“You know who I am?” gasped the girl.
“Yes!”
Benson gave the wheel a last twirl, and sent the car into a dark shed. He helped the girl out, closed the shed door.
“There’s a boat of mine half a block up, at dock,” said Benson. “We will stay on that till daylight, which isn’t far off, now. Then—”
She followed him up a dark gangplank to the deck of the Minerva.
“Then?” she said.
“Then we’re going to turn a lot of folks over to the police,” said Benson. His hand pressed her arm. “I’m sorry. It has to be that way.”
“I’ve known for a long time it would — have to be like that,” said the girl in a low tone.
“It was Tom who finally made you decide to fight the other way?”
“Yes,” said the lips behind the veil, “it was Tom.”
Benson led her to a dark hatchway, and down. He lowered the heavy lid over them as they descended. He opened a steel bulkhead door and light showed.
“Well,” said MacMurdie, speaking for the group that had been waiting in the hold of the Minerva, “we’d begun to worry a little about ye, Muster Benson. Did the skurlies give ye a wee bit o’ trouble?”
CHAPTER XIX
Down to the Sea
Tom stared at the veiled girl, trying to make out the features under the mesh. There was a very grateful look in his eyes. She had saved him from the chair when she had driven him away from Town Bank the night he had been such a fool as to hold it up with the Luckow mob.
But the rest looked at The Avenger.
There was grim finality in the pale, deadly eyes; the look of accomplishment that came to their colorless depths when Benson had finally gathered all the facts he needed to know to annihilate a supercrook.
MacMurdie knew that look. So he nodded.
“Ye’ve got our man where ye want him, then?” he said in his broadest Scotch accent.
“Yes,” said The Avenger, voice cold and calm as ice. There was a faint throb of a propeller as some boat passed the dock in the river outside. No one paid any attention; the river traffic is always heavy in the Hudson. The sound of the propeller died.
“That Town Bank crew of pirates—” burst out Wayne Crimm.
“They are not directly responsible,” said Benson. “They were only hired hands. It was another man who killed your father, shot Haskell with a silenced gun, and forced Maisley over the cliff. That last, by the way, was done rather well. The man drove a car with a pair of foglights under the regular headlights. As he approached Maisley’s car, the foglights were swung to the left, on a hinged bar. So two sets of lights rushed toward Maisley. He undoubtedly thought two cars abreast were plunging toward him, swerved right to avoid them, and went over and down.”
“You can prove all this?” said Tom eagerly.
Benson nodded. “Quite easily. I have the car outside, with the foglight arrangement. And the rear tire with the telltale V-cut in it is still on the machine. There will be fingerprints all over the car. We’ve got our man as surely as if he were seated in the electric chair this moment—”
A voice came from the door — hard, ruthless, triumphant.
“That’s what you may think, Benson. But let me assure you that you are a little mistaken. It isn’t you who have me. It is I who have you.”
They all whirled to face the voice. It was coming from the steel bulkhead door. The door had not been quite closed by Benson when he came in. It was an inch or so ajar.
“You are supposed to be practically omnipotent, Benson,” continued the man just outside the door. “But apparently there are tricks that can take you in. That car you mention was rather important to me. So on the slight chance that something might happen to it before I was through using it — which I am now — I fixed it so that I could trace it no matter where it went, or by whom it was driven. Didn’t you hear a slight clicking from the dash as you drove?”
The Avenger said nothing. Eyes like diamond drills gauged the distance to the partly opened steel door.
“That clicking was caused by a rather crude wireless sending apparatus,” the voice went on. “A simple spark signal, constantly sounding, and keeping me informed of the location of the machine. I had ample time to gather up Fiume’s men and Luckow’s men and come here to this dock. Your trail was as plain as though you had scattered colored paper in your wake.”
Tom and Wayne Crimm were pale and desperate-looking.
Josh and Rosabel, Mac and Smitty and Nellie stared at their chief’s face. It was as dead and expressionless as ever, of course. Even in moments of extreme stress it could express nothing.
The pale eyes were expressionless, too.
The group in the hold felt a slight jar. They heard propellers throb heavily under load just outside the hull. And they heard water lap gently against the steel shell between their ears and the river.
The ship was moving.
The propeller they’d heard a while ago was that of a stealthily approaching tug. Now the tug had slipped a line to the docked freighter and was towing it out to sea!
Smitty roared like a maddened bull, and dashed toward the steel door.
It slammed in his face.
They were trapped in here, while the Minerva bore them gently and easily toward the broad Atlantic.
“They’re going to scuttle the ship and sink us,” breathed Rosabel, dark eyes seeking Benson’s dead face.
The Avenger said nothing.
Nellie Gray spoke up. Her voice was as calm as if she were commenting on a new shade of lipstick.
“You’re all familiar with the Minerva,” she said. “Don’t you remember where the sea valve is located?”
Smitty suddenly smacked one big fist into an equally huge palm.
“Of course. The sea cock’s under the deck plates of this very compartment. That gang out there will find that out with a little searching. They’re going to have to come in here and take up the deck plates to do their scuttling job. When they do—”
His big hands opened and closed like the jaws of a steam shovel.
The killers outside, it seemed, found out about the location of the sea valve at just that time. There was a scrape at the door, as the great bar on the other side was raised.
Smitty leaped to the door as it opened an inch.
“Down!” snapped Benson.
The giant fell just in time. Over his head poured a burst of machine gun slugs. The gang wasn’t going to be circumvented quite so easily as he’d hoped. The instant the door was opened, they’d poured in lead to discourage just such attempts as Smitty had had in mind.
The cold, clear voice of the man who had addressed Benson a few minutes ago, sounded out.
“It seems we’ll have to take over that compartment you’re in, Benson. Go aft, into the next compartment.”
As the man spoke, the bulkhead door at the far end of the compartment, opposite the one through which Benson and the rest had come, was opened a little. It had been barred before, like the other one, to keep them prisoners. None of the little group had made a move.
“Go on! Into the next compartment!” the cold voice cracked out. “Unless you all want to be gassed.”
Benson and his aides didn’t care about that threat. They were always equipped to go through a gas siege. But there were Tom and Wayne Crimm to consider — and the girl who still kept her face veiled. They weren’t prepared for gas.
“Into the next compartment,” nodded Benson.
The group filed in, through the steel doorway, and the bulkhead door clanged shut behind them.
They were in the aft compartment, with the hull rounding at each side of them to form the Minerva’s stern. They could hear a little through the door that had just been barred after them; could hear the activities in the compartment where the fatal sea valve was.