference door opened. Wittwar looked out. “Mr. Benson, could you come here for a moment?” he asked.

“Stay here, please,” said Benson to Lini.

He went into the conference room again. Wittwar said, hopefully, “Since you hadn’t gone yet we wanted to call you in and ask you something. That is, would you take an expedition back to the caves that girl described, and to which she has promised to lead us?”

Conroy nodded eagerly. “There’s no man on earth we’d trust more, Mr. Benson,” he said. “And we’ll pay you anything in reason—or out of reason!”

Benson shook his head. “Sorry, gentlemen. I have other things to do. Any good man can perform this task for you.” He went back into the other room, leaving disappointment on four faces.

Lini Waller was not there. In Benson’s short absence, she had gone. In her taxicab, leaving the Kembridge Building, Lini continued to frown. But this time at herself. Perhaps she had made a mistake in not finding out a little more about this Mr. Benson. Perhaps she had been too swift and suspicious in turning down his offer to guard her. After all, the Wittwar Foundation directors, all important men, had treated the young man with the white hair and the pale eyes very respectfully. She shrugged and put it out of her mind. After all, since no one knew of her reason for being here—save the four in the Kembridge Building—what possible danger could she be in?

Lini had taken a small suite at an obscure but excellent hotel. Her brother, Brent, had made an adequate salary since leaving college; so the two of them could afford good things. Like the radio receiving-transmitting set which Lini had set up in the corner of the living room. The set, operating on batteries or plug-in, was a twin to one which Brent had in his far-away cave under the river of ice. On it, she had talked to him nightly, save for a few days when the static was so bad that even a superfine commercial set couldn’t bridge the distance intelligibly. She switched on the set now to tell him that they had won, and were millionaires.

Brent Waller had reached the stage where he was beginning to talk to himself. As day followed day, he grew more and more lonely, down in his hole that had originated with an ancient and forgotten race, thousands of years ago. And there was plenty to give him the jitters. “I’ll swear those damn sentries move every now and then,” he said aloud.

He had a small fire going in the large cave, off which the seven other caverns were situated. He had the seven doors carefully closed; the slight heat of his fire might injure hides and flesh, hitherto preserved only by glacial cold. He coughed. It was pretty smoky in the cave. There was no opening in the top for the smoke to get out. Remembering an old trick, he had built his fire against the rear wall. The smoke hugged the wall as it rose, flowed sluggishly along under the roof, and eventually found its way out the opening under the glacier’s foot. A nice trick; only it didn’t work very well. There was enough smoke hazing the lower air to make him feel like a herring.

But you can’t eat meat and fish raw. He had to have a few embers to cook on. “I’ll only have a few more days of this,” Brent promised himself. His spoken words echoed eerily in the cavern. “Last night Lini said she was sure our proposition would be accepted today. When she comes back with him, it will certainly be by airplane. A boat can get here later to take this stuff away. Only a few more days.” Then Brent said some words that would have led anyone overhearing him to be sure he had gone insane in the solitude. “I’ll be all right—if the mastodon doesn’t get me!”

Brent’s meal was done. He took up the frying pan and went to the first door on the right. He entered the cave behind this door to eat his meal in more comfort, away from the smoke in the outer cave. The first door on the right was the seventh door. And in the cave behind that—the seventh cave, as Lini and Brent had counted it from the first—was the gigantic ancestor of the modern elephant.

Brent ate his solitary meal with his eyes on the tremendous animal that towered in perfect preservation to the rock roof. Perfect preservation? Well, not quite. Now, with a bit of the glacier’s cold dispersed, the big thing was beginning to show its age. “It smells,” Brent said aloud. “So does the guard,” he added morosely, looking at the long-dead mummified sentry who sat almost under the mastodon’s trunk, grasping his polished spear.

Brent finished his dinner. He didn’t know why he should choose this cave, out of all seven . . . But he did know. There was no use kidding himself. He kept having the sneaking suspicion that the seven dead sentries moved a little once in a while. With the mastodon—it was more than a suspicion. It was an absolute conviction!

He could swear he had seen the mastodon move on at least three occasions. Once, its great trunk had swayed a little. Once, an ear had distinctly flopped. Once, the left foreleg had twitched, sending a shiver through the whole mighty bulk. Yet he knew that wasn’t possible. The thing was so dead that it smelled. It couldn’t move! He was going insane in here. To preserve his own sanity, he forced himself to stay in the cave of the mastodon more than in any other, as a matter of strict self-discipline.

The mastodon didn’t move—while he finished his dinner at any rate. Brent took his frying pan out to the outer cave again, and cleaned it in glacial water. He debated going outdoors and decided against it. It wasn’t dark yet. There was always the chance that some hunter or trapper might see him and investigate his presence in the wilderness. It was bad enough to have to have smoke coming out the foot of the cliff.

He went into the cave containing costumes of the vanished race. Furs—nice thick ones. He selected a cape to throw over the fur suit he had already filched from the cave. It was as cold as the devil under the glacier. “Hey!” he screamed suddenly, jumping a yard. Then he swore at himself. He thought he had seen the guard in this room move its spear. “I am jittery,” he snapped, aloud. “That’s what comes of studying the stuff in the caves too much.”

To while away the time, as much as to learn, Brent had gone over some of the records in the library cave and had studied more minutely the pictures painted in the mastodon cavern. He had learned more about the master of mastodons. The master was headman of the tribe, all right. More, he was supposed to have everlasting life and to be able to guard the race always. His spirit was thought to have gone from body to body of a succession of reigning masters, and to be imperishable. Brent was reminded of the fear of the three Chinooks who had deserted him and Lini. “Old spirits.”

“I’ll get a Hollywood orchestra on the radio,” Brent shivered. “I need something to cheer me up. Boy, I’m earning any dough we might get out of these caves!” He went back to the seventh cave where his fine radio was set up. He pressed at the right-and-left spots on the door to swing it open—and whirled with a gasp! He thought he had heard the sound of a step. It had seemed to come from the cave of the costumes which he had just left. There were no further sounds, but so strong had been his sense of hearing a step that he went back to that cave door and opened it. There was nothing moving within, of course. How could anything move in a place where death had reigned for thousands of years?

Brent returned to the mastodon’s cave and went in. The radio was against the side wall. He walked to it, passing the dead sentry within a yard, walking almost close enough to the mastodon to brush its trunk. He’d show the damned dead thing if he was afraid of it! He snapped on his radio which was set at the wave length he and Lini used. He’d leave it on that for a little while, before getting some dance music to make the hours endurable in this awful place. It wasn’t the hour when Lini usually communicated with him, but she might try a little earlier tonight.

In the civilized sophistication of her hotel suite, thousands of miles from the glacier caverns and thousands of years from it in human advancement, Lini kept calling into the radio. There was panic in her heart. Every time Brent didn’t answer her call at once, she started thinking of all the things that might have happened. Particularly the possible collapse of ice over the cave mouth that could entomb him forever. Then she heared his voice and gasped in relief. It was tiny, thin, intermingled with static; but she could get it all right. “Brent! How are you?”

“All right, Lini. Didn’t expect to hear from you for a couple of hours.”

“You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Yes. But hurry things up, will you? I’ll admit I’m beginning to get awful nervous in here. Hearing things after me and all that sort of thing. And the mastodon moves.”

“Brent!” exclaimed Lini, with an awful fear clutching her.

“I’m just kidding,” Brent’s tiny voice came back, in a different tone. A better tone. “Just kidding, Lini.”

“Well, hang on,” said his sister. “The deal’s gone through, Brent. We’re millionaires. I’ll be starting back any time, leading men to take over the caves.”

“Great!” came Brent’s far voice. “I—” There was silence.

Lini called frantically. “Brent! Brent!”

Then she heard his scream. Like the far wail of a seagull in a night of storm, it sounded over the crackling in the radio. His scream, and the words, “Help! The mast—” That was all! Lini leaped up from in front of the radio with horror filling her heart. Something dreadful had happened to Brent! To have heard him cry for help—and to realize that he was as far from her as if he were on another planet! “I’ve got to do something!” she whimpered. “I’ve got to—”

The lights in the room went out! She screamed and ran toward the door. Something caught her by the arms. She fell into a blackness more absolute than that of any darkened room!

CHAPTER V

Sign of the Skull

Lini Waller had been suspicious of everyone. Even of Wittwar and his fellow directors of the Foundation. She hadn’t told even them where she was staying in New York. Her address wasn’t on record anywhere at all. Therefore, it took The Avenger over an hour to locate her hotel, and another twenty minutes to get to it. And by then he was too late. Lini was gone.

Benson looked around the hotel suite. There was little luggage. The most conspicuous thing in it was a small but excellent radio. The radio was on, indicating that the girl had been kidnaped while she was listening to it. That she had been kidnaped Benson was sure. Something had happened to her even sooner than he had feared. And there was not one clue from which The Avenger could discover where she had been taken. He carefully noted the wave length to which the radio transmitter was set and switched the instrument off.

To make sure the girl’s absence wasn’t legitimate, if hasty, he phoned each of the Wittwar Foundation directors. Not one of them had heard from Lini since she had left the Kembridge Building an hour and a half ago. Downstairs, he had his worst suspicions confirmed. “Nope,” said the doorman when Benson described Lini, “nobody like that’s come out in the last two hours. Far as that goes, I know the lady by sight. Make it my business to know the hotel guests after they’ve been here a coupla days. She didn’t come out.”

“Have workmen carried any heavy bundles out of the building?” asked Benson. “Any crates, big boxes or anything like that?”

“Nope. Wait a minute. Yeah, a coupla guys carried out a roll of carpet. A big roll. That was about three quarters of an hour ago.”

Benson didn’t have to go to the management to know that there had been no authorization for the removal of a roll of carpet recently. In that bulky roll, Lini Waller had been carried unseen out of the building. Where she was now it would take a wizard to figure out. And The Avenger was not quite that, though enemies as well as friends sometimes thought he was.

At that moment Lini Waller was several miles away and across the Hudson River. She had arrived there in brisk time after leaving the hotel in a roll of carpet. She wasn’t aware of the manner of her exit, however. She wasn’t aware of anything till she regained consciousness, quite a while after being pricked with a hypodermic needle after the lights had been turned out in her room. It took Lini some time to snap completely out of the fog that seemed to envelop her. Whatever drug had been used to knock her out had lasting effects. First, she was aware of a vague sense of horror that she could not quite place. It didn’t concern her so much as someone else. Who? Then it began to seep back.

Brent! He was in some sort of danger. He had been talking about—of all things—the mastodon moving. Then he had yelled, “The mast—” and everything had gone dead.

“Brent.” she moaned, opening her eyes. She felt strange, as if she was back under the glacier. It was cold and the walls seemed to be icy. In fact, they looked like solid ice sheets. But she couldn’t be in the caves with Brent. The caves were thousands of miles away.

“She’s snapping out of it,” she heard someone say. She tried to move and couldn’t. Something bit into her ankles and wrists. She was bound. But she felt as if she were made of ice. There was one thing; she could move her head a little. She lifted it and gazed around dazedly. She was in what seemed to be a solid ice chamber with a big door also made of ice. There was one thing in the room—a wide bench, or low table, near the center. White light streamed down over the bench and over the room’s nakedness.

Near the ponderous door were five men. They were rats if Lini had ever seen rats; and she had seen many, in the course of traveling around with her active brother. Narrowed, heavy-lidded eyes, poorly-shaped heads, indifferently cruel features, flashy but cheap clothes, twisted mouth—ugh! It gave her the shivers to look at them. Here were five thugs who would stop at nothing.

“Yeah, she’s with us again,” drawled one of the five. He had practically no mouth, his lips were so thin. In his dark eyes were a mixture of sadism and lust as he stared at the bound girl. Lini writhed, trying to get her dress down farther over her bound legs.

“Do we pop her off?” said one of them lazily.

“Not if you know what’s good for you,” was the retort. “She’s supposed to stay alive. The boss needs her alive to go through with the sale and get the dough for that Indian stuff—or whatever she came to New York to sell. No girl; no pay. And he wants the pay.”

“Who is the boss?” said the man with the thin-lipped gash for a mouth.

The other speaker shrugged. “Far as I know, it’s Corny.”

“Yeah. Corny’s the guy that the smoothies, who don’t dirty their hands with hot work, get in contact with when they want something done. But Corny ain’t the real boss, and you know it.”

“All right,” shrugged the other. “So Corny ain’t the real boss. So what? I don’t care who is as long as we get ours. And we’ve got two thousand dollars apiece already with a lot more to come.”

Lini closed her eyes again. Her mind raced for a way out of this—and could not find one. She could think of but one thing to try. “You,” she said. “You men. Let me go, and I’ll give you more money than you could possibly get from whoever is paying to hold me here.”

The five looked at her, dead-pan, indifferent. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars apiece,” said Lini hysterically. “Twenty thousand. I swear it!”

“We’ll get that much from the boss,” said one of the men.

“I’ll double any offer he makes.” Lini remembered an expression she had seen in the faces of men, similar to these, in gold fields she and Brent had visited. The yellow metal she knew, could do something to greedy men that even piles of currency could not do. “How would you each like to have more gold than you could carry? Well, if you’ll let me go, I’ll turn over to you more gold than you’ve ever seen.”

“Where would you get any gold?” jeered one of the men.

“You know something of what this is about, don’t you? I heard one of you mention Indian relics. Well, that’s what the person who hired you is after. And among those relics is a whole roomful of gold ornaments and statues. You can have the whole thing. I can still sell the rest of the stuff for enough to make my brother and me rich.”

One of the men moved uneasily. “Johnny, maybe there’s something in what the dame says. If there’s a roomful of gold to—”

The big door began to open, and the man promptly shut up. Lini’s heart sank. It had looked for a moment as if she might succeed in her bribery attempt. This interruption had ruined it. The door swung all the way open, and two more men came in.

One looked much like the other five, only a little more smooth. His face was as callous as any of theirs, but sleekly shaven and pink with massages. His clothes were as loud as theirs, but a little better in fit and quality. His eyes were as cold, but were bland and had more intelligence in them.

The other figure was one to make Lini wonder if she had quite recovered from the effects of the drug yet. It was the figure of a man in a long overcoat that hid his body. He had on a felt hat with a peculiarly drooping brim; and this down-drooping brim, plus the turned-up overcoat collar hid all of his face but nose and eyes. And over the eyes were dark glasses. The man seemed very old. His nose was that of an elderly person, and his hands were lined. Yet his step was firm and young. It was as if he were very old—yet, in a way, ageless. The skin of the man’s hands was nut-brown, with a faint hint of copper under the tint. Like the skin of an Oriental with Negroid blood. Or of an Indian.

“Hi, Corny,” said the man with the thin mouth to the first of the two who had come in. He and the rest stared furtively, in perplexity not unmixed with fear, at the second man. The man with the shielded face and dark glasses said not one word. He reached into the inner pocket of the overcoat and drew something out, a peculiar little hammer with a thin striking head and long, sharp prongs on the opposite end.

Corny was staring at his men. “Did I hear something about a roomful of gold as we opened the door?” he said. His voice was smooth and he was smiling a little. But the look in his bland eyes made all the men shake their heads promptly and vigorously. “No, Corny. Nothing like that,” said the thin-lipped hood. “We know what you’re thinkin’, but you’re way off.”

“I’m sure I am,” nodded Corny, still with the set smile on his lips. “I know none of you guys would want to sell out to anybody, at any price. In the first place, you’re all too honest to do a thing like that.” He smirked. “In the second, you’ll get a wad that’ll choke a horse for doing what you’re told. In the third—none of you’d live long enough to spend much sell-out money, if you were bats enough to take it.”

The curious figure in the long, loose coat was paying no attention to this pleasant chitchat. After taking the queer little hammer from his inner pocket, he reached into an outer one with nut-brown, lined hands and took out a roll of paper. The paper held a sliver of metal. Steel, from its sheen and color. It had been rolled in the paper to keep an excessively sharp point from sticking through the fabric of the coat. The man jerked his head toward the girl, and then toward the bench.

Corny got the wordless command. “Tie the dame to the table,” he said, without even looking at Lini. Two men picked her up. She screamed! The sound backed against her eardrums in a hundred echoes from the ice-walled room. None of the men paid any heed at all. She could scream as loud as she pleased, with no chance of the sound being heard outside.

They dumped her on the low table under the strong white light. The man in the loose overcoat came toward her! He hadn’t said one word since coming in, and continued to be absolutely silent, as if he were a disembodied spirit instead of a man. He held the steel splinter, which was much like a darning needle, and the hammer, in one hand. The fingers of the other began to explore Lini’s skull through the silky thickness of her hair.

She bobbed her head around wildly. The man’s free hand went into his overcoat pocket again and this time came out with a roll of two inch adhesive tape. The tape was passed over her forehead, down and under the bench. Now she couldn’t move her head a fraction of an inch.

The fingers took over their exploring task again and finally halted. The nut-brown hands parted the silky tresses and bared the scalp. The point of the slim steel length was placed lightly against that spot and held in the man’s left hand. The right raised the hammer.

He was going to drive the thing into her head! Again Lini screamed, and again no one paid the least attention. She fainted before the queer little hammer could drive down against the steel splinter!

CHAPTER VI

Falling Death!

The Avenger had his headquarters in one of the most curious buildings in New York City. It was on Bleek Street, which is only one short block long, and in effect, Benson owned the block. On the side where his headquarters were, he had all the buildings under long lease or straight ownership. The entire other side of the block was taken up by the windowless back of a huge storage warehouse.

Three dingy, old apartment buildings had been thrown into one, and their top floors had been made into one tremendous room. The Avenger and his aides were up in this room now with a map spread out on the great center table. Next to the table was a radio, the likes of which no commercial manufacturing company had ever seen, with a special radio-directional antenna. This had been devised by the man who was at the moment delicately adjusting the range-finder.

He didn’t look like a person capable of inventing anything at all. He was a giant, and his moon face appeared more good-natured than intelligent. But regardless of his looks, he was one of the finest electrical and radio engineers in the world. “No more’s coming over that wave length,” he said.

“Let me listen, mon,” said the man standing next to him, reaching for the special earphone in which every last bit of distant radio sound could be gathered and further amplified. “Ye couldn’t hear a gunshot on a quiet day if the bullet whizzed right past yer ear.”

“All right, smart guy,” said the giant.

The other man took the earphone. He was the tall, bony Scot, Fergus MacMurdie. “Thanks for the compliment, Algernon,” he said.

The giant flushed wrathfully. He had been christened Algernon Heathcote Smith, but folks who valued their health called him Smitty. Except for Mac, who sometimes could use the Algernon and get away with it.

Richard Benson had tuned the radio in on the wave length he had noted at the empty rooms of Lini Waller. Smitty had listened over the silent wave length for some time. Then a voice had sounded.

“Sis? You still there? Everything’s O.K. on this end. There was a little trouble, but everything’s all right now. Good night.”

After that, there had been no more sounds at all. But the few words that had been spoken enabled Smitty to swing his direction-finder to a point he felt sure was accurate. A line drawn on the map, along the direction noted, ended somewhere along the Pacific coast in northern British Columbia. But there was no telling from where, along the line, the radio had transmitted the words.

Nellie Gray, the diminutive blonde member of The Avenger’s crime-fighting unit, sat at the table. “You said the girl had left her brother behind to guard the spot where the relics were hidden,” she said to The Avenger. “So that must have been her brother radioing that all’s well in the caves.”

“That’s what it sounds like,” nodded Benson, pale eyes like polished agate as he stared at the marked map on the table.

“And the sister,” said Nellie sympathetically, “isn’t at her radio to hear.”

“No,” said The Avenger.

“Do you think she has been murdered?” asked Joshua Elijah Newton. The gangling sleepy looking Negro was another of Benson’s aides.

“No,” The Avenger answered his question, “I don’t think Lini Waller has been killed. That radio message came from quite a distance, didn’t it, Smitty?”

“Yes,” nodded the giant. “But from just what distance I can’t say, of course.”

“Could it have come from the British Columbia coast?” asked Benson, pale eyes on the map.

“Sure!”

MacMurdie put down the earphone. “Well, ye overgrown mass of muscle,” he said to Smitty, “I guess there’s nothing more to hear, at that. The other end’s gone dead and stays dead.”

“Wish I could have heard a little more, to check my direction,” said Smitty. “But I guess I got it pretty exactly . . .”

At the door of the great room, a red speck glowed. “See who’s downstairs, Josh,” said Benson.

Josh went to another smaller table. Here was a small radio set, reflecting perfect, if very shortrange television pictures. It showed whoever was in the vestibule downstairs at the street entrance. Josh looked surprised. “Why, I think—” he said. “I think it’s the girl you’ve been talking about, chief! Her looks tally with your description.” Before the words had ceased, Benson was staring into the television set. Then his finger pressed the button that released the door catch.

In a moment Lini Waller came in through the doorway.

She walked up to Benson, while the rest stared in amazement. The chief had just told them how this girl had been taken away somewhere and was probably in grave danger. But here she was, visiting the Bleek Street headquarters alone and unharmed. At least, it seemed that she was unharmed. “Mr. Benson,” she said to The Avenger, “I have changed my mind about your offer.” Her manner was different than it had been at the Wittwar Foundation office. It was hard to spot that difference. Her voice seemed a shade mechanical; her eyes were a little duller; her face held less expression. The eyes of The Avenger were as brilliant as ice in moonlight as he studied that slight difference.

“You offered to help me—to guard me,” Lini said. “I would like to accept that kind offer now. Something has happened that makes me know I really am in danger.”

“The offer still stands,” said Benson, eyes like diamond drills as they probed her stolid face. “I was afraid you were already beyond help. I visited your hotel a short time ago, and it looked very much as if you had been kidnaped.”

“I was,” said Lini, with no fear in her tone. “Some men drugged me and took me away. I regained consciousness in an automobile. I got the door open and jumped out when the car stopped near a traffic officer, and the men didn’t dare to stop me. I came here at once. May I stay here with you and your friends?”

“You poor kid,” said Nellie Gray impulsively. “Certainly you can stay here. And all of us will see to it that nothing more happens to you.”

“First,” said Lini, looking at Benson, “there is something that ought to be done. You saw the manuscript I left with Mr. Wittwar and the others as a sample of the relics in the caves my brother and I discovered. Well, there are some other ancient things I brought too. I have them in a suitcase at a rooming house on Twelfth Street. I rented the room just to keep the things in; and I haven’t been back to it since for fear someone would trail me there. Would you have someone get those things and bring them here?”

“Of course,” said Benson. Lini thanked him and murmured an address.

“I’ll go, Muster Benson,” said MacMurdie.

“Perhaps,” said Lini, “several should go. It’s possible the men who tried to kidnap me might have learned the address from something in my other hotel suite. If so, there would be trouble.”

“ ’Tis just a messenger boy’s job,” persisted the Scot. “Smitty and me will go, Muster Benson—”

He stopped. The Avenger’s pale eyes were looking at, and seemingly through him, lost in thought. Mac repressed a shiver. Well as he knew Benson, those colorless, dreadful eyes could still make his heart skip a beat when they were turned on him. “The three of us will go,” said Benson quietly. “You and Smitty and I.”

Nellie looked hard at Benson’s white, dead face. She knew him perhaps a little better than the others. Intuition told her that Benson had sensed something very peculiar and that he was working on it with all the power of his amazing genius, but as yet he had come to no conclusion. That he expected danger was proved by the fact that he also meant to go on what seemed an easy errand. Benson allowed his helpers to take no risks that he himself would not share; and, of course, The Avenger frequently entered danger zones more sinister than he would let his followers face.

Benson turned to Lini Waller. “Make yourself at home here. Nellie, show her a room. We should be back soon with the suitcase, Miss Waller.”

“Thank you very much,” said Lini, in her slightly wooden, expressionless tone.

In the basement of the triple building was Benson’s garage. There were over a dozen cars down here of all kinds and sizes. Among them was a car with truck tires half again as big as ordinary tires. That was because the car, a sedan, was made of something like armor plate and weighed nearly five tons. Benson got into this car. “Lookin’ for trouble?” said Mac. “Perhaps,” said The Avenger. Smitty got in the back with Mac and a door rolled soundlessly up while Benson drove up a ramp and out over the sidewalk onto Bleek Street.

The address given by Lini Waller was a little north of Bleek Street. The heavy sedan nosed around the corner to the left, went up to Twelfth Street, and turned right. Down the second block loomed something that was a common sight in European cities. The wrecked shell of a building, standing stark and ragged in the night. It looked as if a bomb had gone right down through the center of it and exploded in the cellar. But New York was not being bombed, as yet. It was the work of ordinary wreckers, tearing down an old building to make way for a new one.

“Ye know,” said Mac pessimistically, “some day this city’ll be done. Then they won’t be forever tearin’ at your eardrums with rivetin’ machines, and shakin’ the gizzard out of you with subway blasts. But we’ll never live to see the day. Yon building, for example. It was good enough as it stood. But no! They have to yank it down and put up a marble and stainless steel prison that misguided apartment dwellers pay too much rent for.”

“You Scotch raven,” said Smitty, “stop croaking, will you? The new buildings are swell.”

Benson said nothing. But at the wheel, his pale, infallible eyes seemed to be looking at everything at once. Though still a young man, The Avenger had made a fortune in strange, dangerous places. He had made millions in minerals from Peru, more from engineering feats in Siam and Arabia and Africa. He had lived in antarctic wastes and tropical jungles. He had seen death in more guises than any dozen average adventurers. He could literally smell danger. And he smelled it now!

“I suppose,” said Smitty to Mac, “you’d rather have the old buildings stand till they tumble down around your ears. I suppose you’re against all progress. The horse and buggy is good enough for you, huh? If everyone figured the same way—”

“Look out!” yelled MacMurdie. But the car had already swerved to the right under Benson’s deft hand till both Smitty and Mac were almost thrown to the floor. Smitty could see why Mac had yelled and what The Avenger’s swift eyes had caught even before Mac’s. Something like a mountain falling on them!

The car had approached the building that was being demolished. It had been rolling past the boarded-off sidewalk, with the planks throwing back the rhythmic swishing of the tires. And then the building wall had started to fall on them. At the same instant they heard a rumbling boom.

The remaining wall of the old building was nearly six stories high. It was leaning out and over the car as if it would never stop tilting. And Benson was driving the sedan right at it! Instead of trying to speed ahead of destruction, he had swung the wheel around so that the car dove straight for the base of the falling masonry and mortar. It would have been impossible to get ahead of the fall by going forward; but any other man on earth would have automatically tried it, too frightened to think otherwise.

Not Benson. Instead, the sedan was rocketing at the base of the leaning wall. It jounced over curbing, sent planks in all directions and jammed half through the opening that had formerly been the entrance of the place. Mac and Smitty didn’t know whether they were yelling or not. They rather thought they were. But if they had been, no one would have heard them.

Six stories of brick wall falling outward from its base! The roar of that collapse drowned all sound for blocks. The top began tumbling down over the front of the building on the other side of the street. The wall disintegrated, seeming almost as liquid as an ocean wave. Bricks and great stone blocks tossed up high fell again. The street at that section was a choked welter of debris with several parked cars buried somewhere beneath many feet of brick and rock.

“Whoosh!” sighed Mac, in the sedan. “Ye can consider me faintin’ like a young girl. ’Tis a miracle we’re alive.” And yet not such a miracle. The Avenger had shot the car into the one spot where it had the chance of escape: half through the base of the wall itself. The structure had leaned out and down away from them, instead of falling on them. The top of the sedan was dented where assorted fragments of brick and cement had collapsed through the top of the entrance frame, but that was all.

However, it was close enough, even for these men whose lives were made up of close calls. They got out of the sedan, with Smitty using his enormous strength to jam open a door that was bent less badly than the rest. “Go on to the address Miss Waller gave,” Benson said quietly to Mac. “Smitty and I will return to Bleek Street. I’d like to ask the girl a few questions.”

“And she’d better answer them pretty straight too,” said Smitty hotly. “It’s a pretty odd coincidence that we were sent along a street where a building wall was ready to collapse just as we came along.”

But there were no questions to be asked. Lini was not at Bleek Street! Benson called Nellie Gray down from the top floor after he had gone to her room on the second and found it empty. “Slipped away!” said Nellie ruefully. “It’s all my fault, chief. But, naturally, I wasn’t looking for her to do a thing like that. Why would she come here begging for help and then steal away again after we’d promised it?”

MacMurdie got back from the address given by Lini. “No room’s rented there under her name or the name of anybody else lookin’ like her,” he said sourly. “She’s a schemin’ little skurlie. She came here only to lead us into a death trap. The trap failed and now she’s cleared out.” But The Avenger shook his white head, his pale eyes searching as if through far mists for the whole of a truth of which, as yet, he could only suspect a small part.

CHAPTER VII

The Alibi

Next morning at about ten o’clock, Benson left the Greenwich Precinct Station with his white face as expressionless as always, but with his pallid, deadly eyes glittering as they did when he was pitted against large-scale crime.

That this was super crime he was now sure since hearing the results of police investigations of the collapse of the building wall. The wall had been made to fall by a charge of explosive cleverly placed at the base, in the cellar. The explosive had been touched off from a distance, when Benson came along in his massive sedan. It had been a streamlined death trap, all right. And it seemed as if Lini Waller must have deliberately sent him into it.

And yet how could that be so? It would indicate that the girl was fighting against her own best interests, allied with forces who were trying to get the relics away from her. Who wanted to eliminate The Avenger from the game before he could get a chance to move against them?

Benson went from the Greenwich Station to the Kembridge Building. Wittwar, Conroy, Werner and Mallory were all there in the Foundation office. They were neglecting their own businesses, it seemed, while they made sure of getting the priceless relics of a race that had died out over fifty thousand years ago. They were pretty angry when Benson came in. Wittwar didn’t bother to say “Hello.” He opened up with, “We’re in a fine mess now, Mr. Benson. We were to meet that girl here and arrange for the trip west to wherever those caves are—and she hasn’t shown up. She was to come at nine o’clock.”

“I’ve told you what she has done,” snapped Werner, testily. “She has gone somewhere else. She has approached some other foundation or museum or something, in an effort to get more money. She has crossed us up.”

“So we asked you to come in for a minute or two and advise us,” said Mallory. “We thought possibly you could tell us how to locate her. You see, we don’t know where she is staying, or anything. We have asked her for an address, and she has refused to give us one.”

The Avenger quietly seated himself at one of the chairs placed around the conference table. “She may be in after all,” he said. “There is no reason that I can see why she shouldn’t—and every reason why she should—with two and a half million dollars and much, much more at stake.” It didn’t seem a hundred percent intelligible to the four at the table, from the slightly perplexed looks on their faces, but they didn’t ask for an explanation. You just didn’t demand explanations from the man with the white, paralyzed face.

“I still think there may be something crooked about this business,” snapped Werner. “Not the ancient manuscript. That has been proven to be genuine. But something crooked about the girl. I’ll bet the manuscript is the only thing she and her brother found—if there is a brother.”

“Why would she act as she has?” objected Mallory. “If the bundle of ancient records is all there is, why go through the act of selling us more? She knows she won’t get any money till all the rest of the stuff she has mentioned is located by our men.”

Werner shrugged. “I don’t know what game she has in mind, but it could easily be crooked. Look at the way she acts; won’t even tell where she is staying in New York!”

As they talked, The Avenger studied the four men out of colorless, brilliant eyes. One of these four, he thought, was a crook, an employer of thugs and murderers who would send a six-story wall toppling down on a sedan with three men in it—or would kidnap a girl. Lini Waller had sworn she had told only the four directors of the Wittwar Foundation about the discovery of the ancient relics. Benson believed her. But if that were true, then one of these four was trying to steal the objects instead of buy them—and might be attempting to get the two and a half millions from the Foundation for the relics, and take the relics too. But all of them were respected men in the city.

The Avenger, without seeming to do so, took Wittwar visually apart: burly body, muscular for a man in his fifties; firm, aggressive jaw, clear but rather hard gray eyes. However, Wittwar was, it would seem, too wealthy a man to attempt kidnap and murder for money. As for the relics, he didn’t have to steal them. They were to be acquired by his Foundation with funds that didn’t come from his own pocket, but from a dead man’s estate. There was no reason for him to be in it.

There was Conroy with stiff, reddish hair not unlike the hair of Fergus MacMurdie. But there the resemblance ended. For Conroy was heavy-set too; even heavier in body than Wittwar. And he was heavy-featured, with eyes a lot less icy a blue than Mac’s. Conroy was the millionaire owner of a butcher’s supply company; and he too would seem to have no monetary incentive for working against Lini Waller.

Werner came next in The Avenger’s cold, clear evaluation. Werner, with the cherubic face, the steel-trap jaw and square, strong chin. Werner owned a big printing establishment, and was worth nearly as much money as Wittwar. No money motive here, either.

The last of the four, Mallory, was of a slightly different stripe. He was well off, but no millionaire, as Benson had found out when he methodically rounded up all available facts about the four men. Mallory was, indeed, an employee of Wittwar. A very important one—vice-president and general manager of all Wittwar’s powerful packing enterprise—but an employee nevertheless. Mallory did have reason to covet the two and a half millions the Foundation stood ready to pay for the relics. But The Avenger knew that more than a motive must be unearthed before a man could be suspected.

The secretary opened the door. “Miss Waller is here, Mr. Wittwar.”

“Well! It’s about time! Show her in.” Werner, who had seemed most suspicious of all concerning Lini Waller’s possible integrity, was now the most reassured when she actually did show up. His face was all cherubic smiles again, and he rubbed his pink hands delightedly together. Lini came in. She nodded to the men and to The Avenger. Her manner was just as it had been at Bleek Street last night—wooden and dull, almost indifferent. You’d think the acquisition of two and a half million dollars meant nothing whatever to her. It was not at all like her previous visit when the offer of the big sum had enraptured her.

“We were getting worried, Miss Waller,” said Wittwar. “You are so late, we were beginning to fear you weren’t coming at all.”

“I was detained,” was all Lini said, dark eyes calm to the point of dullness. She neither avoided Benson’s gaze nor sought it. “Is the money ready to be turned over to me?”

Wittwar nodded. “It is on deposit at the Standard Trust Bank. You know the terms. When men of ours see the rest of the things you describe, the sum will be made over in your name.”

Benson stood up, lithe, powerful looking. “Gentlemen,” he said, “with your permission I would like to speak to Miss Waller alone—in the next room.” There probably wasn’t another man in New York who could have made such a request at that moment, and have gotten away with it. And the four directors didn’t like it very much—even from Richard Benson. Mallory, blinking sourly through his glasses, was the one who finally spoke for them. “Well, all right. But don’t keep her out there too long, Mr. Benson. We’d like to have Miss Waller settle the question of how soon we can send men to the caves.”

Benson nodded. He went to the next room, the connecting room between anteroom and conference room. He shut the conference room door, and stared into Lini’s brown eyes. “We had a little trouble last night,” he said. “On our way to the address you gave, a building wall caved in on us. We were pretty lucky to get out of it.”

Lini nodded, little trace of emotion in her face. “I know, Mr. Benson. I saw the wall collapse.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes,” said Lini. “I got to thinking that you might be trailed, or be in danger, if you went to get the suitcase with the other relics in it. So I left Bleek Street just a few minutes after Miss Gray showed me to a room. I . . . I ran toward Twelfth Street and reached the corner just as the wall fell—right on your car, it seemed. I went on quickly and got the suitcase myself and hid it.”

Benson’s eyes were pallid diamond drills, boring into her own dark orbs. Few could face that stare unless they were telling the truth. Lini’s eyes never wavered.

“A man of mine went on to the hotel you mentioned and was told no one of your description had rented a room recently.”

Lini nodded passively. “The clerks were paid to say that to anyone who asked,” she said. “I told you I had kept my identity a secret there.”

“Then the only reason you stole away from my place last night was because you were afraid I might run into trouble on your errand?” Benson said.

“Yes,” nodded Lini calmly. “That’s the only reason. I can see where it might be suspicious, but it’s the truth.”

“Where is your suitcase now?”

For the first time, a flicker of agitation appeared in Lini’s face. “It’s gone. Stolen!”

“Stolen?”

“Yes. After I had gotten it and was hurrying to put it in another place, I was attacked. A car stopped alongside me, and I was jerked into it and taken away.”

Benson said nothing. But his eyes were like pale fire opals as they dwelt on the girl’s countenance. Lini’s hand went to her forehead, and she rubbed it in a queer, dazed way. “I was taken to my brother,” she said. “I didn’t see my brother, but I was taken to the icy caves of the ancient race. I regained consciousness in the cave after being knocked out. A cave of ice, cold and bare, bright with the white light that has burned all these thousands of years.”

This was beginning to sound like pure gibberish. But Benson was paying as much attention as though the words were pearls of sanity from a great philosopher. “Cave of ice?” he said softly. “Light burning for thousands of years?”

“Yes. That’s where I was taken.”

“But the caves are thousands of miles from here.” Benson spoke in a gentle, almost monotonous tone, and his eyes were compelling on hers. He was trying hypnotism; and The Avenger was probably the best hypnotist alive. “The caves are thousands of miles from here, Miss Waller. How could you be taken that distance in a night and be back here in the morning?”

“I was in the ice-walled cave.” Lini stopped rubbing her forehead in that dazed way, and her manner became calm to the point of indifference again. “I had better go in to see those men now.”

The Avenger had tried to hypnotize her, and had failed! It was the first such failure he had ever had. He let her go back into the conference room, and he stayed in the room where they had been talking. When she came out again, she was going to Bleek Street with him and was going to stay there. Benson sensed some dreadful thing more subtle and sinister than he had ever encountered before—with this girl on the receiving end!

But she didn’t come out of the room. Benson waited for nearly ten minutes. Then, with his pale eyes looking deadly in their cold wrath, he walked into the conference room. The four men were obviously about to leave and go to their own offices. They had finished. And they were alone.

Benson looked around, his face white and still. “Where is Miss Waller?”

“Why, Mr. Benson,” exclaimed Wittwar, after his nervous little throat-clearing that preceded most of his sentences, “we thought you had gone.”

“Where is Miss Waller?”

“She went directly from here.” It was Mallory talking, saturnine, thin and dry-looking. “There’s a private exit to the hall from here. See that panel? Pretty good job of concealing, isn’t it. Miss Waller wanted to leave privately; so we let her go out that way. She is to tell us this afternoon just how to get to the caverns, and will go with our men . . .”

Mallory’s voice dribbled into silence at the look in The Avenger’s pale glacial eyes. All four stared at him in awe, mixed with a little inexplicable fear, as he walked out of the room with his soft panther tread.

CHAPTER VIII

Icy Prison

Lini Waller was in deadly danger. Fantastic danger! The Avenger knew that. The nature of the danger was almost clear to him. But not quite. There was just one thing to be done now: trace the girl, who had gotten away for the simple reason that it had never occurred even to The Avenger that there might be a private, practically secret, door directly out of the conference room.

“Mon, how can ye trace her?” inquired MacMurdie gloomily. “Ye haven’t a thing to work on.”

“We have a few things to work on,” said Benson quietly.

“Such as?” said Smitty, almost as pessimistic as Mac.

“Lini has given us the key, I think.” Benson quoted her bemused words: “ ‘I was taken to the icy caves of the ancient race . . . A cave of ice, cold and bare, bright with the white light that has burned all these thousands of years.’ That was what she said.”

“How could a light burn thousands of years?” demanded Mac.

“That,” said The Avenger, softly, “is a highly interesting point. But it is not what we are concerned with at the moment. The thing that is more relevant right now is Lini Waller’s reference to ice caves.” The pale eyes were glittering with the flaming genius behind the paralyzed, white countenance. “She thought she had been taken to the caves discovered by her and her brother. Obviously that is impossible. So she must have thought that because of a similarity in the sites. Now, there are no ice caves in New York or vicinity. But there may be something like them. A refrigerating room. A cave of ice—ice walls.”

“A refrigerating room doesn’t have ice walls,” objected Smitty. “Unless it could mean white tile.”

“White tile doesn’t look like ice, ye overgrown lummox,” snorted Mac.

“Glass,” said Benson. “Glass blocks. They might be used.” He went on slowly with brilliant method. “One of the four Foundation directors . . . well, Wittwar’s business requires refrigerating rooms for meat packing. And Mallory is the head of that business under Wittwar.”

In an incredibly short time the three were zipping through the Holland Tunnel, under the Hudson River toward Jersey, where the newest and most modern of the Wittwar Packing Co. storage plants was located, in Newark. And in this plant, glass blocks had been used in walls between refrigerating rooms.

“If Lini Waller was kidnaped and taken to a Wittwar refrigerating warehouse,” said Smitty, as their car shot out of the New Jersey end of the tunnel, “then a Wittwar man would seem to be behind the crime. Wittwar himself, maybe.”

“I’d say ’twould be the man, Mallory,” Mac retorted. “But then it could be either of the others too. Just because the girl was held in a Wittwar building doesn’t mean that somebody else couldn’t have sneaked her in.”

They reached the new warehouse building. It was not quite noon. At that hour, trucks were pulling up to the loading platform empty, and rolling away from it loaded. Men in stained whites were as busy as ants. It was a common looking scene.

“Ye want to get in unseen, Muster Benson?” said Mac.

The Avenger nodded. “Yes. We’ll wait till noon.”

The twelve-o’clock whistle blew in a neighboring factory. At the warehouse, a last truck was loaded and pulled away. Then truck drivers got out their lunches and settled in their cabs to eat; or else they went to nearby restaurants. Warehouse workers did the same. In a little less than ten minutes Benson, Smitty and Mac slid in through the wide loading doorway with no one around to see.

Benson had talked with the architect’s office to confirm his guess about a glass-block wall in the Wittwar meat-storage building. He knew the layout of the warehouse. “Top floor,” he said. “The glass-block partitions are in a row of coldrooms designed for frozen meats. That row is on the third floor.”

They went up broad stairs, ducked off onto the second floor for a moment to avoid a man coming downstairs munching an apple, then went on up to the top story. There was no one up here; and at a glance they could see that only part of the top floor was used at all. The new warehouse still wasn’t needed in all its capacity.

“Now?” said Smitty, looking gigantic and gorillalike in the dimness of the top story. He had his coat collar up. It was cold up there.

“The row with the glass block walls is here on the side,” said Benson, leading the way to the right. There was a narrow corridor. On the right were many doors. They started looking for a refrigerating room that wasn’t being used. “Cold and bare,” the girl had said the “cave” was.

The fourth door they opened revealed an unused room. Mac looked sourly at the door. It was tremendous, as refrigerator doors tend to be. Thick with insulation, metal-paneled back and front, it was like the door of a bank vault. “I’d hate to have this door locked on me,” the Scot murmured dourly.

“Might be a good idea,” jeered Smitty. “You’re about as cheerful as a block of ice anyhow. A coldroom would be a swell spot for you to be locked in.”

As the door was swung open entirely, lights were automatically lit in the bare, icy chamber. The lights, white and cold, revealed only one thing in the place, a wide bench, or low table. And it revealed walls of glass block that did look remarkably like ice. The Avenger’s pale eyes went to that bench. And into them at last came a glitter of dawning knowledge. The presence of the bench tended to confirm that knowledge. He went to it, with the giant Smitty and the dour Scot beside him. He bent down, then nodded.

At one end of the bench were three long, silky dark hairs. They matched exactly the hair of Lini Waller; The Avenger knew it was an exact match because his rare eyes never failed to distinguish shades of color. Lini had been on that bench. This cold barren place had been her prison chamber . . .

There was a soft but heavy thud behind the three! They whirled. Richard Benson didn’t seem to move fast, even when he was in a hurry. That was because his movements were so perfectly coordinated. But he got to the ponderous refrigerator door almost before it had stopped closing. Almost, but not quite. There was a rasping sound outside as he tried to get his steel-strong fingers on some projection and swing the door open again. The rasping was the sound of the heavy lever being locked home.

And now there was hardly a crack showing where the massive door fit into the wall. On the inside of the door was no handle or projection at all. There was a place where there had been one, to comply with safety rules.

But it had been removed. The light had gone out with the door’s closing.

“Caught!” grated Mac, more in fury than in fear. “The skurlies! And we thought we were smart in sneakin’ in here without bein’ seen!”

“Ouch!” came Smitty’s voice in the next second. “I burned myself!”

“Burned yersel’, did ye say?” Mac snapped. “And how would ye burn yersel’ in a rrrefrigeratin’ room?” Only in moments of stress did the Scott roll his r’s.

“Anyhow, I burned myself,” Smitty insisted.

The Avenger’s flashlight went on. It was a powerful little thing, designed by Smitty in an off-hour, tossed off by a brilliant mind usually more engrossed with abstruse electrical problems than with things so humble as flashlights.

The thin but glaring beam flitted around the cold-room, came to rest at last on several cakes of ice. From the cakes a perceptible vapor was rising. The things had been slid silently into the room before the door was closed. “ ’Tis dry ice!” Mac said. “Of course! There’d be plenty of it in a place like this. That doesn’t look so good, chief.”

Benson nodded agreement that it did not look at all good. Smitty was puzzled. “Seems to me the rats who went to the trouble of locking us in here could do something more dangerous than just freeze us a little with dry ice.”

“It isn’t a question of freezin’, you brainless mountain of suet,” said Mac. “ ’Tis the fumes. The vapor from meltin’ dry ice can knock you off into eternity as slick as anything you’ve ever inhaled.”

Smitty coughed a little. “This would be scientifically airtight, of course,” he said quite calmly. “And that door couldn’t be broken down by an army.” He picked up the bench. The thing was very heavy, made of wood nearly three inches thick, with massive legs. But the giant whirled it around like a top. Whirled it around and smashed it against one of the glass block walls.

Smashed was right! Nothing could withstand the impact of that tremendous blow. Either wall or bench had to go. And, unfortunately, it was the bench. Smitty was left with two legs of the bench in his hands, looking kind of surprised and sheepish. And the wall wasn’t damaged in the least. Glass in thick blocks is not fragile like it is in thin panes or sheets.

“Ye’ll be gettin’ out that way about the time ye sprout a long white beard,” coughed Mac. The fumes were getting very noticeable indeed, by now.

“Looks like we’re hooked,” said Smitty. He said it resignedly, regretfully, but with little fear in his voice. The Avenger and his aides knew that some day their number would be up. They lived with death, literally, in their constant war against the underworld. And they knew that no man could go on risking death, forever, without sometime catching it in the neck.

Thus, they were half ready for death in any serious trap. And that this was serious was apparent enough. By the simple process of getting themselves locked in a refrigerating room, they were in a worse spot, really, than they had been the night before, with six stories of masonry and mortar falling toward their sedan. In this spot, both men looked toward The Avenger. He was the type of leader to whom men instinctively look when their own minds are baffled.

Benson was staring at one of the glass-block walls, with the glass seeming no paler, no colder than his eyes. At length, he nodded. “Keep your coat lapels over your mouths and nostrils,” he said.

As regular precaution against gas, the aides of The Avenger kept the lapels of their coats saturated with a gas resisting chemical of Benson’s invention. They held their collars tighter to their faces now.

“I’m afraid we’re going to disappoint our captors,” said The Avenger, steel-white fingers dipping into two of the many pockets of his specially made vest. He drew out two pieces of glass and fit them together. The result looked like an atomizer. But it was not an atomizer; it was the world’s smallest blow torch. Into the body of the tiny torch, Benson dropped two grayish pellets. These were the work of MacMurdie, chemist extraordinary. Moistened, they gave off a concentrate of acetylene gas.

Benson wet the pellets, and touched a match to the glass tip of the protruding tube. Tiny, but intensely hot flame lanced out. “Some of that dry ice, Smitty,” said Benson, pale eyes intent on a section of the glass-block wall between this and the next cold-room. He was playing the thin lance of fire over a large section. Smitty came with a cake of the dry ice, protecting his hands from burning by his folded coat.

“Against the heated part of the wall,” said Benson. Smitty pressed the intensely cold cake against the heated glass. There was a thin shriek, and a crack appeared. The thick glass could hardly be broken with a sledge hammer, and the three had no sledge hammer. But it could crack with quick alternates of heat and cold, like an ordinary milk bottle.

Benson was continuing to play the torch over the glass. “Again.” First the torch, and then the ice. The partition began to look like a sheet of rotten, cracking ice. And when Benson finally pushed against it, a large section fell to the floor in bits, revealing the next room. They stepped into it, holding aside quarters of hung beef as they might have brushed aside jungle undergrowth to make a path. The door of this room had an inside handle, for the very precaution of keeping someone from being accidentally trapped. Smitty pushed up the lock-lever, and they jumped out into the narrow corridor.

There were men out there, six of them. They were clustered around the next door, the one with no inner handle, the one that had been shut to trap Benson and Mac and Smitty. They were watching that door as terriers watch a rat hole, to be sure the three inside didn’t pull a fast one and escape.

When the three intended victims suddenly came out of the next door, the six men gaped at them in a bewilderment that would have been funny if it hadn’t been instantly succeeded by such furious deadliness. The six leaped toward the three!

These men were in the whites worn by the workers around here. But the whites were too clean. They weren’t spotted with the labor of handling sides of meat. And the faces of the six were not the faces of honest workers. Corny, mob leader, would have known those faces; the manager of the warehouse would not.

“Come and get it!” rumbled Smitty. This was something the giant liked—a good, open fight. Much better than a furtive door-closing which was supposed to lock them in a death chamber of dry-ice fumes. Two of the men jumped at Smitty, one from each side. The giant struck twice! He got one of the charging men with a blow to the side of the head that must certainly have dislocated his neck. Perhaps it broke it: the man fell, singularly still.

The second man was fortunate. He managed to duck a bit so that Smitty’s hamlike left hand only glanced from the top of his head. He received just a little blow. Only enough to whirl him around twice, slam him against the side of the narrow corridor and leave him shaking as he clawed at the smooth wall for support.

Mac had a man who was becoming very sorry he had attacked. The Scot was working the fellow over with fists that were like bone mallets at the end of his stringy but amazingly strong arms. Mac was having fun where it showed the most—on the man’s face. MacMurdie had suffered from crime as much as Benson himself. So he was having a good time now—first smashing a nose flat, then splitting a mouth into a bloody ruin, then blackening an eye.

Benson had already accounted for one man and was turning to another. The Avenger’s fist flicked out with the delicate skill of a surgeon’s scalpel and struck a jaw just hard enough to send the owner into sleep for a half-hour.

The sixth man, discreetly hanging around just outside the range of ruinous fists, drew a revolver. “Gun ’em down!” he yelled. “The hell with the noise. They’re gettin’ away!”

Benson was way ahead of the man. He had been expecting some such move, even sooner than this. His right hand drove into his coat pocket. Through the fabric of the pocket thrust a needle point. But this needle was hollow, like the needle of a hypodermic syringe. From it came a tiny stream of greenish liquid. The thin stream instantly expanded into a thick one, and kept on expanding into a black and nauseous cloud. Before the man could fire, or the others fumble for their guns, half the corridor was enveloped in a thick, dense pall. You couldn’t see your hand before your eyes.

Mac and Smitty said nothing. There was no need to call orders. They went for the staircase, getting to it so close together that their bodies touched. Six steps down and they were out of the black pall vaporized from MacMurdie’s chemical discovery which had been shot out through the hypolike needle.

Leisurely the three walked down the stairs and out of the building.

CHAPTER IX

Four Into Three

Benson moved fast when he was out of the building. “Mac,” he snapped, pale eyes like ice in a polar dawn, “go at once to Wittwar’s office. Find out if he has been there during the last hour. Make sure of it! Smitty, do the same thing on Mallory. I’ll check up on Werner, and from there I’ll go to Conroy’s. If any of the four Foundation directors has been away some place during the time we were trapped in the cold room and can’t account fully for his whereabouts, I want to know about it.”

The three took The Avenger’s car back through the tunnel and separated at Canal Street, Smitty to go to Mallory’s office, Mac to Wittwar’s, and Benson to Werner’s.

At Werner’s office Benson found nothing out of order. The man with the pink, cherubic countenance and the steel-trap jaw had his printing establishment near Houston Street. He was in his office when The Avenger got there, and had been there since nine o’clock that morning. He hadn’t even gone out for lunch. A dozen people around the place, deftly questioned by the man with the colorless, indomitable eyes, confirmed that.

Benson sped from there to Conroy’s office, was told that he had stayed home that morning, and raced to the man’s big apartment on lower Fifth Avenue near Washington Square. The Avenger rang the buzzer under Conroy’s name in the vestibule. There was no answer. He rang again; then he took out a slim length of flexible steel and inserted it in the vestibule lock.

Smitty came in before Benson started picking the lock. “No soap with Mallory,” said the giant. “He was in his office from nine o’clock till a little after twelve. Then he went next door to lunch. I checked that with half the guys working around his office, and three quarters of the waiters in the restaurant. He’s still in the restaurant.”

Mac came in. He had a similar story about Wittwar. The Avenger said nothing, cold eyes as unreadable as glacier ice. The fact that these men had alibis was not too important. If one of them was the employer of murderers, he could quite easily have left the details of trapping Benson in the warehouse to others. Meanwhile, he could have sat safe and respectable in his own office. But checking on their whereabouts was common sense; and The Avenger’s genius was always methodical.

He turned back to the lock, and the thin steel length snapped the bar back. The three went up heavily carpeted stairs to Conroy’s top-floor apartment. The Avenger rang, pressing the buzzer beside the apartment door. He stood for a moment listening. Then he deftly opened that door too. There wasn’t a lock on earth that Benson couldn’t open in record time.

The three men stepped into a beautiful big living room. Wealth and taste had furnished it. It was about twenty-five feet by thirty, with overhead beams exposed. They saw that the beams were exposed in the hallway in the same decorative manner. But there wasn’t a soul around, and that, the glances of the three men said, was odd. There should have been servants in the house. They went down the hall and began looking through the apartment room by room. Ten of them. In the last, they found the tenants of this elaborate but deserted place. And they found that Conroy had the best alibi of all.

Conroy was dead! The room in which he lay, at the rear of the hall cutting through the apartment like a main artery, was a library. There were many books, several tables, leather chairs, a leather divan. The beams showed in here too in imitation of an ancient feudal castle. Around the walls were the heads of animals, a zebra, two lions, a tiger and an elk. Benson recalled that his investigations of the four directors had revealed that Conroy had been quite a big game hunter up till a few years ago.

Conroy lay on the divan. He seemed only asleep, with his hands folded across his chest and his eyes peacefully closed. But there is something about death that proclaims itself from afar, to those accustomed to it, as were the little group aiding The Avenger in his crime battles.

“Well,” said Smitty, towering in the room, “he isn’t to blame for any of our recent troubles. Wonder what killed him?” It took a lot of searching to find that out.

The Avenger took out a small bit of what seemed to be dark violet paper. But the paper was coated with a special methyl stain of MacMurdie’s concoction to detect gunfire. Hours after a gun had been fired in a room, this stain would pick up the faint remaining fumes and turn to bluish-green. The paper retained its color, showing that no gun had been fired in this room, at least not for a long time.

Conroy’s body, on examination, seemed to be completely unmarked. You’d have thought the man had simply lain down on the divan and peacefully died of a heart attack. Or perhaps he had committed suicide in some subtle way, since it was apparent that his servants had been sent away from the place.

Then The Avenger’s sensitive, steel-strong fingers found something. They had been searching Conroy’s scalp, through the thick, reddish hair. There was a tiny projection above the left ear, not quite as far from the ear as from a point at the exact top of the skull. Benson stared closer. Something like the end of a needle was just barely seen in the scalp—with the other end far down in the brain beneath.

Into the stainless steel chips of eyes came the diamond glitter that meant The Avenger had suddenly discovered a great deal. He straightened up and stared at the curiously staring giant and the equally curious Scot. “From the mists of the past,” said Benson, pale lips scarcely moving in his paralyzed face, “the ruthless ancients teach the modern crook. But not, it would seem, too well.”

“Huh?” said Smitty.

The colorless, terrible eyes turned on him; and the giant experienced a funny feeling at the pit of his stomach, as even friends did when those pale-agate orbs rested on them. Benson’s lips barely moved in his paralyzed face. “I told you about the sample manuscript, the ancient bundle of hides, Lini Waller brought to New York as an example of the archaeological wonders of those caves,” he said. “I told you that the ancient record they chanced to pick at random was a volume dealing with the medicinal and surgical skill of that lost race. Well, among other things, it is told in the record how they made slaves by a brain operation that robbed the victim of conscious will, turned him into a robot that moved and talked as its master commanded. But it was hardly complicated enough to be called an operation. It consisted of very simply, and diabolically, driving a slim metal wedge into the brain at precisely the right area to paralyze the seat of will. Whoever we are after, has learned this trick from a study of the manuscript.”

The pale, clear eyes narrowed. “I think this was done to Lini Waller. It would explain the way she is apparently working against her own interests. She’s an automation docilely working toward her own destruction. And that would explain why I was unable to hypnotize her. There was no conscious will there to hypnotize.”

Smitty jabbed a colossal thumb in the direction of the divan. “But Conroy wasn’t turned into a robot. Conroy was turned into a corpse.”

The Avenger nodded. “By accident,” his calm, cold voice came in reply. “I have said the ancients seem to have taught the modern crook the robot trick—but not too well. This is a delicate operation, simple as the actual penetration of the brain appears to be. The metal must go into the exact segment of the brain. If it strays to right or left, even a fraction of an inch, the victim dies—as Conroy did. It would appear that someone wanted Conroy to become an automation obeying crooked orders, perhaps wanted him to be a scapegoat in case trouble developed. But the needle didn’t go exactly where it should have gone; so Conroy died!”

Mac was staring at the bizarre picture presented by the dead man and his immediate surroundings. The divan on which the corpse lay was covered with dark-red leather, so that it looked like a sacrificial slab coated with crusted, long-dried blood. And right over the body, like the head of some sort of vile god, was the mounted head of a North Woods moose. “Sacrifice to the beast,” muttered Mac. “Only beasts don’t come as rotten as the man who did this.”

Smitty had an objection to one of Benson’s points. It was so seldom that he could see even a small hole in the reasoning of the ice-eyed man that he felt sneakingly proud of the fact. “You said this may have been done to Lini Waller,” he said. “But if that were true, how could the girl give away the place where she’d been held prisoner? You remember her babble to you of ice caves was what let us find that cold-room at the refrigerating warehouse. If she were a robot, doing someone else’s bidding, how is it she would let that slip out?”

Benson had the answer, as Smitty should have known he would. “She was operated on in that room,” The Avenger said, voice absent as he stared at Conroy. “The hairs on the bench indicate that. The bench was a crude operating table. But just before the needle was driven into her brain, she was still herself, and observed the appearance of the room. Later, that memory, lingering in her subconscious mind, came out as she was talking to me. Only her sense of timing was wrong. She said she was held in the ice cave last night; but, actually, it must have been the night before last.”

Mac nodded. “And even a very intelligent mon,” he added, “as intelligent as our head skurlie in this affair must be, would hardly foresee a trap like that. If he had told the girl to say nothing of where she had been held, she wouldn’t have done so.”

“That’s right,” said Benson.

“I don’t know that our discovery of the cold-room did any good,” said Smitty gloomily. “Where’d it get us, I’d like to know?”

“Now who’s croakin’ disaster?” demanded Mac, at whom the giant was always jeering as being a Scotch raven croaking of failure.

Smitty grimaced, then grinned sheepishly. But The Avenger seemed not even to hear the byplay. He was staring at the corpse, but obviously not seeing it. His pale eyes were like twin swirling pits of fog as, in the brain behind them, cold facts began to marshal themselves into an orderly arrangement.

CHAPTER X

Death’s Hammer

The Avenger and his aides were all in the great room on the top floor of their Bleek Street headquarters. Smitty was tinkering with Josh’s little radio. These tiny radios were rather marvelous things. Run on tiny but powerful batteries, they were encased in small metal containers curved to fit the waist and hardly larger than cigar cases. They would transmit as well as receive and had a range up to forty miles. Benson and each of his helpers always wore one strapped to his belt; and they had saved the little crew a lot of grief.

Since the radios were Smitty’s own invention, he found the bug in Josh’s pretty quickly and fixed it. “There, Josh. Bet you ate so many maple-nut sundaes that you bulged in the meal case and loosened the connection,” said Smitty, handing back the tiny radio.

Josh grinned. The lanky Negro’s consuming passion was sticky maple-nut sundaes. He had been known to eat six of them at a sitting; and four or five were nothing at all.

“Ye’ll be breakin’ me up in business, Josh,” said Mac solemnly, “if ye keep on lappin’ up the sundaes in my drugstore during yer spare time.”

The drugstore had been bought by Benson and turned over to MacMurdie. It was an ordinary drugstore in front; but in the rear it was highly extraordinary. Back there, Smitty had a long bench at which he worked on his electrical inventions, and Mac had an equally long table where he concocted drugs that so often turned out to be revolutionary in the world of medicine—and of crime fighting.

The Avenger sat at a teak desk near a rear window, with late sun slanting in on his white, thick hair through what seemed ordinary Venetian blinds. Only instead of being wood, the slats of the blinds were made of nickel-steel, set in the masonry at a forty-five degree angle to admit light but deflect bullets.

Nellie Gray looked at the chief, as they all called him. Benson was staring at the desk top with eyes as cold and still as his face. Nellie knew that look. He was driving through mystery and evasions on a path half of chill logic and half of an almost feminine intuition. He stared suddenly at the group. “Mac. Josh.”

The Scot with the big ears and feet and the sleepy looking Negro went to the desk. “I think we’d better locate the caves where Lini Waller and her brother found the ancient relics,” Benson said calmly to Mac. “You and Josh had better hop out there and look around. There has been no word from her brother since that last message we caught on their wave length about his having had ‘a little trouble’ but that ‘everything is all right now.’ ”

Mac gasped. “D’ye think we can find the cave, Muster Benson? The girrrl has made it her chief business to keep the secret of that location, ever since coming to New York. She didn’t tell even the men who are to give her two and a half million dollars for the stuff in the caves.”

“I think we can reason out about where the caves are,” Benson repeated. “The nature of the sample she brought to New York is about enough. A bundle of hides which, after all, is quite a perishable thing. Now how could thin hides last for forty or fifty thousand years? Only in one way—preserved by intense cold. You could find such cold only in polar regions, or in glacial ice. Since it is unlikely that the girl went on a polar expedition with her brother, the glacial idea is indicated. This would be borne out too by her talk of being held in an ice cave here in New York.”

Benson took out the map on which Smitty had ruled the line laid out by the radio direction-finder when the words came from Brent Waller in the far away cave. “There are no glaciers inland anywhere near this line,” he said. “But there are two within a hundred and ten miles of it; one is almost on the line, along the Pacific coast. You two take the fast plane out there and try to locate that glacier from which the stuff came. Look for one which has recently cracked so that it might expose an object heretofore hidden. You might be able to find whatever Indians guided the Wallers recently, and get an even closer line on the location. Radio back the minute you have something to report.”

Josh and Mac went out. The Avenger had half a dozen planes, small and large, built variously for speed or to transport heavy loads. They’d be in one of the fastest in about half an hour, winging their way toward the virgin fir forests of northern British Columbia.

Neither had said a word to the command. They were all prepared for such instant trips to far corners of the continent. They occurred frequently in the strenuous fights against crime for which the indomitable little crew existed.

Nellie Gray turned her lovely face toward Benson. “What do I do?” she asked. “You haven’t given me a thing to do so far.”

“There will probably be plenty for you to do before this is over,” said Benson. “But for the moment there is nothing.” He got up, moving, as always, so smoothly that he seemed slow, but getting to the door in about half the time you’d expect. “It’s nearly seven o’clock,” he said. “Well after standard office hours. I’m going to have a quick look at the offices of Werner and Mallory and Wittwar. I’ll be back soon.”

He left; and Nellie, sighing for action, picked up the late afternoon paper. There was a lot in it about the strange death of Conroy. Nothing was said of murder. Benson had told of the inconspicuous needle when he reported to the police; but for their own reasons they were soft-pedaling the murder angle. They thought they’d have less reporters interfering in a murder chase, possibly. Nellie smiled a little. There was only one man alive who could solve that murder, she reflected loyally. That was the scourge of the underworld—The Avenger.

The Wittwar Packing Co. had its own five-story office building in lower Manhattan. The building was deserted when Benson reached it; too late for late workers, too early for scrubwomen. Which was precisely what Benson wanted.

It was night now. No trick for the gray steel bar of a man to slide like a shadow up the fire escape of the next building, walk a narrow ledge and get into the building absolutely unseen through a third-story window. Wittwar’s big office was on the top floor. It was unlocked; there was nothing furtive about it.

The Avenger went in. The powerful little flashlight played around on a big vault, two desks and several chairs. He went to the vault first. The combination of the vault was good, but not as elaborate as that of a safe in which money and other valuables might be kept. Benson, with sensitive fingertips, felt out the numbers worn by constant use and swung open the door. There was nothing in the vault that didn’t refer to the meat business.

He went to the desks, a huge one for Wittwar and a smaller one for a secretary. In the top drawer of Wittwar’s desk was a large tablet of blank paper, with the top dozen sheets covered with lines of figures. The numbers were quite common. They related to the electric-power companies on the North American continent: output per year, gross income, net profits, et cetera. The Avenger replaced the big pad of paper and continued his search. And found nothing!

He left the building the way he had come in and went to Werner’s office. There was not one thing in the office that even the genius of The Avenger could connect with the kidnaping of Lini or the theft of age-old relics.

Benson went on to Mallory’s office. The vice-president and general manager of Wittwar’s big company had his office in the uptown branch of the company, not in the main office building where Wittwar’s was located. The branch was over on Tenth Avenue; and the neighborhood was dark even at this early hour. Dark and deserted.

The Avenger stopped his car a block from the address and went on foot to the building. He seemed to be walking normally, but such was the inconspicuousness of his tread that you probably would not have noticed him. Indeed, from the way he managed to keep within what shadows there were along the fairly lighted sidewalk, you probably would not have seen him at all. Benson was a master at taking advantage of cover where there would seem to be no cover. Enemies sometimes swore he could make himself invisible.

At any rate, the man in the car a hundred feet down from the branch entrance did not see Benson. But The Avenger saw him. A long dark sedan, with the smooth motor idling; a man at the wheel who could be distinguished only as a dark shadow at the top of which a little red glow now and again indicated the puffing of a cigarette.

Benson came as near the car as he could along the sidewalk, then took to the street. He moved in a line that would keep his body hidden from the rear-view mirror by the blind spot caused by the upright between glass windows at side and rear. At the tail of the car, he crouched and looked around. There was no one near enough to see what went on. He moved, head low, along the side of the car.

The first thing the man at the wheel knew of the presence of someone else in the night was when a hand, not large but strong as a steel cable, whipped up from the side of the car and slapped over his mouth. The next thing he knew, as he flopped in the seat and tried to get away from the hand and yell, was that another hand was compressing the back of his neck.

It was the strangest attack. First, there was a feel of terrific pain, making him squeal behind the sound-deadening hand over his lips. Then there was a sort of swift fadeout of the surrounding neighborhood. And finally, the man was falling into a world of fog that got blacker and blacker and had no bottom.

The Avenger released the pressure on the great nerves at the base of the skull that could kill if held long enough. He left the man still slouched in a fairly upright position behind the steering column and went back to the entrance. The door was locked. Apparently the man was a guard, to prevent anyone from going in, not a lookout for someone who had already entered.

Benson softly forced the lock and went in. He went to Mallory’s office on the second floor of the two stories of the branch housed in the five-story warehouse structure. The Avenger had heard no sound as he went up the stairs, but he found his ears straining for any noise.

Danger! He felt it, instinctively, with the sixth sense that animals of prey develop. He moved by memory to the door of Mallory’s office, not showing the flashlight. He went in, closed the door, and only then did he turn on the beam.

There is a technique of searching. An ordinary man could take a day to search one room as it should be searched. The police could do the same job in an hour or less. The Avenger could do it in about eight minutes. In six, he had found more than had turned up in all the rest of his investigations to date.

First, at the rear of the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, there was a ragged corner of something that seemed to have been torn from a parchment page. But it was not parchment. Benson studied it in the white beam of his flashlight. It was thin hide, strange looking, obviously very old and yet well preserved. It was a corner from one of the thin hides making up the ancient volume Lini had brought from the ice caves.

With his eyes glittering like chromium slits, Benson recalled his conviction that from the manuscript he had studied in the Foundation office, one page near the front was missing. This corner, it seemed, had been inadvertently torn off that missing page. And on the corner were the ends of three jagged lines tooled in the thin, queer leather.

In the top drawer of Mallory’s desk was a measuring compass. Quite a large one. Experimentally, The Avenger drew a half circle on a large letterhead from the drawer. The half circle was the approximate size of a human skull from the ears up. He tried the compass on it. It was large enough to span the half circle easily, and large enough to measure off a given segment of it.

There was still another thing. A section of the wash-stand paneling sounded loose under a soft tap. Benson’s deft, steely fingers found the end, pulled it forward. A flat space showed between panel and rough plaster. In the space was a hammer. It was a curious hammer, with a narrow, long striking head, and with sharp prongs on the opposite end. Benson nodded. An archaeologist’s hammer, used for the delicate chipping away of stone and hard earth from valuable objects long buried.

A hammer, a piece torn from the lost page of the ancient book and a measuring compass large enough to be used on a human skull . . .

The door of the office swung softly open as Benson stood with his back to it. Light flared on! Benson whirled.

“Just keep where you are, with your mitts in sight,” said the man in the doorway. The man had a machine gun trained on Benson’s body. Behind him, two men had automatics also trained on the same target.

“Burn him down,” snarled one of the men behind the machine gunner. “What’re you waiting for, Nick? Burn him down!”

CHAPTER XI

Disaster Calls

Nellie Gray was spoiling for action. To look at the lovely little blonde, you’d have thought she would never have an idea about anything more sinister than the latest lure in perfume, or the most modern thing in handbags. But Nellie’s ideas were confined, ninety percent of the time, to thoughts of guns and gangsters.

And now she was sitting around staring at her perfectly kept fingernails, trying not to bite them, while everybody but her was busy in this case of the ancient relics! As is often the case with people who wish for things, Nellie was about to have an overdose of that which she was wishing for.

It began with the tiny red glow on the wall, announcing that someone was in the vestibule downstairs and wanted to come up. She looked into the short-range television screen and saw the face and form of Lini Waller. “Uh-oh,” she said softly. “Whenever that girl shows up, trouble comes to call! The chief should be here, now. I wonder where—”

She went swiftly to the big radio set in the corner which was always tuned to the group’s special wave length. “Nellie Gray calling,” she said into it. “Chief, this is Nellie Gray. Answer, if you hear. I think you had better come back to headquarters. Chief, Nellie Gray calling.”

At that moment a machine gun was covering the approximate spot in Benson’s middle where the little belt radio he carried was located. But Nellie didn’t know that. All she knew was that The Avenger didn’t answer.

The giant, Smitty, was down in a second-floor room. She pressed a buzzer that sounded in the room. In about four seconds Smitty was upstairs with her. The giant moved fast when Nellie called. It was to be suspected that his main concern in life was this small, lithe, fragile looking blonde. It was to be suspected that the big fellow had a large spot in her heart too; but you could never do more than suspect: Nellie would have died rather than show it.

“Smitty! Lini Waller is downstairs! I think the chief would want to know that and be with her, as soon as possible. He’s out at the office of either Wittwar or Mallory or Werner. Get him, fast! Tell Lini to come up as you go through the vestibule. I’ll stall her here till he comes.”

Smitty went out in a hurry. In a moment Lini Waller came in the door of the great top-floor room. “Hello,” said Nellie, making the greetings sound as careless as she could. “Come in. We’ve missed you.”

Lini stood there. “I can’t come in,” she said. “I haven’t time. I must see Mr. Benson right away. I have important news for him.”

Nellie stared at her with carefully veiled curiosity, and sympathy. If Benson had deduced correctly, a dreadful thing had been done to this girl! At this moment she was walking around with a length of steel in her brain. But it seemed impossible to believe so fantastic a thing. Lini’s face showed little expression, to be sure. Her tone lacked a certain animation. But it was hardly enough to confirm that hideous statement of the chief’s.

“I’ve got to see Mr. Benson right away,” repeated Lini.

“He isn’t in,” said Nellie. “But he will be any minute. Come in and sit down.”

“I can’t. I must go at once, before they guess that I am here and come and take me.”

“No one can take you from this place,” said Nellie soothingly.

“Yes. They can. They can do anything. They are terrible! I must see Mr. Benson and tell him where they are.”

Whew! Hold everything! was Nellie’s thought. And with the thought went all ideas of just stalling the girl till the chief returned. “You mean, you know where the men who are after your secret are hiding?” she demanded.

Lini’s head nodded, slowly. “I think I do. I am sure I do! Within a block or so. Mr. Benson can find the exact place when I take him to the block in which they are.”

Yes, thought Nellie, the chief could do that easily. But she had another thought: So could I.

“You lead me to that block,” she said, reaching for a perky hat as she spoke. “Come on, let’s go!”

Lini hung back. “It was Mr. Benson I wanted.”

“When it comes to a thing like this,” said Nellie, “you can’t distinguish between Mr. Benson and anyone of us who work for him. Lead on!” Her blue eyes were wide and pleased as she followed Lini Waller down the stairs. This was going to be dandy.

The chief was expected back any minute with Smitty. When he returned, he would hear Nellie’s voice on the radio. By then she should have marked the precise building in which their enemies were located, after Lini had led her to the block. Then The Avenger could come directly to that address instead of having to waste time finding it himself. Meanwhile, she could lurk around the place and be sure that none of the men went out.

Lini a pitiful automation? Well, maybe she was. But it didn’t matter. One way or another, she was going to reveal an important thing: the location of the enemies’ headquarters. And Nellie wasn’t going to allow such an intention to cool! Anyhow, she had been pining so hard for something precisely like this that she jumped at the chance.

“It’s on or near Park Avenue,” said Lini, when the two girls were in the coupé Nellie usually used.

Nellie nodded. She was no dope. The chances that this was a trap were large. She had known that when she started, but she had not cared. Even if it was a trap, she could still lead The Avenger to a place where the enemy, lying in wait for her, could be located, couldn’t she?

Had Lini mentioned some dark or disreputable district, the trap possibility would have been confirmed. As it was, Park Avenue is not a typical place for gangsters to try to burn people down. Though it was still possible, of course.

“I think,” said Lini, when the coupé had raced to Park Avenue and the Forties, not far from the lordly Waldorf Astoria, itself, “that it is in this block, between Park and Lexington.”

The traffic light went red. Nellie dutifully stopped. From the opposite curb came a bellow: “Hey, you! In the coupé! Why don’t you stop when the fight goes red?”

Indignantly, Nellie looked toward the source of the noise, a burly traffic officer in blue. The man walked over to her coupé, shoulders swinging.

“You’re a foot and a half over the white line,” he said truculently, leaning close. Nellie was rolling down her window to protest. “How do you expect pedestrians to cross with the lights when you’re clear out in the next street like that.”

And this was all Nellie heard. From the dark, blue-clad bulk so close to the rolled-down window, a large hand jabbed forth. The hand caught her by the throat. Nellie could handle any two men, so expert was she at jujitsu. But she hadn’t a chance, sitting down, with the steering wheel cramping her and her assailant’s bulk outside the car and inaccessible. She tried to yell, and couldn’t. She tried to squirm free, and couldn’t.

“I think you’ll just take a little ride to the station house,” said the man loudly, for the benefit of a car waiting just behind Nellie’s. “Move over! I’ll drive.”

This fell on ears that couldn’t hear at all. Nellie was completely out. Her inert body was shoved over against the impassive form of Lini, and the man in cop’s clothing slid behind the wheel. The coupé sped smoothly from the desirable neighborhood of Park Avenue to another neighborhood almost as discreet and respectable. Lower Fifth Avenue.

But Nellie knew nothing of destinations. Once, when she stirred a little, the big hand jammed down on an already bruised throat, and she didn’t stir any more. She came to, finally, feeling nauseated with the pain of her aching throat. She stared around, thinking she was still out and wandering in some kind of nightmare.

From a little above her, and to her left, stared the glassy eyes of a lion. Or, rather, of a lion’s head, just the head. Above, was a queer, rough ceiling with exposed beams, as if she were in some very crude place. She could see the ceiling plainly because she lay on her back on something firm, yet yielding.

She moved to get off the thing and found that her arms and legs were tightly bound. Furthermore, she couldn’t even roll her head. She tried, and there was a firm pressure on her forehead that prevented it. After a moment she realized that adhesive tape passed over her forehead, binding it down to whatever she lay on. She could only move her eyes. Then she tried to scream!

Right over her was an awful thing with great horns, like a caricature of the devil himself. And this also stared at her out of glassy, immobile eyes, like a strange, deadly god staring down at a victim who lay on a sacrificial slab beneath its swollen snout. Nellie made a violent effort to get her arms free and failed. Her elbows were bound by cord that went around her arms and body several times; and her hands, folded at her waist, were clamped together by more adhesive tape.

“She’s prettier’n the other one, even,” said a man. There was regret in his tone but not too much regret. “Too bad the boss couldn’t pick ’em plainer lookin’.”

Nellie rolled her eyes to the side as far as she could. Now she saw four men, from about the chest up. The sight wasn’t any treat. The chests were scrawny. At the left armpit of each was a bulge indicating a shoulder holster replete with gun. And the four faces were those of rats more than of humans. A nice quartet of mobsters, Nellie decided. She tried again, frantically, to free her hands. But they could only flutter harmlessly at her waist.

“Here he comes,” said another of the four, in a low tone.

Nellie heard the door open, heard measured steps. Into her range of vision came the upper half of a body completely swathed by a loose overcoat so that you could not make out any single feature of it. There was a face, but because of upturned coat collar and low-drawn hat brim, you could see only the nose and eyes. And the eyes had dark glasses over them.

The man stood over the helpless girl, staring down at her. Nellie wished she could see the shielded eyes, then decided it was probably better that she couldn’t.

The man took a queer, divided thing from his pocket. Each leg of it had a needle point. A measuring compass, Nellie saw. The man leaned over her. His fingers experimentally parted her shining blonde hair from her scalp. He poised the measuring compass, with one sharp point just touching her left ear. The other point was lightly pressed at the exact top of her skull.

The man calculated a moment; then he drew a pen from his pocket. Nellie felt a slight sting as the point was pressed firmly against her head, and a fleck of ink released to dry almost instantly. The point marked was not quite halfway between left ear and center of the skull. It was a little nearer the ear than the top of the head.

Nellie’s hands began to beat wildly as, with sudden horror in her blue eyes, she sought to shift the binding adhesive tape. The tape didn’t shift. Her fingers could only flutter fruitlessly at her waist.

Richard Benson possessed two of the world’s oddest weapons. Pitted against criminals who went armed as heavily with machine guns and high-velocity short arms as was possible to obtain, The Avenger trusted to only these two. One was a little .22 revolver, silenced, so streamlined for compactness that it looked like little more than a blue length of slim pipe with a slight bend for a handle. This he called Mike; and Mike was holstered at the calf of his right leg, below the knee. The other weapon was an equally slim, razor-sharp little throwing knife. This he called Ike; and Ike was holstered at his left calf.

Faced with a submachine gun and two automatics in the doorway of Mallory’s office, The Avenger had wasted no time in words or false moves.

“Burn him down!” one of the three had said.

With the words, the machine gun began its deadly clatter. But just before, Benson had bent down like a court attache making a deep bow to royalty. The slugs went over his head. The man jerked to get the gun down; but a machine gun tends to tilt up and up, with the constant hammer of bullets passing from its muzzle. So that by the time the gun was lined down again, Benson was a yard to the right, with Mike and Ike in his hands.

The two men behind the machine gunner fired at the gray, shifting shadow that was The Avenger. Both hit!

But Benson stayed upright. The Avenger had devised a plastic, tougher than most steel, pliant as yarn, which he called celluglass. From this marvelous stuff, he had fashioned bulletproof garments for himself and his aides. The celluglass stopped the automatics’ slugs now.

The machine gun swung toward him again. Benson’s left hand flashed forward. Ike left the hand like a pebble from a catapult. The machine gunner screamed and tried to drop the gun and could not because his left hand was pinned to the hardwood stock like a butterfly pinned to a cork with a needle.

He flopped around, trying to get his hand loose, and screaming as each wrench at the knife produced more and more unbearable agonies. But no one paid attention to him. Mike’s silenced little muzzle had spat out a tiny leaden pea. And one of the two with automatics went down. But he wasn’t dead. The Avenger himself never took life. He deftly creased the gunman with Mike, slamming a small slug so that it glanced from the top of his skull, producing unconsciousness instead of death.

But the other man didn’t know that. He saw one pal trying to jerk his impaled hand from a machine gun, and the other lying on the floor, apparently dead. And this in a spot where the three of them were going to kill the one—the fellow with the dead-pan face and blazing, colorless eyes. The guy had on a bulletproof vest or something. The third man yelled hoarsely and sent three shots at the head with the virile white hair on it. But a head is a poor target, particularly when it is moving as rapidly as Benson was shifting his.

Mike spat a second time, and this third man went down. Then Mike served as a club, while Benson tapped the wildly screaming machine gunner where it would do the most good. The Avenger went to the telephone on the desk nearby, staring dispassionately with icy, pale eyes at three still forms as he did so. He reported to the police that they could pick up three burglars at this address and hung up.

He walked from the building to see Smitty sitting in one of their cars at the curb with a look of horror on his moon face. “Chief!” the giant gasped. “I came to get you. But just as I pulled up here, after missing you at the other two places, I began to get a message. It was from Nellie, chief! She’s in an awful mess.”

Benson listened to Smitty’s tiny radio. From it was coming, not a voice, but fluttering kind of tappings. Morse code.

“Nellie calling. S. O. S. Held in place with beam ceiling; thing with horns over me. Don’t know where. Come fast—”

The fluttering of her fingers at her waist had not been entirely fruitless. She had been tapping like that for minutes. Praying that it could be heard in time; that the man with the infallible brain would be able to figure out where she was and come to her.

CHAPTER XII

Mysterious Cauldron

Had Benson been piloting the plane in which Mac and Josh sped to British Columbia, it would have followed the map line of Smitty’s direction-finder with rulerlike precision. But Mac was piloting it. Mac was an excellent pilot; but he hadn’t the genius of The Avenger. Hence, he came out at the Pacific coast nearly a hundred miles north of the line. He spotted it quickly enough, with the sun’s rise. And he found that the mileage wasn’t wasted after all.

Two glaciers, Benson had said, within a hundred and ten miles of the line. They were almost at the most northern of the two; so Mac swung still farther north, and they located it. The glacier, from twelve thousand feet, was like a wide ribbon of white in the dark earth. But it wasn’t that smooth when they zoomed down. It was a tumbled mass, with great hillocks and slashing cracks. It poked its foot into the sea itself; and even as the two winged down, a huge section splashed off into the sea.

“Very interestin’,” said Mac indifferently. “But I don’t see what we’re lookin’ for, Josh. Signs of recent crackin’ that might expose somethin’ long hidden.”

Josh shook his dark head. He didn’t see any such signs, either. Of course, any of the crevasses in the white ribbon beneath them might have been freshly formed. But from a low altitude, they could see that none of them were accessible. Had Brent and Lini Waller discovered something in any of them, they’d never have been able to climb out to tell about it.

Mac flew low along the foot of the glacier, where the clear ice of its middle mass was to be seen. But that’s all there was at the foot of the glacier—just ice, no openings of any kind. He turned the plane’s nose south, and gunned the twin motors. They rocketed along the ocean. Josh caught the Scot’s arm and pointed down.

Mac looked down too, banking so he could see out a window. What he saw wasn’t very exciting. It was a little collection of a dozen or so huts in a clearing in the fir forests. An Indian settlement. Instantly, Mac started to spiral down, with the same thought in mind that Josh had. Perhaps through the Indians in this vicinity they would get a closer line on the Wallers’ last movements.

There was a long cleared spot near the settlement. Mac swooped low, judged he could land all right, came back and settled down as lightly as if the plane had been butterfly weight instead of weighing nearly two tons.

Men came from the settlement, wearing the mackinaws of the North Woods. Indians. They stared curiously at Josh. It was seldom they saw a Negro here. “Probably think ye’re a second cousin, Josh,” Mac grinned out of the corner of his mouth.

A big Indian with a scar under his left ear was in the lead. It developed that he knew a few words of English, and that planes were no novelty to these natives.

There was none of this big-devil-bird-from-the-sky business. Instead, the big Indian said, “What you want? We no got gas here.”

“We don’t want gas,” said Josh. “We are looking for a friend. A man who was probably guided by one of you who live in this section.”

The big Indian’s eyes narrowed a very little, though in no other way did emotion express itself on his stolid face. “Friend?” he said. “Here?”

Josh had caught that slight flicker of eyelids, and followed it as deftly and swiftly as any psychology professor. It told him he was on a very hot scent. “Yes. You guided him yourself, maybe? His name is Brent Waller.”

“Me guide him?” said the Indian, looking stupid. “No guide. Hunter. Trapper.” And he looked askance at MacMurdie.

Josh Newton’s brain was as quick as a mongoose. He said to Mac, softly, “Take a walk, will you, Mac?”

“Walk?” said Mac, staring.

“Yes. I have a hunch this man knows something. And I have a hunch he might talk to me because I’m black and rather akin to himself. But I don’t think he’ll talk with you around.”

Had The Avenger some such thought in his amazing mind when he sent Josh with Mac? The Negro knew that it was probable. “You guided Brent Waller?” he asked the big Indian when Mac had gone back to the plane in the clearing.

“No guide,” said the Indian. “No guide down there. Next ice river.”

“Along the shore?”

“No guide near water,” said the Indian, nodding. He was trying to be very, very shrewd about it, with rather unsuccessful results. He had left the man whose name sounded like Waller. A guide should not leave anyone in the forests. He might get in trouble for that. At the same time the Indian felt inclined to answer this man whose skin was even darker than his own. So he was quite specific about the exact place to which he did not guide the man. Thus, later, this black man could not accuse him of anything.

“No guide near water—other side of ice. No fix tent hard against storm. No tell about bad spirits. Old spirits. No leave when he not come too.”

Josh nodded. “I get it. Well, I wish I could set you up with a nice maple-nut sundae or something. Thanks. Other side of the glacier, on the shore. You haven’t been back there?”

“No go back ever,” said the Indian. “Bad danger! Old spirits. You say I say; I say I no say,” he concluded, promising to deny he had admitted anything if Josh should try to make trouble for him.

Josh went to the plane. “Glacier, south, Mac.”

Mac took off, and in twenty minutes they were over the southern-most glacier along the coast. In three more, Josh exclaimed and stared at the foot of the ice stream. “That’s it!” he said. “See that low cliff? I’ll bet that hasn’t been exposed for a long time. The Indian said something about a storm. Probably a big chunk of it was cracked off then.”

“I don’t see any cave entrances in the cliff,” objected Mac.

But when they had landed the amphibian on the water and taxied in to the shore, Mac’s bleak blue eyes caught the thing Lini Waller had seen: worn spots on a rock slab set flush with the cliff, where countless fingers had pressed, countless ages ago.

He pressed on the two spots, and the slab swung. “We’ve hit it right on the nose!” he exulted. “This is it!”

Josh didn’t say anything in answer. He was walking in, and instantly being astounded by something the Wallers had not noticed at first. “Light in here!” Josh said. “Light, Mac! It isn’t possible!”

“Say, there is, at that,” the Scot said. “And ’tis na comin’ from the entrance, either.”

Josh climbed up to look into the rock niches, so like concealed lighting ledges, that Brent Waller had investigated.

“Hexagonal rods, like fused quartz,” he said. “They give off a fluorescent glow. They’re stone-cold.”

They knew the final meaning now of Lini Waller’s babble concerning ice caves with a “bright white light.” But they couldn’t figure out what made the light. The seven doors beckoned. They opened the first and went into the cave piled high with gold. Ornaments and statues and slabs of the stuff.

Behind them, across the first cave, another door opened very slowly!

“It’s immense, unbelievable,” breathed Josh, as they went from cave to cave.

“ ’Tis all of that,” said Mac. “But where is the brother of Lini Waller?”

There didn’t seem to be any answer to the question. Wonders aplenty, they saw. But all thousands of years old. There was no living thing. That is, they didn’t think there was any living thing! Twice, Josh thought he saw a mummified, long-dead sentry move. But he didn’t have the nerve to mention it till Mac blurted, “Josh, d’ ye think there’d be any way one of these fifty-thousand-year-old spear toters in here could move?”

They were in the fifth cave. Josh eyed the bizarre figure of the guard in there, who had apparently seated himself thousands of years ago and never got up again. “Of course it isn’t possible,” he said. “But I thought I saw the arm of the dead man in the last cave move.”

Mac shivered, then squared his shoulders. “ ’Tis nuts we’re goin’. Plain daft!”

They hadn’t a word for it when they saw the mastodon in the seventh cave. They stared in speechless awe at its gigantic form, and had to feel it to believe it. Wordlessly they walked around the cave, studying the pictures painted on rock that depicted the hunting scenes of the ancient race. Wordlessly, till Josh let out a kind of squawk. “Mac, is the mastodon moving now? I thought I saw its tail twitch!”

“Brrr!” said Mac. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back to the sixth cave. That’s an odd lookin’ kettle in there. I’d like to see it some more.” They went into the sixth cave. And across the way, another of the seven doors began very slowly to open!

This sixth cavern held the greatest enigma of all, as Brent and Lini Waller had previously discovered. There was just one thing in here, a thing that looked like a complicated and gigantic machine. There was a great coil of the stuff that looked like fused quartz. Within this was the odd looking kettle to which Mac had referred.

Only, it was hardly a kettle. It was a cauldron as big as a beer vat. And within that was still another seemingly endless coil of the glasslike rods. They looked the same as the rods which glowed white in the other caves. But no light came from the coils. In one spot, at the start of the big outer coil, there was a gap. A section of rod about the size of the gap lay off to one side.

“It beats me,” said Mac.

It beat Josh too. Finally he shrugged. “Waller’s radio is in the cave of the mastodon,” he said. “Let’s go back and see if we can contact Mr. Benson. It’ll save us going out to the plane to our own radio.”

It also saved them, had they known it, the dubious knowledge of finding that there wasn’t any plane in the sullenly heaving ocean at the foot of the ice wall. Where they had set the amphibian down, there was only empty ocean, now.

They re-entered the cave of the mastodon, and went toward the radio left by Waller. It was good enough to be able to transmit over their own secret wave length. They bent over it, absorbed in the effort to contact someone at Bleek Street.

And behind them crept doom!

CHAPTER XIII

The Missing Needle

There were just two things that could turn Smitty into a maniac. Ordinarily the giant was as even tempered as he was huge; but these two things could turn his disposition to acid. One was the use of his real name—either Heathcote or Algernon—instead of calling him Smitty. The other was—danger to Nellie.

That Nellie was in danger now was beyond doubt. The fragile looking blonde accepted ordinary dangers in her stride. It was urgent indeed when she broke down enough to yell for help. “Chief, we gotta do something!” cried Smitty. “We gotta do—”

Benson said nothing. He shifted the car into gear and began to lam toward lower Manhattan at seventy miles an hour. He could do that, because of the lateness of the night, the comparative freedom of traffic and the fact that the little private insignia on his cars just over the license plates were known to all cops and allowed him to break all ordinary traffic rules.

Seventy an hour—but toward what? “We gotta do something!” yelled Smitty. “Nellie’s in trouble and we don’t even know where she’s being held!”

“Yes, we do,” said The Avenger, tone quiet but deadly in its calm. Benson was as stirred as the giant, though he didn’t show it. The ice-eyed Avenger was the type of leader who inspired complete awe because he never let a follower down. When one of his reckless crew was in danger, everything else was stopped till that one was rescued. He was with his aides till death. In fact, he had once been with one—Josh Newton—beyond death. Electrocuted, indubitably a corpse, Josh had been brought back to life again by the marvelous skill of The Avenger.

“Nellie told us precisely where she was being held,” Benson said. “Clever place, too. One that wouldn’t ordinarily be thought of as a spot for a second crime.”

“A second crime?” said Smitty.

“Yes.” Benson twirled the wheel an inch and missed a ten-ton truck by about the same distance. “The first was murder.”

Smitty gaped at the white face and flaming, colorless eyes.

“Nellie said there was something with horns over her, and that the place had a beamed ceiling,” said Benson. “Smitty, you’ve seen a place with beamed ceilings recently.”

“I’ve seen a dozen places with beamed ceilings,” the giant said. “They’re a dime a dozen around New York.”

“Not places with beamed ceilings and also stuffed heads of animals around the walls,” The Avenger said.

Smitty yelped as if he had sat on something that squirmed. “Conroy’s place!”

“That’s right,” said Benson. “The rear library. The heads of lions, a zebra, tigers—and right over the divan the head of a North Woods moose. That’s the thing with horns she mentioned. A rather disconcerting thing to look up at, I’d say.”

“But Conroy’s place has been humming with cops,” the giant protested. “No one would stage a second crime there.”

“Why not? What better place to work in than one sealed by police and hence not to be entered by anyone? And at three o’clock in the morning, with all regular police routine concluded hours ago, the police themselves aren’t apt to come around.”

The car swerved into Fifth Avenue on screaming tires, righted itself, and went on its way, as silently as a shadow, to lower Fifth Avenue, where Conroy’s big apartment was located. And beside The Avenger, Smitty gnawed his vast knuckles in a frenzy of anger and hate and stored up an explosive wrath that was going to be very disruptive indeed when it was released in the midst of criminals.

But he wasn’t too insane with anger to make any false moves. “Quiet’s the word,” he said, when they’d neared the building door. “They’ll keep a sharp lookout on the chance that a cop might make a late call at the place where murder’s been done. And if the lookout spots us coming, the rats upstairs might kill Nellie.”

The Avenger nodded, and they looked at the walls of the buildings on each side of Conroy’s. The one to the south lacked just a story of being the same height. It was an older building, with ornamental stone curlicues under and over broad ledged windows. The two moved to that building. Smitty reached down, grasped Benson’s ankles, and lifted him at arm’s length up above his head. The Avenger caught the first window ledge; and from there on up, the two ascended each other’s bodies in a series of swift, giant steps that would have made a circus acrobat gasp.

From the roof, they could reach to the nearest window on the top floor of Conroy’s building. They were soon in a vacant apartment which Benson judged must be next to Conroy’s. They went to the hall, and The Avenger opened the door a crack.

Down the hall in front of Conroy’s apartment was a man, with his back to them. If anyone approached the street door, a man down there was to signal up at once. Then the attentive guard up here could pass the word, and whoever was in Conroy’s rooms could slide out, wait on a lower floor till the intruders had passed them on the way up, then get away through the street entrance.

Only, in this case, Benson and Smitty had thrown the methodical plan badly out of kilter by not approaching the street door at all. The man continued to stand with his back toward the two while Smitty stole down the corridor in his direction. The giant looked clumsy. You’d swear that bulk so vast as his must be muscle-bound, awkward and unable to move without all the noise usually attendant on a load of bricks. But he was as lithe as a stripling and could move almost as soundlessly as The Avenger when he wanted to.

He got to within a yard of the man before the fellow had any presentiment of danger. Then, when he turned, it was more on an uneasy hunch than because he had actually heard anything. His eyes went wide with amazement, and his mouth strained for a yell. But the yell never emerged.

A hand that was like a flexible ham was around his corded throat before a sound could come from his writhing lips. Another hand doubled into a colossal fist and poised above him. The fist smashed down. It was the giant’s favorite blow: to hit straight down on the top of a man’s head, like a great hammer sinking a railroad spike.

This time he hit a little harder than usual, with anguished thoughts of Nellie’s danger behind the blow. The writhing body instantly became corpse-still, and hung from the grip of his left hand like some queer and rotten fruit from a mighty bough. Smitty opened his hand and the man sagged to the floor.

Benson stepped to the door of Conroy’s apartment. The door was unlocked. The Avenger’s white head nodded. It would be unlocked so that, in case of an alarm, those within could make a quicker getaway. He opened this door an even smaller distance than he had opened the one down the hall. In through the crack, he inserted a dime-sized mirror on the end of a slim metal rod. It was very much like a tiny dentist’s mirror.

The mirror caught the reflection of a man standing just inside the doorway. This place was being guarded closely, very closely. Benson tilted the mirror till it caught a tiny segment of a man’s head. The back of his head. He had his back to the door. However, he was so close to it that if it were opened another two inches it would touch his body and give the show away. And if that happened—if he let out one whoop to warn the rest—Nellie . . .

Smitty shuddered and gnawed at his lip. But The Avenger had the answer. Very softly, he shut the door again. Then he tapped on the panels, hardly more than a touch. He flattened against the wall next to the door as he did so.

The man inside turned. With his marvelous hearing, Benson could catch the stir of his clothes through the panel. Then the door opened, and he poked his head out. “What’s—”

He never concluded the question he thought he was asking his pal outside. Benson’s steel-strong left hand went over his lips, while the wire-cable fingers of his right pressed at the back of his neck! The man flopped a little, then slumped. Benson laid him on the floor, careful that his shoes didn’t scrape and make a warning noise. The Avenger stared down at him for a moment, icy eyes as impersonal and calm as if he were looking down at nothing but the floor itself.

Smitty felt a bit like shivering himself. Never, in danger or rage, crisis or thought, could that face move. The paralyzed muscles made a permanent mask of it. The result was often bizarre. At a time of action, when anyone else would have shown extreme emotion, Benson showed none. It made The Avenger, at times, seem more like a vitalized, white-masked statue, a machine, rather than a thing of flesh and blood.

Benson went on down the hall of Conroy’s apartment. A thing with horns over her, in a room with beamed ceilings. And Conroy’s library, the room in which he had been killed by having a needle driven into his brain, was in the rear.

The door down there was wide open. Evidently the men in the room were so sure that no one could get past three guards in a row, that they hadn’t even bothered to close the door, let alone watch it. So Benson and Smitty looked in without hindrance. Looked in—and saw sheer horror!

There was Nellie, bound so that she could move nothing but her fingers, on the divan that a short time ago had been Conroy’s bier. There was the horned head above her, like the head of a god of sacrifice. And over Nellie bent a man with a hammer in his hand! Two other men watched the scene with as much intensity as the fellow with the hammer watched the bound girl. None of them thought of the door.

Nellie bound and a man with a queer small hammer in his hand! Smitty catapulted into the room as if he weighed thirty pounds instead of nearly three hundred. The three yelled and turned. But they had no chance.

Smitty dove at the nearest, swooping down under a gun that had been frantically drawn and inaccurately aimed. He got the man by the legs and half-straightened up, dumping him hard. But he didn’t let go. He whirled him around toward the other two! They went down as if hit by a steel ram. Smitty whirled again, and let go. The first man went head on, bodily, through the air. Went against a wall, and hadn’t the time to get his arms up. He hit head on, and there was a snap that was audible even over the rush Smitty was making toward the remaining two.

He got his vast right hand on the shoulder of the beady-eyed fellow who still held the hammer, and his left hand at the nape of the other man’s neck. The fellow with the hammer was flailing out with it, trying to hit Smitty on the head. The other man was jerking his gun around in a too-limited area and firing with every jerk!

Smitty’s teeth were showing in a sort of stark grin. A grin of death! The two men were dashed together, as the giant’s shoulders gave a convulsive heave. Their heads hit; and the sound was dreadful.

Benson walked to Nellie. Eight seconds ago there had been three live rats in here. Now there were three dead ones. And that was all of that.

Nellie shook her blonde head when The Avenger had released her from the divan and was working at the cords on her wrists and ankles. She stared at Smitty with wide eyes. “When you have a job to do, you don’t play around with it, do you?” she breathed, staring at the three hideously twisted shapes.

The Avenger stared sharply at her. The question had been about the type you’d expect from the honey haired bombshell at such a moment; but somehow Nellie’s tone was different than usual. It seemed dull, without her usual vivacity. And when she stood up and moved, her movements seemed just a little wooden.

Benson’s pale, infallible eyes went over the room. There was the queer little hammer—either one just like the hammer he had seen concealed in Mallory’s office, or the same identical one. There was a compass, with which you could measure an exact segment on a human skull. But the third thing he could not see.

The needle, the slim metal wedge to be driven into a brain according to the marvelous and diabolical directions of an ancient race. There didn’t seem to be any needle around!

“Those shots’ll draw a lot of people here,” said the giant, with a vast arm protectively around Nellie’s slim shoulders for an instant. “And that’s going to mean delay. We’d better beat it, hadn’t we?”

Benson nodded, and they went down the stairs. The Avenger went first. He didn’t waste time with the man at the door who, it appeared, hadn’t heard the shots down all those floors. Benson creased him with Mike, and the three went back to Bleek Street.

They got into the big top-floor room just in time to hear a faint crying, like the far cry of seagulls. But the cries didn’t come from any bird. They came from the big radio near the end window, which was always on and was always tuned to the crew’s own wave length.

Smitty got to the thing in a half dozen great strides. “It’s Josh!” he exclaimed. “Yelling something. He and Mac . . . in trouble—”

The sound merged into a far-off crackling, as if a berry crate had been stepped on. Then there was no sound at all, just the low-power hum of the radio itself.

CHAPTER XIV

Forced Landing

The plane, outside of the professional, almost wingless speed ships, was about the fastest thing in the country. It headed west at such a clip as to make a perceptible lengthening out of the sunrise. The sun just seemed to hang still in the east, as if it never would clear the horizon. This was partly imagination, but partly due to the plane’s speed of over three hundred miles an hour almost due west.

In the sealed fuselage were five people. The Avenger was at the controls because he wanted to make all possible time in answer to the cries of Josh Newton from the caves on the Pacific coast. Benson was quite sure the alert Negro and the methodically intelligent MacMurdie had found the Wallers’ caves by now.

Sitting behind the man with the pale steel eyes was Smitty, looking as if he would make the plane go even faster by sheer will power. Then there were three girls—Nellie Gray, Lini Waller and Josh Newton’s wife, Rosabel.

Rosabel was like Smitty: looking as if she were concentrating on making the ship go even faster. Josh was in danger! Her Josh! That had been enough to transform the pretty Negress into a tigress, quietly biding her time, and to make her insist on going west with them.

Lini Waller had turned up once more at Bleek Street just as the four were leaving. Benson had seized her shoulders and stared into her strangely vacant eyes. “We are going to the place where you left your brother. You understand? The caves. Where your brother is.”

“I understand,” Lini had said, tonelessly. “You are going to the caves where my brother is.”

“That’s right. Now try to comprehend this. We can save much time if you will guide us to those caves. My men radioed from there, but had no chance to tell us the exact location. Will you guide us?”

“No,” said Lini Waller, just as tonelessly and calmly as a moment before she had said, “I understand.”

“Your brother’s life may be lost if we lose time tracing down the cave. You must lead us there.”

“No,” said Lini.

And that was that. Hypnotism, even for The Avenger, was out of the question. You can’t hypnotize anyone whose conscious will is gone. But he had decided to take her with him anyhow. In the first place, he was afraid to leave her alone in New York, even at Bleek Street. In the second, there was always the chance that as the plane neared the location of the ancient relics, Lini’s face would betray it by some slight expression of remembrance.

Smitty scowled. He was a little anxious about Nellie. He thought maybe she had a headache or something. She was looking out the window with a strange lack of curiosity on her face. And she seemed kind of, well, dead! She hadn’t ribbed him once since the plane started, and that wasn’t like her, either. Usually she was always kidding the big fellow—and getting quite stern and protective if somebody else ventured to kid him!

Smitty leaned forward toward Benson. “What do you suppose happened to Josh and Mac?” he asked, speaking loudly over the powerful drone of the motors that filled the cabin. Lini Waller came up and stood back of the pilot’s seat.

“Josh and Mac were overpowered, knocked out,” said The Avenger.

“Sure,” said Smitty. “But by what? They’re in a place of death. Death as old as the last ice age, to be exact. Who could knock them out?”

Lini spoke suddenly, with a slight wrinkle in her forehead. It was a wrinkle of vague pain, like the small wavelet on the surface of a very deep pond indicating a big disturbance far beneath. “My brother started to say it was the mastodon when he was in trouble.”

The Avenger’s colorless, piercing eyes swung toward her face. “Mastodon?” he repeated.

“Brent said ‘mast—’. That was all.”

Smitty grinned, but not very humorously. “You said there was a mastodon in one of the caves, chief, from what this girl told the Foundation men. Do you suppose the mastodon got Mac and Josh?”

“They were overpowered,” said The Avenger, face as still as snow in a windless night, “by some of the gang who have been giving us such trouble in New York.”

“Hey—that can’t be!” gasped Smitty. “I mean, how could it be? Nobody but this girl knows where the caves are, except probably for Mac and Josh. So how could any gang of crooks find it?”

“There was a page missing from that ancient manuscript Lini gave the Foundation directors,” said Benson quietly. “I found a corner of it later. There were traces of irregular lines ending on the torn corner. So, in the manuscript, there must have been a map of the British Columbia region in which the caves are located.”

“A map? Fifty thousand years old? Holy codfish! No map that old would be any good. The mountains themselves, the shoreline, everything would change in fifty thousand years.”

“Evidently, there has been little enough change,” replied Benson, “and enough accuracy on the ancient map for some of the gang to go by plane to the caves.”

“Well, you’re probably right,” sighed Smitty. “You practically always are. But who stole the page with the map on it? Who of the three Foundation directors still alive is behind all this?”

“I found the torn corner of the map in Mallory’s office,” said The Avenger, pale eyes absorbed with the landscape far below. He didn’t want to waste a mile by going off the radio-direction line, the best clue they had as to the caverns’ location.

Smitty started to ask more questions, realized that the man with the dead face and the terrible, pale eyes was not in a talkative mood, and refrained. He noticed that Lini was gone. And, when he looked around, he saw that Nellie was out of her seat too. Rosabel smiled a little at the anxious look on his face and nodded her head toward the tail, to indicate that Nellie was in the rear compartment. Smitty went back there.

Lini and Nellie were near the left-hand side of the tapering rear compartment. Nellie had the steel plate off the inner side of the double shell. This had exposed the control cables going to the rudders. Nellie’s white hand went out.

“Hey!” said Smitty. “What goes on? Trouble, Nellie?”

Nellie turned away from the exposed wire cables, and then turned back and replaced the plate. “I was just showing Lini some of the working parts,” Nellie said dully. “I think we’ll go back and sit where we can see out, Lini.”

The two girls went back into the cabin proper. Smitty returned to his seat. “Nellie was showing Lini what makes a plane tick,” said Smitty.

Benson’s pallid, deadly eyes turned on him for an instant. “She was, Smitty?”

“Yes. I caught the two of them back at the control cables.”

The Avenger didn’t say anything. He continued to concentrate on the straightest line to northern British Columbia. He turned on the radio. A long flight is much more monotonous than anyone who has never been up in a plane can appreciate. There’s not much to do, practically nothing to see—at twenty-one thousand feet, anyway—and the drone of the motors makes for sleep. Smitty and Rosabel cat-napped in their seats, while The Avenger sat at the controls like a thing of steel instead of a man.

Noon deepened into afternoon, and slow dusk began. They were pretty near the Pacific now. Near, that is, in terms of their high speed. Say six or seven hundred miles. Smitty was wide awake again and worried even more about Nellie. A few minutes ago he had opened his eyes from his most recent doze to see her once more coming out of the tail. With Lini close behind her.

“You got a headache, Nellie?” he asked, going back to her.

“No,” was all she said.

“Tired?”

“Not very,” said Nellie.

Smitty went back toward his seat a bit peeved; she was so unenthusiastic about talking to him. But he had barely sat down when the roar of the motors took on a lower pitch, then stopped altogether. He stared quickly at Benson. The Avenger pointed ahead and downward. There was a long, narrow, limpid-blue lake, fringed with great trees. “We’ll land there,” he said. He shut off the radio.

Smitty’s eyes showed his perplexity.

“The controls aren’t working quite right,” said The Avenger. “We’ll walk out on the tail and see why.” The pontoons were lowered. The big speed-demon of the air settled down and down, finally to ripple onto the quiet forest lake.

The plane stopped. Benson got up and opened the double door onto the wing. The two stepped out and went to the big rudder surfaces. Smitty straightened from a look at the controls. “Everything seems all right out here,” he began. “We—”

Somebody turned on a couple of hurricanes ahead of him and at the same time jerked the plane from under his feet. And Smitty went tail over apple cart. “Waugh—” he got out. Then the waters of the lake stopped his yell. He came up in time to hear another splash and to see Rosabel, astounded, frightened-looking, hit the water, too. She had been thrown right out of the plane beside Smitty and Benson. Even The Avenger had been hurled backward off the tail with that utterly unexpected starting of the plane. The two swam to Rosabel’s side and put an arm under each of hers. Then the three stared west.

The plane had taken off so expertly that they knew who was at the controls—Nellie! In no time at all it was a speck in the air; then it was gone.

“She’s gone crazy,” sobbed Rosabel. “She and that Lini Waller! They threw me out the door. I was just leaning out to see you back on the tail, and they pushed me out.”

“The rudder controls!” gasped Smitty. “If they’re out of order she’ll crash—” He stopped suddenly, remembering how Nellie had been at the control cables. “Say! Maybe she has gone crazy!” he said. “If it had been anybody else, I’d have said there was a little sabotage going on. But surely Nellie wouldn’t jam the controls to force us down, then release them and go on and leave us stranded a thousand miles from nowhere! Not when we’re in such a hurry to see if we can do anything for Josh and Mac!”

Benson didn’t say anything. He swam for shore. Smitty and he had released Rosabel after her first shock of finding herself so unexpectedly in the lake instead of the plane. She was an excellent swimmer. She and Smitty followed The Avenger toward the nearest shore. The giant sputtered and exclaimed during his powerful, if noisy, progress.

“What the dickens will we do now? We may be days from a human habitation, here in the wilderness. And we haven’t got days to waste. We’re in an awful mess!”

Then he floundered and almost choked again. He was remembering something that he should have thought of before. Something dreadful! Something that could explain the utterly lunatic way in which Nellie had ditched them here. “Chief!” he yelled. “In Conroy’s library!”

“Well?” said Benson quietly.

“When we got Nellie, there was a hammer there—but no needle!” The giant began to thresh toward shore at a terrific rate, as though the simple act of getting on dry land might help him somehow to get to Nellie’s side. “No needle in sight, chief! You know what that means? Those damned devils, they made a robot out of Nellie, like they did out of Lini Waller! That needle’s in her brain! She’s an automaton, doing just what the guy behind all this hell’s mess wants her to do!”

CHAPTER XV

Master and Slave

Nellie sat wooden-faced at the controls. Lini had the plane’s radio going again. She kept calling a number and letter into it. Finally there was an answer. “L. W. talking,” she said, voice dull and lifeless.

A small voice came out of the receiver. “Go ahead, L. W.”

“Everything has happened as you wished. I got to Mr. Benson’s headquarters just before they started—”

“No names! No names!”

“I got to his place in time to join them. A fast plane, straight for the spot. The girl he has with him has done as I told her—which was what you told me to tell her in the first place.”

“Then my man succeeded with her.”

“Yes. She does everything she is told. She made him bring the plane down in a forced landing. Then the girl fixed things up again and took off, leaving him and the big one and the Negro girl behind.”

“Very good, L. W. Tell her how to get here.”

Lini looked down. Far off she could see the Pacific. She could also see a faint white streak to the north, and a double row of low hills walling the white streak on each side. “To the north,” said Lini, dull-voiced.

And Nellie, expressionless, swung the ship north, more on a line with the white streak. The glacier appeared almost underneath. At the foot of the glacier was a toy ship. But as Nellie angled the plane down, the toy became a fair-sized tramp steamer, anchored in the deep water near the ice cliff. There was a seaplane painted black moored near the steamer. “Down there,” said Lini. And Nellie nodded and cut the motors.

She might have acted like an automation, but she still could handle a plane. She came down on the Pacific’s slowly heaving surface like a gull.

“The ship,” said Lini.

Nellie taxied the plane to the ship, and men came from the rusting tramp in a boat. They moored the plane and grinning, motioned for Lini and Nellie to get into the small boat.

They were the same type as the crew of thugs and murderers back in New York, men who looked like rats and acted like professional killers. They took the two girls to the tramp. On the bridge, they left the two alone with a figure as weird as if it had stepped from a bad dream.

A man with a long, loose overcoat that swathed his body almost to the ankles and made it unidentifiable. The collar of the coat was high, and the brim of a drooping hat was pulled low so that only his nose and eyes could be seen. And the eyes were covered with dark glasses so that even they were partially concealed.

Lini gasped a little, and a rare shadow of emotion touched her wooden face. The emotion was fear—a horror penetrating the devilishly induced veil of forgetfulness that had been thrown over her conscious mind. This was the man who had stood over her with an odd hammer and a sinister needle in the room whose temperature and walls made it seem like an ice cave.

Nellie gave a similar faint show of emotion. This man had not held hammer and needle before her, but he had marked her scalp for another. The man’s nose moved just a little, so that you could tell that his lips, though hidden in the encircling coat collar, were smiling. Almost hidden eyes peered at Nellie through the dark glasses. “Very good,” came a muffled voice from the unseen lips. “I had been afraid that the man to whom I detailed the delicate job of operating on you had either been killed before he concluded the job, or had missed the precise spot. I see now that I needn’t have worried on either score.”

Nellie said nothing. She stood and stared without expression at the disguised body and face. It was certain that she was looking at the head and brain behind all this murder; but if the knowledge penetrated her dulled senses, it didn’t show in her empty eyes.

“However,” said the man, “just to make sure—” He raised his right hand toward Nellie’s head. The hand was nut-brown, almost like that of a person belonging to a race other than the white race. A scrap of his hair could be seen, and that was pure white, indicating that he was very old. But the hand seemed not to tell of age. It was as if he were very old—and yet, somehow, ageless.

The hand stirred in Nellie’s thick, silky hair. Felt for a spot over the left ear, not quite halfway to a point in the exact center of the head. The man nodded as his finger lightly touched a tiny protuberance there, like the head of a pin—with the body of the pin down under the bone.

“Right!” came the muffled voice. “The wedge is there. I am the master and you the slave. You will do everything I tell you and answer every question I ask you.”

“I will do everything you tell me and answer every question you ask,” Nellie repeated, parrotlike.

The man who seemed very old, yet ageless, nodded his head. “First, where did you leave this man Benson? And who was with him?”

“We left him at a lake, about seven hundred and fifty miles east. With him were the Negro girl called Rosabel and the large man called Smitty.”

“They will be stranded there indefinitely, no doubt?” said the man.

Nellie shook her head. “Mr. Benson had the radio on just before crashing. I believe he was in touch with Vancouver, giving his location from moment to moment, with orders for a plane to leave for the last location if his radio stopped.”

“Then he suspected—” snarled the man.

“I don’t think he suspected anything,” said Nellie, voice machinelike. “I believe he was just playing safe, so that in case anything happened to the plane, such as a normal accident, he would be able to arrive here with little delay to aid the Negro and the Scotchman you hold prisoner.”

The man paced the bridge in short, nervous steps. “So he will be coming on in spite of the delay. Well, that’s fine. He’ll find a nice reception at this end. Captain!”

The master of the small, battered freighter came from the charthouse. He was as disreputable looking as his ship and his crew.

“We will not load the things from the caves at once, as we had planned,” said the man with the dark glasses. “There will have to be a slight delay.”

The captain scowled and looked toward the wall of glacier ice. “That stuff ain’t going to stay up forever,” he protested. “Look at it! Ready to come down if you breathe on it. It’s a wonder it ain’t collapsed already.”

The man in the shapeless overcoat straightened up, and his voice was steely. “I’m giving the orders here. And I’m giving them now. Turn half your crew over to me, to row ashore and join my men. With the other half of your crew, up anchor and stand off from shore. Proceed north at slow speed and keep on going till I radio you to return.”

“But why—”

“The man who has been fighting us all along is due here in a short time. He must land so that we can get him. He is apt not to land if he sees a boat and a strange plane here. But if he sees an ordinary freighter up the coast from here and proceeding in a normal manner away from the glacier, he will figure that the boat has nothing to do with the caves. Now, hurry!”

“Guy comin’ down in a plane, huh?” said the captain thoughtfully.

“Yes.”

“What you goin’ to do to him?”

“Capture him! Leave him in the caves when we have loaded and are ready to go. You know what happens then.”

The captain rasped at a jaw that needed washing as well as shaving. “Yeah, I know. But I got a better stunt. You know, we take seal hides sometimes when the good little boys in Washington don’t want us to. When that happens, we’re apt to look up and see a seaplane lookin’ around for us. So we have a stunt that fixes ’em when they land beside our ship.”

He bellowed an order to a seaman to bring the red case from the hold. The man came back in a moment with a large box painted a warning red. The captain lifted the cover. “We just let ’em land,” he said. “But we scatter these around for ’em to land on.”

“These” were a lot of little tubes painted dull aluminum, with other small tubes fastened to them. “TNT,” said the captain, pointing to the secondary tubes fastened to the aluminum painted ones. “The aluminum cans keep ’em up like a float. We throw a flock of these overboard—like this.” He tossed three of the things as far as he could toward shore. “What do they look like?”

“Why,” said the man with dark glasses, “they look like floating bits of ice.”

“Right,” said the captain. “That aluminum paint looks just like ice, even close up. And what’s more natural than ice in this latitude? ’Specially near a glacier. Any plane would set right down on a section with a coupla hundred innocent lookin’ little chunks of ice floatin’ around. And when it does—zingo! It lands on a coupla hundred little bombs.”

“An excellent thought, captain,” said the other man. “Strew your bombs. You’ll get a bonus for this.”

The contents of the red box were scattered over the water inshore, where a landing plane would be almost sure to settle down. Half the crew went ashore, concealing the small boats when they landed. The freighter stood out from the glacier’s wall and steamed slowly north, out from the coast.

From a point right beside the glacier’s white ribbon, the man with the dark glasses stood hidden by firs, peering out at the fatal landing area. Lini and Nellie stood with him, their faces expressionless.

Far away, to the east, could be heard the faint drone of a fast approaching plane. There had been very little delay back at the lake, where Rosabel, Smitty and The Avenger had been stranded. Once more the man with the pale, flaring eyes and the dead, awesome face had showed how little he ever left to chance.

Nellie had said he’d had the radio on, giving constant location to a man in Vancouver. But Benson had actually done better than that. A thousand miles back, the plane had left Vancouver, with orders to fly northeast on a tangent that should bring the plane on a line with Benson’s ship. There, the other plane was to parallel the course of The Avenger, and hang around at the highest possible altitude, to fly back for aid if anything should happen to Benson’s plane on landing at the glacier.

But Smitty didn’t know any of this methodical plan.

When a plane roared down onto the lake in less than an hour and a half after they’d been stranded, he regarded it as a sheer miracle. However, he had seen the chief work so many seeming miracles that he was not too surprised.

The pilot of the plane, a pleasant faced young Canadian who was one of thousands of friends of The Avenger, ready at any time to drop what he was doing at Benson’s request, gave a military salute when the three swam out to the ship.

“Good! Fast work,” said Benson. It was more than a book of praise from anyone else. The youngster reddened with pleasure.

“We may run into trouble where we’re going,” said Benson. I’d advise you to parachute down as soon as we’re over an Indian settlement and be guided back to—”

“I’d like to stay with you, Mr. Benson,” said the pilot earnestly. “It’s an honor to share even trouble with you.”

Benson hesitated, then nodded. “Very well.” He gunned the motor of the relief ship and sent it slanting upward at the last possible degree of climb. The pilot nodded to himself with instant recognition of a master’s touch.

Smitty stared curiously at Benson. The Avenger was winging along, seeming to have no hesitation about where he was going. The radio-direction line on the map to the spot where they’d heard words from Lini’s brother was not quite that accurate. Benson had said their goal must be a glacier. Sure. But there were two glaciers within a short distance of where that line came out on the British Columbia coast. How did even The Avenger know which glacier they wanted?

Far off, a tangled ribbon of white appeared, hemmed in by twin rows of hills. “There it is,” said Benson quietly.

The young relief-ship pilot was staring in awe at the man who was rapidly becoming a legend in the land. He could see how that legend had originated. Hardly a man, this youthful figure with the virile white hair, but a machine, geared to the destruction of crime.

The plane slanted down. “Nice place to land,” commented Smitty. From their height, they could see the different colors produced in the sea by the outthrust arms of two shallow bars pushed out from shore. The bars made a sort of small harbor. “Mush ice in the bay,” said Smitty a moment later, peering down.

The young pilot nodded agreement. Strewn over the water in the spot offering itself as the best landing area, were gray-white flecks indicating that a chunk of ice had recently broken from the glacier and fragmented in the sea.

The pontoons would be bound to strike some of these when the plane landed; but none of the fragments were big enough to do any damage. The plane settled swiftly toward them!

CHAPTER XVI

Master of Mastodons

Anyone outside the cavern system under the glacier would have seen no people, no activity, nothing at all. To the eye, it would appear that there was no one within hundreds of miles. Even the rock-slab door was shut. One would have to examine it closely, eyes within a yard of it, to realize that there was an entrance at all. But inside it was humming with industry.

The big cave which opened directly on the outer door was larger than the other seven combined. And it was now rapidly receiving the contents of the other seven. Or, rather, the first five of the seven. Men were busy carrying stuff from the other caves. Fur costumes, ancient records, examples of the machinery used by the old, old race that had perished with the ice age, gold statues and ornaments. One of the men carrying the latter set down his load and furtively stuck a hand in his pocket.

“All right, Danny, dig it up!” barked a red-haired fellow with weasel eyes.

The man addressed tightened his heavy shoulders, then relaxed. “Oh, all right,” he snarled. He pulled a small golden mask from his pocket and tossed it sullenly on the pile.

“Whatta we goin’ through these motions for, anyhow?” he demanded of the red-haired straw boss. “We lug stuff from the other caves into this outer cave. Then a little later we gotta lug from this cave onto the boat. Why don’t we just wait and lug it direct to the boat?”

“Because,” snapped the red-haired man, “by carrying stuff here and arranging it to be hauled methodically, we save a little time. And time’s somethin’ we ain’t got too much of. You saw the ice over the entrance?”

“I’ll say I saw it!” snarled the thick shouldered one. “That stuff’ll fall any minute—”

“Well, that’s why we gotta save time, dope. So you just go right on bringing the stuff out here to this cave.”

Like ants, the men went back and forth, back and forth. One of them suddenly yelled. “Hey, the dead guy in here, guardin’ this cave! The dead Indian, or whatever the hell he is! He moved!”

“Aw, you’ve gone cokey,” jeered another of the men. But most of them looked distinctly uneasy. Most of them were prepared to swear that they had seen one or another of those long-dead sentries move a little. And it had them jittery.

They did not monkey with two of the caves. One was the cave which contained nothing but the great cauldron, with its inner and outer tangle of coils on coils of fused quartz. The other was the cave of the mastodon.

The mastodon was a marvelous thing. Even the human rats working here dimly realized that. A giant thing preserved, to every last hair, from another age! What it wouldn’t bring in good, hard dough if they could get it out! But how could they get it out! How are you going to get a mastodon through an eight-foot door, and what are you going to do with it once you’ve brought it into the open?

“How’d they get the damn thing in there in the first place?” growled one of the men.*

* (It was later conjectured that the ancient race forced the mastodon, still living, into the cave through a long, lofty tunnel, and later filled the tunnel in. But this is only a guess, for there was no sign of such a tunnel.)

The red-haired fellow shrugged. “Built the caves around it, maybe. What do you care? Get going.”

They stayed out of the mastodon cave—but there were occupants in it, just the same! There were three people in it, to be exact. Brent Waller, Fergus MacMurdie, and Josh Newton. They all sat on the floor with their backs against the wall, staring at the mastodon. They had nothing else to stare at but the overgrown thing. “Reminds me of Smitty,” said Mac sourly.

Waller said: “Smitty? Who’s he?”

“One of our crew,” said Mac. “He’s about seven feet tall, and four feet thick, and he uses crowbars for toothpicks.”

“I wish he was here now,” said Waller, earnestly.

Mac and Josh wished the same thing; but wishing didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere.

“Josh, do ye think maybe the chief or somebody may have heard that last squawk on the radio?” Mac demanded. He had demanded it a good many times before.

Josh replied, as he had replied before, “I don’t know, Mac. There was no answer of any kind. And then the radio was smashed.”

Waller sighed. “My sister heard my last yell, all right. I yelled, ‘The mast—’ and then was yanked from the radio. You see, I had heard a sound and turned—and there was a guy that I thought was the ancient master of mastodons who has his pictures on all these walls. But the guy turned out to be nothing but a yegg from New York who’d gotten cold and grabbed the first fur thing he saw. Which was the traditional costume of the old master preserved in here. But it sure gave me the creeps. I thought the guy really was immortal, like the pictures claim.”

“Maybe,” said Mac dourly, “he is.”

“Don’t be like that,” said Josh.

“No? Without doubt the mummy guarrrds in these caves move! We’ve all seen ’em! Where there’s movement there must be life. So maybe the master of mastodons really does live and—”

“And what?” snorted Josh.

“And stays around to guard the caves,” Mac finished weakly.

Waller laughed bitterly. “If so, he’s doing a bum job of it. Look at the way the men outside are stripping the caves.”

Josh suddenly came back to one point in Brent’s yarn. “Wait a minute! You said your last words were, ‘The mast—.’ But I heard you say others after that. You said, ‘There was a little trouble, but everything’s all right now; good night.’ ”

Brent Waller swore feelingly. “I said no such thing. That wasn’t me. That was the man who clipped me. I heard him later, when I was sitting here bound. Smart guy! Thought if my sister had heard too much, he could kill her suspicions by giving her a phony O.K.”

Mac almost smiled a dour, bleak smile. “He outsmarted himself, Brent. Those few words were just enough for us to pick out this general location with a direction-finder. We might never have located the place without it. But I wonder how the skurlies outside got the location?”

Waller swore again. “There was a kind of a map on one of the first pages of a manuscript Lini took to New York. There’s the same map in every bundle of pages, just as there’s a language key in every bundle. I didn’t pay much attention; thought sure any map so old would be worthless. But I guess it was all too good! Because in a damn short time after Lini radioed me that she’d submitted the sample relic to the Foundation, these thugs descended on me.”

There was silence for a little while. The three men shifted in unconscious effort to ease their cramped bodies. They had been in these positions a long time. Waller said, “Who’s to blame for all this, anyhow? How many people did Lini show that bundle of old skins to?”

“Only the Wittwar Foundation—four directors,” said Josh. “Your sister was very cautious, Brent. She didn’t broadcast the discovery at all.”

“Why, say! Then one of the four eminently respectable Wittwar Foundation gents must be behind this!”

“One of three,” corrected Mac. “One of them is dead! He was murdered just before we left. A skurlie stuck a needle in his brain—”

Josh coughed suddenly in warning. They hadn’t told Brent what had been done to Lini. It was too hideous a thing to tell him at a time like this.

“Needle in his brain?” Waller repeated curiously. It was evident that he hadn’t studied that ancient manuscript his sister had taken east. “That’s an odd way to kill a man.”

“Isn’t it?” said Josh evasively. He and Mac looked at each other with deep sympathy in their eyes for Brent. They might as well have saved some for themselves. It didn’t look as if they were ever going to get out from under the glacier!

On the point where the fir trees hid them, Nellie and Lini looked at the descending plane of The Avenger as impersonally as if it were some alien thing having no connection with them. Beside them, the man whose face and body were concealed, chuckled harshly. Directly in line with the plane’s pontoons were those little things that looked like innocent small chunks of ice but were in reality miniature bombs. “He can’t miss them!” the man rasped. “He’ll hit them in sixty seconds or less now.”

The ship came lower, wind screaming through its struts, motors silent. Lower, lower. And the speed of the plane was at minimum. Scarcely ten feet separated pontoons and water! Then something happened!

The pilot of the plane cut the speed too low. The plane’s tail sagged, the nose reared up. And there was a hasty roar of motors again, with the props pulling the seaplane out of a bad landing. Up and away, for another try.

The man with the two girls clenched his fists in anger. “The clumsy fool! Doesn’t he know how to fly?”

“Oh!” said Nellie. Even the exclamation was without life. On her lovely face there was little more than indifferent curiosity. “Look! Look there! I believe he’s going to crash.”

The belief sharpened into certainty in about six seconds. The plane hadn’t been sent up sharply enough. It was wheeling to get out to sea, but it was plain that it would never make it. It was too near shore—and the tall fir trees there.

At the very last, the plane banked hard, and almost missed. Almost, but not quite. A wingtip fouled! The plane slewed around. It smashed among massive trunks and thick branches!

“Got him anyway!” snarled the man with the dark glasses. “Everybody! Surround that plane!” The shouted command was unnecessary. Already men were jumping from behind trees and rocks and racing for the wrecked plane. At a more leisurely pace, the man with the dark glasses followed, and with him dutifully went the two girls.

They reached the wreck just in time to see the men lifting four still, dark forms from the cabin. One body took three to handle; it was so big. That was Smitty. The second was the pretty Negress, Rosabel. Another was slight and rather undersized. That was the relief pilot. The fourth was of average size with thick white hair in which a crimson thread of blood trickled from a scalp wound.

And that was The Avenger. Trapped and unconscious in the hands of his enemies!

CHAPTER XVII

End of the Line

The assorted crew of cutthroats had been busy enough in the caves before. Now with their dreaded opponent, The Avenger, out of the way, they became even busier. They swarmed from outer cave to boats with the priceless relics. Others rowed rapidly to the freighter, which had come obediently back within a stone’s throw of the glacier’s towering foot at the radioed command of the man with the dark glasses. The caverns would be emptied in about another hour at that rate.

Meanwhile, in the cave of the mastodon, there were nine people instead of three, leaning bound against the rock wall. Benson, Lini, Nellie, Rosabel, Smitty and the young relief pilot had joined Mac and Josh and Brent. There was a full load of tragic despair in that group.

Brent Waller was half out of his mind. A glance at Lini had told him that something terrible must have happened to her. In the first place, she had barely recognized him when she was led in. In the second, she had nothing whatever to say—because the man with the glasses who had made a robot out of her had left no instructions about what to say when he brought her in here. Her work was done.

Benson had told him quietly what was wrong. Brent had been too crazed to listen further for a moment. Then Benson had told him that he was sure he could repair the damage. He thought that if an electric current were run into that needle, to cauterize the brain injury as the metal was withdrawn, that Lini would be normal again in a few weeks. Nobody had to point out, however, how slim the chances looked of their ever getting free to try the delicate operation.

Nellie was almost as stricken as Brent. “It’s my fault, chief,” she said, almost weeping. “All my fault. It was a crazy stunt. I shouldn’t have tried it.”

“It was a good stunt,” said The Avenger, voice remarkably gentle. “It deserved success. Just one bit of bad luck ruined it.”

The giant, Smitty, had been struggling back to consciousness at last. He heard the latter remark, stared at Nellie, then looked bewildered.

“Hey, Nellie! You don’t look so much like a wooden Indian. Didn’t you get . . . Did I make a mistake?”

“Probably,” said Nellie. “You make a lot of mistakes. But which one in particular?”

“You know good and well which one. You got me to thinking you’d been stuck with one of those needles.”

“Well, I wasn’t,” said Nellie tartly. She was tense and taking it out on Smitty for the ghastly mistake she felt that she herself had made. “It was an act.”

“There wasn’t any needle at Conroy’s—”

“The man over me dropped it when you nailed him. It happened to fall on my left hand; so I managed to palm it, even with my hands bound. I had a flash then of what seemed a good stunt.”

“Stunt?” yelled Smitty. “What stunt? Going off and leaving us in that lake?”

“You don’t have to shout,” said Nellie. “I thought if I pretended to have been made into a robot, I could probably get straight to the side of the leader of this business, through Lini Waller. I thought I could then radio the chief and steer him straight to the place instead of his wasting hours trying to get the exact location. I thought that if I were in the crooks’ headquarters, unsuspected, I might— Oh, I don’t know what I thought! Capture them all single-handed, maybe, or something else equally silly. And all I did was lead the chief into a trap!”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Benson repeated quietly. “I got everything you radioed me.”

“Radio?” put in the young relief pilot, staring. “Were you receiving messages, sir? I didn’t hear the radio.”

“You noticed that it was on just before we landed, didn’t you?” said Benson.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you hear a sort of rustling coming from it?”

“Why, I believe I did,” admitted the pilot.

“That rustling was Miss Gray sending me messages,” said The Avenger. “She has a radio at her waist, though it isn’t big enough to be seen. She was rubbing her finger gently over the transmitter, sending me code messages. She directed me straight to these caves first. Then, as we were about to land, she warned me again.”

“And we crashed,” said Smitty, eyes blinking with the pain of a head that had come in contact with a seatback.

“We crashed,” nodded Benson, face a mask, eyes as cold and calm as if he were in an easy chair in Bleek Street, instead of sitting bound, under a glacier, with death near. “I, in my turn, put on an act. I pretended to rise from a bad landing, to crash in the trees. Then I had intended to crawl out with Smitty and gas the men as they ran to take us. But there was one lone tree-stub where I couldn’t see it till too late. Instead of stripping the wings from the plane and coming to a comparatively safe crash landing, the tree-stub caught the right pontoon and swerved us so the crash became a genuine one.”

MacMurdie’s optimism suddenly reared its head. When everything looked impossible, then the Scot was the most cheerful. “Well, we’ll get out of here all right,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” said Smitty, ironically. “Easy!” Then he looked accusingly at Benson. “Chief, you knew Nellie wasn’t hurt the way I thought she was, and you didn’t tell me?”

“I couldn’t, with Lini there,” said Benson. “I got an inkling of her plan when we freed her in Conroy’s library. Her manner was wooden and queer, as if the missing needle were in her brain. But her words, about your rush against the three men, were not those of a person without a will of her own. But if I had given the show away to you, Lini, a robot spy in our midst, might have found out and ruined whatever plan Nellie had in mind when she got to this end.”

Smitty thought it over and decided that he still felt pretty sore about it. “How’d you fool the big shot when you got here?” he demanded morosely of Nellie.

“I glued a little bead, from that steel-bead purse you gave me, to my scalp.” said Nellie. “The man felt it, and thought it was the end of the needle.”

“And I thought it was the end of you!” howled Smitty. “If only you’d have a little consideration for a guy with a weak heart—”

The rock-slab door of their cave swung open. In the opening stood the man with the dark glasses; coat collar up and hat brim down as concealingly as ever. The man stared at them for a moment, nine people trussed like fowl for slaughter, sitting on the rock floor and leaning back against the wall.

“So,” he said at last. “The great Richard Benson—who has the crust to call himself The Avenger—has finally put himself into a spot from which there is no escape.”

Never in his life had Benson called himself The Avenger. That grim title had been bestowed on him by others, principally members of the underworld. But the man with the white, death mask face and the colorless, deadly eyes did not bother to correct the statement. Benson’s hands were working behind his back, steely wrists straining to spread his bonds.

“At least,” said the man, “you are to have a fitting tomb, you and all your friends: these caves. And you will have a colossal headstone, the glacier above us.”

A voice came from outside. “Hurry it up, will you? The stuff’ll all be out to the ship in another ten or fifteen minutes. We’re about done here.”

The man with the glasses chuckled. And then he went to the nearest wall, reached up and took from its rock niche the glowing rod set there. He held it in his bare hands, and the effect was bizarre. The hexagonal rod looked like a giant crystal of some sort. It glowed in the man’s nut-brown hands like the lighted baton of an orchestra leader, only much, much brighter. It bathed him in cold, white light. He went around the cave, taking each rod as he came to it. In his hands they continued to glow, a bundle of sticks afire, but burning white and giving off no heat.

The last rod was in a niche directly over Benson’s white head. The man with the dark glasses relaxed from his tiptoed reach for the thing. And then he yelled suddenly and sat down on the rock floor with a thump, scattering the coldly glowing rods in all directions. One broke, and the two pieces continued to glow.

But the man wasn’t watching the pieces. He was fighting for his life, The Avenger’s one free hand tearing at his throat. Just one hand. But it looked as if it would be enough. Then the man got a chance for a shrill, terrified yell. That did it! Three men jumped into the cave, and one of the three leaped to where the two were struggling.

Only one hand free and legs still bound, and helpless. The Avenger couldn’t take on more than one assailant at a time. He ducked his head to the whistling blow that was aimed at it with a gun barrel, but got enough of the thing to send him reeling back to the floor. They bound his hands again, more tightly than before. Smitty was bellowing and straining cablelike muscles but couldn’t break loose to help Benson. The rest stared in helpless rage.

The scene was as it had been before. Only now the man with the dark glasses—unsteadily settling them back in place on his nose—was standing at a safe distance at the door.

“Damn you,” he raged. “I was going to put a bullet through your skull before I left. But for that attack on me, you’ll live to know your whole fate; live as long as thirst and starvation will let you; live to go mad in the darkness here.”

“Come on! Come on!” urged one of the pair who had rescued him. “The ice’ll be coming down without that blast in a minute.”

“You hear?” cried the man with the dark glasses, voice still insane with anger. “Blast! That’s your fate. When we leave here, we’ll set a bomb at the foot of the glacier, timed to go off in half an hour. When it does—you will be buried so deeply under ice that an army of engineers couldn’t get you out in a month. You will be buried for another fifty thousand years.”

He went out, and the rock-slab door turned into place. It was hardly to imprison them more securely; that was unnecessary. It was only to add to their tortures by putting them in total darkness. All the light rods had been taken from this cave; and closing the door had shut out light from the outer cavern.

The door slammed, and after a long moment a laugh rang out. It was Rosabel’s, and it was not a natural sounding laugh. Josh’s voice snapped out, more sternly than any of the little group could ever remember his having addressed his pretty wife. “Easy, Rosabel! No hysterics! That won’t help any!”

There was silence again. Silence for many moments. Each was probably thinking the same thing: maybe there wouldn’t be a blast after all. Maybe the man with the dark glasses had promised that fate only to torture them mentally. Maybe—

There was a cracking explosion somewhere outside. It sounded like a heavy sigh to the group deep inside the cavern. There was silence for perhaps a heartbeat, and then it commenced: the tremendous rumble of the ice as the foot of the glacier collapsed over the low cliff along an eight-hundred-foot front, burying the ancient entrance once more under countless tons of the enduring ice.

“So that’s that,” came Smitty’s heavy voice after a moment. He added flippantly, “It’s dark in here. Anybody got a match?”

“Will a flashlight do?” came the quiet voice of The Avenger.

Next instant, within the group whose hands had been bound so tightly that the ropes could not possibly be broken or slipped, shone the steady, powerful beam of one of Smitty’s flashlights.

CHAPTER XVIII

Death For All

The Avenger had acted in a manner typical of him. Before the killers had left the caverns, he had not tried to free himself with the help of another because the act would almost certainly have been seen and the helper murdered promptly along with Benson.

He had acted alone in an attempt to free his own hands because if he had been caught he alone would have died for it. But the instant the little group was left alone, with no eyes to spy on attempts at freedom, Ike came into play.

Below Benson’s left knee, Ike, the little razor-sharp throwing knife, was holstered. And it’s seldom that a searching hand feels for weapons below the knee. So Ike had been left undisturbed. A moment after the light was taken and the cave door shut, MacMurdie felt bound feet touch his hands lightly and then felt the steel muscles of The Avenger’s legs under his fingers. He knew what to do.

The Scot’s hands were bound but his fingers were free. They fumbled Ike out of the sheath. And then with Benson rolling closer, he could reach the Avenger’s wrists and slash with the knife. So it was that when Smitty jokingly asked if anyone had a match, the flashlight had shone in Benson’s freed fingers. In a moment they were all standing and rubbing cramped muscles. Benson opened the door and they were in the light again—the light from the queer, quartz-like rods in the outer cave.

“That’s fine,” rumbled Smitty pessimistically. “We can now die in seven caves instead of one. With that mountain of ice between us and daylight—”

“As long as we’re not actually dead,” said Mac, with his lopsided optimism, “we’re all right.”

Nellie shook her head. “That’s bad, Mac. When you go Pollyanna on us, instead of croaking doom, we’re really in a bad way!”

The Avenger’s pale, brilliant eyes went to Mac’s face. Their colorless glitter indicated that he was not really looking at the Scot, but thinking out something that had not yet occurred to the rest. It was something he had dwelt on before. “I wonder,” he said slowly, “if they took everything from these caves?”

“They didn’t take the mastodon, anyhow,” shrugged Josh. “We saw that.”

“And I don’t suppose,” said Mac indifferently, “they took the big kettle . . .”

The pale eyes were instantly concentrated on his bleak blue ones like diamond drills. The Avenger’s paralyzed face was as dead, as expressionless as it must always be; but his eyes were terrible in their intensity. “Kettle, Mac?”

MacMurdie felt a tendency to stutter. He couldn’t keep from it, when the chief stared at him like that, even though the Scot knew the pallid gaze was not intentionally threatening. “A thing like a great big cauldron, in the sixth cave,” he faltered. “Big as a beer vat, it is. Full of coils and with coils outside. Coils like the stuff that light comes from; only no light comes from these.”

Benson nodded. “That must be it!”

“Must be what?” demanded Nellie, who had been looking first at one and then the other as the inexplicable interchange took place.

“The way out of here,” Benson said quietly. He went on with the thought that had been running through his mind before. “The race that left this ‘museum’ to be found by posterity was far advanced in science and inventiveness. The light rods show that. And we know that this race foresaw the coming of the ice age. Otherwise they would not have left the relics as they did.”

They stared at him breathless, waiting.

“Under the mile-thick crust of the ice-age sheet they would be helpless, of course,” The Avenger went on. “But before that, working under several hundred feet of this glacier, they must have developed a means of escape in case of a collapse over the cliff entrance. Just such a collapse as the one that just occurred. That there was a glacier all those thousands of years ago, just as there is now, we know: the things in here were so perfectly preserved that they must have been in glacial cold from the very beginning.”

“But how does that cauldron—” began Mac puzzled.

“That must have been their machine for getting out in case of an ice slide. Let’s go and look at it.”

There it was, in the sixth cave—like the mastodon, too huge to be carried away with the other stuff. A cauldron as big as a beer vat, dark coils within and without. The Avenger’s flaming eyes went rapidly over the dark, inert mass, then sped to the thing Mac and Josh had idly noted before: the gap in the outer coil near the cave’s door with the piece of coiled quartz, or whatever it was, lying next to the gap as if ready to be dropped into place.

The Avenger nodded again. “The cauldron is of fused rock, able to stand terrific heat. And heat, of course, to melt ice, would be the only method of leaving here—but wouldn’t we be drowned?”

“What,” marveled Nellie to Smitty, “is he talking about?”

“I don’t know,” said Smitty in a return whisper. “But I’ll bet it’s good.”

Benson had gone back to the outer cave. He stared hard at the door leading into that significant sixth cavern. “Watertight when closed. And the first flow, of course, would be molten rock from the cave top, which would plug it farther. Everybody out here, please.”

“But, Muster Benson,” said Mac. “What—”

“The race that could make this rocky stuff give off light,” said Benson calmly, “could also make it give off heat. Terrific heat, such as we can only produce now with the finest of electric furnaces. At least—we shall soon see.”

In his hand, he had the section of coil that was separate from the rest. He stood next to the door, with one hand on the rock slab. He put the piece in position so that the gap was closed and the coil now continuous. Then he slammed the massive door shut and leaped into the outer cave. Fast as he was, he did not quite escape the flashing, tremendous consequences of closing that ancient coil. His face and hands were seared so that the skin was almost cracked.

From then on things happened very fast. First there was a deep thrumming that shook the very rock under their feet. Then a white-hot, crawling tongue came from one spot under the rock door that was not quite airtight, plugged it, and slowly hardened—melted rock from the cave ceiling over the coils. After that there was a wild rushing of water within the sealed cave and finally a series of explosions that seemed endless.

Mac moistened his lips in awe at the mighty force that had been unleashed, a force harnessed by man before the last ice age. The rush of water he knew was the flow of melted glacier ice above the cauldron when the rock was melted away. That had instantly turned to steam on contact with those miraculous coils, and the steam had blown out again and again against the dripping, rotting ice helping the heat to break it clear.

The outer wall of the sixth cave was reddening; and in the big outer cavern, through feet of stone, the heat was creeping out unbearably. They went to the exit under the foot of the low rock cliff. Benson pushed at it. It gave a fraction of an inch, then stuck. “A few minutes more,” said Benson calmly. “The whole foot of the glacier, over this spot, will melt into the sea with a little more of that heat.”

“How in the world is it generated?” gasped Smitty.

The Avenger looked at the reddening walls of the sixth cave far behind them. “Some utilization of electricity that even we do not know,” he said. “And the glacier itself is the generator. Think of the tremendous friction caused by the slow grinding of these millions of tons of ice on its creeping advance to the sea! They learned to harness this friction-generated power, that ancient race of men. They got heat from it. They got the light that has burned ever since, and would go on burning as long as the glacier moved.” He tried the door, and it swung open with a strong push. Swung open through a knee-high torrent of water, and mushy ice that was rushing down to a boiling sea. They were free!

“Free,” said Smitty, stretching his mighty arms, “to go after that rotten gang and this time fix them right!”

There was a curious look in the pale eyes of The Avenger. He was staring out to sea, at half a dozen great ice chunks as big as small office buildings. They had cracked off with the melting behind them and splashed ponderously into the ocean. “We won’t have to pursue our enemies any more,” said Benson. “They’re dead! Their ship was sunk by that falling ice.” The sound of the still roaring water from the glacier was like the sound of rapids in the River Styx, accompanying his cold voice. “I got my hand on their leader for a moment. Not to try to kill him, but just long enough to place in his overcoat pocket all the little delayed-action gas capsules I had with me.”

Mac got it first. “Mon!” he gasped. “Mon—those would open and release the gas in about ten minutes! And if ye had four or five of them, they’d knock out everybody on the ship for at least four hours!”

“I put eight of them in his pocket,” said Benson. “I let them decide their own fate. That ship would be a ship of sleeping men, helpless at the glacier’s foot, before the anchor could be raised. Very well. If they left the glacier alone, they could eventually wake up and sail off. If they brought the front of the glacier down to annihilate us, they would annihilate themselves: the ship would be sunk like a floating match box under tons of ice.”

The quiet words, “I let them decide their own fate,” seemed to hang in the air. It was The Avenger’s way. Never take life; but if enemies tried to destroy him or his aides, manipulate them like pawns on a chessboard so that in attempting to kill, they killed only themselves. Nellie sighed deeply. “There’s only one thing to regret. Now, we’ll never know who the leader was.”

“The leader,” said Benson, awesome, death-mask face still turned toward the sea, “was Wittwar.”

“Wittwar!” exploded Mac. “But the mon had no reason! He didn’t need money; he’s rich. He didn’t have to steal the relics; his own Foundation was buying them easily.”

The pale eyes flicked to Mac’s. “Haven’t you caught the reason yet, Mac? It was the lighted rods, which he took from the cave he left us in. Light everlasting, with no visible source of power. Cold light. A thing science has been searching for ever since there has been science. That was what Wittwar was after.”

Benson’s brooding eyes still stared over the seething sea. “I thought it was Wittwar when he twice helped Lini get away from the Foundation office when I wanted to stay with her. I thought it was Wittwar when I found a corner torn from the ancient map in Mallory’s office. That hide was too tough to tear accidentally, which meant that a bit had been deliberately torn off and hidden to incriminate another man, along with a measuring compass and a chipping hammer. And who had such easy access to any building or office in the Wittwar Packing Co. as Wittwar himself? I knew it was Wittwar when I found a report in his desk on the financial position and earnings of every power company in the country. He was calculating the possibilities of the cold light, estimating the fabulous sums he could extort from the power industry to keep it off the market. From the first he was little interested in the ancient relics. It was the cold light Lini had told about that he wanted. That would tempt even a man as rich as he was.”

Smitty glared at the approximate spot where the tramp freighter had been anchored. A spot that now had three great ice fragments jostling each other, like great ghosts rubbing shoulders in glee above the sunken boat. “While he was at it,” said the giant, “he thought he’d pick up the relics too and shift the two-and-a-half-million-dollar purchase price, through Lini, from the Foundation’s account to his own. Right?”

The Avenger nodded, manner growing absent, inhumanly detached. “That thievery alone wouldn’t have tempted him. But as long as he was going after the secret of the cold light by violence, he figured he might as well take the money and the relics too. What irony! For the cold light could never have meant anything to him.”

“Eh?” said Mac, staring.

“That quartzlike substance was set to flowing,” The Avenger said, “by the enormous friction-power of the glacier. To reproduce the light you’d have to reproduce the glacier as well. Or some other power source equally vast. But Wittwar didn’t know that his supposedly priceless secret was commercially impossible.”

Brent Waller shook his head and tried to laugh. “When I saw that guy in the dark glasses and saw that he looked very old and yet seemed young, you know what I thought? I thought the ancient master of mastodons was after us. I thought the old guy really had everlasting life, like the pictures in the cave proclaimed.”

“The make-up of an amateur,” said Benson, in his detached, impersonal tone. “White hair, stain for the skin. It’s the first thing a layman thinks of.”

“There was more,” said Brent, now not even trying to laugh. “The everlasting-life stuff seemed to be borne out by the fact that some of those dead sentries moved. I’ll swear they moved. And the mastodon too. Just a little.”

They all looked at Benson. For all had the same impression. They felt a little silly at his patient words. “Of course they moved a little. For thousands of years they’d been preserved in the glacial cold. Then the cave doors were opened to the outer world. It got a bit warmer in the caverns. The bodies disintegrated a very little; and as they did so they moved a bit—the mastodon included.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Brent, his ears red. “Of course!” He turned anxiously to his sister, standing with them like a wooden image. “You said you could take that needle out of her brain, sir?”

The Avenger didn’t answer. Plainly, he didn’t even hear. He moved along the shore, alone.

“Sh-h-h,” said Nellie, taking Brent’s arm as he would have repeated his question. “Yes, he can cure your sister. He can see to it that the ship out there is raised; so you’ll get your money from the relics. He can do anything. But don’t bother him now.” Nellie knew the man with the white, awesome face and the terrible, colorless eyes a little better than the rest. Well enough to know what he was thinking, in the chill and lonely desolation of his soul.

Once more he had destroyed a supercriminal. Once more a band of human vermin had annihilated itself when it tried to kill Benson. Complete success! But in the success was no sweet taste for The Avenger. There was nothing but a longing for the next brush with streamlined crime. And in that one maybe he would die.

For it was becoming increasingly clear to his aides that Benson wasn’t trying to avoid death in his dangerous work. He was half courting it. He wanted to die. Fate, with proverbial perversity, was keeping him alive while again and again he battled murderers and thieves to avenge his own crime-caused personal loss.

THE END

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

RIVER OF ICE

CHAPTER I Gale!

CHAPTER II River of Ice

CHAPTER III Priceless Manuscript

CHAPTER IV The Far Cry

CHAPTER V Sign of the Skull

CHAPTER VI Falling Death!

CHAPTER VII The Alibi

CHAPTER VIII Icy Prison

CHAPTER IX Four Into Three

CHAPTER X Death’s Hammer

CHAPTER XI Disaster Calls

CHAPTER XII Mysterious Cauldron

CHAPTER XIII The Missing Needle

CHAPTER XIV Forced Landing

CHAPTER XV Master and Slave

CHAPTER XVI Master of Mastodons

CHAPTER XVII End of the Line

CHAPTER XVIII Death For All