He snapped to a sitting position and his hand flashed to his left leg.
Ike was there. The throwing knife, needle-pointed and razor-edged, was in its holster. Benson had the twin holsters below his knees because a search seldom gets down that far.
The engine behind the glaring light began shrieking like a frightened monster as the brakes ground on. The engineer had seen the body on the tracks and was trying to stop the countless tons behind his locomotive before reaching the spot. A hopeless job.
Dick’s hand swept over the cords at his ankles and they parted. He had just time. The train ground by, with sparks streaming from the iron shoes of the brakes, hardly a second after he had flung himself off the rails.
But a danger past was a danger forgotten. Dick raced by the spot where the battle had taken place and recovered Mike. The little gun was laying on the cinders, in front of the boxcar, where it had fallen from his hand. Then he sped for the fence with no sign in his pale eyes that he realized how close death had been; sped for the fence before the six men, who had trapped him, should learn that their trap had failed.
He just made that, too. Startled yells, shots in the night drowned by the train’s roar, whispering slugs near his head, told him that the gang had discovered the impossible escape and were trying now to set it right with bullets.
Like a huge black cat, The Avenger swung over the fence and was safe. They’d taken those forceps from him; a pat at his pocket proved that. But they hadn’t taken his life, and they’d live to regret that failure.
CHAPTER VIII
Money or the Chair
“I’m certainly glad to see you.”
Markham Farquar’s face showed that he meant the words with all sincerity. The lawyer had leaped from his chair when The Avenger entered his office and had caught Dick Benson’s hand in both of his.
“I haven’t been able to find out a thing about the frame they’re holding over me, Mr. Benson. Not a thing. Have you turned anything up?”
The lawyer ran a hand distractedly through his thick gray hair, and there was something like frenzy in his gray eyes. But Benson didn’t answer that latter question for a moment.
“You say you haven’t been able to find out anything,” he repeated. “You’ve been trying?”
“Yes,” said Farquar. “I’ve been all over the lot, trying to find out where Beall and Cleeves and Salloway keep those fake clues of theirs. Also, I’ve been trying to trace any previous connections of my clerk, Smathers, to see if I can find a hint of what happened to him.” He sighed. “I’ve drawn a blank all around.”
“Smathers’s friends or family know nothing?”
“Smathers, it seems, didn’t have either family or close friends,” replied Farquar irritably. “The man was practically a hermit. I finally located the employer for whom he worked before I hired him, years ago. That man had never heard of any relatives either.”
“Where did Smathers live?” asked Benson, eyes like ice in a polar dawn.
“In a boardinghouse up near Columbia University,” Farquar said. “I’ve been there twice, checking on things. He didn’t show up there before he disappeared. He left the boardinghouse at eight o’clock in the morning, as he always did, and that was the last anyone saw of him. He never came back.”
“And he had no friends there?”
“No. The landlady said he didn’t do more than nod to the rest, although he’d lived there for years. I tell you, the man was a hermit. We’ll never find out anything through his past. And we don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”
“We know that, all right,” said Dick Benson, face as moveless as a mask. He was many years younger than Farquar, but he looked twice as calm and three times as competent. “He’s dead.”
“He— How do you know?” gasped Farquar.
“There was a tramp ground to bits in the Newark freight yard. That unidentified tramp was Smathers, I’m sure.”
“What in the world was he doing in a freight yard?” exclaimed Farquar. Then he shrugged resignedly. “But no matter why he was there. He was there, and he was killed. I’ve felt right along that he was dead. And now there is a definite murder charge against me any time those three blackmailers want to press it. Did you find out anything else?”
“Nothing of importance,” said The Avenger.
Farquar’s shoulders slumped.
“I guess I’d better just bite the bullet and pay the blackmail demand,” he said slowly. “I’m as sure as I am of sitting here that the clues those three men hold will really put me in the chair. And they’re getting impatient. Look.”
He tossed a sheet of paper over to Benson. The Avenger stared at it. Crudely printed words leaped out at him.
IT IS THE MONEY OR THE CHAIR.
MAKE UP YOUR MIND. AND QUICK.
The note was unsigned.
“If we could only get something on the three,” Farquar said. “Something to tie them in with this.”
“One fact about Beall has come out, in the short time we’ve been trying to help you,” said Benson. His eyes were basilisk on the short printed note. “His paper company is in financial difficulties.”
“Of course!” said Farquar with an explosive breath. “There we have the motive, anyway— Say, did you know someone was in my office last night?”
“Several people were in your office last night.” Dick told what had happened to Nellie Gray. But in line with his usual reticence when he hadn’t yet gathered all the facts, he did not dwell on Nellie’s discovery. He didn’t describe the place where, it was pretty positive, Smathers had died.
“We ought to have something more on Cleeves or Salloway or Beall soon,” was all he said. “My men are working on them right now.”
But they were not going to get anything on Salloway.
Smitty was on Salloway, trailing him if he went anywhere, watching what he did and to whom he talked.
Above all, he was trying to get his hands on the cigar case Salloway was said always to have on his person, in which it was said he carried the trumped-up murder clue against Farquar.
Smitty had had no luck so far. He’d found out nothing suspicious about the well-known contractor.
He was in a stairway at the moment.
Salloway lived on the fourteenth floor of an East River apartment building. He had a home in Connecticut, where his family and servants stayed; he himself used this four-room bachelor apartment when he was in New York.
All last night Smitty had lurked on the stairway just the other side of the fourteenth-floor door, ready to trail Salloway if he came out, ready to eavesdrop if anyone went in. But neither had happened.
The giant was sleepy. He had taken several cat naps in early morning, propped against a stair, trusting to his hearing to wake him if sounds of steps down the hall indicated movement at Salloway’s door. But that was all. Now, in the middle of the morning, he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.
Throughout, he had stood ready to step into the four-teenth-floor corridor on the rare occasions when anyone used the stairs. He was pretty sure no one knew of his all-night vigil.
But he was so sleepy—
Smitty’s head jerked up on his drooping neck muscles. There had been a step outside the stair door, in the hall.
There had been frequent steps there as tenants of other apartments came and went. He opened the door a crack to see if this was just another.
He just caught the movement of a door closing down the line. And it was Salloway’s door.
Smitty went to the door. The mountain of a man moved as silently, almost, as the wraithlike Avenger himself.
Yet he moved fast. The door hadn’t been closed more than thirty seconds when he reached it.