House of Death

CHAPTER XIV Reunion

A grin was on Nellie’s lips. For once, it was not Nellie who had gotten into difficulty and had to be rescued. It was the other way around. If she hadn’t taken matters into her own hands and come to the island, and if she hadn’t thrown that lever upstairs, Mac and Benson and Smitty would have been pressed flowers by now.

But she did not rub it in; and The Avenger only thanked her profoundly with his colorless, icy eyes, and that was that.

She had unbolted a door under what she judged was the location of the library, and the three men had hastened out, with the ceiling rising behind them. Then Mac had stopped, with an exclamation, and turned his flashlight on a section of wall near the door.

When that metal ceiling had come down, it had caught on a slight projection formed by one of the innumerable fresh strips of cement lacing through all these walls. It had broken out some of the stuff and revealed human bones!

The bones of dead men! Was this whole house built on dead men’s bones?

They went to the stairs. Nellie told of what had happened since she had set foot on the island, ending with the account of the fat man rushing out into the night after the sound of — of all things — pigs.

“Pigs?” repeated The Avenger. His icy eyes were almost frightening as they rested on Nellie. “Pigs!”

Upstairs, he raced for the front door, with Smitty and Mac after him. The two didn’t know what had put that extra grim light in the basilisk eyes, but they knew Dick Benson had sensed some occurrence of great importance.

Nellie stayed in the hall. Carmella came from the rear stairs, where she had been hiding since the little blonde had thrust her back wordlessly on hearing the voices from the library — voices filtering up through that dreadful moving ceiling.

The two girls waited tensely for Benson to get back.

Out in the night, The Avenger circled the house till he saw the hulking owner of the island. The fat man was up on a ledge peering down into an enclosure and fishing for something with a rope that had a running noose on the end of it.

Benson leaped up on the ledge, too, having decided that since their presence was known, now, anyway, there was no use in trying to remain out of sight any longer.

The mountainous master of Haygar’s Island did not even look at him. Benson peered down.

There were the pigs mentioned — gigantic hogs, gaunt, hungry, fierce, as no purely wild animal could ever be fierce. They were mauling something it was best not to look at. But a glance showed that the fat man had better hurry and get that loop on arm or leg or neck or there wouldn’t be anything left to get it on.

He caught an ankle with the noose and hauled. The hogs followed ferociously, leaped as high as they could at the rising thing, then subsided with furious grunts.

The fat man drew the thing over the wall and let it rest on the ground under the ledge he stood on.

“Von Bolen Haygar!” said Smitty, staring down.

It was just possible to recognize the Prussian with the straight-backed head. But the fat man didn’t waste much time on looking. His hands were darting over the mutilated form, and in a moment he grunted, not unlike the huge things in the enclosure, and drew out two gold medallions.

Two! Not just one. There was a flashing glimpse of them as he played his light on them. Then he had calmly pocketed them.

But not before The Avenger’s camera-quick eyes had seen the letters H H on one of them.

H H. Harlik Haygar. The spidery old fellow for whose murder Benson had been named. Von Bolen Haygar had done that bloody little job. But he would never answer for it now. Somehow, perhaps in an effort to get into the house unseen, he had sneaked onto the island and had blundered into the sty. His death had been worse than that dealt by any electric chair.

For the first time, the fat man seemed really to look at Benson.

“Who the devil are you?” he said. “And what the devil are you doing on my island?”

“The name is Benson,” said The Avenger, his voice for once expressing a shade of emotion — the emotion of irony. “Though the name was unknown to you, I’m sure the face is not. Since you tried twice to kill me and my two friends.”

“Kill you?” The fat man’s face was as blank as a sheet of fresh paper. His heavy-lidded eyes were stone-dull.

“In the rat pit,” reminded Benson, “and in the comfortable little vault with the falling ceiling.”

The fat man shrugged.

“Oh, I see! You must have been prowling my basement. Too bad! My father, when he built this house, put in a lot of curious traps. Evidently valuables were kept here at one time, and that was his idea of protecting them. Of course, I knew nothing of your presence in the basement, or of your near accidents.”

“Oh, of course not!” said the giant Smitty, sarcastically. The fat man paid no attention to him.

“I believe I have heard of you, Benson. Informally with the police, are you not? So I presume you are here to investigate something or other.”

“I’m here on the trail of several murders,” said Benson, eyes as unrevealing as the fat man’s own.

“I see. Well, I’ll be glad to be of any service I may.”

“Smooth as the grease he’s made of,” murmured Mac to the giant, glaring at the hulking owner of the island.

“What would you suggest doing now?” the fat man said.

“We should get in touch with the police,” Benson replied.

The fat man shrugged.

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to do that. This storm must have put the communications system out of order for the time. Yes, I can see the radio tower is down.”

“Radio is your only way of talking with the mainland?” said Benson.

“Yes.”

“Then if the tower is down, I suppose we are marooned until the storm lets up.”

Mac kept his face straight. There wasn’t a radio repair known to science that Smitty couldn’t make with a couple of hairpins and some wire. And Dick Benson was a genius at it when he chose to exert his mind. Dick was only being marooned because he wanted to be.

“There’s no sense in staying on out here in the gale and the rain,” said the grossly fat man phlegmatically. “Shall we go in? I’ll send my servant out to tend to Cousin von Bolen.”

Such was the Prussian’s epitaph.

They went in.

The Avenger had left two girls in the hall. Carmella and Nellie Gray. There were four people in there, now. Shan Haygar and Sharnoff, whom Shan had evidently found in the turret room and untied, were with the girls.

The two men had guns out and leveled. Carmella was cowering, face ashen; Nellie was standing small and straight, with eyes blazing.

“You’re just about courageous enough to shoot down a couple of women,” she was saying when the door opened.

The opaque eyes of the fat man didn’t blink as he took in the scene. He waddled toward the four, not fast, not slow.

“No one will shoot anyone!” he said. “That would be a mistake.”

“This girl,” snarled Sharnoff, gesturing toward Carmella, “is an imposter! She—”

“We shall soon see who is or is not an impostor,” the fat man cut in. He nodded his heavy head toward Benson. “This man is unofficially with the police. So, I judge, are the two men with him. We are all very glad to have the law with us during this trying time. You understand?”

Shan and Sharnoff glanced at each other with veiled eyes. There was hatred for each other in their eyes, hatred for the dark girl from Spain and for the fat man. But there was truce in their eyes, too.

“About impostors,” Shan said, as he and Sharnoff put away their guns. “You were saying?”

“That it’s time we judged identities once and for all. Come along!”

He started toward a front room.

“We, too?” blurted Smitty, amazed.

The fat man shrugged. “Yes, if you like. We are all honest men here. We have nothing to hide from Mr. Benson.”

“Chief!” cried Nellie. “Goram Haygar — he’s the man who was pressing that lever down to kill you.”

“You must be mistaken, miss,” said the fat man, heavy eyelids raising just a bit. “I didn’t even know that anyone was downstairs.”

Biting her lips in anger and perplexity at Benson’s odd impassivity in the presence of a murderer, Nellie went with the rest into the room.

It had been a drawing room and still held tarnished traces of magnificence. The fat man went to a cabinet, opened a drawer, and took out five small pieces of metal.

They were little tuning forks. With them came a stand a bit like a cribbage board. The fat man thrust the five little tuning forks in this and set the whole on a table.

Benson’s colorless eyes glittered a bit. There were tiny letters at the base of each fork. They were, in order:

“Gentlemen, your medallions,” said the gross host of this uneasy meeting.

The men hesitated a long time. Then, wary as hawks about it, they reluctantly handed a gold disk apiece to the fat man.

“You, too, Cousin Carmella,” said the fat man.

Carmella turned bright pink. There was an Oriental screen at the end of the room. She retired behind that for a moment. There was a rustling sound of dainty silks. She came back and handed a gold disk to the fat man.

He placed them in a line on the table. And, now, some of their meaning could be instantly seen.

Each disk showed, in addition to letters and figures, a part of a wall. It could be seen now that that wall was the front one of this house, itself.

The disk lettered v B H showed the left-hand turret; H H, the wall next to that; Sh H, the central turret; S H, the ensuing wall; and F H, the right-hand turret.

The fat hand picked up the disk with F H on it, which was Carmella’s. The coin dropped ringingly on the table.

All the little tuning forks vibrated a bit, but one echoed the tone of the ring quite distinctly.

That was the tuning fork with the same letters, F H, on its base.

One by one, the fat man dropped the coins. And one by one, each rang just a little differently from the rest and set its particular tuning fork droning.

The fat man nodded, and handed the disks back, each to its owner. The dead von Bolen’s and Harlik’s medallions he kept himself.

“There will be a final metallurgical analysis of each coin,” he said expressionlessly. “But already I am satisfied, and I imagine each of you also is, that medallions and owners are all genuine.”

“So then?” said Mac, sensing that this was all there was going to be, and outraged by it.

“Why, then,” said the fat man, giving the Scot a heavy-lidded stare, “the family of Haygar is provenly reunited. We have never seen each other before, so we had to devise a proof that each representative of a Haygar branch was what he seemed to be. The proof has been met.”

The Avenger’s cold, agate eyes silenced Mac. The fat man turned with indifferent politeness to Benson.

“There will be no possibility of contacting the mainland till tomorrow, possibly not even then,” he said. “So, meanwhile, we might as well get what rest the elements will allow us.”

And, as emotionlessly as though The Avenger and his three aides had been invited guests, he led the way upstairs to rooms for them all.