As she passed the door, arms reached out. A hand was clamped over her lips, and a forearm was crooked brutally around her slim dark throat.
Another man passed her and the fellow holding her and sneaked toward Josh, who had his back toward the hall. Josh was making stamping noises with his feet, like a man going up the hall. This was to fool the person outside into thinking he was going for the doorkey.
With a furious burst of lithe energy, Rosabel got clear of the hand over her lips for just an instant.
“Josh!” she screamed.
Josh whirled. But he was just a little late. The man who had been skulking toward him was within leaping distance. His gun hit Josh’s head a glancing blow. He got the door unbolted.
Josh fought like a black cat, but he hadn’t a chance. Two more men came in the front door. The man who had caught Rosabel dropped her limp body, as she went unconscious from strangulation. The four steam-rollered over the colored man and he, too, lay unconscious on the floor.
One of the four pointed his gun speculatively.
“Do we blast these two smokes?” he said.
Another hesitated, then shrugged. “Guess not. No use making any more noise than we have to. They wouldn’t know what goes on in the laboratory upstairs. The guy, Gant, is all we’re told to get. We got the brother; now we’ll take him, and the job’s done.”
They trooped up the stairs.
The laboratory of the Gant brothers was on the top floor of the three-story house under the eaves. It was a big room with workbenches around the walls. Robert Gant was near the door.
“Josh?” he said inquiringly, as the knob turned.
It was the last sound he ever made.
Killers who know their trade take no chances. Three of the four gunmen shot him from the door, pouring lead into his staggering body from their guns.
They stepped over him and went methodically around the laboratory smashing things. They broke apparatus and tubes and jars. They upset tables and benches. But because they themselves didn’t know quite what it was they were to destroy, they left a couple of things that they should have ruined.
One was a large, flat pan with colorless fluid in it. The other was a stack of oblong glass panes, about four inches long and one inch wide, next to the pan.
These things seemed meaningless so they didn’t destroy them or disturb their juxtaposition.
“That’s all,” said the leader of the four. “We better lam now. Those shots must have been heard around here.”
They fled down the stairs. There was a flat roar of a gun, and the leader fell without a twitch, with a bullet in his head.
The gun was in the hands of Josh Newton.
There is a fierce loyalty in men, if they are the right sort. And this long, thin colored man, who looked sleepy and slow-witted under normal circumstances, was very much the right sort.
He had come to in time to hear the last of the crashing destruction on the top floor. He must have known that his employer lay dead. Hence there was nothing more he could do. Common sense should have told him to take to his heels and save himself.
But the colored man wasn’t built that way.
There was an old-fashioned .38 revolver in the library. He’d gotten that. And now one of the four men had paid with his life for what he had done.
The other three swore with murderous surprise and cut down on him. Josh stood by the door, making no effort to hide his thin body. The shot of one of the three went over his head. Another sliced past his side. The third had had a better aim and might have drilled his head. But just before the third was dispatched, Rosabel rose up beside the stairs, where the banisters had hidden her.
She had a vase in her tapering, competent hand. The vase broke over this third man’s head, and his shot went into the hall ceiling. But that was the end.
Both men left on their feet took their time on the next aim. This would get the colored man.
There was an almost inaudible but vicious little spat of sound from the library doorway, and one of the men went down with a gash on the exact top of his head where a small-caliber bullet had creased him.
The second man jerked around in fright and fury. There was another little spat. And he fell, too; again with the small gash in the exact center of the top of the head.
It had been the end, but not for Josh.
The colored man stared at the library doorway with the whites of his eyes showing. That intervention in the face of certain death had seemed like something from heaven. But the intervener was mortal, it seemed. Though a most unusual mortal.
A man stepped lithely from the library and stared at Josh out of almost colorless eyes that were icily flaming in a dead, white face. In his hands this man had the most curious gun Josh had ever seen. It looked more like a slim length of blue-steel pipe than a gun, with a slight bend for a handle and a small bulge where a cylinder held four shells.
But more terrible than any gun was the man’s absolutely immobile countenance — like a wax mask of death in which steel-gray eyes glared forth.
Following this man came a giant whose head seemed to scrape the ceiling, and whose muscular bulk was such that his massive arms could not hang straight down. After the giant stepped a man with dour Scotch blue eyes and sandy-red hair; a man about as tall as Josh and almost as thin.
Josh stared at the three, and Rosabel ran to his side. They’d downed the gunmen, but she couldn’t be sure they were not enemies, too.
The man with the deadly, pale eyes spoke crisply.
“You two are the servants in this house?”
“Yas, suh,” said Josh.
“Where is Robert Gant?”
“I’se skeered he’s daid, upstairs,” said Josh.
“And Maximus Gant hasn’t come back yet?”
“No, suh.”
The man with the dead face turned to the giant.
“Max Gant is dead, then,” he said to the big fellow. “When I radioed headquarters from the plane before landing, and they told me about the lunatic being taken away, I was certain of it. And now we’ve come here too late to save the brother.”
“It’s obvious that they were killed to keep some secret, but what it was, we’ll never know,” the giant said pessimistically.
“Maybe we can learn something in the laboratory.”
“They-all busted up the lab’tory somethin’ turrible,” said Josh to the man with the awesome eyes.
The eyes turned on him in all their clarity, and the colored man had the swift feeling that they were going clear through him.
“You don’t have to talk that way,” the man said to Josh. “You’re very well educated.”
“I’se talkin’ nachral—”
“The little gold key I see between the third and fourth buttons of your jacket tells a different story.”
Josh hurriedly shoved the mentioned article back under his house coat. Then he relaxed.
“Very well, sir. These murderers, I’m afraid, have completely wrecked the laboratory. May I ask who you are?”
“My name is Henry Benson.”
It was enough. Josh was as well informed in current events as he was in scholastic subjects. He stared with rolling eyeballs at the grim, white mask of a face.
“The Avenger!” He and Rosabel looked at each other.
“Some call me that,” said Benson. “Now we’ll have a look at that laboratory, before the police get here.”
In the big, wrecked room, the pale, all-seeing eyes dwelt briefly on the dead body of Robert Gant and on the wrecked apparatus. Then Benson strode swiftly to the one thing left untouched: the flat pan. He sniffed the colorless fluid in it.
It was plain water.
He looked at the little stack of glass strips beside the flat pan of water. In his pale, deadly eyes was a dawning glitter.
There was one other thing that roused that glitter. This, he found in the closet off the lab. And the object — or rather twin objects — was a pair of old shoes.