Benson’s arms strained swiftly apart, flinging the two clinging men off him as if they had been children. But it was too late.
A club in the hands of someone behind him caught him on top of the head, and another got him on the side.
He was bound hand and foot when his eyes opened. He was next to the rail; and the leader of this band, who insisted he was the genuine Shan Haygar, sat on that rail and stared down at him.
“Coming out of it, eh?” he said, in almost a conversational tone. “I didn’t think you would regain your senses quite so fast. You are going over the side with a hundred pounds of iron tied to your feet! Would you like to be hit on the head again? It might be easier for you.”
The Avenger’s voice was as calm as though he were seated in his own headquarters with nothing on earth to fear. His face, dreadfully calm even at a time like this, made several of the cutthroat band back away a step, as if they feared the man even when he was securely bound.
“I’ll face it conscious,” he said.
The leader nodded. “But of course your courage is well known,” he shrugged. Then: “Oh, yes, I recognized you at once! I recognized you and realized that, while we were sure to overpower you in the end, a man like you might kill many of my men first. And I need them all. So I tried a little trickery.”
A brawny fellow was lugging a section of iron rail toward them. Benson said evenly, “So the man you killed engaged this boat first. And you took charge, bound his crew, and laid in wait for him.”
“That’s right,” nodded the leader, swinging his long legs a little as he sat on the rail. The boat was making her full fourteen knots, but the water was calm.
“There seems to have been a great deal of murder over a few small gold coins,” observed Benson. The man was tying the iron rail to his bound ankles.
“It would seem so,” nodded the leader. “But then, we Haygars attach a great deal of sentiment to our small possessions. We have so few left, you know.”
“Does the gold medallion you took from the dead man have the letters S H, or H H, on it?” asked Benson.
The man frowned a little and got off the rail.
“You know too much, my friend. It is indeed well that you try a sea cure for knowledge. One that will last a long time — till that rope rots and lets your unidentifiable body float at last to the surface. Over with him!”
Even bound, The Avenger made trouble for four of them. But finally his body was poised on the rail and pushed over.
The splash was deadened by the throb of the propeller and the rush of water past the hull. He slid along like a surfboard with the momentum for a second, then sank like a stone.
“The other, too, but don’t bother with iron,” said the new Shan Haygar.
The dead man was given to the sea. The boat went on, with the first pink of the new day just dappling the water’s placidity.
CHAPTER IX
The House in the Sea
The island was nearly six miles off the Maine coast. It was fairly large — about twenty-five acres in extent. It was wooded, with a large cleared space in the center which rose a few feet above the rest of the terrain.
In the cleared space was a big house. And from a little distance, the house seemed to be rising from the sea itself, instead of having its foundations on dry land.
The place looked a little like an old-world castle.
It was of dark-red brick. There was a central turret, and then a slightly smaller turret at each end. They were flat-topped and looked like crenellated watch towers. There were few windows, and these were small and had heavy bars over them. Under the central turret was a big, blank door of ponderous oak.
The house must have been elaborately kept up at one time; the layout of the grounds suggested great wealth.
But now the grounds were overgrown with weeds and young brush, and the building itself was in bad repair.
It was late night, but the moon was bright and bathed clearly the stained, badly kept old building. Stretches of unhealthy ivy made splotches on the walls.
Into the moonlight, at intervals, from the wooded sections around the once-lovely formal gardens came animals that at first appeared to be calves or ponies — they seemed far too big to be dogs. However, that was what they were: the most ferocious mastiffs, trained in killing, that the present owner of the island could lay hands on.
These four-legged, fanged pets of the devil aided the six miles of open sea in keeping intruders off the place.
Perhaps the man steadily forging through the water in a slow, tireless crawl stroke from the mainland did not know of the existence of the dogs. At any rate, he kept coming on, with singularly little in the way of equipment to protect him from a dozen of the brutes if they ever winded him.
At the moment, whether or not he knew of the dogs, they did not know of him. Nor did the two men in the grim, eerie-looking house.
These two men were in the unkempt vastness of what had been a drawing room. They were the master of the island and his one servant.
The master was a huge man, over six feet and weighing well over three hundred pounds. He had small, rhinoceros eyes, a hide that looked as if borrowed from the same animal, and a small head half buried in his ponderous neck.
The servant was a wisp of a man, harassed-looking, meek, the type of human rabbit who would jump if a small boy looked angrily at him.
“Our visitors will be coming along sometime in the next twenty-four hours,” growled the master.
“Yes, Master Goram,” said the wisp of a servant. He had a high-arched nose, a long, narrow jaw speaking of feebleness of will, and a skin that was too white and too thin. He looked like a cartoon of an aristocrat gone to seed.
“Fix some of the bedrooms so they can at least be camped in,” grumbled the huge man. “Damn it! This house will fall down around our ears soon, if it keeps on going to pieces. But then, it’s only sharing the fate of all the other possessions of the Haygars.”
He picked up a cracking leather case with the initials G H on it and stared at it moodily. The G H stood for Goram Haygar, only living member of the American clan of Haygar.
Goram Haygar was the son of Wendell Haygar. Wendell, of the American branch, had, at one time perhaps, been the strongest and wealthiest of all the strong and wealthy clan. But that was long before this house had been built.
The house had been erected on the island when the family fortunes had almost sunk out of sight. Old Wendell must have designed it as a retreat in which to end his days in comfort, if not in luxury. But even the comfort had disappeared before his death, a few years ago.
In country after country, the Haygars had gotten into desperate circumstances because of things beyond their control. War and revolution had taken their estates.
To one after another old Wendell had poured out financial help, draining his own resources, vast as they were. Lower and lower had sunk his own reserve.
Then he had bought this island and built this home, a sort of castle to guard his old age. But hardly had it been built when he was forced to let servants go, one after another, and was forced to watch the building, still quite new, fall into disrepair because there wasn’t money to keep things up.
At the end, he had been absolutely alone, no servants at all, when death took him. Then the estranged son had come back. The huge man had come to the island announcing that he, Goram Haygar, would take over. And one old servant had come back — the wisp of a man with Goram, now — to help.