Only, it was hardly a kettle. It was a cauldron as big as a beer vat. And within that was still another seemingly endless coil of the glasslike rods. They looked the same as the rods which glowed white in the other caves. But no light came from the coils. In one spot, at the start of the big outer coil, there was a gap. A section of rod about the size of the gap lay off to one side.
“It beats me,” said Mac.
It beat Josh too. Finally he shrugged. “Waller’s radio is in the cave of the mastodon,” he said. “Let’s go back and see if we can contact Mr. Benson. It’ll save us going out to the plane to our own radio.”
It also saved them, had they known it, the dubious knowledge of finding that there wasn’t any plane in the sullenly heaving ocean at the foot of the ice wall. Where they had set the amphibian down, there was only empty ocean, now.
They re-entered the cave of the mastodon, and went toward the radio left by Waller. It was good enough to be able to transmit over their own secret wave length. They bent over it, absorbed in the effort to contact someone at Bleek Street.
And behind them crept doom!
CHAPTER XIII
The Missing Needle
There were just two things that could turn Smitty into a maniac. Ordinarily the giant was as even tempered as he was huge; but these two things could turn his disposition to acid. One was the use of his real name — either Heathcote or Algernon — instead of calling him Smitty. The other was — danger to Nellie.
That Nellie was in danger now was beyond doubt. The fragile looking blonde accepted ordinary dangers in her stride. It was urgent indeed when she broke down enough to yell for help. “Chief, we gotta do something!” cried Smitty. “We gotta do—”
Benson said nothing. He shifted the car into gear and began to lam toward lower Manhattan at seventy miles an hour. He could do that, because of the lateness of the night, the comparative freedom of traffic and the fact that the little private insignia on his cars just over the license plates were known to all cops and allowed him to break all ordinary traffic rules.
Seventy an hour — but toward what? “We gotta do something!” yelled Smitty. “Nellie’s in trouble and we don’t even know where she’s being held!”
“Yes, we do,” said The Avenger, tone quiet but deadly in its calm. Benson was as stirred as the giant, though he didn’t show it. The ice-eyed Avenger was the type of leader who inspired complete awe because he never let a follower down. When one of his reckless crew was in danger, everything else was stopped till that one was rescued. He was with his aides till death. In fact, he had once been with one — Josh Newton—beyond death. Electrocuted, indubitably a corpse, Josh had been brought back to life again by the marvelous skill of The Avenger.
“Nellie told us precisely where she was being held,” Benson said. “Clever place, too. One that wouldn’t ordinarily be thought of as a spot for a second crime.”
“A second crime?” said Smitty.
“Yes.” Benson twirled the wheel an inch and missed a ten-ton truck by about the same distance. “The first was murder.”
Smitty gaped at the white face and flaming, colorless eyes.
“Nellie said there was something with horns over her, and that the place had a beamed ceiling,” said Benson. “Smitty, you’ve seen a place with beamed ceilings recently.”
“I’ve seen a dozen places with beamed ceilings,” the giant said. “They’re a dime a dozen around New York.”
“Not places with beamed ceilings and also stuffed heads of animals around the walls,” The Avenger said.
Smitty yelped as if he had sat on something that squirmed. “Conroy’s place!”
“That’s right,” said Benson. “The rear library. The heads of lions, a zebra, tigers — and right over the divan the head of a North Woods moose. That’s the thing with horns she mentioned. A rather disconcerting thing to look up at, I’d say.”
“But Conroy’s place has been humming with cops,” the giant protested. “No one would stage a second crime there.”
“Why not? What better place to work in than one sealed by police and hence not to be entered by anyone? And at three o’clock in the morning, with all regular police routine concluded hours ago, the police themselves aren’t apt to come around.”
The car swerved into Fifth Avenue on screaming tires, righted itself, and went on its way, as silently as a shadow, to lower Fifth Avenue, where Conroy’s big apartment was located. And beside The Avenger, Smitty gnawed his vast knuckles in a frenzy of anger and hate and stored up an explosive wrath that was going to be very disruptive indeed when it was released in the midst of criminals.
But he wasn’t too insane with anger to make any false moves. “Quiet’s the word,” he said, when they’d neared the building door. “They’ll keep a sharp lookout on the chance that a cop might make a late call at the place where murder’s been done. And if the lookout spots us coming, the rats upstairs might kill Nellie.”
The Avenger nodded, and they looked at the walls of the buildings on each side of Conroy’s. The one to the south lacked just a story of being the same height. It was an older building, with ornamental stone curlicues under and over broad ledged windows. The two moved to that building. Smitty reached down, grasped Benson’s ankles, and lifted him at arm’s length up above his head. The Avenger caught the first window ledge; and from there on up, the two ascended each other’s bodies in a series of swift, giant steps that would have made a circus acrobat gasp.
From the roof, they could reach to the nearest window on the top floor of Conroy’s building. They were soon in a vacant apartment which Benson judged must be next to Conroy’s. They went to the hall, and The Avenger opened the door a crack.
Down the hall in front of Conroy’s apartment was a man, with his back to them. If anyone approached the street door, a man down there was to signal up at once. Then the attentive guard up here could pass the word, and whoever was in Conroy’s rooms could slide out, wait on a lower floor till the intruders had passed them on the way up, then get away through the street entrance.
Only, in this case, Benson and Smitty had thrown the methodical plan badly out of kilter by not approaching the street door at all. The man continued to stand with his back toward the two while Smitty stole down the corridor in his direction. The giant looked clumsy. You’d swear that bulk so vast as his must be muscle-bound, awkward and unable to move without all the noise usually attendant on a load of bricks. But he was as lithe as a stripling and could move almost as soundlessly as The Avenger when he wanted to.
He got to within a yard of the man before the fellow had any presentiment of danger. Then, when he turned, it was more on an uneasy hunch than because he had actually heard anything. His eyes went wide with amazement, and his mouth strained for a yell. But the yell never emerged.
A hand that was like a flexible ham was around his corded throat before a sound could come from his writhing lips. Another hand doubled into a colossal fist and poised above him. The fist smashed down. It was the giant’s favorite blow: to hit straight down on the top of a man’s head, like a great hammer sinking a railroad spike.
This time he hit a little harder than usual, with anguished thoughts of Nellie’s danger behind the blow. The writhing body instantly became corpse-still, and hung from the grip of his left hand like some queer and rotten fruit from a mighty bough. Smitty opened his hand and the man sagged to the floor.