The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns (7 page)

Then Dick Benson went on, pale eyes alert. He had an idea he had already found the most important thing he was apt to pick up in here. But it was the course of method to go on and cover the rest of the ground. There might be some slight clue that the police had not found when the tramp’s death was reported.

Suddenly Dick stiffened and stood still, face as emotionless as ever, but with all his compact body tensed for instant and powerful action if necessary.

A man had appeared behind him so suddenly that it seemed that he must have materialized out of thin air.

The man made no effort to keep from being heard. He walked along a line of sidetracked boxcars toward Benson with normal steps, feet scraping on the cinders and gravel. Dick turned.

The man wore blue overalls and a blue shirt of denim. He had a striped railroader’s cap on his head and there was a red handkerchief loosely tied around his throat. He looked like an engineer walking through to report for the midnight shift. He was swinging a lunchbox in his left hand. In his right was a rolled newspaper.

“Well!” said Dick evenly. “Where did you spring from?”

The man looked friendly but curious.

“I didn’t spring from anywhere,” he said. “I was cutting across the yards and came out from behind that string of empties, and here you were.”

His face got a little less friendly.

“What’re
you
doing in here? Trespassers in the yards get pinched if the railroad dicks catch ’em.”

“I’m investigating the death of that tramp three nights ago,” said Dick, truthfully enough.

“Got credentials to show you have a right to do that?”

“You want to see credentials?” countered The Avenger, colorless eyes like ice in moonlight.

“Me? No. I’m no road cop. But if any show, you’ll have to—” He broke off and looked up the track. “Get out the credentials, pal. Here they come.”

“Who?” said Dick.

“Four—no, five cops. They’ve been heavy since that tramp got in here.”

Dick had seen the five men before the man beside him. And he had surmised that they must be yard detectives: A lot of valuable stuff was in these hundreds of freight cars waiting to be shunted onto private sidings. But just to play it safe he’d acted a little dumb with the man beside him.

He waited for the five to come up to him. They did in a hurry, flashing lights into his face and with their right hands near either hip pockets or armpits.

“Who you got here, Fulton?” one of the men asked harshly.

“I don’t know,” said the man with the lunchbox. “Says he’s investigating the death of the tramp a couple nights ago.”

“So?” The man’s voice changed subtly.

And so did Dick Benson’s manner.

These men were not road detectives. Three of them might have been mistaken for such. But the other two gave the lot of them away.

One of these two had the cold dull eyes of a lizard, sunning its torpid length on a wall. The other had the hot eyes of a maniac, with pupils standing in a manner suggesting dope.

Two types of eyes characteristic of killers!

“Newshawk, or cop?” snapped the spokesman for the five, edging a little closer to Benson. “Working on some paper, or for the city?”

“Neither,” said The Avenger quietly, face never showing his thoughts. “I’m a private investigator.”

“Got papers proving that?”

“Of course,” Dick said. And at the look in his pale, awesome eyes, the man seemed less arrogant.

“Come along, then,” the man growled. “We’ll take you into the shed and have a look—”

It was as if the words were a signal. Perhaps, indeed, they had been. Anyway, the five all jumped for him without warning of any kind.

And The Avenger leaped to the left and backward like the black panther he resembled. Five to one. But the men would not shoot unless they absolutely had to. For it would be embarrassing for them to be found here by the yard employees they were impersonating.

Dick leaned down. This was one time he would have to ignore his code.

Below his right knee was holstered the special silenced little .22, which he called Mike. The Avenger whipped out Mike and the unusual little weapon whispered once. With deadly accuracy, it spat its lethal slug into the neck of one of the gunmen. The phony yard detective screamed; then sickening gurgling sounds came from his blood-spattered lips. He fell to the ground. He was dead!

Given an opportunity, the man with the icy eyes and thick black hair could have made those odds of five to one look sick. But he wasn’t given the opportunity.

He had discounted the sixth man, the one in overalls and denim shirt. Faced with such odds, you have to take a chance somewhere. And this, it developed, was the wrong chance.

The sixth man had circled behind Dick and climbed into the open boxcar. From the doorway, directly above The Avenger, he struck with the rolled newspaper in his hand!

Inside that paper there was a length of pipe, making a most efficient blackjack which could stun without breaking skin or flesh. It landed on the back of Benson’s head.

Dick fell forward on his face. He writhed to get up again, in spite of the shock of the blow; so the man swung his deft club a second time. And after that, The Avenger lay still.

He came to with a kind of singing in his ears, and lay without attempted movement for a moment. From the way his head hurt, and from that whining drone in his head, he realized he must have been out for quite some time.

When the bursting lights in his skull died down a bit, he tried to move—and couldn’t. At the same time, he was aware that he was lying with something painfully obtrusive humping up under the back of his neck and the backs of his legs.

The two painful things were rails. He was bound to them! Tied on his back, across one of the railroad tracks.

At the same time, he made another discovery.

The singing in his ears was not inside his skull; it was not the result of that blow to the head.

It came from the tracks on which he lay—a steady, tremulous thrumming that made the roadbed under him seem to quiver.

A train was grinding down the track on which he lay!

On The Avenger’s forehead appeared slight drops of moisture. But otherwise his face didn’t show any more fear than it had before he made the discovery. He knew, of course, that he’d die someday in these perpetual brushes with supercrime. He was constantly ready for it. Maybe this was the time.

But a Richard Benson doesn’t die without trying to beat Death first. So Dick began a sort of rhythmic convulsion on the track, as if he were trying by main strength to break his bonds.

But that wasn’t what he was attempting. One sharp effort had told him that was impossible. He was trying to get his hands to a certain spot between the lowest and next-lowest of his vest buttons.

Dick’s hands and arms were bound to his sides by coils of rope around his body, so that it was a tremendous task for him to work his hands over. But he made it, with the whining of the rails under him increasing by the second.

His left forefinger found a small loop and pulled hard.

The edge of this vest was just a little stiffer than the fabric would warrant, as were the edges of most of his other vests. This was because through the edging, concealed in the material, ran a length of very thin wire.

The wire, under a low-powered microscope, would prove to have numberless little teeth in it, making it into a tiny hack saw. You could saw through steel bars with it, given time.

Benson held the wire taut by pulling at the little loop into which the lower end was twisted. Then he expanded and contracted his chest muscles rapidly.

In a few seconds the slim, barbed wire had frazzled through the fabric of the vest; and in not many more it had parted the coils of rope. But the train was very near now! Light from its single glaring eye was beginning to touch Benson.

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.

“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.