Also In This Series

By Kenneth Robeson

#1: JUSTICE, INC.

#2: THE YELLOW HOARD

#3: THE SKY WALKER

#4: THE DEVIL’S HORNS

#5: THE FROSTED DEATH

#6: THE BLOOD RING

#7: STOCKHOLDERS IN DEATH

#8: THE GLASS MOUNTAIN

#9: TUNED FOR MURDER

#10: THE SMILING DOGS

#11: RIVER OF ICE

#12: THE FLAME BREATHERS

#13: MURDER ON WHEELS

#14: THREE GOLD CROWNS

#15: HOUSE OF DEATH

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

FIRST PRINTING: SEPTEMBER, 1973

COPYRIGHT © 1941 BY STREET & SMITH PUBLICATIONS, INC.

COPYRIGHT RENEWED 1969 BY THE CONDÉ NEST PUBLICATIONS, INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THIS WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION IS PUBLISHED BY

ARRANGEMENT WITH THE CONDÉ NEST PUBLICATIONS. INC.

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY GEORGE GROSS

WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY IS A DIVISION OF WARNER BOOKS,

75 ROCKERFELLER PLAZA, N.Y. 10019.

A Warner Communications Company

ISBN: 0-446-74-262-7

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

THE HATE MASTER

CHAPTER I: Red As Rubies

CHAPTER II: The Search

CHAPTER III: The Furious Rabbits

CHAPTER IV: The Dog’s Owner

CHAPTER V: Winged Madness

CHAPTER VI: The Red Pool

CHAPTER VII: Motor Meeting

CHAPTER VIII: The Devil’s Mask

CHAPTER IX: Death in the Sky

CHAPTER X: Strange Call

CHAPTER XI: Into the Trap

CHAPTER XII: The Mob

CHAPTER XIII: Dollar War

CHAPTER XIV: The “Peacemaker”

CHAPTER XV: Killer Wilson!

CHAPTER XVI: Death for President!

CHAPTER XVII: Hide-Out

CHAPTER XVIII: The Hate Master

THE

HATE MASTER

CHAPTER I

Red As Rubies

Death was there. And worse than death. For death can be clean—a crisp break from living, a straight road into oblivion.

This was a grim and foul thing, to leave its loathsome mark in red-dripping letters over a page in American history better hidden than read.

The place in which this thing was born was secretive, hidden, a perfect spot for unnamable births.

All around, for over four miles in any direction, were thick woods, almost as gloomy and impenetrable as the Black Forests of Europe. Then there was a clearing half as large as a football field. Around the clearing, with trees and underbrush crowding right up to the thick-mesh wire, was a high fence with barbed-wire strands slanting outward at the top.

The wire of the fence was electrified; it carried a load that would bring sure death to any small animal and a severe shock to a human.

In the center of the clearing was the building. It was a one-story structure, looking like a small factory. It was about fifty feet square, with windows from ground to roof along all the walls but one corner. The windows in the corner were average size and had curtains at them, indicating that this corner of the place was for living space. Evidently, some woman was around to make that space as cozy as possible.

The building was not a factory; it was a laboratory. And few in the country were more complete. It belonged to Arthur Morel.

Arthur Morel was a name to conjure with in chemical and biological research circles. The world knew and profited by many of his great inventions.

But the world knew nothing of the one on which he was working, now.

Morel, at half past twelve in the evening, was at a small bench at the far end of his barnlike laboratory. There was little equipment on this bench. It was the space he used when an experiment was almost concluded. And this one was.

Almost, but not quite!

Before Morel there was a tiny scale which could measure a human hair with exactitude. There was also a rack in which a little vial now rested.

The vial was no larger than a man’s thumb. In it was a syrupy-looking liquid, remarkable chiefly for its color. It was as red as blood; as red and sparkling with evil life as if made of liquefied rubies.

Morel stared at this vial, his hands idle for the moment. On his face was a look of impatience, frustration—and hope. And for a little while there was silence in the place, save for the chittering of a cageful of guinea pigs at the opposite end of the lab.

Daylight bulbs cast a white light over the chamber that never varied day or night. But this white light was stained ghastly red where it passed through the small, sinister vial. The red bar of light struck Morel on the left cheekbone, and the sight was so eerie that a stifled scream sounded as a girl came from the corner of the building with the curtained windows and saw the man at the small bench.

Morel turned swiftly, and the girl started walking again and came up to him.

Lila Morel was about twenty-one, tall, full-formed, dressed in gray slacks, but looking extremely feminine in spite of shirt and pants. She was dark-eyed and black-haired, whereas Morel was blue of eyes and gray-blond of hair; but you’d know her as Arthur Morel’s daughter because the cast of their features was the same.

“Sorry I yelled, Dad,” she said. “But you should have seen yourself as I came in! There was a red slash of light across your face that made it look as if a saber had just slashed you and almost taken the top of your head off.”

She shuddered a little, her shapely shoulders quivering.

“You don’t suppose that was in the nature of an evil prophecy, do you?” she said, words light but tone not quite so casual.

Morel smiled a little, though his face was still drawn in the impatient, frustrated lines.

“As a scientist, I can hardly believe in omens,” he said. “As a scientist’s daughter, you ought to be free of superstitions, too.”

“If you could have seen yourself—” Lila began. Then she flung out her hands and words came in a torrent.

“Dad, how long are we going to stay up here in the Maine woods? We’re buried here. It’s a wilderness. Why, all we ever hear is the howling of wolves and the occasional hum of a plane motor!”

She paused, and as if to punctuate her words, there sounded in the distance a long drawn-out wail.

“Wolves! I wouldn’t have thought there was a place left in the United States where you’d hear wolves like that.”

“There are many such places,” Morel said absently.

He was looking at the little vial that seemed filled with liquid rubies.

“Are you coming to bed now?” said Lila. “It’s getting on toward one o’clock in the morning.”

“I’ll be in soon,” said Morel, as if he had scarcely heard her.

“Packer has some milk and a sandwich ready for you,” said Lila, “though you ought not to eat just before going to bed.”

“I’ll be in in a minute,” Morel repeated.

Lila saw that he hardly knew what he was saying. He was already back in his scientific universe, staring at the evil-looking red liquid in the small vial.

She turned slowly and went back to the four-room living quarters in the corner of the building. Morel studied the red stuff, then picked it up together with a small hypodermic needle and walked back toward the guinea pigs.

Time passed, the night deepened. The howl of the wolves gradually died out and there was such silence as is only found in thick woods just before dawn.

Then Morel’s head jerked up, and his light-blue eyes narrowed.

He thought he had heard a sound in the clearing outside that had nothing to do with wolves or other children of nature.

A sound hinting at human origin!

Now, this was impossible. That high fence, with its deadly charge of electricity, saw to that. There was a gate, but the gate was closed; and, when it was closed, it completed the electrical circuit so that it was no easier to climb than the fence itself.

Morel shook his head and turned back to his work. Rather, he started to turn. Then he listened again. And this time he could have sworn he heard a sound at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, as if someone out there were trying to look in.

The windows were opaque, frosted glass with wire through them. No one could look in. But that sound—

Morel laid down his work and padded to the door of the lab. His feet, clad in slippers, shuffled a little on the cement floor, and the sound rose to the ceiling and whispered there like disturbed bats.

He went out into the night.

The stars were fading a little as the black of dawn came over the world. Nothing stirred; nothing moved. Morel was smiling at his own imagination, now. But he started conscientiously to make the round of the fence.

He started at the gate and worked back.

There was the drawn-out howl of a wolf. Then, right in the clearing, it seemed, there was an answering howl!

Lila, tossing wakefully in her bed, heard that second howl and shivered. She got up to go and see if her father couldn’t be pried from his work.

Packer, the elderly servant who took care of father and daughter when they came to the Maine laboratory, padded into the room. He was a kindly, fatherly looking person whose lips were always set in a slight smile. In fact, even now, they smiled just a little, though eyes and expression were grave and did not at all match the small curve of his lips. Lila hastily put a robe over her night clothes.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered.

“You mean the wolf’s howl, so close?” Lila said. She felt like shivering, and Packer’s ghostly whisper added to the feeling, which annoyed her. So she spoke in a deliberately loud tone.

“Yes,” said Packer, still whispering. “It sounded as if the beast were right outside the building. And Mr. Morel isn’t in the laboratory. I just looked.”

“Dad’s not out there?” Lila said hastily. “Oh, but he must be!”

She went to the lab, herself. Its ghostly emptiness confronted her. Complete emptiness. The man with the blue eyes and the gray-blond hair was not at any of the workbenches.

“He . . . he must have gone out to walk around for a minute in the fresh air,” Lila faltered. “Packer, put on the lights.”

The servant clicked a switch. The great windows became pale-white jewels as floodlights outside lit up the clearing. Lila stepped out. Packer slid back out of sight.

Every pebble, every blade of grass, showed up in that pitiless light. You could have seen a field mouse scurry over the close-clipped lawn.

But there was no movement anywhere; no sound.

Lila drew the robe closer around her bare white throat.

“Dad,” she called.

There was no answer. She half ran and half walked around the laboratory building.

“Dad!”

No answer. And the gate was locked and could be opened from within the house only.

Morel had stepped into a clearing from which no man could go, and into which no man could climb. He stepped into it and disappeared!

There had been the far howl of a wolf, then one so close that it seemed in the clearing itself—and that was all.

CHAPTER II

The Search

If only Lila Morel had had something to work on! But she hadn’t.

A man walks along a city street, we’ll say. That man gets to a certain spot, and then just vanishes into thin air. How would you trace him?

That was Lila’s problem.

In the twenty hours that had passed since her father’s disappearance in the Maine laboratory, she had gotten over the feeling that there was something supernatural about it. She had decided there was a natural explanation. There simply must be! As her father had said, she was a scientist’s daughter and hence ought to be beyond superstition.

Her father must have had some way of getting out of the compound gate that she didn’t know about. He must have suffered an attack of amnesia or something and simply walked off into the night.

But inquiry all over that part of the country had not turned up anyone who had seen Morel. And besides, he was in splendid health with not one thing to hint at brain trouble such as amnesia.

So he must have gone off, sane but in some suddenly conceived hurry. Or he might have been kidnaped!

Lila was trying not to think of the latter possibility. She was acting as if her father had left of his own accord and in full possession of his faculties.

So she was coming to talk to his oldest friend.

The house she was approaching was set in acres of lawn, sloping off to the Hudson River, not many miles north of New York City. It was a beautiful estate that belonged to a well-known figure.

The owner was Edwin C. Ritter, wealthy owner of an inherited shoe company, who was now high in power in the political party which had always had his allegiance.

Ritter was Arthur Morel’s closest friend. The two men had gone to school together and had kept in close touch with each other ever since. Lila felt that if anyone would know where her father had gone it would be Ritter.

Anyhow, she hoped so.

It was about ten o’clock at night, but lights blazed from most windows of the country place. It looked as if her luck were in and that Ritter, a busy man seldom at home, was now here to be seen.

Lila stopped her modest coupé, got out and walked up the stone steps to a ponderous door. She pressed the button there and heard soft chimes within. Then the door opened.

For a moment Lila felt as if she were in a dream and was seeing a nightmare.

From the crack between door and jamb, peered out at her one of the ugliest faces she had ever seen. And it was set on a form equally ugly.

The man was hardly five feet high, with shoulders and back twisted subtly so that the malformation didn’t actually show, but was more sensed than seen. Over this dwarfish body was a face that seemed to have come from the Stone Age. The features were so heavy that it was like a mask of a face twice life-size. He had a great, jutting jaw, heavy cheekbones and a beak of a nose. The whole countenance was almost hairless so that it looked curiously naked.

But the eyes reassured her. In the midst of this grotesque, almost repellent malformation, the eyes were intelligent, clear, kindly.

“Yes, miss?” the ugly, dwarfish man said. Only then did Lila see that he wore servants’ livery.

“I’d like to see Mr. Ritter, please,” she said. “My name is Lila Morel.”

The twisted little man showed her into a small drawing room, then disappeared. In a moment the famous Edwin Ritter came in.

Ritter was over six feet, very handsome, with black eyes and heavy black brows and prematurely white hair. He had an orator’s large, mobile mouth. He came to Lila with both hands out.

“Fine to see you,” he boomed. “How is your father? I haven’t seen you and Arthur for much too long.”

Lila’s heart sank, and it must have showed on her face. For Ritter said quickly:

“What’s the matter? Anything wrong?”

“I was hoping you had seen Dad,” Lila answered. “I came here to ask if you’d seen him or heard from him.”

“No. I haven’t. What—”

Lila told what had happened. Ritter sat there with a slight frown on his handsome face.

“That is odd. Yet, there must be a natural explanation,” he decided at last.

Lila shook her head.

“Why would he simply walk off, in carpet slippers and with no money or anything else, at two or three o’clock in the morning, and without saying a word to Packer or me?”

“It does seem odd,” said Ritter. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know that there’s anything you can do,” said Lila. “Except to get in touch with me right away if you hear from him. I’ll be at our town apartment.”

Ritter nodded. His hand touched her shoulder in a fatherly way.

“Now don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be all right.” He stopped. “Hang it, I’m not at all sure of it! Tell me, is Packer still with you?”

“Yes,” said Lila.

“Is he perfectly all right? Are you sure of him?”

“Absolutely sure,” said Lila. “He’s above suspicion.”

Ritter chewed his lip, then shrugged. “This hits me as hard as it does you. Should we get in touch with the police?”

“I hate to do that, yet,” said Lila. “Dad has sometimes done eccentric things. Maybe this is one of those times. I’ll go to the apartment and wait. Tell me if you hear from him.”

She started toward the hall door, then looked at Ritter.

“You have a new butler?”

Ritter nodded, smiling a liitle. “Nothing of beauty, is he? But he is the perfect servant. In fact, he is more than a servant. Knarlie is my right-hand man, and I think I’ll make him my confidential secretary one of these days.”

“Knarlie?” Lila almost smiled, too. “What an odd name for an odd man!”

She said good night and walked out. She got into her coupé, turned south along the Hudson toward where the lights of the great city glowed in the sky. And that was almost the end of Lila Morel!

There was a big truck taking up over half the road ahead of her. She paid little attention to the van. There is always a lot of night trucking. She simply blew her horn, started to pass, then got one glimpse of a face.

The face was reflected in the closed truck’s rear-view mirror which stuck out at the left side of the cab. The mirror was highlighted by her headlights so that the reflected face swam out at her like the head of an evil monster.

Deadly, slitted eyes; a sort of grin shaping a thin gash of a mouth; face like a hatchet blade and with just about as much human emotion to it.

Then the truck had stopped with all the swiftness of oversized airbrakes, and Lila’s coupé slammed into its rear.

After that, things were pretty confused.

Lila’s head banged against the side upright of the coupé with the shock and drew a curtain of white wool over her senses. Then she was in a kind of moving room with men around her, and queerly enough she was still sitting in the coupé.

What had happened, though she hadn’t seen it, had been a marvel of co-ordination and planning.

With the crack of her car against the truck’s flat tail, the big thing had suddenly become a cave instead of a closed box. That is, the rear had suddenly lowered, after the truck had gone on a few feet, so that it formed a steep incline up into the van.

Then, from the van, men came jumping. Five or six of them, with their presence inside unsuspected as the truck rolled innocently along.

One of the men shoved Lila away from the wheel and took it himself. There was a roar from the coupé’s motor and a creaking jounce as it took the short, steep incline with a rush.

Then car and girl and men were inside, and the rear of the truck slid up into place again, smoothly, without sound.

The van started toward New York, innocent-looking.

The man at the wheel slouched half out of the cab window, cigarette drooping from his mouth, apparently alone.

There had been a van and a coupé. Now, there was just a van. That was all.

That is, for a moment that was all. Then there came a scream from inside the van that had a great deal of girlish enthusiasm behind it.

There was a small window in the back of the cab. The driver turned his head sideways, keeping his eyes on the road, and snarled out of the corner of his mouth:

“Keep that dame quiet, you punks! There’re cops around.”

The words were not necessary. With the first sound, one of the men had clamped dirty fingers over Lila’s lips. The scream died in a gurgle, like that of a drowning person. Lila felt something prick her arm, hard. And then for the second time a white fog settled over her so that she was aware only of swaying around in the van for what seemed weeks, and finally of its stopping.

The second time she came to, she was alone.

She was still in the coupé, this time shoved back under the steering wheel where she had been in the first place. Her shoulder ached like fire, where a hypodermic needle had been shoved home. In addition, there was a moist feeling on her skin, there, and a slight wet patch on her dress.

The needle, in the hands of men not skilled in such matters, inserted hurriedly, had not discharged its full load into her veins, which accounted for her not being still senseless.

She decided it was the better part of wisdom to pretend she was still unconscious, however, while she looked around from under lowered lids.

She was on a road unfamiliar to her, next to the river. There was a railing along the road, but the railing was broken in one section. Sounds of motors to her right indicated that the main highway was off there a quarter of a mile or so.

Then she shut her eyes in a hurry, as voices sounded.

“O K, Dutch?” somebody said.

The answer came: “O K! I got the marks of the truck tires brushed out where you nosed the railing over. The only tracks anybody’ll find will be the tracks of the dame’s car.”

“I still think we’re makin’ this too complicated,” somebody else protested. “Why don’t we just bop her on the bean, or send a slug through her?”

“You dope! This way she just had an accident and ran her buggy off the road, through the railing and into the river. Start the motor, Jake.”

Lila stayed very still, slumped behind the wheel of the coupé. She felt the car sag as a man got in the right side. Her foot was kicked aside while his felt for the starter button.

The coupé’s motor roared into life.

“Put her in first, Jake,” called the man. “Then slide out and slam the door.”

“The front of her car’s busted where she connected with the back of the truck,” protested the gloomy voice again. “That’ll tell the cops that this wasn’t any accident.”

“The front of her car would be busted up anyhow, from hitting the railing, wouldn’t it?” snapped the other man. “O K, Jake, let ’er roll.”

It was lucky it was dark. Fine beads of sweat were on Lila’s forehead as death yawned for her.

Trapped in a coupé, sent into many feet of water, it might be days before her body was found. Maybe the car would never be found!

Gears clashed as the man beside her slammed into first without bothering to use the clutch. The car began to move slowly toward the place where the truck had battered down the railing to receive it.

Lila grabbed the wheel convulsively, but it was too late. Just then the front wheels slid over the edge of the twenty-foot embankment.

Down its steep slant, the coupé half rolled and half slid, then dove into the water with a great splash.

The blackness of night as well as the ebony of the river closed over the car and the graceful figure at its wheel.

CHAPTER III

The Furious Rabbits

The drugstore looked like any other drugstore to the casual customer.

There were counters with everything carried in a modern pharmacy. There was a long marble soda fountain. There was a pharmacist’s desk.

But this drugstore was really unique. That was because of the back room.

The store part was only about half the size of this rear room, which couldn’t be seen. An iron door barred a casual entrance.

In the rear, there was something that looked like a dual laboratory. In fact, it was a dual laboratory.

Along one wall was ranged all the equipment ever heard of for conducting chemical experiments. Along the other was complete paraphernalia for electrical and radio work. The chemical side belonged to Fergus MacMurdie, set up here in this store bought for him by Richard Benson, better known as The Avenger. The electrical side was the property of Algernon Heathcote Smith.

MacMurdie and Smith were not in the rear room that morning. They were in the front, the store part, at the soda fountain.

Mac wasn’t having sodas. Sodas cost money, even when you owned the fountain; and the Scot was as reluctant to let a nickel go to waste as most men are to part with a toe or a finger. He stood at the end of the fountain, tall and bony and gangling, with bleak blue eyes. He scowled at Smitty.

Algernon Heathcote Smith—but call him Smitty if you didn’t want to be taken apart—was a dainty little figure of a man, six feet nine inches tall, weighing nearly three hundred pounds.

“There ye go,” Mac said to Smitty. “Sluppin’ up all the profits of my fountain.”

“It’s only my third sundae,” said Smitty mildly. “Josh is the guy you ought to talk to.”

Josh was the man next to the giant. Josh Newton, as tall as Mac and even skinnier, was a Negro who looked dull and sleepy but was actually an honor graduate from Tuskegee Institute.

John was now well along in his seventh sundae.

These three men were integral parts of the indomitable little band known as Justice, Inc., which was getting to be known as the most efficient crime-fighting organization in the country. Perhaps in the world. A little band apart from the police, but as feared by the underworld as ever the police were feared, they carried their lives lightly in their hands from day to day.

At that moment a fourth member of The Avenger’s band came into this store which was often a gathering place when there was no work on hand.

This fourth man was Cole Wilson, the newest recruit to The Avenger’s battle standard. Wilson was lithe, with dark hair and black eyes, and was almost too good-looking. If Smitty hadn’t seen Cole in action and known he was almost as good in trouble as The Avenger himself, he might have disliked the good looks. As it was, he paid no attention to them.

Wilson came in a hurry, as he did most things. He was the quickest moving and the most impulsive of all the crew. In his hand was a newspaper, folded to a back page. And as he walked in the door, he started talking.

“Mac, Smitty, Josh—what would you do if a ferocious rabbit came after you?”

“A ferocious—what?” said Smitty, jaw dropping.

“Rabbit,” said Wilson, leaning against the fountain with them.

“Look,” said Mac dourly, “there’s been enough kiddin’ around here without ye to add your two cents’ worth.”

“I’m not kidding,” said Wilson. He ran his hand through his dark hair. He always went bareheaded. “Look here, in the paper.”

“Read it, Mac,” said Josh. I wouldn’t trust Cole to read the thing. He’d have a rabbit biting a lion, if we let him.”

So Mac read, and Smitty and Josh looked more and more amazed.

“ ‘If it is news for a man to bite a dog,’ ” Mac read, “ ‘what would it be called if a rabbit bit a dog? Yet, this apparently has happened out in Scarsdale where rabbits are tough and like their dogs done rare for dinner. This morning Patrolman Swinnerton phoned in the report that he had just driven three rabbits off a Scotch terrier—’ ” Mac glared at the paper. “That’s a lie! A Scottie? Neverrr!”

“Go on with the account,” said Smitty impatiently.

“Drove three rabbits off a terrier,” Mac went on, omitting the breed, “ ‘but not in time to save the dog, which had been slashed almost to ribbons by the maddened bunnies. The dog died shortly after, Patrolman Swinnerton said, and—’ ”

Mac snorted. “Some reporter’s havin’ fun kiddin’ the public,” he snapped.

“It’s true,” said Wilson. “I called the paper. The reporter handled the story lightly, of course. But it actually happened.”

“Three rabbits attacked a dog?”

“Attacked it and killed it,” said Cole, black eyes blazing. “Two people saw it beside Swinnerton.”

“I think they’re all nuts,” observed Josh, getting back to his maple-nut sundae. But Smitty shook his head. His eyes were bland and china-blue, and he looked as dim-witted as he was huge. But the looks were deceptive; Smitty was a very shrewd guy.

Shrewd enough always to ask questions when something unnatural happened. And this was certainly not a natural occurrence!

“Could rabbits get rabies or go loco some way?” he asked Mac. As one of the world’s best chemists, and a wizard at pharmacology, Mac would know those things.

“It’s possible,” said Mac.

“These rabbits didn’t have rabies,” said Wilson. “The reporter asked that, too.”

“Ferocious rabbits,” mused Josh, grinning. “That’s about as rare as warlike doves.”

“So rare,” said Wilson, soberly, “that I thought I’d like to run out to Scarsdale and look at the dog and maybe look around the spot where he was killed. Anybody want to go with me?”

“Yeah, me,” said Smitty.

“Fine,” snorted Mac. “When ye get there, shoot a rabbit for me, if ye’re not frightened. I’ll mount its head on my library wall.”

But Josh, for one, had stopped grinning. It was the business of The Avenger and his aides to question things that didn’t seem to have normal explanations. Some very odd and deadly plans had been discovered more than once by such investigations.

Smitty and Wilson went out to Scarsdale to police headquarters—and went out fast.

The giant was getting well known as an aide of the mighty Avenger. The sergeant at the desk nodded a respectful greeting and talked freely when Smitty asked about the dog.

“Craziest thing you ever heard of,” the sergeant said. “Rabbits killing a dog! But I guess it happened, all right. The dog’s down at the morgue. Usually, we’d have it carted off, but we thought maybe we ought to keep this one awhile in case any highbrow wanted to investigate.”

“Has anyone done so?” said Smitty.

“One guy showed up half an hour ago and wanted the dog’s body. He said he was the owner; but he didn’t give a good description, so we chased him. He was pretty mad about it, too. Wanted the remains mighty badly.”

Smitty and Wilson quickly looked at each other, then chased to the morgue.

The giant whistled softly as he stared at the little corpse spread on a slab usually reserved for human remains.

“You kind of forget,” said Wilson, “that a rabbit has very big, very sharp teeth. This would remind you, though!”

It certainly would. The paper had said the dog was slashed to ribbons. That had not been literary exaggeration.

The dead dog was sliced as if it had been attacked by knives. Its throat was a red mass; its furry body looked as if a wild cat had had access to it, for a long time, without interruption.

“And rabbits did that!” said Wilson. “Where was it that Swinnerton picked this up?” he asked the morgue attendant.

The man named a street. Smitty and Wilson went out there, with the picture of the mangled, furry body in their minds.

It was a quiet, residential street; distinctly not the sort of street where you’d expect this type of thing.

Wilson’s black eyes, alert and alive, found it first: a stained spot, near the curb in the middle of the block, where blood had been. The dog’s blood. The two ranged around, themselves a little like dogs on a scent. Smitty called; he had found several drops, fifty or sixty feet down the street.

Wilson joined the giant, but there were no more drops to trace. It was impossible to tell from which property the dog had come. And at police headquarters, they’d been told that the animal hadn’t been traced yet. There was no license on its collar.

That seemed the end as well as the beginning of their minor mystery. They went back to Mac’s drugstore.

They had just entered the store when Mac, at the iron door leading to the significant back room, called out:

“The chief! On the television set! Better hustle back in a hurry. When The Avenger calls, somethin’ important is usually up.”

It was in this case.

CHAPTER IV

The Dog’s Owner

In the big rear room of the drugstore, at the end wall, were the two principal results of the chemical apparatus worked on by Mac and the electrical stuff manipulated by Smitty.

There, on Smitty’s side of the lab, was a big box with a three-foot-square screen over the front of it. This was the world’s finest television set, as far ahead of the best commercial sets as a powerful automobile is ahead of a buggy.

The set was connected constantly with the Bleek Street headquarters of The Avenger; it was the face of The Avenger that now formed in the screen.

It was a startlingly young face to belong to the man who was becoming a legend in police and crime circles, after having made several large fortunes and after having retired from business.

Richard Benson was in his early twenties. But the expression on his regularly chiseled features, and the lack of it in his pale, cold eyes, indicated a man much older in experience if not in years.

“Mac.” The Avenger’s lips seemed scarcely to move with the word.

“Yes, Muster Benson,” said MacMurdie.

“You and Wilson and Josh and Smitty had better come to Bleek Street at once.”

Smitty stared at the young, impassive face. Time was when that face had been paralyzed by a nerve shock, so that it was always as expressionless as a block of ice. Now it could express emotion—but seldom did.

The Avenger was still The Avenger, immobile of countenance, deadly cold of eye, the bane of the underworld.

“Chief!” said Wilson impulsively. “Smitty and I have just stumbled onto something. It’s something I think you ought to know about right away. Happened in Scarsdale. Smitty and I just got back from there. Rabbits killed a dog! Believe it or not—three rabbits went after a Scotch terrier—”

“I know,” said The Avenger quietly.

Wilson gaped at him. He could still be surprised by the fact that this man seemed always to know everything. But the knowledge in this case was explained in the next minute.

“The owner of that dog,” said The Avenger, “is at Bleek Street, now.”

His impassive face faded from the screen, and the set went dead.

“Sweet Sue!” said Wilson. “I don’t know anything I’d like more than to talk to that owner right now!”

The sentiment was exaggerated when he got to The Avenger’s headquarters. For Wilson was susceptible to feminine charms. And the owner of the dead Scottie had lots of them.

Bleek Street is only a short block long, dead-ended. One side is taken up by the windowless back of a vast storage warehouse. In the middle of the other side are three old, narrow, red-brick buildings, flanked by stores and a couple of small warehouses. All these were either owned or leased by Dick Benson, so that, in effect, he owned the block.

Behind their dingy facade, the three red-brick buildings had been thrown into one, and they were furnished as luxuriously as only a very wealthy man could have furnished them.

The vast top floor of the Bleek Street headquarters took up the whole third floor areas of all three buildings. Dick Benson was in here when the four arrived from Mac’s drugstore. And with him was the owner of the dead dog.

The owner was Lila Morel; and Wilson and Smitty looked with undisguised admiration at her dark hair and eyes and the beauty of her face and figure.

But her face was unduly pale right now. She looked grief-stricken—and frightened.

Benson sat at his great desk near one of the windows. Over this window, as over the others, nickel steel slats were set in imitation of Venetian-blind slats at a forty-five-degree angle so that bullets could not get in but light could. The slats sent bars of light over The Avenger’s strong face and left his pale, icy eyes in shadow.

“Miss Morel, these are four of my aides,” he said quietly. “Perhaps you had better tell them what you have told me.”

Lila told of her father, her father’s occupation—though each of them knew him by scientific repute—and sketched the location of their Maine laboratory. Also, she told how Morel had disappeared.

Mac’s sandy ropes of eyebrows drew together.

“Ye mean ye’r father walked into a high-fenced clearin’, with no way of gettin’ out, and disappeared?”

“That’s right,” said Lila, voice tense.

“Perhaps the gate,” began Wilson.

Lila shook her pretty head.

“The gate can be opened only from inside the laboratory. The mechanism there was untouched. So Dad didn’t leave by the gate.”

“You heard or saw nothing after he’d left the building?” asked Dick Benson, voice even and calm as always.

“Nothing,” said Lila. “Except—”

She shivered a little, and bit her lip as if uncertain whether to go on. Then she did, with a rush.

“About the time I think Dad must have gone out into the night, I heard a wolf howl, far off. And then, so close that it made me jump, seemingly right in the clearing, I heard another wolf.”

She looked at the five men with every drop of blood draining from her face.

“It was as if Dad had been changed into a wolf and taken away!”

Smitty felt the hair rise on his scalp. But he knew Dick Benson was not so affected by the words. The giant knew that The Avenger always sought a natural explanation for apparently supernatural things. Indeed, Dick now offered a logical guess.

“That might have been a signal,” he said, “if the thing happened to your father that you evidently fear. That is—kidnaping!”

“I’m sure of it,” nodded Lila. “Something dreadful has happened to Dad. I know it!”

“But how,” puzzled Josh, “could a kidnap gang get into and out of a place which is without entrance or exit?”

“That,” suggested Dick quietly, “may probably not be cleared up till the rest of this odd business can be explained. Go on, Lila.”

“I wanted to do something right away to help Dad,” said the girl, “but I didn’t know which way to turn. Then I remembered that Edwin Ritter, the well-known politician, is one of Dad’s closest friends. I went to Mr. Ritter’s Hudson River home to see if he had heard anything from my father. He had not. I left the place, drove several miles along the river toward New York and found I had been trailed to Mr. Ritter’s. A gang caught me and almost killed me. They drove my coupé into the river, with me at the wheel. They thought I was unconscious, but I wasn’t. I swim pretty well; so I managed to get out of the car, underwater, and swim away in the dark.”

Smitty’s vast hands clenched, giving some slight hint of what would happen should he ever catch any of the members of a gang that would do such a thing.

“After I got away,” said Lila, “I hurried and got my dog, Prince. I brought it back to the spot where the gang had left me; thinking Prince might be able to trail the men to their hide-out—”

“They were on foot?” interrupted The Avenger, pale eyes like ice in moonlight.

“No, they were in a truck. Of course, Prince couldn’t trail that. But I thought it barely possible that one or more of them might have gone to the gang lair on foot, if the place happened to be nearby. And I guess that must have happened because Prince led me to a house in Scarsdale, a short distance away. And it was there that . . . that—”

“That it was killed,” nodded The Avenger. “Did you get into the house?”

“I just got the door open. It was unlocked. The . . . the rabbits jumped out and went for Prince. I thought I was seeing things or going crazy.”

“You have the address of the place?”

Lila told it to him. Dick turned to Mac, with the unspoken command to go out and look the place over. Mac left. The Avenger turned to Lila again.

“You said you’d sent for Packer, your servant, to come down from the Maine laboratory to your town apartment?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Lila. “He should be there by now.”

“Bring him here, Cole,” Dick said to Wilson.

And then the door opened and Nellie Gray came in.

Nellie Gray was another of The Avenger’s aides. She was tiny—barely five feet tall and weighing a little over one hundred pounds. You’d never dream, to look at her pink and white blondness that she was as valued a crime fighter, in her way, as even the giant Smitty was in his.

“What goes on?” demanded Nellie indignantly. “Are you leaving me out of some excitement? Can’t a girl go out to get a new hat without being shoved in the discard?”

“Yeah,” said Smitty, “if you thought less of excitement and more of your neck you wouldn’t always be getting into messes and make me come and get you out again.”

“Why, you,” gasped Nellie, “you ten-ton truck! If I had a nickel for every time I’ve saved your hide—”

“Tell her about the rabbits,” Josh broke in impatiently.

So Nellie was brought up to date, and she fussed sympathetically over Lila Morel. Then Wilson came back with the Morel servant, Packer, in tow.

And Packer disagreed with Lila.

“I think your father left the laboratory of his own free will, Miss Lila,” he said mildly. As always there was the faint smile on his lips. “I don’t think there is anything wrong.”

“But we haven’t heard from him, and there was that attack on me,” said Lila.

Packer shrugged.

“Do you remember last year when he left the New York apartment without explanation and was gone for six weeks?”

“That was different,” said Lila miserably.

Dick Benson took over, pale eyes on Packer’s.

“Do you happen to know what Morel was working on at the time he disappeared?” he asked. “Miss Morel doesn’t know.”

“Neither do I, sir,” said Packer. But Benson’s pale, infallible eyes caught a flicker of the man’s pupils.

“You do not know, perhaps, but you have—guessed?”

Packer hesitated, looking into the pale orbs. Then he nodded. “I have come to tentative conclusions.”

“And they are?”

“I think Mr. Morel was working along bio-chemical lines. Something requiring the use of live animals. He injected something into guinea pigs just before he left the laboratory that night.”

“What effect did the injections have?”

“None that I could see, at the time,” said Packer. “But I left shortly after that, at Miss Lila’s bidding, to inquire around the country for Mr. Morel. Then I came to New York.”

Benson nodded and stopped questioning the man. The Avenger seemed satisfied as to his complete innocence, as far as you could tell from his icy, inscrutable eyes.

Mac came back after awhile. He shook his sandy head.

“The place at Scarsdale is cleared out,” he said. “My guess is that it wasn’t lived in for a long time. These men who tackled Miss Morel must have been in only once or twice, using it as a temporary headquarters.”

It was then that The Avenger got the telephone call about the pigeons. The call was from the public library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. It was made by a sharp-eyed newsboy, who, with hundreds of his fellows in the great city, worked with The Avenger by always calling the Bleek Street headquarters if anything queer were observed.

And, Heaven knew, this was queer enough!

“Boss,” came the lad’s voice, “this is Stinky Williams. The pigeons down here at the library are goin’ nuts.”

“How do you mean?” asked The Avenger.

“They think they’re eagles or somethin’. They’re fightin’ each other, and even going after people on the sidewalks.”

“What?”

“As I live and breathe,” said the boy earnestly. “The men bat ’em off and don’t know whether to laugh or run. A lot of dames is hysterical. I tell you them birds are goin’ completely screwy. Fightin’ pigeons! Ain’t that one for the book?”

“I’ll be down immediately,” said Dick Benson.

CHAPTER V

Winged Madness

There are always throngs of people in front of the New York Public Library’s main branch. Not that the city is so starved for book learning; but the building happens to be in almost the exact center of town.

The broad walk in front of the library was in an uproar, now, crowded densely, with more crowds coming all the time to see what was up. Some people were laughing and ducking around. Others looked stupefied with amazement. All were staring upward.

Through the crowd and around the fringes, were traffic cops, sweating with a fruitless effort to get people to break it up and move along.

Dick Benson got to the curb, with Wilson beside him. And then the two got a taste of what it was all about.

A pigeon charged them!

That sounds funny, but it wasn’t.

The bird came at Wilson like a mad-winged javelin, its little red eyes gleaming like jewels. Like a thrown projectile, it struck almost before Cole could get his hands up; and on Cole’s cheek a long shallow gash appeared where the bird’s beak had ripped past.

The Avenger could move so fast it baffled the eye.

He moved that way now, one hand going out like light. The hand caught the bird as deftly as a hawk snares a chick.

Regretfully, Benson flipped his hand and broke the bird’s neck. He had to have it for experimentation. He slipped the dead pigeon into a big inner pocket, then went to the nearest cop.

Every police officer in the country either knew The Avenger or knew of him, by now. The man nodded respectfully.

“Move along now, will you?” he yelled at the milling people. “Haven’t the lot of you ever seen pigeons before? There have been pigeons at the library as long as the joint’s been standing.”

“But not like these,” he confessed in a lower tone to Dick Benson. “Do you know what’s causing this?”

The Avenger shook his head, and all three men ducked as a crazy bird lanced at them out of the blue. Once more Dick’s hand darted out, fast as the dart of a hummingbird. Another pigeon was caught; but this one he got alive. It went into the inner pocket, where it struggled but could do no harm.

“Not all of the birds are like that, I see,” said Dick, gazing up at the building ledges.

“No, sir,” said the cop. “Just some of them. The devil’s in ’em, all right.” A couple of normal pigeons fell from the ledges, pecked to death by their maddened fellows. The cop looked as if he might cross his fingers any minute. “Move on, all you guys— Oh, I beg your pardon; I didn’t mean you.”

The last person addressed was a man who had suddenly turned up at the cop’s elbow, and whom the cop treated almost as deferentially as he had The Avenger. He was a tall man, unusually handsome, with graying hair and fine features and an orator’s mobile mouth.

“Hello, Ritter,” said Benson.

Wilson blinked. This man seemed to know everyone of prominence.

Edwin Ritter, well-known politician, stared at The Avenger, then nodded affably.

“How are you, Benson? Quite a curious thing, all this, isn’t it?” He waved a hand at the gyrating birds around the ledges, then ducked as one winged at his head.

“Quite curious,” Dick agreed, voice even. “Did you come here expressly to see it?”

“No,” said Ritter. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood and saw the crowd. Like most of the rest here, I came out of curiosity, to see what was attracting all the attention.”

Benson’s coat writhed and pulsed with the struggles of the live pigeon. Ritter stared.

“What in the world—” he gasped.

“I’m taking one of these abnormal birds to my laboratory for experimentation,” said Dick.

“I wouldn’t think,” smiled Ritter, “that a man as prominent scientifically as you are would be turned to so small a task.”

“It might not be small,” The Avenger said.

Ritter was borne off on a wave of movement, then.

Benson and Cole went back to the Bleek Street laboratory with the one live pigeon and the one dead one.

Funny to some in the crowd, frightening to others, the scene seemed ominous in the extreme to Benson.

Pigeons attacking everything in sight! It was as mad as it was for rabbits to attack a dog.

And The Avenger had an idea that the two madnesses might possibly have some connection.

In a small plane, Smitty and Lila Morel neared the Maine laboratory of Lila’s father.

Dick, before going to the library to have a look at the incredible pigeons, had sent the giant, with Lila, to look around that laboratory a bit.

“You say there’s no landing place near the laboratory?” Smitty asked the girl.

“There’re only thick woods all around,” said Lila. “Thick woods and wolves and black flies.”

“I take it you didn’t enjoy your trips there.”

“I didn’t,” confessed Lila. “I’m a city gal, I guess. No wilderness for me. But Dad needed me to take care of him—away from a test tube he was as helpless as a child—so I always went.”

“Would the clearing around the lab be big enough to land in?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Lila. “We’ll have to walk it from the nearest village.”

“Or hire a car,” said Smitty hopefully.

“There’s no road to the lab,” said Lila. “Dad let it grow up with young trees as soon as the place was built and equipped and there was no more need for trucking. The only way through the woods is on foot.”

Smitty sighed. The big fellow was a Samson by nature and not by exercise. He didn’t like exercise, except the kind requiring huge fists to batter against the faces of crooks. Just out of college, Smitty had been framed into prison by a smooth crook. His main pleasure in life would always be taking that out on all other crooks within reach and making them sorry they’d been born.

The two didn’t get to the clearing around the lab till dusk. They’d heard Lila’s wolves plenty by then. She stayed very close to the big fellow and looked very thankful for his gigantic size. Smitty swelled his biceps a little under her clutching hand. There was only one girl in the world for him. That was petite Nellie Gray. But that didn’t keep him from admiring other beauty once in awhile.

Lila went up to the gate.

“I thought you said the gate could only be opened from inside the laboratory,” Smitty said rather dumbly.

“You can’t open it from the inside when everybody’s on the outside,” Lila pointed out. “When we leave, we set the inner mechanism so that a secret latch out here will open the gate for us to get back in.”

Smitty looked at the fence. A full two stories high, of heavy mesh, with barbed wire slanting outward on the top. It was as impossible to negotiate as the fence around a munitions factory. The big fellow didn’t see how anyone could ever disappear from within that barrier!

Lila twisted something near the ground beside the gate. There was a small flash as the current was shut off. Then her hand moved again.

“Pull,” she said.

Smitty tugged at the great gate, and it swung open. It was just getting fully dark as they stepped inside the clearing. Lila methodically fastened the gate again and turned on the current.

The laboratory door opened when she passed her hand four times in front of a spot in the wall which Smitty judged contained a photo-electric cell.

“You sure protect this place,” he said. “Your father must have been working on something very important.”

“I believe he was,” said Lila.

“But you don’t know what it was?”

“I have no idea,” said Lila.

Smitty frowned. It seemed odd that Morel’s servant, Packer, should have an idea what Morel’s work was about, though Morel’s own daughter did not know.

The two stepped into the laboratory. They only went far enough to find the light switch controlling the floodlights in the compound, however. Smitty had said he wanted to look over the clearing first.

The lights blazed out, and he went back outside.

There was little to observe in the clearing. It was just that—a clearing. Morel, in his anxiety to have an area around his laboratory that couldn’t harbor any trespassers, had cut down every tree and shrub. There was only grass, close-cropped. And in this, the giant could find no trace of visitors who might have taken Morel away with them or, indeed, of Morel’s walk out there itself.

The thing grew more impossible by the minute, as Smitty walked slowly around the high, unscalable fence and examined the gate, set now so that only from inside the building could it be opened.

Morel couldn’t have gotten out of here—

A scream from the laboratory sent the giant jumping back toward the building door. He moved fast. It had been a scream of pure horror, and it had come from Lila Morel.

Smitty charged through the doorway.

There was a sort of small anteroom inside the door, and the giant jumped into this and started toward the next door leading into the laboratory proper. He had left Lila in the tiny vestibule. It was in there that the floodlights could be turned on.

Neither had thought to look back in the lab before Smitty left Lila to look around the yard. Why should they think of it? Nobody could get in.

And now this scream of horror from the girl. What was after her in there?

Smitty got through the inner door and into the lab itself. A vast room with a high ceiling and many windows, blazing now with light from the switch Lila had clicked on a moment ago.

Smitty’s china-blue eyes bulged.

Lila was doing a kind of fantastic dance near the center of the room on the cement floor, stamping, swaying, starting to run, stopping again to stamp some more.

She had gone crazy from the strain of grief, Smitty decided sympathetically. Coming up here among her father’s things had revived the memories of him before fate overtook him, and she’d been unable to stand it. He ran toward her, to put a calming hand on her shoulder.

And then he began to dance, himself!

If the girl’s dance was fantastic, Smitty’s was like something out of a circus book. The trained elephant, dancing to fast music. It seemed as if even the solid-concrete floor was shaking under his weight, though this was, no doubt, imagination.

The reason for the dancing was fanged terror at their feet!

A dozen little tailless forms raged around them, darting in whenever possible, using sharp little teeth on shrinking flesh.

Lila’s stockings were ripped in several places, and crimson showed on the whiteness of her ankles. In a moment Smitty was in worse shape because he couldn’t move his three hundred pounds as agilely as Lila could move.

And the damnedest thing was the species of attacking animals. They were guinea pigs!

Common, ordinary guinea pigs, pets of laboratories, as mild an animal as ever lived. Usually a guinea pig is no match even for a determined wren; they aren’t built for fighting anything. And here were a dozen or more of the ordinarily harmless things doing real damage to two humans. Smitty felt like yelling, himself.

It was high time something was done before their ankles got slashed to cat’s meat. And it would take too long to stamp on them one by one, the way they were flashing around.

“Hold your breath!” Smitty yelled to the girl.

Then he hastily dropped a flashing little thing, like a glass marble, which he had taken from a lower vest pocket.

But the thing wasn’t a marble. It was a thin-shelled glass capsule. In it was a volatile, colorless gas invented by MacMurdie in his drugstore laboratory. The gas could knock any living thing cold in less than three seconds.

It knocked the guinea pigs cold in about one second. They fell in midmotion, sliding along the floor, still in the direction of the two humans they had been insane enough to attack.

“Whew!” Lila gasped.

Which was an indiscretion. She got a whiff of gas.

“Hang it, I told you to hold your breath!” said the giant, after he had carried her out to the little vestibule.

Lila only looked at him and gasped for breath. The one little whiff was going to make it imperative for her to lie down somewhere for ten or fifteen minutes. Smitty pulled out a little nose clip, then went back into the laboratory and opened the windows. The air cleared.

“What in the world kind of guinea pigs does your father raise?” he said, when Lila had recuperated.

She shook her head wonderingly.

“Just the ordinary kind,” she said. “They weren’t like that the last time I saw them.”

Smitty thought a moment.

“Didn’t Packer, your servant, say he thought your father had injected something into those pigs just before he vanished?” he asked.

Lila nodded, equally thoughtful.

“It must be,” Smitty said slowly, “that the behavior of those crazy little things has something to do with what your father was working on when he left here.” He sighed. “I’ll bet we never see a crazier thing than that.”

The giant was wrong. They were to see a crazier thing in a very short time.

CHAPTER VI

The Red Pool

The gas had gone out the opened windows when the two went back into the laboratory. But it hadn’t cleared in time for the luckless guinea pigs. They were dead. Mac’s gas was powerful stuff.

Smitty shoved the little bodies under a table with his toe as unobtrusively as he could. But he needn’t have worried about sparing Lila’s feelings. She wasn’t looking at him at all. She was staring around the great room in dismay. And in a moment Smitty joined her.

The dismay was well warranted.

Everything in that fine shop had been smashed. Delicate instruments lay in shards on the floor. There were iridescent patches of glass, the remains of test tubes and beakers. The lab had had the finest of everything, tens of thousainds of dollars’ worth of instruments. And all was damaged beyond repair. Smitty, a scientist himself, groaned when he saw the havoc.

“Poor Dad,” murmured Lila forlornly. “I’m glad he isn’t here to see this.”

There was movement in a far corner. Instantly, Smitty crouched, ready to leap. Then the maker of the movement walked out on satin paws, and Smitty grinned sheepishly at himself.

It was a cat, gray and white, purring loudly.

“Mathilda!” exclaimed Lila. “Didn’t Packer put you out when he left?”

She turned to Smitty. “She’s a tramp tabby; came to us out of the woods one day. We feed her when we’re here, then turn her loose to hunt field mice for herself when we’re away. Packer should have loosed her in the woods when he—”

She stopped and stared. So did Smitty.

Mathilda had stopped her purring and her satiny advance toward them. She was crouched like a tiny panther, suddenly, and her slitted eyes glared toward a corner. Then she stalked slowly toward the corner.

Smitty saw, then, why the cat was in such good shape in spite of being shut up in this building. She was stalking a mouse. The little creature was under a work table that had less fragments of broken equipment around it than most. It stared warily at the advancing cat. But here was something eerie—it didn’t run! It just stayed there.

It was only later that Smitty remembered the little details. It was only later that he repictured the mouse and the thing beside which the mouse was crouching.

This was a small red puddle on the floor. It was a slowly drying puddle, coagulated around the edges so that it looked startingly like blood. Smitty thought he had seen flecks of red on the mouse’s muzzle; but he couldn’t be sure of this. It was pretty hard to see that at twenty feet by electric light.

However, at the moment, he wasn’t thinking these things. He wasn’t thinking anything. He was too stupefied by what was happening.

The cat got right up to within springing distance. And the mouse hadn’t moved. Beady eyes fearless, it was looking at the cat, symbol of death to mousedom.

The cat’s tail twitched preliminary to a leap. And Lila cried out in wonder and fear. And it wasn’t the cat that leaped; it was the mouse—right at its comparatively colossal enemy.

The cat backed a step, hissed, and reared up in a feline astonishment that must have been intense. And then the mouse got there. Sharp teeth caught the cat’s stubby nose, and there was the doggonedest snarling and hissing you ever heard. There was a flurry of fur, and then the cat was streaking toward the door on an obvious and frantic hunt for some sane corner of a world where mice were mice and not mad acrobats.

“I didn’t see it!” breathed Smitty.

Lila’s hand was at her throat and she was staring at the door.

“I’m not crazy!” said Smitty.

And then he remembered the details and looked back to verify them.

Where the mouse had been, was the drying red pool on the floor. And he was now prepared to believe that he had seen flecks on the mouse’s muzzle.

“I’ll be a son of a pigmy,” he said. “It’s the answer!”

“What’s the answer?” said Lila, voice queer.

“Rabbits chasing dogs, pigeons attacking humans, mice going after cats!” said Smitty. “That little red pool! It must have been spilled when this joint was wrecked. And the mouse must have consumed some of the stuff, and that must be what gave it the insane courage to tackle a cat. That red stuff must be the answer—”

Click!

The lights in the laboratory went out.

There was a sound of padding feet, seeming to come from all directions at once. Then the giant found himself in the midst of a hailstorm. But the hailstones were blackjacks, clubbed guns and other extremely hard objects.

When the lights suddenly go out, you are left with an after-image, a kind of photograph, that persists for half a second or so. Smitty’s after-image showed an overturned bench, hardly higher than a footstool, a little to his right.

He stooped, head sunk to avoid the blows, gathered six or eight or ten legs in his vast embrace, and straightened up suddenly.

The owners of the legs yelled as they were dumped on their heads. Smitty felt the bench, lay down and put the bench over him. Then he just felt around for extremities.

When he found an ankle, he squeezed.

That doesn’t sound very drastic. But the giant could have crushed a beer bottle in his bare fingers, if he’d been foolish enough to risk cutting his hands. When he exerted that pressure on an ankle, that owner of the ankle hopped off on one foot and sat down somewhere.

He got several ankles, with the bench over him absorbing the wild flailings of the unseen attackers. And in the meantime a corner of his mind was concerned with amazement at the presence of this gang at all.

That fence was supposed to keep everybody out. Hadn’t he seen its impregnability for himself? Yet, here was a band of yeggs enthusiastically trying to kill him and Lila and only kept from shooting them down by the fact that in the darkness they might miss and kill each other. How had they gotten in?

A shriek from Lila galvanized Smitty into offensive instead of defensive warfare. The shriek was cut off, and he knew it was by a hand over Lila’s lips.

The giant heaved up from the floor, bench held like a shield. Then he caught the end of it and whirled it around like a monstrous club.

Yells and smacks delighted him. He jumped for the spot where Lila had cried out. He heard another beginning of a scream, this time near the inner door, and bounded there, barking his shins on things in the blackness. He cursed the method of this gang. They’d turned the yard lights off when they turned the others off. There wasn’t even light from outside shining in to relieve the blackness.

Smitty heard the rustle of Lila’s dress, moved faster and brought up smack against a wall. But also, he brought up against the light switch.

He snapped it on, turned in relief to go on with the fight against men he could see, and then he sagged to his knees!

He wasn’t the only one near that light switch. One of the gang, perhaps the one who had snapped it off in the first place, was there, too. And this one had struck before Smitty could see him.

A bad clip on the head with a gun barrel.

Smitty instinctively rolled as he sagged so that the giant was spared the next blow. But he was too dazed to go on. He braced himself for the blow or the shot that should put him out of this world—

“All right!” yelled a man near the table under which the mouse had been. “I’ve got it.”

Smitty got one confused glimpse of this man, and then an abrupt change came over the picture.

The men left.

Just like that! They poured out of the building. Two men who had been holding Lila, loosed her and beat it so abruptly that she almost fell. The man with the gun on Smitty turned and ran.

Before the big fellow could get strength back to rise from knees to unsteady feet, the place was empty, save for Lila and himself.

Lila had nerve. She started toward the door.

“We can catch them in the woods. I know the country around here better than they can possibly know it. Well, why don’t you come on?”

Smitty didn’t make a move; he didn’t even answer her. He stood with his head cocked to one side, as if listening intently. Which, as a matter of fact, he was.

“Do you happen to have a thermocouple around?” he asked. “Or would you know one if you saw it?”

“Of course I’d know one—a simple little thing like that?” flashed Lila. “But why do you ask at a time like this? Those men in the woods will be—”

“See if there’s a thermocouple unsmashed,” said Smitty.

They found one in the living quarters, and hence unbroken. Smitty nodded as he saw it. It was a delicate instrument able to detect the heat from a star. Which was more ability than Smitty needed.

He set it up and observed its message carefully. Then he nodded.

“U-huh. Going in and out of this clearing at will, in spite of the fence! I get it.”

“Get what?” said Lila, exasperated by all this.

“The heat of a motor would register on this thermocouple, if it was within a mile or two,” said Smitty.

“No motor could be within a mile or two. I told you there wasn’t a road for cars or trucks through the woods. And no plane could land with the men, and, besides, we’d have heard a plane motor.”

But the giant was off on another tack. The one glance he had had of the man who had yelled “All right,” was clear in his mind. The man had seemed to be the head of affairs. His yell had sent them all running.

“You described your father, at Bleek Street, when you were talking to us,” Smitty said, looking hard at the girl.

Her lips opened, shut without words, and she only nodded.

“You said he had graying blond hair, blue eyes and was husky-looking, though a bit stooped at the shoulders from work over test tubes and beakers,” he said.

Lila didn’t even nod this time. She stared at him with her eyes wide.

“The man who ran this little raid,” said Smitty, “looked husky, though stooped at the shoulders, and he had light-blue eyes and graying blond hair.”

Lila seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to go on.

“That man,” said Smitty, “was your father, wasn’t he? Your own father, busting in here and raiding his own laboratory!”

“He . . . he wasn’t,” stammered Lila, white-faced.

“Oh, yes, he was. Your looks show it.”

“No! He . . . I never saw that man before!”

Smitty dropped it and went to the bench under which the red pool had been.

The drying red puddle of some stuff that had turned a mouse into a miniature lion when it partook of it. The coagulating little pool that was like blood in color if not in texture.

And there was no sign of that pool, now!

The puddle had been so meticulously scraped up that there were marks of whatever blade had been used deep in the cement of the floor. There was not one trace of it left for Smitty to take to The Avenger’s laboratory.

“That proves it,” he said. “Only your father would have known the significance of a puddle of spilled chemical on the floor. No one else would have had the sense to remove that, when the gang came back to make sure no clues had been left.”

“He wasn’t my father! He wasn’t!” cried Lila. And then she burst into tears, leaving a perplexed and dismayed giant with the prospect of getting a hysterical damsel ten miles through woods, at night, on foot.

CHAPTER VII

Motor Meeting

The Avenger had a laboratory that could not have been beaten even by the great commercial laboratories. And he could use that lab as few men ever born could use scientific equipment. He was one of the world’s leading scientists, pick any branch you please.

But Dick Benson was being baffled, now.

He had a pigeon that thought it was an eagle and tried to attack everything moving, and he couldn’t find what had made it savage.

He had taken one live and one dead pigeon from the public library. He had tested and vivisected the dead bird in every way known to man, and he could find no variance from normal in it. So he was now concentrating on the live one.

And this one was certainly something to write home about.

The bird was in large cage. It kept to the side of the cage nearest to anything moving. Then it flew at the bars—most of the feathers were out of its head from beating against the wires—and tried to get at what made the movement, regardless of the size of the thing.

“ ’Tis strrrange,” burred MacMurdie, who was working with The Avenger. Of course, Mac, though an outstanding scientist himself, was only a capable helper when his knowledge was compared to the knowledge of Dick Benson.

“You bird’s mad,” said Mac dourly. “Yet, ’tis a consistent kind of madness. It acts as if it would like to destroy every livin’ thing except itself.”

The Avenger’s head, with its virile, heavy black shock of hair, nodded slowly.

“It almost seems,” Dick said, “as though the pigeon has a fiendish hate for everything alive; as if the brain or nervous system were subtly deranged. But there was no sign of injury in the other bird.”

Mac shrugged.

“ ’Tis sick in the head—but only the head, Muster Benson. Ye’ll obserrrve that the pigeon is healthy enough. It eats when ye feed it—after ye’ve drawn back so it doesn’t try to fly at you.”

“Yes, it’s healthy enough,” conceded Dick, colorless eyes like wells of ice in his impassive face.

The Avenger paced slowly up and down the laboratory. Mac stared. It was the first time he had ever seen Dick baffled by anything of laboratory nature. But, he had to admit, it was the first time he had ever seen a problem of so unique a nature brought home to anyone.

“Ritter,” said The Avenger, stopping his pacing.

“Eh?” said Mac.

“Ritter was at the library,” Dick explained. “He’s no scientist, as far as I know. But he is an intelligent man. I’d like to ask him what he observed about the behavior of the birds. Besides—”

The Avenger didn’t go on with that last sentence.

Mac said: “Ritter’s gotten to be a big figure, politically, hasn’t he?”

“The biggest,” said Benson. “He’s quite apt to be a presidential candidate in the coming election, and there is a good chance that he’ll be our next president.”

“D’ye think it’s possible that Ritter knows something about this?” said Mac.

But Dick made no reply to that. He summoned Cole Wilson from the vast, top-floor room. Wilson came barging in, dark hair back on his forehead, black eyes blazing, eager for a job.

“Do you remember Edwin Ritter, the man who was at the library when we visited it?” Dick asked Cole.

Cole nodded.

“I wish you’d go and have a talk with him about it,” The Avenger said. “Find out exactly what he observed about the birds. He may have seen something we missed. Also, try to find out how he happened to be there just at that time.”

Both Wilson and Mac stared swiftly at Dick, at that. It sounded as if The Avenger were beginning to have curious doubts about Ritter. And yet, prominent as Ritter was it wasn’t possible there could be real suspicion directed against him.

Mac helped Benson some more while Dick tackled the mystery of the mad pigeon. But there was to be no report on Ritter from Wilson.

Each of The Avenger’s aides carried a tiny two-way radio set in a curved case at his waist. A belt set designed by Smitty. Wilson’s voice came over his small set after his signal had sounded.

“Cole reporting, chief. Ritter isn’t in town. He left, by plane, for Detroit, earlier today. His servant, a little fellow by the name of Knarlie, says Ritter went there to attend a banquet af automobile manufacturers. The banquet’s just about beginning now. Any further orders?”

After a minute, Benson told him that there were no further orders for the moment. Even in the fastest of planes, Cole couldn’t have reached Detroit in time to take in that banquet. And there seemed no reason why anyone should go to it anyway.

All of which only proved that occasionally even The Avenger failed to divine the importance of some occurrence. For, as it turned out, the banquet in Detroit was to be highly important, indeed.

The Book-Brunswick Hotel is impressive with marble and uniforms and lobbies and general richness of appearance. The Green Room, where important meetings are held, looks like something out of Versailles Gardens.

The gentlemen in the Green Room that evening, congregated around a large oval table, were the sleekest, most polished bunch you ever saw. And the richest gathering you were ever apt to see. Each was owner of a great motor kingdom.

There was Leslie Fox, sponsor of the Fox 8, and also manufacturer of motorboat engines. There was Horace Weyland, truck and tractor king. There was John Ainslee, white-haired old-timer who had started before the days of steering wheels with the Ainslee twin-cylinder. There were George Moppert, Alfred Vanden, Gervaise Childs, Charles Swing—

There were twenty-nine men there, and twenty-eight of them were the heads of giant corporations bearing their names.

The twenty-ninth was Edwin C. Ritter.

Ritter sat at the right of the toastmaster of the evening, and Ritter wore a perpetual, pleased smile. For this banquet, announced to the public as a yearly meeting of the motor association, was not that at all. It was a banquet in his honor, at which had already been pledged the support of these influential men in his forthcoming presidential campaign.

It was a little past ten o’clock. Till now, the evening had gone smoothly enough. The dinner had been eaten, with an accompaniment of red wine and white. The coffee and cigars had been served. Several short speeches had been made. And now it was time for Ritter’s speech of acceptance.

The well-known public figure had never looked more impressive. He stood up, with his prematurely white hair like a white banner over his good-looking face. He started to say something, but whatever it was was never said.

Leslie Fox, a beefy man with frosty-gray eyes, and John Ainslee, with fire in his own aged orbs, had been whispering about something for several minutes. Then the whispering had grown a little louder, with neither of them paying any attention to anyone else.

Both of them had been getting madder and madder, if the mottled red rising in their cheeks was any true sign.

Now, just as Ritter’s first smooth word was about to come forth, old Ainslee suddenly leaped to his feet and his fist smashed down on the table with a force to make the coffee cups jiggle in their saucers.

“You rat!” he howled at Fox. “You double-crossing louse! You—” There followed a name like an explosion, which jerked every head there in the direction of the two men.

Fox was on his feet, too, by now. The two glared at each other like two animals about to battle to the death.

“Gentlemen,” pleaded Ritter. “Please—”

One of the other men said: “What’s up, Les? Why the commotion?”

“He should tell you what’s up!” exploded Ainslee. “Go on, tell ’em, you slug!”

“What I want to do in my own plant is my own business,” howled Fox.

“The hell it is! It’s the business of every one of us. We’re all in the same boat, aren’t we?”

“What are you talking about?” rapped out Alfred Vanden.

“You know we’re all going to get a lot of airplane business,” said Ainslee. “There’s even been talk of suspending automobile production for a while to get caught up on planes. Well, listen to this: Fox just hired eleven hundred plane mechanics at eight cents an hour above the standard scale!”

That was a bomb in the room all right. Vanden jerked around to where Fox and Ainslee stood and caught Fox’s arm.

“You . . . you didn’t!” he choked.

Fox said nothing, but looked ferociously at Ainslee.

“You cheap chiseler,” shouted another of the men. “You know we’re all going to have to have plane mechanics, and you steal a march on us by hiring a lot in advance—at excess pay! Now we’ll all have to pay that much. Where do you get off, endangering our profits like that?”

“Gentlemen—” pleaded Ritter once more. But no one even heard him.

“You old hyena!” roared Fox to Ainslee. “Can’t you ever keep your mouth shut? I was trying to do you a good turn. You could have hired some yourself, ahead of the rest. So do you thank me? You do not! You blab around. Why, I’ve a good notion to—”

Fox finished with what he had a good notion to do. That was to let go with a good right hook to the older man’s firm jaw.

Ainslee spun around twice on his way back and fell to the floor. Fox started toward him and was grabbed by a couple of the others. He struck at them, and one thing led to another—

A sleek, polished bunch, all right—when they got into the place. When they got out, there were several black eyes, a few bloodied noses and a whole lot of bruises in places where they would show. It had been like a battle in the bleachers after an unfair decision by the umpire against the home team, or like a rotten-tomato battle against rival gangs of tough street kids.

Certainly not like a meeting of motor magnates.

And the hard feelings didn’t break up with the banquet. They persisted till next morning. They had full possession of old Ainslee as he sat at his desk in the administration building of the vast plant bearing his name.

Ainslee was thinking of Fox, and his eyes flashed with a fire younger than his years.

“I’ll fix his wagon,” he said finally.

He phoned his executives and gathered them around him.

“Our new Speed-Flow competes directly in price and type with Fox’s 8, doesn’t it?” he said.

It was more a statement than a question. The old man knew it did. One of the younger men nodded.

“The Speed-Flow and the Fox 8 are within a few dollars of each other in price, a few pounds in weight, a few miles in speed. They’re directly competitive.”

“They’re not any more!” snapped Ainslee. “Beginning at once, a new price is effective. The Speed-Flow sells for $650.”

There was a concerted gasp. Then the general superintendent exclaimed:

“We can’t sell for that! The car costs us over $600 at the factory door. We make little enough, with sales costs out, at the present price of $980.”

“The new price,” said Ainslee, “is $650. I’ll show that louse, Fox.”

“You’ll lose millions!” protested the manager.

“So will Fox,” barked Ainslee. “And I can stand it better than he can. I’m better heeled. I’ll run him out of business if it takes my last dollar.”

“The whole industry will suffer! The whole price structure of one of the nation’s greatest industries—”

“Damn the price structure,” snarled Ainslee. “And, particularly, damn Leslie Fox! Do as I said, at once, or I’ll fire the lot of you!”

CHAPTER VIII

The Devil’s Mask

The Avenger was in his laboratory. He had been there for twenty hours, working tirelessly on the mystery of the pigeons. Tirelessly? He seemed made of metal, where fatigue was concerned. He had worn out Mac and Wilson and now had Josh assisting him.

Josh thought Benson was getting places. The slight tautness of expression indicated it. But as usual the man with the deadly, colorless eyes was not revealing anything till he had something actual to reveal.

Dick was working on about the fiftieth variety of test that can be given to a minute quantity of blood. The blood had been taken from the belligerent pigeon. He had just diluted this bit with a golden liquid which instantly turned cloudy purple, on contact with the blood.

The color was intriguing, but Josh knew The Avenger scarcely noticed that. Color was incidental. What the pale, infallible eyes were studying through a low-power microscope was a queer crystalline pattern forming in the blood cells.

Smitty came in. The giant had a length of what looked like white ribbon in his hands. But it was not ribbon. It was ticker tape from The Avenger’s private news ticker in the big top-floor room.

Over that ticker constantly flowed all the world’s news. Smitty had just gathered an item and now handed it to Dick for his inspection.

Benson read it.

The item was only an account of a personal quarrel, and would have had no importance save for the vast power of the persons involved. That made it front-page news.

There had been an automobile association banquet the night before. There had been an argument between Ainslee and Fox, two titans in the industry. Fox had slugged Ainslee in the jaw.

The account was of the type that is frequently reported by waiters and bellboys in big hotels who get a fee for every tidbit of gossip turned in to the papers. But the sequence of the incident was the important thing.

Ainslee had just announced a price drop of $330 in his car, competing with the Fox 8!

“That’s split the whole motor business apart,” said Smitty.

The Avenger nodded, colorless eyes lambent, like cold moonstone.

“You said Edwin Ritter was at that banquet, Wilson?”

Cole nodded. “The banquet was really given in his honor. The Detroit motor magnates held it officially to indorse his candidacy for president.”

Dick said: “It’s queer.”

They waited for him to say what was queer.

“Lila Morel goes to call on Ritter,” said Benson slowly. “Near his house, she is trapped by thugs and almost killed. There is a crazy affair about mad pigeons at the public library. Ritter just happens to be there at that time. Now, Ritter attends an important banquet, and the men attending it have a violent quarrel that bids fair to disrupt one of the nation’s biggest industries.”

He stared at the test tube. He hadn’t completed his latest test and didn’t want to leave it.

“We haven’t one thing, definite, against Ritter,” he resumed. “But wherever he is, there seems to be a sudden blossoming of trouble. Josh, you and Smitty take one of the planes and go to Detroit. Watch Ritter and note everything he does and every place he goes.”

“We keep out of sight?” said Smitty.

“First see Ritter,” said The Avenger. “See what he has to say about the banquet. After that, trail him so he doesn’t know he is being trailed.”

He turned back to the test tube, and Josh and Smitty went out of the laboratory and then out of the building.

If Dick Benson hadn’t been so immensely rich, his car-and-plane bill alone would have ruined him. He had a dozen planes, ranging from a little bullet of a thing, all wings and motor, which would go almost four hundred miles an hour, to a giant trimotored fortress which would have made the military eyes of any foreign warring power glisten with delight. In addition, he had over a score of cars of every size, designed for every conceivable transportation function.

Josh and Smitty took a low-wing monoplane that cruised at about two-sixty and hopped for Detroit.

It was a pretty short hop in that ship.

It was easy to locate Ritter. A presidential candidate isn’t hidden under a bushel—or in a large auditorium hall, usually, for that matter. The hotel where the banquet had been held, knew his whereabouts.

He was at the Grosse Point home of Horace Weyland, the truck and tractor baron. Weyland had gone west the morning after the banquet and had turned his home over to the politician.

“It simply doesn’t seem possible that Ritter could be mixed up in anything shady,” Josh repeated, as they sped toward the Weyland estate in a rented car. “He’s too prominent.”

“Have most of the guys we’ve fought been little fellows, or have they been prominent?” Smitty pointed out.

Josh had no answer for that one.

Justice, Inc., had been formed to fight supercrime, led by men so powerful that they were beyond the reaches of ordinary police efforts. It was hence the rule, and not the exception, that the men Justice, Inc., fought and vanquished should be wealthy and prominent, beyond all normal suspicions.

“Why,” asked Josh, “would Ritter break up a banquet held in his honor, assuming he has the power to and chose to use that power?”

Smitty shrugged vast shoulders.

“He wants to be elected president, doesn’t he? So, suppose he starts an argument in the automobile trade that looks like it’s going to bring trouble affecting, directly or indirectly, everybody in the country. Then suppose he patches up that trouble, with a lot of publicity. That would make him hot stuff as a pacifier, wouldn’t it?”

Josh admitted that it would. And Josh admitted to something like awe.

“Gee, Smitty. We’ve gone after crooks who had big stakes in mind. But we’ve never tackled anybody who actually dared to try to steal the presidency of the United States before. That is, if your guess is right.”

They were at Weyland’s place, now. Smitty tooled the car up a tree-lined drive and stopped in front of a home that looked like a movie set of an English castle. The giant rang the bell, then listened intently to something sounding out in back of the house. Anyway, it seemed to come from that source. Josh heard it, too.

It was an anguished screaming. Half a yelp and half a shriek. It seemed almost human, yet not quite human.

“Something’s being tortured pretty badly,” said Josh, soberly.

Then the door opened in answer to Smitty’s ring.

The servant in the doorway gave both of them a start. He was so different from the type of figure usually found as a servant.

A small man with a malformation of the back that was felt more than actually seen. A man with a face almost hideous in its homeliness but with exceptionally intelligent, kindly brown eyes peering out at you from all the ugliness.

There were somber shadows in the eyes, now.

“Yes?” the ugly small man said.

“We’d like to see Mr. Ritter,” said Smitty. There had been silence in the back. Now, there were more of the queer screams, followed by a long moaning. The ugly little man looked as if he were about to moan, too.

“Mr. Ritter isn’t here just now,” he said.

“You’re sure?” said Smitty.

“Quite sure,” retorted the ugly one. “I am Mr. Ritter’s personal servant; so I should know.”

More shrieks. Smitty started toward the door.

“I’m sorry,” said the little man hastily, barring the way. “Terribly sorry. If you will come back in an hour—”

He was trying to bar the door, and Smitty was having none of it. The giant pushed door and servant back without effort.

Smitty had placed that shriek. He thought it was, incredibly, from a dog. And anything that put a dog in such agony that its cries of pain became almost unrecognizable was a matter of extreme importance to Smitty. He liked dogs.

Josh followed close on the heels of the big fellow, with the ugly little man, distress in his eyes, trying all the time to get in front of them and insisting that Mr. Ritter was not in the house.

The front hall led straight from the big main door back through the center of the house to a large, glassed rear door. And that door, in turn, opened onto a rear terrace.

The little servant stopped trying to block their way; he saw it was no use as they got to the rear door. He had done his best.

Smitty and Josh went onto the terrace, stopped aghast at what they saw, then hurried on with fists instinctively clenched.

There was a small terrier, tied up close to the base of an iron urn. The terrier was screaming and trying to twist away from the whistling blows of a whip that seemed made of fine, cutting, copper wire. And the wielder of the diabolical whip was a man whose face had been pictured in all the nation’s papers at one time or another.

But Edwin Ritter’s face had never been caught by a camera as Smitty and Josh saw it now.

His face was a devil’s mask. The lips were curved up in a frightful grin. The eyes were almost closed as the whip whistled down. Little muscles in the cheeks jerked with every blow. It was a face out of hell.

Just one last blow Ritter got in when he sensed the presence of others. Instantly, he whirled toward Josh and Smitty, and as instantly his face changed.

It became benevolent, regretful, pained, sorrowful—but stern.

“Gentlemen,” Ritter said, “I’m extremely sorry you should chance to come here at such a time. My poor dog. It distresses me so much to have to discipline it now and then. Yet, discipline is necessary. Not a very nice sight for visitors to see, though, is it? Knarlie!” The bland, benevolent expression still held, but cords in the man’s throat suddenly stood out in a frenzy of carefully veiled anger. “Knarlie, why did you show visitors out here?”

The ugly-looking servant opened his mouth to speak but seemed to realize there was nothing to say and only spread his hands. Then he left the terrace, looking stricken and frightened. And well he might. For the last person on earth to be caught in such a scene was a man who wanted to be president of the United States some day.

Josh saw Smitty’s big hands quivering for action. But the giant couldn’t break this man’s neck or use the dog’s whip on him as he ached to do.

“We’re from the press,” Smitty said, taking a malicious pleasure in seeing Ritter’s face go deadly white and his lips twitch in terror. “We came to check on the banquet proceedings last night.”

“I gave all the details it was seemly for me to give to others from the papers,” Ritter said, very, very, friendly.

“There seem to have been a few details omitted,” said Smitty. “For instance, have you any idea what started the fight between Ainslee and Fox?”

“None whatever,” said Ritter. He looked with a bland smile at Josh. “You represent a Negro publication?”

“The Southern Courier,” nodded Josh, playing up Smitty’s punishing lead.

Ritter moistened putty-colored lips, and Smitty went on with his questions but couldn’t pry out anything not already printed in the papers. Ritter herded them subtly into the house and down the hall toward the front door.

“I . . . er . . . trust you two won’t bother to report my regrettable necessity back there on the terrace,” he said, opening the door for them.

“Necessity?” said Smitty, face impassive.

“Yes, of course. When a dog disobeys orders, it must be punished. Dogs must be kept well trained or they become nuisances to others, and that would be most inconsiderate on the owner’s part. Yet, I realize that it may have looked severe to two men chancing to come at the wrong moment.”

Smitty and Josh said nothing, getting at least some small revenge from seeing him wriggle.

“I hope to be president one of these days,” Ritter said, smiling widely with pale lips. “In fact, I have every reason to believe I will become so. And two . . . er . . . journalists who happen to be close friends of a president of the United States would be in a very fortunate position indeed.”

“Yes, wouldn’t they?” said Smitty. And the two left.

But with them went the vision of Ritter’s face just before he knew there was anyone watching. The face of a fiend, inflicting torment on a helpless animal for torment’s own sake. “I wonder how many times that faithful little servant of his, the one he called Knarlie, has kept people from seeing Ritter in one of those moods?” mused Josh.

“Always, till now, I guess,” growled Smitty. “It would have come out in print if he’d been caught like that very often.”

“And he wants to be president!” Josh’s jaw set. “How would you like a man like that in the White House?”

Smitty felt like shivering.

“I could believe anything about him,” he said. “Watch him is right! We’ll take day and night shifts and never let him out of our sight. Flip you for the night watch.”

The coin came heads, so Smitty won. The giant got out of the car to take over the daylight vigil, with the politician still in the Weyland place. Josh went back to town to get some rest for the night watch over Ritter.

And both kept seeing him at his diabolical work with the wire whip.

CHAPTER IX

Death in the Sky

This time the meeting of the automotive heads was not held in any hotel. There was too much chance of publicity.

It was held at the home of one of the magnates, and everyone was there save Ainslee and Fox. Ritter was there, too.

The meeting was to discuss that price war between the two absent ones—a war that was going to mean chaos for hundreds of thousands of people. When any main industry in a nation is crippled, that nation is also put seriously out of order.

So they met to see what could be done about it, and it was lucky they weren’t in a public place. For this time not just two men fought. They all did!

Twenty-five men, dignified, reserved, representative of several billion dollars, became raving males who wanted only to hit each other as hard as possible with the first weapon at hand.

Josh, on the outside of the house with a tiny stethoscope arrangement attached to the windowpane of the room in which the men had gathered, felt that he couldn’t be hearing correctly. Middle-aged and elderly millionaires behaving like gutter urchins! Bursting with hate for each other! Blacking each other’s eyes and throwing things around!

Josh ventured to raise his head a very little, so he could see into the room. The thing he saw was the exit of Edwin Ritter.

The handsome politician was slipping from the room with a small, enigmatic smile on his face. The rest were too busy screaming and fighting to notice. Josh went to the door, hiding behind shrubbery. He got there just in time to see Ritter step out, now with a broad grin on his face.

The fight back there apparently was precisely what he wanted. And that confirmed Smitty’s hunch of earlier in the day:

Somehow, Ritter was deliberately sowing hate and discord in the vital automotive industry, so that later he could step in and make peace and be hailed as a great man for stopping the trouble. Trouble he himself had started.

Ritter stepped into a town car, probably Weyland’s, which had been turned over to the politician along with Weyland’s home for his use while in Detroit. Josh had a car out along the curb, but a glance at the town car decided him against using that.

The rear bumper of the town car was too inviting. He got on it, dusky face blending with the night so that only teeth—when he grinned—and white eyeballs revealed his presence.

And he was not grinning, now.

The car started toward open country, and Josh took out the transmitter of his tiny radio with his right hand, while he clung to the bumper with his left.

The Avenger’s aides all knew Morse code. When they were in a position where it would have been dangerous to talk aloud, as it might have been for Josh now, they transmitted messages to each other by tapping on the transmitter instead of talking into it.

Josh tapped till he got Smitty’s attention.

“Yes?” the giant said.

“I’m on the tail of Ritter’s town car,” Josh tapped. “Going west on Route 39. Seems odd Ritter is heading that way. May be a rendezvous. Better come after us.”

Smitty, who could talk, cursed a little because, he told Josh, he was ready for bed. But he ended, of course, by saying he’d take the trail at once.

Josh put away the radio and clung to the bumper while the town car rolled sleekly over the highway. Several people in other cars saw the Negro hanging to the rear and turned to look. Josh didn’t like that because it might warn the man in the town car; but there was nothing Josh could do about it.

Finally, the car turned off the highway, down a small road. Josh promptly dropped his hat at the turn, hoping fervently that there wouldn’t be more turn-offs. He only had one hat.

The town car went about four miles, slowly, as if ahead of time for some appointment and killing minutes to come out right. Josh was beginning to get ridged like a washboard from the sharp bumper edge; this back road was rough.

He was glad when the car stopped. Glad for about twenty seconds.

In that time, he dropped from the bumper and scuttled for the side of the road where underbrush grew heavily. And there he felt as if an octopus had attacked him.

The octopus resolved itself into the clinging arms of about four men. One of them growled:

“Uh-huh! Company!”

Then Josh got loose.

The gangling, bony Negro didn’t look very strong, but appearances were deceptive. Josh could fight like a panther when he had the chance. And he had the chance now, for about three minutes!

His fist lashed out in the direction of the voice, and knuckles smacked home against cartilage and flesh. He swung at another head, showing only as a blotch against the night sky. The shock to his hand told of another first-rate sock.

Something hit him on the head, then, and he went to his knees. But he was still far from out. He grabbed legs, pulled them and tumbled a third man. He got this one most enthusiastically in the midriff as he was struggling to get up.

The man let out an ooof which was sweet music to Josh, but it was the last sweet music he was to hear for a while, because then he heard the smooth purr of a motor, not on the adjacent road, but, strangely, in the sky. And after that, a gun barrel or something got him on the skull and he lay without movement.

He recovered soon enough to feel himself being lifted high and caught from above. He knew vaguely that he had been hoisted in through a sort of trapdoor, and then he felt movement.

It was the strangest movement! It was without sound, without effort, as if he were on a raft floating downstream.

In a minute he got it.

This was an airship, a small blimp, possessing engines so beautifully muffled that they could be heard only a short distance. It was now not using even them. It was drifting slowly away from the road, and Ritter’s car, with the wind.

Josh opened his eyes. For a moment he saw nothing at all. Then he dimly perceived that he was on the floor of a small cabin. Three men were in the cabin with him. The three at the moment were staring downward.

“Another car coming down that road,” said one of the three in a low tone.

“So what?” said another. “It’s a public highway.”

“Not very public,” protested the first. “We picked it because not three cars a night usually use it. This could be one of those three, but I don’t like it.”

“Aw, dry up! Nobody can see us a couple hundred feet up on a starless night without lights—”

“Hey, our friend is awake,” said the third suddenly.

One of the men kicked Josh.

“So you’re out of it, huh? Thought I slugged you harder than that. Who are you, black boy?”

Josh said nothing. The kick was repeated.

“Talk! Who are you? Who’re you working for? Where do you fit in this?”

A lie would be quite justified, under the circumstances, but Josh couldn’t think of any.

“Open up, or I’ll—”

Josh opened up, all right. He let out a howl that from the ground must have sounded like the cry of some weird sort of night bird.

So they hit him on the head again, and the next time he opened his eyes it was over a gag that almost kept him from breathing, let alone making a noise.

They tried no more to get him to talk. Josh had a hunch that this was ominous. The hunch was confirmed a minute later.

“There’s the lake,” said one of the three. “We’re drifting right toward it. We’ll float along till we get a couple miles out, then heave this guy over the side and start our motors.”

“Yeah,” began another. Then, voice sharp, he said: “Hey! Ain’t we losing altitude?”

“Don’t know why we would,” said the first. He stared downward for a minute; stared hard because it was too dark to see anything well. Then an oath crackled from his lips.

“We are down! Heave out some of the sand.”

“Wouldn’t that be a smart thing to do,” jeered the third man. “Heave out some sand and keep on drifting out over the lake. So ten miles out we ain’t got any more sand to heave, and we sink down into the drink. You sap, lower away and we’ll have a look at the bag before we go farther.”

Josh couldn’t see the lake because he was lying on the floor, but he could smell the expanse of water, and he uttered some heartfelt sighs of relief when the blimp began nosing downward. It was a short reprieve anyway.

It seemed it was to be a long one.

The cabin bumped, dragged, and the blimp hauled on the grappling hook. Two of the three men got out, leaving the third to keep an eye on Josh.

The two men seemed to have stepped into a basketful of snakes, the way they thrashed around.

Josh heard yells and muffled noises.

“Who is he? Where’d he jump from?”

“Whadda you care? Ouch! Grab that—”

There were no more coherent words, just a lot of grunts and then two blows in quick succession. Josh blinked at the heavy smacking sound of those blows. He would have thought that only one man on earth could hit that hard. But it was impossible for that man to turn up here, of course.

The precise nature of what was happening outside, however, was of less importance to Josh than the fact that something was happening. It gave him a chance to do something about the fellow left to guard him, while that person’s attention was distracted.

The man was leaning out the cabin window when Josh got him.

The gangling Negro’s hands had been bound together when he had been gagged. But the job had been hasty, and no one had bothered to tie his arms to his sides at the same time.

Josh got a double handful of the slack in the seat of the man’s pants with his two bound hands. He heaved up hard.

The man yelled, and pitched forward out of the cabin on his face. There was one more resounding blow outside, then the sound of panting as loud and heavy as that of a locomotive that has stopped to take on water.

When Josh had gotten out of the window, after loosening his bonds, a man’s body blocked out the night sky to his right. Only one body that Josh knew anything about was that big.

“Smitty! What— How’d you get here?”

“Just . . . puff . . . a minute . . . puff, puff,” gasped Smitty. “I . . . uh—”

He drew great breaths into his bellowlike lungs for a couple of minutes, and then was in better shape. Meanwhile, the three men who had been downed by the big fellow’s blows, lay right where they had fallen. When Smitty hit ’em, they stayed hit.

The giant had his wind back and was shaking his head reproachfully at Josh.

“Couldn’t you have gotten tossed into something a little easier to follow than a blimp?” he demanded. “Phew! Try following one, drifting with an eight-or nine-mile wind, straight across country, over fences and up and down hills. I got in about four miles on somebody’s bicycle I commandeered from in front of a farm house, when the bag drifted along a road. But the rest was on foot.”

Josh said just one word.

“Thanks.”

They didn’t make much fuss about saving each other’s lives, these members of The Avenger’s indomitable band. In their perilous business, somebody was always getting into deadly danger and needing a helping hand.

Josh was curious, though.

“How’d you do it?” he demanded. “Bring the blimp down, I mean. Or did it just happen?”

“Mac would explode over that,” chuckled Smitty. “Saying it ‘just happened,’ I mean. Mac’s responsible. I had one of his acid bullets in a compressed-air gun in the car. I got out, after turning where you dropped your hat, just as the blimp was taking off, and I had a chance to send that bullet at the bag. It took all this time for the acid to eat a big enough hole.”

“Ritter?” said Josh.

“I couldn’t follow his town car and the blimp, too; so I went after the blimp, because you were in it. There’s one thing, though. We know Ritter’s up to his ears in this business—whatever it is. He either got some message from these three in the blimp or gave them one. Then he hit back for town.”

“It begins to clear up a little,” said Josh thoughtfully. “We can make some close guesses. Morel invented some kind of drug up in his Maine laboratory that makes creatures fight. Men, too. Ritter got hold of it and of Morel. Now Ritter is using that serum—kind of a hate serum you’d call it—to make trouble which he later can smooth down.”

“Looks like it,” nodded Smitty.

“The blimp tells how Morel was taken from his Maine place, too. It just drifted over the clearing, with no noise; then men went down a rope ladder, knocked Morel cold and hauled him back up.”

Smitty didn’t say anything to that. He had known it before. He had guessed, when he and Lila were at the Maine place, that exit and entrance must have been by air. That was why he had asked for the thermocouple. And the thermocouple had revealed the heat presence of motors nearby. The motors couldn’t have been plane motors or car motors; hence there must be a silent, lighter-than-air ship around.

There was a road not far away. Smitty picked up two of the unconscious men, Josh took the other, and they went to the road.

“We’ll turn these guys over to the local police,” said Smitty. “Then we’ll trace that blimp if we can.”

CHAPTER X

Strange Call

The Avenger was practically living in his laboratory these days, and only taking a few hours sleep now and then when even his steel frame was taxed beyond endurance.

Morel was a great scientist. And it had taken him a year and a half to produce finally the red liquid with which he had injected the guinea pigs just before he was taken from Maine. If he was taken and had not gone off of his own volition.

It was a commentary on The Avenger’s vast ability that he now had a little vial full of red liquid, like Morel’s, which he had managed to synthesize from scratch in only a couple of days. One of his innumerable tests with the blood of the mad pigeons had finally put him on the track.

He had duplicated the serum. Which, he figured, was about two fifths of the job he had cut out for himself.

There was a soft buzz as Nellie, in the top-floor room, called on the laboratory phone. Dick picked up the instrument.

“Yes?”

“Smitty talking, chief,” came the giant’s voice.

“Yes, Smitty. Where are you? What has happened?”

Smitty told briefly what had happened.

“Josh and I are morally sure, now, that Ritter is in this. He’s the head man. But there’s no proof of anything, yet. In the meantime, we’ve been buzzing around that blimp. We got a sample of dirt from the grappling hook, and a government soil-conservation man was able to tell us the approximate Michigan section it came from. We went around that spot till we found an old duffer in a village who swore he’d seen a balloon or something a couple of times at night, near there. Village called Knightstown. We’re here now, trying to find the hangar the blimp was kept in, if possible.”

“Good work,” said Dick, voice even and calm. “Keep in touch with me. Things are moving faster, I believe.”

He didn’t bother to explain, and Smitty knew better than to ask for explanations.

“O K,” said the big fellow. He hung up. And then Nellie’s voice came to Benson.

“Another call came in while you were talking to Smitty,” Nellie said. “I’m holding it on another wire. It’s for Lila Morel. Do you want to hear it?”

Dick hesitated. Every phone call into the headquarters was recorded. He could hear any conversation later. But he thought he’d better listen to actual voices; sometimes there were slight overtones which a recording missed.

“Yes,” he said. “Is Lila ready now?”

“She’s ready.”

“Then go ahead.”

So the call from outside sounded on the phone in the lab as well as on one of the battery of phones in the big room.

“Kinnisten, Maine, calling,” came the long-distance operator’s voice. “A call for Miss Lila Morel. Person to person.”

“This is Lila Morel,” came Lila’s voice over the phone.

“Go ahead, please,” said the operator.

A man’s voice sounded. “Hello. Lila?”

“Yes? Oh, Dad! It’s you! We were all so worried. What happened to you? Where are—”

“This is Dad, Lila,” came the man’s voice. “I’m at the Maine place. I don’t know just how long I’ll be here. I have to leave for the West. I can’t explain now.”

“Dad, what’s it all about?” pleaded Lila. “You—”

“I called to tell you I’m safe and well,” said Morel. “And to tell you not to try to find me.”

“But, Dad, I must see you—”

The voice went on as if she hadn’t spoken.

“I’m all right, but very busy. Just stop trying to find me, and I’ll see you soon. Good-by, Lila.”

“Dad—wait—”

But the line was dead. The scientist had hung up.

Dick Benson replaced his phone slowly on its cradle. His pale, infallible eyes held the icy glitter that was theirs when The Avenger was thinking out something that could not quite be explained at the moment, but which struck the man of genius as important.

There was something about that phone call; something peculiar.

He couldn’t place it; so he went back to his test tubes.

In the Michigan village of Knightstown, Smitty and Josh set out to find the place where that blimp had been kept hidden.

“You’d think it would be easy,” said Josh. “A blimp’s no atom. It’s as big as all outdoors. It would take a tremendous barn, or some such building, to hold one.”

Smitty nodded, and they started inquiring around. They had to seem not to be inquiring about anything in particular, however, because the headquarters of the acid-ruined blimp might also be the headquarters of a large gang.

It was about noon, and they were hungry; so they started with the biggest lunchroom in town.

Knightstown only had two lunchrooms, so the biggest was no Waldorf. It was a twenty-foot square room next to the town poolroom, with a few tables and a counter in it. Three or four men were at the counter when Smitty and Josh strode in.

“Hamburgers,” said Smitty.

A sad-looking man in a soiled apron took the order. He looked speculatively at Smitty’s vast size.

“How many?” the man said.

“How many would you say?” shrugged Smitty.

The man took in Smitty’s bulk again.

“I’d say about ten for you and two for your friend.”

“We’ll start with that,” said Smitty.

“Hey!” Josh said, injured at the difference in numbers.

Then both shut up as a few words from one of the men at the counter caught their ears. They seemed to have drawn something. It looked as if their luck was in.

“—bricks from that old car barn,” the man was saying angrily. “We used to get bricks there. Now, they chase us off the place.”

“Why don’t you try buyin’ bricks,” laughed one of the others.

“Bricks’re expensive. And there’s a great, big, falling-down building with all the brick you need, and nobody to stop you taking some. Anyway, there didn’t use to be. Now, some watchman or somebody is out there. He pulled a gun on me when I went around last week!”

The talk veered, since none of the men save the one talking seemed interested in bricks. Smitty looked at Josh, and then grinned at the counter man as he bit into his fourth hamburger.

“Car barn?” he said. “You still got streetcars around here?”

“Not for thirty years,” said the man behind the counter sadly. All his words, looks and actions were sad. The two couldn’t figure why, unless he’d been born that way. “We used to have interurban service all through these parts. Then they took the rails up and sold the cars, long before the cities began trading streetcars for buses.”

“Is the car barn in town?” said Smitty, making his voice sound disinterested.

“Nope. Out in open country. Along Sheep’s Nose River. Middle of no place.”

Smitty looked mildly surprised. The man said:

“Knightstown didn’t have no brains, forty years back. The interurban service wanted to put a car barn and power plant here because it’s a halfway point. The town council said, ‘No, sir! Not and spoil their beautiful town!’ So the car company put the buildings out on the river, miles away from anything. The power plant’s all dismantled and half falling down. The car barn’ll be the same way soon, the way everybody helps themselves to bricks when they need ’em.”

Smitty let the matter drop. But only till he and Josh were outside the lunchroom.

“That’s our baby,” said Josh.

Smitty nodded and they went to their car.

A car barn, unexpectedly out in the middle of no place because of an ancient feud with village elders! Car barns are big. Plenty big enough for a small blimp.

It took them well over an hour to find it because they didn’t want to ask any more questions of anybody, and because they went the wrong way along the river on their first attempt.

The car barn, it seemed, was in the opposite direction.

It was well along in the afternoon when Smitty stopped the car under a tree.

They had been following, not a regular road, but the old grass-grown twin roadbed where ties and rails had once been. The roadbed went on ahead of them, to end at the river—and something else.

“There she is,” said Smitty.

The huge old red-brick structure was on a leveled area among small hills along the river. Behind it were only bits of another building that had been a power house. The whole area was in a bay of thick woods.

It was a swell place in which to hide that almost impossible creation to be hidden—a blimp. And indications told that this was where it had been hidden, all right.

The building had a flatly arched roof. Wide doors had covered the front, but these had long since been ripped off by looters. In addition, now, as if it had just happened to fall at some time in the past, the section between the peak of the roof and top of the vast door sills had fallen in, leaving the whole end open. Even this building could barely take a small blimp since there was no room for door sills.

“So?” said Josh.

Smitty scratched his jaw. It was clear sunlight, broad daylight. No one could get to the car barn without being seen, if there was anyone inside to see. But the giant felt disinclined to wait through the long hours till night.

“Let’s just go right up to it,” he said. “Pick up any stray pieces of iron you see around. If anyone’s in there, he’ll think we’re gathering scrap to sell.”

It sounded pretty thin to Josh, but he didn’t feel like waiting, either. They walked openly forward; Josh saw an old piece of car spring and picked it up. Smitty, a few paces farther along, saw an iron rod and stooped for it. There wasn’t much around. For years kids must have come here for junk to sell in order to make a few cents for candy bars.

They got quite near. They could see through the vast open front of the building. It was cave-dark in there but not too dark for Smitty, finally, to see a man’s figure flit from shadow to shadow, within.

“I’ll be an ant’s grandmother!” he breathed.

“What’s the matter?” said Josh.

“That guy in there. That was Morel!”

“What?”

“I’m dead sure of it. I saw him in Maine, with Lila. She swore it wasn’t her father, but in such a way that I knew it was. And here he is again—”

A pretty thin subterfuge—to pretend they were a couple of junkmen out looking for scrap iron. They found out how thin before Smitty could finish his sentence.

There was a rattle of sound like that of a giant typewriter, and grass and bushes suddenly were sheared to their right! Another rattle, and the same thing happened to their left.

“Next time,” came a voice from near the open front of the building, “we’ll shoot straight ahead, unless you guys stick your hands up high and keep ’em there.”

Then they saw it, hugging the right-hand corner of the opening—the muzzle of a machine gun! And in a moment a dozen grinning men had come from left and right, where they had been out of sight of Josh and Smitty.

The men came toward the two, with a lane between them down which the machine gun could fire, if necessary. They got to the sides and behind the two aides of The Avenger.

One of them was the man who had mentioned the car barn at the lunch counter. Smitty and Josh had been supposed to hear that!

“Walk into the joint, you two,” the man jeered.

Smitty and Josh, by common consent, stayed where they were.

“Jack!” the man yelled to the gunner.

They saw his fingers move a little; so Smitty and Josh started forward.

“What are you going to do to us?” stalled Josh.

“You’ll find out,” said the man who had roped them in so neatly at the lunch counter.

But another of the men was more talkative.

“There are pits where they used to work under the old cars, see? Like grease pits in a garage. We’ll herd you guys into one of them, and pouff! No more guys.”

Josh and Smitty didn’t know just what the pouff meant. But they could guess at the result. The result would be death!

“Ritter,” said Smitty, “wouldn’t like that.”

“Oh, yeah?” jeered the man. “Ritter said we were to knock off you two, and some others he described, wherever we caught up with you. And here you’re nice enough to walk right into our mitts while we’re waiting for the blimp to come back.”

Smitty and Josh kept from looking at each other. The gang still didn’t know the blimp had been brought down and their pals jailed.

“So Morel is in on this, too,” said Smitty. “We got the word that he was kidnaped, but it doesn’t look so much like that, now.”

The man started to say something, then swore violently and shut up. He had realized that the big fellow was just trying to pump him for information.

The two prisoners were inside the big doorway, now. They could see one of the long, narrow pits the man had mentioned. Tracks had once run along the sides of the pit, where a car could be run so that mechanics could get at motors and axles from beneath.

The tracks had long since been ripped up. But one, at least, had not been carried away. The rusting length of rail lay athwart the end of the pit, down where the stairs into its depths were.

The machine gunner was turning his weapon to keep Smitty and Josh covered as they moved. What was going to happen to them when they had gone down the five steps to the bottom of the gravelike pit? What did that pouff mean?

Smitty decided not to wait to find out.

“You want us to get down in that thing?” he said, rebelliously.

“That’s right, big boy,” said the machine gunner.

His pals were bunched around him in a knot. All except Morel. Smitty had had no second glance of the inventor, missing for so long. It began to look as if the scientist had slipped out the back of the building as the two were marched in the front.

“Go on! Down!” snapped the machine gunner.

Smitty stooped, and his hands gripped the length of car rail as if to lift it aside from the stairs. But he didn’t do that.

He snapped erect with the rail in his vast hands and plunged like a human tank toward the machine gunner and the knot of men!

Few men can lift a length of rail, even light-weight material for streetcars. Smitty not only lifted it; he ran with it—and made time, too. He must have been an awesome spectacle, indeed, as he plunged for the gang. As he came, he yelled at the top of his lungs. And right after him, zigzagging to confuse aim, raced Josh.

“Crack down on him, you dope!” screamed one of the men.

The palsied machine gunner opened up! But it was too late. There were only a few yards between the men and the pit. They’d kept at close range to be sure and hit the two if they rebelled. Now, Smitty had covered this too-short distance in half a dozen bounds, with the iron rail held horizontally before him in his two vast paws.

Some of the slugs hit. And they hurt. But they did not penetrate. The Avenger and each of his aides always wore bulletproof garments of a substance called celluglass, which Benson had invented. It was as strong as steel and much lighter.

These garments saved Josh and Smitty, though they left bruises that would remain for many a day.

Then the bar smashed against the men, with all the force of its own weight and of Smitty’s three hundred racing pounds behind it.

Several of the gang had automatics out. These dropped as the men were mashed against the brick wall behind them. The machine gunner doubled over the bar and dropped his weapon—

“Josh!” roared Smitty.

But there was no need to call. Like a black streak, Josh was after the gun. He got it, leaped back a few paces, and leveled it. Then Smitty dropped the rail. The fact that a few toes were in the way was just dandy with him.

“Now,” he said pleasantly, “you guys can get into that pit, and my partner will hold you there with the gun while I go to Knightstown for a flock of deputies—”

There was an ear-shattering roar. Half the rear wall folded and began raining down its individual bricks. The great roof sagged.

Josh yelled and whirled around. Smitty glared toward the rear, too. Morel! It looked as if he hadn’t gone away, after all. He had exploded part of the building to rescue the gang.

Shots jerked the giant around again. Josh was just sending hasty slugs at the last of the gang, who was limping out the door and running to the right, where the corner hid him from sight.

The two leaped to the front. The men were in the woods, running in all directions. They’d thought they had cornered this giant and this black tiger, and they had been cornered themselves. They were having no more of them.

Smitty ran for the rear, where no more bricks were falling. There was no sign of the scientist. Morel had provided a distraction, during which the men had gotten away, and right afterward had fled himself.

“Hell!” said Smitty, looking at the empty bag they were now holding.

They went back to their car and Smitty got out his radio transmitter. If conditions were right, he could just get New York.

Conditions, it seemed, were right. A tiny voice came through the earphone. “Benson talking.”

“Chief,” said Smitty, “we found the hangar where that blimp was kept. And we had a bunch of prisoners and Morel, but they got away—”

“What?” came The Avenger’s voice, so electrically that Smitty jumped. It was rarely that that voice was raised. “You said Morel?”

“Yes. He was here, but he got away with the—” Smitty was talking to nothingness. There was no more from The Avenger; no sign of any kind. He had left the New York receiving end without a further word.

CHAPTER XI

Into the Trap

There was an excellent reason why The Avenger burst into action without even waiting for Smitty to finish his report.

The phone call from Morel, some hours ago!

The scientist had called from the Maine laboratory, it seemed, through the nearest exchange which was Kinnisten, Maine. He had said he was safe, but couldn’t take time to explain anything and would probably have to leave right away for the West.

Now, the very first thing that had happened after that call, of course, was Lila’s urgent request that she be allowed to rush up there and see if she could catch her father and have a few words with him before he left for another indefinite and unexplained period.

Benson had rather reluctantly agreed and had sent Mac along to guard her.

There seemed no reason not to do this, though Dick had been instinctively uneasy. After all, from the first, there had been no proof that Morel hadn’t left the clearing of his own free will.

Smitty’s work with the thermocouple showed how a kidnaping might have occurred from the air, where at first glance such would seem impossible.

But there was no proof of such a thing, and Morel’s call had cast further doubt upon it. And it had been Morel! Lila knew her father’s voice without a shadow of a doubt. So it had seemed all right. A man wouldn’t mislead his own daughter.

Now, Morel had been seen in Michigan, hundreds of miles from the spot from where he had ostensibly phoned. And many things had clicked into place in Benson’s brain.

The queer monotony of Morel’s voice over the phone! The way he had kept right on talking in spite of Lila’s questions and exclamations! Morel had answered none of those questions; had replied to none of her statements. The voice had just gone on.

Why? Because it wasn’t Morel! That phone call had been a recording of Morel’s voice, played in advance and run before a telephone in Maine when the owner of the voice was nowhere near there.

“Nellie!” The Avenger called, eyes like pale ice with cold flame behind them.

The elaborate scheme meant only one thing—a trap!

Their enemy had decided, for reasons of his own, that Morel’s daughter must know too much and must be killed. Morel had been drugged or tricked into making that phonograph record because the gang was shrewd enough to know that the girl’s first move, after hearing from her absent father, would be to hurry up and try to contact him. In which case she could be murdered at leisure.

“Nellie!”

“Yes, chief.”

The diminutive blonde appeared in the doorway. Her satin-smooth cheeks were pink, and in her blue eyes was the light of excitement.

“Mac and Lila Morel have left for Morel’s Maine laboratory, near Kinnisten,” said Dick.

“Yes, I know.”

“I find out now,” The Avenger went on, “that it is almost certainly a trap. They’ve been drawn up there by a false telephone call. Take the fastest plane and go after them.”

“And just bring them back?” said Nellie, looking disappointed.

“By no means!”

Dick Benson’s colorless eyes were something to scare the most hardened of crooks. A trap! Very well, Benson had a way with traps. Never avoid them, was his motto. Always walk right in, because in traps, you are apt to learn something you might otherwise have no opportunity to discover.

“Lila Morel and Mac will fall into the trap, as has been planned for them. Only—you will be Lila Morel.”

Nellie nodded complete comprehension.

“She’s quite a bit taller than I am, though,” she said.

“Take inch-and-a-half lifts and your highest-heeled shoes,” said Benson. “Put them on in the plane, don’t bother with anything, now. They may already be there. In that case—”

He didn’t have to finish. It is one thing to walk into a trap open-eyed. It is quite another thing to fall in unwarned.

And Mac and Lila were unwarned!

Nellie didn’t even stop to acknowledge orders. She was gone from there. It was a normal eight minutes fast driving to the river where, in an old loft building, some of The Avenger’s planes were secretly kept. She made it in five.

The fastest plane, Dick had said. That was a silver bullet with stubby wings and an impossibly big motor. An amphibian. It ripped up the water for a hundred yards, lifted, soared off.

“Mac, Nellie calling. Mac! Mac!”

She kept calling into the transmitter of her radio. And she kept hearing no answer.

“Mac. Come in. Nellie calling. Mac.”

She set the robot pilot and, while the plane shot north automatically guided and kept on an even keel, she put on a dark wig she had grabbed from the make-up kit and which somewhat resembled Lila’s hair in hue. She also put on a pair of shoes with ridiculously high heels and, in addition, inserted the maxim shoe lifts she could handle.

When she was through, she had the sensation of wearing stilts. But she had trained herself to walk naturally in such circumstances.

“Mac. Nellie calling. Oh, Mac, thank Heaven, I got you in time!”

“In time for what?” came the Scot’s burring voice, tiny in the receiver.

“Mac, the chief has found out you and Lila are walking into a trap. Where are you now?”

“Halfway from Kinnisten to Morel’s laboratory, on foot, goin’ through the thickest woods ye everrr saw.”

“Go back to Kinnisten. I’ll meet you there. I’ll be there before you will, I think.”

“Wait a minute!” growled Mac’s voice. “Back to Kinnisten is six miles. Through this underbrush, that’s no little hike to take just for the fun of it. Oh, all right! There’s an old mill half a mile north of the town with a wheatfield next to it. Ye can use it for landin’.”

Nellie was there first, all right. But about ten minutes after she had set the plane down with an expertness that would have commanded the respect of an army flier, Mac and Lila came.

Lila was pale and trembling.

“A trap!” she said, when she saw Nellie. “You’re sure? Then—that means Dad is in trouble. Are we going back to New York?”

“No,” said Nellie. “We’re going to walk into the trap.”

Lila started to say something. Nellie said swiftly:

“Your dress. Take it off, please.”

“I don’t quite understand—”

“If somebody did all this to get you up to the lab,” Nellie said impatiently, “they probably had a man posted near Bleek Street to see if you actually started. That man would describe the clothes you wore in his report to the rest. So I’ll change dresses with you, also hats.”

Mac turned his back and looked glumly at the stream babbling past the old mill building while the transfer took place.

Nellie had a thought as she moved around. She had said “they probably had a man posted at Bleek Street” to tip off the gang as to what Lila wore. There was another possibility. Packer, the perfect servant with the kindly smile. He could have given that information, too. But that, she decided as she finished the change of clothes, was ridiculous.

The fit wasn’t very good. Nellie’s blue dress on Lila ended appreciably above Lila’s attractive knees. And Lila’s dress on Nellie was too long in spite of the extra high heels and the shoe lifts. Nellie took it up at the shoulders and put on Lila’s hat. In the night, she could pass for Morel’s daughter, all right.

“Wait here,” Nellie told Lila. “Don’t move out of the building. And if anybody comes around—anybody at all—hide instantly.”

Then she was gone, with Mac’s bony height towering over her, through the woods in the direction of that laboratory in which something monstrous had been hatched. A plot which might affect the entire history of the United States if The Avenger and his band failed in their quest.

The two went the miles afoot to the lab a lot more quickly than Lila and Mac had been going.

Nellie was a trained woodsman with muscles, under her dainty skin, like silver springs. She had gone on many an archaeological expedition in jungles with her father, dead now; murdered by crooks who wanted to get from him the secret location of ancient gold. So she made even Mac puff a little to keep up as she slid through night and forest.

With the laboratory less than half a mile ahead of them, Mac said:

“Did Muster Benson have any idea of what this trap would be like?”

Nellie shook her head, so different from its normal blondness because of the dark wig.

“There was no clue to that. He only knew there was a trap. We’ll just have to keep our eyes open, that’s all.”

Then they were in sight of the clearing, through the trees in the moonlight. They began creeping forward like Indians, taking advantage of every bush and tree for cover.

Because the woods’ growth went right up to the gate, they could be morally sure that if anyone were hiding in the building, they couldn’t have seen them.

Lila had told Mac how to open the gate. There was a little lever at ground level next to the portal, hidden in grass and leaves. You pulled that up, then pushed it down again in the opposite direction. That shut off the current in the fence wire and released a massive set of bolts which secured the gate.

Mac’s hand went toward the little lever. Then he looked thoughtfully at Nellie, who looked thoughtfully back. And both shook their heads.

There was no need for words as to what to do next. They started looking through the woods till they had found three young, straight trees, taller than the fence. Then Mac took an odd little contrivance from his vest pocket.

It looked like an atomizer. But in the glass receptacle instead of liquid, were several grayish pellets. And the bulb was not of rubber, but of metal.

Mac moistened the pellets, released some of the contents of the bulb—almost pure oxygen—and had a tiny acetylene flame capable of eating through inch steel.

It ate through the slim trees in a matter of seconds.

Mac trimmed the poles, bound them together at the top and had a slim tripod a foot or so higher than the fence. He climbed it, with Nellie steadying the base, leaped, and was in the clearing.

He went to the gate. And their precaution against lifting that lever was found to be justified.

There was a charge of explosive wired to the lever that would have blown Mac and Nellie sky-high if they had disturbed it.

Mac disconnected the deadly little bundle, and Nellie then opened the gate and came in.

The clearing held nothing suspicious. That could be seen, in the moonlight, at a glance. So the two went on to the laboratory building.

“You stand at the left of the door,” said Mac. “Ye pass your hand across in front of a certain spot, four times, and the door opens.”

“Photoelectric cell, of course,” nodded Nellie.

And again the two looked at each other.

“A cell could set off explosive, too,” said Mac.

They went to the first window, and Mac applied the tiny but terrifically hot torch to the steel casement and the latch inside. The contents of the torch ran out before the job was quite done; but a hard push broke the seared, fused metal, and they opened the window.

All the burglar alarm bells in the world seemed to be wired to that window and to sound off when the window was opened.

“Gracious, what a din!” said Nellie.

She flashed her small light around, found the light switch and clicked it. Only after she had done it did she stop to think that this, too, could have been a death move. But it wasn’t. So she hunted for the switch that controlled the bells, turned it off from a distance with a window pole, and sighed with relief when the racket subsided.

“Well,” she said, “if anybody’s lurking around they will certainly know now that somebody has come in! What’s next, Mac?”

“We’ll have a look at the door-openin’ mechanism,” said the Scot.

There was the little bundle of explosive, hooked up to the cell so that if they had opened the door they would have ended up in their graves.

Mac gingerly set the bundle down on the floor and opened the door, which could be opened from the inside on a regular latch.

“We’ll give the lab the once-over,” he started to say.

From the open door behind them came a deep Yankee drawl.

“Put your hands up, you two!”

Mac whirled to leap. But he didn’t. Half a dozen men, with deputy written all over them, stood beyond the doorway in the clearing. At their head was the man who had spoken, the sheriff, according to his badge.

Mac had been ready to depend on his bulletproof covering, but he saw at a glance that he couldn’t. The sheriff had a shotgun in his hands, and it was pointed at Mac’s head.

“Nice of you to leave the gate and door open.” the sheriff drawled. He was lanky and had a lantern-jawed face and a voice like a guitar. But Mac knew of no enemy more dangerous than a drawling but quickmoving country sheriff on a rampage.

So he kept his hands up. And so did Nellie.

They kept them raised a little all the way back to the Kinnisten jail, through the dark woods where normally they’d have tried for a break. They didn’t let them hang naturally to their sides till the cell door had banged on each of them.

CHAPTER XII

The Mob

The sheriff still had two deputies with him in the back room of the local jail, though Nellie and Mac were now carefully handcuffed. He was taking no chances with his two prisoners. And when he began to question them, the reason for his care, and the grimness of his lean face, became apparent.

“What did you two do with the body?” he began bluntly.

“Body?” said Nellie.

“Body!” said Mac.

“The body of Morel,” said the sheriff.

There was a surprised silence on the part of the two prisoners.

“Look,” said Mac, “there’s been some mistake. You don’t want to hold us. We—”

“I know,” said the sheriff, “you’re important people. We can’t do this to you.”

“I wouldn’t claim too much importance for myself,” said Mac. “But the mon we work for is important. Ye’ll have heard of him. Richard Benson. They call him The Avenger.”

The sheriff spat accurately into a can in the corner.

“You pick ’em good while you’re at it,” he said. “The Avenger, huh! And you’re connected with him! That’s a hot one.”

“We can prove—”

“You murdered Morel,” said the sheriff. “He has been gone for days from the lab. We were gettin’ uneasy about it; he’s the most distinguished citizen in these parts. And then we got the tip that he was murdered and that his murderers would come back tonight. The tip came from a guy who seems to be very close to Morel.”

“Tip,” snapped Mac, looking suddenly at Nellie, “from a guy close to Morel?”

But Nellie was staring at the sheriff, whose attention had suddenly become centered on her head. The sheriff’s hand whipped out, and when it came back it had the dark wig in it. Nellie was revealed in her natural, dark-gold blondness.

“Disguise, huh!” snapped the sheriff. “And you sneak into Morel’s lab like a couple of burglars, over the fence and through a window—”

“We did that because we suspected a trap had been set for us,” explained Nellie. “It had been, too. There was a charge of explosive wired to the gate mechanism and another to the building door—”

“Stop stalling,” said the sheriff. “You killed Morel. We know that. If you confess, things might go a little easier for you. Well?”

The absurd grilling—absurd to Nellie and Mac, at least—went on for an hour. Then they were returned to their cells, each with a pair of nickel-steel bracelets on.

The cells were adjoining—there were only four cells in the place—so they could talk if they each stood close to the cell door.

“This is it!” Nellie said suddenly.

“This is what?” snapped Mac, sore at the crazy twist that had thrown them into the local jail.

“The trap,” said Nellie.

“Huh?”

“This arrest—this jail. This is the trap.”

Mac still didn’t get her and said so.

“The explosive at gate and door were all very well,” Nellie said. “If we got killed by either of them, fine. Lila Morel and one of The Avenger’s aides were out of the way. That’s the way the gang figured it. But if we escaped the explosive, then this was the real trap. This arrest for the murder of Morel.”

“That doesn’t make sense. There’s nothin’ to worry about here.”

“I wonder,” said Nellie.

“But look! There isn’t a chance of proving we’re murderers. We’ll be out of here by morning, with Muster Benson’s help. The worst that can happen is a night in a cell.”

Nellie was shaking her blond head, though Mac couldn’t see that; he could only hear her.

“This is the trap, I tell you,” she repeated. “I’ve got a hunch on it.”

The sheriff and a deputy came in, then.

The four cells were on one side, and taking up the other half of the front of the building was the sheriff’s office, a desk and chair in otherwise vacant space.

“You take over for the night, Lem,” said the sheriff. “This jail ain’t as modern as some. These two are slick customers and might just think of a way out. So you’ll stand guard in here till morning. Here’re the keys.”

“O K,” said the deputy, a burly youth with a grin.

The sheriff went out; the deputy grinned at his two prisoners and sat down in the chair.

There was silence. The deputy looked sleepy and closed his eyes for a minute. It was getting on toward midnight. And then it happened!

It didn’t seem like much at first.

A rat nosed in from somewhere in the rear, and scuttled toward the deputy’s chair. The first thing Mac and Nellie noticed, looking through the bars of their doors, was that the rat was singularly fearless. It ran right up to the chair.

Then they both held their breaths as the rodent circled the chair once.

“Ouch!” yelled the deputy, opening his eyes in a hurry. “What the hell—”

He jumped to his feet. The rat’s teeth had viciously slashed at his ankle.

The deputy roared with anger and pain and snapped out his gun. The youngster was a good shot. The revolver lanced flame, and the rat became a kind of fringe of red flesh.

But then two more rats scuttled in, and then a dozen, and then—

“Mac!”

There were, seemingly, hundreds of rats. They swarmed up the now horrified deputy’s body and seeped into the cells between the bars.

The deputy was yelling and shooting. And Mac and Nellie were kicking frantically at the crazed rodents. They’d had the presence of mind to leap to the windows, which were set high in the walls, and jump up and catch the bars.

They hung there with their feet drawn up a yard from the floor. But rats can climb a seemingly impossible steep wall; so they were kept busy kicking.

The deputy hadn’t thought to do any such thing. And now he couldn’t. He lunged blindly around the room, like a person whose clothes are in flames and hasn’t wit enough to lie down and roll.

And then the man was down, and it was frightful! Mac and Nellie shuddered as the squeaking, slashing mass waved over him.

This was something out of an inferno! An attack by rats! There were many such attacks on record, but always the rodents had been maddened by starvation into attacking humans.

And these rats weren’t starving. They were fat and healthy-looking.

Mac had finally gotten something out of an inner pocket. Fortunately for the sheriffs deputy, the sheriff hadn’t found the thing when he searched Mac.

It was a little glass gas bomb, about the size of a plum.

“Watch it, Nellie!” Mac yelled.

Then he threw the little bomb between the bars of the cell door and into the space beyond.

It plopped on the floor and a pale-greenish cloud spread instantly. And almost as instantly, the rats began dropping like flies sprayed with insecticide.

The gas was not a death-dealer. It produced deep unconsciousness. That is, it did to humans. Whether it would produce death to smaller animals, Mac didn’t know. He hoped it would.

The luckless deputy, a dreadful sight but at least still alive, lay in grateful unconsciousness. The gas had spread to the cells, now, and the rats in there were out of it, too.

Mac took another instrument from an inside pocket. It was a small clip with a kind of tiny sponge at the curve of it.

“Nellie!” said Mac, at the door, exhaling as he called so that he wouldn’t get any of the gas.

He managed to toss the clip so that it fell in front of her door. He saw her manacled hands reach out and pick it up. She’d be all right, with the clip over her nostrils. The spongelike mass was impregnated with a chemical which counteracted the gas.

Mac himself needed no clip. The lapel of his coat was impregnated with the same chemical.

Holding his head down so that he breathed through the lapel, Mac pressed close to the door. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. The rats had done one thing at least.

They had sent the deputy, in his blind gyrations, so close to the cells that, when he fell, he was within reach of Mac’s cell door.

Mac, by squeezing so hard against the bars that most of the hide was scraped from his shoulders and chin, could just get his fingertips under the man’s belt. Then it was short work to drag him closer, and almost as short to get the keys the sheriff had turned over to him. Keys to handcuffs as well as doors.

Mac had thought he heard something, while he was freeing Nellie and himself. The sound was a little like that of distant surf, a queer, growing roar.

The gas was out of the room, now, with windows thrown open. Mac could dispense with the coat lapel, and Nellie removed the nose clip.

“We’ve got to get a doctor for this poor fellow, right away,” said Nellie, looking at the deputy, still unconscious from the gas.

Mac nodded. Getting help gravely increased the risk of not completing their getaway. But it had to be done, of course.

“Voices!” exclaimed Nellie suddenly, listening hard.

So then Mac understood that curious, surflike roar. It was quite close, now.

Voices, of course! Many voices! Many people, roaring in dull fury and advancing on the jail.

“A mob!” said Mac. “What in the worrrld—”

He went to the window and looked out.

The road sign gave the population of Kinnisten as twenty-four hundred. It looked as if every one of the population was outside the jail. Then the Scot saw that the mob was mostly men, though a few women raved their inexplicable fury among them.

One thing all had in common. A fury, a very insanity of hatred seemed to possess them. More than one mouth had white flecks of foam on it as the mad crowd stormed toward the jail.

Now, individual shouts could be made out.

“Bring ’em out!”

“They killed Morel! We’ll kill them!”

“String ’em to the nearest tree!”

Nellie stared at Mac. “Mac—the rats, those people! They’ve been treated with some of the hate serum Morel invented!”

“Looks like it,” said Mac. “Maybe in the town water supply. Ye were right. This jail is the real trap. If we were missed by the rats, we were to get hung by the crazy mob outside.”

“Mac, what are we going to do!”

The Scot shook his head. “I ha’ no more gas pellets save a couple that produce death instead of unconsciousness. We can’t kill anyone in that crowd. They’re decent citizens, turned crazy by Morel’s drug. It’s not their fault.”

No, not their fault; but it would be Nellie and Mac’s death if the mob got their hands on the two!

There was a sudden battering at the door. The portal split clear down the center. They had a battering-ram or something outside.

“String ’em up, they murdered Morel! Sheriff said so.”

“Kill ’em! Kill—”

Incarnate hatred held that mob. Murderous hatred!

“So?” said Nellie evenly.

“I guess the trap has worrrked,” burred Mac, eyes steady, though his freckled face was pale.

CHAPTER XIII

Dollar War

“Wouldn’t it,” said Cole Wilson, “have been better if we had come up with Mac and Nellie instead of sending them on ahead?”

He and The Avenger were in the cabin of another of Benson’s planes, with Kinnisten, Maine, just over the skyline.

Dick shook his head, pale eyes fixed on the altimeter.

“You were out, and I couldn’t leave my laboratory for several more hours; so I sent Nellie alone. I wouldn’t have come up with you, now, but there have been no reports from them. I don’t care so much for that.”

“It was a dangerous thing to try—walking right into a trap,” sighed Cole.

Wilson was absolutely fearless, himself. Walking into a trap was precisely the sort of thing that appealed to his reckless nature. But, like so many fearless persons, he could always feel fear for others’ safety. The Avenger himself was like that.

“Some day,” said Dick evenly, pale eyes lambent and icy-clear, “all of us will have to die. Now or fifty years from now. Fifty years is a short span in the history of the human race.”

Cole nodded his comprehension. What the man with the colorless, deadly eyes meant was that no one could go on indefinitely cheating death as he and his helpers did in their crime battles. Some trap some day would close on one or all of them—and stay closed!

“I hope this isn’t the day for—” Cole began.

Then he stared ahead and downward.

“There are the lights of Kinnisten. And a red light, an uncertain light— One of the buildings is afire!”

Benson nosed the plane downward and, at the same time, shut off the twin motors. With only the shriek of the wind sounding, he planed toward the fire.

“It’s the jail,” he said crisply. “And there’s a yelling mob around it,” he added, a moment later.

“Nellie and Mac are supposed to be at Morel’s laboratory, miles from here,” Cole said uncertainly.

But The Avenger kept right on going down toward the blazing building. When there was trouble in a district, with his aides anywhere in the vicinity, the trouble was apt to be whirling right around the aides.

And a mob is always a murderous thing to be stopped.

The Avenger’s steely right hand went out to stop them; went toward the instrument panel where a small knob glistened among innumerable dials. The dials were standard for planes of this type. The knob was not. Only this one plane had that knob.

The Avenger pulled it out on a sliding rod and zoomed down straight for the milling people. Some looked up, saw the plane and shook fists at it in blind frenzy. The rest paid no attention at all. They cavorted like maniacs around the building.

Now, Cole and Benson could see two figures crowded back toward the rear of the roof, away from the fiercest flames. Nellie and Mac.

The plane roared over the crowd scarcely twenty feet above them. It rolled sharply, banked and came back.

Twice, this maneuver was repeated; and each time the plane zoomed over the crowd, from its leading wing edges came fine spray, released by the tug at the knob. It was like spraying a potato field for bugs. But this spray was a different thing, and the creatures on which it acted were not bugs.

“Chief!” gasped Cole, for once in his life trembling in every limb. “They’re not— Look!”

There was no more surflike roar of fury from the mob. There was no sound or movement at all. On the street around the blazing building, instead, were hundreds of prone bodies. It was as if the whole town had suddenly sighed, yawned and lay down in their tracks to sleep.

“They’re not . . . dead?” quavered Cole. “All those people— They’re not—”

“Quantity production of Mac’s sleeping gas,” said The Avenger. And his eyes had never been colder nor his voice more calm. The street rose as the plane nosed toward it. The wide main street would barely land a ship, with such wizardry as The Avenger’s at the controls. “They’ll be all right in a few hours.”

Cole saw Mac and Nellie drop in a hurry from the roof of the one-story building. Nellie had on the nose clip, and Mac was breathing through his lapel as they ran for the plane. Both had known, at sight, the meaning of Dick’s swoops with the plane and the way the people lay down.

“Whoosh!” said Mac, beating out sparks on his clothes when they were in the sealed cabin. “That was hotter’n I like, in more senses than one. Those people got some of Morel’s hate drug, Muster Benson. Will they be like that, full of hate and murrrder, permanently?”

“I think not,” said The Avenger. He gunned the motors. “My experiments lead me to believe that the effect of the drug is quite temporary when it is taken internally. Injected, the effect lasts much longer and is more serious. So many people must have had it given them internally, in food or water. It would be impossible to inject them all. I think they’ll be all right soon— What is it, Nellie?”

“There was a deputy in that blazing building,” Nellie said in a low, stricken tone. “We had no chance to get him out. Unconscious—in those flames—”

“When a mob of people are possessed by hate,” said Dick, with his voice as icily calm as ever and yet holding profound sadness in it, “that is the sort of thing that happens. There was nothing to be done about it. Where is Lila?”

Nellie pointed toward the old mill, too shaky to speak. By a miracle of piloting, The Avenger got the plane up off the avenue, then flew to the wheatfield where the ship Nellie had flown here was staked.

Cole took the controls of that plane, with Lila beside him, after they’d called her from her hiding place in the mill building. The two ships zoomed back to the city.

It was stalemate. The jaws of the death trap had clicked shut on emptiness. But Mac and Nellie had learned nothing from their hazardous experience.

Nellie and Mac were in the laboratory at Bleek Street with The Avenger.

Dick had a small vial of ruby-red liquid. The stuff glinted evilly in the light as if it had a life of its own. A satanic life.

“That’s a duplication of Morel’s drug?” asked blond Nellie.

“Yes,” nodded Dick, pale eyes fixed on the evil red fluid. “I was pretty sure of it before. Now, I am certain it is an exact duplication.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes had never been so coldly flaring. They were like chips of polar ice under moonlight.

Then the door opened and Smitty came in, bulking gigantic in the apparatus-crowded lab.

“Smitty!” said Nellie, with a soft shine in her eyes, which told for a fleeting instant her true feelings for the giant. But the soft shine was instantly wiped out and she looked covertly and self-consciously at Mac and at Dick.

“About time you showed up, Gargantua,” she said crisply. “We work around here. Remember?”

“Hey!” said Smitty indignantly. “If you think I haven’t been working you’re out of your head. Josh and I just got to town, chief. We trailed Ritter here from Detroit. Seems to me I haven’t slept for months. Josh is after Ritter, now. I left him at the airport and came to report.”

Dick Benson nodded.

“Catch some sleep, Smitty. There’s nothing more to be done for a while. Josh can take care of Ritter, wherever he may be, now.”

Ritter, at the moment, was in Wall Street. To be more specific, he was in the Palmer Building on Wall Street. This small building was the heart of the nation’s financial system. For it housed the biggest banking promoting and financing company in the world.

Ritter had gone into these portals, and Josh, following like a dark shadow half a block behind, was stuck. It was about as easy to get into the Palmer Building as it would be to stroll whistling into Fort Knox without a pass and a guard beside you.

Josh, however, didn’t give up too easily in anything. He looked thoughtfully at the building across the street. This building was a standard skyscraper with batteries of windows facing the Palmer Building. Josh entered it and walked up four flights of stairs.

The main corridor on each floor ended at the street side in a window. So Josh went to the window on the fourth floor and looked across the narrow canyon of a street.

There was no sign of Ritter in any of the offices he could look into. He went down a floor.

As soon as he looked across from this floor he knew he was looking at the important offices of the Palmer Building because the windows over there, on that floor, were opaque. You couldn’t see through their frosted expanses.

It was an unreasonably warm day, however; so most of the windows were open a few inches. Normally you couldn’t see in. But The Avenger’s crew went prepared for the abnormal.

Josh drew out a small telescope that was a marvel of its kind. The world’s finest lens maker had ground the lenses for this little cylinder. When he looked at the middle window again, through the narrow crack at the bottom, faces leaped at him.

They were faces every newspaper reader knew.

One was Ritter’s. The other three were the faces of the top three partners of the great financial house. And Josh had caught them at a moment when something of unusual import must have happened. For the three faces were twisted in an insanity of hate and anger.

The faces were brought so near by the little telescope that it seemed silly that Josh couldn’t hear the words spoken. But of course he couldn’t. He could just see lips writhe and twist in furious words tossed from partner to partner, but he could hear not one syllable.

Ritter simply sat there, in the big office, looking distressed. Now and then, he opened his mouth to speak, as though he would say something to calm the three down. But he didn’t get a chance to put in any words.

He read enough of one sentence to gather that it was a hot accusation of chiseling thrown by one partner at another. He gathered that the other made a furious offer to buy up the first man’s share of the business so that he could get out if he didn’t like the way it was ran. Then the third partner’s lips moved in words so menacing that Josh hated to believe he had read them right.

It seemed that this third one, the most powerful of the lot, was threatening to split the firm wide open and drive the other two out and to hell with them.

At this point, Ritter got up, said a few words resignedly and left. So Josh had to leave, too, almost holding his breath over that third partner’s speech.

He couldn’t have gotten that right! It wasn’t possible!

Civil war in this vast institution that controlled billions of dollars in money and physical assets? Why, that would crack the nation’s whole financial structure to bitter fragments! It would produce a panic on the Exchange; alter the economic structure of the land almost as drastically as real war itself could alter it.

Ritter came out the doorway of the Palmer Building, and Josh slid from the door across the street. Josh felt murder stir in his heart as he saw that a little smile was on the politician’s lips.

Ritter had caused that vital conflict in there. He had gone to the Palmer Building only to make trouble. And he had succeeded. Several million people would be unemployed, thousands of small companies would go broke, great hardship would be suffered, because of this gently smiling, handsome man who would be president.

The combination of a hellish drug and a ruthless monster of ambition was shaping into the worst scourge the United States had ever suffered from. For there was no doubt the drug had subtly been used back there. In no other way could the terrible quarrel between partners, each of whom in sane moments knew the awful results of such a fight, have been caused. The financial leaders were under the influence of Morel’s drug.

Josh trailed Ritter from the financial district, up along Manhattan Island, and out the Henry Hudson Parkway to Ritter’s estate on the river. And there, at a window, Josh got a brief glimpse of a face that set him urgently to contacting The Avenger on his belt radio.

“Ritter’s at his Hudson River place,” he reported. He told grimly of the happening at the Palmer Building. Then he finished, “I just saw Morel up here, Mr. Benson.”

“Morel? You’re sure?”

“Yes, quite sure,” said Josh. “I only got one look, but it was a clear one. It’s Morel. Looks as if he is in with this mob, no matter what his daughter may say about it. I guess he wasn’t kidnaped. I think he was approached with promises of great power by this bunch of political killers and accepted their offer.”

There was silence from The Avenger’s end. And Josh could understand it perfectly. He surmised what Dick Benson was thinking.

The most dangerous person on earth is a brilliant scientist turned criminal. And here they had one of these menaces in the shape of the eminent Arthur Morel!

CHAPTER XIV

The “Peacemaker”

The newspapers had been running first-page stories of the disastrous fight in the motor industry. The price war had spread till it was no longer confined between the Fox 8, and the Ainslee Speed-Flow. All the big companies had announced ruinous prices and policies.

But this morning the headlines were different—and joyful.

Most of the headlines read:

RITTER ENDS AUTOMOTIVE WAR

And the following accounts in all the papers were almost word for word:

Edwin C. Ritter, drawn and tired from a night spent with the heads of the motor industry, announced this morning that peace had finally been made. The new prices and policies will not go into effect. Prices had been announced which would shortly have disorganized the entire industry, but Ritter after an all-night session, persuaded the industrial heads to return to the old policies. When questioned, Ritter minimized his own part in the peace making; but it was evident that he, and he alone, was responsible.

There was a long eulogy. Ritter, the man of the hour! Single-handed, he had straightened out a tangle that the bankers, the president of the United States, and the heads of the labor unions had been unable to do anything with. The one man in America able to perform such a miracle!

It was repeated that this wonderman was a presidential candidate, and all the papers did more than hint that a man capable of performing such miracles was the type of man who would look well in the White House.

“They’ve got him practically elected right now,” said Smitty disgustedly. “Wonderman, huh. Well, I will say he’s smart. We’ve never bumped up against anything like this before. But then, we’ve never seen a politically ambitious man backed by anybody like Morel before.”

Nellie tried to signal him to shut up. But she was too late. Lila had been coming in the door, and she had heard the giant. Instantly she was before him, cheeks flaming.

“My father isn’t ‘in on’ anything he shouldn’t be!” she flared. “He is a scientist. He isn’t personally ambitious at all. He lives only for science. Packer could tell you that.”

It was too late to pretend he hadn’t said anything; so Smitty shrugged and went on.

“He seems to be living for more than science right now. He was with the gang at that car barn, and he helped them get away. He was in Ritter’s Hudson River place, night before last; Josh saw him there. And he went with Ritter to a Vermont farm this morning. Josh reported in a few minutes ago, just before noon.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Lila defiantly. “Or, if he is with Ritter, he is being held forcibly.”

The Avenger had been staring out the window, pale eyes lambent and coldly flaming. He spoke without turning.

“I think we’d better see about it, right now. Cole, go with Lila to the Vermont place. If Morel is with this gang, as Josh reported, try to get him away from them. Bring him back here.”

“Right,” said Cole confidently. Wilson was always confident, and he had a right to be. Seemingly built out of steel cable and leather, almost as fast in action as The Avenger himself, Cole usually came home with what he went out to get.

“You know where the Vermont farm is?” said Dick.

Cole nodded.

“I placed it on the country map after Josh phoned.”

“All right, I’ll go with you,” said Lila. “But we won’t find my father mixed up with that bunch of killers. I know that.”

However, in the plane, she let her shoulders droop a little and became less sure. She talked more openly to Cole. Perhaps because he was very good-looking and was the kind any girl would like to talk to.

“Do you suppose it’s possible Dad is criminally involved?” she faltered.

“I don’t know,” said Cole slowly. “Arthur Morel’s name is a great one. It doesn’t seem that he’d go in for anything like this. And yet, to be the unseen ruler behind a president of the United States—that’s a tremendous stake to play for.”

Cole had taken an autogyro plane. He was particularly adept with the flying windmills. He could land on a roof top with one and, by jumpstarting, almost take off from as small a space.

He landed just over the Vermont line in a field that looked hardly bigger than a handkerchief, with hills fringing it on every side. The farm to which Ritter and Morel had gone was less than a mile away.

Lila and he had made it to the edge of the place through woods and over hilly country.

There was an unpainted barn and a rough-looking house and a corn crib leaning at a crazy angle. It didn’t look like the kind of place where a man like Ritter would come. But then, that was probably why he had chosen the out-of-the-way spot.

Cole saw movement at one of the first-floor windows. He looked hard for a moment, then handed his little telescope to Lila. It was the kind of instrument Josh had used, very powerful for all its size.

Lila stared through it; then Cole saw a couple of tears slide down her cheeks. She just nodded; there was no need for words. The man she had seen at the window was her father.

“We’ll get him out,” said Cole gently. “You stay here while I—”

“I’m going with you.”

“There may be trouble,” Cole argued. “You can’t—”

“I’m going with you!”

In that tone of voice, Cole knew she either went with him or he’d have to forget he was a gentleman and knock her cold to keep her in the edge of the woods.

He looked a long time and saw no sign of men. Perhaps only Morel was there, now. Cole was a little worried that there was no trace of Josh, who was supposed to be around watching. His absence hinted that Ritter had gone away from here, too, with Josh on his trail.

“All right,” said Cole.

And he went openly across the field to the door with Lila. There was no other way to approach the house, no way to get there over cleared fields in daylight without being seen.

Cole knocked, the door was opened, and Ritter’s man, Knarlie, peered out.

“Oh!” said the man, shocked at any visitors, particularly these. He tried to shut the door. Cole shoved it open.

“Mr. Ritter isn’t here,” Knarlie babbled, trying to keep them out, trying to do his duty.

“We didn’t come to see Ritter,” said Cole. “We came to see Morel. This is his daughter, as I think you know.”

Knarlie nodded to Lila, but looked more troubled than ever.

“I don’t think you’d better try to see him,” he said. “I really would advise—”

“Where is he?” demanded Cole.

“He’s in there, isn’t he?” said Lila suddenly, pointing to a door behind which she had heard a sound.

Without waiting for an answer, she went to the door, the first on the right, and opened it.

“Dad!”

Cole leaped to her side. Together they stared through the doorway into a living room furnished better than the outside of the place would indicate and at a man sitting before a table on which were desk equipment.

“Oh, hello!” said Morel to his daughter.

He said it evenly, quietly, without seeming in the least surprised—or glad—to see Lila.

And Cole, for some reason he couldn’t quite spot, felt a shiver touch his spine.

“Dad, what are you doing here? Where have you been?”

“Why, I’m here as the guest of a friend,” said Morel, quietly.

Cole knew now why he felt that tendency to shiver. Morel’s eyes! They were flat and rather dull, with pupils not quite normal, as if he had taken dope. His hands were moving restlessly among the things on the desk top: a little blotter on a curved bit of wood like a rocking horse runner, a pair of library shears, a paper knife.

“We want you to come with us,” said Lila. Her face showed that she, too, was getting a hint of something terribly wrong.

Next instant the hint expanded into terrible fact.

Morel screamed. It was a dreadful sound—a yell of pure hate! His face was twisted demoniacally with the same lust to kill. A mask of hate! Hatred for everybody, everything.

He leaped to his feet and his hand drew back.

“Down!” yelled Cole to Lila.

With the cry, his hand caught her arm and he pulled her to the floor by main force. The shears whistled over her head so close that it seemed a lock of hair must be shorn off.

Morel had tried to kill his own daughter!

Cole gave the girl another powerful thrust as the paper knife whistled murderously after the shears. Then he reached Morel and caught his right arm in a viselike grip as Knarlie, looking scared but game, raced to get his left arm.

But Knarlie never got there. Knarlie gave a kind of bleat of fright and suddenly scuttled out a side door. Next instant, Cole knew why.

“Drop the guy’s arm,” snarled a voice at the hall door. “And stand still. You and the dame.”

Cole whirled. In the doorway were two men, each with an automatic leveled at him. Behind the two crowded more. He couldn’t see how many, but from the noise he judged there were a lot.

He and Lila had been followed here. Or else someone at Bleek Street had notified the gang of their coming. But that was unlikely because there was no one in that category, save Packer; and Cole was sure Morel’s servant was O K. No, they had been followed. The followers had closed in. Now they were neatly trapped.

“Get Morel out of here,” snapped the man who had told Cole to stand where he was.

One of the men sidled to the scientist. Morel stood with dull eyes, his blind hatred seeming to have been burned out of him by his swift murder attempt of a moment before. The man led him out of the room. Lila sobbed. Another of the men laughed.

The one who had laughed drew a bottle from his pocket, opened the cheap liquor, took a swig, then set it on a table next to an open window.

“We’ll celebrate,” he said cheerfully. “There’s a nice price on this dame’s head. And we’ll get some extra for the guy. He’s with The Avenger.” There followed a string of curses showing what the man thought of Dick Benson.

“Got any last words?” said the leader of the gang of thugs to the white-faced girl and the blazing-eyed Wilson.

Wilson was getting ready for a leap at the man. It would be a leap straight into the jaws of death. He knew that. But better to die fighting than be shot down in cold blood.

However, the leap was never made.

There was a slight phhht of sound. And the leader’s gun sagged down in a limp hand. For an instant he stood there, eyes dulling, looking astonished. Then he fell. And on the exact top of his skull was a shallow gash, as if he had been clubbed.

But there was no one around to club him.

Another phhht! Another man sank. And then Wilson got it. The Avenger!

Dick Benson had two of the world’s most curious weapons. One was a hollow-handled throwing knife which he called, with grim affection, Ike. The other was a little .22 revolver, long-barreled, so streamlined that it looked more like a slim length of blued tubing than a gun. This he called Mike. It had a specially devised silencer on it, and with it he “creased” his opponents—knocked them out by glancing a bullet off their skulls. The Avenger never took human life.

Few but Dick Benson had that eighth-inch accuracy of marksmanship; and only Mike’s silenced muzzle made that deadly little sound.

But more than Cole got the meaning of the two men on the floor with the shallow gashes on their skulls. Three of the gang stared swiftly at each other and then at the open window.

No one showed there, now. But the three, without a word, tiptoed from the room.

“Chief! They’re after you!” yelled Cole.

But the warning was too late. On its heels came the snarled command outside: “All right, you! Drop the pea shooter and come along with us!”

Cole leaped for the window and Lila screamed. The next thing Cole knew, he was opening his eyes from a prone position on the floor. He had been clubbed from behind.

The Avenger was in the room, standing nearby with Lila beside him. Dick Benson quietly bent down and helped Cole to his feet. Dick’s face was as calm as ever, and his pale and icy eyes showed no emotion. Though, with eight men lined across the room with guns in their hands like an execution squad, there was plenty of occasion for emotion.

“Well!” said Wilson. “Looks like they’ve got us.”

“Just getting wise to that, huh?” sneered the man who had set the bottle on the table. “Boy, this is good! Who’d of dreamed we’d get the big boy himself up here!” He glared at Dick. “We’ll have another drink on this, eh, guys?”

Cole saw, then, that the opened bottle of liquor was half gone; and he saw it pass from hand to hand again, this time to be set down empty. Celebration? Or were the men getting Dutch courage to shoot down three helpless humans in cold blood? It didn’t matter.

What did matter, it seemed to Cole, was The Avenger’s utter calm in the face of what seemed sure death.

Wilson knew that Dick, far from fearing death, seemed at times almost to court it. Though he knew that those colorless, inhuman eyes never expressed much emotion, it did seem to him that they’d express at least a little agitation—unless the crime battler had some ace up his sleeve.

It seemed that the men were made uneasy by this inhuman calm, too. It wasn’t the first time that killers with the drop on The Avenger had been disconcerted by his air of being protected by an unseen army.

“Aw, take him!” snapped the owner of the rotgut whiskey.

“Take him yourself!” snarled the man he had spoken to.

“Why you—” howled the first one. “Who gives orders around here? Me or you?”

“Not you, you ape!” another man broke in. “You’re just a damned straw boss. I’ve got more right than you have to give orders.”

Cole looked on in wonder. And instantly the men were in a milling bedlam, concerned only with themselves, paying no attention to their prisoners.

It was fantastic and horrible. It ended with one of the gunmen clubbing another down with the barrel of his gun. And that one would never move again. A pal turned his gun on the clubber and blasted him through the chest.

“Out of here, fast!” said The Avenger, tone low.

Cole got the terrified, dazed Lila, and rushed her to the side door. The Avenger came after. There was a sound of shots in the room behind them like a miniature battle of the Marne.

“That liquor bottle!” exclaimed Cole suddenly, staring hard at The Avenger as the three ran across the fields back toward the autogyro, after Dick had retrieved Mike.

“Yes,” said Dick. “I had some of Morel’s drug with me. I had just synthesized it in the lab. Before I started using Mike through the open window, I poured the lot of it into the bottle. I thought they might drink from it. If they hadn’t we might have been in trouble.”

Cole felt wonder, and something like awe, fill him. He knew well enough The Avenger’s code now. Don’t take life, but place opponents in such a position that if they try to slaughter you, they are themselves annihilated.

But along with this wonder, Cole suddenly felt red rage creeping through him.

“You and your plots!” he yelled suddenly, stopping at the fringe of the woods. “This one happened to turn out all right, and there probably won’t be a man left alive back there in the farmhouse. But suppose it hadn’t come out right? We’d have paid with our lives for your silly scheme!”

Lila looked at him with wide eyes. The Avenger stared with eyes like cold fire opals.

“You ought to be beaten up within an inch of your life,” snarled Cole. “You ought to be—”

And then he leaped, murderously, treacherously, with hate-filled eyes. But Dick was more than ready.

The Avenger took a short step to the side, about the movement a bullfighter makes when he sways six inches to right or left so that the bull’s horn grazes him. Thus did Cole’s maddened fist miss Dick’s head by a half inch. And then Benson’s fist got Cole in the jaw, almost gently, with just enough scientifically applied force to knock him cold.

Dick picked up Cole as if he had weighed nothing at all and went on through the woods. But he looked hard at Lila, with a question in his eyes. And the girl nodded, suddenly, biting her lips.

“Yes,” she said. “I remember, now. One of the men—I think he was half drunk to start with—forced some of the liquor from that bottle down Cole’s throat while he was unconscious. He said Cole ought to be awake to know what was going to happen to him, and then he laughed.”

She shivered. “The poor boy got some of Dad’s drug. Mr. Benson! My father! What has happened to him in all of this?”

They were at the little field where Cole had landed the plane. Lila saw another plane, now. A larger one, with unique wind flaps allowing such a low landing speed that Benson could set it down in almost as small a space as the gyro. From this plane, Mac grinned at Lila, but with sympathy in his bleak blue eyes. She saw why.

Her father lay, in bonds, on the floor, eyes filled with the lust to kill.

“I had an idea you and Cole might be followed,” said The Avenger to Lila. “So Mac and I came after you, just in time to see the gang sneak into the farmhouse. I got your father, and Mac brought him to this plane; then I went back. The rest you know.”

The pale, icily calm eyes went to Mac.

“Better take the gyro, with Wilson. It’s easier to take out of this small field than the plane.”

They tied Wilson hand and foot. Before they were finished he was conscious. And he was a hideous example of what Morel’s drug could do to a man. He raved and writhed to get free; to get at Mac and Dick and Lila; to kill them.

“Mon, mon!” said Mac. “Muster Benson—”

“Watch him carefully, Mac,” was all Dick said. “He’ll strike like a cobra if he gets a chance. Now—back to Bleek Street and the lab.”

CHAPTER XV

Killer Wilson!

There were more headlines in the newspapers—bigger ones than had been in before, with the same name:

Edwin C. Ritter.

The man was becoming an American idol overnight. For this time, it seemed, he had settled a squabble in the ranks of the great financial institution at the Palmer Building on Wall Street.

There had been no previous hint of a fight here, as there had been in the motor business. The implications of a financial civil war were so vast that the papers hadn’t dared print it.

The story would have precipitated a panic that would have lowered the combined values of stocks and bonds by billions of dollars overnight.

Only now, when the fight was settled, did it come out, with the name of Edwin Ritter as the pacifier.

Ritter had smoothed down a nasty situation in the automotive industry. He had done the same thing, with even more benefit to the United States, in the financial circles of the country. The papers unanimously came out, this morning, with what they had only hinted at the other time.

“We must have Ritter for our next president!”

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind now. Ritter for president.

With sinking hearts, Smitty and Mac and John and Nellie read those editorials.

The Avenger and his little crew knew precisely how the man had gotten into those glowing headlines. They knew that, to patch up the sinister trouble in industry and finance, he had first made that trouble.

Deliberately, ruthlessly, devilishly he had set man against man, so that he could step in with a bow to the gallery and make them friends again.

“Which means, of course,” said Nellie, “that there is an antidote to this drug of Morel’s. Otherwise, Ritter couldn’t undo so easily what he had done. He gave them the hate serum first, then later gave them this other stuff to make them normal again.”

“I grilled Packer, and he swears as far as he knows there is no antidote,” sighed Mac. “But there’d better be an antidote! If there isn’t—what about Wilson?”

Cole was in a specially fitted room downstairs. With heavy hearts the rest had fixed it. A similar one had been arranged for Arthur Morel.

They had fixed the rooms by padding them and putting bars over the windows. In one of those, Morel now paced. In the other was Wilson.

The Avenger came into the vast top-floor room. He came from the laboratory, still in a white coat. Even Dick Benson looked a little tired after his Herculean work. But his voice was even and his eyes icily calm as he said:

“I think I have something. We’ll try it anyway.”

“An antidote!” gasped Mac. “Ye’re sure?”

“I’m not at all sure,” said Benson. “It seems to work with rabbits. Whether it will work with humans is another matter.”

His pale eyes were somber.

“To try again, on another angle, would take me days. And I’m afraid, in that time, the mania possessing Morel and Wilson might become permanent. No one knows the results that prolonged effects of the drug produces. We’ll give some of the antidote to them, in spite of the risk. Better to have them dead than permanently insane—if the antidote fails to work.”

Lila cried out, then pressed her hand to her lips. The Avenger’s colorless eyes seemed as icy as ever as they turned on her; but she appeared to find some sympathy in them, for her hand slowly came down.

“I won’t give it to your father if you’d rather I did not,” Dick said to the girl.

She shook her head.

“I feel as you do about it. Better to have him dead than a homicidal maniac for the rest of his life.”

“Very well,” said Dick. “We’ll inject them with some of the antidote.”

They went down to the second floor, to those two rooms. For a moment The Avenger looked through the small opening in each door at the two men.

Morel was sitting on the bed in his room. His eyes were dull, slightly bloodshot. But they were still savage. He half rose to his feet as he saw Dick watching him, then sank back. But he was ready to spring, like a watchful panther, if he got a chance.

Wilson wasn’t quite like Morel; after all, Wilson had gotten only one dose while it seemed that Morel must have been injected repeatedly, over a long period of time. Cole waved to Dick when he saw him.

“When are you going to let me out, chief?” he said cheerfully. “I’m O K, now. Entirely normal.”

“Don’t believe it, Muster Benson,” whispered Mac.

But Dick had no intention of letting Wilson out. Instead, he got out one of Mac’s milder gas pills. This was one that induced deep sleep.

He tossed it into Wilson’s room.

Wilson saw it, knew instantly what it was and turned into a snarling demon. Also, a sly demon.

The lapel of his coat was saturated with the chemical of Mac’s devising which counteracted for a little while the effects of the gas. He promptly held this to his mouth and nostrils.

It took four of the pills, spaced at five-minute intervals, to send him off to sleep. Even then, Mac moved warily when The Avenger told him to get him and bring him into Morel’s room.

Morel succumbed to the first pill, of course. Lila, ashen, trembling, saw him lie down on the bed and go off into a profound sleep.

The two men were laid side by side, and Benson got out the small vial in which was the stuff he thought was an antidote for Morel’s hate serum. Thought only! He did not know.

This stuff was absolutely colorless. The hate serum was bloodred, but this antidote was as white and clear as distilled water. It looked pretty ineffective to Mac, even though, as a chemist, he knew that color had nothing to do with the potency of any liquid. After all, TNT is practically colorless.

The Avenger plunged a hypodermic needle through the cork of the vial and drew it full. Then he turned to Cole Wilson.

It was a somber moment. If Dick were wrong, he would be a murderer. And instead of watching a man slowly come back to sanity and life, he would watch him slowly die.

Lila and the others literally held their breaths while Dick injected the stuff into Wilson and then into Morel.

They were ready for anything. What they were not ready for was what happened. Which was nothing at all.

The two had been in a deep sleep. After the injection they remained just the same, eyes closed, breathing deeply and slowly. But The Avenger was physician enough to know that there had been a slight change, after all.

He nodded, eyes as icily calm as if he were not taking sole responsibility for the continuance of two human lives.

“They are in a coma,” he said. “They’ll probably remain in it for some hours, unless—” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Unless they passed from the coma straight into death.

That was what the “unless” meant.

They went up to the top-floor room again. The Avenger paced slowly near his big desk, his pale eyes seeing none of them, and seeing none of the immediate surroundings. Lila didn’t know what the brilliant far look in his eyes meant. But the others did.

Now and then in the course of a case The Avenger thought aloud, pinning down more clearly the points he had listed up to that moment. It was a rare and wonderful thing to hear him. They were hopping he would do this now.

He did.

“I think I have the rough outline of this now,” he said slowly, absently, talking to no one of them there. “Morel invented this drug. It is, as my laboratory work has shown, mainly a refinement of adrenalin.

“With all the war there is on earth at the moment, it is easy to see why Morel tried for such a drug. He was after something that would turn men into heroes. Something that would make them entirely courageous, utterly without fear. That explains the heavy amount of adrenalin in his formula. Adrenalin, shot into the blood stream, makes a human, or animal, warlike and fearless and gives him more than normal strength. Just the thing for an army.

“Morel found his drug, all right. A serum that turned anything that felt it into a thing without fear. But the serum had something wrong with it. There was another effect that Morel hadn’t planned on, and emphatically didn’t want.

“It filled its victims with a murderous hate, as well as a complete fearlessness.

“The drug, instead of being a courage serum, was a hate serum. Instead of making heroes of men, it made murdering maniacs of them; made them want to kill everything in reach.

“In working to correct this, Morel stumbled onto an antidote. That was how I got what I think is an antidote by an extension of the same experiments that gave me a duplicate of his drug. That much, at least, he had done. But until he could get the hate part out of his courage serum, the whole thing was a failure. You couldn’t give an army the stuff to make it unbeatable in battle. If you gave it to an army, the army would begin killing each other, hating each other, instead of the enemy.

“Morel’s close friend was Edwin C. Ritter, the politician. Ritter happened to hear about Morel’s unsuccessful experiment. But to Ritter it seemed quite successful. He could use that drug, as it stood.

“Ritter could, with the drug, turn leaders of industry and finance against each other. He could start a hate campaign that would fill the country with dread. The man who had that drug in his possession would become a sort of hate master.

“Ritter could start fights in important circles of the United States, then step in with the antidote and make peace by injecting the fighters with it. This would bring him national acclaim and, since election time was at hand, the presidency of the United States. It is needless to comment on what kind of a president he’d be, after getting into office by such methods.

“Ritter had Morel and his drug taken from the Maine laboratory. But before using it, he wanted to see for himself how it worked.

“He tried it on rabbits in that Scarsdale house. The result was that when Lila went near there later with her dog, the rabbits attacked the dog and actually tore the life from it.

“He tried it on pigeons at the library. That was why he was present at the time—to watch the effects. They were perfect, from his point of view. You all saw how the pigeon I brought from the library acted in the laboratory.

“Just before he was taken, Morel had injected guinea pigs at the Maine laboratory, which explains the attack on you, Lila, and you, Smitty.

“There were other times he used it, aside from the use in his presidential plans. He fed it to the rats in Kinnisten, and to the townspeople, probably in the water supply. The result almost took the lives of Mac and Nellie. And, of course, several captains of industry and finance have felt the effects of the drug—and the antidote—though they still don’t know it.”

Smitty nodded. It all sounded watertight to him. But, as nearly always was the case with the criminals Justice, Inc., fought, there was no proof of anything. Such men were too clever to leave loose ends.

“So what do we do about it?” he said gloomily. “We can’t let this thing succeed and let Ritter get into the White House.”

“No, we can’t allow that,” said The Avenger, eyes like ice in a polar dawn. “There is one thing we can do, of course. But it’s a last resort. It is rather extreme, even for Justice, Inc.”

How extreme it was, they were breathlessly to discover a little later.

CHAPTER XVI

Death for President!

The way to the White House was clear for Edwin C. Ritter.

The papers had it all. Ritter for president. A grateful nation wanting to reward the man who had straightened financial and industrial tangles before they could become serious; a man with the ability to be a great peacemaker in a warring world.

“Yes, the way is clear for Ritter,” said Smitty. He shook his head. “But, my gosh, we simply can’t allow a thing like that!”

They all looked at The Avenger.

Dick Benson had said that there was one last thing they could do to stop this. One last resort, though he had added that it was a great risk to take, even for Justice, Inc.

The little band wanted to hear that last resort, now.

The Avenger’s almost colorless eyes were as coldly brilliant as pale jewels. He nodded his head.

“We’ll have to do it,” he said.

“Do what?” asked Nellie.

“Kidnap Ritter.”

It fell among them like a bombshell.

Kidnap Ritter!

Why, here was a man whose name at the moment was known around the world; who was the biggest figure in America. Kidnaping him would be like stealing the Statue of Liberty. And the Statue would be much easier to keep hidden than Ritter.

The implications of the thing kept growing in their minds.

“Suppose,” said Smitty, “we snatch the guy, and then get caught at it? And even Justice, Inc., would have to jump to keep ahead of all the police in the country.”

“We’d get the death penalty,” said Dick calmly.

“What good would it do if we did get him?” asked Nellie.

“We could keep him till we’d cleared up this affair of the hate serum and had definite proof to offer the nation,” said The Avenger.

“If we couldn’t clear it up?”

“Then we’ll just hold him till after the election,” said Dick Benson.

“He’d know precisely who was responsible and could turn us all in to the cops,” said Mac dourly.

“Yes,” nodded The Avenger, face as calm as ice, eyes unreadable.

“And that would mean the chair,” said Mac.

“Yes.”

“So when do we start?” boomed the giant. “If we win, we expose this political plot for the deadly thing it is. If we lose, we keep a murderer out of the White House, anyway, but go down on the records as criminals with the whole country raving for our deaths. But either way we save the country a great disaster. So—when do we start?”

Obviously, the others all had the same thought.

“We’ll start immediately,” Dick said. “There is no reason for delay. Ritter is at the Hudson River place. Josh contacted me a little while ago. I’ll speak to Josh again and see how things are out there.”

He stepped to the big master radio, moving as always with the fluid speed that spoke volumes about his lightning muscular co-ordination.

“Josh. Benson calling. Josh.”

“Yes, Mr. Benson.”

Josh’s voice was low. Evidently he was speaking into his tiny belt radio from some spot where he didn’t dare make too much noise.

“You’re at Ritter’s place now?” asked Dick.

“Yes. I’m up in a buttonwood tree about twenty yards from the house. Can’t talk any louder than this. Men all around. Can you hear me all right?”

“I can hear you. What are these men, Josh?”

“Guards,” said Josh.

“And there are a lot of them?”

“Twenty or thirty, I’d say. Tough-looking customers.” There was a pause. Then: “There are three cops and a squad car at the road gate detailed especially to guard Ritter.”

Smitty and Mac looked at each other and shook their heads at that.

“All right, Josh,” said Benson. “We’re coming out. Stay on duty.”

The Avenger turned to his aides, who had heard all Josh had to say.

“Ritter had a hunch something like this might be tried,” mused Mac.

“Naturally,” said Dick. “So he has gathered all his forces around him.”

“But that gang of his . . . er . . . eliminated itself back at the Vermont farm,” said Smitty.

There was no need to answer this. Thugs who can handle a gun are a dime a dozen. It would be easy for Ritter to hire a new gang, importing them from a distance so that they wouldn’t be known to the police detailed to watch his place.

“Those cops,” said Mac. “We can’t fight police, Muster Benson. We’ve always worked with the police.”

“We won’t fight them, now,” said The Avenger. “Come on.”

Dick took a big seven-passenger sedan. It was the largest and most heavily armored of his fleet of cars. It weighed nearly ten thousand pounds, but you wouldn’t know it; it looked like any other big sedan. Only the tires gave it away, with a careful study. The tires, slightly bigger than they should have been, were truck tires.

Mac sat in front with The Avenger. Smitty and Nellie were in the back. Josh would be in there on the return trip. And, with luck, Ritter. But there was still a vacancy.

“Cole ought to be with us,” sighed Smitty. “Was he any different last time you looked at him, chief?”

“Still in the coma,” said The Avenger, spinning the huge car through traffic as though it had been a motorcycle.

“Where do we go with Ritter?” asked Nellie. “We can’t go back to Bleek Street. It’s too well-known that Bleek Street is our headquarters, and there’s too much chance that something may go wrong enough for us to be linked up with this.”

“We’ll take Ritter to the Justine Building.”

“If we get him,” said Mac dourly. Mac was the pessimist of the band.

“We’ll get him,” said The Avenger quietly. “Rosabel will send Lila there, too, in a little while. We’ll all stay at the Justine Building for a time.”

There was silence, then, till they got near the estate of Edwin Ritter, presidential candidate.

The Avenger stopped the car. In that filing cabinet he had for a brain was a complete layout of this section of the country. He knew that the road gate to Ritter’s twenty-acre place was between a quarter and a half mile up the highway. He knew that a hundred yards ahead, around a bend, was a secondary road; that off the road to the left, four miles down, was a tiny woods lane that circled back once more to this main pike.

“We’ll get out here,” he said quietly. “No, not you, Nellie. You’re to get that squad car out of trouble.”

He took pencil and paper from his pocket and drew for Nellie the surrounding roads, from the map of his mind.

“When we have gotten around the bend, ahead, give us five minutes. Then fire this gun four times and scream. Make it good and loud. After that, drive around the bend, going slowly. The police will come in a hurry in that squad car to investigate the scream and the shooting. As soon as you see them, drive into this road, go till you hit the little woods lane, turn into that and circle back. Don’t let anything stop you because we’re depending on you to pick us up. And we’ll want to leave in a hurry.”

Nellie nodded her dainty blond head and took the wheel, looking smaller and more fragile than ever in the vast sedan.

The rest went on.

It was about seven minutes later that the shots and the scream rang out. In something like forty seconds, the wail of a police siren sounded, and the squad car from Ritter’s gate dashed by at seventy miles per hour or better.

Mac and Smitty and The Avenger emerged from behind a high hedge at the corner of Ritter’s grounds and went toward the house.

“Hey,” said Smitty uneasily, “there was something odd about that yelp of Nellie’s. It sounded like the real thing to me, instead of a fake.”

“She was supposed to make it good,” shrugged Mac.

“She wouldn’t really be in trouble back there, would she?” worried the giant.

“No time to think about that now,” said Mac. “Come on.”

They had timed it so that dusk was falling, now. Dusk, that tricky light, or half light, which is almost as easy to move in unobserved as the darkness of night itself.

The big house was before them, blazing with lights. At the door, they could see two men. A man swung around the corner of the house at a slow pace, walked like a sentry past the side of the place and disappeared around the other corner.

“I should say he has got the place guarded,” muttered Smitty.

The three stole to the side of the house, from bush to bush. They stopped under a big buttonwood tree. They said nothing now, not even wanting to risk a whisper. But words were not needed. The window here was their goal.

The Avenger felt at his pocket.

They had come with about all the equipment they had, to face this large crew of thugs guarding Ritter. One of the many small pieces was a glass-cutting gadget. Benson cut a small circle from the window with a diamond point and pulled it towards him with a tiny rubber suction cup so that it wouldn’t fall inside and rouse inquiry by breaking.

He reached in. Mac and Smitty were careless enough to watch him for a moment instead of their surroundings. They jumped a foot when there was a sudden smack almost at their elbows. The smack was followed by a double thud, then silence.

They all whirled. Josh grinned at them; and at his feet was a man, knocked cold. Smitty nodded silent thanks to Josh—and to Lady Luck.

They’d slipped up enough so that one of the many men around here had seen them at the window, had started to raise a yell, and then had been downed by Josh. He’d happened to stop under this tree and Josh had dropped and felled the man in his fall.

The Avenger raised the window, having bridged the alarm wire so there would be no signal when, an instant later, he cut it. He climbed into the house. Mac started to follow. And then a couple of armies came tumbling down around them and the night was split with shots and yells.

Somehow the alarm had been given, and they were caught!

But catching these three was a little like catching three grizzlies, as the men were soon to discover.

The shots didn’t bother the three. The slugs jolted and bruised when they were stopped by the bullet-proof celluglass garments, but that was all. The shouts were worse. They’d draw everyone from miles around, in the quiet country, in short order!

Smitty’s vast paws reached out. He got a throat in each hand and squeezed. Two professional gunmen went down. One would recover, a long time later.

He swung twice. Two more sank to the lawn. He tripped over one of them in the darkness and fell just as a shot ripped murderously where his head had been. There was no bulletproof shield there!

Mac, meanwhile, was using those bony fists of his to unbelievable effect. Like ivory mallets, they crashed cartilage and flesh; and the recipients of the blows usually stayed where they had fallen.

Josh was the least powerful of the doughty three, but he was a match for most two men, at that. He writhed and ducked and shot out blows like a black tiger. Then he was slugged and dazed by a gun barrel, and Smitty heaved powerfully under a knot of men that for the moment held him helpless.

“Mac!” Smitty’s voice sounded, under the heap. “The g-g-ga—”

That was all, but Mac heard it and understood. As a matter of fact, Mac hadn’t needed the urgent call. He had been trying right along to get a couple seconds of time to dig in his vest pocket for what Smitty had been reminding him of.

The gas!

He got out three glass pellets. Then he was kept busy ducking blows for half a minute. Finally he threw the pellets.

“Watch noses!” he yelled, warning Josh and Smitty.

You couldn’t see the vapor that rose when the pellets broke. You couldn’t even smell it. But you certainly felt it.

Half a dozen of the gang went down, out for at least an hour to come. As many more started staggering dizzily in circles. But somebody in the crew was brighter than crooks usually are.

“Back!” this one yelled, coughing, “They got tear gas or some—”

There were about ten who had the power to get back and away from the spreading vapor. It left Mac and Josh and Smitty unattended for the moment. Breathing through the lapels of their coats, they clambered in through the window The Avenger had entered moments before.

“The door!” bawled the bright guy outside. “Keep ’em in the house!”

Mac looked out the window and saw three men stand with guns out, guarding it. He saw men run to the front, and to the back doors.

And then, as he was thinking sourly what a nice little trap they’d fought their way into, he heard The Avenger’s quiet, icy-calm voice.

“This way.”

They went after the voice. Two figures loomed. But one was in the arms of the other. And it was not Benson who was being carried!

“You got him!” breathed Smitty. “You got Ritter!”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” Mac said. “Now all we have to do is get him out of here.”

Far off, a police siren was wailing. That squad car was coming back, after being lost by Nellie’s sedan.

“And fast, too!” said Mac.

They were following Dick as they spoke. They didn’t know where to, but they had followed him blindly before.

They went upstairs, to a back window. Down below was a roof—the garage. They dropped to that, handing Ritter down as if he had been a bundle of carpeting. The rear of the garage was almost in the water of the Hudson River.

They lowered themselves to the narrow strip between building and water. A man came around the end of the garage, but Josh fixed that. He leaped, struck; and the jaws that had been open for a shout clicked shut to a smack that would leave the victim unconscious for a good many minutes.

They circled through woods and shrubbery.

“How’d you do it, chief?” said Smitty.

“Ritter was leaning out a window, looking for the reason for the commotion.” The Avenger’s voice was as icily calm as his pale eyes. “The nerve pressure at the back of his neck put him out— This is where Nellie should be with the car.”

But Nellie wasn’t there with the car. The highway was deserted as far as they could see. And behind them began to swell the sound of furious pursuit, as men chased after the daring kidnapers of the nation’s No. 1 political figure.

CHAPTER XVII

Hide-Out

When Benson and Mac and Smitty had left the car, Nellie had started to act precisely as commanded. But she had only started.

She was about to go into gear, after the three had rounded the bend, and was opening her red lips for a scream.

The scream came, all right, but it was real. Two men had suddenly bobbed up into sight beside her. And when she looked to her right, she saw three more on that side of the car.

Her scream was cut off by a hand clapping over her mouth.

The next thing Nellie knew was that she was lying on the car floor and someone had his foot on her neck. There were voices.

“Up this lane?”

“Yeah. Take the woods road just like we heard Benson tell the dame to do. But we’ll keep right on up the river, ditch the car, then heave the dame into the water about ten miles from here.” There was a chuckle. “The guys at the house will take care of Benson and the mugs with him. But if they don’t and Benson gets to where the car should be waitin’ for him—won’t he be surprised!”

“Smart of the boss to post a few of us at a distance from the house,” approved another voice. “It fixed Benson up, all right.”

Nellie’s returning consciousness was hastened by the words. She felt as if ice water were in her veins instead of blood.

When Dick reached the place where she should be waiting with the sedan—then what? He would be helpless without the fast car there, ready to escape in.

Nellie had made no move since her eyelids first fluttered. She lay there and thought as the ponderous sedan jounced along a narrow lane. Everything—absolutely everything—depended on her.

There were a lot of trick arrangements on that sedan. It was about the most completely equipped of all The Avenger’s cars, which was saying a lot.

Among other things, it had a perfect dual control.

Something is always apt to happen to a car driver in a gun battle, even with bulletproof windows. The Avenger had fixed it so the sedan could be driven from the rear seat if such a thing happened.

Lifting up the padded, concealed back of the front seat disclosed two knobs, a small lever and a button. The two knobs could be pulled in and out for brake and clutch action. The lever shifted gears and then, locked down, could be used to steer the car instead of a wheel. The button, pressed down, was the accelerator.

In the darkness of the rear Nellie furtively raised that panel cover on the back of the front seat and got her hand in on the controls.

The sedan slowed so suddenly and violently, as she pressed the brake knob, that all the men were thrown forward; and the one in the front seat smashed his head against the windshield.

“What the hell—” gasped the driver.

The rear controls were independent of the front ones. He had no clue as to what had happened.

Nellie gave them little time to think. She gave the steering lever a twist to the left.

“Hey! You’re going to ram that tr—”

The car did ram the tree, again throwing all the men forward with a jerk. The sedan was so heavily built, and was going so slowly along the narrow lane, that it didn’t get hurt. It pushed the four-inch sappling half down and stopped.

“What the hell kind of guys are these?” snapped one of the men, referring to Benson and his band. “They take a getaway car out with the brakes so bad they jam and the steering gear so out of kilter that you can’t hold the thing on the road.”

“Aw, tie it outside!” snapped another. “Buck, you’re the grease monkey of the crowd. Roll under and see what’s wrong.”

The man who had been driving swore and pushed his way under the car. Three of the others stood around with flashlights, leaving just one in the back with Nellie. It was what she had played for.

“How’s the dame?” called one of the men outside.

“O K,” said the man in the back seat. “What’s wrong with the bus? Find it?”

“I don’t see anything wrong,” came a snarl from underneath. “Brakes’re right. I’ll look at the tie rods—”

The man in the back seat yelled.

Nellie, as has been said, was a past mistress of jujitsu. She knew the exact spots in the calf of a leg where slim white fingers could press and cause excruciating agony.

So she pressed!

That was when the man had yelled. Next instant his yells came from outside the car instead of inside. Nellie had opened the door with her other hand, and one deft move, with more strength than you’d ever have suspected was in her slim arm, had rolled the fellow out.

Then the men were treated to the disturbing spectacle of a car seemingly driving itself rapidly away from them.

The sedan roared backward. Buck, under the car, yelled horribly as a wheel went over his ankle. Too bad, but it couldn’t be helped. The others jumped for the sedan. It shot forward, brushed two of them down like flies and roared away down the lane, still with no one in the driver’s seat!

Nellie had the controls well in hand, now. She stayed where she was, not wanting to take even the time to stop and get up front. So a few drivers on the highway saw an apparently empty sedan whirl left into the main pike, and then saw it shoot like a comet toward the Ritter estate.

That police siren was very near when Nellie skidded the sedan to a stop beside Benson and the others.

“In!” she panted.

They didn’t waste time. They piled Ritter into the back seat and climbed in around him. The Avenger himself took the wheel. And they got out of there.

“You gave us heart failure,” said Smitty reproachfully. “What did you do—go off somewhere to have a permanent?”

“A little delay,” was all Nellie said. Danger past was danger forgotten.

The lights of the city, and temporary safety, beckoned.

No one outside Justice, Inc., knew of the Justine Building. That is, no one knew of its connection with the man with the pale, deadly eyes and the icy calm.

It was a small office building downtown. The top three floors were kept by Benson. The rest, below, were rented carefully to tenants who never had a call to be in the place at night.

Behind normal-looking marble slabs of the corridor wall was an elevator, in addition to the regular four, that no one knew anything about. This went from the basement up to those three floors at the top. You could drive directly into the basement from the street, which Benson did.

They took Ritter from the car. Ritter was conscious, now, and the first thing he did was to yell at the top of his lungs and slug Smitty in the jaw.

Smitty didn’t mind the yell; the basement was soundproof. But the blow to the jaw, delivered with all the force a fairly athletic six-foot man could put behind it, stung him a little and hence annoyed him.

He picked Ritter up under his arm like a bale of straw and carried him there, kicking and cursing.

The elevator rose with them, and The Avenger stopped it at the top floor.

“I’ll stay up here with Ritter,” he said. “He may have something interesting to tell me. The rest of you go down to the next floor. Walk down. Don’t use the elevator— Something, Nellie?”

The diminutive blonde was looking as if she had been kicked in the ribs. And it developed there was something.

“Chief,” she gasped, “I just remembered. There was a bill for repairs in the glove compartment of the sedan. The bill was addressed to the Justine Building! And I think one of the men who caught me went through that glove compartment!”

Smitty whistled.

“Now we’re in for it!” growled Mac.

“How did a thing like that get in the compartment?” wondered Josh. “That gang’ll be on us like a ton of lead as soon as those guys get back to Ritter’s house with the addressed bill. It’s like sending them an engraved invitation to come to the Justine Building.”

“We’d better take Ritter out of here,” said Smitty.

“No,” said The Avenger.

“But, chief—”

“We’ll stay right here. You all wait on the floor below. And don’t use that elevator; walk down.”

It wasn’t the first time he had given an unexplained command. But never had one been more mystifying.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Hate Master

The top floor of the small office building was fixed up as a commodious eight-room apartment. Benson sat with Ritter in the smallest of the rooms, near the back. Ritter sat bolt upright in a straight-backed chair. The Avenger sat at ease in a padded easy-chair.

“You fool!” sneered Ritter. “You’ll burn in the chair for this. You and all your friends.”

“Possibly,” said Benson.

“You can’t get away with kidnaping a presidential candidate.”

“After tonight, you won’t be a candidate,” said Benson.

“You think you can stop me?” snarled Ritter. “Why, you haven’t any proof of anything. If you think you can put me behind bars—”

“I haven’t bars in mind at all,” said Benson. “What I have in mind is your cure!”

There was thick, throbbing silence for a moment

“Cure?” said Ritter.

“Yes. You see, I don’t believe you’re the master mind behind this crime at all.”

Ritter didn’t say anything. He looked at The Avenger with hate-gleaming eyes.

“There was the affair of the dog,” said Benson calmly.

“If you mean the time I was disciplining my dog and your men caught me at it—”

“There was no ‘discipline’ about your treatment of the dog. Beating with a wire whip isn’t discipline; it is pure torture. The result of blind hatred. Since then, I’ve been convinced you were a pawn in this game and not the king. Someone is your master, and has injected you with carefully measured amounts of Morel’s hate serum as well as others.”

“You’re crazy,” said Ritter.

“You bear out my theory,” nodded Benson. “If you were guilty, you would be eager enough to have me think someone else was responsible and that you were an innocent victim. As it is, the man who calls the tune for you—shall we call him the Hate Master?—has you so thoroughly in his power that you try to protect him.”

Ritter laughed. It was a hard, jarring sound.

“Who do you think your ridiculous Hate Master is? Morel?”

“No, Morel is also a victim. He was taken and held so that he could manufacture more of the stuff, and its antidote, if needed. That he is a victim was proved by the fact that he actually tried to kill his own daughter. Only a maniac would try that.”

“Then who is it?”

“I don’t know,” said The Avenger frankly. “I have my suspicions, but I can’t prove them. I hope to know before the night is over, however—”

“You will know,” came a low, harsh voice, “right now. Just before I send you to hell!”

Ritter turned with a gasp. The Avenger turned slowly, calmly, though the increased glitter in his pale, deadly eyes attested to the fact that the interruption was a complete surprise to him.

A man had opened the door so silently that not one sound betrayed him. The man came easily into the room, with a sawed-off shotgun pointing straight at Dick Benson’s head.

Even at that moment, the man had what seemed to be a slight smile on his lips, and an almost kindly light in his eyes. Even at such a moment he handled his body in an almost obsequious way, as if he could never get over his training—which was that of a perfect servant.

“I happen to know about your bulletproof underwear, or whatever it is,” the man said. “Please observe that the gun is leveled at your face, not at your body.”

The man was Knarlie, the servant in Ritter’s home.

Behind Knarlie, seven men filed into the room, all with guns pointed at the two men. As The Avenger had once said, professional gunmen are a dime a dozen. A ruthless man can always go out and hire murderous stooges if he needs them.

“I expected you to show up here,” said Dick, evenly. “In fact, I planned the whole thing to get you here. But—”

“But you didn’t expect me to get here so fast, or to get in so quietly, eh?” said Knarlie. The little man looked like a figure out of hell. His brown eyes, which had seemed so benevolent and so distressed at the cruelties of his “employer,” Ritter, now glittered with ambition for power and with ruthlessness against anyone standing in his way.

The Avenger’s eyes were lambent moonstones on him. He said nothing.

“Your place,” said Knarlie, “is like most fortresses. It is designed to be impregnable from the outside. But in the design it was forgotten that, if ever any enemy did get in, the fine fortress would become a terrible prison. As this has now become your prison.”

“You seem to have studied military terms and tactics,” murmured Benson.

“Of course,” said Knarlie. “A dictator needs such knowledge. And I shall be dictator—when Ritter is in the White House. I couldn’t run for president, myself. My damned ugliness makes it impossible for me to be a public figure. But I could—and did—take promising material like Ritter to put in the limelight, while I really ran things from behind the throne. It is hard to pretend to be a servant, as I have done, when you are really the master. But that’s ended now—or will be with the next elections.”

“You’re going ahead with your plan?”

“Of course,” said Knarlie. His voice was as calm as The Avenger’s own. The most dangerous killer is he whose voice is never lifted, whose nerves never quiver.

“You are the only one who can stop me,” he said. “And you are as good as dead, right now! I said a fortress could be a terrible trap. Yours has become so. You know the thick steel doors that shut off this floor from all the rest? Those are closed and bolted now, save for one out of which we shall go. Then I’ll jam that so no one can open it. Ritter and I will get out of here quickly and speed away from the building. My men”—he nodded at the hired thugs, who nodded almost indifferently back—“will mop up your helpers, and Morel’s daughter, on the floors below. And that will be that!”

“You seem very sure,” shrugged The Avenger. “How about Ritter? You can’t keep a man, even a president, injected constantly with a drug for four years.”

“I don’t have to,” said Knarlie, smiling silkily and looking more physically hideous than ever. “Morel’s serum, used for a long period, leaves a man permanently affected. Ritter hasn’t had an injection for a long time now. He hasn’t needed one; have you, Ritter?”

“No,” said Ritter docilely.

“And you’re glad I gave you the drug, aren’t you, Ritter?”

“Yes, I’m glad,” snarled Ritter. He seemed to come alive, eyes green-glazed with hate. “It has made me more powerful than any other man in public life. Hatel That is the strongest of all emotions. Without it, men become soft. I have hate, so I am strong. Yes, Knarlie, I’m glad you gave me the serum.”

“You, Knarlie,” said The Avenger, “didn’t seem to need any of the serum.”

“Hardly,” said the ugly little man. Then his face twisted. “I’m deformed, unattractive; so from the time I was a child, the world has either pitied me or showed contempt for me. For me! With a brain finer than any of theirs! Well, I’ll show them now, with Ritter. We’ll see what they think of us when we rule the land in a grip of iron, eh, Ritter?”

“There will be scores to settle,” snarled Ritter. “Yes, we’ll see— Enough of this, Knarlie! Kill this man! Then, after we’ve gotten away, you men kill everybody on the floors below. Kill, kill, kill!”

His voice rose to a shriek.

“Now, Ritter,” said Knarlie, like an indulgent parent to a spoiled child. “We’ll have to disguise our power in public, won’t we?”

Instantly Ritter’s face was transformed. It became sly, cunning. Then it was bland, kindly, the perfect picture of the kind of countenance a great executive should have.

“You needn’t worry, Knarlie,” he said. “Not till after we have won will I show my feelings.”

“And so—good-by,” said Knarlie to Benson, almost gently. The ugly little fellow faced his gunmen. “Out the door, there. Ritter, you, too. You men, give Ritter and me five minutes to get down to the street level and away from the building. Then take this man’s aides on the floors below.”

The men went back out of the room, with Ritter among them. Knarlie, at the door, smirked at The Avenger.

“Through murder you have risen high,” said Dick Benson calmly. “Through murder you will now destroy yourself. I warn you.”

Such was his calm, and such was the infallible gleam in his icy, pale eyes, that even Knarlie looked a trifle uneasy for a moment. Then he laughed, satanically, and his hand made a throwing motion.

A grenade struck the wall just behind Benson, and exploded! Knarlie slammed the door shut from the outside, and triple barred it. His dying steps sounded as he ran for the elevator, to join Ritter in escape.

The grenade poured out the last of its contents: deadliest gas known to science; a gas that lingered for hours. The Avenger had his saturated coat lapel to breathe through for a few seconds, and then his nose clip with the chemical-soaked sponge for the nostrils that would take him through a few more. Ten minutes at most.

And this gas would persist in a closed room for at least a day!

On the floor below, The Avenger’s band was jubilant over news just radioed by Rosabel, Josh Newton’s pretty wife.

Morel and Wilson were all right! They were out of the coma produced by Dick’s antidote, still weak but as sane as anyone and regaining their normal physical strength by the minute. Morel, most dosed, was the weakest.

It was at that moment that a far, far crash came very faintly to them.

“What,” said Josh after a moment, “was that?”

“I don’t know, but it had a nasty sound,” said Mac.

Then there was another sound.

A clamor of bells, outside the end door of this room and a little above them. The clamor was not loud, but it was continuous. At the same time, an orange light glowed over the door in question.

“Someone is on the stairs,” yelled Smitty. “They’re going up to tackle the chief. Come on!”

“They have already been upstairs,” came a quiet, almost weary voice. “They have already tackled me.”

They whirled.

From the center of the ceiling a strip had dropped, revealing itself as a narrow stairs, like a tall stepladder, concealed in the ceiling and floor above when not in use.

Down this was coming Dick Benson, pale eyes hooded and enigmatic. He was taking his nose clip from his nose as he descended. And they saw that he came down fast and raised the stairs to seal the ceiling again as soon as possible.

“Gas up there,” Dick said. “The type that is a shade lighter than air; so I don’t think much got down through the opening. But open all the windows.”

Nellie’s blue eyes were wide.

“That c-crash!” she stammered. “And the alarm on the stairs between this floor and the next!”

The Avenger nodded. His face was almost tired-looking, which told his aides all they needed to know. His features had that look only on one occasion: when a case had been closed and The Avenger was ready for the next battle against crime.

Mac was the one who pieced it out.

“Gas! And the private elevator has a special pin on the brake control so that when it is pulled and you push the down lever, the cage is left without support and falls. And say—you left that Justine Building address in the sedan on purpose!”

The Avenger nodded again.

“With Ritter here as prisoner, I wanted Ritter’s boss to come for him. And he did. Knarlie!”

“Knarlie?”

“Yes. I guessed the supposed servant was really the master, some time ago. But I had no proof. I still haven’t. But now proof is needless. Knarlie grabbed Ritter, threw gas in the library and locked me in it. Curious. All he could see was steel doors barring me in to death. It didn’t seem to occur to him that after all this was my place, and that I might have apparatus in it which was known to no one but me. Like a concealed exit from that room above. Like the elevator which was thrown out, instead of in, control when the down lever was pulled. Like the staircase with an armor-plate door at head and foot which could be snapped shut with a step on either the top or bottom stair.”

The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes went unseeingly around the room.

“I warned him,” he almost whispered, in that dead and icy tone. “I told him he would destroy himself through murder. Why is it that a killer will never believe that his actions will eventually doom him?”

Smitty sighed and looked at his chief with something like awe.

“So it’s all over!” he rumbled.

“All over,” said The Avenger. “Ritter, poor mad dupe, and Knarlie, his supposed servant, will be found dead at the bottom of the elevator shaft. The thugs trapped in the stair well will talk, eventually, and the police and the rest of the nation will learn what happened—and the fate it narrowly escaped.”

He stopped, and there was silence. Justice, Inc., had won its spurs again. It had saved a nation, though the nation would never know.

Looking at Dick’s calm face, with its classically regular features, surmounted by the heavy, coal-black hair, Nellie sighed. This was just another day’s work to The Avenger, who looked forward coldly, calmly, to the next great service he might perform for mankind.

THE END

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

THE HATE MASTER

CHAPTER I Red As Rubies

CHAPTER II The Search

CHAPTER III The Furious Rabbits

CHAPTER IV The Dog’s Owner

CHAPTER V Winged Madness

CHAPTER VI The Red Pool

CHAPTER VII Motor Meeting

CHAPTER VIII The Devil’s Mask

CHAPTER IX Death in the Sky

CHAPTER X Strange Call

CHAPTER XI Into the Trap

CHAPTER XII The Mob

CHAPTER XIII Dollar War

CHAPTER XIV The “Peacemaker”

CHAPTER XV Killer Wilson!

CHAPTER XVI Death for President!

CHAPTER XVII Hide-Out

CHAPTER XVIII The Hate Master