The girl, however, was smarter than most men. Back on the salt flat, she must have seen that the collapse of the gunmen was preceded by an inconspicuous move of Benson’s hands.
“Keep your hands absolutely still,” she warned. “No, don’t even raise them over your head. Keep them absolutely as they are.”
Benson stayed as still as stone, eyes like chips of white steel. Mac and Smitty raged impotently beside him. And men began to pile in the front door of the garage.
There were about ten men. They came so quickly in answer to the horn signal as to suggest that their headquarters were in one of the buildings flanking the garage.
They glared at Mac and Smitty and Benson and began running purposefully toward them. Mac recognized half a dozen of the men they had gassed on the salt flat. The gunmen were pretty sore about that, it appeared.
However, this time the men did not attempt to shoot. With blackjacks and clubbed guns in their hands they prepared to surround the three and knock their heads out from between their ears.
The reason for the desire to avoid shooting was plain enough. This wasn’t deserted country; this was a city. And the noise of gunshots wouldn’t be easy to explain.
There is one thing about a large gang of men. They look imposing; but in such a number, there is always one chump who messes the works. It was so in this case.
A big fellow with a split ear was in the lead, snarling more ferociously than any of the others, eager to get in the first crack with the butt of his automatic.
He got there first, all right; half a dozen steps in the lead; And he swung at the first head to present itself — the sandy-thatched skull of MacMurdie.
At the same time, without realizing it, the man got between Mac and the girl with the gun.
It was the opening awaited.
With a snarl that made the gangster’s grimace seem like a weak grin, the Scot ducked the flashing gun barrel and surged forward. He got the gunman in the middle with a bony shoulder, and the man went flying back as if propelled by a giant sling shot. Went flying back, and caromed against the girl.
She cried, “Oh!” in a strangled way, as the breath was knocked out of her. And she dropped the gun.
From then on it was a shambles, with ten men against three, and all desirous of avoiding gunfire. The ten, of course, had no doubt as to the outcome. Not at first.
They were all over the three now! Mac went down with two men on top of him. Smitty, huge as he was, was knocked to his knees under the shock of a four-man wedge. The Avenger was the only one who remained erect, and he had a man clawing on his back and another trying to smash his white face flat with a blackjack!
The fight seemed over before it had fairly begun. Then, somehow, things seemed to happen!
MacMurdie could fight about as well on the floor as on his feet. His bone mallets of fists pistoned up at two savage faces. One suddenly sprouted a red mask and disappeared. The other was hidden abruptly in the crook of an arm to protect it from the Scot’s battering.
So Mac’s bony fingers got the throat under the face in a steel-cable sort of noose, and in a moment he was up and clear of the two.
Smitty hadn’t bothered to use his fists. On his vast knees, he was still almost head high with the men clubbing at him. He swept out his gorilla arms and gathered three of the four to him in an embrace that was an excellent counterpart of the embrace of an enraged grizzly bear.
With the three yelling against him and trying to keep their ribs from caving, the giant simply fell straight forward.
There was a squashing thud as one of the three broke the force of Smitty’s near-three-hundred-pound bulk as it smashed against the concrete floor. He didn’t move any more.
Smitty ceased his embrace and got an ankle in each hand. He swung, and the two remaining men did curious cartwheels sideways, smashing against the front of a car twenty feet away.
The fourth man was industriously clubbing for the big fellow’s head. He’d only hit glancingly, what with the fast shifting of bodies. But now he got a square sock on Smitty’s skull.
It should have felled an ox. The gunman stood expectantly, waiting for Smitty to fall. But, somehow, Smitty did not oblige.
Smitty shook his head, as if to clear it of fog, and blinked a couple of times. Then his face reddened.
He had been fighting almost impersonally till now, just doing a job in the most efficient manner possible. But that last crack had evidently made him very annoyed.
“Why you—” he bellowed.
At the look of him, the man screamed and ran. He scuttled between garage wall and the back of a big coupé and began clawing along cleaning rags and polish cans piled there in crazy disregard of all fire laws.
Smitty whirled to where Benson and Mac were.
The Avenger’s fists had accounted for two men. The man with the dead face and the icily flaming, pale eyes was standing almost erect, weaving like a dancer on the balls of his feet, with his fist licking out now and then like darting white flame.
When it went out, a man went down. Odds of ten to three, it seemed, were not enough. Not when the three were Mac and Smitty and Benson.
But, suddenly, the complexion of the struggle changed.
There was a sound like a riveting machine! Slugs screamed off the garage floor to plunk into the plank wall behind the three.
The man who had run yelling from Smitty and hidden between the wall and a parked coupé had picked a submachine gun out of the piles of rags. Throwing all desire for silence to the winds, he was intent on mowing the three down!
With clockwork precision, the three spread at the first deadly hammering sound. Benson leaped left, Mac to the right, and Smitty ahead — toward the sound.
The Avenger’s hand flashed to the little device at his collar. Through the knot of his tie, where something like a tiny jewel could be seen, came a thread-like squirt of liquid.
It didn’t stay thread-like. It became a stream of almost solid looking black as big as the jet of a fire hose. Then it became a dense small cloud which spread from wall to wall of the garage almost before the eye could follow its expansion.
The black ball probably saved Smitty’s reckless life, for no man can rush a machine gun and not get riddled.
Smitty couldn’t find the man any more. But that was not necessary. He was at the front of the coupé, with the gunner lurking between the back of the car and the wall. So Smitty put his vast hands on the front of the radiator and pushed!
There was a shriek from behind the car as a man was pinched like a bug between rear bumper and plank wall. The shooting stopped abruptly, and so did the shrieking. Then Smitty fumbled to the place in the back where The Avenger had burned a hole.
The other two were there. They identified each other in the blackness by an arm pressure they had worked out for such cases, and they slid through to the outside air.
“We’ll come back…” Smitty began ominously.
But the words had hardly left his lips when there was a soft roar from behind them and a sheet of pale, intense flame enveloped the place.
The garage had been set afire!
They heard the girl scream; heard the shouts of the men, fading toward the front of the building. Then all they heard was the crackle of flames.
It was incredible, the heat of that fire. It made a furnace of the garage building in three minutes. By the time the wail of approaching fire engines sounded, it was obvious that the buildings on each side of the plank structure were going to go up in smoke, too.