The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (16 page)

Suddenly, along a creek bank, Nevlo seemed to disappear.

It was night, now, but not
that
dark. The Scot found the explanation in a moment. There was a hole out of which the creek was gushing. Beside the hole there was a thick stub where a shielding bush had recently been cut away.

A concealed hole in the ground. This must have been where Nevlo went.

Mac crowded himself through the hole and along the path The Avenger had taken. He followed Nevlo by sound, now, ears tuned to the drag of those uneven, crippled footsteps.

Up an incline, to the right—

The Scot heard the sound of a shot ahead, a roaring report magnified many times, like a snare drum. He saw the gorilla form ahead—outlined in the backwash of a flash he held—start to run. And Mac ran, too.

He went through caves like beads on the chain of the crude tunnel they were in. Ahead of him, Nevlo stopped. There was a man there, with a rifle. The man was beside a sort of breastworks formed of recently fallen rock.

Between the rock and the roof was a two-foot hole. As Mac neared Nevlo and the man with the gun, he saw the latter, grinning, thrust the rifle through the opening, aim, and fire!

From beyond the barricade Mac heard a heavy, booming crash. Then he could see into the cave a little by the aid of a flashlight which the grinning marksman had strapped to his rifle barrel.

Mac felt such rage fill him as even the bitter Scot seldom experienced.

In there were two people, trapped by the rock slide. Over their heads hung dozens of ponderous stalactites, huge icicle-like incrustations. The man with the gun had been amusing himself by firing at the stalactites over the heads of the two, sending them crashing down like great daggers of death.

One of the massive things was bound to catch the two and crush them. Quite an amusing game.

Then a strange thing happened. With this last shot, the marksman hadn’t bothered to get his head out of range of the opening when he turned. Probably he had decided some time ago that his two victims were helpless and unarmed. But it seemed they were not so helpless.

There was a subdued little
spat;
a gash appeared on the exact top of the marksman’s skull, and he fell. There was a foolish look on his unconscious face, marred a bit by a trickle of blood from the gash.

“Whoosh!”
breathed Mac. “Only one gun could do that, in the hands of one man—the chief.”

So the Scot leaped for the remaining enemy, Nevlo!

Mac had fists, as has been said, like bone mallets. They were about as good a weapon as anyone could own, aside from actual firearms. They had seldom let him down.

But they did so now.

He got a right and left square in the hideous face of the monstrosity, who had whirled, snarling, to confront the man who had tiptoed behind him from the secret entrance. And the two blows didn’t stop Nevlo at all.

Nevlo didn’t attempt to hit back. He wound his gorilla arms around Mac’s sinewy body, pinning the Scot’s arms to his sides, and squeezed!

Mac gasped in that mighty bear hug. He tried to get loose and couldn’t. He heard a roaring in his ears, and felt his ribs cracking!

The terrible pressure, after how long a period he couldn’t even guess, was relieved. He fell, as the arms uncoiled, and lay gasping on the rock floor.

The monster was roaring in pain, with the roars getting more suffocated every second. And Mac saw why.

From the opening between rock barricade and roof a steely arm was thrust. At the end of the arm was a hand, slim, not large, with muscles like little wire cables standing out on it.

Dick Benson’s hand. And it was clamped over the back of Nevlo’s neck, in the dreadful nerve pressure that could put a man out in a minute, kill him in two.

Had Benson been in the clear instead of straining to reach from a distance, his gorilla-like opponent probably never could have done it. As it was, Nevlo managed to jerk loose, the only person who had ever broken that hold.

Still roaring with pain and rage, he raced back past Mac and down the tunnel.

Mac got to the opening when Benson had half finished making it large enough for him and Janet Weems to get out.

“Whoosh!”
said the Scot, feeling tenderly at his ribs. “I thought it was ye I’d rescue, Muster Benson. But it looks like ye rescued me.”

The three of them went back down the tunnel toward the stream exit. Janet trembled a little, but was game. They crawled out into the open night, Benson first. And up from the bushes rose a dozen men.

“Put your hands up, Benson,” came a voice. “You are under arrest. Don’t try anything, because if you do we’ll shoot at once. And believe me, I’d rather not have to do that.”

The Avenger’s hands were up a little way above his head. Those marvelous, pale eyes of his had identified the speaker even in the darkness and had told him that the threat was deadly in its sincerity.

Benson had a lot of things he wanted to do immediately. He simply could not allow himself to be delayed like this. But he couldn’t afford to die, either.

Paul Edward Arnold, himself, stooped and took Mike and Ike warily from their leg holsters; Arnold was one of the few who knew the existence and location of those two little weapons used with such deadly effectiveness by The Avenger.

The Marville jail was the last word in strength and efficiency. The bars were of case-hardened steel, nearly two inches thick. The walls were of brick, reinforced throughout. Floors were of cement. The locks might have baffled Houdini.

Even the sheriff’s office, a big room in the rear of the building, was of that type of construction. In that rear room, a lot of prisoners were intensively questioned, and the sheriff didn’t want to risk jailbreaks by them or their friends.

Dick Benson was back in that rear room, now.

He had been taken to a cell by Arnold, after quite a talk between the two men, a talk that had helped The Avenger not at all.

“Of course I’ve been in the thick of this,” said Benson calmly. “The government asked me to investigate, didn’t it?”

“The government,” said Arnold bleakly, “didn’t ask you to try to extort five million dollars from a bunch of utilities men.”

“I was playing a part,” retorted Benson. “I went through an act, to see if I could confirm a suspicion of mine. And I did confirm it.”

“Just what did you find out?” Arnold inquired icily.

The Avenger had looked around at half a dozen Federal men, the Marville sheriff, and several burly deputies.

Sheriff and Federal men were probably above suspicion. But The Avenger couldn’t be sure of the deputies. He dared not take chances with them in an affair of such magnitude.

“It is too soon,” he said evenly to Arnold, “to tell what I have discovered to date.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell. If not here, then in Washington. There is a through train at four-thirty in the morning. I am arranging to have that stop at Marville. We will take you to Washington on it.”

“You’ll be making a serious mistake to delay me like that,” said The Avenger, pale eyes like ice in moonlight.

“I’ll have to take that chance,” shrugged Arnold. “Personally, I think you’re guilty as hell. But you’ll be given every chance to disprove your guilt, in the next few days in Washington.”

Benson’s eyes had glittered like little agates. In a few more days this gigantic crime plot would be successfully concluded, with a tremendous blackmail sum gathered by the archcrook and all evidence to convict him carefully destroyed. He simply could not give up the time Arnold demanded.

But he had saved his breath at the look in Arnold’s face.

Arnold and his men had left, after seeing Benson locked in the jail’s stoutest cell. But hardly had the special government men left when the Marville sheriff led Benson out of that cell and to his rear room.

The sheriff was a good officer, but he had a desire for publicity of the right sort. And here was a gorgeous chance.

The power plot was the biggest thing in the crime history of the country. It had the nation so excited it could scarcely sleep nights. The man who cracked it would be the nation’s hero.

And the sheriff saw no reason why he shouldn’t be that man.

If this fellow with the colorless eyes really knew something, he should be forced to tell it; then the sheriff would carry on from there.

There were three deputies with him when he herded Benson into the rear room. Benson, hands cuffed behind him, stood for a moment and faced the four. And for a second even the sheriff had his doubts.

This man was not large. Any one of the four of them was inches taller and pounds heavier. He seemed helpless with the handcuffs binding him. Yet there was something distinctly disquieting about the way he stood there.

“Sit down!” barked the sheriff, indicating a straight-backed kitchen chair.

Benson calmly sat down.

“I shall, of course, tell you nothing, sheriff,” he said, with no more emotion in his vibrant voice than in his calm face.

“You’ll talk,” said the sheriff. “You can start by telling me where Nevlo is and how you get into them caves near where Arnold picked you up.”

The Avenger said nothing. He wouldn’t have answered in any case. But even if he had felt like speaking, he would have held off because he was listening hard to something.

Something out in the night.

The night was unseasonably warm, so the side window of the rear room was open. The thick bars set in solid steel casements were revealed. And from out there, just barely to be heard even by The Avenger’s fine ears was a
pop-popping
roar like that of an airplane just ready to take off.

Only, of course, the airplane would have had to be taking off from one of the city streets, since there was no airport that near.

“Come on,” said the sheriff, filled with visions of being a national hero. “Where’s Nevlo?”

The muffled booming of a heavy motor sounded nearer. The sheriff and deputies could hear it now, too. One of the deputies raised an eyebrow.

“That’s a big truck,” he commented.

“Probably one of them twenty-ton trailer outfits from Akron,” said another. “So what? We don’t care about trucks.”

The big motor changed tune as it suddenly idled, out there in the night. Perhaps the driver had stopped for a cup of coffee.

There was the faintest of sounds from outside the open window.

The Avenger had been forced to sit down with his hands behind his back. Those hands now gripped the uprights of the heavy, plain chairback. He pulled a little. His slim fingers went whiter than normal with strain.

There was a thin screaming sound of wood strained beyond endurance. Then The Avenger dropped the back of the chair on the floor behind him. He had plucked it out of its glued and doweled holes as easily as if the two uprights had been two stalks of asparagus.

“For—” began one of the deputies in a whisper. But he stopped with the first word, mouth open. Not a man of them could have duplicated that feat, even with unbound hands and standing upright to brace knees and shoulders and back for the pull.

The Avenger’s eyes, like stainless-steel chips, regarded them all calmly. He had not plucked the back out of the seat simply to show off. He had done it to rivet their attention to him for a moment. And for an excellent reason.

He didn’t want any of them glancing at the window for a while.

Around the two central bars, an instant before, had been cautiously placed two thick steel hooks. From the hooks went one-inch steel cable.

“Maybe,” said one of the deputies, staring uneasily at the chairback lying on the floor, “we better take this guy back to his cell and wait for Arnold to—”

The Avenger stood up. Hands behind him, he raised the remnant of the chair as he got to his feet. His left hand moved a little, and calmly and easily a rung broke out with a report like that of a pistol shot.

Again he had done it to keep the men’s eyes away from the window and to keep their ears from hearing a slight noise of the hooks over the bars, a noise caused by the tightening of the cable behind the hooks.

“We’re not waiting for Arnold!” snapped the sheriff. “Answer my question, Benson— What’re you nuzzling the lapel of your coat for?”