The Avenger 15 - House of Death (11 page)

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

“Smitty!” gasped Nellie.

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

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

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

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

That was when Smitty got there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

About ten airport attendants got in between.

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

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

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

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

Smitty stopped fighting. The attendants warily let him up.

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

“Huh?” said one of the attendants suspiciously.

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

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

“I just told you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nearby, Josh and Mac grinned at their confusion.

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

Nellie told what had happened.

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

Dick’s black-cropped head nodded.

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

Smitty nodded his somewhat battered head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And Carmella Haygar?”

The Avenger shrugged a little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There had been a faint sound behind them.

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

“Dogs,” whispered Mac.

The owners of the snarls came into view.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it had had to be done.

The four went on down the shoreline toward the dock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benson’s calm voice stopped. His hand, sliding along the flat rock of the cliff, had touched a curious thing. A small, round hole in the stone. He bent to look closer in the darkness. Then, with his coat around the spot so that the light could be seen by no one but himself, he snapped on his small but powerful flash.

The tiny beam showed a hole about an inch and a half in diameter that was too regular to be natural. It had been drilled there.