Benson didn’t take life. With Mike, he could snap a slug on the top of a skull, glancingly, so that it knocked a man out instead of killing him. Creased him, in a word, as he had done here.
But not soon enough! For the man had already yelled a warning, and there were pounding steps on stairs outside, hastened by the sound of the shot.
From his left leg, The Avenger whipped Ike, the second of his unique little weapons. This was a throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle, with needle point and razor edge.
The sharp edge severed the bonds of Will Willis and the girl. And then there was the scrape of a key in the lock.
The door slammed open. A man came in, gun ready. He fired at The Avenger, which was a little like firing hastily at a shifting gray shadow. Mike spoke again! The man went down.
Benson slammed the door, locked it, and smashed the lock with a third shot so that no other key could open it. He rushed Willis and Doris Jackson to the window.
“Hang on!”
He lowered the girl on the thin silk cable, then let Willis down.
The door behind him crashed inward and a head and a gun appeared at the window. The gun spoke, and Benson dropped! But off the roof, not on it. The bullet had only bruised under the bulletproof body sheath.
It was about thirty feet down to the ground; but in the parking lot was a big closed truck left by some driver, who, while en route, had probably stopped at the Dragon for a drink.
It was only about eighteen feet down to that, and The Avenger lit on it lightly, and then leaped to the ground.
The sound of a siren split the air, as Mantis blew into the watchlike device. The sound started low, as if far away, and gradually built up as if a squad car were approaching.
Confused uproar sounded in the roadhouse, and Benson took an arm of the girl and of the elderly man and urged them fast toward the orchard where his own car was hidden.
And Willis suddenly jerked loose. He began to run, when they were halfway to the orchard — off into the night, away from the road. Benson turned to follow and the girl said:
“No! Let him go!”
At the same time her arms wound around him. He could not have moved without hurting her in an effort to tear loose.
He stood still till Willis’s steps couldn’t be heard any more.
“Why,” he said evenly, “did you do that? I needed him for information.”
Doris looked at him and her eyes filled. Then, disconcertingly, Benson had a hysterical, weeping girl on his hands. There was nothing to do but take her to the car and back to the city.
CHAPTER X
Wrecked Rollers
The new Marr automotive works was something that drew sightseers from all over America and technicians from all over Europe who thirsted for industrial knowledge.
The heart of the plant was its new strip mill, into one end of which went scrap iron and raw ingots, and from the other end of which came detailed parts of cars ready for final machining.
There was an entire building devoted to turning out the thin plates from which body parts were stamped. And in this building there was a line of rollers that had cost close to a million dollars to install.
It was a typical blooming-mill operation, with new improvements.
A bloom, or white-hot steel billet went through a succession of rollers. Each set of rollers was adjusted closer together than the last, and the billet became a thinner and thinner and wider and wider plate, till eventually it wound up as the thin-guage steel sheet which would make turret tops and fenders.
The blooms, fed into the thick end of the roller procession, were constantly tested by a metallurgical expert, to see that they weren’t too hard or too soft. Indeed, the very billet that did the damage that morning, was one of the one-in-three that had been so tested.
But you’d never think it had been tested when it hit that first roller.
There weren’t many men in the shop. There are few in a modern plant of that nature. But those who were there suddenly dropped everything they were doing at about ten minutes past ten in the morning. Because that was when it occurred.
The crash sounded like a sixteen-inch gun being fired. Only this was accompanied by a screaming of strained metal and a roaring of metal chunks, weighing tons, dropping to the concrete floor.
Wham!
The next roller, its rolls set closer, went with a report like the blowing up of a battleship!
And the white-hot bloom that had broken the first rolls and had scarcely been flattened at all, sailed past the second set still undented, save for a smaller chunk split off a corner.
Down the moving bed of the rolls it slid, while the cries of men resounded in the place.
“Stop the rolls!”
“Shut off that current!”
“Stop the—”
Bam!
The flaming billet was so much too big for the third set that it merely stayed hard against them while the moving bed buckled and ground underneath. But there was that foot-thick fragment split off before.
That wasn’t too thick to go through, but it was too thick to handle if it wouldn’t flatten.
Which it hadn’t!
One more set of rollers smashed with the unyielding fragment before they got the rolls stopped and examined, speechless, the damage done. Then the foreman handed his shop coat to a workman, rolled up his sleeves and, white-faced, hunted around for the metallurgist who had tested that bloom. He meant to strew pieces of his body around the plant.
“You damned fool! You let a billet go in with a carbon content so high it was like shoving a chunk of high-speed cutting steel in there!”
“I didn’t,” protested the lab man, shaking and gnawing at his knuckles while he stared at the appalling sight. A hundred thousand dollars would hardly cover the damage. What it would cost in lost time to the entire big plant before the rolls could be replaced was almost beyond computing.
“You must have,” shouted the foreman. “Stick up your fists. I’m gonna—”
“I tell you, the carbon content was O. K. Look — I’ve still got a sample of the run. I’ll test it again for you.”
He did, and the carbon content — an excess of which makes steel too hard and brittle to handle — was indeed all right.
“Then what,” said the foreman, “made that bloom bust the rolls?”
“How do I know,” wailed the lab man. “Where’s Jackson? Phineas Jackson? He hasn’t been around for days, and no one can find him. He’s the only man who could tell us what is wrong with that steel.”
The new mystery Marr-Car, put out by Marcus Marr.
The moment Josh and Mac had reported, The Avenger had contacted a friend at the plant.
One of the main reasons why Dick Benson was such a powerful factor in a fight against the underworld was that he had more friends than most ten men.
In the course of a life, short in years but very long in adventure, he had met hundreds of men in all walks of life: dock laborers, millionaires; beach combers, college professors; laborers, ambassadors. And no man ever met The Avenger without feeling awe for his genius, and feeling impelled to obey him if he ever asked for something to be done.
A glance at the Marr personnel had told Benson that he knew the tool-room superintendent. He had phoned the man to get in touch with him at once if anything unusual happened at the plant.
And the wrecking of the rolls was certainly not in the ordinary factory routine!
So The Avenger hung up the phone from that report and went out fast. He went to the downtown office, in the Marr Building, of Marcus Marr.
A hostile-eyed secretary was in the outer office like a prison guard.