“Fine?” said Smitty, looking perplexed.
“Yeah! We got kind of a court. See? I’m the judge and my two pals, here, are the jury. Now, we’ve judged y’u, and we’ve fined y’u ten bucks.”
“Ten dollars?”
“Y’u heard me. Come on, shell out, or we’ll go to work on that mouth of yours that we don’t like.”
Smitty looked bewildered, but wasn’t. Not at all. He knew just what he was up against; a variant of the cruel kangaroo court, in which prisoners judge other prisoners and fine them whatever amount they think they can wring from them.
“Come on, come on,” snapped the fighter. “Shell out!”
“I ain’t got any money,” said Smitty. “They stripped me, in the office.”
“Y’u can get it, can’t y’u?”
“Well—”
“Ah, cut out the soap,” drawled the snaky-looking man wearily. “Give him a sample. The guys on the wall are looking the other way.”
“Okey doke,” said the fighter cheerfully.
His professionally fast left hand lashed out toward Smitty’s abdomen, to be followed an instant later by a smashing, knockout right to the jaw.
But some very peculiar thing happened.
The left hand hit home — and seemed to bounce back as if it had collided with a wall of stone and rubber. Which was about what Smitty’s abdomen, sheathed with tremendous pads of muscle, was.
The right hand didn’t hit home at all. The giant had moved his head sideways three inches so the fist went harmlessly over his shoulder; then he had caught the fighter’s arm in a careless left hand.
The prize fighter yelled suddenly with anguish. The man with the apish grin jumped Smitty from the right, and the snakelike man, swearing, moved in from the left.
Smitty, still wearing his good-natured look, and with his moonface seeming amiable and slow-witted, smashed the man he held first to the left and then to the right. He handled the fighter’s body as if it had been a rag doll. A rag doll weighing practically nothing.
The fighter’s body knocked the snaky man back a yard and bowled the apish-looking one clear off his feet. With the last smack, Smitty indifferently opened his hands, and the boxer fell, too.
It wasn’t the end. All the other men in the yard were gaping at the amazing display of strength. The three bullies knew their power was slipping. If they let the giant get away with this, there would be no more rulership, no more juicy fines wrung out of them.
The man with the mashed nose bored in in a professional crouch. The snaky one slid close with a knife made out of a file. The third suddenly had a stabber in his hand made from a fork that had been straightened and left with only one sharp tine.
Smitty had never learned to box. He simply hadn’t bothered to. It had never been necessary. It wasn’t now. He let the prize fighter hit him in the chest, as a grown man plays with a child by letting it hit him as hard as it pleases. And while the man was thus engaged, Smitty reached out and seized hold of the left forearm the man had up in a supposedly efficient guard.
He broke the arm!
Then he caught the other two men and knocked their heads together, taking a light gash on the back of his hand from the file-knife as his sole punishment.
There was silence in the yard, and then an audible, concerted sigh.
“The guy’s an elephant,” somebody whispered at last.
Smitty stared at the whisperer with mildly surprised, slow-witted blue eyes. Then the guards came.
“All right, break it up. Break it up! Back into the building. And you — gorilla — you’ll catch it for this. Think we can have fights in here all the time?”
“They tried to hit me,” said Smitty mildly.
“You started it, tough mug. I saw the whole thing. Go on — into the building.”
Later in the day, Smitty watched the fading of winter daylight through the bars in his cell window. But he wasn’t seeing the daylight.
He was seeing a strong, wax-white face that never, in any set of circumstances, moved a muscle. Because it couldn’t change. He was looking into flaring, icy, colorless eyes under a thick shock of virile, snow-white hair.
Smitty was in a bad spot. But he could look at that mind’s-eye picture of The Avenger and feel that somehow he’d be gotten out of it. All The Avenger’s aides felt that way: that while Benson lived, they’d somehow be gotten out of the worst kind of jams. Which was one reason why they were willing to take such long chances.
Smitty suddenly heard a man clearing his throat in a meaningful sort of way. He turned from the window. He heard the sound again, from near the barred door.
He went there, covering the length of the cell in three short strides, squeezing between cot and wall. And he found that the throat-clearing came from the barred door of the cell next to his.
“Smith!”
It was a ghost of a whisper. The giant barely caught it.
“Stand next to your door so you can hear me, but pretend you aren’t listening.”
Smitty stood, vacant-eyed, next to his cell door. The whisper went on.
“You’ll have a mouthpiece, or friends, or somebody comin’ to see you. I want you to give ’em a message. I saw you knock Hammer and his two pals out, so I know you’re on the up and up.”
Smitty leaned against his door, and stretched his great arms as if sleepy. That was for the benefit of a man across the narrow corridor, who could see Smitty’s door — and the one next to it — if he looked.
“It’s about Judge Martineau,” the whisper came.
The giant almost grunted aloud with the mention of that name. The most important thing, The Avenger had said, on their calendar of investigation.
“The guys who did it, crossed me and put me in here,” the whisper went on. “I got a hunch I’ll never get out — even to go to a courtroom. So I’ll get back at ’em by tellin’ what I know. I drove the getaway car the night the judge was burned down in the Friday the Thirteenth Club. There were two guys in the car, but the one who went into the club and—”
There was a clang as the big lever at the end of the corridor threw the bars opening the cell doors. It was six o’clock, time to file down to dinner in the first-floor mess hall.
Smitty walked out with the rest. He flung one quick glance at the man in the cell next to his. He hadn’t noticed him before.
The man was slight, wiry, with a scarred, bitter face and sullen fright showing in his muddy-brown eyes. Smitty glanced swiftly away again so that no one should catch his look. The man with the scarred face was playing with death, even here in a jail, talking about the murder of the judge.
They went to the bare mess hall. They ate bean soup and potatoes and scraps of beef. They got up.
But they didn’t all get up!
There was sudden pandemonium, yells from the men, oaths from the guards, the bell clanging for the warden to hurry here.
Because one man stayed on his bench, sagging lower and lower over the long, raw wood table. As he sagged, blood in a torrent came from a hole in his side.
The man was Smitty’s cell neighbor, and he was dead when he finally rolled off the bench and hit the floor. Whatever he’d been going to say about the murder of Judge Martineau would never be said now.
Sardonically Smitty watched the frenzied activities of the guards. Some of those guards, he was sure, were in with Sisco’s crowd. He was therefore sure that no prisoner would ever be convicted of the murder of the man who had driven the getaway car.
The giant went back to his cell. He had come close to knowledge — and death had intervened.
It was shortly after “Lights Out” when a guard came to his cell, with the eyes of others curiously following him.