The Avenger had gone to work with his weapons.
Benson had probably the strangest pair of weapons the world holds. He kept them strapped in slim sheaths on right and left calf, below the knee. He called one Mike and the other, Ike.
Mike was a streamlined, special .22 revolver with a tiny cylinder holding only four cartridges and with a specially devised silencer on it. With this, The Avenger “creased” enemies; smashing a slug across the top of their heads so that they would be knocked unconscious but not killed.
Ike was the dagger which Gargantua found transfixing his hand before he could shoot at Nellie — a throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle with which Benson could hit a flyspeck from twenty feet.
Nellie had her hands on the submachine gun, now. Kopell saw it, and leaped for her with a savage yell. His feet were aimed at her head, to crush her skull. But he had jumped too fast to reckon his distance properly, and to realize just how close Nellie was to the edge of the deep chasm.
Nellie twisted aside like a blond shadow, so that the flying feet missed their cruel aim. Kopell went right on, hands clawing as he lit, but not stopping his slide in the dirt.
His body hurtled over the edge. For an instant he clung with just his fingertips, hanging over the brink of the cleft with the dank, cold air whipping up around him from the secret river far, far below.
His scream was a ghastly thing in the closed cellar. Then it was receding as his body plummeted down. Quite a joker, Kopell. A grim joker! But death had proved the grimmest and most effective joker of all, and had directed his jest at Kopell.
A man racing from the infuriated pursuit of Mac, turned to fire at him. And there was a burst from Kopell’s gun. The slugs shaved his head and knocked craters in the basement wall beside him. The man gasped at the unexpectedness of it, then yelled hoarsely as he realized how close the marksmanship had been.
“Drop the gun,” said Nellie Gray. “Or next time I’ll shoot your ears off. And I can do just that!”
There was silence where there had been pandemonium.
Four men lay unconscious on the floor. Gargantua was groaning and nursing his streaming hand. Kopell was floating down a subterranean river. The young man with the old eyes, the man with the narrow jaw and the fellow with the slant, Mongol eyes, were released from Smitty’s tremendous embrace to join Fats — facing Nellie’s submachine gun.
“And that’s that,” said Nellie. “Where’s the chief?”
Benson was no longer in the basement room. But Nellie didn’t look very hard. Her eyes caught the red stream welling from Smitty’s columnar leg.
“Smitty!” she gasped. “Smitty! Are you hurt badly?”
“Just a scratch,” said Smitty through set teeth. “Keep your eyes on your work, will you, you frivolous blond nuisance?”
Nellie jerked her gun back in line in time to avert incipient rebellion on the part of the four she covered.
In Cranlowe’s library over their heads, the masked young man was exhorting the inventor who, with wide eyes, was writing out that formula. It was an intricate thing, taking time.
“Hurry, Cranlowe!” the masked man snapped. “That shooting downstairs— Something’s gone wrong! Some piece of careless — some stupid blunder— Hurry up!”
Cranlowe made a last symbol on the paper, and stopped.
“That’s all there is to it? The formula is complete?”
“Yes,” said Cranlowe.
The masked man stooped, took the paper so swiftly from under Cranlowe’s hand that he almost tore it, and whirled to run, stuffing the precious formula in his pocket as he did so.
He stopped at once and stood very still.
In the doorway stood a man whose hair was snow-white, though the man was obviously young. From a death-white face that moved not at all, pale and deadly eyes peered at the blue silk handkerchief acting as a mask. The man was not big, but he seemed to fill the doorway as he stood there.
“Who — who are you?” said the masked man, mechanically. He was stalling while his right hand, still up from putting the formula in his inner coat pocket, strayed slowly toward a holster under his left arm.
“You know who I am,” said The Avenger. “I’ll have the formula, please, Grace.”
“Grace! Grace? Why are you calling me by a girl’s name?”
“Stanley Grace,” Benson corrected, quietly.
“Why, you’re mad!” The hand was touching the gun butt, now. “You’re—”
“Who could be in a position to dominate Jenner so easily and constantly? His secretary. Who could have witnessed the experiment with the vibrator to kill bacteria, in the Garfield Gear plant? The president’s secretary. It was apparent from the beginning that you were behind this, Grace.”
“And now I’m beaten, eh?” said Grace, shoulders drooping while his hand, slowly, unobtrusively, drew the gun free from its holster. Why, the white-haired man didn’t even have a weapon in his hand!
“Now you’re beaten,” nodded The Avenger. “You’ve moved heaven and earth to get that formula. And now you’re caught with it. And downstairs is an underworld gang that will go up for kidnaping to the last man — Miss Gray knows where Robert Cranlowe is being held, and can take the police there. It’s all over, Grace.”
With his left hand, Grace reached up and slipped off his mask, revealing the high-bridged nose and pale, almost delicate face. The move was to distract his captor so that he could get that gun still a little farther into the clear.
“A proposition, Benson,” he said, pleadingly. “This high-explosive formula is worth more millions than any one man can spend. Let me go, and we’ll split the money which some nation will pay for it. I’ll give you a duplicate of it, right now, to prove that I’m not trying to put anything over on you.”
The gun was ready to whip out. The man in the doorway was surely doomed. Yet, Grace felt a chill steal up his spine.
The Avenger looked like the figure of Fate, herself, as he stood there, empty-handed, pale eyes flaring like chips of ice in an arctic dawn.
But it seemed that he was not quite empty-handed after all. Not quite!
A subtle change was stealing over Grace’s weakly aristocratic face. It was becoming — blanker! Mounting triumph, even hatred, died slowly on his countenance.
Benson’s left hand moved a little, within itself. It was enough to tell the tale to Grace, whose hand had moved that same way many times.
“Damn you!” he screamed. “You’ve got… a disk.”
“Of course,” said Benson. His voice was not a fraction of a tone different. “Didn’t Jenner, at your command, put one into my pocket in his office?”
“You’ve… got… a… disk—”
Sweat was standing out on Grace’s forehead as he fought the swift numbing of his will power. He got the gun out of its holster. But his hand was moving more and more slowly. And it stopped with the muzzle barely freed.
“I’ll… get… you—”
With the last remnant of his will, Grace tried to pull the trigger. He did not know the gun was pointed, not at The Avenger, but down at his own abdomen in his lax and will-less hand.
Ruin, if another three seconds passed, and left him at the mercy of this man with the white-steel eyes! Ruin, if he could not shoot him down and get to the disk!
Grace squeezed the trigger as the last light of volition blanked from his horrified eyes. He pulled the trigger — and fell at the feet of the man in the doorway.
Not an expression appeared — could not appear — on the white death-mask of a face. Then Benson took the formula from a bloody pocket and dashed both the disk he’d held in his left hand, and the disk beside Cranlowe, against the wall.
The inventor, when he began to think for himself again, found himself free. And found the man with the prematurely white hair silently, extending a bloody paper to him