Smitty stood so that he wouldn’t be seen when that door opened.
Benson tapped on it.
“Come in, come in,” snapped an irascible voice.
The gray fox of a man opened the door, went in, and shut the door behind him again.
“Who are you?” said the hawk-nosed old man at the desk. He went on without giving a chance for an answer. “If you want to buy Catawbi ore, you’ll have to compete with the others in the regular way. People have found out what good steel the ore makes, now. A lot of ’em want to buy. And the supply is limited. Send me a letter stating the price you’ll pay and I’ll compare it with the rest—”
“I don’t want to buy steel,” Benson said quietly. “I came for a few words with you about the skyscraper that collapsed yesterday. And the Lincoln Park pavilion that went down. And the missing two miles of track and the wrecked depot on the Catawbi Railroad.”
Colonel Ringset stared at the man with the snow-white hair and dead, white face with his savage old eyes unreadable. He was a man who would play a marvelous game of poker.
“Why come to me about these things?” he barked. “I don’t know anything about them.”
“I came,” said Benson, “because the accidents are so complimentary to Catawbi steel.”
The cold glare from Benson’s colorless eyes and the deadly expressionlessness of his white face were beginning to eat at the colonel’s will like acid on metal. But he tried to bluster it off.
“What the devil do you mean?”
“In the case of the building collapse, some sound girders were found — of Catawbi steel. The same thing was true of the pavilion collapse. In the case of the missing rails, toward the end of the section where they’d vanished, a few rails were lying untouched. They were, I discovered later, of Catawbi steel.”
“Well?”
“It has not yet been determined what has caused the steel made from competing ore to fail,” said Benson. “But whatever it is, it leaves Catawbi steel untouched. That means that the market for Catawbi ore will suddenly skyrocket. You’ll be able to see all you can mine, at your own figure.”
The colonel’s veined old face began to get purple.
“These catastrophes will leave you a very rich man,” Benson said quietly. “That’s why I came to see you about them.”
“Why, you young—” the colonel choked. “You’re insinuating that I had something to do with those things that have taken several dozen lives — just to increase the market for Catawbi ore? Get out of here before I throw you out, old as I am.”
It was a fine exhibition of honest rage. Benson faced it with his dead face as immobile as wax, and with his cold, pale eyes unmoved.
Meanwhile, those inexorable eyes were ranging the old office.
There was an iron rack in a corner. A water-cooler stood next to a screen which surrounded a washbasin. Several chairs were placed around the walls. Near the window was the great mahogany desk at which Ringset was seated in a heavy, old-fashioned swivel chair.
Benson’s purpose was to see if there was any filing cabinet or other hiding place of business papers in here. There was none. All were in the outer office where Smitty soundlessly searched. No telling, of course, what was in the furious old man’s desk; but that was the only place in the room where documents could be concealed.
The colonel’s eyes had grown almost as cold as Benson’s own, though in their depths could be seen a lurking, growing fear of the man with the dead face.
“I won’t ask you by what authority you come here and say such things,” he barked. “I assume you have such authority or you wouldn’t dare such a thing. But I do say this: no matter if you’re from the mayor’s office, or from the police commissioner — or whoever is backing you — you’ll find, if you don’t get out of here, that I can swing enough influence to break you.”
Benson paid no attention at all to the angry words. His deadly pale eyes bored into Ringset’s.
“Skywalker,” he said.
The colonel blinked.
“What?” he mumbled, looking bewildered.
“The man who walks the sky,” said Benson. “The sound from the sky. These things are the secret of the tragedies — which will make you rich.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Skywalker! No man can walk in thin air. Or isn’t that what you mean?”
The perplexity on the colonel’s face seemed genuine. Then it faded into wrath again.
“But no matter. It isn’t important what’s in your mind, behind your raving. I’ve told you to get out! And if you don’t—”
He reached for his desk phone.
Benson had done what he came to do. All he’d wanted was to anger the colonel to the point where slight noise of a search in the next room would not be apt to be heard. He had succeeded in that. And Smitty must be through by now.
“All right, I’ll go,” said Benson, continuing to play the part of a blundering regular investigator behind whose bluster was no real information. “But I’ll be back — if there are any more failures of competing steel with more lives lost.”
He went out, leaving Ringset utterly speechless with justified outrage.
Smitty was in the hall. They went to the rickety old elevator together. Benson glanced at the giant, question in his eyes.
“No record of any contact whatever with the Warwick Corporation,” Smitty said. “Nothing else that seemed the least bit incriminating, either.”
The elevator door clanged open. They stepped into the cage.
“Down,” Benson said, tone absent, pale and deadly eyes absorbed.
The cage groaned and shivered, started down—
The aged elevator operator screamed suddenly, high and shrill like a trapped animal.
Now and then a man is molded whose coordination of eye and body, brain and sensory perception and muscles, is so perfect and instantaneous that he seems able to make the movements of all other men seem like slow motion. Dick Benson was such a man.
His mind was intensely occupied with things having no connection whatever with an old elevator cage. Just the same, in a fraction of a second his brain caught the deathly significance of a sudden lurch that was more abrupt and extreme than any previous jerk of the elevator had been. He divined the meaning of it even before the old operator, who had been running elevators so long that he could fairly feel something the matter almost before it could happen.
But whereas the operator simply screamed in horror when he felt the parting of the cable that held up the cage, Benson moved.
The man had started the cage downward before he had quite closed the ninth-floor doors, as most operators do. The doors were open six inches or so when the elevator gave that sickening lurch in its worn slides. Benson got his hands in that opening, with steely fingers clamping down on the metal sill of the sliding doors.
The cage fell eight inches, and stopped. It stopped because the top of it banged on Benson’s head and shoulders, and those shoulders and head were held by Benson’s vicelike grip on the ninth floor sill.
The cable had parted above the cage. Only one thing kept it from falling ninety or a hundred feet to the bottom of the shaft. That one thing was Benson’s tormented grasp. Benson hung by little more than his fingertips. The elevator, with two other men in it, hung on Benson.
“Smitty—” the white-haired man gasped, his paralyzed features remaining expressionless.
The giant, face white with realization of how Benson must have been dazed by the sag of the elevator on head and shoulders, reached to open the elevator doors a little more and get his own great hands through.
“Move… very… gently—” said Benson, in a ghost of a whisper.