Mac and Smitty stared swiftly at each other.
“Whoosh!” the Scot whispered. “Abel Darcey! President of Catawbi Railroad, and general big-shot. What’s he doin’ here in Ludlow?”
They soon found out. They heard Darcey say:
“I came in to inquire about a young friend of mine. That wreck down the line — I’m so afraid she was caught in it. She was coming here for a few weeks’ stay with her maid.”
“Her name, Mr. Darcey?”
“Gray. Miss Nellie Gray. She is blond, blue eyes, rather small.”
The clerk looked through the registration cards.
“There is no Miss Nellie Gray and maid registered,” he said. “And since I’ve been on the desk, no one of that description has come in. I’ve been on since eleven this morning, too.”
“How,” muttered Smitty fiercely, “did he know Nellie and Rosabel were coming here? Is there a dictaphone planted back at our hotel?”
“I think we’d better find out how the mon knows,” Mac said grimly.
“I’ll be back in a half-hour or so to inquire again,” the two heard the man at the desk say to the clerk.
Then, before Darcey could turn, they were on their feet and walking out of the hotel door. But they didn’t go far. Mac stood against the building wall to the right of the doorway, and the giant Smitty to the left.
Darcey stepped out — and they moved to each side of him.
“Just a minute, Mr. Darcey.”
Darcey stared up at Smitty’s moon-face, with eyes in it that were not quite so blandly harmless-looking as usual. Then he looked into Mac’s bleak blue eyes. His own eyes were apprehensive, but his face was admirably controlled.
“Well?” he said sharply. “I don’t believe I know you two men. Why are you approaching me?”
“We want you to take a little ride with us,” said Mac, nodding toward their rented car, parked nearby.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Darcey. “Naturally I wouldn’t get into a car with two strangers—”
His voice trailed to a halt as Smitty’s vast hand was laid very lightly, as if in affection, on his right shoulder. The hand was very near Darcey’s throat.
“I can break your neck,” said Smitty, smiling for the benefit of passers-by who were staring at him because of his great size, but who hadn’t any notion of what he was up to, “with one twist of my fingers. As fast a death as one from a bullet. I will break it, too, if you don’t stroll to the car with us.”
Darcey looked as if he were going to risk everything in a shout for help. He stared into Mac’s bitter blue eyes, then into Smitty’s lighter, china-blue ones — and didn’t yell.
“Where are you taking me?” he demanded, after getting in the car.
Mac, at the wheel, drove off without replying. Smitty, beside Darcey in the back seat, said, “Oh, not very far. Just out of town enough to be able to ask you a few questions without being interrupted.”
“What questions?”
“The most important is — how did you know Nellie Gray and Rosabel were due at the Ludlow Hotel?”
“Oh, that! Of course. You’re MacMurdie and Smith, aren’t you? I’m stupid, not to have recognized you at once, from Benson’s description. But even after that, I wasn’t prepared for a man quite so big as you.”
His eyes went over Smitty’s giant frame.
And Smitty stared back with dawning dismay in his full-moon face.
“Benson?” he said, in a different tone. “He told you the girls were coming to Ludlow? And he said we were coming, too, and described us?”
“That’s right,” Darcey nodded.
“Watch yersel’,” Mac burred, not taking his eyes from the road. The car was at the town limit, now, and rolling into the open dunes country. “The mon may be puttin’ on an act.”
“An act?” Darcey repeated. “I don’t understand.”
“Why would Mr. Benson tell you any of our plans?” Smitty demanded.
“Your employer,” said Darcey, “seemed to think my life was in danger. So he called on me.”
The car rounded a bend in the road. Ahead a few hundred yards was a lane going into the scrubby but thick woods growth typical of spots of the dune country.
“Would you mind turning around and driving me back to town?” said Darcey politely.
“I’ll tell you on the way,” he added.
Mac rather mechanically turned into the lane to back around in the road. Then he stopped the car, nose in the trees.
“We’ll not be goin’ back,” he said, “till ye do some explainin’—”
The Scot stopped, exclaimed aloud, and tried frantically to back out. But it was too late, then!
A man had stepped from the thick growth to the right. He had a submachine gun in his hands. Another man, similarly armed, appeared on the left side of the car. And two more stood, as though risen from the ground, directly in front.
Mac stopped trying to get away. They weren’t in one of The Avenger’s special bullet-proofed cars. They were in this rented thing that could be riddled by bullets like a tin can.
“Ye double-crossin’ devil,” Mac grated, glaring at Darcey.
The railroad man’s face remained inscrutable. Only his eyes showed a humorless smile. He didn’t even answer. He got out of the car and greeted a fifth man, who appeared at that moment with an automatic rather negligently hanging in his right hand.
The man was the ubiquitous Carlisle.
“Well, boss!” Carlisle said, mild surprise in his smooth face. “I didn’t quite expect to see you show yourself openly to us all, no matter what the occasion.”
“It’s quite safe now,” Darcey said to Carlisle. “No one here can ever say anything without sending himself to the chair. And with the capture of these two,”—he stared at Mac and the giant, who both trembled with impotent fury—“our roundup is practically complete. When we get the altruistic gentleman at the head of things who calls himself The Avenger, we’ll be through. And I have an idea he is on his way up to our headquarters right now, thinking himself very safe indeed.”
CHAPTER XVI
Invention — A Crook’s Tool!
Dick Benson had guessed the ferry’s new location right on the nose.
The big scow had been towed north, to a point a little above Ludlow where scrubby woods bordered the lake for several miles. There, it had been beached in a small cove. Branches had been cut and strewn on its top so that a cursory search from the air would not have revealed it.
The giant thing was sure to be located in a few days; but the gang using it had every reason to expect that it wouldn’t be found till after they were through with it.
The ferry’s hold was brilliantly lighted by the electric plant run by the diesel. You could see the drums of oil and aviation gasoline, and the small machine shop, and the mysterious vats of water quite plainly. Also, you could see something else, the like of which had never been seen before.
An airplane. But a plane like something out of the book of tomorrow.
It was a big single-motor, cabin job, with conventional lines. But it wasn’t the design that caught and held your eye. It was the material from which it was built.
The plane seemed to be made of glass.
Wings were transparent, fuselage was transparent, seats and pontoons and struts were transparent. It glittered in the improvised hangar like a gigantic dragonfly. Or like a bird of crystal.
The only thing that bulked solid and heavy through the crystalline casing was the motor itself.
Along one wall, staring with fascinated eyes at the plane, were all of Dick Benson’s aides. For once, it looked as if The Avenger had been beaten. Only the pale-eyed man with the prematurely white hair, himself, was not yet in the net.
The giant Smitty leaned his vast back against the timbers of the ferry’s side. He was bound again, with as many coils of rope as would be used to tie an elephant.