“What happened to me?” He stared at Wilson.
“You must have been held up, knocked out by burglars, Mr. Ormsdale,” said Wilson sympathetically. “I was riding past, and stopped off to have a word with you. But I saw the door open and came in and found your butler knocked out. Then I came back here and found you on the floor. I went out for the police, and found Mr. Benson just coming in.”
“We’d better get the police, now,” said The Avenger, voice even. Ormsdale’s hard blue eyes were on him in a way showing that the name was familiar to him,
“Police?” Ormsdale snapped, struggling up on one arm. “Oh, no. No — no! Not at all.”
“But—” began Wilson, looking perplexed.
“Not necessary. Just give me some unwanted publicity,” said Ormsdale. “You can see”—he looked around—“nothing has been taken. No harm done. And I didn’t get a glimpse of whomever it was that knocked me out. So I’d do the police no good — and they’d do me no good.”
The Avenger’s colorless, all-seeing eyes were on the phone. The instrument was off its cradle just a little.
“I see you were phoning when you were attacked,” he said. “Do you mind telling me who?”
“I do, sir,” bristled Ormsdale.
Benson said nothing to that. He went to the phone and spliced the wires. He got a special operator. And the name of Dick Benson was very potent indeed.
“So you were trying to trace a man named Robert Mantis, in New York,” he said to Ormsdale, who was now sitting up and looking angry.
“All right,” he said, “all right. So I was. What business is it of yours?”
“I have reason to think Mantis is in danger,” said Benson.
At that, Ormsdale’s manner changed.
“He is? Oh, my! I’m sorry to hear that. More than sorry.”
“Why?” said Benson.
“Because he’s an employee of mine,” said Ormsdale. “Anyway, he was an employee. Nice young fellow and very capable. I’d like to get in touch with him and ask him to come back. He quit in a huff a few weeks ago.”
He seemed more concerned over Mantis than over his own injuries. And The Avenger watched him with icy, pale eyes, but on his face was no more expression than there is on the frozen face of the moon.
CHAPTER IX
News of the Girl
Benson had taken the rooms adjoining the one in the names of Mac and Josh and had them thrown into a suite. These would be temporary headquarters in Detroit. He had just opened the traveling laboratory he always took with him — a marvelously compact and complete set of apparatus in a case about the size of a wardrobe trunk.
And then Mac and Josh came in.
They looked as if they had been run through a meat grinder. Mac had a blue eye and an egg on his forehead. Josh walked with a limp and was dabbing at a cut on his cheek, in addition to having a swollen lip.
“We had a fight,” said Mac.
“Go on,” said Smitty unbelievingly. “I’ll bet you just tried to pick up the wrong girl.” Which was funny, applied to dour, homely MacMurdie.
“Ye mountain of larrrd,” Mac began. But the cold eyes of the chief recalled him to his reporting.
“We are still on the trail of news concerning a mystery car,” said Mac. “We got some news, too! Then, while we were pumping a workman who must be a lot better mechanic than he is a thinker, a gang jumped us.”
“Six of them,” said Josh, touching his swollen lip. “The reason was, they wanted to get that workman before he could say anything to us. It was near the factory where he works. The man got away, I’m glad to say. We managed to keep them too busy to follow. Then they started shooting. But a squad car showed up; so they beat it.”
“You say you did learn of a mystery car?” asked The Avenger. And the fact that he said nothing of the danger they had escaped did not mean that he wasn’t thinking of it. His eyes were not quite so icy as they regarded the battered pair.
“Yes,” said Mac. “Most of it came from that workman. Marcus Marr is the mon who put it out. His company’s been working on it secretly for a year and a half. It’s almost ready to market, and it’s a honey. There’s a new type Diesel motor, set over the rear axle instead of up front. It’s streamlined, teardrop shape. Twice the power of ordinary cars. But the most unusual thing about it is the steel it’s made of.”
Mac gingerly touched the lump on his head.
“They’ve found some new way of tempering steel at the Marr plant. It takes an ordinary good alloy and turns it into something as good as tungsten. The man said the new processing is the invention of a guy named Phineas Jackson. He’s head research worker for old Marr. Several of the new features on the mystery car, which they plan to call the Marr-Car, are his. Now — he has disappeared. Gone from his home. The plant can’t find him anywhere, and they’re going crazy about it. And that was all we’d learned when the gang broke up our tea party.”
Smitty said: “I don’t see how a new way of treating steel would be so important—”
But MacMurdie shook his head. He remembered the weird machine that had rammed and actually disabled Benson’s tanklike special car — and scarcely suffered dents in the process.
“It’s apparently the most marvelous thing ever discovered in automotive circles. It’s got the rest of the Detroit manufacturers wild. They can see themselves going out of business if—”
The phone rang. Benson picked it up.
“Send him up at once,” he said. And the three men noticed a glitter in his eyes that made them look like agate under white light.
“New development?” said Smitty.
“I think you might call it that,” said The Avenger quietly. “A visitor is on his way up. His name is Robert Mantis.”
“What?” yelped Smitty.
And then there was a knock at the door and they let him in.
Mantis’s pleasant, youthful face was twisted with worry and fear. And he, too, showed signs of having been knocked around recently, though not as recently as Mac and Josh.
“Mr. Benson!” he said. “Thank Heaven you’re in Detroit — and that I found you so quickly. We need your help.”
“We?” said The Avenger.
“Doris Jackson and I,” said Mantis. “I was taken prisoner in New York just after that fight near the trucks,” he said, looking at Smitty. “They carted me off to a warehouse or some place. A little while later the men came in with Doris. They’d got her somewhere. Their leader, a fellow who doesn’t look like much but is a rattlesnake if I ever saw one, was for torturing her to find what she knew. But they didn’t. I think a call from somewhere must have come for him, because he hurried out. If I ever get my hands on him — a man with a slightly enlarged vein in his forehead that moves when he’s angry or excited.”
Benson nodded. That checked. It was the man who had headed the little group of choice thugs at the hangar.
“Go on.”
“There isn’t much more to say,” Mantis replied. “We were held there for hours. I kept working at my bonds and finally got them off. We picked a time when no one was around, escaped and came here by plane. Here, by the luck of the devil, part of the gang spotted us again, and Doris was recaptured. I got away, but I hung around, hidden, and heard where they were going to take her. I know about where the place is. It’s a roadhouse, west of town, on the Ann Arbor road. I’ve heard of the place. The Red Dragon. Anything goes, there.”
Those pale, infallible eyes of The Avenger were staring at him.
“Is Doris Jackson related to a man named Phineas Jackson?” Benson asked.
“Why, yes,” said Mantis. “She’s his daughter. Do you know anything about Phineas Jackson?”