The Avenger nodded for Mac to take the second phone, on which all conversations could be recorded.
Mac picked up the instrument and heard a frantic but low-pitched voice. As if someone were desperately afraid for his life, but in a place where he dared not let himself be heard by anyone but the person to whom he was phoning.
Which, it turned out, was precisely Farquar’s position.
“—got me!” Mac heard Farquar’s frantic whisper. “I’ve been a prisoner since last night. Two men came to my office. They shoved in, and before I could realize what was happening, one clubbed me down. A gash on my head has been bleeding a lot—”
But that wasn’t a patch on what Farquar really had to say.
“The two men were Beall and his son! So you see, I knew already that you’d somehow got hold of the three gold crowns again. Oh, yes, Beall told me what they were, when they had me prisoner. And told me my life would be worthless if I didn’t see to it that he got them back again.”
“Yes, yes,” said Benson urgently. “But where are you being held?”
“My own home,” said Farquar. “My country place in New—”
He gasped then, and the phone was clicked down at his end. Something had happened to prevent him from talking any more.
Mac was wild. Farquar’s country home — where? He had said in New— Might mean New Jersey. But that’s a large state. It would take time to look it up.
He had forgotten The Avenger’s method.
“We’ll go to him at once,” Dick said, voice as calm and cold as his icy eyes. “His country home is near Remington. I looked it up several days ago.”
Josh went with them; there might be trouble and Dick needed all the brawn he could muster, and Josh was an excellent fighter. Gangling, looking as if a breath would blow him over, he was in reality as tough as a goat and could battle like an infuriated tiger.
On the drive out from New York, The Avenger had placed the lawyer’s secluded country home on a real-estate map. There was a great stack of maps in each of Dick’s cars — maps showing, section by section, the property locations of the states fringing the great city.
“Turn here.”
Mac was at the wheel of the armored sedan. He looked in doubt at the turn indicated by The Avenger after his map study. The side road was little more than a grassy lane, and it had a sign:
PRIVATE
PROPERTY OF ARTHUR C. WALLACE
Josh and Wilson looked puzzled, too.
“There is no Wallace on the real-estate map,” said The Avenger, divining Mac’s thought. “This is Farquar’s place, all right. He must have put up another name to protect his seclusion. Or perhaps in the last few days, to help keep unwelcome trespassers away.”
Mac turned into the lane. The lane wound through a belt of woods along the road a hundred yards deep; then at the fringe of the woods they could look ahead and see glades and meadows and, about three hundred yards off, the old house and barn, remodeled.
“He’s got a huge acreage,” commented Mac. “Do we stop here?”
“Yes, of course,” said Dick.
Mac nosed the sedan into a thicket, and the three men got out. They went to that woods fringe again, and Josh said, suddenly:
“Look out! Wasps’ nest!”
But the icy, colorless eyes of The Avenger had already seen the thing that had drawn Josh’s exclamation. And Dick went slowly up to it, instead of avoiding it.
For it was not a wasps’ nest.
The thing was a large rubber ball, a little bigger than an indoor baseball, of the type used on beaches. What had made Josh think it was a wasps’ nest was that it had a lot of holes drilled in it.
There were at least twenty holes in the ball, small toward the house, larger on the side away from the house. And in addition the sides of the ball were all notched up till the circumference had a queer, saw-toothed look.
“What in the worrrld—” breathed Mac.
The ball had been there, hanging by a few inches of wire, for some time. The rusted condition of the wire and the weathered look of the ball told that. Several weeks at least, the signs said.
Benson turned away from the ball with just the remark: “I see.”
The Scot, wild with curiosity, ventured to say, “Ye see what, Muster Benson?” But the answer wasn’t very revealing.
“Many things, Mac. Come on to the house. We’ll go along the edge of the woods to that big beech tree, and then get to the side of the place from there. That line of trees, along with the fact that it’s such a gloomy day, should keep us from being seen.”
A barn, in good shape but unused. A house that was small, considering the size of the farm, but well kept. Just those two buildings.
The house was on a hillside. The lower end of the basement had been remade into the garage space, leaving six or seven rooms of actual living space. A humble but comfortable layout.
“The garage?” whispered Cole, black eyes like burnished jet.
Benson nodded.
The garage door was open a foot. There would doubtless be a doorway from it into the house proper. The four slid to the corner of the garage like four shadows. They went inside, convinced they were unseen.
“Phew!” muttered Mac. The rest felt like holding their noses, and they could only breathe with difficulty.
The garage was commodious, with no car in it. The smell came from a pile of five-gallon cans along the end wall. They were gasoline cans, and one of them had sprung a leak, it seemed, and lost all its contents on the floor.
It was lucky that none of the four had had a cigarette in his mouth; a spark would have been enough to blow them all off the earth, so terrific were the fumes.
“ ’Tis verra high-test stuff,” said Mac, sniffing and making a face about it. Mac was a great chemist. He had once worked on a radically new petroleum-refining process; so he knew petroleum products inside and out. “The mon must have a private plane. Ye don’t need gas like that for a car.”
The Avenger did not reply. He was swinging back a little steel door high up in the wall between the garage and the basement. Behind the door was a fan. Dick shut and secured the little steel cover very carefully.
Then he looked at the partition wall.
The wall was double-thick, of concrete block. And the door, leading from garage to basement proper, was of heavy iron. The place would have satisfied the fire insurance underwriters’ idea of garage safety, all right, though of course they’d have turned thumbs down on that supply of gas stored loose in the garage.
The iron door was open a crack. Benson went toward it. Next moment, Wilson and Josh and Mac were crowding on his heels.
A groan had sounded from in there.
Mac and Wilson and Josh got in first because, at the very doorway, Benson paused.
Paused and did an odd thing.
There was a rusted nail sticking out of a beam overhead, in the garage, to hang a chain or whatnot on. Benson reached up to it.
His fingers, as steely-strong as pliers, turned the nail twice and then drew it out with a slight creaking sound. Then he put the nail in a crack between two concrete blocks at the side of the iron door, bending the end of the nail around a little toward the door itself.
Then he followed his three men into the basement.
The fumes in here were, if anything, worse than in the garage. All four gasped in them. Benson went to where Mac and Josh and Wilson ringed around something on the floor. Mac’s flashlight was playing on it.
They wouldn’t have to search for Beall any longer, it seemed. Here he was, eyes dull, face white; red streaming from between the fingers of the hand clutched to his abdomen.
“He got me,” Beall panted, words hardly audible. “Farquar. Stabbed me with shears.”