The Blood Ring

CHAPTER II The Amulets

Miles away from the Braintree Museum, in Washington South-East, was the big home of Gunther Caine. in spite of distance, there was a direct connection.

Gunther Caine was curator of the vast building in which were stored the records of man through the ages.

Caine was a multi-millionaire in his own name. His job paid well, but it was a hobby with the rich man rather than a necessity.

He had it because he was rabidly fascinated by the work entailed. He glowed like a small boy with a new red sled when some new acquisition passed through his hands en route to a case in the museum building.

He was glowing now, in the library of his luxurious house. Because an acquisition of tremendous import had just come into the possession of Braintree.

Months ago, an expedition had unearthed the unrifled tomb of the son of Taros, high priest of Rameses. There had been a mummy, complete with case and sarcophagus. There had been a brief history of the young man; brief because his life had been brief. He had succeeded to his father’s position, when Taros died, ruled the temples for eight months, then died, himself.

Also, there had been the priceless amulets of the young man’s father, passed down directly to his hands.

Charms against death. Charms against evil.

The amulets were disks, mostly of gold, a few of cornelian. The gold ones were set with a king’s ransom in rubies and other precious stones. But the worth of the stones was only a fraction of the real worth of the things as relics.

In addition to the amulets, there was a ring.

The ring was of old gold with a slab of pinkish cornelian as a setting. And this was, perhaps, worth all the amulets put together. That was because of its history.

The ring was described in temple hieroglyphics as the Ring of Power. It had been worn always by the current high priest. The belief was that without that ring, the head priest would instantly lose all his authority, and with it, probably, his life.

The mummy and case had been shipped to America without much trouble. But the Egyptian government had held up the shipment of the amulets and ring. They wanted them, themselves, for their museum in Cairo.

Finally the stuff had come through. It had been brought down tonight. The box containing the stuff had been carried by a heavily armed, special messenger. With the messenger had come two private detectives.

Now the precious box was in the room next to Caine’s library.

In the library were half a dozen men, talking over the priestly relics.

There was Gunther Caine, tall, thin, so unconcerned with clothes that his expensive suit looked wrinkled and almost shabby. He had fuzzy brown eyes and gray-brown hair and a short, snub nose.

There was Harold Caine, Gunther’s son. Harold was twenty-two and had never grown up. He was the jitterbug type, without a serious thought in his head, and his rather shallow blue eyes and vacuous face showed it.

There were the three directors of the board of the Braintree Museum — Evans, Spencer, and Moen. Evans was short and fat, with a monkishly bald head; Spencer was tall and fat, with a face like a kewpie doll; Moen was tall and squarely built, an ex-football star now fit though forty.

Then there was an individual who would have stood out in any gathering at any time.

His lithe body, in the dark-gray he habitually wore, gave an impression of colossal, steely power. The man’s face was the most arresting thing about him.

His face was dead! Motionless, white, still, it was like a death mask rather than a human countenance. And in this immobile, dreadful face were set eyes so light-gray as to be almost colorless.

The name of this sixth man was Richard Henry Benson. But it was not as Dick Benson that he was best known. The name that brought awe into the faces of honest men, and terror into the hearts of criminals, was — The Avenger!

The Avenger was the greatest enemy the underworld had, but he was not here tonight as a crime-fighter.

Benson, in addition to being a crime-fighter, possessed a fund of knowledge on almost any given subject so vast as to make him a top-ranking expert. It was as an expert Egyptologist, probably without peer in the world, that he was here tonight.

Caine, and the museum directors, had invited him in to judge the authenticity of the amulets and the ring.

The ancient charms against evil had been out of the hands of the expedition for some weeks. The Egyptian government had had them. Presumably the stuff had been locked in an untouchable vault. But there might be a possibility that a clever thief had stolen them and substituted forgeries.

“They are completely genuine, gentlemen,” said Benson.

His voice was as distinctive as his person. It was low, quiet, impersonal — but vibrant with power and authority. The men in that room were all wealthy and had authority themselves, but they were dwarfed by the personality of the man whose face seemed carved out of dead-white metal and whose colorless eyes were like chips of stainless steel — or like holes in the motionless countenance through which you could peer deep into a world of fog and ice.

“These death charms,” Benson went on, “as you perhaps know, have been mentioned several times in picture records of Rameses’ time. We have a pretty complete description of their use by the mad priest Taros.”

Harold Caine’s shallow blue eyes expressed boredom and his vacuous face looked resigned. He wasn’t interested in all this stuff from thousands of years ago. He thought his father was nuts.

Harold Caine looked bored, and looking that way, he got up.

“Excuse me, please,” he mumbled.

He went out the hall door. The rest were hardly conscious of his exit. They were too intent on the words of this master among them.

“Taros was high priest under Rameses. First, for about twenty years.” The Avenger went on. “He was a monster of cruelty. He wore this Ring of Power. The cornelian, as you noticed, is pinkish. The legend was that it had to be dipped into life blood every forty-eight hours. When it was so dipped, it became deep-red, fading slowly to a pinkish color again when two days and nights had elapsed. Then it must once more be renewed in the blood of an innocent victim.

“As long as the ring was worn, Taros would keep his high place. But if he took off the ring, or failed to dip it in blood before a lapse of forty-eight hours, he lost his job and his life.”

Moen and Caine nodded. The curator, and the husky director who was an ex-football star, were the best Egyptologists there, save The Avenger, himself. They knew some of this — but not as much as Benson was telling them.

“Taros also constantly wore the amulets as a guard against evil. But the evil he was really guarding against was the rage of the populace over which he was a tyrant. Anyone in Egypt would have been glad to kill him, but he spread the tale of the amulets and their power to make him deathless, so he kept from being mobbed.

“All this, the records show. And they have also given us a short description of him. He was tall, and thin to the point of emaciation. He had an eagle nose, high-bridged, arrogant and cruel. He was hairless, with a bald skull and practically no eyelashes or eyebrows.

“The appearance of the son of Taros, whose mummy you have just acquired, we do not know.”

They were silent, envisioning the things the words brought up.

The great temple of Rameses. In it, a small army of priests, fattening on the corruption of the Egyptian court, really rulers of the officials of the government, themselves. Over them, this tall, emaciated Taros, with the amulets slung across his chest to ward off death, and with the baleful ring on his finger.

The Ring of Power, keeping its wearer in authority, making him invincible — as long as he renewed that power by dipping it into the life blood of an innocent victim every forty-eight hours.

A death every two days! Murder of an unsuspecting person every forty-eight hours! That was the price of the cornelian ring’s power! It was a dread picture.

And that very ring, stained with the blood of countless sacrifices, was in the strong-box in the next room, with the amulets! One of the most priceless treasures of the museum world.

“Wherever Taros is,” murmured Gunther Caine, “he must be turning over in his grave, or I should say in his mummy case, at the thought of his charms and ring in the hands of those who rifled his son’s tomb.”

Short, fat Evans, and tall, fat Spencer, and burly Moen nodded agreement.

The Avenger’s car was at the curb in front of Gunther Caine’s house. Benson had driven down from his New York headquarters, since nothing in Washington had seemed urgent enough to make the swiftness of a plane necessary, although he could travel at a terrific speed in the great, glittering closed car he used for long-distance trips.

At the wheel of the car sat a man in livery.

The driver of The Avenger’s car was enormous. Even seated, you could see that. Had he been standing, you could have seen even more. And you would probably have gasped a little at the man’s six feet nine inches and two hundred and ninety pounds of solid bone and brawn.

The man at the wheel was Algernon Heathcote Smith, called by people who didn’t want to flirt with annihilation, plain Smitty.

He was a trusted aide of The Avenger, and in addition he was a marvelously capable radio engineer.

Smitty sat at the wheel of the hundred-and-eighty-horsepower car and felt a little bored. He had joined services with The Avenger because he hated crime as much as Benson did.

This trip, on the peaceful mission of examining some musty Egyptian relics, was not to his liking. He wanted action and lots of it—

Suddenly Smitty sat bolt upright behind the wheel of the car. He wasn’t at all bored any more. He was as tense as a coiled spring, and a bit anxious about his sanity. Because it looked as if what he had been thinking about — Egyptian stuff — had somehow become incarnated and was parading before his eyes.

Near Gunther Caine’s house, Smitty saw a tall, thin figure that he couldn’t decide about. He couldn’t decide whether it was really there or not. And he couldn’t decide whether, if it were there, it was made of mist or of something more solid.

A tall, thin figure that glided rather than walked. A figure clad in loose, whitish garments that were vaguely familiar to Smitty.

“For the love of—” he breathed.

The garb this tall figure wore, a garment seeming to melt into nothingness at the edges, was priestly raiment. The costume of a priest — of old Egypt!

“I’m screwy!” thought Smitty. “A priest of ancient Egypt trotting around in Washington, South-East! I’m bats!”

He felt a chill touch his spine, but decided that this thing would have to be investigated. He looked at the dashboard clock. Midnight almost to the dot. Benson should be coming out, soon; but Smitty didn’t wait for him before doing something about the Egyptian priest.

He got out of the car, his enormous bulk silhouetted in the backwash of light from the headlamps. He began following the shadowy figure, like Gargantua chasing a wraith of mist, toward the rear of Caine’s house.

There was a ten-foot strip of lawn between the house and the one next door. Smitty slid down that as silently as possible, to the landscaped backyard. He saw the gray shape again, and started running toward it.

The shape disappeared.

There wasn’t any corresponding flight of the shape from the giant’s rush. It didn’t turn and flee. It didn’t duck to right or left.

It just vanished!