At the same time, Mac and Smitty were cruising slowly along 4½ Street.
They were down there, watching the house in which Josh had been held in particular, and the whole neighborhood in general, on the faint chance that they would find a clue to the whereabouts of Nellie Gray and Nan Stanton.
The two girls had been gone all the early morning. And Smitty was wild.
“Doggone that little blond halfpint,” he growled. “She isn’t happy if she doesn’t head into some kind of trouble that even a marine would go miles out of his way to avoid: I don’t know why any of us bother to help her out again.”
Mac only grunted. Smitty’s words went in one homely Scotch ear and out the other. Mac knew that the giant was only talking; that he wouldn’t eat or sleep till he’d rescued that frail-looking little fighter from her current mess.
If he could!
Because one of these days she was going to get in so deep she wouldn’t get out. Except in a coffin.
“Whoosh!” sighed the Scot. “I wish we had just a bit of lead to worrrk on — Is that a handkerchief wavin’ from yon window?”
It wasn’t. It was a diaper, hanging in a window to dry, not a furtive distress signal from a prisoner.
The two cruised on.
Josh and Rosabel, equally worried about Nellie, were on another assignment given by The Avenger.
That trail lay along the path of little red men and smiling green dogs. They were following out the lead provided by the little black book of the murdered veterinarian, Quinn.
Benson had told them to locate the dachshund answering to the name of Bob. The one listed in the small black book as having had its vocal cords cut. They were to report on the nature of its owner.
There were several thousand dachshunds in the city; but fortunately only a few dozen had been recently sold by pet shops. And Benson had told them to look for a recent sale.
Josh and Rosabel were plodding from new dachshund owner to new dachshund owner and finding nothing suspicious anywhere. Meanwhile, they were half out of their minds with sorrow over the vanished Nellie Gray.
Nellie, at that moment, was not far away. But she might as well have been on a desert isle as far as proximity could help.
Nellie and Nan Stanton were in a small stone cell. They’d had nothing to do for quite a while but look at it, in the light of a single candle; so they knew it all too well.
It was dank, with water oozing down its walls like sweat from the skin of a frightened man. It was far down in the earth; they knew that, from absence of all noise as much as anything else.
Absence of all noise? Well, there was a little noise in evidence. A constant, murmuring noise. A terrifying noise.
The noise of rushing water!
It came from a distance and from overhead, never slackening, never changing in tone. It was so faint that had it not been for the utter soundlessness of the place, you’d never have heard it at all. But it was unmistakable, nevertheless.
The two girls were not alone in the dank, deep dungeon. There was a third party in with them. That one was — Dr. Fram.
Fram had been bound and gagged when the two girls were thrown in here. They had untied him. Now he was giving them the low-down on the strange and tangled mess in which all three had been caught.
Nan’s first words, when she had looked at her former employer, had been an angry accusation. Fram met the charge with a weary but patient denial.
“I didn’t send you up to the New York office just to be kidnapped,” Fram said. “I sent you out of Washington simply because I was ordered to do so. I didn’t dream you were to be captured and held. I thought you were just wanted out of the way for a little while, so you would not have a chance to learn anything of what was going on in Washington.”
“You were ‘ordered’ to send her up?” Nellie Gray said swiftly.
Fram nodded. “Yes. Ordered! I’ve been under orders for a long time. And bitter ones they’ve been. I’ve been forced to betray my country and my soul.”
The psychiatrist paced up and down the cell, eyes bitter and defeated. The pacing was pretty constricted; the cell was hardly ten feet square.
“Wealthy mining interests want Bison Park,” he said. “One of them, fiendishly clever, found out about my interest in the sanity-test law for couples about to be married. He decided that that would be an excellent blind, behind which I could get in touch with politicians about turning Bison Park over to private interests. So I have been forced to be a mouthpiece, negotiating with senators and congressmen about the matter. Now, my usefulness is over. The mining crowd has made all the contacts they need. So I was seized and thrown in here to be killed. In that way, I’ll never be able to turn on my enemies.”
“How could they force you to do such a thing?” said Nellie, lovely gray eyes puzzled. “What possible hold could they have on you — what threat that would make you betray your country? And you did betray it. The helium deposits in Bison Park might be vital to the United States.”
Fram shuddered. His eyes seemed to sink a little farther back into his head. “What difference does it make how they forced me?” he said. “They did. That’s what matters. And now I’m to be killed for what I know.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nan impulsively, gazing at the man for whom, after all, she had worked pleasantly for over a year.
“You’d better save your sympathy for yourself,” said Fram dryly. Then his face softened. He touched his trim goatee with his middle finger. “I didn’t mean to be sharp. It’s fine of you to say that. But we’re all in the same boat, you know. We’re all going to die down here. And the ironical part of it is that with just a little help we could beat this gang and turn the tables on our enemies.”
Nellie Gray’s face lightened at that. “How?” she demanded.
Fram shrugged. “Why go into it, since we can’t get the help that is necessary?”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Do you know where we are?” said Fram.
Nellie listened a moment to the faint, ever-present swish of water overhead. “We’re under something awfully wet,” she said, with a game little smile. “But that’s all I can guess.”
“We’re under the Potomac River,” said Fram. “I heard the gang talking about it when they brought me here. There are about twenty men in that gang, the choicest bunch of roughnecks I’ve ever had the bad luck to lay eyes on. It seems that years ago the city decided to build traffic tunnel under the Potomac to avert some of the overcrowding of the bridges during rush hour. The project was started, and then abandoned when two thirds done. The tunnel was bored and reinforced, but never paved or finished off.
“We are in a raised chamber off the tunnel. I was bandaged when I was brought here, but I got the cloth up from over my eyes a little and saw how they entered. There is an empty warehouse on the edge of the river. I saw part of an old sign — RAIN CO. I suppose it is the something-or-other GRAIN CO. In that warehouse there is a newly cut opening, covered by a section of basement wall, that leads into the abandoned tunnel.
“But the main thing is — a plain iron lever in the beginning of the old tunnel, about fifty yards from the entrance. I heard the gang talking about that, too. It seems that that lever opens a floodgate into the river above us. If the police ever track them here, the gang means to open that and simply flood them out. That lever would be our salvation — if we could only get help. If we could be helped out of this barred dungeon, we could pull the lever ourselves and trap the gang!”
Nellie drew a deep breath. She’d had the means of calling for aid ever since she and Nan had been in here. But she hadn’t utilized it because she’d had no way of knowing where that aid was to come. She hadn’t had the faintest notion where she was.