The Hate Master

CHAPTER XI Into the Trap

There was an excellent reason why The Avenger burst into action without even waiting for Smitty to finish his report.

The phone call from Morel, some hours ago!

The scientist had called from the Maine laboratory, it seemed, through the nearest exchange which was Kinnisten, Maine. He had said he was safe, but couldn’t take time to explain anything and would probably have to leave right away for the West.

Now, the very first thing that had happened after that call, of course, was Lila’s urgent request that she be allowed to rush up there and see if she could catch her father and have a few words with him before he left for another indefinite and unexplained period.

Benson had rather reluctantly agreed and had sent Mac along to guard her.

There seemed no reason not to do this, though Dick had been instinctively uneasy. After all, from the first, there had been no proof that Morel hadn’t left the clearing of his own free will.

Smitty’s work with the thermocouple showed how a kidnaping might have occurred from the air, where at first glance such would seem impossible.

But there was no proof of such a thing, and Morel’s call had cast further doubt upon it. And it had been Morel! Lila knew her father’s voice without a shadow of a doubt. So it had seemed all right. A man wouldn’t mislead his own daughter.

Now, Morel had been seen in Michigan, hundreds of miles from the spot from where he had ostensibly phoned. And many things had clicked into place in Benson’s brain.

The queer monotony of Morel’s voice over the phone! The way he had kept right on talking in spite of Lila’s questions and exclamations! Morel had answered none of those questions; had replied to none of her statements. The voice had just gone on.

Why? Because it wasn’t Morel! That phone call had been a recording of Morel’s voice, played in advance and run before a telephone in Maine when the owner of the voice was nowhere near there.

“Nellie!” The Avenger called, eyes like pale ice with cold flame behind them.

The elaborate scheme meant only one thing — a trap!

Their enemy had decided, for reasons of his own, that Morel’s daughter must know too much and must be killed. Morel had been drugged or tricked into making that phonograph record because the gang was shrewd enough to know that the girl’s first move, after hearing from her absent father, would be to hurry up and try to contact him. In which case she could be murdered at leisure.

“Nellie!”

“Yes, chief.”

The diminutive blonde appeared in the doorway. Her satin-smooth cheeks were pink, and in her blue eyes was the light of excitement.

“Mac and Lila Morel have left for Morel’s Maine laboratory, near Kinnisten,” said Dick.

“Yes, I know.”

“I find out now,” The Avenger went on, “that it is almost certainly a trap. They’ve been drawn up there by a false telephone call. Take the fastest plane and go after them.”

“And just bring them back?” said Nellie, looking disappointed.

“By no means!”

Dick Benson’s colorless eyes were something to scare the most hardened of crooks. A trap! Very well, Benson had a way with traps. Never avoid them, was his motto. Always walk right in, because in traps, you are apt to learn something you might otherwise have no opportunity to discover.

“Lila Morel and Mac will fall into the trap, as has been planned for them. Only — you will be Lila Morel.”

Nellie nodded complete comprehension.

“She’s quite a bit taller than I am, though,” she said.

“Take inch-and-a-half lifts and your highest-heeled shoes,” said Benson. “Put them on in the plane, don’t bother with anything, now. They may already be there. In that case—”

He didn’t have to finish. It is one thing to walk into a trap open-eyed. It is quite another thing to fall in unwarned.

And Mac and Lila were unwarned!

Nellie didn’t even stop to acknowledge orders. She was gone from there. It was a normal eight minutes fast driving to the river where, in an old loft building, some of The Avenger’s planes were secretly kept. She made it in five.

The fastest plane, Dick had said. That was a silver bullet with stubby wings and an impossibly big motor. An amphibian. It ripped up the water for a hundred yards, lifted, soared off.

“Mac, Nellie calling. Mac! Mac!”

She kept calling into the transmitter of her radio. And she kept hearing no answer.

“Mac. Come in. Nellie calling. Mac.”

She set the robot pilot and, while the plane shot north automatically guided and kept on an even keel, she put on a dark wig she had grabbed from the make-up kit and which somewhat resembled Lila’s hair in hue. She also put on a pair of shoes with ridiculously high heels and, in addition, inserted the maxim shoe lifts she could handle.

When she was through, she had the sensation of wearing stilts. But she had trained herself to walk naturally in such circumstances.

“Mac. Nellie calling. Oh, Mac, thank Heaven, I got you in time!”

“In time for what?” came the Scot’s burring voice, tiny in the receiver.

“Mac, the chief has found out you and Lila are walking into a trap. Where are you now?”

“Halfway from Kinnisten to Morel’s laboratory, on foot, goin’ through the thickest woods ye everrr saw.”

“Go back to Kinnisten. I’ll meet you there. I’ll be there before you will, I think.”

“Wait a minute!” growled Mac’s voice. “Back to Kinnisten is six miles. Through this underbrush, that’s no little hike to take just for the fun of it. Oh, all right! There’s an old mill half a mile north of the town with a wheatfield next to it. Ye can use it for landin’.”

Nellie was there first, all right. But about ten minutes after she had set the plane down with an expertness that would have commanded the respect of an army flier, Mac and Lila came.

Lila was pale and trembling.

“A trap!” she said, when she saw Nellie. “You’re sure? Then — that means Dad is in trouble. Are we going back to New York?”

“No,” said Nellie. “We’re going to walk into the trap.”

Lila started to say something. Nellie said swiftly:

“Your dress. Take it off, please.”

“I don’t quite understand—”

“If somebody did all this to get you up to the lab,” Nellie said impatiently, “they probably had a man posted near Bleek Street to see if you actually started. That man would describe the clothes you wore in his report to the rest. So I’ll change dresses with you, also hats.”

Mac turned his back and looked glumly at the stream babbling past the old mill building while the transfer took place.

Nellie had a thought as she moved around. She had said “they probably had a man posted at Bleek Street” to tip off the gang as to what Lila wore. There was another possibility. Packer, the perfect servant with the kindly smile. He could have given that information, too. But that, she decided as she finished the change of clothes, was ridiculous.

The fit wasn’t very good. Nellie’s blue dress on Lila ended appreciably above Lila’s attractive knees. And Lila’s dress on Nellie was too long in spite of the extra high heels and the shoe lifts. Nellie took it up at the shoulders and put on Lila’s hat. In the night, she could pass for Morel’s daughter, all right.

“Wait here,” Nellie told Lila. “Don’t move out of the building. And if anybody comes around — anybody at all — hide instantly.”

Then she was gone, with Mac’s bony height towering over her, through the woods in the direction of that laboratory in which something monstrous had been hatched. A plot which might affect the entire history of the United States if The Avenger and his band failed in their quest.

The two went the miles afoot to the lab a lot more quickly than Lila and Mac had been going.

Nellie was a trained woodsman with muscles, under her dainty skin, like silver springs. She had gone on many an archaeological expedition in jungles with her father, dead now; murdered by crooks who wanted to get from him the secret location of ancient gold. So she made even Mac puff a little to keep up as she slid through night and forest.

With the laboratory less than half a mile ahead of them, Mac said:

“Did Muster Benson have any idea of what this trap would be like?”

Nellie shook her head, so different from its normal blondness because of the dark wig.

“There was no clue to that. He only knew there was a trap. We’ll just have to keep our eyes open, that’s all.”

Then they were in sight of the clearing, through the trees in the moonlight. They began creeping forward like Indians, taking advantage of every bush and tree for cover.

Because the woods’ growth went right up to the gate, they could be morally sure that if anyone were hiding in the building, they couldn’t have seen them.

Lila had told Mac how to open the gate. There was a little lever at ground level next to the portal, hidden in grass and leaves. You pulled that up, then pushed it down again in the opposite direction. That shut off the current in the fence wire and released a massive set of bolts which secured the gate.

Mac’s hand went toward the little lever. Then he looked thoughtfully at Nellie, who looked thoughtfully back. And both shook their heads.

There was no need for words as to what to do next. They started looking through the woods till they had found three young, straight trees, taller than the fence. Then Mac took an odd little contrivance from his vest pocket.

It looked like an atomizer. But in the glass receptacle instead of liquid, were several grayish pellets. And the bulb was not of rubber, but of metal.

Mac moistened the pellets, released some of the contents of the bulb — almost pure oxygen — and had a tiny acetylene flame capable of eating through inch steel.

It ate through the slim trees in a matter of seconds.

Mac trimmed the poles, bound them together at the top and had a slim tripod a foot or so higher than the fence. He climbed it, with Nellie steadying the base, leaped, and was in the clearing.

He went to the gate. And their precaution against lifting that lever was found to be justified.

There was a charge of explosive wired to the lever that would have blown Mac and Nellie sky-high if they had disturbed it.

Mac disconnected the deadly little bundle, and Nellie then opened the gate and came in.

The clearing held nothing suspicious. That could be seen, in the moonlight, at a glance. So the two went on to the laboratory building.

“You stand at the left of the door,” said Mac. “Ye pass your hand across in front of a certain spot, four times, and the door opens.”

“Photoelectric cell, of course,” nodded Nellie.

And again the two looked at each other.

“A cell could set off explosive, too,” said Mac.

They went to the first window, and Mac applied the tiny but terrifically hot torch to the steel casement and the latch inside. The contents of the torch ran out before the job was quite done; but a hard push broke the seared, fused metal, and they opened the window.

All the burglar alarm bells in the world seemed to be wired to that window and to sound off when the window was opened.

“Gracious, what a din!” said Nellie.

She flashed her small light around, found the light switch and clicked it. Only after she had done it did she stop to think that this, too, could have been a death move. But it wasn’t. So she hunted for the switch that controlled the bells, turned it off from a distance with a window pole, and sighed with relief when the racket subsided.

“Well,” she said, “if anybody’s lurking around they will certainly know now that somebody has come in! What’s next, Mac?”

“We’ll have a look at the door-openin’ mechanism,” said the Scot.

There was the little bundle of explosive, hooked up to the cell so that if they had opened the door they would have ended up in their graves.

Mac gingerly set the bundle down on the floor and opened the door, which could be opened from the inside on a regular latch.

“We’ll give the lab the once-over,” he started to say.

From the open door behind them came a deep Yankee drawl.

“Put your hands up, you two!”

Mac whirled to leap. But he didn’t. Half a dozen men, with deputy written all over them, stood beyond the doorway in the clearing. At their head was the man who had spoken, the sheriff, according to his badge.

Mac had been ready to depend on his bulletproof covering, but he saw at a glance that he couldn’t. The sheriff had a shotgun in his hands, and it was pointed at Mac’s head.

“Nice of you to leave the gate and door open.” the sheriff drawled. He was lanky and had a lantern-jawed face and a voice like a guitar. But Mac knew of no enemy more dangerous than a drawling but quickmoving country sheriff on a rampage.

So he kept his hands up. And so did Nellie.

They kept them raised a little all the way back to the Kinnisten jail, through the dark woods where normally they’d have tried for a break. They didn’t let them hang naturally to their sides till the cell door had banged on each of them.