“I caught this man acting very suspiciously,” Benson whispered. “I wish you’d turn him over to the police for later questioning.”
“You can’t do this!” the little man whispered savagely. “I’ll raise hell in here! I’ll—”
He stopped, and a repressed yell sounded like the thin moan of a dying man, as Benson’s fingers tightened still a little more above his knee.
The man could scarcely use that leg when the guard marched him silently out of the gallery. It had been very quietly done. A few people had looked disapprovingly at the whispering three, then stared down at the Senate again.
Benson took the little black case.
It was a stereopticon.
An ingenious little thing, it had batteries and a small but intense light. There was a slide in the thing. Just one.
It was a picture, in color, of a little red man in frock coat and topper, leading an impossibly smiling little green dog. The kind of thing only a man with a disordered mind would see.
The radio vibration seemed still to be burning The Avenger’s waist. Hurry! Hurry! Nellie Gray — perhaps the others — in deadly danger!
But there were things that must be done first.
Benson snapped the little slide from the clever tiny stereopticon, and ground it under foot. He wrote swiftly on a small sheet of paper from a notebook; then he tore the paper to fit the slide.
He pointed the tiny stereopticon, himself. First at Burnside’s desk top, then at Cutten’s. He saw both men stare in an astonishment greater than their previous fear, then in a relief so profound that both men leaned hard on their chairbacks while a physical weakness swept over them.
Benson got up and hurried to the door of the gallery. His work was done.
On that slip of paper, projected like a small movie image onto the desk tops of the two Senators, he had written:
You’re perfectly sane. What you saw was a stereopticon slide, as this is. Block that bill!
Even as Benson went out the door to the stairs, he heard Burnside’s voice, with a buglelike note in it as the man wrenched free from the awful chains of fear which had held him.
“Mr. President, with your permission I shall withdraw my amendment concerning Bison National Park—”
The Avenger hurried on. His little crew in danger! The men and women who were always ready to give their lives for his — and for whom, naturally, he expected to do the same!
But great as was his urgency, The Avenger made one stop before seeking out the death-trap described by Nellie.
The one stop was at the Library of Congress, where were collected all the statistics and data on every undertaking ever attempted by the city of Washington.
The Avenger had the disguising eyecups off his pale, icy eyes now. His face was still that of Tetlow Adams; but the eyes, colorless, deadly, calm as glacial moonlight, were The Avenger’s.
He was in the opening of the tunnel. He had sped straight to the Murrain Co. warehouse on the edge of the Potomac. He had gotten in as quickly as had Smitty.
He had dropped into the dark tunnel and had replaced the manhole cover over his head, just as Smitty and Mac had done.
But there, his path, for the first minute or so, was different.
He went back, first, instead of forward.
Seeming to float a little above the concrete flooring of the tunnel, instead of moving on top of it, so silent were his feet, the gray fox of a man stole into blackness.
He stopped. His ears, miraculously keen, had heard breathing. The breathing of many men. He waited there in the blackness, with unguessable odds lurking at the very end of the tunnel, fifty yards back from the manhole cover.
Finally, he heard a whisper.
“Now?”
In the blackness ahead of the man with the dead, white face, came the answer.
“Yeah! After him. He’s had time to get along quite a ways. And don’t any of you mugs make any noise!”
The Avenger felt upward. The tunnel, at this spot, was much lower than under the river itself. He could just reach the top with his fingertips. And up there, he felt an angleiron bracing, with a thick glass insulator, from which a power cable had been hung at one time when power drills and other tools were in use in the tube.
He drew himself up as far as he could, with his head against the tunnel roof and his knees doubled under him.
And under Benson, the men lying in ambush for him, their last victim, stole toward the river.
It was a terrific muscular strain, hanging like that. But Benson held the position for at least five full minutes, to make sure all the men had gone. Then he dropped and stole along after them.
Ahead, he could catch the faint rasp of a shoe sole on concrete, now and then. He followed. All sounds stopped. He stopped, too. There was a whisper.
“You say the guy ain’t been past here? You’re nuts! Or else you weren’t on the job.”
“Nobody’s been past this door,” came the earnest whisper, in reply.
“Look. We seen the guy lift the manhole cover and drop down. We didn’t see him go back up, and we would have if he had opened that lid again. The light up above would have given him away. See? He’s in this damn tunnel. And he’s got to be ahead of us. We went along abreast; so we knew we didn’t slide past him in the dark. That means he went through this door.”
“I didn’t hear or see anything, — ” protested the first whisper.
“The guy can move like a shadow. We know that. He probably slipped through while you were lighting a cigarette or something. He has to be beyond here! Keep your eyes open and your ears, too.”
The footsteps resumed their faint sounds, going on under the river away from The Avenger.
Benson moved forward again.
It was so black that an owl could scarcely have seen anything. But The Avenger’s rare eyes picked out enough so that, sensed as well as actually perceived, he made out the dim barrier of a wall with a wide door in it across the tunnel, and in front of that the vague shape of a guard.
The unfortunate guard was peering ahead, not behind. So there was never a more surprised man than he, when suddenly something like a vise clamped around his neck. He had no chance to utter a sound. He could only jerk wildly for half a minute, then sag to the tunnel floor when the deadly hand released him.
Benson felt over that barrier. Solid metal. The big door, with a lever bolt on the outside — his side — was easy to understand: it was a bulkhead arrangement, designed to stop water if the tunnel ahead sprang a leak. Like the water-tight bulkhead of a ship.
The Avenger lifted the deeply unconscious guard over the raised sill and into the river side of the tunnel. His steely fingers arranged the outer bar delicately.
Then he stepped through the steel barrier himself, and shut the heavy door.
He slammed it hard. And that ended the whispering and tiptoeing around, for that ended the silence in the tomblike place.
The clang of that ponderous door in its metal jamb rang down the tunnel like a cannon shot. And was answered by startled cries of men ahead, still groping forward for The Avenger.
After the cries, in a solid flood, came light, as the many bulbs in the string overhead were turned on.
From down the tunnel, the men came pouring back. Over a score of them. But The Avenger moved toward them instead of trying to get back and away.
He passed the flood-control lever. His pale eyes took on a crystalline glitter as he sped past that. Nellie had mentioned it specifically.
He saw a door, again of heavy steel, to his right, about thirty yards ahead. Behind that door would be Nellie. But he had no chance of reaching there. For even as he glimpsed it, the men were on him.