And in his veined hand this wild-eyed maniac held a large revolver.
“You thief!” he squealed. “You dirty thief! You’re going to die, right now!”
And the revolver jerked straight in his hand with its muzzle almost in Smitty’s face! Lead and thin flame lanced from it!
Unfortunately, Mac and The Avenger had no way of knowing what had been done to the giant, less than two minutes after he had told Mac he was all right.
And they were too intent on working over their prisoners to speculate about it.
A truck had brought them to New York again after Benson had stopped the driver and exhibited a badge of the United States Secret Service — of which The Avenger was an honorary member — in front of the man’s startled eyes. The truck had delivered Mac and Benson and their prisoners clear to the Bleek Street entrance; and the driver would take nothing but thanks for it. He had heard of this man with the granite face and the pale, cold eyes.
Up in the vast top-floor room, The Avenger’s icy eyes drilled into the sullen faces of their three captives.
Benson had several chemical aids to the extraction of truth from unwilling guests; serums such as even the big city police departments didn’t even know existed. But he had one way that was superior to all the others, and that was a natural way. Natural to him, at least.
The Avenger’s deadly, glittering eyes had hypnotic power to an almost unprecedented degree; so as he searched the faces of these three thugs, he looked for the weakest will.
The possessor of that, as often happens, was the biggest man physically. He had a jaw like a snow plow, beetle brows drawn in a terrific scowl and a mouth that looked like a slash cut in stone.
But in his shifty eyes, Benson read paralyzing fear, and not very much will power.
His gaze remained on the shifty eyes. Mac, without any words being necessary, led the two other men out of the room. He locked them in a cell that Houdini, himself, could not have escaped from, then hurried back.
The fun was already commencing, short as the elapsed time had been. The man was so subjugated by the icily flaring eyes of The Avenger that he might as well have been Benson’s own hand.
“You meant to kill us tonight,” Benson said, voice pitched in a monotone that was as compelling as the drone of a buzz saw. “Why?”
“To keep you from talking to Doris Jackson.”
“Who is this Doris Jackson?” said Benson.
“I don’t know. We only know her name and what she looks like. We’re to get her, too.”
“Then you haven’t done anything to her, yet?”
“Not as far as I know,” said the man. His voice was like a phonograph recording, it was so mechanical and so without volition.
“Why are you to kill the girl?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“Do any of the others know?”
“I don’t think so. None of them that I ran around with had anything to say about it.”
“Where did you get that curious automobile you were riding in?”
“Detroit,” said the man, voice dull and docile. “We got it yesterday morning, about dawn, on the east shore of Lake Michigan, but it came from Detroit. We followed the closed van that took it across the State, all night.”
“What kind of car is it?”
“I don’t know. But it’s some buggy. It’ll go away over a hundred, and takes a plowed field like it was a smooth road. And you can’t hurt it.”
“You don’t know whom it originally belonged to?”
“No.”
“Or where it concerns Doris Jackson?”
“No.”
“Who is Robert Mantis?”
“Never heard of a guy by that name.”
Thus ended a period of an almost fruitless questioning. Dick Benson had gotten very little out of his carefully transported prisoners; just the one fact that Doris Jackson was concerned in some manner with a mystery car, the likes of which no one had ever seen before.
CHAPTER VII
Clagget’s Field
First thing next morning, Josh Newton and Mac stood before The Avenger’s big desk and stared into the icy, colorless eyes of their chief.
They could still be awed and disquieted by those eyes. They never quite got used to them.
“Take the small plane,” said Benson, voice quiet but vibrant with authority, “and go to Detroit. See if any manufacturer either there or in Flint has put out a mystery car lately. Some machine that has grown in a guarded laboratory and was recently sneaked out into the country for a secret test.”
“ ’Twill not be easy,” said Mac gloomily. The dour Scot was the world’s worst pessimist. “A manufacturer wouldn’t report even the theft of such a car; he’d be anxious to avoid publicity.”
“You can find out,” said Benson, voice so quietly confident that it made the two feel they could accomplish any miracle. Which is one of the qualities of leadership.
Josh and Mac turned and went to the door. Near it, was Rosabel, Josh’s pretty wife, who was as well-educated and as mentally sharp as her husband.
Josh kissed her, said: “So long,” and went out. But the way he did it told how close the two were. And Rosabel’s smile showed that she knew, as she always did when Josh left her, even on a seemingly safe assignment, that he might never come back alive.
The Avenger’s icy eyes rested on Rosabel.
“Take care of things here,” he said. “Above all, if this Doris Jackson calls, get her to come here if she feels she can do so safely. Find her exact location if she thinks she’d better not risk it. I’m going after Smitty. It’s odd he hasn’t showed up by now.”
He went to the basement and got into one of his cars, a coupé that looked old and sedate but which had a motor like a locomotive. He started again on the trip to Clagget’s airfield which had been interrupted last night.
Nearly nine hours had passed since the giant had said he was O. K., and there had been no sound from him. It was possible, of course, that some emergency had arisen calling for instant action on his part — trailing someone to some distant part, perhaps. But this was not probable because he would almost certainly have reported the fact. And there had been no radio or any other kind of message from him.
So Benson thought it was high time to try to find out what had happened.
The brain behind the colorless eyes was like a filing cabinet, in which maps were stored as well as facts. Dick Benson knew the section of the country around the abandoned airfield so well that he was able to pull into a back road a mile from it without hesitation, though he had never chanced to set foot on the field before. And he made his way over open fields and through woods to the spot without a moment’s uncertainty.
There were woods around the field, which does not make a landing spot ideal, even when the field is large, as this one was. Perhaps it was one of the reasons why it had been abandoned: crack-ups by amateurs in those fringing trees.
The weeds were eyed by Benson with approval. Through them, he started for the desolate-looking small hangar at the side of the field.
Looking directly down on the spot, from a low plane, perhaps, you could have seen The Avenger’s body slowly advancing. But from the eye level of a man standing, he couldn’t be seen at all. He was a past master at traveling through such cover, as many a jungle head-hunter could have testified. He slid through the tall weeds and grass with scarcely a ripple betraying the fact that anyone was approaching the building.
At the door, he paused, then went to the side instead of risking the opening of the big portal. The hangar was of wooden planking.
He took a thing like an atomizer from his pocket, put a couple of grayish pellets in it, and screwed on a tiny nozzle. The pellets were an invention of MacMurdie. They held more than acetylene heat; made the little atomizer contraption a tiny but marvelous blowtorch.