The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (16 page)

The two followed the little trail, walking silently, alert for any sound or move.

It led them to basement stairs, and down. And it ended before what seemed a blank wall, till Mac began prodding around with powerful, bony fingers. Then a section of the wall swung back disclosing a tiny cell, in the floor of which was a manhole cover.

A new manhole cover.

“It’s been verrra easy,” whispered Mac dourly. “I’m thinkin’ it’s been too easy—to come here and find just what we’re after.”

Smitty snorted and lifted the manhole cover. The Scot was always sure of disaster when things were going well, reserving his optimism for situations so desperate that any other man would give up completely.

There was a tunnel under the manhole cover. Smitty’s small flash revealed that. He lowered himself to it, and Mac did the same.

“The lid?” whispered Mac.

“Better put it back in place, over our heads,” Smitty replied in a low tone. “Just in case some dope comes along in a minute and gets wise by seeing it out of position.”

Mac lowered the manhole lid into place. They went down the tunnel by the light of Smitty’s flash.

Speedily the thing broadened and heightened till it was a full-sized traffic tube, twenty or twenty-five feet wide and almost the same in height. But walls and floor were of rough concrete, never finished off, and drops of moisture oozed from the river bed just above.

They could hear the swishing of the water near their heads. They opened a heavy steel door.

“I don’t like this at all,” whispered Mac dolefully again, looking back at the door. It was like a bulkhead.

Smitty glared at him and the two went on.

There was a slight bend in the tunnel at the beginning. They rounded this bend; then Smitty pointed. Mac nodded wordlessly.

There, protruding from the side of the tunnel, was a plain iron lever. This was the lever Nellie had mentioned. It was rusted very little, indicating that it, and the flood-gate mechanism it controlled, had been installed only recently.

They had been told to keep anyone from throwing that lever, if anyone were near it as they came along. But there wasn’t a soul in the tunnel ahead of them.

They went on.

And
behind
them a score of men crept in the darkness as silently as rats!

The men got to the heavy steel door across the tunnel at the bend. They went through the doorway, and closed the portal behind them. One of their number remained behind, outside the door. There was a heavy iron bar there. He dropped it into place. Now, no matter what happened in the tunnel ahead, the big fellow and the Scotch guy would be trapped.

Mac and Smitty were, as yet, unaware of the events in their rear. They were too busy looking ahead.

Nellie had said she was held in a cell off this tunnel. So the two men were looking for some kind of portal behind which might be such a dungeon.

They didn’t see one. Instead, staring ahead, they suddenly saw feet and legs, in Smitty’s flashlight beam.

“Back!” roared Mac. “There’s an arrrmy of the skurlies waitin’ for us!”

The two started back.

Smitty’s flash rayed into the tunnel’s gloom, and threw into bold relief a multitude of faces. Rats’ faces, though on the shoulders of men.

“They’re here, too!” growled Smitty. “They’ve got us two ways, like a pair of pincers.”

As he yelled, he threw his flashlight at the nearest face, and charged, to fight them in the darkness. But it seemed they were not to have that advantage.

Light leaped out all along the tunnel’s length, from bulbs strung high overhead. With the light, the men behind the two and the men ahead of them, rushed forward.

It was like being caught between two tidal waves. A score of men on one side, a dozen or more on the other.

The two waves of snarling humanity met, with Mac and Smitty like two pieces of driftwood in between!

Smitty howled, and grabbed a man by his two clutching arms. Then he began to swing the man around in a giant’s circle. The fellow screamed as his arm sockets gave way under the strain and both arms were dislocated. But the scream didn’t stop Smitty.

He just kept swinging! And the flying feet of his captive knocked over men like tenpins.

Meanwhile, Mac was laying to right and left with fists like bone mallets swinging at the end of wirerope lengths.

The gang stepped back to avoid the swirling, helpless body of their pal. They waited till Smitty had to stop turning round and round to avoid getting so dizzy that he couldn’t stay on his feet. Then they came in again, in a second double wave.

Mac was down on one knee, but still battering away against the hopeless odds. There were going to be broken bones as souvenirs of his cold, controlled ferocity.

Smitty was doing all the damage he could. Which was about as much as a baby tank could have done.

The giant had never bothered to learn to box. With his colossal strength, it simply wasn’t necessary. He just hit, and whether his opponent had his arms up in a boxing guard, or not, made no difference. Smitty simply smashed through all conceivable guards and mashed face or body behind them.

He was knocking men around now with an enthusiasm that brought cold terror to their murderous eyes. The odds had been sixteen to one against these two; and it developed that such odds were not very much more than were needed. There weren’t many of the men unmarked when Smitty finally went down and out beside his unconscious friend.

The men kicked the two and took them down the line.

They threw open a door and tossed the two into it. Then they slammed the door shut again and barred it before a black panther could come from the cell inside and maul a few of them.

The panther, as Mac and Smitty discovered when their senses wavered back to them, was Josh Newton.

Nellie was in this dismal dungeon with Nan Stanton, as her radio SOS had said. But in addition, Rosabel and Josh stared somberly at the giant and the Scot when they sat up and rubbed their aching heads.

“So they got you, too,” growled Smitty.

Neither Josh nor Rosabel answered. The fact was self-evident.

All The Avenger’s aides were nicely immobilized in this rock prison. But there was one person missing who had been there at first.

Fram!

The doctor’s voice sounded suddenly from outside.

“Thank you for calling the help, Nellie Gray,” his voice came mockingly. “It was a help. It caught your companions quite neatly. Now I’ve got you all—except the man who commands you and so arrogantly calls himself The Avenger. I’ll have him too, in a little while. Then the lever will be thrown and we’ll be rid of the lot of you.”

Nellie looked guiltily and in distress at the rest. She had been the one to send out the fatal call for help. She had been entirely duped by the clever man whose business was the subtle manipulation of minds.

None of them wasted any time in regrets.

“The chief,” said Smitty in a low tone. “We’ve got to warn him. The radio—”

His great hands had been fumbling at his waist. They went slack. There was no radio there. The men outside had ripped it from him before throwing him into the cell.

He stared at Mac. The Scot mutely shook his homely head. There was no radio at his belt, either.

It was the same with Josh and Rosabel and Nellie. The diminutive blonde had been allowed to make that appeal; then her set had been snatched from her.

Now they had no way of contacting the man with the pale, infallible eyes and the white, dead face. They could only hope that he had not heard Nellie’s signal, as all the rest of them had.

The Avenger
had
heard the signal.

Sitting in the Senate gallery, watching a great treasure belonging to the government being tentatively thrown away. Benson had felt the vibration of the radio call. He had unobtrusively held a tiny earphone, kept in a vest pocket, up to his ear. Nellie’s call had come to him.

But there was nothing Benson could do about that, at the moment. For just then, his keen eyes had detected the reason for the horror with which Burnside and Cutten had glared at their desk tops.

The little, vague-looking man with the camera concealed in the opening of his coat, didn’t have a camera at all.

That little black case, aimed downward, was not a camera. It was the reason for the terror in the Senate.

So it was that The Avenger had a hideous choice to make.

Nellie Gray was in danger. Perhaps the others of his aides, if they had obeyed that call, were in peril too. And the urge to help them was strong.

But—there was patriotism. And no man loved his country more than The Avenger. If he dropped everything and sped to his comrades’ aid, the United States would suffer a terrific loss. One, he knew now, that would entail needless suffering to countless thousands of its citizens.

Patriotism against loyalty to individuals! He had to serve his country first.

Benson slipped quietly along the row of seats in the gallery, a row behind the man with the black case. He sat down next to the man before the fellow realized anyone was within six seats of him.

The Avenger’s hand went to the man’s leg, just above the knee. He pressed.

The man had started to jerk his leg away from the searching hand. He stopped moving it and stopped breathing, too, as an awful pain seared him from the waist down. The Avenger’s fingers, trained as few surgeons’ fingers are trained, had found their nerve quarry.

“Hand me that case,” whispered Benson.

The man tried wildly to clutch Benson’s wrist, but stopped as the appalling pressure tightened just a little. Sweat was forming a little ring of moisture around his lips.

“Hand me the case!”

The man passed the case to The Avenger.

Benson turned. A guard was at the gallery entrance. The Avenger motioned with his head for the guard to come.

“You know me?” he whispered to the guard.

It was not suspicious to whisper. The natural attempt of anyone would be to avoid interrupting Senate proceedings down below.

“Yes, Mr. Adams,” murmured the guard. The mining man, whom Benson was supposed to be, was known all over the Capitol.

“I caught this man acting very suspiciously,” Benson whispered. “I wish you’d turn him over to the police for later questioning.”

“You can’t do this!” the little man whispered savagely. “I’ll raise hell in here! I’ll—”

He stopped, and a repressed yell sounded like the thin moan of a dying man, as Benson’s fingers tightened still a little more above his knee.

The man could scarcely use that leg when the guard marched him silently out of the gallery. It had been very quietly done. A few people had looked disapprovingly at the whispering three, then stared down at the Senate again.

Benson took the little black case.

It was a stereopticon.

An ingenious little thing, it had batteries and a small but intense light. There was a slide in the thing. Just one.

It was a picture, in color, of a little red man in frock coat and topper, leading an impossibly smiling little green dog. The kind of thing only a man with a disordered mind would see.

The radio vibration seemed still to be burning The Avenger’s waist.
Hurry! Hurry! Nellie Gray—perhaps the others—in deadly danger!

But there were things that must be done first.

Benson snapped the little slide from the clever tiny stereopticon, and ground it under foot. He wrote swiftly on a small sheet of paper from a notebook; then he tore the paper to fit the slide.

He pointed the tiny stereopticon, himself. First at Burnside’s desk top, then at Cutten’s. He saw both men stare in an astonishment greater than their previous fear, then in a relief so profound that both men leaned hard on their chairbacks while a physical weakness swept over them.

Benson got up and hurried to the door of the gallery. His work was done.

On that slip of paper, projected like a small movie image onto the desk tops of the two Senators, he had written:

You’re perfectly sane. What you saw was a stereopticon slide, as this is. Block that bill!

Even as Benson went out the door to the stairs, he heard Burnside’s voice, with a buglelike note in it as the man wrenched free from the awful chains of fear which had held him.

“Mr. President, with your permission I shall withdraw my amendment concerning Bison National Park—”

The Avenger hurried on. His little crew in danger! The men and women who were always ready to give their lives for his—and for whom, naturally, he expected to do the same!

But great as was his urgency, The Avenger made one stop before seeking out the death-trap described by Nellie.

The one stop was at the Library of Congress, where were collected all the statistics and data on every undertaking ever attempted by the city of Washington.

The Avenger had the disguising eyecups off his pale, icy eyes now. His face was still that of Tetlow Adams; but the eyes, colorless, deadly, calm as glacial moonlight, were The Avenger’s.

He was in the opening of the tunnel. He had sped straight to the Murrain Co. warehouse on the edge of the Potomac. He had gotten in as quickly as had Smitty.