The Blood Ring

CHAPTER III High Priestess

Gunther Caine was saying goodnight to the men in his place. It was after midnight, and the man looked tired.

Evans, looking shorter and fatter than ever with a round-bellied derby on his head, shook hands with the curator, and left Spencer, beaming all over his kewpie-doll face, congratulated Caine and, incidentally, himself for being smart enough to get the Taros relics. Moen shrugged his burly shoulders into a topcoat, nodded, and went out.

Harold Caine, the curator’s son, was in the hall near the front door as the directors of the board left. But none of the three men paid any attention to him. Nor did his father.

However, The Avenger noticed him. Those pale, icily flaming eyes didn’t often miss anything out of the ordinary. And Harold’s appearance, to eyes as keen as that, was out of the ordinary.

Harold’s face had a slightly frightened look. At the same time, his eyes were dull, almost glazed-looking — as if he had taken dope.

He nodded nervously as each of the three men went out, playing assistant host in spite of the fact that no one was noticing him. His body was twitchy and his hands wandered around as if he were ill at ease.

Benson, alone in the hall with Gunther Caine and his son, came closer to the curator.

“Those amulets, and the Ring of Power,” he said, “are without price. There are a lot of people who would murder to get them in their possession. Watch them very closely.”

Caine looked startled, then smiled.

“No one will take them from my house,” he said. “I can assure you of that. And first thing in the morning I’ll take them to the museum safe. We will make replicas and exhibit them, keeping the genuine amulets in the vault.”

“That’s best,” said The Avenger quietly. “But the danger will come while they are in your house.”

Benson didn’t put into words the thing that made him speak. That was because the thing was too vague and without substance to warrant words.

The Avenger had spent his life in jungle wilds and impenetrable wildernesses. He had developed a sixth sense that whispered when trouble was near. That sixth sense was functioning now.

With every fiber of him, he felt that something was wrong.

Yet there was nothing that even Dick Benson could put his finger on. Only the directors and Caine and his son were in the house with the Taros relics. The servants were off, having been given a night out because the relics were expected, and Caine didn’t want to subject his employees to such temptation.

Nothing could possibly be the matter. Yet Benson had that feeling. He opened the door, nodded to Caine, and the door was closed as he stepped out.

He saw that Smitty’s giant figure was missing from behind the wheel of his car.

Then he heard a hoarse yell! The yell cracked in the middle and died. It stopped as if cut with a knife.

It had been Smitty’s yell, from down the block.

The Avenger could move so fast, when an urgent matter required it, that he made the movements of normal men seem like slow motion. He moved that way, his body a gray streak as he raced toward the sound of the call.

Smitty had stayed in the backyard of Gunther Caine’s home for a full five minutes after seeing the last of the wraithlike, emaciated figure. He had looked all around for it — and found nothing.

But he found traces of the thing. Traces enough to prove to him that he really had seen something, and not just imagined it.

The night was dewy, and when he bent down he could see a line along the grass, in the moisture, where this thing had moved. So something had really been there.

“But not,” Smitty told himself, “any geezer, in the robes of an ancient Egyptian priest. That’s crazy. That part I must have imagined because I was thinking about the chief and the Egyptian stuff he came here to examine.”

After five minutes of prowling around the backyard, with no results to show for it, Smitty walked back to the glittering car.

He started to get in and saw the tall, thin figure, again.

This time it was down the street, at least half a block away. How it had gotten down the narrow strip of lawn between houses, and out to the sidewalk without Smitty’s seeing it, was a mystery.

There was a high wall in back of Caine’s house so the thing couldn’t get out that way. Unless it was as ghostly as it looked and could walk through things like walls.

“Humph,” growled Smitty. “There are no such things as ghosts.”

He started after the figure again, and it promptly disappeared. But an instant later he got a glimpse of something like whitish mist to the right.

When he got to that section of the block, he found a large vacant lot, with trees sprinkled through it. The trees cast deep shadows, but he began investigating, hunting for the thing.

Probably some maniac was wandering loose under the hallucination that he was an Egyptian priest. He might be harmless. On the other hand he might be dangerous. Smitty thought he ought to be shut up somewhere.

He made his soundless way toward the center of the open space. And then he stopped with a grunt. It was all he could do to keep from sounding out and giving his presence away.

Ahead of him, in the starlight between several tree shadows, were two white figures!

“Did the guy split double, like an amoeba?” Smitty soundlessly wondered.

Then he saw that that was out of the picture, because this second white figure was of a different sex. The tall one had been undeniably male. You could tell that not only from its walk and behavior, but also because it was bald. And a female doesn’t often get bald.

This second one was female.

Smitty rubbed his eyes. He had bumped into two maniacs with the same obsession.

The tall figure was garbed as a high priest of Egypt.

This second one was robed as a high priestess.

Smitty recalled that high priestesses are sometimes amazingly pretty. This one was no exception.

His second recollection was that you could get a bold idea of the prettiness because high priestesses didn’t wear much.

The girl was dressed in flowing white, like the tall man with the beaked nose and the bald skull. But her robe was as transparent as the mist it resembled. You could see right through it; and, while what you saw also seemed misty and insubstantial, it was the shapliest mist the giant had ever hoped to encounter.

To go further, the girl was tall, slender, though rounded, and had either black hair or hair of a very dark brown. Smitty couldn’t see which. He saw her face, though, and felt a kind of shock.

That face could have come entirely from an old Egyptian temple frieze.

There were the wide-spaced, lustrous eyes and the broad, low forehead. There was the straight line, rather Greek, from the top of the forehead to the end of the fine nose. There was the rounded chin with the short upper lip.

“She is a priestess of ancient Egypt,” whispered Smitty in awe.

The tall, thin figure with the bald dome raised its left hand in a queer gesture. On the second finger of that hand, Smitty saw something glitter with a pinkish cast. Some kind of ring.

The girl dressed like a priestess went submissively to one knee before the arrogant gesture. And Smitty started to close in.

Had there been a lot of fallen leaves around, he would have watched his step more closely. But there weren’t. So he was careless enough to step on a fallen twig to which half a dozen dry leaves adhered.

They rustled like paper and sounded loud in the stillness.

The figure of the high priest whirled and sprang toward Smitty, its gaunt arms raised high as if in an invocation — as if bringing down a curse.

Smitty felt as if he had been dumped bodily into a vat of nettles. He burned and prickled all over. Then the world began to go even blacker than the midnight darkness warranted.

He yelled once, hoarsely, hardly conscious that sound was coming from him. He got one more glimpse of a shapely shadow in gauzy mist, like the robe of a priestess.

Then the ground came up and hit him!

Back in Caine’s home, the phone was ringing.

Gunther Caine started toward the library, where the downstairs phone was located. So did Harold, eyes glazed and dull, his face queerly frightened.

“I’ll answer it,” said Caine to his son. “You go on to bed.”

It was unusual, thought Caine, as he closed the library door, that Harold was home at all, at this hour. Usually he was out till dawn, running around with a pack of kids younger than himself. At times Caine despaired of his son’s ever growing up and becoming a responsible citizen.

“Hello,” he said into the phone, wondering who was calling him at this hour.

It was Casey, museum watchman and night caretaker.

Caine listened for a moment to wild words, sitting more and more rigid in his chair. Then he exploded harshly into the instrument:

“Get a grip on yourself, man. Talk sense. Nothing like that could have happened.”

“But it did!” came Casey’s agitated voice. “It did, I tell ye! The mummy talked!”

“The mummy of Taros’ son?” said Caine.

“Yes. Yes! It talked.”

“How could it talk? And if it did, how could it be heard through that glass lid?”

“Sure, an’ how would I be knowin’ that? Anyhow, talk it did. It was perfectly plain. It said, ‘They’re gone. My father’s charms against evil are gone. And the Ring of Power. They must be retrieved.’ Or somethin’ like that.”

“Casey, you’ve been drinking!”

“I swear, sor, I haven’t. Not a drop.”

“Then you need a rest. You’ve been working too hard.”

“I’m as sound as a ten-dollar gold piece, sor. But the reason I called—” There was a pause, then Casey’s voice went on with a rush. “The mummy said the things were gone, Mr. Caine. I’d like to ask ye, did ye get them amulets and things, tonight, like ye thought?”

“Yes,” said Gunther Caine crisply. “They came several hours ago. They’re in my small den, now, in a steel box.”

“Well, look now, sor. The mummy seemed dommed sure the things were gone. Stolen, that must mean. And wouldn’t that mummy be in a position to know? I mean — the son of the old boy that first had the ring and the other stuff — wouldn’t he know if anything had happened to them?”

Caine, in spite of himself, looked uneasy.

“Go back to your beat, Casey,” he said.

“But ye’ll look an’ see if ye’ve still got the stuff, Mr. Caine?” Casey said, almost pleadingly.

“Yes, I’ll look. Good-by.”

Caine, in spite of himself, looked and then got up. With a look of amusement for Casey, and half of one for himself, he went into the next room. The small den.

It was time to put that steel box in the safe, anyhow. And while he was carrying it to the safe, it wouldn’t hurt to look. Though of course there couldn’t be anything to the Irishman’s yarn.

There was a slide top on the box, strong enough so that a steel jimmy would have had to be used to open it if locked. But he hadn’t locked it when he set it on the desk in here.

He slid the top back. And the box dropped from fingers suddenly as limp as if made of wet cotton.

The box was empty. Amulets and ring were gone!

“Harold!” he tried to cry out, to get his son’s help.

Not a sound could he force from his numbed lips. The priceless Taros relics gone—

He staggered to the front door and opened it.

The Avenger was gone, too. His car was no longer at the curb.

It was speeding away with Benson at the wheel and the giant just coming out of his coma in the back seat, where Benson had put him after finding him alone and unconscious in the center of the vacant lot. But Gunther Caine couldn’t know that.

He began phoning frantically, all the places he could think of where The Avenger might be reached in Washington.

He had asked the white-haired man down here as a great Egyptologist. Now he needed him desperately in his grim capacity as crime fighter.

But he didn’t know where Benson was staying, or, indeed, if the man with the stainless steel chips of eyes was not at this moment driving back toward his New York headquarters.

The Taros relics gone — and the one man on earth who might help him, gone too.

Gunther Caine sat on the porch steps and put his face in his hands.