The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (15 page)

“Thank you for the information,” he said, in a different, harder tone.

The man blinked, then started a little.

“I suppose,” said The Avenger, turning back, “you kept this information to yourself for fear of gang reprisals.”

“Yes, I did,” said the man. “Say—what did I tell you, anyway?”

“Quite a bit. For which, again, thanks.”

The Avenger went out with Janet. On the street, he looked at her.

“Banners? Caves?”

“There is a quite large cave formation several miles out of Marville,” explained Janet. “The local chamber of commerce has been trying for a long time to make it a tourist attraction. They advertise it once in a while, and they have a shell-shocked World War veteran there for a few dollars a week to act as guide. Only about a dozen tourists a week come there. But the guide is zealous; he ties a banner to every rear bumper, as he was ordered. He did it this time—to a gangster car.”

“We go south to Marville,” said The Avenger.

Behind them, the store-owner was cursing himself for somehow having told a thing he had resolved never to breathe to a soul. Gang murder! He knew what sometimes happened to innocent bystanders who informed on phases of gang wars.

But having told once, he saw no reason not to tell again when, about an hour later, several men came in and asked about the questions the man with the dead face had asked. The men were special Federal investigators, headed by P. Edward Arnold, himself.

“Gone to Marville, eh?” repeated Arnold. “We’ll get him there.”

In the government car, which was armored like a rolling fortress, one of his men said, “You still want him—dead or alive?”

Arnold nodded, face regretful but eyes grim. He had thought a lot of Richard Benson. But the evidence against him, among which was a witnessed attempt at extortion, was too conclusive.

“If we say we want to take him in for questioning,” his man pointed out, “he may say he simply can’t be delayed now because he is on the edge of making important discoveries.”

Arnold nodded to that, too. “Yes, that would be the most logical way to try to stall. But it can’t be allowed. He surrenders instantly, or you shoot him down. Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be. The welfare of our nation depends on it.”

In our broad land there are dozens of cavern systems almost rivaling the famous natural caves of Kentucky. Not quite as extensive as the Mammoth Caves, they are yet vast underground labyrinths filled with natural beauty—and with death for the unwary one who goes too far from an exit and loses his way.

In nearly every case the businessmen of the nearest town try to attract tourists to their caves. But it is hard to make a dent in the prevailing public apathy to things subterranean.

It was so in this case. Janet’s guess that a dozen tourists a week came to the Marville Natural Caves was probably overly generous. And the few who did come never went beyond the first huge cave, because there was a bottomless rift between that and the next one. And the “guide” didn’t know of any other entrances.

That guide, by the way, The Avenger and Janet found as they got to the entrance of the caves, would never tie any more banners to rear bumpers. He was dead!

He lay just inside the cave mouth with his throat slashed from ear to ear.

Janet exclaimed in pity, “Poor fellow. He wasn’t quite right from his shell shock. It was like killing a child—”

“Even a child can see too much to be allowed to live,” Dick said quietly.

“But what on earth could this poor man have seen?”

“Let’s go on farther,” suggested Benson, “and see if we can find out.”

They went into the cave. They had covered at least four hundred yards and gone around half a hundred spectacularly fantastic and beautiful stalagmites, before they reached the end of the trail. The end, at least, as far as Janet knew.

This was a rift in solid rock that was about fifty feet across, as Dick’s powerful little flash revealed. And it went straight down to depths out of reach of the flashlight’s beam.

“There’s water down there,” said Benson.

“Is there?” Janet had thought she had fine ears, but she couldn’t hear any water.

“Yes. An underground stream. And it must flow to the south, since all the land here slopes that way. We can go back out, find the stream, and perhaps get into the rest of the cavern system along it.”

“Why go into them?”

“Because,” said Benson, “there is some mystery about the Marville Caves that we want to find out about. There is plainly no mystery about this big, well-known entrance cave, so it must lie in the others.”

“You’ll have a hard time finding the stream as it comes above ground,” said Janet pessimistically. “You see, there are a dozen little creeks outside here. I know, I used to play in most of them when I was a little girl, building dams and going wading. It will be next to impossible to decide which of them is the stream down there.”

“It shouldn’t be too hard,” said Benson, voice calm almost to the point of indifference.

The Avenger wore a vest that had more little pockets in it than ten ordinary vests. He dipped into one of the pockets now and drew out a capsule about the size of an olive. This he dropped into the underground watery depths.

Janet looked puzzled.

“The shell of the capsule,” said Benson, “will melt in a moment or two in the water. It will release a powerful dye. The dye will turn the water red, like blood, for many yards around. We’ll go outside, now, and search for the stream that is reddish in color.”

They returned to the entrance of the main cave. And Janet screamed sharply.

The body of the guide was no longer there!

The Avenger said nothing. He had been certain enough before that a lot of activity was taking place in this cave system. He needed nothing like the removal of the murdered man to prove it to him.

They went out. The fourth stream to the east, gushing from the side of the chain of hills forming the roof of the cavern system, was distinctly reddish in color.

They found the spot where the water came from the hillside. There was something like a jungle of trees and undergrowth around the spot, lush plants that flourished in the continual moisture. As if by instinct, The Avenger cut one extra-thick bush to the ground with Ike.

And a hole was revealed above the icy flow.

The hole was small, but by bending double he and Janet could get through it, wading up to their knees in the water.

“I’d heard there were other entrances to the caves,” said Janet in a low tone. “But even the oldest residents around here didn’t seem to know where they were.”

“
Ssh!”
said Benson instantly.

They were in a small tunnel that was rapidly swelling into a big one. Up this long funnel, sound went tripping, doing odd magnifying things. Even The Avenger hadn’t foreseen how odd.

His sibilant warning preceded them like an army of ghosts, with the near ones roaring and the far ones whispering.

“SSH!”

“Ssh!”

“Ssh—”

“Sss—”

Benson’s flash lit a path for them like the headlight of a tiny locomotive. They went as fast as they could. If anyone were ahead of them, the echoing sound must have been a warning. Then, suddenly, the tunnel veered right and upward and left the stream. They climbed the incline to a point where, on their left, a deep chasm yawned.

Across the chasm was the main cave which they had entered first.

They turned away from the chasm and went back into unguessable depths.

“The caves are like a chain of beads,” said Janet in a whisper.

They were. Like beads strung on a thread, the thread being a rift like a corridor, leading into and out of first one and then another.

But the rift soon forked.

“Now what?” whispered Janet. “Right, or left?”

There was a sound to their left, and the words: “Stay where you are and drop that light!”

The Avenger moved with the uncanny swiftness of which he was capable. Janet found herself suddenly in the right-hand fork as Benson lifted her and leaped with her. The flash went out. They had evaded the unseen foe.

There was a roar and a dreadful trembling of the solid rock on which they stood. And down from the low-hanging roof, over the narrow bottleneck through which they had leaped, came tons of stone. It completely blocked their way back out.

Somebody laughed out there, and then a gun roared!

Fergus MacMurdie yawned and stretched.

He had had orders to follow the chief and Janet Weems in another plane and watch Blake’s house. So he had come; and he had been watching, for nearly five hours, lying cramped behind a bush in the rear yard of the Blake estate.

He had seen nothing there, and had about concluded that for once Muster Benson was off on a cold scent. Then he saw the servants leave the place. They were looking contented enough, and it appeared that they had been unexpectedly given an evening off. So Mac regained his first alert watchfulness.

A big town car drew up in front of the place.

The front door was out of Mac’s range of vision, so he went, like an Indian from bush to bush, to the side where he could see it. And he got there just in time to see a remarkable figure being smuggled out the front door and into the town car.

The figure was like that of a gorilla, with long arms and a crouching walk that came near to dragging the creature’s knuckles on the ground.

“Nevlo!” Mac whispered to himself between set teeth. “The skurlie! ’Tis some hold he’s got over Blake that he can make the mon shelter him in his home and drive him around in his town car!”

The Scot didn’t have much time for reflections. The town car swirled off in a hurry, and Mac could barely get to his own rented coupé down the line in time to pick up the trail before Blake’s glittering machine faded from sight completely.

It went south of Marville.

Mac followed, far behind, through the little town and out into open country. It was not to the power plant they were going. Mac knew that. In fact, it seemed as if they weren’t going anywhere, because the town car dumped the misshapen gorilla in open country just south of a line of low hills and then rolled back toward Marville as if the devil were after it.

Mac bit his lips in indecision as to which to follow, and decided that Nevlo was the more important man to trail. He went after the monstrosity who had been a fine engineer.