House of Death

CHAPTER XIII Nellie Horns

In Nellie Gray had been left out of this. The Avenger, with a theory about the affair of the golden disks already complete in his coldly flaming brain, had looked forward to too much violence on Haygar’s Island to want a girl — even the amazingly capable Nellie — to experience it.

So he had left Nellie out of it. And Nellie didn’t want to be left out.

In the first place, she thought Carmella was on that island. And she had not yet gotten over her self-fury for allowing the regal brunette from Spain to give her the slip at Bleek Street. The chief had put Carmella in her charge. She had let Carmella get loose.

All the other Haygars seemed to be bound for that island. Probably Carmella was, too. Nellie wanted to take up her charge over the girl again, particularly in case danger threatened.

In the second place, Nellie just wasn’t used to being left out, and didn’t like it at all. So she was horning in again.

She had taken a small fast plane to Maine, waited for night, then slipped into the water and headed toward the island six miles away.

Nellie was an expert distance swimmer, and she reached the island, scarcely breathing hard. She slipped fairly dry clothes over her swimming costume, which consisted almost entirely of her own lovely white skin, and started for the house in the clearing.

She almost fell into one of the innumerable trenches crisscrossing the island, leaped the next, and then became the reason why the one mastiff left on the place had not scented The Avenger and his two aides.

It was because the brute scented Nellie first.

It was when Nellie crossed the second trench that she became aware of that and froze in her tracks.

There was a whipping of underbrush, a snarl that chilled her blood; then she saw a dog that looked, in the dimness, as big as a lion.

Nellie knew dogs. She could see at a glance that this one had been trained to kill — trained for that and nothing else. No one but its master could ever approach the brute; probably even the master would have to depend on clubs and whips.

It was less a dog than a man-killing machine!

Nellie took to a tree with a promptness of movement that The Avenger himself could scarcely have beaten. From a branch fifteen feet up, she stared at the mastiff.

The dog was making no outcry. Only the low, hideous snarling came from his throat. Nellie didn’t know whether she was glad or not for the silence.

She was glad because there wasn’t a commotion letting everyone on the island know that a stranger had landed. She was dismayed because it is about the worst sign of all when a dog attacks silently: it means that nothing but a ripped throat will make him go away again.

Nellie was as good a woodsman as any of the men in the little crime-fighting band. She had accompanied her father, murdered finally to get his secret of the hiding place of a great store of gold, on many of his archaeological expeditions into jungles. She began to travel as only a supreme woodsman can.

That was ape fashion among the tree limbs.

The trees were close enough so that she could leap and clamber and swing from one to another on overhanging branches.

It was a perilous task, not nearly as easy as it seems in the movies, where an aerial path is selected before the camera turns. She had to descend in places to a point where the snarling brute beneath could almost leap up and get her. In others she had to climb high, hold her breath, and swing for ten feet through thin air.

She reached the clearing around the house, and there she seemed to be all through. She sat in an uncomfortable fork and considered.

She had a gun, but she couldn’t shoot the dog without rousing the island. And she didn’t know what that might do to the plans of The Avenger, who, she was sure, was on the place. But she couldn’t stay here all night, either.

A dangerous native trick occurred to her, one she had seen a guide in Central America work on a jaguar.

In a belt under her trim dress, Nellie carried a little knife. She got it out and cut two short branches about an inch thick.

With her two shoelaces tied together, she fastened one short wooden length to the other, making a T. The handle of the T was about a foot long, and the top of it about six inches. She sharpened one end of the top to as fine a point as the wood would take.

She tossed the leafy end of the limb she had whittled to one side. The mastiff, snarling, swung to stare as it landed, and Nellie leaped down.

“Oh, dear!” she said. “If this doesn’t work—”

The dog was already springing toward her. If it did not work, she would have a hand chewed to a mess of bone and flesh. But then, if it didn’t work, she wouldn’t care what happened to her hand because she wouldn’t be around to use it anyway.

The dog left the ground and seemed fairly to soar at her in one long, bloodthirsty leap! She extended the T.

Into the gaping, slavering jaws she jammed the top of the T, sharp end up. She could feel the froth from the brute on her fingers as the jaws snapped like the jaws of a steel trap; the dog’s breath was hot on her wrist!

And it worked!

The sharp point burst up through the roof of the brute’s mouth and into the brain with the savage force of the jaws. The mastiff fell without a further move or sound, with the end of the stick protruding from its clenched fangs.

Nellie sat down for a minute, feeling sick and shaking all over. Then she got up and went on toward the house, a lovely, flying wraith as she crossed the clearing.

A little while before, the wind had begun to rise, and a storm had started growling in its beard out at sea. It struck, now, with all the fury of a summer squall, only with a steadiness that indicated much more persistence than a squall.

Screaming wind almost knocked Nellie flat, but she reached the house wall. And, there, she was glad for the racket of the gale.

Up the side of this repulsive-looking, decayed building were splotches of vines. Light as she was, she could climb them; but without the wind the sound might have been heard by those inside.

Now she could make as much noise as she pleased. She started climbing, with the right-hand turret window as her goal. There were no bars over that window.

She found that she could probably have made it even without the vines, for the bricks of the house wall were set in uneven rows to make a tapestry design, and her fingers and toes found good holds.

The first gust of rain batted down at her as she reached the window. Torn by wind and beaten by rain, she stared in.

And the first thing she saw was the person she’d had principally in mind on coming here.

Carmella Haygar.

The girl was lying on the floor of the otherwise empty little room in the turret. She was bound, but not gagged. A single candle in a bottle illuminated the room.

The place wasn’t empty long. Another came in — a dapper man with a tiny gray mustache and a trim little goatee. It was Sharnoff Haygar, though Nellie didn’t know that.

What she did know was that she hated this man on sight, and that he was precisely the type to whose extermination she had dedicated her life. She knew that by the way he approached Carmella.

He had a little bottle in his hand. Evidently, he had gone out to get the bottle, which was the reason he had not been in the room when Nellie first looked in.

With her tiny knife, Nellie had pried up the window an inch. She could hear through that crack as she clung to the brick ridges outside.

“Now,” said the man with the trim goatee, “I think you will talk. This, my dear, is sulphuric acid! It does curious things to faces. As you shall certainly find out if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

He shook the little bottle, then drew out the moistened stopper.

“First,” he said, almost gently, “we’ll press this to your right cheek. Then just a drop on the left. After that, if you are still stubborn, there will have to be a bit of attention paid to the eyes—”

Nellie dropped the knife, not having time to put it back in her belt. She snapped out her gun and smashed the window with it. Sharnoff whirled, hand going for his pocket. But the hand stopped and stayed very still as he saw the gun.

Nellie did not dare come through the window. She stayed where she was for a moment, gesturing toward Carmella, whose black eyes were enormous with horror — and relief.

“Untie her,” Nellie said, cold fury in the tone that came through her small, set teeth.

Sharnoff turned to Carmella and untied her. He didn’t even try to stall. The acid vial, which he had set on the floor to work on the bonds, was his death warrant, Nellie’s flaming blue eyes told him, if he didn’t obey implicitly and swiftly.

Carmella stood up, rubbing shapely ankles and flexing slim arms.

“Now tie him,” said Nellie, nodding to Sharnoff. “But keep behind him! Don’t let him grab you and use you as a shield.”

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned — or a woman whose beauty has just been wantonly threatened. The blaze in Carmella’s black eyes matched that in Nellie’s blue ones. By the time Sharnoff was tied, the cord bit into his flesh so deeply that he sunk his teeth in his upper lip with the sting of it. But he made no sound.

Nellie knocked jagged glass out of the window sash and crawled into the room at last. The storm outside was at its height now, with wind howling, rain hitting like bullets, and occasional thunder rattling the universe. Nellie had to pitch her voice high to be heard.

“He was after your medallion?” she said.

Carmella hesitated. Gratitude to her rescuer fought with reluctance to say anything about the golden disks.

“In a way,” she said finally.

“What do you mean — in a way?”

“He wanted to know the message on the medal.”

“Well,” said Nellie, annoyed by all the mystery in the affair of the golden disks — a mystery which she still couldn’t make head or tail of, “what is the message?”

Carmella pretended not to hear because of the storm. Nellie said something to herself, shrugged, and went to the door.

“What are we going to do now?” Carmella said.

“Is everyone in this house your enemy?” asked Nellie. “Or only this rat here with the acid?”

Carmella hesitated again, but this time in real, instead of pretended, indecision.

“I think they’re all enemies,” she said at last. “But they pretend not to be. And this one is the only one who has openly attacked me.”

“We’ll have to take a chance on the others and go downstairs,” said Nellie over the storm’s roar. “Can’t roost up in this turret forever.”

And besides, she added to herself, she wanted to see how things went with Mac and The Avenger and Smitty.

The turret room was a full four stories from the ground. They went down a lot of stairs. Then Nellie thrust out her small white hand to make Carmella stop.

Nellie had heard voices in a room to the right. She went to the door.

The room was a sort of library, but there was a hole in the floor at the moment. Down through this was peering a monstrous fat man. He had a smile on his face that the devil himself could have been proud of. His puffy, huge right hand was on the lever at the side of the hole, and he was slowly pressing the lever down.

Nellie hadn’t any idea what this sight meant, but she was willing to bet it meant trouble in some fashion. She was debating what to do, when the sound came.

It was a very peculiar sound, barely to be heard over the storm’s roar outside, and yet unmistakable.

The sound of pigs. But not just a barnyard noise; it had a quality, somehow, to chill the blood!

Nellie saw the man’s huge head jerk up as he listened, saw him scowl instead of smile. Then he waddled toward the door, and Nellie ducked across the hall and into an opposite room.

He was hardly out the front door of the place when she was back in that library, jerking up the lever. She still didn’t know its meaning, but she could look down the hole in the floor and see something like a moving platform that had still been settling downward when she got in, and which stopped when she threw the lever back up.

It began to rise again. There was a momentary lull in the gale outside, and she heard a voice clearly under the movable platform.

“It’s stopped!”

Smitty’s voice!

Nellie raced to find stairs leading down.