The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (16 page)

They hastened, eager on both sides to give the “thing” in the pool these white victims who had appeared so obligingly to feed it.

Only two of the ape men had been left to guard Stahl and Dick Benson. That was enough for Benson and Stahl, but it showed a mistaken trust on the old man’s part to leave just two with Heber and the big fellow with the horn-rimmed glasses.

The minute the rest were out of sight, Heber flashed Gleason a look, and the two came up to the little monkey men who squatted close to the pair at the stakes.

Heber smiled jovially at these two, but he had his hand behind his back. So did Gleason.

In unison the two leaped and slapped guns down hard on the two guards’ heads. The sound was pretty bad. The little men sprawled. And Benson knew that one, at least, would never move again.

“Well, that’s that,” said Heber jovially. “Get going, Harry. We’ll look through the huts. I’ll take the old guy’s big hut; you take the next one. Scrape around the dirt to see if the stuff’s buried.”

Like ferrets after eggs, the two darted into the huts. The Avenger’s glacial, pale eyes went to Stahl’s face.

“I almost hope they find what they’re after,” snapped Stahl. “They’d never live to enjoy it. The leader here would send a hundred men to the ends of the earth, if necessary, to kill them. Don’t they realize that?”

“Apparently they’re willing to take that chance,” said Benson.

He was working at his bonds. But he realized that he would not be able to work loose from them. There was very little slack to utilize.

Meanwhile, death was swiftly on its way for Smitty and Nellie and Mac at the pool.

Heber came out of the biggest hut looking furious and baffled. At about the same moment Gleason came from the next hut. They glared at each other.

“No luck?” Gleason said.

“No luck,” Heber cursed. “I’d have sworn it would be in the old guy’s place.”

The two bustled into two more hovels, then two more. They were getting livid with disappointment.

“What’s wrong?” came The Avenger’s calm voice. “Can’t you find the emeralds?”

“Who said anything about emeralds?” snarled Heber.

“You did. Some time ago,” The Avenger said. “When your men pulled the fake kidnap scene on Sixth Avenue, one of them apparently hit you harder than was necessary. Anyhow, he really did daze you for a minute. And you babbled of emeralds, among other things. ‘A bucket of emeralds.’ Later you denied it, but I’ve been sure ever since that your first statement was the correct one.”

“Yes,” said Stahl bitterly, “it’s emeralds. For a few miserable pebbles, Heber has done all this!”

Heber was struck by a dire idea. He didn’t go into another hut. He came up to where Stahl stood upright, bound to the stake, and stood before him.

“Sure!” Heber exclaimed suddenly. “Sure! Harry, we’ve been dopes. This guy Stahl will know where they’re kept. He’s lived here for weeks.”

The Avenger began straining harder at his bonds as he foresaw what was coming. It didn’t take long to come.

“All right, Stahl,” Heber ground out. “Where are they?”

Stahl shook his head. “I can see this is going to be bad, because I can see you won’t believe me. But I don’t know where the emeralds are kept. I’m not even sure there are any; I’ve never seen them.”

“You’ve seen the one the little guy at the head of the tribe wears, haven’t you? It’s as big as an egg.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that one.”

“It proves there are a lot more. Where are they?”

“I swear I don’t know.”

“Look.” Heber’s voice was like an animal’s growl. He took out a big knife and slowly opened it. “We’ve gambled all our dough on this. We’ve gone through hell for the emeralds. I’ll cut you up a piece at a time if you don’t come through.”

Stahl said nothing. Of what use to talk? But The Avenger lifted hard on his tiptoes, and suddenly his glacial, colorless eyes narrowed just a little.

Heber put the keen point of the knife to Stahl’s forehead.

“I’ll cut my initials here first,” he said. “After that, if you don’t get smart—”

“Heber! Watch out!”

That was Gleason’s amazed and anguished shout. With it, The Avenger straightened up like the uncoiling of a taut and powerful spring!

In moving just before, Benson had felt the stake move a trifle, too. So he had crouched, sliding his bonds down the shiny worn wood of the stake, grasping it as hard as possible between the backs of his bound hands, then had reared powerfully straight up.

The stake had left the ground and lay along his bent back like a log tied to the back of a beast of burden.

Heber was staring, stupefied, and had a knife instead of a gun in his hand. So The Avenger turned his attention first to Gleason. He sprang at the man with the glasses, head down, back almost horizontal with the ground.

Gleason saw his danger just before it hit. But he couldn’t move fast enough. Trying to jump, trying at the same time to put a slug into Benson, he was caught squarely in the forehead by the top end of that stake! It hit home like a battering-ram, and The Avenger didn’t have to worry about Gleason any more.

He swerved toward Heber, at the same time backing so the pointed end of the stake nuzzled against Stahl’s bound hands. Stahl had a fast brain, too. Instantly, his fingers curled on the thing; and Benson, with a forward jerk, slid clear along its length and was free of the stake.

Heber started warily toward him, face twisted with fear and hate, knife ready for a death plunge! He feinted, leaped to one side, and bored in.

The Avenger’s arms and hands were still bound, but the monkey men had not bound his feet, nor Stahl’s.

Why bother? The stakes would hold them.

Benson’s left foot shot out and up like a dancing master’s. It seemed barely to touch Heber’s wrist. But the touch was enough to send the knife flying a dozen feet away. When Heber howled and ran to get it again, The Avenger darted into the nearest hut.

He had the slack that had been taken up by the stake.

With that, he twisted his steely, supple hands free in a couple of seconds. And when Heber leaped furiously into the hut to knife a bound man, that was the last Heber knew for a long time.

The Avenger’s fist caught the side of Heber’s jaw with surgical precision, and Heber went down, and out!

Benson took Heber’s knife and slashed Stahl loose.

“Run!” he commanded. “Approach the sacrifice pool by a roundabout path so the men there won’t see you approach. We’ll join at the pool.”

Then the man with the thick black hair and the icy, pale eyes was gone. A leap up to a tree branch, the beginning of that smooth, fast flow of motion through the green jungle canopy, and The Avenger was off to the aid of his friends.

But the killers had a terribly long head start on him this time!

At the pool, The Avenger’s aides and Marge Stahl were getting pretty desperate.

They had tried a dozen times to climb the steep cliff at their backs. It was impossible. They could get eight or ten feet up by clinging to vines; then the vines would pull loose from the sliding earth and dump them back on the stone terrace.

“We’re hooked, all right,” said Mac. Then, hopefully: “Try that rock slab again, Smitty.”

They had discovered this rock slab about five minutes after landing here.

At the far end of the stone ledge, under the shadow of the side wall of the pit there, the remains of a stone wall showed. The stones were huge, tight-fitting. In the center of this thirty-foot section of wall was one rock bigger than all the rest. It was at the foot of the wall, and it suggested a door.

A rock slab, weighing maybe half a ton, that opened as a door and led into the bowels of the earth under the cliff.

But even Smitty, with all his giant strength, couldn’t move the slab. This was not so much because of its weight as because, with its smooth-fitting edges, he couldn’t get a handhold anywhere.

But the big fellow moved obediently toward the door—if it was a door—to try again. However, he never made this final try. The slab moved before he reached it.

Tense, desperate, they all stared at the thing.

It moved outward, swinging like any ordinary kitchen door, without noise and apparently with nothing to make it move. Some secret mechanism of weight and counterweight was working beautifully to move that ponderous slab. But what was working the mechanism itself?

They had the answer to that in about thirty seconds.

An old, old native came through the wide-open doorway. He looked to be a hundred. After him poured at least fifty of the little monkey men. They were absolutely silent. There was a businesslike air about them that chilled the blood of The Avenger’s aides..

“They’re up to no good,” said Mac.

“I’ll say they are.” Smitty jerked his head toward the pool. “They’re going to throw us to that fish—or whatever it is in there.”

It was obvious that the giant’s dismal guess was right. Every action of the monkey men proved it. And then the blacks were followed by a dozen or so white men.

“Where have we seen
them
before?” Nellie said bitterly.

It was Heber’s gang, under the direction of the man with the yellow hair and the limp. He leered at them. They were backed against the far edge of the terrace, with the monkey men slowly and purposefully approaching them.

As the yellow-haired man started that way himself, in the wake of the natives, it could be seen that his limp was more pronounced. For an instant the leer on his face changed to a worried look.

“Hey, my knees hurt!” he said. “I can’t seem to straighten them out. Do you suppose that antitoxin Heber gave us was on the up-and-up?”

“Of course it was,” said another of the men. But he spoke doubtfully, and it could be seen that he wasn’t standing quite straight, either.

“Oh-oh!” murmured Smitty, on whom a great light was beginning to dawn.

The old native ignored all this. His attention was on the little group huddled at the far end of the stone ledge. His gaze was without anger, which made it more sinister than if he’d been frothing with fury. He looked gravely at Mac and Nellie and Smitty and Marge. Then he looked gravely at the pool.

Possibly, there was some extra vibrant note in his voice that carried farther than its volume warranted. Possibly the intonation had been chanted so many times before that it automatically spelled food to what Smitty had called “the fish.”

Anyhow, there was a sudden commotion in the water at the end of the native’s intonation, and the horror in the pool appeared once more.

“Holy mackerel!” breathed one of Heber’s gang. “What is that?”

“D-damned if I know,” said Yellow Hair, in awe. “But I know one thing—when these nosy boys and girls are put in there with it, they’re going to stay put!”

The group of four toward whom the natives were walking were looking anywhere else but at the silent, waiting menace in the pool. Smitty and Mac stood in front of the two girls.

“So?” said Mac shakily.

Smitty’s arm and shoulder muscles knotted.

“We rush the monkeys,” he said.

“They’ll get us with those darts.”

“That’s better than the pool. Anything’s better than the pool. And maybe we can shove a few of them in first, though I’d rather shove Heber’s monkeys than these natives— Hey, the guy with the yellow hair looks nervous.”

The guy with the yellow hair was indeed looking nervous.

He said to the man next to him, “My knees hurt like hell. I’ll bet anything you like that Heber didn’t give us the real antitoxin to inoculate us.”

His pal’s face twisted with fear. “Then we’ll all of us have this disease! We’ll die in a few months and look like apes in our coffins! But Heber wouldn’t do that. Come to think of it, he took the same stuff himself.”

But Yellow Hair still looked nervous. “Another thing. I’m sure I heard a couple of planes awhile back.”

“Aw, you’ve been sayin’ that for two hours. You’re nuts.”

“All right, I’m nuts. But there’s still another thing—we were all nuts when we left Heber and Harry alone back in the village. If they ever get their hooks on the stuff, they’ll go off with it and maroon us here.”

“Now,” said the other man, while the rest looked disturbed, “you got something.”

The old native still was paying no attention to the white men at his back. Staring at the four ahead of him, he gave a curt order. The natives drew up for a rush. Apparently, they didn’t want to use their darts if they could help it. Maybe the “thing” in the pool preferred its victims full of life.

Nellie stirred suddenly. She had listened attentively to the ancient headman’s words. She nodded a little. She had been to this Amazon country three times with her archaeologist father before he was murdered by crooks. She knew a dialect so close to this one that she thought she might make herself understood.

“Wait!” she said, in the tongue that was kin to theirs.

The blacks stopped, more in surprise than obedience.

Behind them, the man next to Yellow Hair stared. “What do you know! The dame knows their lingo. Suppose she can pull a fast one?”

Yellow Hair shook his head. “Not a chance. These folks are dead, right now. So there’s no use sticking around. Let’s get back and see what Heber’s doing. Things don’t feel right to me.”