The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (11 page)

Hose went from wharf tanks to the wing tanks of the plane. And then the girl came to life.

In the beautifully equipped ship there was a small compartment near the tail, like one of the tiny private staterooms on a deluxe train. Into this, Benson had put the girl suffering from the spider bite.

Nellie had gone in from time to time to see how she was making out, or to feed her at mealtimes. Aside from this, they’d all pretty well forgotten her. And she had helped them to forget by just sitting in there, hour after hour, like an inanimate object instead of a living, warmly beautiful girl.

But now, suddenly, the girl reminded them of herself. She came out of the compartment as the high-test gas was pouring through the hose.

She was sniffing.

Smitty thought at first that she was smelling the gas—the raw odor was heavy in the air—and didn’t like it. But then he saw that she was paying no attention to that odor. She had her nose turned toward the wharf, beyond which the old banana boat was sending a stench to heaven.

Now, Smitty had noted that smell before, and he had done a bit of philosophizing about it. The aroma, he had decided, somehow compressed the whole of the tropics into one odorous bundle that you could comprehend with nose alone.

The girl was sniffing this symbol of the tropics. And it seemed to be doing strange things to her.

Smitty watched her perplexedly while he saw in her eyes the glints of some kind of emotion—the first she’d shown—deepen into small fires.

Nellie was with Smitty. Mac and The Avenger were out on the wing. Heber was out there, too, at the tip of the wing.

Nellie and Smitty saw the girl stand in the open door. They looked at each other, and then back at the girl. A sort of moan came from her lips.

“Somehow,” said Nellie, “the tropics mean a lot to that girl. Some memory is being brought back to her. I do believe she’s snapping out of that coma from the spider bite.”

Smitty nodded, looking uneasy.

“Looks like she’s going off her nuts,” he said.

“No. She’s just deeply affected by—” Nellie stopped, and her blue eyes widened. “Of course! I get it now!”

“Of course what? You get what?”

“She has been in jungle country before. A lot. I wondered about the golden color of her skin. That’s tan, deep tan, that has paled but never disappeared in civilization. And her muscular development—she has traveled like a man through wilderness.”

Nellie was getting pretty affected herself, and Smitty knew why.

Nellie’s father had been a famous archaeologist, and Nellie had accompanied him on many a trip through jungle and forest. So, in a way, this girl was like the girl Nellie herself had been, before Nellie’s father was killed by criminals.

The girl in the cabin doorway screamed.

It was an indescribable sound. Memory was coming back to her all right, with some kind of anguish almost too much for her to bear. Something terrible was pressing on her mind, now that that mind was beginning to function again.

She screamed a second time.

“Watch out for her—” yelled Smitty.

As he yelled, he leaped. So did Nellie. But they were too late.

The girl had jumped to the wing and from there had leaped straight into the water.

On the wing, Mac and The Avenger heard the scream and ran to the spot. They saw the girl clumsily splashing for the shore. She wasn’t much of a swimmer, just enough to stay afloat. She acted as if everything in the world depended on getting to the shore in a hurry and then departing for spots unknown.

“Get her!” snapped Benson. “She isn’t responsible. No telling what she’ll do.”

That was all Smitty heard. He dived and slid into the water with the last word.

He came up to hear a curious roaring, and to see that somehow the world had turned pinkish in the two seconds he’d been submerged. He looked back. A hoarse yell came from his lips.

Plane, hose, some of the surface of the water were an inferno! Somehow the gas had caught fire.

Smitty saw Nellie dive clean and saw Mac topple from the wing to join her. The giant didn’t see Heber. The Avenger didn’t dive.

Benson leaped through flame into the cabin of the plane, as if there were something he could do to save it. But there was nothing; the plane was doomed. Smitty knew that.

“Chief!”
he yelled in horror.

Benson appeared at the opening. He had a parachute pack in his hands. He looked positively inhuman, because in all this inferno his eyes were as icily calm and his face as glacially emotionless as ever. Young, good-looking, but a machine instead of a man.

The Avenger threw the pack to the wharf and went back. Four more times he did this, retrieving five ’chute packs from the fire. Then he leaped himself, through flame that singed his thick black hair.

All were out of the fire, at least. So Smitty, hardly knowing what he was doing, but still obeying orders, turned to go after the girl again. She was almost ashore.

With a racing crawl stroke, he got to her as she was wading out. He held her by the arm, none too gently, and saw that she was watching the fire with eyes into which still more intelligence, and shock, had appeared.

So Smitty watched the fire, too. And he literally moaned as he watched.

The plane, the beautiful plane, was doomed! It was wreathed in fire there was no putting out. There was an explosion with fire hurled in all directions; then the plane sank, a total loss.

The silence succeeding this tragedy was broken by the yells of men trying to keep the wharf from burning, too. If those big tanks of high octane gas ever caught—

They extinguished that fire. Smoke in torrents rose to the sky. But the wharf was saved, though the plane was lost.

The plane lost.

The little group gathered at the land end of the dock—Nellie and The Avenger, Smitty and Mac and the girl. With still no sign of Heber.

“Marooned here!” mourned Mac. “Stuck! It looks like the search of yer old friend Stahl is indefinitely postponed.”

The girl with the warm-brown hair, and the light of renewed intelligence in her lovely face, stared at Mac.

“Did you say Stahl?” she exclaimed. “You are going to the aid of Alden Stahl?”

The Avenger’s pale, calm eyes swung to her. They were still without expression of any kind. It looked as if the whole bottom had dropped out of his plan, but no disappointment, nothing, showed in his face.

“We are,” he said. “Stahl is your uncle, isn’t he?”

It was the turn of all of them to gasp at this. How had The Avenger known that?

The girl nodded. “I am Marge Stahl, his brother’s daughter. My folks died many years ago, and Uncle Alden has been all of my family. We have been very . . . close.”

“And you got a letter from him recently that upset you very much?”

“Yes.” The girl looked almost fearfully at the pale eyes. “How did you know? I’m sure I must have been unconscious or something, for days. I’m sure I couldn’t have told you.”

“You told me in a word-association test that you do not remember,” said The Avenger. “Heber mentioned Stahl’s name, and you promptly tried to kill him. That indicated that the name of Stahl, and also of Heber, meant so much to you that they penetrated for an instant even the paralysis of will and intelligence from which you were suffering. Which indicated that you were somehow connected with the affair we were beginning to investigate.”

Benson looked unseeingly at the spot where his plane had been. He was reviewing the word game.

“I said ‘mine’; you said ‘radium.’ I said ‘snakes,’ which symbolizes jungle; you said ‘uncle,’ which tied the two together. I said ‘guide’; you said ‘snake,’ indicating deep distrust. I said ‘letter’; your answer was ‘radium,’ meaning you’d heard of radium recently in a letter. ‘War’—‘home.’ All of which gave a fairly clear picture.

“Your uncle, Alden Stahl, was in the jungle looking for radium. He wrote you, probably just before leaving Manaos, and told you he was going. He must have expressed distrust of Heber, the guide, and said that if you didn’t hear from him by a certain time it would mean that something had happened to him. Probably through Heber’s untrustworthiness.”

“That’s right,” Marge Stahl said. “And I didn’t hear, so I knew he’d gotten into trouble through that unspeakable Heber. Oh, I wanted to go with him this time as I’d gone with him before on other expeditions. But he said with a war on and no one knew what forces in secret places in South America, I must stay home this time.”

“ ‘War’—‘home,’ ” mused Nellie, nodding. Now, with the key to the trend of the word-association test exposed, each word was part of a logical whole. But there were still a few unexplained.

“How was it that ‘radium’ and ‘towers’ were linked together?” Nellie asked.

“The mention of towers,” said Benson, “must refer to an ancient Indian city in the jungle which was Stahl’s destination.”

“But Heber said there was no city near there, that it was probably only someone’s imagination.”

“Heber said several things that were not quite true,” The Avenger retorted.

“That’s right—Uncle Alden mentioned the ancient city in his letter,” Marge said. “That letter! I was so afraid! I was on my way to get your help, Mr. Benson, when I saw a little dark man—from the Amazon wilds, I was pretty sure—right beside me near Sixth Avenue. It was strange to see a man like that in New York. It was even more strange because the little fellow looked so much like a monkey. Then something bit me, or stung me, and that’s all I know till now.”

“The little monkey man had friends,” said Smitty. “They paralyzed you with a spider bite and dragged you, a prisoner, into a joint they had as a hangout. I happened to blunder along and get you out.”

“But why would they capture me?” Marge said. “How did they even know about me?”

There seemed to be no answer to his, for the moment. But the rest was plain enough.

Marge, recovering anyway from the paralysis, had sniffed the scent of the tropics. Vaguely it had spelled terrible trouble to her. It had started her mental processes functioning again, and the shock of the fire had completed the recovery.

“Heber betrayed my uncle. I’m sure of it from his letter.”

Smitty started a little and looked around.

“And by the way—where
is
friend Heber?”

“Gone!” said The Avenger.

“Gone?”

“He set the gas afire, jumped for the wharf, and got away in the confusion. I heard the roar of a fast motorboat a minute later.”

“Heber started that fire?” roared Smitty.

“Yes. He is in with that gang on the transport. We didn’t rescue him last night; we just got him away from the cutthroats he leads.”

Smitty looked his stupefaction.

“It’s all fairly plain,” said The Avenger. “Heber wanted the treasure contained in the ancient Indian city in the jungle. But there were ‘two guards,’ as he put it himself. The two guards were . . . the disease called the green killer, and the Indians of the region who were grimly determined that no white man should live to bring other white men back to their realm.

“Heber and his men figured they could take care of the natives with grenades and machine guns. But the odd, possibly prehistoric, disease that makes men into apes was beyond them. He knew of my work with obscure diseases. He knew Stahl was an old friend of mine. He took Stahl to the place, exposed him to the disease, left him a prisoner to the natives. He came to me in New York, faking the disease, to get an antitoxin for it, knowing I’d work to help an old friend.”

“Faking it?” protested Nellie. “Why, he gave you blood from his own veins, and from it you discovered the remedy.”

“It was not blood from his own veins. Remember, he insisted on drawing that blood himself, alone? It came from some little container or bottle, not from his body.”

“He certainly looked sick.”

“Yes. He was clever. He walked like an ape and pasted hairs low down on his forehead. We saw some of the hairs in his room at Bleek Street after he’d gone.”

“But the blood—”

“It was the blood of the Indian who was murdered near Mac’s store. The natives around the ancient city have apparently had the disease for so many centuries that they are immunized to it, though it is constantly in their blood stream.”

“That’s why they cut his throat
after
killing him!” Mac exclaimed.

“Yes. Heber’s men did that. Then they gave the blood to Heber in the fake kidnap scene near Mac’s store. Heber must have carried the bottle under his armpit to keep it at body temperature. Thus he could give me a fresh sample of blood with the disease germs in it. But I analyzed some of the blood Josh washed from his shirt, from the gash on his head, and it tipped his scheme. It was an entirely different type from the blood he’d given me.”

“Then all he wanted was the antitoxin?” Nellie said.

“Yes. With that, he could go to the treasure spot and be safe from the green killer, inoculated against it. As soon as he got the little bottle, he left Bleek Street.”

“And you and Smitty got him back. But if you knew he was a crook—” Nellie frowned, bewildered.

“It was best to say nothing. We had to have him to guide us. As long as we let him think we suspected nothing, he would be more or less compelled to cooperate, lead us toward where Stahl is, for fear of tipping his hand to us. So I kept him with us, watching him every second to see that he did no harm.”

Marge Stahl gave a low cry of distress.

“Then this trouble we’re in now is my fault.”

Mac stared at her.

“I had to go and jump into the water like a maniac and distract your attention just long enough for Heber to be able to start that fire,” she said.

“I’m afraid that’s about the size of it,” said The Avenger. “But you weren’t responsible; you can’t be blamed.”

“Well, we’re sure licked, now,” said Mac pessimistically. “We have a million miles of jungle to comb through because we haven’t Heber as a guide any more. And we have no plane to comb with.”