The Hate Master

CHAPTER IV The Dog’s Owner

In the big rear room of the drugstore, at the end wall, were the two principal results of the chemical apparatus worked on by Mac and the electrical stuff manipulated by Smitty.

There, on Smitty’s side of the lab, was a big box with a three-foot-square screen over the front of it. This was the world’s finest television set, as far ahead of the best commercial sets as a powerful automobile is ahead of a buggy.

The set was connected constantly with the Bleek Street headquarters of The Avenger; it was the face of The Avenger that now formed in the screen.

It was a startlingly young face to belong to the man who was becoming a legend in police and crime circles, after having made several large fortunes and after having retired from business.

Richard Benson was in his early twenties. But the expression on his regularly chiseled features, and the lack of it in his pale, cold eyes, indicated a man much older in experience if not in years.

“Mac.” The Avenger’s lips seemed scarcely to move with the word.

“Yes, Muster Benson,” said MacMurdie.

“You and Wilson and Josh and Smitty had better come to Bleek Street at once.”

Smitty stared at the young, impassive face. Time was when that face had been paralyzed by a nerve shock, so that it was always as expressionless as a block of ice. Now it could express emotion — but seldom did.

The Avenger was still The Avenger, immobile of countenance, deadly cold of eye, the bane of the underworld.

“Chief!” said Wilson impulsively. “Smitty and I have just stumbled onto something. It’s something I think you ought to know about right away. Happened in Scarsdale. Smitty and I just got back from there. Rabbits killed a dog! Believe it or not — three rabbits went after a Scotch terrier—”

“I know,” said The Avenger quietly.

Wilson gaped at him. He could still be surprised by the fact that this man seemed always to know everything. But the knowledge in this case was explained in the next minute.

“The owner of that dog,” said The Avenger, “is at Bleek Street, now.”

His impassive face faded from the screen, and the set went dead.

“Sweet Sue!” said Wilson. “I don’t know anything I’d like more than to talk to that owner right now!”

The sentiment was exaggerated when he got to The Avenger’s headquarters. For Wilson was susceptible to feminine charms. And the owner of the dead Scottie had lots of them.

Bleek Street is only a short block long, dead-ended. One side is taken up by the windowless back of a vast storage warehouse. In the middle of the other side are three old, narrow, red-brick buildings, flanked by stores and a couple of small warehouses. All these were either owned or leased by Dick Benson, so that, in effect, he owned the block.

Behind their dingy facade, the three red-brick buildings had been thrown into one, and they were furnished as luxuriously as only a very wealthy man could have furnished them.

The vast top floor of the Bleek Street headquarters took up the whole third floor areas of all three buildings. Dick Benson was in here when the four arrived from Mac’s drugstore. And with him was the owner of the dead dog.

The owner was Lila Morel; and Wilson and Smitty looked with undisguised admiration at her dark hair and eyes and the beauty of her face and figure.

But her face was unduly pale right now. She looked grief-stricken — and frightened.

Benson sat at his great desk near one of the windows. Over this window, as over the others, nickel steel slats were set in imitation of Venetian-blind slats at a forty-five-degree angle so that bullets could not get in but light could. The slats sent bars of light over The Avenger’s strong face and left his pale, icy eyes in shadow.

“Miss Morel, these are four of my aides,” he said quietly. “Perhaps you had better tell them what you have told me.”

Lila told of her father, her father’s occupation — though each of them knew him by scientific repute — and sketched the location of their Maine laboratory. Also, she told how Morel had disappeared.

Mac’s sandy ropes of eyebrows drew together.

“Ye mean ye’r father walked into a high-fenced clearin’, with no way of gettin’ out, and disappeared?”

“That’s right,” said Lila, voice tense.

“Perhaps the gate,” began Wilson.

Lila shook her pretty head.

“The gate can be opened only from inside the laboratory. The mechanism there was untouched. So Dad didn’t leave by the gate.”

“You heard or saw nothing after he’d left the building?” asked Dick Benson, voice even and calm as always.

“Nothing,” said Lila. “Except—”

She shivered a little, and bit her lip as if uncertain whether to go on. Then she did, with a rush.

“About the time I think Dad must have gone out into the night, I heard a wolf howl, far off. And then, so close that it made me jump, seemingly right in the clearing, I heard another wolf.”

She looked at the five men with every drop of blood draining from her face.

“It was as if Dad had been changed into a wolf and taken away!”

Smitty felt the hair rise on his scalp. But he knew Dick Benson was not so affected by the words. The giant knew that The Avenger always sought a natural explanation for apparently supernatural things. Indeed, Dick now offered a logical guess.

“That might have been a signal,” he said, “if the thing happened to your father that you evidently fear. That is — kidnaping!”

“I’m sure of it,” nodded Lila. “Something dreadful has happened to Dad. I know it!”

“But how,” puzzled Josh, “could a kidnap gang get into and out of a place which is without entrance or exit?”

“That,” suggested Dick quietly, “may probably not be cleared up till the rest of this odd business can be explained. Go on, Lila.”

“I wanted to do something right away to help Dad,” said the girl, “but I didn’t know which way to turn. Then I remembered that Edwin Ritter, the well-known politician, is one of Dad’s closest friends. I went to Mr. Ritter’s Hudson River home to see if he had heard anything from my father. He had not. I left the place, drove several miles along the river toward New York and found I had been trailed to Mr. Ritter’s. A gang caught me and almost killed me. They drove my coupé into the river, with me at the wheel. They thought I was unconscious, but I wasn’t. I swim pretty well; so I managed to get out of the car, underwater, and swim away in the dark.”

Smitty’s vast hands clenched, giving some slight hint of what would happen should he ever catch any of the members of a gang that would do such a thing.

“After I got away,” said Lila, “I hurried and got my dog, Prince. I brought it back to the spot where the gang had left me; thinking Prince might be able to trail the men to their hide-out—”

“They were on foot?” interrupted The Avenger, pale eyes like ice in moonlight.

“No, they were in a truck. Of course, Prince couldn’t trail that. But I thought it barely possible that one or more of them might have gone to the gang lair on foot, if the place happened to be nearby. And I guess that must have happened because Prince led me to a house in Scarsdale, a short distance away. And it was there that… that—”

“That it was killed,” nodded The Avenger. “Did you get into the house?”

“I just got the door open. It was unlocked. The… the rabbits jumped out and went for Prince. I thought I was seeing things or going crazy.”

“You have the address of the place?”

Lila told it to him. Dick turned to Mac, with the unspoken command to go out and look the place over. Mac left. The Avenger turned to Lila again.

“You said you’d sent for Packer, your servant, to come down from the Maine laboratory to your town apartment?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Lila. “He should be there by now.”

“Bring him here, Cole,” Dick said to Wilson.

And then the door opened and Nellie Gray came in.

Nellie Gray was another of The Avenger’s aides. She was tiny — barely five feet tall and weighing a little over one hundred pounds. You’d never dream, to look at her pink and white blondness that she was as valued a crime fighter, in her way, as even the giant Smitty was in his.

“What goes on?” demanded Nellie indignantly. “Are you leaving me out of some excitement? Can’t a girl go out to get a new hat without being shoved in the discard?”

“Yeah,” said Smitty, “if you thought less of excitement and more of your neck you wouldn’t always be getting into messes and make me come and get you out again.”

“Why, you,” gasped Nellie, “you ten-ton truck! If I had a nickel for every time I’ve saved your hide—”

“Tell her about the rabbits,” Josh broke in impatiently.

So Nellie was brought up to date, and she fussed sympathetically over Lila Morel. Then Wilson came back with the Morel servant, Packer, in tow.

And Packer disagreed with Lila.

“I think your father left the laboratory of his own free will, Miss Lila,” he said mildly. As always there was the faint smile on his lips. “I don’t think there is anything wrong.”

“But we haven’t heard from him, and there was that attack on me,” said Lila.

Packer shrugged.

“Do you remember last year when he left the New York apartment without explanation and was gone for six weeks?”

“That was different,” said Lila miserably.

Dick Benson took over, pale eyes on Packer’s.

“Do you happen to know what Morel was working on at the time he disappeared?” he asked. “Miss Morel doesn’t know.”

“Neither do I, sir,” said Packer. But Benson’s pale, infallible eyes caught a flicker of the man’s pupils.

“You do not know, perhaps, but you have — guessed?”

Packer hesitated, looking into the pale orbs. Then he nodded. “I have come to tentative conclusions.”

“And they are?”

“I think Mr. Morel was working along bio-chemical lines. Something requiring the use of live animals. He injected something into guinea pigs just before he left the laboratory that night.”

“What effect did the injections have?”

“None that I could see, at the time,” said Packer. “But I left shortly after that, at Miss Lila’s bidding, to inquire around the country for Mr. Morel. Then I came to New York.”

Benson nodded and stopped questioning the man. The Avenger seemed satisfied as to his complete innocence, as far as you could tell from his icy, inscrutable eyes.

Mac came back after awhile. He shook his sandy head.

“The place at Scarsdale is cleared out,” he said. “My guess is that it wasn’t lived in for a long time. These men who tackled Miss Morel must have been in only once or twice, using it as a temporary headquarters.”

It was then that The Avenger got the telephone call about the pigeons. The call was from the public library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. It was made by a sharp-eyed newsboy, who, with hundreds of his fellows in the great city, worked with The Avenger by always calling the Bleek Street headquarters if anything queer were observed.

And, Heaven knew, this was queer enough!

“Boss,” came the lad’s voice, “this is Stinky Williams. The pigeons down here at the library are goin’ nuts.”

“How do you mean?” asked The Avenger.

“They think they’re eagles or somethin’. They’re fightin’ each other, and even going after people on the sidewalks.”

“What?”

“As I live and breathe,” said the boy earnestly. “The men bat ’em off and don’t know whether to laugh or run. A lot of dames is hysterical. I tell you them birds are goin’ completely screwy. Fightin’ pigeons! Ain’t that one for the book?”

“I’ll be down immediately,” said Dick Benson.