“Your name,” said Smitty.
“Edward Carp,” said the man, in a voice as mechanical as a phonograph’s.
“You were going into the building that exploded.”
“Yes,” said the man.
“Why were you going in there?”
“To see the guy who hired me yesterday.”
“What did he hire you for?”
“I don’t know yet. He hadn’t told me.”
“What,” said Smitty, “made that explosion?”
“Peanuts,” said the man, voice dull and lifeless.
“Peanuts! What do you mean?”
“They look like peanuts, only a little bigger.”
“The explosion was caused by something looking like large peanuts?”
“Yes.”
“What was the name of the man you were to see?”
“They call him Red. That’s all I know.”
“Did he die in the explosion, or come out of the debris after I left?”
“Red must have died. He stayed in the basement. The explosion must have been an accident, and he must have died.”
“What was the explosive for?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t with Red long enough to be told anything much.”
“Was it for any definite purpose at all?”
“Sure. I don’t know what for. But it was going to be used.”
“Anytime anything like that is used, it will cause more death and destruction, won’t it?”
“Red said a few people might be bumped off, but it would be worth it.”
“What would be worth it?”
“Mexican bricks.”
“What about Mexican bricks?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t told.”
“Now that Red is dead, whom will you be working for?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s a little mon,” said Mac, in a low tone. “Some big-shot crook’s hired boy, that’s all.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Smitty. “But we’ve got a little out of it. That explosion was caused by the mishandling of some terribly deadly weapon of crime. And there may be more explosions that aren’t accidents!”
He went back to the man.
“You and Red were going to wreck and murder — for Mexican bricks. Can’t you tell me any more than that? What kind of bricks? Why are they worth so much?”
“I don’t know.”
A voice came from the cabinet. The voice of the man with the dead, white face.
“That’s all you will get from him, I think, Smitty.”
“Orders, chief?”
“Turn him loose. If Mac’s hypnotic drug works as well as it usually does, he will wake remembering nothing of this. Trail him. See where he goes. We seem to have the start of something huge and deadly here, but we haven’t enough, as yet, to be of value.”
“Right,” said Smitty.
There was in his voice, and in the homely face of MacMurdie, no faintest question of the authority of the man with the dead face and the snow-white hair. Which was as it should be.
The man whose arresting, dangerous countenance had stared from the screen for an instant was Richard Henry Benson, known, since the tragedy that had robbed his life of human meaning, as The Avenger. That tragedy was the loss of his wife and little daughter in a criminal plot. The loss had dedicated him to the smashing of crime everywhere he came in contact with it. And to his grim battle with the underworld he brought the weapons of genius, super-human strength and quickness, and a fortune gained in earlier days from a life of adventure.
Benson had taken on the giant Smitty as his personal aid. MacMurdie had been set up in business in this weird drugstore by Benson in payment for the help he had given the man with the white hair and paralyzed face when he was trying to get back his wife and child through the destruction of the gang that had caused their disappearance.
When Benson commanded, Smitty and Mac moved. And shortly thereafter someone in a high position in some criminal venture was doomed to suffer exceedingly.
The man who had given his name as Edward Carp had closed his eyes again. He was moving convulsively in the chair. Smitty put the mirrored ball out of sight and lifted the man, big chair and all, to another part of the room.
Carp’s eyes opened. Now they weren’t wide and blank. They were wary and narrowed, but also bewildered.
“What am I doin’ here? Where am I? What you guys—”
Mac helped him up out of the chair.
“Ye’re all right now, mon. Ye fainted on the sidewalk. Don’t ye remember? I brought ye in here.”
“Fainted, huh! I never fainted in my life.” But the man’s voice was without conviction. He remembered nothing of the mesmeric trance. Not remembering that, he had no ground for suspicion of the giant and the red-haired Scot.
“Thanks for lugging me in here,” he said grudgingly. “But I got to beat it now. Unless you got some objection.”
He glared at them, all suspicion again; but the suspicion died soon as Smitty grinned and said, mild blue eyes peaceful and not too intelligent-looking:
“You can run right along, any time you please. We just wanted to help you out a little.”
The man left. Not till he’d got out of sight beyond the Sixth Avenue window did Smitty slide out after him. He left a Scotsman as puzzled as any who had ever come from Bruce’s kingdom.
“Whoosh! It’s mad. There’s no meanin’ in it. The explosion was caused by big peanuts. And there’s to be more. For what? Mexican bricks! It makes no sense in any direction at all!”
In the street, Smitty trailed the man as deftly as if he’d been a midget instead of a giant. He kept a full block behind him till the man turned a corner, about three blocks east of where he’d started. Then Smitty edged up closer and peered around the corner.
The man had stopped. He was standing in front of a big building that had once been a railroad magnate’s home. In the gay 90’s. Now it was an exclusive school for the very young tots of the rich.
Smitty’s pulse began to pound faster as he recognized the place in front of which lounged the ratlike Carp. Children of the rich! A crook hanging around! It smelled like kidnap to Smitty.
Though he couldn’t figure out where kidnap and explosives had anything in common.
The doors of the school opened. It was a little after three in the afternoon. Boys and girls from four to six came out. Several had governesses with them, ladies who stayed right at the school with their charges till time to take them home.
Some of the kids went to limousines at the curb, where chauffeurs waited. Some went to cars almost as impressive, in which doting young mothers were ready to drive them home.
One, a little boy with black hair, came out with a girl of twenty-three or so who was so beautiful that even from that distance she made Smitty blink.
She had yellow-bronze hair and gray eyes and the finest pink-white skin you’d ever care to see. She looked like a dish of peaches going somewhere to be eaten with cream. But her dress — smart and trim, but not expensive — told that she was not a rich young matron. She was one of the instructoresses of the school.
With the appearance of the dainty, lovely miss with the black-haired little boy, Carp suddenly straightened. He looked this way and that, and then stepped toward the two. And Smitty began to go there from the corner with space-devouring strides. The way Carp had acted showed he was up to something.
Smitty was still too far away to hear what was said. But he saw Carp’s lips move. And then Carp put a hand on the dainty blonde’s wrist.
Smitty could never afterward figure out quite what had happened.
At one moment Carp had a none-too-clean paw on the girl’s arm. At the next he seemed to have leaped into the air in an attempt at a backward flying somersault. An attempt that didn’t come off very well, because he lit on his back and shoulders with a grunt.