Right over her was an awful thing with great horns, like a caricature of the devil himself. And this also stared at her out of glassy, immobile eyes, like a strange, deadly god staring down at a victim who lay on a sacrificial slab beneath its swollen snout. Nellie made a violent effort to get her arms free and failed. Her elbows were bound by cord that went around her arms and body several times; and her hands, folded at her waist, were clamped together by more adhesive tape.
“She’s prettier’n the other one, even,” said a man. There was regret in his tone but not too much regret. “Too bad the boss couldn’t pick ’em plainer lookin’.”
Nellie rolled her eyes to the side as far as she could. Now she saw four men, from about the chest up. The sight wasn’t any treat. The chests were scrawny. At the left armpit of each was a bulge indicating a shoulder holster replete with gun. And the four faces were those of rats more than of humans. A nice quartet of mobsters, Nellie decided. She tried again, frantically, to free her hands. But they could only flutter harmlessly at her waist.
“Here he comes,” said another of the four, in a low tone.
Nellie heard the door open, heard measured steps. Into her range of vision came the upper half of a body completely swathed by a loose overcoat so that you could not make out any single feature of it. There was a face, but because of upturned coat collar and low-drawn hat brim, you could see only the nose and eyes. And the eyes had dark glasses over them.
The man stood over the helpless girl, staring down at her. Nellie wished she could see the shielded eyes, then decided it was probably better that she couldn’t.
The man took a queer, divided thing from his pocket. Each leg of it had a needle point. A measuring compass, Nellie saw. The man leaned over her. His fingers experimentally parted her shining blonde hair from her scalp. He poised the measuring compass, with one sharp point just touching her left ear. The other point was lightly pressed at the exact top of her skull.
The man calculated a moment; then he drew a pen from his pocket. Nellie felt a slight sting as the point was pressed firmly against her head, and a fleck of ink released to dry almost instantly. The point marked was not quite halfway between left ear and center of the skull. It was a little nearer the ear than the top of the head.
Nellie’s hands began to beat wildly as, with sudden horror in her blue eyes, she sought to shift the binding adhesive tape. The tape didn’t shift. Her fingers could only flutter fruitlessly at her waist.
Richard Benson possessed two of the world’s oddest weapons. Pitted against criminals who went armed as heavily with machine guns and high-velocity short arms as was possible to obtain, The Avenger trusted to only these two. One was a little .22 revolver, silenced, so streamlined for compactness that it looked like little more than a blue length of slim pipe with a slight bend for a handle. This he called Mike; and Mike was holstered at the calf of his right leg, below the knee. The other weapon was an equally slim, razor-sharp little throwing knife. This he called Ike; and Ike was holstered at his left calf.
Faced with a submachine gun and two automatics in the doorway of Mallory’s office, The Avenger had wasted no time in words or false moves.
“Burn him down!” one of the three had said.
With the words, the machine gun began its deadly clatter. But just before, Benson had bent down like a court attache making a deep bow to royalty. The slugs went over his head. The man jerked to get the gun down; but a machine gun tends to tilt up and up, with the constant hammer of bullets passing from its muzzle. So that by the time the gun was lined down again, Benson was a yard to the right, with Mike and Ike in his hands.
The two men behind the machine gunner fired at the gray, shifting shadow that was The Avenger. Both hit!
But Benson stayed upright. The Avenger had devised a plastic, tougher than most steel, pliant as yarn, which he called celluglass. From this marvelous stuff, he had fashioned bulletproof garments for himself and his aides. The celluglass stopped the automatics’ slugs now.
The machine gun swung toward him again. Benson’s left hand flashed forward. Ike left the hand like a pebble from a catapult. The machine gunner screamed and tried to drop the gun and could not because his left hand was pinned to the hardwood stock like a butterfly pinned to a cork with a needle.
He flopped around, trying to get his hand loose, and screaming as each wrench at the knife produced more and more unbearable agonies. But no one paid attention to him. Mike’s silenced little muzzle had spat out a tiny leaden pea. And one of the two with automatics went down. But he wasn’t dead. The Avenger himself never took life. He deftly creased the gunman with Mike, slamming a small slug so that it glanced from the top of his skull, producing unconsciousness instead of death.
But the other man didn’t know that. He saw one pal trying to jerk his impaled hand from a machine gun, and the other lying on the floor, apparently dead. And this in a spot where the three of them were going to kill the one — the fellow with the dead-pan face and blazing, colorless eyes. The guy had on a bulletproof vest or something. The third man yelled hoarsely and sent three shots at the head with the virile white hair on it. But a head is a poor target, particularly when it is moving as rapidly as Benson was shifting his.
Mike spat a second time, and this third man went down. Then Mike served as a club, while Benson tapped the wildly screaming machine gunner where it would do the most good. The Avenger went to the telephone on the desk nearby, staring dispassionately with icy, pale eyes at three still forms as he did so. He reported to the police that they could pick up three burglars at this address and hung up.
He walked from the building to see Smitty sitting in one of their cars at the curb with a look of horror on his moon face. “Chief!” the giant gasped. “I came to get you. But just as I pulled up here, after missing you at the other two places, I began to get a message. It was from Nellie, chief! She’s in an awful mess.”
Benson listened to Smitty’s tiny radio. From it was coming, not a voice, but fluttering kind of tappings. Morse code.
“Nellie calling. S. O. S. Held in place with beam ceiling; thing with horns over me. Don’t know where. Come fast—”
The fluttering of her fingers at her waist had not been entirely fruitless. She had been tapping like that for minutes. Praying that it could be heard in time; that the man with the infallible brain would be able to figure out where she was and come to her.
CHAPTER XII
Mysterious Cauldron
Had Benson been piloting the plane in which Mac and Josh sped to British Columbia, it would have followed the map line of Smitty’s direction-finder with rulerlike precision. But Mac was piloting it. Mac was an excellent pilot; but he hadn’t the genius of The Avenger. Hence, he came out at the Pacific coast nearly a hundred miles north of the line. He spotted it quickly enough, with the sun’s rise. And he found that the mileage wasn’t wasted after all.
Two glaciers, Benson had said, within a hundred and ten miles of the line. They were almost at the most northern of the two; so Mac swung still farther north, and they located it. The glacier, from twelve thousand feet, was like a wide ribbon of white in the dark earth. But it wasn’t that smooth when they zoomed down. It was a tumbled mass, with great hillocks and slashing cracks. It poked its foot into the sea itself; and even as the two winged down, a huge section splashed off into the sea.
“Very interestin’,” said Mac indifferently. “But I don’t see what we’re lookin’ for, Josh. Signs of recent crackin’ that might expose somethin’ long hidden.”