The Devil’s Horns

CHAPTER XV Shambles!

MacMurdie had worked all day and evening, following the gratifying brush with Buddy Wilson in Lila Belle’s apartment, getting dope on John M. Singell, dubious politician and owner of the Sweet Valley Contracting Co.

He hadn’t gotten much. But one of the few stray bits was the information that Singell was a regular patron of Sisco’s Gray Dragon Club.

It was with no definite plan in mind, simply to check on Singell’s possible presence there, that MacMurdie went into the Gray Dragon at past two o’clock in the morning.

But afterward the bony Scot insisted that pure Providence had guided him. For he stepped into the café room just in time to see Nellie Gray, in a green gown, down the narrow corridor off the orchestra dais, being hustled into a doorway by Sisco!

The dour Scotchman’s bitter blue eyes burned. But his face gave away none of his thoughts. He had been following the head waiter to a corner table. He said:

“I’ll be with ye in just a minute.”

He walked to a row of phone booths where patrons could phone their wives that they had to stay late at the office on business, fished in his snap-clip purse till he found a nickel, grudgingly inserted it, and dialed the number of the hotel room Smitty had taken on first arriving in Ashton City.

Mac was as sparing with words as with pennies.

“Smitty, Gray Dragon. Come fast! I think Nellie’s in trouble.”

He hung up and went, smiling a little, to the table that had been cleared for him—

He hadn’t gotten to that table when the giant, two miles away, was out his door, putting on hat and overcoat as he ran.

Lie low, Benson had told him. There was still a murder charge hanging over him. The police — who fortunately didn’t know of this hotel room or the name he’d used to register — would be hot after him.

But that short call of Mac’s made everything different, of course. Nellie in danger! Smitty charged two blocks like a wild bull elephant till he saw a cab. The vehicle sagged under his weight as he hopped in.

Five minutes later he got out a block from the Dragon — and promptly ducked down an alley. A cop was standing at the nightclub entrance, talking to the doorman.

The alley led behind the Gray Dragon. There was a back door to the club kitchens. Off the corner of the building there was a window. Since the window was on the first floor, it was barred.

Smitty seized hold of the grating. The giant emitted a kind of enraged grunt, while his vast shoulders writhed and his huge back bowed.

The heavy grating came off the building in his hands, leaving deep little craters in brick and cement where the bolts had been set.

Smitty opened the window and climbed in.

He was in a dimly lighted storeroom, with barrels of flour and cans of eggs around. Since the storeroom window was barred, it hadn’t been thought necessary to put a man in here. The room was empty.

Smitty stepped to the door — and at that moment the door opened. A man in chefs whites, not very clean, came in, whistling. He jerked to a startled stop as he saw the huge man in front of him, opened his mouth for a yell, and Smitty struck.

The giant simply hammered straight down with his fist on the top of the man’s head, like a sledgehammer hitting a railroad spike. The man’s neck seemed to disappear, and he fell.

Smitty went on, breathing fire. Where diminutive, blond Nellie was concerned, the giant was a protective landslide.

He got into a narrow corridor. Down at one end he saw the café room. And he saw a man sitting alone at a table. The man had sandy red hair, reddish, freckle-splotched skin, and bleak blue eyes.

At the same moment MacMurdie saw him.

The Scot got to his feet and was into the corridor before waiters, bouncer, or Sisco’s men could do anything but start toward him with warning yells that customers weren’t supposed to go to the dressing rooms.

“Where?” rumbled Smitty succinctly.

“There,” said MacMurdie, pointing to the doorway through which he had seen Nellie shoved.

The nearest man to the café room end of the corridor had a gun in his hand, now. But there were a lot of people still in the café. He hesitated to use it before so many witnesses; so he clubbed it in his hand and charged on.

The giant wasn’t waiting to receive him. He backed across the corridor, shoved forward with all the force he could generate in the narrow, four-door span, and hit the door.

His great shoulder struck the panel like a two-ton battering ram. Once was enough. Something had to give. The door couldn’t because it was too strong — an oak slab with an inner, double facing of metal to give Sisco the soundproof effect he wanted. But the hinges flew from the wall on one side, and the lock on the other. Smitty fell over the door and into the cloth-draped room.

Nellie was standing with blue eyes blazing defiance, her small, compact body braced for any effort. Rosabel was right beside her, equally indomitable.

They ran forward as they saw who it was. But Smitty didn’t stop to greet them. He’d smashed his way in, had gathered the two girls up. Now he had to get them out of here.

And that didn’t look too easy!

Between the wrecked doorway and the café room were at least a dozen men, crowding the narrow corridor, all killers, most of them with guns out.

The giant’s eyes rested on the intact door, lying on the floor. He picked it up as if it had been a light aluminum pot lid.

“Go ahead of me, Mac. Take anybody getting between us and the kitchens.”

Using the ponderous, metal-lined door for a shield, Smitty angled through the doorway. They were shooting now — and to the devil with witnesses in the café room.

The giant held the detached door between his bulk and the men in the corridor. Bullets spanged into it — but not through it. An army-rifle bullet would have pierced it, but not slugs from any automatic.

Mac and Nellie and Rosabel slid out of the room behind the giant’s back. They went ahead toward the kitchen, with Mac ready to mow down anyone appearing ahead of them. But none appeared. The entire enemy force was on the other side of the door. And Smitty was making an excellent job of holding them back.

The door almost covered the corridor from wall to wall. The men could not shoot through it; they couldn’t shoot around or over it. They could only watch it back steadily to the rear exit — and escape.

Sisco himself leaped into the corridor, drawn from his office by the shots. His greenish eyes took in the situation at a glance.

“Charge that door, you dummies!” he yelled. “Knock it down — and the guy behind it.”

Every man in the corridor poured against the retreating door. There were at least ten of them, with the front one pushing the panel and the men behind pushing them.

They might as well have pushed a mountainside. The giant’s legs arched like stone columns. Tendons stood out, quivering, on his hands. And the door continued to move back just as much — or as little — as Smitty pleased and no more.

“Arch! Come here with that tommy gun!” yelled Sisco.

Smitty, holding back a corridor full of men, moved faster. Nellie and Rosabel and Mac jumped into the kitchen. The giant followed, still holding the heavy door as a shield.

With all his titanic strength, he shoved forward on the door.

Men were mashed like flies between it and the corridor wall behind them. The fellow called Arch was jumping around with a submachine gun in his hands, but not daring to shoot with all the others around.

Smitty slammed the kitchen door shut and bolted it.

Mac and the two girls were three-quarters of the way to the alley door. A man in whites ran to head them off, and got there first.

There was a heavy cleaver on a meat block next to Smitty. Smitty caught up the cleaver and threw it. The ponderous chopper fairly whistled as it streaked through the air — straight at the man in front of the alley door.

The man had a gun out by now, but when he saw that cleaver start toward him, he screamed like a woman and ducked so fast that he dropped his weapon.

The cleaver whistled over his head, struck the door — and went clear through it!

Mac was wading in with his big fists swinging like bone mallets. He caught the man in whites as he was rising, knocked him fifteen feet away to slam against the hotel-size refrigerator.

And then the four were through the door and in the alley.

As they got into a cab a block away, MacMurdie said: “Ye needn’t have been so particular about huntin’ a doorway. Ye could have saved time by walkin’ us right out through the building wall, ye dumb human tank.”

Smitty was still breathing hard, because death had been so close to Nellie, not because of his exertions.

“Whoosh,” said Mac dourly, “ye’re soft, ye overgrown mass o’meat. A little workout, and ye puff like a grampus.”

But his bleak eyes were saying different things, and so were the eyes of Nellie.

“Thanks, Smitty,” she said.

“Aw—” began the giant, fumbling for words. He was unsure with only one person — Nellie.

“Twasn’t nuthin’,” Mac ribbed him by answering for him. “Any mon would have done the same — providin’ he was ten feet tall and five feet broad and hippo heavy.”

But Smitty didn’t care. For Nellie’s hand was on his huge paw for a fleeting pressure to express further her gratitude.

“Where are we going?” asked Rosabel.

That stumped them all for a moment. They’d been busy just getting away from the Gray Dragon. Now it was time to think of a destination.

“Straight to the chief, I guess,” Smitty said. “Looks to me as if this thing is about to come to a head. We’re all spotted now; so there’s no use hiding out in separate holes any longer.”

He gave the cab driver Oliver Groman’s address—

At that address, with Josh safe in a room upstairs, Benson was witnessing a bizarre scene in the bedroom of Oliver Groman.

The Avenger, prowling restlessly through the two big floors comprising the old lion’s home, had seen Ted Groman, the lion’s cub, sneaking down the second floor hall.

Benson could move as softly as a jaguar’s whisper. He followed young Groman, down the stairs, down the front hall — to the door of his father’s two rooms.

The body had been removed from the office. There were still cops around the building entrance, and a plainclothes man was right across the hall looking around the drawing room. But the hall, itself, was clear.

Young Groman cautiously opened the office door and slid in. Benson could see that it was dark in there. He waited two minutes; then he followed.

There was no one in the big room. He crossed to the bedroom door. The door was opened a crack, and from the crack came the dim light of the night lamp kept burning beside the old invalid’s bed. Benson looked through.

The night nurse was there, but asleep. They do sleep, lightly, sitting up, attuned to the slightest need of their patient. At nearly three in the morning, this one was taking forty winks in a padded chair across the room from the bed.

In the bed was the moveless, wooden hulk of what had been a powerful man. Old Groman’s eyes were open, indicating that he was awake — what there was left of him not in permanent slumber. He was staring up at his son, who was bending low over him.

Ted Groman was doing a thing that looked completely meaningless and mad.

He had a little celluloid desk ruler with him. He had his father’s nerveless right hand in his grip. As Benson watched, he extended the old man’s first and little finger, straight out from his palm, parallel.

Then he measured, very carefully, the distance between fingertips.

After that, as softly and noiselessly as he had come, he turned from the bed and stole away again.

The Avenger stood at the foot of the stairs, white-faced and enigmatic-looking, when young Groman got there. Ted stared at him suspiciously, then started on.

“How’s your father?” Benson asked quietly.

Ted said, in a strained tone, “Asleep — as nearly as you can tell. The nurse is dozing, too; so I didn’t go in. No reason to wake her. I looked at Dad from the doorway and turned back.”

“You didn’t go into the bedroom at all?” said Benson.

“No, not at all,” said young Groman. “Goodnight.”

He went on up the stairs. The Avenger’s pale, brilliant eyes stared after him and at the slight bulge of his coat pocket where the six-inch celluloid ruler stuck out the cloth.

Why measure the span between a paralytic’s forefinger and little finger when stretched parallel? The Avenger thought he knew.