Because, of course, no one could get to him fast enough to help him out!
One of the men with the guns did a surprising thing. He cried out suddenly, threw up both arms, and slumped to the ground with his gun sagging from his fingers as he fell.
The others — including Wilson — stared in open-mouthed, amazement. Nobody was around save the man’s own pals. Yet he looked as if he had suddenly been clubbed down. And to bear out that impression, there was a shallow gash on the top of his head from which blood dripped lightly.
Before the paralysis of surprise could break, another man fell to the ground, flat on his face. And then a third man screamed and grabbed at his ear. The ear was half gone, as if a knife had appeared out of thin air and sliced it in two.
“The rest of you,” came a calm, icy voice, “put your hands up. Drop your guns.”
Instead, the survivors made a wild dash for another shed, twenty yards off. And Cole heard the voice again. The Avenger’s voice.
“Cole! Yard gate!”
Cole looked around for the ex-prisoner of this crew and couldn’t see him. The man, it seemed, had gone out the back where the planks yawned wide, clipped a man with a gun on the way, and was now free.
Wilson sprang for the gate. It was The Avenger. He still couldn’t believe it.
“Did you fly?” he gasped. “I can’t see how you got way out here so soon after I radioed the location of this yard.”
“I was beginning an investigation of my own,” said Dick Benson, pale eyes cold as polar ice. “I was in a fast car when I got your first message. I started for Beall’s estate immediately, and went on past and here when your second message came. I was within five miles of this spot when you gave the exact location.”
Dick Benson was looking at something in his right hand. It was a weapon, the strangest Cole had ever seen. It was a streamlined little .22 revolver, equipped with a silencer of The Avenger’s own invention. In Dick’s eyes was something nearer to anger than Cole had seen there before.
“Missed!” Dick said. “I aimed to crease that third man; glance a bullet off the top of his skull and knock him unconscious instead of killing him — and I missed. I hit his ear instead.”
Cole followed him into a car, a big, rather shabby-looking coupé that looked like an old lady’s car; but it had a power plant like that of a locomotive under the innocently worn hood.
“I don’t think you have any complaints about missing,” Cole said. “Shooting at that range, by electric light, you could hardly expect to make an eighth-inch shot like that, three times running.”
“I have to make them every time,” said Dick, colorless eyes somber. “If I miss once in a while, I might kill a man. And I missed back there!”
Cole could only stare at the almost legendary figure at the wheel of the speeding coupé. So feared by the underworld, famous in so many branches of activity, and yet so young! Bitterly self-reproaching himself because he could not perform a miraculous feat of marksmanship ten times out of ten, instead of only two times out of three.
He stared sideways at the pale, icily calm eyes and was almost afraid. To hide it, he began telling what had happened: the watch on Beall’s home, the brush with the gang, the kidnaped man, whose identity he still did not know.
CHAPTER VII
Over the Rails
The Avenger had started out on a personal investigation of the death of that tramp in the Newark freight yards.
Then, just as he was rolling out of Bleek Street, he had received the message from Cole Wilson: “On gang car going north from Beall’s… Following kidnaped man…”
So Dick had turned his car north instead of south and streaked for Long Island at a pace seldom duplicated in New York. Such a fast pace that he had been able to get to the junkyard in time to save Cole’s life on this, his first job with Benson’s band. Kind of a baptism of fire, that had been for Wilson.
Now The Avenger was ready to start the investigation of that freight yard again.
He went through the tunnel under the river to New Jersey. Quite a distance from the freight yard, he parked the ancient-looking but unbelievably powerful coupé.
It was getting on toward midnight. There was no one around this warehouse-freight-yard section save a few watchmen. But The Avenger acted as if there were squads of enemies lurking nearby to watch him. As indeed there might be; hidden by darkness. Dick Benson never took chances if he could help it, which was one reason why he had lived so long with the whole underworld after him. The man with the thick black hair and pale, deadly eyes, and the regular featured face held habitually so expressionless as to seem like a good-looking mask, could move down a crowded street in broad daylight in such a manner as not to be noticed at all.
Here, in staggered darkness from the lights, with plenty of cover around, he could become practically invisible in his passage.
At one moment he was in the shadow of a loading platform, looking down the street at the high fence that walled off the freight yard. Then he was across the fence and dropping onto ties on the other side. And no man could have said just how he traversed the distance.
Dick had looked up everything the police had on the death of this tramp on the rails.
It had been very little.
A man’s body had been found on the through-freight track. Rather, pieces of a body had been found. The head could hardly be recognized as a head. There were no labels in the man’s worn clothes; nothing in his pockets. Nothing strewn along the track could point to name or address.
An elderly tramp, in a drunken stupor, had somehow gotten into the yards and had perished under the wheels of a freight train. That was all.
The spot where he had perished, as nearly as The Avenger could place it from the accounts he had read, was about a hundred yards down and eight tracks over from where he had dropped lightly over the fence.
The Avenger had formerly moved like a gray fox — gray-white of paralyzed face, white of hair, pale-gray of eye, habitually wearing dark-gray clothes.
Now he moved like a black panther, clad in black to blend with the night, and with his thick hair like a black cap on his head.
And he moved, not across the tracks, but along the fence.
There were lights all through the freight yards on poles. But he managed to elude most of the rays by hugging the fence. And this precaution also gave him a break. For next to the fence, some fifty yards from where he had climbed over, he came across something for which he might have hunted deliberately for hours and never have found.
A glint of light from the ground caught his colorless, infallible eyes. He bent down and picked up the thing that glinted.
At first glance it looked like a pair of pliers, dropped from some careless mechanic’s pocket. But a second look told that they were very odd-looking pliers; in fact, that they were not pliers at all.
They were dentist’s forceps.
Shiny, nickel-plated forceps of the type used for yanking molars while the man in the white coat says: “Now this isn’t going to hurt a bit.”
If a dentist had sneaked into the freight yard with one of the tools of his trade in his pocket, at just this point, the tool might have slipped out when he dropped to the ground.
But what would a dentist be doing in a railroad freight yard?
The Avenger slipped the forceps into his pocket and went on toward the place on the tracks where the mangled body had been found. The tracks thrummed and a glare split the half-darkness of the yard. He sank down behind a pile of ties. A switch engine jerked past, bunting freight cars into a side track.
Then Dick Benson went on, pale eyes alert. He had an idea he had already found the most important thing he was apt to pick up in here. But it was the course of method to go on and cover the rest of the ground. There might be some slight clue that the police had not found when the tramp’s death was reported.