They could barely catch the response.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bob.”
“Yes, you do!” snapped Mantis. “You know all about it. Much more than I ever dreamed, I’ll bet. Now — where is Phineas Jackson.”
Wilson laughed. There was perfect self-control and apparent good nature in the sound.
“If you can prove I have anything to do with Jackson,” he said, “you’re a very smart boy, indeed.”
Mantis literally snarled the answer to that.
“I know you’re fiendishly clever, Cole. I know you’d leave no proof behind. I haven’t even looked for proof. I’m working on logic. And logic tells me you know where Jackson is.”
There was another good-natured laugh. And then something not nearly so good-natured. The smack of bone on flesh, and the thud of a body.
It was plain to the three in the hall. They knew what had happened without having to see it.
Wilson, laughing and apparently looking as if he wouldn’t hurt a fly, had suddenly whipped a knockout blow to the jaw of Robert Mantis. And, now, there was another sound. A sound which set Benson at the lock of that door in such a hurry that he paid no attention to opening it deftly, but simply forced it as fast as possible.
But the lock didn’t rasp back fast enough. The three jumped into a room, to see an unconscious man on the floor — and a significantly open window across from him.
The man on the floor was Mantis, right enough. The Avenger leaped over him to the window.
Four feet away was a fire escape. And as Benson stared down, he was just in time to see a form whisk around the corner of the building down there.
Wilson was gone! Wary as an animal, he had somehow sensed more danger in the offing than that presented by Mantis, then had fled!
“The guy’s got a sixth sense or something,” growled Smitty.
But Benson didn’t listen. He was already leading the way to the door again, and upstairs.
His brief study of the mailbox names and their positions was coming in handy now. Apartments occupied to right and left, but the one directly above apparently vacant.
He went to that one and got the door open. The three were suddenly staring at an elderly man who looked a little familiar, yet whom none but The Avenger placed at once.
Then Mac and Smitty got it, too.
The man looked vaguely like Will Willis, with his hair trimmed and combed, without the scraggly whiskers, and without the wild light in his eyes that had made him look like an unkempt wild man. It was the inventor, Phineas Jackson, with his disguise of Will Willis removed.
“Hello,” he said, not seeming very relieved at the entrance of the three. “How did you get here?” He looked befuddled and added: “And where is ‘here,’ anyway?”
“Say, don’t you know where you are?” said Smitty.
Jackson shook his head.
“I was brought here blindfolded and half drugged. I don’t know who brought me, and I’ve never seen my captor. But whoever he was, he has treated me well.”
That statement was borne out by appearances.
There was a slim chain to a small handcuff over each wrist of the inventor. The chain kept his hands from moving more than eight or ten inches apart. The door had been triple-locked, as Benson had noted when he got in. Aside from these two things, there was no sign that Jackson was a prisoner at all.
There was a cot, an easy-chair, magazines and books on a reading table with a box of cigars next to them. There was a tray that had recently held food, and there was a large thermos bottle to keep drinking water cold.
Jackson certainly hadn’t been abused here.
“You are above the apartment,” said Benson, pale eyes like diamond drills on the man’s face, “of Cole Wilson.”
“Cole Wil—” began Jackson. Then he stopped, looking completely bewildered, but very much on his guard.
“Well,” he said, “I may be above his apartment, but I am quite sure Cole could not have had anything to do with bringing me here. And, in any event, it isn’t the fact that I’m held prisoner that has been bothering me. It is worry over the fate of my—”
He stopped again, looking fearful of saying too much. But he might as well have gone on. Benson finished for him.
“Worry over what has happened to the Marr-Car?” he said.
Jackson looked as if resolving to say no more, then seemed to change his mind.
“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “That’s what I’ve been worrying about. The new-design car. It is mostly my creation, the Marr-Car. And it was stolen, and since then I’ve been running around in a sort of disguise trying to find it again—”
“And now and then taking time off to get your daughter out of trouble,” put in Smitty.
“Yes. Then I was brought here. And the car—”
“The car,” said The Avenger, looking as if he now knew many things, “is safe. And we know where it is. If you like, we’ll take you with us. We’re going to it, now.”
They went out, after Benson had melted the chain, holding Jackson’s wrists together, with the little blowtorch. The handcuffs he would have to wear like bracelets till they had more time.
On the next floor down, they stopped briefly at Cole Wilson’s door. Mantis was sitting up, rubbing his jaw. He scrambled to his feet when Benson entered the room, then he relaxed when he saw it was not Wilson after him again.
“You!” he said, moving his jaw to see if it was in normal working order. “I almost caught the man behind all this monkey business,” he began.
But Benson cut him off. “We know what happened. We are going to where the Marr-Car is hidden, now. Want to come with us?”
Mantis did, emphatically. They all went out and piled in The Avenger’s car — Mantis, Jackson, Smitty, Mac and Dick Benson.
And then to the place where Nellie was still on guard near that garage.
The diminutive blonde stepped from the doorway of a vacant building as the men came up the sidewalk, after parking their car several blocks away.
“That’s the place,” she said, nodding down the street.
There was a garage building there, with a vacant lot on one side and a warehouse on the other. The garage looked almost too small to be a public garage, but too large for a private one. It would hold probably ten or a dozen cars.
It had a window, boarded up, on their side. The big doors, they could see, were apparently nailed shut. It certainly looked as if it had not been used for many months, which would have roused The Avenger’s suspicion even without Nellie pointing the way.
“No one has tried to drive the car out?” he asked.
Nellie shook her head.
“Nobody has been in or out since I last contacted you,” she said.
Benson’s pale eyes narrowed at that.
“You’re sure?”
“I watched every minute,” said Nellie. “Why? Does that surprise you?”
Benson didn’t answer. But there had been a slight tightening of the muscles of that newly expressive face of his that had hinted surprise, as if he’d been sure someone had either left or entered.
“We’d better go and get the car at once,” he said, “before something else happens to it.”
“Yes!” exclaimed Jackson emphatically. Obviously, all he could think of was the new product embodying so many of his brain children. Particularly the new steel. “Yes! That is what we must do first!”
They got to the garage door. This street, just off busy Jefferson Avenue, was practically deserted. A small oasis of vacant buildings, weedy lots and storage places, it held no one to watch them.
“The door isn’t boarded up, as it looks to be,” said Nellie. “That boarding is a fake; it moves when the doors are moved.”
She pushed at one, and it rolled easily open, phony bars and all. The Avenger didn’t enter at once. He stood and looked at that door.