The Avenger hurled the jerking body toward the man with the leaping vein in his forehead. At the same time, he jumped to the right where the other two men stood with their guns poking uncertainly around as they tried to get a clear shot at the man with the thick white hair.
Now and then a person appears whose muscles seem to have twice the power, ounce for ounce, of average muscle. The Avenger was that type of person; as these men swiftly found out.
The two men fired as Benson twisted toward them. And missed. Then one was reeling back from a terrific blow to the jaw, and the other was trying to run.
The Avenger’s steel-strong hand got him by the neck. He was jerked back. At the same time, Benson’s foot arced out and forward; and the gun in the hand of the leader, who was working himself free from the hideous embrace of dying Beanie, flew from his hand and slammed against the plank wall of the hangar.
The man Benson had by the neck was over six feet in height and weighed well over two hundred pounds. In addition, the look of the cartilage of nose and ears told that he had been either a professional boxer or wrestler.
The Avenger was about sixty pounds lighter and six inches shorter.
Which meant that it took Benson about twenty seconds to subdue him instead of five or six. Which was lucky for the leader of this deadly crew. For it gave him just time to scramble to his feet, run like a scared rabbit to the door and escape, before The Avenger’s fingers could settle on the nerve centers in the back of his opponent’s neck and put him to sleep.
Benson dropped the third man and was after the fourth like a mongoose after a deadly snake. But the man was halfway across the weed-grown flying field by now; and before even Benson could get near him, he had burst into the fringing woods. Then there was the sound of a car motor started with frenzied speed.
The Avenger stopped his running, but kept on going — away from the field and across country to where his own coupé was parked. He had learned one thing anyhow. A thing he didn’t believe any of the men knew they had given away, so brief had been the mention of it.
The place where Smitty had been taken. Smitty and “the old crazy guy,” whoever that was.
Wyler’s farm and the boathouse thereon.
CHAPTER VIII
Will Willis
The farm was abandoned and for sale, which allowed its location to be quickly learned from a real estate company. It was beautiful, along the Hudson, with a tumbledown boathouse in the midst of trees.
A form suddenly appeared in the branches of the trees nearest the back of the boathouse and dropped lightly to the ground, where high underbrush, and the rear wall of the boathouse concealed it nicely. It was Dick Benson.
The Avenger leaned close to the wooden wall, and listened. He heard the breathing of two men. Two only, in the place. Then he heard a strangled curse; the voice of Smitty.
He looked down.
About two feet up from the ground, two holes had recently been bored. They were on each side of a row of nails indicating one of the main supporting upright beams of the weathered but stout old building.
Through these holes came the two ends of a steel cable, which had been twisted and fastened together. The Avenger’s eyes showed fast comprehension as the cable moved, and there was a curse from inside again.
Smitty had broken an ordinary rope. So the second time he was taken, his captors had used steel cable. They had passed a loop around the giant’s seated body, had run the ends back of him through the wall on each side of a big beam, and there had fastened the ends, binding him with a coil of steel. And let him break that!
The ends had been spliced with powerful pliers. But The Avenger’s slim fingers had strength unbelievable. They managed to twist loose the steel wires composing the cable, one by one, without tools, till the ends hung free.
There was another straining at the cable a moment later, the ends whisked through the holes, and Smitty rumbled on the other side of the walclass="underline"
“Hey! I’m loose. Those chumps must not have fastened the cable as tight as I thought— Chief!”
Smitty had looked through one of the holes and seen an eye as icy and pale as ice in moonlight.
Benson went around and into the boathouse. Smitty was stretching his great body. Then he untied another man, who had been bound only with rope.
The man was elderly, with straggly gray whiskers and a sparse mop of gray hair that could well have stood barber’s shears. The hair and the wide stare in his eyes made him look like a mildly insane man.
“Will Willis,” Smitty said, jerking his head toward his companion. “I caught him sneaking around Clagget’s field last night. I mean, he caught me. I’d just finished telling you I was all right when I turned and looked into this guy’s gun. He even fired at me — but missed.”
“They stole my inventions,” muttered the elderly man, eyes staring.
“A minute later,” said Smitty, “a couple of guys, who’d hidden in the hangar without my knowing it, came out and got the drop on both of us. I’d have bopped them, but this guy, who says his name is Will Willis, fell against me. I think he did it on purpose.”
Smitty glowered at the man, who only ran his hand through his wild hair and said:
“My inventions. They stole them.”
Benson’s eyes, like pale diamond drills, were on the wide, staring ones.
“What inventions, Willis?” he said.
“They stole them,” Willis said, as if he hadn’t heard The Avenger.
“Who stole them?”
He heard that a little better. “I don’t know. Somebody. Somebody stole them all.”
“You mean, the new features of the mystery car?”
“How do you know that?” The wide eyes dilated even more. “Who are you? What do you know?” The tone dropped again. “Can you tell me where my inventions are?”
“You’re not well,” The Avenger said.
Suddenly his hand went out, and a deft thumb rolled the man’s upper eyelid back. For an instant, before Will Willis jerked away, Benson stared at the exposed eyeball. His own eyes glittered a little more brightly, but he only said again:
“You’re not well. You had better come with us to my place, where we can help you.”
The three went out of the boathouse.
“I was a dumb to get caught last night like I did,” said Smitty sheepishly, as they got into the coupé. “But this old dumbbell was so clumsy he knocked me off balance. If it was clumsiness.”
The Avenger said nothing. He hurtled the car toward New York.
They’d gotten clear to Manhattan and were crossing Park Avenue, when Willis, who had been motionless for a long time, suddenly stiffened and went as rigid as a bar of iron. The breath whistled between his clenched jaws, and his eyes rolled up till only the whites could be seen. A kind of animal bleat came from his taut lips, and he began to flop around like a hooked fish.
“Hey! He’s having a fit of some kind,” yelled Smitty. “There’s a drugstore. Stop!”
Benson already had the car stopped. Smitty dragged the flopping body out — and it was suddenly leaping and running down the street.
“Get him—” cried Smitty, starting to run, himself.
There was a line of cabs ahead, several of them with motors running. Will Willis got to the first. Insanely, he dove with his fist at the driver, who had been reading a newspaper and hardly knew what hit him. Then Willis jumped into the cab — and was gone!
The Avenger had not left the coupé. He jerked it forward, slowed for Smitty to leap onto the running board and get in, then started on. But the cab had rounded the next corner; and when they got to it, half over the curb with its nose against a hydrant, it was empty. Willis had leaped out, and Heaven knew where he was, now.