They were the two killers who had been caught in Groman’s place, sprung already. The smaller of the two had bandages on his right hand, where Ike, the throwing-knife, had bitten deep.
The man at the wheel of the pursuing car was tensed for fast, split-second work. And Benson knew why.
The crest of the long hill, where the road ran at the very edge of the three-hundred-foot cliff, was just ahead of them. If the men behind could nudge The Avenger’s car over the cliff, the result would seem to be an accident. There would be no bullet holes to spell murder.
Smitty was still calm. But it was with the composure of an iron will. He knew, too, what the plan was. It was only too easy to guess. And — it might succeed.
The giant saw the car beside them sweep up a little more, till the hood was two feet ahead of their own. Then he saw the driver, grinning with effort, rise half out of his seat as he whirled the steering wheel straight toward the edge of the road.
And The Avenger slammed home the brakes.
No animal, in extreme emergency, is quicker than man, himself. The driver of the death car had timed every move perfectly. When he turned ahead of the sedan, the sedan should have plowed into the front of the attacking car, and should have been deflected hard right over the cliff.
But Benson, with his miraculously swift coordination, had outmaneuvered the men by about two-fifths of a second. His car, with the wheels locked, didn’t hit the front of the other machine. It slowed just enough so that the gangsters’ car shot almost clear ahead of the sedan and was hit in the rear by it instead of the front.
So it was the attackers who went over.
The man at the wheel, white with horror, was wrenching to overcome the fatal direction of the car. But there wasn’t time. The right front wheel dipped through the railing and over the edge.
A hundred yards farther on, The Avenger stopped the car. He brought it to a stop just as the car with the four men in it landed upside down on top of a house three hundred feet below. There was that one awful crash, then silence in the winter night. The headlights of the falling car, that had rayed out in thin air like the desperate tentacles of a dying monster, had been snuffed out.
So, too, had the lives of four underworld rats. They had died through their own maneuvers to take the lives of others.
The Avenger’s face, as moveless as marble, turned from the cliff-edge to the road. He backed the car around and started going wordlessly down the hill and back to town.
Smitty wiped sweat from his hands and neck, and said nothing. For the moment, even the iron-nerved giant did not trust his voice.
The big sign on the front of the largest of the group of three big buildings said: “Sweet Valley Contracting Co.”
The three buildings were warehouses, with a part of the front building divided into offices. But the meeting was in the basement of the warehouse farthest from the street.
The men in the car that had tailed The Avenger’s had known The Avenger wasn’t Sisco — because they had known where Sisco was.
He was here!
The four had known that, though they had not known just where in the three buildings he was, or what he was up to.
That was because of the masks.
As the ruthless Lila Belle had finally learned from Buddy Wilson, the town of Ashton City had been taken over by five men, in a group, when Oliver Groman had lost his political throne through age and infirmity. And these five met masked, whenever there was an emergency threatening their crooked rule.
They were meeting tonight, in the basement of that warehouse farthest from the street.
The basement was cluttered with contracting supplies: reinforcing bars, sacks of cement, great beams used in temporary construction. But one corner had been walled off. And in here was only a large, rough table with five chairs around it.
In the chairs sat the five masked men.
The masks they wore were of black cloth and went from foreheads clear down over collars. So that, due to hat and mask, each of the five was absolutely unidentifiable from the shoulders up.
At the end of the table sat a big bulk of a man with eye-slits in the mask so narrow that you couldn’t even note the color of his eyes. On his right and left were two each of the remaining four. A single, unshaded light bulb hung over the middle of the oval table and bathed the crude room in raw light.
One of the masked five, at the leader’s left, clenched his hands and said in a quavering voice:
“Everything has gone wrong lately. Everything! We’ve got to do something about it.”
That was Sisco. You could tell his dry, deadly tone.
The man next to him spoke up.
“Yeah, we got to do something about it, all right. And what we got to do is throw everything else out the window for a week or so and concentrate on gettin’ rid of that white-headed guy — and the sandy-headed Scotch rat that works for him.”
This was Buddy Wilson, leader of the underworld in Ashton City.
Norman Vautry’s voice came from under a mask across the table.
“There may be more working for Benson than just the Scotchman.”
“We’ll know that soon,” said Sisco. “One reason we’re here tonight is to get that report from New York on Benson.”
The man next to Vautry said: “I can’t believe that one man could upset things so.” This man was John M. Singell, proprietor of the Sweet Valley Contracting Co., in whose headquarters they now sat.
“I can hardly believe it, myself,” came the voice of the man at the head of the table. This was the one whom nobody knew. Four out of the five at the table knew each other by voice. But no one of the four knew who this fifth man was.
Some big businessman of Ashton City, “high in financial circles.” That was all they knew.
He went on, voice quiet and measured.
“Perhaps we have Arthur Willis, instigator of that bothersome Civic League, to thank for the recent interference.”
“I don’t think it’s Willis,” argued Singell. “We have the police sewed up pretty helplessly. And the Civic League can’t do much real damage without police help.”
“Naw, it ain’t Willis—” Buddy Wilson began.
A man came into the room.
The man was one of Wilson’s imported killers. And his entrance explained the real use of the masks.
The five knew each other, save for the leader himself, so masks were superfluous. But they shielded the faces of the five from their subordinates, so that later no petty murderer could be picked up and grilled and know what men to name behind those shrouding black cloths.
The gunman looked curiously at the masked five, and gave his report, vaguely, to all of them. After he had gone there was quivering silence.
“So the guy had the gall to pretend he was me and get that big truck driver out of the coop!” Sisco grated.
“The hell with that,” snarled Wilson. “He got four of my men, somehow. Four of ’em! Over the cliff and smashed like bugs on the top of a house!”
“They botched their job of trying to get Benson,” said the unknown fifth man. “They deserved what they got.”
“Listen, you—” Wilson rapped.
“No quarreling,” said Singell crisply. “We’ll get nowhere doing that. Ah, here’s the man we’ve been waiting for.”
The man Sisco had sent to New York to get all that was known on Richard Henry Benson, had entered. He was a step above Wilson’s gangsters, in look and intelligence. He stared at the five, no doubt wondering what faces were under the masks, and realizing that he’d probably never know.
“I got it all,” he said. “Some I dug up myself, and some I got from a couple of private-detective agencies.
“Benson is some wealthy sap who fancies himself as an amateur crime fighter. Rich as hell. About five feet eight, with white hair from a nervous shock—”