Smitty’s rat-trap simile was now complete. He and Benson had stuck their heads in here. Now they weren’t going to be able to take them out again!
The flashlights gave dim illumination even to the far corners, there were so many of them. Among other things, they outlined Doris Jackson. So at least she was here, where Willis had said she was.
She was sitting on the filthy floor, thick with the coal dust of previous trips of this old scow. She was bound, again, and gagged. This time, instead of adhesive tape over her mouth, a dirty rag was used.
Three men with flashlights in one hand and guns in the other. Five with submachine guns! The leader of the cutthroat band, grinned with plenty of confidence at the giant and The Avenger.
Then his grin faded as his eyes rested on Benson. In his forehead, a slightly enlarged vein squirmed restlessly with bewilderment.
“Hey,” he said. “The big guy’s one of ’em, all right. But who’s this other one? We wanted the fella called Benson.”
“That’s him, ain’t it?” said another, staring at Benson.
“No. Benson’s got white hair — and a dead face. This guy ain’t got any hair at all, and his face moves.”
The Avenger’s features hadn’t moved much — had just become thinner-lipped and grimmer; but it was enough to reveal the difference from former days.
“Aw, that’s him, all right,” still another said. “Look at his eyes. No color in ’em. Like holes in his face. I’ve only seen one pair of eyes like that, ever.”
The Avenger spoke, quietly, confidently, as if there were an army unseen behind him.
“If it will rest your minds any, it is I, Benson. I don’t think you’d better use those guns.”
The men looked at each other in quick doubt. Benson seemed so calm, so sure. They had never seen any other man, faced with certain death, act like that. Even the big guy, Smitty, courageous as he was, had his eyes narrowed and was sort of waiting with bated breath for slugs to blast through him. But not the man with the pale eyes.
Then they rallied.
“Get it over with!” growled the leader, vein in his forehead jumping around. “Hey—”
The bulkhead door had opened a foot, and shots poured from the crack!
“What the—”
“The cops!”
“Douse the lights—”
One of the men dropped his machine gun and grabbed for his left arm, which was spouting red. Then the lights went out, and Benson and Smitty leaped — for the men, not away from them.
They had noted that all the shots came from just one gun. And whoever was at the door, as one lone person, was not going to be a factor in keeping these men cowed for very long. The odds were too great.
So Smitty and The Avenger began to whittle those odds down.
The big fellow felt a thigh, and compressed his fingers. A dreadful scream sounded out! Smitty could easily bend a silver dollar in his fingers, and flesh doesn’t offer the resistance that metal does.
He went on to somebody else, feeling around with his vast paws till they felt something. As he moved, he heard two smacking blows, like hitting a pillow with a whiplash, and then heard two men fall.
He knew that neither was Benson. The Avenger was demonstrating one of the many incredible abilities of his pale, deadly eyes. This was, an ability to see a little in the dark, like a feral animal. It gave him an immense advantage.
He saw, for example, that one of the men was thrusting a flashlight in front of him to take a chance and snap it on again. So he clipped that man just once in the side of the head. That once was enough!
He tripped another, saw Smitty with the neck of a man in each hand, and then Benson went on to where the girl was.
He picked her up and carried her to the bulkhead door. On the way he poked Smitty in the back twice. It was a signal meaning: Clear out with me, it’s all over.
Smitty flung from him the two he had been so enthusiastically working on, and darted to the door. Benson threw several of Mac’s little glass anaesthetic pellets into the space they had just quitted; then he slammed the door shut.
There were yells, then groans, then the thuds of bodies falling. The men in there would be no trouble to anyone for at least an hour.
Benson’s flash snapped on. He held it while he cut the girl’s bonds with his left hand. Then the flash rested on the wide eyes and thin face and wild hair of the man whose bullets had provided the distraction that saved them.
Will Willis.
Doris Jackson was sobbing and shivering, trying to control the hysteria rising from the relief from danger. Even at that she was beautiful, with her dark-blonde hair and her deep-blue eyes.
Smitty was looking at her admiringly. But Benson was not. His pale eyes were noting that Willis’s gun was being held in a peculiar way, half leveled, as if on the slightest provocation he would point it at them!
“This time,” said The Avenger quietly, “you’ll come along with us. We have things to ask you—”
And the gun did level — at Benson’s hairless head.
“Sorry,” said Willis. And his wide, erratic eyes were frightening. “I’m not going anywhere with anybody. Stay just as you are while I leave—”
Benson’s foot shot out and up like the toe of a dancer.
It caught Willis’s wrist, and the gun spun up in an arc and came down again.
“Somebody,” said Benson evenly, lips a grim line, “is going to say something. We’ve been working in the dark on this case too long.”
“Put your h-hands up, M-Mr. Benson,” came Doris’s fear-trembling tone. “You t-too,” she said to Smitty.
She had picked up Willis’s gun and was aiming it at their heads. It was a terrifying thing to see how it shook in her hysterical hands and yet remained in a killing line. The two were probably in greater danger than they had been a moment ago.
Willis promptly turned and ran for the square of light coming in the open hatchway. He leaped, caught the edge and drew himself up and over. The sound of his steps died, and the girl kept on holding the gun till it was too late even to think of following Willis. Then she let the gun sag.
Smitty promptly grabbed it, and his great hands were impatient on her slim shoulders. Her good looks didn’t impress him at all, then.
“You little dope!” he raged. “Why did you do that? Don’t you know we might have learned something helpful to all concerned if we’d had a chance to talk to him?”
Doris made an even more maddening reply. That was, to burst into tears and cling, sobbing, to Smitty’s arm.
The Avenger, pale eyes icy in his newly normal and regular-featured face, went back into the other compartment. He bent over one gassed man after another, going through pockets in search of some helpful clue.
In the coat pocket of the leader, the man with the uneasy vein in his forehead, he found something that narrowed his colorless eyes and formed a harsh square of his jaw.
That was a stub of an indelible pencil. Blue. Benson whipped out the extortion note he had taken from Marr’s house without Marr’s knowing it.
The pencil was almost certainly the one that had written the note. So they took that man back to the temporary headquarters in Detroit for questioning.
CHAPTER XV
The Man With the Pencil
The man was the fellow who had been shot through the arm by Will Willis. It was a clean hole. It was disinfected and treated by Dick Benson, himself, which was much more of an honor than the man deserved. For The Avenger was probably the world’s finest surgeon.
However, the wound, plus the loss of blood, plus the effects of that gassing back at the scow combined to put the leader out of this world for a while. Until next morning, in fact.
He was delirious part of the time, and so deeply asleep as to be almost unconscious the rest. Then, at about ten o’clock, some twenty hours after the scow episode, he opened his eyes, took some food and was all right. It was no longer inhumane to think of firing questions at him.