“All right, Smith, down to the office,” the guard said.
Wordlessly, the giant followed him down the corridor to the stairs, and then down to the front office of the grim stone building.
The warden was in there, and Captain of Detectives Harrigo.
Also there was a man, with greenish, dead-looking eyes, and a partially bald head. He looked spiderish, with dead, dry, long-fingered hands like tentacles.
“O.K., Sisco, I’ll run along,” said Harrigo. He waved and went out. And Smitty stared first at Sisco, the man with the greenish eyes, and then at the warden.
The warden was chewing his lips.
“Pretty irregular,” he complained, “taking this guy out like this.”
Smitty was almost bowled over. A murder suspect, refused bail, refused even a chance to phone anybody, could be sprung by even this politician and crook, Sisco? It didn’t seem credible. Yet it looked as if that were the case.
“The D.A.,” said the warden, “could raise the roof about it.”
“The D.A. hasn’t got the sense to come in out of the rain,” said the man with the greenish eyes. “In fact, he hasn’t sense enough to be sure of knocking over a case — even when it’s all fixed.”
“But to let this guy out—” began the warden.
“I can get the pretty papers from Judge Broadbough, all nice and legal, if you insist,” Sisco said. But his tone was irritable to the point of menace. The warden hastily backed off his high horse.
“Not necessary at all,” he babbled. “Not at all! I know the judge, and I know you. But why do you want to take this guy—”
Suddenly, the warden stopped.
Sisco’s back was three quarters turned to Smitty. But the giant had just managed to catch the fleeting glance from politician to warden.
There was a volume to be read in that dangerous look. It meant: this man is not to be trusted to a murder trial because there’s just the chance that an incompetent district attorney might not convict. He will be taken out of here now, and will go for a nice long ride, with a ditch on a lonely road as his destination.
“Come with me, Mr. Smith,” Sisco said blandly, staring into the giant’s seemingly slow-witted moonface. Smitty’s china-blue eyes looked very bewildered, indeed. Also, a bit thankful.
“Where?” said Smitty. “And why?”
“Wherever you want to go,” said Sisco. “You’re free, sprung, out. A mistake has been made, and we’re setting it right. That’s all you need to know.”
“That’s sure swell of you,” mumbled Smitty, as if he had never caught that look of death. “You must be mighty powerful in this town if you got drag enough to get me out of here.”
The warden coughed nervously. Sisco laughed a little.
“I swing a little weight. And I might be able to use you in a job, if you want it.”
“Gee — yes!” said Smitty. “If—”
“Well, come along and we’ll talk it over in my car.”
Smitty followed Sisco out of the office, and out of the barred front gate that he hadn’t thought to emerge from for a long time. There was a car at the curb. He could barely see it in the darkness.
But he could see it plainly enough to know that it was — empty.
Now, the giant was at a loss.
He had known with sure knowledge that he was being taken out of here to be shot in a gang ride. He had left gladly, feeling that he had more chance against a brace of gunmen than legally behind bars of a penal institution.
But here he was being led to an empty sedan!
“Get in!” said Sisco.
And there was a curious change in his voice.
It had been dry, dead, evil. Now it had a new vibrancy and purpose. It was like a draft of cold spring water. It matched a dead-white face and pale, icily flaming eyes and a steel-gray figure of a man more like a machine than a man.
“Get in, quick!” snapped the cold, impersonal voice.
A car was drawing up behind the sedan. This car had four men in it, and they were staring curiously at the giant and the man with the greenish eyes.
Smitty got in. Quick! And the man who had delivered him so smoothly from a cell got away from there. Quick.
“Benson—” breathed Smitty, incredulously.
The Avenger, man of a thousand faces, took the greenish-pupiled eye lens from his cold, colorless eyes. They interfered a little with sight. He sent the sedan tearing ahead.
CHAPTER XI
Death Boomerangs!
The most perfect of plans can be knocked out of line by some small bit of bad luck that the most brilliant person could not have foreseen. This was a case in point.
The Avenger had schemed brilliantly and perfectly to get Smitty out of trouble. He had marvelously played the part of Sisco.
But one bit of ill fortune had bobbed up.
The four men in the car that had stopped at the jail gate behind The Avenger’s car, just happened to be Sisco’s men. And Sisco’s men just happened to know where Sisco was at that moment.
Since the spot was a long way away from here, they knew that the man with the giant could not be Sisco, no matter how much he resembled him. So they acted accordingly!
Smitty turned in the front seat as Benson shot the car forward, toward the open country.
“They’re after us, chief,” he said.
Benson merely nodded, face as cold and emotionless as a thing of marble; eyes taking on that deadly glacial look, like bits of polar ice under a gray dawn.
“They’ve got a faster car than we have,” said Smitty. The giant was calm in the face of danger, too. He could see the ugly snouts of three machine guns snugged in the lowered windows of the pursuing car, but the sight didn’t shake his voice any.
The Avenger nodded again. The accelerator was down to the floor. In spite of the fact that they were going up a steep hill, the car was hitting over sixty.
But the car behind was catching up!
The Avenger left little to chance. When he had planned the jail delivery, he had gone over the road he would leave Ashton City jail by. So he knew every foot of it for fifteen miles.
Because of that knowledge, the glint of death in his flaring, colorless eyes grew more pronounced.
“They’ll be drawing even with us in a minute,” said Smitty. Then his voice got perplexed. “That’s funny. The guys are putting their guns up! And they could nail us easy, in about two shakes!”
The Avenger knew the reason for that. Or, rather, the two reasons. One was that for all the men behind knew, this car had bullet-proof windows. The other reason—
Well, that was tied in with Benson’s knowledge of the road — and with the glints of death in his eyes.
A curious machine of vengeance was this man with the snow-white hair and the paralyzed face. He was death and destruction to crooks. Many had gone to their just doom through him. Yet Benson could still say that his hand had not killed. In every case he had put the killers in a position where they had wrought their own destruction by trying murderously to take the lives of others.
The car had been speeding up a long hill and was almost to the top. At the crest, there was a sheer drop down; a cliff from the brink of which you could see Ashton City like a big map at your feet.
“They’re nose to tail with us,” said Smitty.
“Don’t look at them,” said Benson, voice cold and clipped as if death were not at their very elbows. “Let them think the noise of our motor drowns theirs out so that we don’t realize how close they are.”
Smitty nodded, and stared straight ahead. The Avenger did, too. But out of the corners of those marvelous eyes, he could see the front bumper of the gangsters’ car creeping forward. He had already spotted two of the four men in that car.