The Devil’s Horns

CHAPTER XIV Imposter — Get Him!

The man, who was in Judge Broadbough’s study with him, was news all by himself. When the top gangster of a town comes to call on one of the town’s most eminent judges, it is something!

The man in with Judge Broadbough was Buddy Wilson. Josh, at the library door, could just hear the two talking.

They were talking of the devil’s horns.

“I simply can’t figure it out, Wilson,” came Broadbough’s pompous, affected voice. “Yet it must have great meaning. Hawley, in our secret employ, gave his life to find out those words. And he tried to tell us.”

“Aw, nuts!” said Wilson. “Devil’s horns! What can that mean?”

“I can only think,” Broadbough said, “that it has a connection with the one thing we want to know about old Groman. The thing. But we’ve got to know.”

“Yeah, and in the meantime, this other guy’s picked up dead at Groman’s.”

“What?” Broadbough’s voice was a little wild. “What other man?”

“I got it just a minute ago. Even the papers don’t have it yet. Some mug was found stabbed in the old boy’s office. Someone that nobody knows!”

“Good heavens,” came the judge’s muffled voice.

“Yeah! That’s bad, all right. Who’s cuttin’ in on this?”

“Something will have to be done — fast!”

“Something will be,” Wilson grated. “I got it all laid out. A job that comes in my department — and I do jobs like that well.”

There was a rasp of a chair, and Josh got away from the door, hiding in the coat closet down the hall. Wilson had kept hat and overcoat on when he entered the judge’s study, and therefore wouldn’t be going in there.

He heard the library door open, heard Wilson’s steps, then the slam of the front door. For several more minutes Josh stayed in the closet. Then he looked out, and saw that light was still coming from the library. The judge was still in there.

Josh went back to his post.

He knew he was flirting with death in staying so constantly at that door. One of his shrewd axioms was that the smartest fox gets caught at last if he plays around traps long enough, and that, when he does, he’s a sorry-looking fox indeed.

But the colored man was working for The Avenger. And The Avenger’s aides drew the line at no risk, no matter how great.

The double, sliding door was open an inch in the middle. Josh peered in — and his eyes almost leaped from their sockets.

Broadbough was evidently satisfied that at this late hour the servants were long since in their own wing and asleep. And his guest had just left. Therefore, he must be alone. So he was acting accordingly.

With bulging eyes, Josh saw Broadbough step to the wall, take out two law books, and reveal innocent-looking plaster. Then he saw the plaster swing aside, at a finger touch, revealing a beautifully finished little safe.

The judge opened the safe and took out a big envelope. Josh saw a little brown note book, and half a dozen sheets of paper, written hastily in longhand. The Negro knew he’d made a ten-strike!

Benson had told him to watch out for the documentary evidence the judge was holding out on the gang for his own protection. And this was it!

For some reason, Broadbough suddenly feared that his regular safe was not the best place for the valuable stuff.

Josh saw the judge close the safe, look around, then go toward the street window. The judge touched the sill in several places — and it hinged up, revealing a long, flat recess about an inch deep. Broadbough put the papers in the secret recess, carefully shut the sill, and reached for the light switch—

Josh was out of the coat closet again almost before the sound of Broadbrough’s steps had died away on the second floor. He darted into the library, sped in darkness to the sill. The papers and the little book rustled faintly in his dark hand.

There was a sound at the door.

Josh opened the window an inch, dropped papers and book into evergreen shrubs along the outside wall, then stooped and made straight for the sound. He was next to the door when he thought he heard someone sneak into the dark room. But he didn’t wait to find out. He slid into the hall, and hurried to the rear. There, he climbed to his room under the eaves.

He had been in pajamas and robe. To be caught that way at this hour of the night would have been explainable: he could have said he’d heard a noise and had got out of bed to investigate. To have been caught fully dressed would have looked bad.

He got dressed now, in darkness. But before he left the room, he fumbled in the depths of his closet and got out his little radio. There was just a chance he’d be caught before leaving the house. He’d better get in touch with Benson. He plugged the radio in.

“Chief,” he whispered. There was a pause. Then again, “Chief—”

“Yes?” came the measured, clipped tone of the most dangerous crime fighter on earth. The white, terrible face and the flaring, pale eyes could fairly be visioned at the sound of that voice.

“It’s Josh. I just got something. I’m coming with it unless there’s an accident—”

Light bathed the room as a finger touched the switch near the door.

The finger had belonged to Buddy Wilson. And Wilson stood in the doorway, now, and stared at the colored man.

The gun in Wilson’s hand spoke once. And the tiny radio flew into pieces. The man’s girlish face, with the flat, hard eyes, didn’t change expression at all. The mouth, still bruised badly from the caress of MacMurdie’s bony knuckles, was a straight, hard line.

“Mah radio!” Josh exclaimed, trying to act it out. “You-all done ruined mah—”

“Shut it!” Wilson snarled. “I see you’re dressed to go out. So we’ll go! Some place where we can be nice and alone.”

Josh was a fast thinker, and a clever, educated man. But he couldn’t think his way out of this one.

“Come on, I said,” Wilson barked. “Or take it right now. I nearly got you in the library. I have got you now!”

Josh went to the door. Wilson retreated so that at no moment could the colored man have leaped for him. Josh, feet and legs feeling numb, went downstairs again. On the second floor, Judge Broadbough was standing, white and scared, in the doorway of his bedroom.

“Wilson,” he bleated. “What’s he done! What’s—”

“I’ll take care of this,” the gunman said. “This is in my department, too. Go back to bed — and you never saw me, and never saw this guy go out. See?”

Josh went ahead of the gun to the street door, out to a car at the curb. A man at the wheel grunted in surprise.

“I didn’t know we were going to have a passenger, Buddy.”

“I did — when I came here. So I catch him red-handed, snoopin’ around. So we got the passenger. You know where to go.”

The man at the wheel nodded. He started off, fast, as Wilson sat beside Josh with the gun in his ribs.

The car stopped in front of the largest of three big warehouses taking up with a fenced yard, a whole city block near the edge of town. A sign on the biggest building said: “Sweet Valley Contracting Co.” There wasn’t a soul in sight, and one dim street light far away was all that illumined the place.

Josh was prodded into the office of the building, through it, and into the basement of the warehouse behind it. But before this, Wilson had slipped a black mask over his face. Evidently, he trusted some of his own men, but he did not trust the men to be encountered around here.

Down in the basement, Wilson wasted no time.

There was a flat, wooden mixing tray on the basement floor. Nearby were several big, empty barrels. Wilson yelled and two men appeared.

The two stared at Wilson’s masked face, at the thin, gangling Negro, and at the big, flat mixing trough. Without a word they dumped cement, sand and water into the trough tray, and began to hoe it around.

“There’s a quarry, four miles out from here,” Wilson’s voice came from under the mask. “Far as we can tell, the thing hasn’t any bottom at all. When you get dumped in there, you just keep on going down and down. Especially if you’re in a barrel with concrete poured in around you.”

Josh said nothing at all. He was getting ready to make as much trouble as possible before his life was snuffed out. The skinny, long body was packed with power. The colored man, honor graduate from Tuskegee, could fight like a wild cat — and he meant to, now.

The outcome was a certainty. Wilson’s gun would belch a bullet, and Josh would fall dead. But he was hanged if he’d just stand and take it quietly. He might get in a lick or two first—

Suddenly a voice came from the far end of the basement, where stairs went up.

“Hold it!”

They all turned. But Josh knew even before turning who it was, and knew there was no hope here. Because he recognized a voice he’d heard at Broadbough’s. Norman Vautry’s voice.

A figure came from the bottom of the stairs. The man was hooded as Wilson was, but from under the mask came the newspaperman’s voice, again.

“This man got something very valuable from Broadbough before you took him out of there. Something very valuable! He hid it someplace. We’ve got to find out where before he goes into one of those barrels.”

Wilson’s flat, shark’s eyes glared at Josh through the eye-slits of his mask.

“Oh, he did, huh! Well, we can make him talk about it—”

“We’ll do better than that,” came Vautry’s voice. “We’ll take him back to Broadbough’s — and make him get the stuff himself, right now, from where he hid it.”

“But he can tell us, and we can come back here after we’ve got it, and fix him—”

“It would be dawn or later by then. And you won’t want to hold him here, in a barrel, till tomorrow night’s darkness. Too many of the men working around here in the day are honest.”

“Oh, all right,” Wilson said, mask stirring impatiently with the words. “I’ll—”

“I can take him; there are two men in my car.”

“If what he’s got is half as valuable as you say,” came Wilson’s cold, dangerous voice, “you better not make any slips.”

“You can be very sure of that,” was the meaningful reply.

A gun was in the other man’s hand. He waved with it. And Josh went back to the stairs and up again.

He went with alacrity. Down here, it was sure death within a few minutes. Leaving, he might have an hour more of living. Though with two men in a waiting car and this man, Vautry, beside him with a gun, Josh didn’t see that his position was much better—

He felt a cold gun butt in his astonished hand as they got to the head of the stairs. It was only by a great effort of will that he kept from exclaiming aloud. And it was only by a great effort that he kept from collapsing with relief.

The man who had gotten him so smoothly away was not Vautry — but The Avenger.

“I heard that shot shattering the radio,” Benson said. “I thought they’d bring you here, so—”

Steps sounded ahead of them. The steps were rapid and agitated.

There was a rather dim night-light in the cavernous warehouse. Josh saw a man coming toward them, taking a mask from his pocket and starting to put it on as he came.

The man was Norman Vautry.

Josh knew despair again. They had another building, with who knew how many men in it, to get through before getting to the street and freedom. And here appeared the very man, supposed to be masked beside him, at this moment! One Vautry meant deliverance.

Two meant instant death!

Again Josh, fast thinking and shrewd as he was, was utterly without hope. But the genius beside him was master of the situation.

The Avenger leaped back to the stairway, lifting his mask a little as he moved.

“Up here!” he yelled. “That guy wasn’t Vautry! He was a fake! I got him cornered up here now! Get him!”

There was a scramble from the basement. Meanwhile, Vautry, staring and struggling ineffectually to get his mask over his face, was doing some yelling of his own. But it went unheard.

He tried to get in the way of Josh and Benson as they raced toward the street. But though he might have a ruthless, double-crossing, keen brain, he was no man of action. Josh’s fist lashed out, and Vautry staggered back to the floor.

He was just getting up, dazedly, and Josh and Benson had just slipped into the next building, when Wilson got up onto the first floor. The killer’s eyes were like cold, shining grapes as they stared through the eye-slits at a man resembling Vautry and just getting up from the floor with a mask in his hand.

Not Vautry — an imposter — a fake — get him!

“No!” the newspaperman was screaming. “N—”

Long after the second bullet stopped all the man’s movements forever, Wilson methodically sent slugs ripping through his body. Guy calling himself The Avenger! Guy called man of a thousand faces! Sticking his bill in at Ashton City. Well, this would fix him! And this—