The Devil’s Horns

CHAPTER I Murder Trap!

The apartment building did not cover much ground space, but it loomed ten stories up into the frosty winter night. Some others in Ashton City were larger, but this was the most ornate and commanded the biggest rents.

The surrounding streets were very dark. The shadows seemed blackest right around the building. And that was as it should be. For that building had a dark reputation. Its owner had an even darker one.

At the corner of the building, in the blackest of the shadows, a hat seemed to float six feet up in thin air. Then a hand appeared to shift the hat a little. And finally there was a match flare, illuminating a hard, scarred face for an instant, and igniting a cigarette.

A man’s voice sounded.

“Put that out, ya dope. This guy we’re waitin’ to burn down might see it.”

The fresh cigarette was ground under an irritated foot and darkness prevailed again. In the darkness, three professional killers with drawn guns waited to do a job they were sure of accomplishing.

The murder of a fourth man, soon to come.

The streets around there were dark because Ashton City hadn’t money in its treasury for decent lighting. There were no cops in sight for the same reason. The city hadn’t funds enough to pay an adequate police force. The force had been cut and cut again, in the interests of economy, till now it was only half large enough.

It was nice for the crooks in Ashton City, but not so good for the citizens.

The city treasury was not perennially impoverished because the town was poor. There was a lot of money there. A great deal was collected in taxes. The reason there was no money even for necessities was largely contained in that tall, slim, elaborate, apartment building.

The building was owned by Oliver Groman, and had been built, so the rumors went, largely out of the very funds that should have gone for municipal services.

Groman was political boss of Ashton City. He had been boss for a long, long time. The political jackals of the town had followed his lead — and a ruthless, profitable lead it had been.

So now three men could lurk safely in shadows that ought never to have existed, with guns in their hands — for Groman’s own undoing.

“Why do we turn the heat on this guy?” one of the three black figures in shielding darkness asked.

His voice was indifferent. The question was plainly queried out of only idle curiosity. The asker didn’t really care why a murder was to be done. It was only a way of passing time.

“I don’t know, exactly,” said the man who had snapped out the order to extinguish the cigarette. “Maybe he got in the boss’ hair. Maybe the boss thinks he’s gonna get in his hair in the future. Anyhow—”

He stopped, and all listened.

It was nearly midnight of a cold December night. There were few abroad. The steps of these few sounded clearly when they were near enough. Each time steps had sounded the three killers had slunk down and kept silent.

Other times the steps had gone on and they had relaxed. This time the steps did not die away. They kept on toward the corner — and death!

“This’ll be him,” whispered the man who had inadvertently lit the cigarette.

The third peered down the street. Under a far light a man could be seen, walking straight toward them and making the crisp, quick steps.

“Yeah, it’s him. Just a little guy. I don’t see why the boss is so anxious to get him.”

“Well, anybody comin’ to see Groman, at this time, may make trouble—”

“Shut it!”

Silence again. They waited confidently for their approaching victim.

Had they been able to see this fourth man a little more clearly they might not have remained so confident. For even at first sight, he was revealed as a highly exceptional and dangerous person.

The man coming straight toward the three waiting guns was only of average height and weight — surely not more than five feet eight and weighing about a hundred and sixty-five pounds — but he gave the impression of being much larger.

He walked like a cat, with each sure step a perfect flow of rhythm and accomplishment. His shoulders swung only a little with each rippling move, but they appeared to be ready at an instant’s notice to bunch for colossal action.

The man’s hat was down over his forehead, but at the temples and back you could catch a glimpse of white hair. Snow-white hair, thick, virile, but without even a trace of color.

His face was the most remarkable thing about him.

The man’s countenance was almost as white as his hair. Linen-white. And moveless. It was as dead, as immobile, as a mask of wax. You got the impression that that face would be moveless and changeless no matter what the situation into which its owner was thrust. And you would have been right.

The flesh and features were paralyzed. They could never move — unless the man moved them with his fingertips. In that event they stayed where put, like putty, till moved again.

But wait! His face his most remarkable feature? No! Perhaps the most remarkable was his eyes.

From the white, paralyzed face under the snow-white hair, peered colorless eyes to give a man the shivers. They were as pale as ice in a polar dawn. They were as cold as a death sentence. They glared from under moveless brows like small agates with a light behind them.

“Just a little guy.”

One of the confident three had said that.

But not one of them, fortunately for his own peace of mind, knew that the little guy — was The Avenger.

The three were completely ready now. Each had the safety off his gun and aimed. They didn’t aim from the hip, either. Each had his automatic braced on a raised left forearm, for pistol-range accuracy.

They waited only till the man should get to the apartment building doorway, which should be the nearest possible point to them. The doorway was only ten yards from where they lurked. Impossible to miss at that range.

The Avenger came on. And in his very walk could be seen his unusual capabilities.

The quick, crisp steps of a man who was young and powerful in spite of the appearance of snow-white hair.

The purposeful, almost grim movements of a man who has one sole aim in life, and unfalteringly pursues it with every waking move.

The glaring, cold eyes of a person utterly without fear.

The instant readiness of a man to leap sideways or forward if ambush presents itself.

Thus could you read the physical tale of Richard Henry Benson, known as The Avenger. Adventurer, rich man, genius in a hundred lines, his life had been blasted when criminals had snatched his lovely wife and his small daughter.

So he had devoted his life from then on to fighting crime. He had become a machine, a nemesis to crooks.

And it was this man, this dynamo of action and quick thinking, whom the trio in the shadows thought of as just a little guy, easy to kill.

The Avenger was nearly at the building doorway, walking straight ahead, pale and frightening eyes for once not seeming all-seeing. And maybe the three would succeed, where a hundred others had failed. Maybe, with ignorance keeping their aim steady, they would actually—

“What—” whispered one of the men, perplexed. But he stopped even that bewildered wonder, as the answer came.

The man with the dead face and the snow-white hair had stopped his walking for a moment, and bent down. His hands moved quickly.

Tying his shoelace was the thought of the three.

The Avenger straightened, came on. Twenty feet from the entrance. Ten. Three trigger fingers tightened.

“Got him!” the leader of the three whispered soundlessly. Two more steps would take their victim to the spot closest, which had been picked as an execution point.

The man needn’t have bothered to be so careful to make his whisper soundless, to make no noise.

The Avenger had heard them a long time ago. And he had seen them an even longer time.

Dick Benson’s hearing was a marvelous thing. He had trusted his life to it in the wilderness of tropical jungles — and also in the wilderness of city streets. His sight was even more marvelous. Those colorless awe-inspiring eyes could take on telescopic power when necessary. Just as they could examine a close object with almost microscopic ability.

Right now, The Avenger could hear the suppressed breathing of the three in the cold and frosty night air. He could see the melting shadows of their bodies.

He knew their purpose. It was a plan any murderer might have made, if he knew his game. Let your victim get as close as possible.

The doorway was, of course, the spot; so, just before he reached it, he had leaned down as if to re-tie a shoelace.

The three killers were all set. Indeed, one shot roared out on the quiet street.

But the bullet didn’t reach its mark, because that mark suddenly wasn’t there any more. And for the same reason the other two guns didn’t speak yet.

With a movement absolutely incredible in its flowing quickness, the man with the dead face and the icy, colorless eyes, was back ten feet from the doorway — and was facing the three in the building shadow.

The Avenger’s left arm snapped up and back. There was a small, thin glitter from his hand. Then the glitter left the hand and traced a path through the night as straight as a bullet and almost as fast.

A path dead toward the three.

At almost the same instant, there was a muffled, whiplike spat from a queer thing in The Avenger’s right hand.

The results were as weird as they were unexpected.

One of the three gunmen screamed like a hurt woman, and he began frantically tearing at something embedded in the left forearm on which he had braced his gun.

Another of the three didn’t make any sound at all. He sank to the sidewalk like a tired old man and lay still with his gun slipping from lax fingers. He sank like a dead man, though he was not dead.

The Avenger, responsible for the deaths of a dozen crime geniuses with their scores of helpers, had a queer prejudice against taking life himself, no matter how richly that life deserved to be snuffed out. He had not taken one now. The man who had fallen had been shot deftly on the exact top of his skull. Had been creased so that the concussion of the slug knocked him cold but did not kill him.

The third of the murderously confident trio stared with gaping jaws at the screaming man on his left, then at the unconscious man on the walk on his right. Then, cursing, he fired three times at the slightly built man who had produced these impossible results.

But again the mark was, incredibly, not there.

Dick Benson had literally dodged bullets many times in his deadly career. He seemed to do so now, as if those appalling, icy eyes of his could see the slugs coming and get out of their way.

He was stepping rapidly from side to side, but you didn’t see his feet actually move. You thought that he was flowing, like a river of quicksilver.

As he moved, he drove toward the swearing, shooting gunman.

For half a dozen steps the man endured the charge. Then his nerve broke. He turned to run.

Benson’s swift flow seemed to accelerate endlessly. His feet made no sound now, but they covered two yards to the one traversed by the pounding feet of the killer.

The man yelled hoarsely, just once, as fingers of steel closed on his throat. Then he was silent, fighting with all his strength.

He was half again as big as Benson, but all his strength wasn’t half enough.

The Avenger held the bigger man as you would hold a child. His hands never wavered in their grip on the gunman’s throat. His cold, appalling eyes never blinked as they glared into the gunman’s convulsed face.

More terrible than anything else, perhaps, was the complete expressionlessness, even at such a time, of his white, dead face.

Like a mask, it seared itself into the killer’s glazing brain. He would never forget that awful impassivity at a moment when any other man would be grimacing with effort and rage.

The man’s struggle ceased. He sagged in Benson’s hands. He opened those hands and dropped him to the walk.

A patrolman was pounding up the street, drawn by the shooting. Benson, with moves like fast-motion pictures, went through the pockets of the two unconscious men. The screaming one who had torn at his forearm was gone, now.

Then the Avenger put away the two unique weapons he had used.

One, the knife he had thrown at the first man, lay on the walk where the recipient had blindly dropped it. The knife was slim, long-bladed, needle-sharp, with a hollow tube for a handle. It was a specially designed throwing-knife, and Benson called it, with grim affection, Ike.

He put Ike back in its sheath strapped to the calf of his left leg. Then he sheathed, at his right calf, the sinister little gun with which he had creased the second man. And that was as unique as the knife.

It was a .22 revolver, with only a slight bend for a handle and a cylinder, built small for streamlining, that held four cartridges. The gun was silenced. It looked like a plain piece of slim blued pipe, with a sleek, small bulge where the cylinder was, and a bit of a bend for a butt.

The Avenger called this second little aid of his, Mike.

The patrolman, panting, got to the scene as Benson had Ike and Mike put away. He stared at the two men on the walk, and then whirled to Benson.

“All right, you! To headquarters—”

Benson’s voice was smooth. But his eyes bit into the cop’s face like white acid.,

“There seems to have been a gangster’s battle here, officer,” he said. “I got here in time to see one man strangling another. The other hit him on top of the head, just as he was winning, and ran away. So — here are two unconscious men. I am only a witness.”

“Yeah! That’s a likely story! You—”

“I’ll be at Mr. Groman’s if you want me. My name is Benson.”

The patrolman hesitated. Groman’s name carried a lot of weight. He bit his lip, then gathered up the two killers. A squad car appeared down the street.

Benson was a master at psychology. Taking sure and instant advantage of the man’s uncertainty, he simply turned and walked toward the building entrance. The cop took a step after him, stopped.

The squad car screamed to a stop and the patrolman loaded the two in it.

Benson went on into the building. The two, he knew, were killers and probably had long records. But they would be released soon from cells on someone’s imperative orders. For Ashton City was a paradise for murderers.

That was why The Avenger was here.