The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (6 page)

The depot was an old building, about as big as a six-room house. It had been built in the era of gingerbread architecture. There was a silly little cupola on it, which served no purpose. The rest of the frame structure was bare and unadorned, squatting like a crate beside a wooden platform bordering the track.

The cupola was the first to go. It was leaning drunkenly when Smitty exclaimed aloud. After his cry, it seemed to melt, like a big cube of sugar. And under it the building began to dissolve, too.

It was not quite a collapse; not like the account they had read of the pavilion in Lincoln Park. The thing just fell slowly, almost gracefully, to pieces, and it finally ended in an unsightly stack of old boards, beams, and slate shingles. There hadn’t even been much noise connected with it; just a low rumble like that of a colossus muttering in his sleep.

They ran toward it.

The noise in the sky was fading out, toward the west, over the open lake. It was gone by the time they reached the collapsed depot.

They searched swiftly in the wreckage for people, with Smitty hauling beams and timbers with the strength of a bull elephant. They soon discovered there had been no one inside. Then they began to look around.

Benson seemed to be hunting for something specific. Board after board he picked up and searched carefully. He sighted along each, looked at the ends of each, his pale eyes taking on a look of microscopic concentration.

“So that’s it,” Smitty heard him whisper to himself, dead lips barely moving in his dead face. But what “it” was, Smitty could not imagine.

There was a puffing in the distance. They stared that way.

Along the whole trackage, beside the shimmering lake, a work train was coming to help clear the wreckage down the line. There was a small and rather ancient switch engine, followed by two flatcars loaded with rails with which to start rebuilding the track, and ending in an ancient day coach for the repair crew.

The three-car train stopped at the collapsed station. It would have had to stop anyway, because part of the melting structure had spilled out over the rails and blocked the way. But the manner in which a man leaped from the rear car and strode toward Benson and his two aides told that the train would have stopped anyhow, at sight of them, to investigate.

The man had a gun in his hand, which was leveled at him. He was hard-jawed, broad-shouldered, with a battered felt hat. His whole appearance spelled track foreman.

“All right, you guys,” he bellowed, as he neared them. “Who are you? What’s the idea, blowing up this station? I guess the three of you’d better come along with us for some fancy questioning.”

More men were pouring from the old day coach, behind. They came threateningly toward the three. Some had guns, some had ax handles, some were armed with crowbars.

Smitty hunched his huge shoulders warily. The situation looked tense. He could handle any four average men, but there were sixteen or eighteen in this railroad mob. Those were odds too great even for him.

“I’m investigating the loss of the rails, back up the line, and also the destruction of this depot,” Benson said quietly. “I have credentials, if you’d care to see them.”

The man with the battered hat calmed down a little.

“Hand ’em over,” he grunted.

Benson did so. There was a letter from Chicago’s police commissioner to whom it might concern, and one from the governor of New York State.

The man read slowly, carefully, and as he did so, the rest crowded close. It all looked very natural and innocent. It was so smoothly done, that no one could have guessed the transformation that was to come.

The man who looked like a foreman handed the credentials back to Benson and pocketed his gun.

“I guess you’re O.K.,” he said.

At that moment, with the three men completely off guard so that they could not possibly have drawn weapons in time, the railroad crew became a mob of killers.

Into the hand of each leaped an automatic; all of them were leveled at Benson and Smitty and Mac. The ax handles and crowbars had been only so much stage setting; now they were shifted to left hands while rights held guns.

“So you’re investigating these things,” the mob leader mimicked Benson. “Well, you won’t investigate any more. Into that last car, you guys.”

Benson stood still, with his deadly, pale eyes raking over the men. They shifted uneasily under that icy gaze. They were six to one, and had guns; but something in this man’s colorless stare made them nervous.

“Maybe we better bump ’em now and have it over with,” one of the mob mumbled.

The leader heard and shook his head.

“No! We follow orders. A slug in the skull shows right away something besides an accident happened. And this has to look like an accident. Go on! Go on, get into the end car.”

Benson and Smitty and Mac let themselves be prodded up the steps of the end car. Their capturers crowded in after them.

The man who had played the role of foreman stared at the captives.

“You look like three tough guys, all right,” he said. “I can see why you got to be knocked off.”

They tied the three securely to the old plush seats of the day coach, using one-inch rope from a big coil in the forward tool locker. They were wary of Mac because of the way his bitter blue eyes burned at them. They moved gingerly around Smitty, awed by his huge size. But they were most careful of all with Benson.

Something in the pale, deadly eyes, calm and cold in the white deadness of his immobile face, gave them all the shivers. Five covered him with automatics while the sixth passed loop after loop of rope around his compact body.

Then it was done. In three seats, one behind the other, Benson and Mac and Smitty sat upright with enough rope around each to bind half a dozen men to the seat backs.

The leader of the murderous crew waved an arm out a window. There was a hiss from the switch engine; then it started backing slowly in the direction from which it had come.

“Johnny,” the leader said to one of the younger men, “run up to the engine and tell Clay to slow down at the bend where we left the automobiles. We’ll all jump off. Then tell him to lash the throttle full open and jump himself.”

The man went back toward the engine. Mac saw him swing out the door and weave over the rail-piled flatcars. The gang leader grinned at Benson.

“Like an accident, we’re supposed to make this. So like an accident it’ll be. There’s a sharp curve eight miles up. So sharp that any big-time railroad would have straightened it years ago. The work train will hit it at about seventy an hour, and I guess it’ll go straight instead of around the bend.”

Benson said steadily: “The train crew you overpowered to get this train can testify that a wreck at the curve was no accident.”

The man grinned again. It was a forced grin, however. Obviously, he was anxious to get out of sight of The Avenger’s pallid and deadly eyes and death-white face.

“We didn’t knock out any train crew. These cars and the engine, with steam up, were at the next town with nobody on it. Everybody was gettin’ orders, I guess. So we just borrowed it. The verdict’ll be that you nosey investigators took it for some cockeyed reason, didn’t know how to run an engine, and wrecked yourselves.”

There was a brief toot from the engine in the rear, and the cars began to slow. They swung around a bend. Looking out the window, Benson saw four or five automobiles on a dunes road waiting to pick up the men.

“So long,” waved the mob boss. He went to the door and dropped from the train. The others followed.

There was a sudden jerk from the rear, and the engine roared as its drivers spun on the tracks. The throttle had been jammed wide open, and the driving wheels wouldn’t take the load without slipping, at first.

The three-car train rolled down the track, jerking as the spinning wheels caught for a moment, easing off as they slipped again. Benson saw a last pair of men scrambling into the automobiles on the lonely lane. They had acted as fireman and engineer. The roaring locomotive behind them, full throttle, was empty now.

The rail joints began clicking under them at a swiftly increasing rhythm as the driving wheels slowly stopped spinning and began to make each stroke of the racing pistons count.

Benson sat straight in his seat, bound tightly, with Smitty ahead of him and MacMurdie behind him. Behind the dead-white face of the Avenger burned the discovery he had made in the debris of the wrecked depot. A discovery it looked as if he might never follow up, now.

The discovery that in all that pile of old boards and rubble there had been not one screw or nail. All had gone, as though someone, hours before, had removed each with painstaking care, leaving the building to fall like a house of cards the moment a breeze struck the unsecured beams and boards.

If one of the more dignified Chicago newspapers had come out with the headlines, the city might have paid more attention to them. But they appeared only in a sensational sheet whose owner was notorious for getting news scoops by the simple process of making up his news as he went along.

Because of that, most people smiled at the screaming headlines. But under the smile there was uneasiness, too. After all, a pavilion at the south end of Lincoln Park
had
collapsed.

IS WAR DECLARED ON THE
UNITED STATES?

That was the idiotic headline in the sensation sheet. The account went on even more idiotically.

It seemed, according to the correspondent who had gotten his news from a source that “cannot be divulged,” that an unnamed foreign power was going to hold up the United States for some vast bit of international booty, as yet unspecified. Perhaps for the rich province of Alaska. Perhaps the demand would even include the Western coast with the States of Oregon, Washington, and California.

This unnamed enemy was going to invade the interior of the United States. Chicago and vicinity, to be precise. The enemy claimed to be able to destroy at will, with no man able to learn the source of the destruction. There would be no way of fighting back; the country would have to give up whatever territory was demanded, or see its rich inland cities turned into collapsing charnel houses.

The managing editor of the Chicago
Record
studied his rival’s scoop and finally relaxed.

“Hooey!” he said. “No enemy nation can strike unseen. And if one could strike, the East coast would be the target, not the Middle West. The intimation is that the Lincoln Park pavilion was a sample of the destruction. But we all know that the reason for that collapse was structural failure of the girders. The steel corporation sold the city bum goods, that’s all.”

The city editor agreed with him. It was good policy, of course, to agree with him; but in this case the city editor could nod wholeheartedly.

“For thirty years that rag has pulled a phony war scare every so often to jack up its circulation. It’s just doing the old trick again.”

Up in the Avenger’s temporary headquarters, Nellie Gray and Josh and Rosabel Newton studied the sensational headlines.

“I wish Mr. Benson were here,” Nellie said, her pink-and-white face twisted with worry. “An enemy invasion? It doesn’t sound right. But he could probably read a meaning in the account that no one else could.”

“He’s a great man,” said Josh. White-jacketed as a standard servant would be, he was now moving at his normal pace—which was very slow. And his thin, dark face had taken on the deceptive, somnolent look that had caused him to be nicknamed Sleepy.

“You feel, when you’re near him, like you feel in a powerhouse, standing next to a dynamo,” nodded Rosabel.

“I’m almost afraid of him,” Josh mused. “Yet I’d do about anything he asked me to do.”

“He’ll never ask you to do anything unreasonable or that he wouldn’t try himself,” Nellie said. “You can depend on that—”

There was a buzz of the telephone. She picked up the receiver. On her lovely face was a look of extreme wariness.

Dick Benson interested himself only in cases beyond the powers of the police to handle. Such cases necessarily meant that men were involved who were far more intelligent than the usual criminal. And such men were quick to find out precisely who was fighting them so efficiently—and to try with every sinister means at their command to wipe out The Avenger and his helpers before they, themselves, were wiped out.