It was a sound argument. The union leader had outlined an age-old method of finding happiness — through work. But Di Lauro had a silver tongue and glib cleverness in the use of words. He raised his hands to the men. His voice boomed out dramatically.
“What does life mean to you, friends? What do you ask? Do you demand nothing more than enough money to keep you existing so you can get on the job at the blast of the whistle every morning? Are you toiling ants, insects, that life means nothing to you but work? Take warning, friends! Don’t let yourselves be slaves of the money monsters who drain your life away. They will throw you aside when you can no longer produce the wealth they squander in riotous excesses.”
Di Lauro’s teeth gleamed in a triumphant snarl. His eyes blazed. Momentarily he was holding the workers spellbound, keeping them away from the jobs that gave them a living.
The union leader boiled with rage. He was a self-made man who’d worked hard and honestly all his life. His face still bore the marks of encounters of an earlier day. He lunged at Leon Di Lauro, and the rabid, wild-eyed agitator met him with a bruising attack. The two men clashed, each ready to fight to a finish.
The Secret Agent wondered. The union leader was obviously a hard-headed, two-fisted advocate of labor organization, loyal to his union, right or wrong. But what about Leon Di Lauro? Even the Agent, skilled at detecting hidden motives, was in doubt. Was Di Lauro, possibly an emissary of Summerville, spreading discontent, working for the DOACs, building a campaign to exploit man power?
While the Agent harassed his brain with conjectures, the bearded agitator and the union leader began a furious exchange of blows.
The mill hands stopped. Forgotten were their troubles in the excitement of witnessing a primitive battle.
Di Lauro was a savage fighter. He slashed into his foe with both fists pumping destruction The union leader fought valiantly, but he wilted under the blasting punishment. Di Lauro rocked his opponent repeatedly with devastating blows to the head and body. The bearded agitator was beyond the age of fist fighting, and he did not avoid all the clumsy swings that were hurled his way.
In a few seconds both of them were drenched with crimson. None of the workers attempted interference. The Agent himself saw that it was a fair fight.
Di Lauro had his foe on the way out. Grimly he bored into the union advocate, slugging in flesh-splitting blows. He pounded a hard left to the head, sunk a sickening right to the stomach, cut loose with a deadly onslaught to the chin. The union leader was finished.
Then the crowd suddenly melted away. Five uniformed guards came sprinting from the mill. They carried tear-gas bombs, guns, blackjacks, and they were roaring threats at Leon Di Lauro.
IT was the Agent who told the agitator to run. Those guards were not headed on a kindly mission. Given the license, they might even kill Di Lauro. The agitator took one sharp look at the oncoming group, muttered savagely, and headed down the residential street that adjoined the mill grounds. The guards redoubled their speed.
The Agent broke into a swift run, too, following Di Lauro, careful not to lose sight of the man.
All the while he had been maneuvering for the end of the strike, he had been thinking of Betty Dale and the gruesome fate awaiting her if he failed to obey the DOACs. He had to get back to Washington in time, and a whipping southeast wind worried him. A headwind could cut a plane’s speed in half. Even now the Agent’s margin of time was so scant that he was filled with a chilling, gnawing fear — but he wanted to catch Di Lauro.
Suddenly a siren screeched. A black touring car careened around the corner of a side street, swung into the road ahead of the Agent.
“X” gasped in terror. He saw death in that rocketing car. He visioned Betty Dale being thrown to those drooling old men, the leering DOAC executioners. How could he save himself? How could he get away from the men in that car, so he could save Betty from leaded destruction?
The ugly snouts of Tommy guns were protruding from the bounding, roaring car. The siren never ceased its shrill, ear-splitting blast. Obviously that shrieking racket was to drown out the snarling thunder of blazing sub-machine guns.
Those death-dealing weapons were manned by men in vivid blue hoods, by members of the DOACs! The siren increased in deafening intensity. The machine’s exhaust began to snort and boom.
Spouts of angry flame spewed from the Tommy guns. The roar of the pounding guns merged with the shrieking siren and the exhaust’s explosions. But those jagged tongues of powder flame didn’t lick out at the Agent, now darting for cover.
The target was Leon Di Lauro, the agitator.
Di Lauro stopped suddenly. His head went forward and his feet flew into the air as though he had tripped over a wire stretched knee-high across the road.
The Tommy guns poured a wicked stream of lead into the bearded man. Before he hit the ground, his body had been pierced a hundred times. He had been converted into a human sieve.
The death had come with merciful swiftness, for Di Lauro had died before the first shots had ceased echoing. The car came to a screeching, grinding, tread-destroying, skidding stop. Three hooded men leaped out. One carried a smoking pot. The others held grim-looking tongs. The dead man’s jaws were pried open. A shaft of molten lead descended from a ladle. The dead body gave a convulsive shudder as the live metal shriveled tissue.
The corpse was left in the center of the road, with a beard of lead attached to the broiled flesh of the chin. The Agent ground his teeth. The murder car streaked down a side street. DOAC vengeance had reached South Bolton, and that vengeance made the Agent searingly conscious of Betty Dale’s peril.
Chapter XVI
THE workers had swung around again. They were heading toward the corpse. “X” gnawed at his lips and surveyed them for a tense moment. They had been swayed by the words of Leon Di Lauro. Now they would be infuriated over his murder. And they might turn their fury on the Agent thinking he was an accomplice of the killers, because he had apparently pursued Di Lauro under the muzzles of their guns.
The least they would do would be to hold him for a thorough questioning, and now a delay would mean that another life would be taken by the fiendish DOACs. Up a side street in the residential section, “X” saw a man stepping into a car.
He dashed for that car. A cry sounded behind him. The mill guards were heading the mob. They were coming after him!
Something whined above the Agent. It was a bullet. The sweet, smiling face of Betty Dale rose before him. The roar of the mob behind him sounded like an angry storm at sea. “X” had done his work in South Bolton. He had broken the backbone of the strike, had prevented untold misery. He was the benefactor of those men behind him. Yet those he had protected would destroy him, and, finishing him, would rob Betty of life, too.
The car ahead was starting. The driver was shifting gears quickly. In a moment he would be on high, speeding away from harm. The guards were shooting at “X.” From a second-story window a man hurled a bottle at him.
The Agent dodged the missile. From another window an earthenware jug came spinning. The Agent saw it too late to avoid it entirely. The jug struck his shoulder, jolting him off balance. The Agent stumbled, regained his stride, and catapulted through the air.
His hands flung out, clutching the spare tire on the back of the moving car. His hands slipped, but he dug his fingers into the treads. Those treads saved him from the charging mob. “X” was dragged a quarter of a block before he could get sufficient hold to draw himself up.
Once his feet were off the ground, he quickly muscled himself to the top of the car, and crawled across the fabric. He lowered himself to the running board beside the terrified driver. “X” was loath to take advantage of the frightened fellow, but he was in no position to trust a stranger. The driver uttered a shout of alarm. The Agent cut it short with a sense-shattering left hook to the point of the jaw.