The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (10 page)

Smitty had prowled the bears’ den unmolested—but now the bears were coming home.

He jumped to the entrance, splashing in the breast-high water, as light-footed as a sixteen-year-old stripling, for all his giant bulk. But he saw at a glance that he was too late. He couldn’t get out of the ferry’s hull now without being seen.

Only a few hundred yards away, and skimming fast, was a large motor cruiser, with riding lights gleaming like jewels in the gathering dusk. But Smitty didn’t pay any attention to the pretty lights. He was staring at the cruiser’s deck.

He saw at least a half dozen men there, and in addition got a glimpse of a head bobbing down a hatch aft.

The giant paddled back away from the door. It was all he could do. He couldn’t get out. The best remaining course was to try to hide somewhere till he had a chance to slip away unobserved.

He chose the drums of gasoline as a convenient barricade, and slipped behind them. He barely made it when he heard the cruiser stop outside, then grind forward again at low speed and under a load.

The load, he saw, from between two close-placed drums, was the swinging weight of one of the great doors at the end of the ferry. The cruiser’s nose had been bunted against the left-hand one, and was pushing it inward. Smitty guessed that when the diesel generator was functioning it worked the big doors on motors. When it was off, the doors had to be opened like this.

The cruiser crept in till the prow grated on the ferry’s bottom timbers, which was at a point just far enough inside for the door to be closed again.

But the men on the boat didn’t close the door. They left it open, and began swarming off the cruiser.

Smitty’s brow wrinkled in disgust at the lousiness of his luck. There were even more than he’d thought. Eleven men came off the cruiser. Eleven were too many for even the giant Smitty to handle, particularly since each, of course, would be fully armed.

The last two to come off the boat carried something.

And with the first glimpse of it, Smitty’s eyes narrowed dangerously. The thing the two carried was a bundle about five feet long wrapped in sailcloth. But it was a bundle that kicked and squirmed till it was all the two men could do to handle it, in spite of the sailcloth which was used as a sort of straitjacket.

From the kicking end of the bundle two silk-sheathed legs suddenly burst free of the clogging heavy cloth. Small feet clad in high-heeled shoes were vicious twin blurs as they sought earnestly to make connection with something.

It was a girl! The gang had added kidnapping to its activities.

Smitty growled deep in his throat like an enraged bull elephant. But he stayed behind the drums. The odds were too hopeless. He could serve the girl best by waiting and trying at a later, safer time to take her away from here.

Then, with an oath, one of the two men dropped the wriggling bundle so that it splashed in knee-deep water.

“She’s a wildcat!” Smitty heard him snarl. “I think we ought to smack her with a wrench and have it over with, once and for all.”

“Not till we find out from her how much the white-headed guy knows,” the second man said. Then he cursed, too, as the dropped bundle freed itself from the clogging cloth, and a girl with her skirt ripped and her blouse in shreds seemed to soar right at his face like an enraged, leaping lynx.

Behind the gas drums Smitty hunched great shoulders in an unreasoning urge for action no matter how hopeless the odds. For the girl was Nellie Gray!

Pink-and-white, dainty, fragile looking as a Dresden doll, Nellie seemed even more softly helpless and feminine than usual with her slim body shielded only by shreds of blouse and a tattered skirt. But so does dynamite look harmless in a slim round stick.

One of the men, lunging for her, suddenly found himself splashing flat on his face in the dirty water beside her. The second felt tapering small fingers briefly clamp on his wrist, felt himself whirled a little sideways, and then fell with awkward splash over the first man.

“You dummies!” raged one of the men who had gone toward the machine shop from the boat. “Get her! Quick! Before she can start that boat!”

Like a sleek-legged wraith, Nellie was at the boat and raising herself toward the deck. But they got her! Two more men caught her slim ankles before she could draw them out of reach. The two in the water, furious at her and at themselves, reinforced them. They hauled her down with brutal force.

And then two oil drums near the port side of the ferry’s hull banged apart and an infuriated giant sprang from between them.

No matter what the odds, or how illogical it was to tackle them, Smitty couldn’t stand to see Nellie Gray knocked around like that.

Men yelled and ran for him! Others shot at him! But with only the lights of the cruiser for illumination, the interior of the vast hull was very dim; and Smitty was only a gigantic shadow charging toward the struggling group. So no bullet hit home.

The four saw him coming, and one of them swung on Nellie while two others were holding her arms. It was a man’s blow, catching her full on one satiny cheek. She slumped in their grasp—and Smitty proceeded to go completely crazy.

He got the man who had slugged her, with one great hand on a shoulder and the other on a thigh. He raised his struggling body almost at arm’s length above his head, turned and threw him bodily at the other men who were rushing to get at him.

The man catapulting through the air hit the first two men and bowled them over. But he hit them dead! Two slugs intended for Smitty tore through the thrown man’s body.

The three remaining by Nellie’s side were climbing up Smitty’s tall frame like three boys hugging a tree trunk. But suddenly the three were one! Smitty’s gigantic paws had grabbed two men by their necks and cracked their heads together. They fell like broken twigs, and one was destined never to get up again.

The rest were on the big man, now, no longer trying to shoot because of the darkness and the danger of shooting each other. A thrown wrench sailed toward Smitty’s head. He blocked it with a massive arm, stooped to pick it up.

Two men leaped to his back, pounding with clubbed guns at his skull. He heaved them off with a sudden upright lurch, and began swinging the wrench.

A man staggered back with a broken collar-bone. Another sagged with a crease in the bone of his skull over his left ear. A third screamed and pressed his hands over the place where a face had been. The others callously stepped over his body and came on.

It was a battle between pygmies and a giant. But there were too many pygmies!

A slashing gun barrel found his head, and he staggered. Another got him and he went ponderously to his knees. His feeling hands got the calf of a leg. He squeezed, and the owner of the leg shrieked with the agony of pulped muscles that would keep him off his feet for at least a month.

But that was the last. They were all over him. And then he was down—and out.

Three men had their guns at his great head. But one of the others—he of the battered felt hat who had played the part of a track foreman so smoothly in the afternoon—raised his hand.

“No! Hold the slugs,” he said thoughtfully. “What we want is information. We were going to get it out of the babe. But she may be too stubborn to talk, no matter what we do. This guy, though, might crack after he watches us work her over. Anyhow, it doubles our chances. So tie him up with everything in the place, and let him live.”

The man shook his head wonderingly.

“I don’t see yet how he and the other two got off that train in time! They sure die hard.”

The prone giant and the limp, doll-like figure of Nellie Gray were carried to the back of the ferry. Smitty was bound with cable till he looked like a mummy. And the girl, in memory of her amazingly effective struggle, was tied with more precaution than the gang would have given to most men.

The leader of the murderous crew looked toward the lake end of the big hull.

“Open the other door,” he said. “They’ll be coming back soon.”

One of the men, with a great welt on the right side of his face where Smitty’s left fist had brushed him, started the diesel generator. Lights glowed out in the ferry’s cavernous hull. And there was a hum as a small motor swung back the other hangar door.

With the entire end of the barge open, anything short of an overseas clipper could glide within. But no one on shore could see that opening. And no one on shore could see the unexpected spectacle of electric lights illuminating the abandoned hull. There were no cracks in the sound old timbers wide enough for that.

With death in his eyes, the leader of the band turned to the bound pair, to slap the girl out of her unconsciousness and make her talk.

The weird noise in the sky over Chicago had completely disappeared in the thunder of the Fort Sheridan army planes when Benson and Mac got their big two-motored job off the lake. It was a full ten minutes after the fall of the skyscraper. But Benson wasn’t discouraged by these things.

In the plane was the latest thing in small sound-detectors, with amplifying tubes and a cone-shaped restrictor that could listen to one piece after another of the empty sky and meanwhile keep out all other sounds from other parts of the heavens.

Benson turned this on now and knew he had a listening device almost equal to the army’s great four-horned detectors. He began pointing it in one segment of the sky after the other, trying to pick up the weird noise again.

The army ships left him respectfully alone. A radio call to Fort Sheridan had been relayed to the service planes explaining Benson’s standing and ordering that his ship be given a working berth.

MacMurdie, bleak, blue eyes tense, stared at the pinpoint of drama in downtown Chicago where a big building had once stood.

“The cold-blooded devils!” he grated. “If I ever get a chance at them—”

“You will,” said Benson, shifting the listening ear while his plane slowly circled.

“I hope so, Muster Benson,” said the Scot gloomily. “But ’tis only a thin hope. We haven’t yet any idea of the particular devil directin’ all this.”

“Oh, yes, we have,” said Benson, pale eyes flaring their deadly light. “There are many hints.

“Our man is wealthy. It takes money to hire these underworld rats, and to fix that abandoned barge up in such a complete manner. Our man knows something about the Catawbi Railroad, or he wouldn’t be aware of the existence of the old barge in the first place. Our man knew the Gant brothers quite well, or he’d never have suspected that they were working on the inventions he murdered them to get and keep secret. Our man has some interest in publicizing the destruction of buildings, or he wouldn’t have sent an agent to tell a news reporter all about it in advance.”

He adjusted the delicate listening device again, his white, paralyzed face as expressionless as the face of death, itself.

“We shall start with the friends of the Gants. When we find one who also is rich, is familiar with the workings of the Catawbi Railroad, and has a motive for advertising the destruction of buildings, we’ll be getting warm.”

Mac’s bleak eyes narrowed pessimistically.

“But if we do find him, how will we ever prove any-thin’ on the mon? He’ll be clever as Satan himself. Too smart to leave any clues that a court of law could use.”

Benson said quietly: “Most of the men we fight are as clever as that. But they somehow pay in the end, don’t they? This man will be taken care of—when we discover him—”

Suddenly the plane banked and began racing east and a little north at five miles a minute.

“Ye’ve hearrrd somethin’?” blurred Mac. “The noise?”

“I think so. Listen!”

Benson passed the earphones to Mac, who used both of them. Benson had only pressed one to his head, listening to Mac with the other. Even so, the Scot couldn’t hear with two ears what Benson had caught with one. Not for a minute, that is. Then he got it.

“ ’Tis the dronin’ sound, dead ahead,” he said. “Ye’ve hit the direction square on the nose.”

“We’ll hit whatever makes the sound pretty soon, too,” Benson said calmly. “I’ll back this plane against anything else in the sky, normal or supernatural, for speed.”