The giant was across the elevator as smoothly as a ballet dancer. The operator stayed at the useless controls, not daring to breathe.
Smitty got the sliding doors open another foot, and took on Benson’s inhuman burden, just in time. The white, strained fingers slipped, with the long drop to the bottom of the shaft seeming to reach up and drag the car.
Now Smitty hung like Atlas, with the cage-top pressing down on his vast bowed shoulders, and with only the grip of his two hands thwarting the deadly fall.
Benson took several great breaths, then was at the giant’s side. Together they heaved up a little.
No other two men in the city — perhaps in the entire country — could have done it: could have raised the unsupported cage with only the straining muscles of their arms alone. But these two did.
They got the cage up so that instead of a three-inch crack between its top and the ninth-floor sill, there was an eighteen-inch opening.
“Can you hold it here, just a little while?” said Benson.
“I… think… so,” panted the giant. His hands were as white as chalk with the strain, and his arms were trembling like great bass-violin strings.
Benson writhed out of the opening onto the floor of the corridor.
Had Smitty’s hold weakened then, his chief would have been sliced in two between car-top and sill. But the giant hung on.
Benson raced to the roof, to the elevator-cable control room. The end of the supporting cable had snapped back up ten feet when it broke. Benson’s deadly eyes flamed like ice under an arctic moon as he saw the broken end.
It had been cut by a hacksaw through nearly three-fourths of its thickness, so that the slightest extra strain — like that of starting the old car down from the ninth floor — would snap the steel strands.
“Smitty — get ready to take just a little more,” Benson called down.
And he dropped lightly on the roof of the cage.
He had won clear, and was safe. Now, by lowering himself to the car’s top he was putting his head into the jaws of death again. But a leader does that kind of thing for the safety of his men, if he deserves the title, chief.
Anyone who has ever tried to tie a knot in steel cable knows what a long-drawn-out, almost impossible task it is. But Benson’s incredibly strong fingers got the broken end of the elevator cable under the top supporting girder, and twisted the woven steel strand into a single pretzel-shaped bow, in about the time it would take an ordinary person to do the same thing with wrapping twine.
“All right, Smitty!”
Benson heard the giant groan; then the cage was dropping as the great hands were withdrawn and the cage was unsupported.
It dropped a foot, jerked to a stop as the loose bow in the tied cable tightened. Steel shrieked on steel as the bow continued to knot in on itself and as the elevator continued the slow sinking downward. Then its passage was stopped. The knot held.
Benson helped the shaky giant out of the cage on the eighth floor. He hauled the operator out bodily; the man had fainted minutes before.
Smitty managed a trembling grin.
“We tell Mac and Nellie to watch out because somebody might trail ’em and try to kill ’em,” he said, “and we get it in the neck ourselves. I wonder how—”
He said no more.
Steel cable is slippery stuff. The large bow Benson had bent in it had been quivering into a smaller and smaller knot under the elevator’s weight with each passing second. Now the sawed end of the cable had slipped at last through the loop of the knot, and let the cage go!
With a squeal against ancient slides, it rocketed downward. And then, far below, it hit! There was a smash that rocked the building, and the wood and steel of the cage became a sort of dreadful porridge of crushed wreckage.
In the center of that porridge there would have been three pulped bodies had it not been for Benson’s superhuman swiftness, and Smitty’s gigantic strength.
CHAPTER XIII
No Sale — No Suspect
You could fairly feel the tensity in the city that afternoon.
The rain clouds had cleared and the sky was bright with sun. The entire city of Chicago seemed to cower under the clearness like a gigantic, frightened beast, and to peer upward in apprehension.
From the sky, on two successive clear days before, had come a droning noise with no visible thing making it. And following that had come disaster. Would a third tragedy come from the clear sky today?
Something moving in the sky. A man “walking” there, according to a few wild accounts. Something trailing over the city and leaving catastrophe in its unseen wake.
Would that happen today?
Up in his temporary headquarters, Benson was integrating the reports of Nellie Gray and Mac, and digesting the knowledge they afforded.
“Vanderhold seems as innocent of any of this as a babe,” the dour Scot had reported. “He was at home, not at his newspaper, when I got him. He was in a flowered dressing gown, eatin’ a breakfast big enough for a gorilla, and lookin’ over his own paper. A big, fat, bald-headed guy with pockets around his eyes. I told him about Catawbi steel bein’ the one that held up. He didn’t seem interested. I asked more about how that reporter of his got advance news of the building collapse. He told me about not knowin’ anything about it for a solid half hour.”
“You saw nothing out of the way?” Benson had asked.
“Well, one thing that might have meanin’,” the Scot said doubtfully. “There was a letter near his orange-juice glass; one of a lot that’d come in the mornin’ mail. It was open; so I got a glimpse of it. Somethin’ about the Catawbi Railroad. I couldn’t see who it was from or anythin’, but I got just a couple words before he tumbled that I might be looking at it and folded it shut. I think the letter was something about buying the road.”
“Somebody wanting to buy the Catawbi Railroad?”
“That’s what it looked like. Vanderhold has a share, as a commuter on it, of course. But I don’t see that it means anythin’, Muster Benson.”
Nellie Gray’s report had seemed equally fruitless.
“Abel Darcey is all up in the air about the things that have happened to the railway. I posed as a girl reporter and got him talking about the wreck and the depot collapse. He has no idea what could have caused the two miles of track to disappear, but rather thinks the rails were stolen for their value as scrap — though he admits it would be pretty impossible to have done it. When it comes to the depot falling down, he just gives up. He says he hasn’t the faintest notion why that happened.”
Nellie referred to some shorthand notes she had made.
“He O.K.’d an order for more rails while I was there. And the specification was that they be made of steel from local Catawbi ore.”
Benson merely nodded. His finding at the Missouri Steel Corporation’s laboratory that it had been Catawbi steel which bore up in the collapses, was definitely known around the city, now. Almost any order for steel would have the same specification: made from Catawbi ore.
“Anything else, Nellie?”
The fragile-looking Dresden doll of a girl had hesitated a full minute. She knew Benson’s passion for precision of details and didn’t want to report anything meaningless.
“I think,” she said finally, “that Mr. Abel Darcey’s life may be in danger, though I don’t believe he knows it.”
“What gave you that impression?”
“You said that out at the Gant brothers’ house you found a pair of shoes in the laboratory with no nails in them — looking as if someone had stolen the nails.”
“Yes!”
“Well, as I was going out of Mr. Darcey’s office, I saw a boy leaving the outer office after delivering a bundle. The bundle looked like a pair of shoes. I caught up with the boy and asked him about them. He said they were Mr. Darcey’s shoes. His secretary had sent them to the shoe repair shop nearby, to have them nail the rubber heels back on. The soles were sewn, so they were all right. But the cobbler had received the shoes with not one nail in the heels. As if somebody had pulled them out.”