The ship came lower, wind screaming through its struts, motors silent. Lower, lower. And the speed of the plane was at minimum. Scarcely ten feet separated pontoons and water! Then something happened!
The pilot of the plane cut the speed too low. The plane’s tail sagged, the nose reared up. And there was a hasty roar of motors again, with the props pulling the seaplane out of a bad landing. Up and away, for another try.
The man with the two girls clenched his fists in anger. “The clumsy fool! Doesn’t he know how to fly?”
“Oh!” said Nellie. Even the exclamation was without life. On her lovely face there was little more than indifferent curiosity. “Look! Look there! I believe he’s going to crash.”
The belief sharpened into certainty in about six seconds. The plane hadn’t been sent up sharply enough. It was wheeling to get out to sea, but it was plain that it would never make it. It was too near shore — and the tall fir trees there.
At the very last, the plane banked hard, and almost missed. Almost, but not quite. A wingtip fouled! The plane slewed around. It smashed among massive trunks and thick branches!
“Got him anyway!” snarled the man with the dark glasses. “Everybody! Surround that plane!” The shouted command was unnecessary. Already men were jumping from behind trees and rocks and racing for the wrecked plane. At a more leisurely pace, the man with the dark glasses followed, and with him dutifully went the two girls.
They reached the wreck just in time to see the men lifting four still, dark forms from the cabin. One body took three to handle; it was so big. That was Smitty. The second was the pretty Negress, Rosabel. Another was slight and rather undersized. That was the relief pilot. The fourth was of average size with thick white hair in which a crimson thread of blood trickled from a scalp wound.
And that was The Avenger. Trapped and unconscious in the hands of his enemies!
CHAPTER XVII
End of the Line
The assorted crew of cutthroats had been busy enough in the caves before. Now with their dreaded opponent, The Avenger, out of the way, they became even busier. They swarmed from outer cave to boats with the priceless relics. Others rowed rapidly to the freighter, which had come obediently back within a stone’s throw of the glacier’s towering foot at the radioed command of the man with the dark glasses. The caverns would be emptied in about another hour at that rate.
Meanwhile, in the cave of the mastodon, there were nine people instead of three, leaning bound against the rock wall. Benson, Lini, Nellie, Rosabel, Smitty and the young relief pilot had joined Mac and Josh and Brent. There was a full load of tragic despair in that group.
Brent Waller was half out of his mind. A glance at Lini had told him that something terrible must have happened to her. In the first place, she had barely recognized him when she was led in. In the second, she had nothing whatever to say — because the man with the glasses who had made a robot out of her had left no instructions about what to say when he brought her in here. Her work was done.
Benson had told him quietly what was wrong. Brent had been too crazed to listen further for a moment. Then Benson had told him that he was sure he could repair the damage. He thought that if an electric current were run into that needle, to cauterize the brain injury as the metal was withdrawn, that Lini would be normal again in a few weeks. Nobody had to point out, however, how slim the chances looked of their ever getting free to try the delicate operation.
Nellie was almost as stricken as Brent. “It’s my fault, chief,” she said, almost weeping. “All my fault. It was a crazy stunt. I shouldn’t have tried it.”
“It was a good stunt,” said The Avenger, voice remarkably gentle. “It deserved success. Just one bit of bad luck ruined it.”
The giant, Smitty, had been struggling back to consciousness at last. He heard the latter remark, stared at Nellie, then looked bewildered.
“Hey, Nellie! You don’t look so much like a wooden Indian. Didn’t you get… Did I make a mistake?”
“Probably,” said Nellie. “You make a lot of mistakes. But which one in particular?”
“You know good and well which one. You got me to thinking you’d been stuck with one of those needles.”
“Well, I wasn’t,” said Nellie tartly. She was tense and taking it out on Smitty for the ghastly mistake she felt that she herself had made. “It was an act.”
“There wasn’t any needle at Conroy’s—”
“The man over me dropped it when you nailed him. It happened to fall on my left hand; so I managed to palm it, even with my hands bound. I had a flash then of what seemed a good stunt.”
“Stunt?” yelled Smitty. “What stunt? Going off and leaving us in that lake?”
“You don’t have to shout,” said Nellie. “I thought if I pretended to have been made into a robot, I could probably get straight to the side of the leader of this business, through Lini Waller. I thought I could then radio the chief and steer him straight to the place instead of his wasting hours trying to get the exact location. I thought that if I were in the crooks’ headquarters, unsuspected, I might— Oh, I don’t know what I thought! Capture them all single-handed, maybe, or something else equally silly. And all I did was lead the chief into a trap!”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Benson repeated quietly. “I got everything you radioed me.”
“Radio?” put in the young relief pilot, staring. “Were you receiving messages, sir? I didn’t hear the radio.”
“You noticed that it was on just before we landed, didn’t you?” said Benson.
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you hear a sort of rustling coming from it?”
“Why, I believe I did,” admitted the pilot.
“That rustling was Miss Gray sending me messages,” said The Avenger. “She has a radio at her waist, though it isn’t big enough to be seen. She was rubbing her finger gently over the transmitter, sending me code messages. She directed me straight to these caves first. Then, as we were about to land, she warned me again.”
“And we crashed,” said Smitty, eyes blinking with the pain of a head that had come in contact with a seatback.
“We crashed,” nodded Benson, face a mask, eyes as cold and calm as if he were in an easy chair in Bleek Street, instead of sitting bound, under a glacier, with death near. “I, in my turn, put on an act. I pretended to rise from a bad landing, to crash in the trees. Then I had intended to crawl out with Smitty and gas the men as they ran to take us. But there was one lone tree-stub where I couldn’t see it till too late. Instead of stripping the wings from the plane and coming to a comparatively safe crash landing, the tree-stub caught the right pontoon and swerved us so the crash became a genuine one.”
MacMurdie’s optimism suddenly reared its head. When everything looked impossible, then the Scot was the most cheerful. “Well, we’ll get out of here all right,” he said.
“Oh, sure,” said Smitty, ironically. “Easy!” Then he looked accusingly at Benson. “Chief, you knew Nellie wasn’t hurt the way I thought she was, and you didn’t tell me?”
“I couldn’t, with Lini there,” said Benson. “I got an inkling of her plan when we freed her in Conroy’s library. Her manner was wooden and queer, as if the missing needle were in her brain. But her words, about your rush against the three men, were not those of a person without a will of her own. But if I had given the show away to you, Lini, a robot spy in our midst, might have found out and ruined whatever plan Nellie had in mind when she got to this end.”
Smitty thought it over and decided that he still felt pretty sore about it. “How’d you fool the big shot when you got here?” he demanded morosely of Nellie.