The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (17 page)

He had dropped into the dark tunnel and had replaced the manhole cover over his head, just as Smitty and Mac had done.

But there, his path, for the first minute or so, was different.

He went back, first, instead of forward.

Seeming to float a little above the concrete flooring of the tunnel, instead of moving on top of it, so silent were his feet, the gray fox of a man stole into blackness.

He stopped. His ears, miraculously keen, had heard breathing. The breathing of many men. He waited there in the blackness, with unguessable odds lurking at the very end of the tunnel, fifty yards back from the manhole cover.

Finally, he heard a whisper.

“Now?”

In the blackness ahead of the man with the dead, white face, came the answer.

“Yeah! After him. He’s had time to get along quite a ways. And don’t any of you mugs make any noise!”

The Avenger felt upward. The tunnel, at this spot, was much lower than under the river itself. He could just reach the top with his fingertips. And up there, he felt an angleiron bracing, with a thick glass insulator, from which a power cable had been hung at one time when power drills and other tools were in use in the tube.

He drew himself up as far as he could, with his head against the tunnel roof and his knees doubled under him.

And under Benson, the men lying in ambush for him, their last victim, stole toward the river.

It was a terrific muscular strain, hanging like that. But Benson held the position for at least five full minutes, to make sure all the men had gone. Then he dropped and stole along after them.

Ahead, he could catch the faint rasp of a shoe sole on concrete, now and then. He followed. All sounds stopped. He stopped, too. There was a whisper.

“You say the guy ain’t been past here? You’re nuts! Or else you weren’t on the job.”

“Nobody’s been past this door,” came the earnest whisper, in reply.

“Look. We seen the guy lift the manhole cover and drop down. We didn’t see him go back up, and we would have if he had opened that lid again. The light up above would have given him away. See? He’s in this damn tunnel. And he’s got to be ahead of us. We went along abreast; so we knew we didn’t slide past him in the dark. That means he went through this door.”

“I didn’t hear or see anything,—” protested the first whisper.

“The guy can move like a shadow. We know that. He probably slipped through while you were lighting a cigarette or something. He has to be beyond here! Keep your eyes open and your ears, too.”

The footsteps resumed their faint sounds, going on under the river away from The Avenger.

Benson moved forward again.

It was so black that an owl could scarcely have seen anything. But The Avenger’s rare eyes picked out enough so that, sensed as well as actually perceived, he made out the dim barrier of a wall with a wide door in it across the tunnel, and in front of that the vague shape of a guard.

The unfortunate guard was peering ahead, not behind. So there was never a more surprised man than he, when suddenly something like a vise clamped around his neck. He had no chance to utter a sound. He could only jerk wildly for half a minute, then sag to the tunnel floor when the deadly hand released him.

Benson felt over that barrier. Solid metal. The big door, with a lever bolt on the outside—his side—was easy to understand: it was a bulkhead arrangement, designed to stop water if the tunnel ahead sprang a leak. Like the water-tight bulkhead of a ship.

The Avenger lifted the deeply unconscious guard over the raised sill and into the river side of the tunnel. His steely fingers arranged the outer bar delicately.

Then he stepped through the steel barrier himself, and shut the heavy door.

He slammed it hard. And that ended the whispering and tiptoeing around, for that ended the silence in the tomblike place.

The clang of that ponderous door in its metal jamb rang down the tunnel like a cannon shot. And was answered by startled cries of men ahead, still groping forward for The Avenger.

After the cries, in a solid flood, came light, as the many bulbs in the string overhead were turned on.

From down the tunnel, the men came pouring back. Over a score of them. But The Avenger moved toward them instead of trying to get back and away.

He passed the flood-control lever. His pale eyes took on a crystalline glitter as he sped past that. Nellie had mentioned it specifically.

He saw a door, again of heavy steel, to his right, about thirty yards ahead. Behind that door would be Nellie. But he had no chance of reaching there. For even as he glimpsed it, the men were on him.

Benson backed to the wall. For an instant, the gang paused. This man’s face was as still as if he were in no danger whatever. There was no fright, or anger, or any other emotion on it. It was as cold as ice—and as unmoved.

Besides, it was not the face of the man they’d thought they were trapping. That man was called Benson. And this one looked like somebody else—

“Hey, it’s Adams,” yelled one of the men.

But from behind them all came a voice that Benson knew. The voice of Dr. Fram.

“That’s not Adams, you fools! Look at his eyes! That’s the man we want. Get him!”

They rushed him again. At their head was a bony man with a fresh scar on his forehead. And with real pleasure, The Avenger took care of him first.

The fist of the gray steel bar of a man lashed out, and the bony man fell back, whimpering, with a broken jaw. The rest jumped the average-sized fellow with another man’s face.

The Avenger’s hands were like precise laboratory tools as they pistoned in and out.

Each blow caught a man where it would do the most good. The side of the jaw. Over the heart. The pit of the stomach. And each blow knocked a man out of the fight, as if, one by one, a supreme marksman were shooting down clay pigeons.

Could Benson have taken them on one or two at a time, he might actually have downed the lot of them. But that, of course, was not possible. They were milling around him in even greater numbers.

From behind them the voice of Fram kept egging them on.

“Get him! Is one man to beat the lot of you? Can’t you take on one person, and that one smaller than any of you?”

They were smothering Benson by sheer weight of numbers. They had him down. A few more yelped and jerked back as his calm hands found places to apply their steely pressure and ruin nerve centers.

Then he was done.

Cursing, panting, looking as if they had fought an army with brass knuckles, the men limped to the steel door in the bend of the tunnel. They opened it, with half a dozen of them standing guard with drawn guns.

The drawn guns were necessary.

With the opening of the door, a giant, a Negro who was raging like a panther, and a bony Scot leaped out to do battle.

They were forced to leap back in again as lead splashed all around them from watchful guns.

The gang threw Benson into the cell, and clanged the door shut. The big bolt on the outside boomed into place.

They were all there, now. The Avenger himself, as well as his indomitable little band. All there—in death’s corral!

“Why, it’s Tetlow Adams!” Nan Stanton exclaimed.

But Nellie shook her head.

“It’s the chief,” she said. “Those rats outside! They’ve killed him.”

Benson’s eyelids opened. His eyes peered at them out of the death-mask face, colorless and icy and perfectly normal.

“Not dead,” he said. “Not even unconscious. But I thought I might be treated a little less savagely if I pretended unconsciousness.”

He got to his feet and went to the door. His eyes glittered with grim satisfaction as he saw that to reach the door you went down three steps; the cell was a little higher than the tunnel, itself.

At the door, with the eyes of the others on him, he wasted no time trying to force it open. That was obviously impossible. Even Smitty couldn’t force that metal door.

Instead, The Avenger began doing a curious thing.

He ripped off his shirt, slit it into lengths, and began stuffing cloth tightly into the small crack between the top of the door, and the jamb.

Just the top of the door. Sides and bottom he paid no attention to.

“I . . . I got us into this,” mourned Nellie. “I’m so sorry. If I hadn’t lost my head and used the radio—”

A voice from outside cut her off. Fram’s voice.

“Nice of you all to walk into my parlor,” he said. His voice was without a qualm, without any human feeling at all.

Smitty shook his head.

“I thought, till now, that Adams was the man behind all this, and that he was making Fram do his bidding. But it looks as if it were the other way around. Fram was the man who wanted Bison Park, and he meant to make Adams and his mining connections the goat. I wonder how?”

“Adams was threatened as the Senators were,” replied Benson quietly, as he completed stuffing cloth into the crack at the top of the door with all the force of his slim but steel-strong fingers. “He thought he was going mad—seeing hallucinations—the little red man and the dog. Fram threatened him with an insane asylum for life if he didn’t do as he was told. Just as he threatened the rest.”

The Avenger raised his voice.

“You mean of course to throw that lever and drown us, Fram?”

“I do, my white-haired friend with so many faces,” said the psychiatrist.

“Don’t do it, Fram,” said Benson, voice like the somber tolling of a death knell.

Into Fram’s tone crept a little trace of fury, carefully controlled.

“You’ve stopped the Bison Park deal. I heard that just a minute ago on my own small radio. You’ve beaten me there. But you’ll never live to menace me with the penitentiary.”

“Don’t throw that lever, Fram!”

There was a laugh from the tunnel. Then those inside heard the man shout:

“Pull down the lever. Wide open! Then run for the bulkhead door and get away. You can all get out and slam and bolt the door, before the flood reaches that point.”

“Well,” said The Avenger, voice still like the tolling of a bell, “they had their chance.”

Outside came the steps of the men as they retreated back up the tunnel toward the warehouse exit. All of them, in a group. The little band in the dank cell heard one man say:

“You guys’ll have to jump fast. The water gets this far along in a hurry—”

“O.K.!”

With the cry, the steps outside changed tempo. They became the steps of frantically running men. And at the same moment, down the tunnel in the other direction came a roar of water as the whole Potomac River tried to shoulder into the tunnel running beneath it. The floodgate had been opened!

Nan Stanton screamed once. But none of the others made a sound. It looked like the end, but they only stared at the man they called chief, blindly faithful to him. In a moment even Nan, an outsider, managed to regain some sort of self control, with the example of that icy calm before her.

Smitty thrust his great hands in his capacious pockets, and talked, as a small boy will whistle to keep up his courage.

“The little red man and the dog,” he said. “Nobody’s given an idea as to how they could live in steam. And Mac and I saw them in steam at the Lost Geyser.”

The Avenger shook his head. His eyes were on the bottom of the door. Under the door, water was forcing itself in a solid sheet. It hit the first step up to the cell floor, and then the second. Outside it was a rushing, howling flood.

“They weren’t in the steam,” he said. “What you saw was a stereopticon slide. A man was trying much the same trick from the Senate gallery, a while ago—keeping the Senators in line by making them think they saw visions on their desk tops. That lady’s handbag, Smitty.”

“Huh?” said the giant, moistening dry lips as he saw the flood top the third step and rush over the cell floor.

“A lady’s handbag,” said Benson, “lying in such an unexpected place as Lost Geyser, where you wouldn’t think any woman would be able to go, was sure to be picked up by anyone seeing it. When it was picked up, it set a concealed stereopticon in motion and the mad little man and his green dog appeared against the column of steam. In that way, anyone blundering past Lost Geyser would be apt to be scared away, and wouldn’t be able to talk of what he had seen for fear of being thought a maniac—”

Like the cries of birds, far away, came men’s voices from outside and down the tunnel.

“Hey, what goes on out there?” said Mac, bleak blue eyes beginning to take on a speculative look as they rested on Benson’s white, still face. “What are they sayin’?”

“They are saying,” said The Avenger calmly, “that they can’t get that steel door open to escape.”

“What?” gasped Smitty. Josh and Nellie and Rosabel stared with their mouths open.

“I set the outer bar in such a way that when I banged the door shut from the inside, the bar would fall and block the exit,” said Benson calmly. “I did that because from the nature of the trap and the layout of the blueprints, it was evident that our doom was to be death by drowning.”

“B-blueprints?” said Josh.

“In the Congressional Library.” The water was up to their knees, and spurting in around the dungeon door in flat sheets. “Blueprints of this abandoned traffic tunnel are there, naturally. I stopped on my way to have a look.”

“So you let the men and their precious leader, Fram, throw the lever that will drown them all like the rats they are!”

“I don’t take life, as you know,” was The Avenger’s calm, cold retort. “If murderers kill themselves in their efforts to kill us, that is their own affair. So I let them throw that lever, knowing that by the time they found the steel door locked against them they wouldn’t have time to get back and shut the floodgate again. By then, the rush of the water would have cut them off from it. But they had their chance. You heard me warn Fram not to do it.”

The cold, even voice was like something coming from a machine—a machine of vengeance—rather than a human being.

“But, Muster Benson,” spluttered the Scot. “Ye’ve killed us, too. We’ll be drowned along with the rats. Look at this, now!”