The Sky Walker

CHAPTER XII Murder Stroke!

In a city like Chicago there are many office buildings that, in their way, could be called “tenements” just as many apartment dwelling places are tenements. There are office building in neglected neighborhoods, old and shabby and dingy, waiting to be torn down and meanwhile, rented for whatever they will bring.

It was in such a building, on the west fringe of the Loop, that Colonel Ringset had his office.

Ringset was his own ore salesman. He had this little office to which he came from Catawbi every day, and out of which he sold the few but large orders that kept his mines barely solvent. There was a spinster secretary and office girl, and that was all there was to the office end of Catawbi Mines, Inc.

Colonel Ringset was a tall old man of seventy, with biting gray eyes under bushy white brows. He barked instead of talking. He had a temper that was notorious. He had an arrogant hawk nose and a ruthless, bony jaw.

He had bought the Catawbi Range as worthless land, forty-eight years ago, and had later developed the iron mines. But even his driving power and ingenuity had been unable to squeeze from ore, which was higher-priced than any one else’s, the millions to which he was entitled.

Meanwhile, he did what he could. He shipped his ore to Gary, Indiana, and South Chicago on the Catawbi Railroad, under a special rate. He borrowed from one bank to pay overdue interest on mortgages held by another; got new loans just when it seemed he must lose all his holdings; managed to keep his chin above water when almost any other man would have drowned.

Most people didn’t like Colonel Marius Ringset. But they didn’t say so. For he was a savage old fighter, dangerous in spite of his seventy years.

His spinster secretary was out to lunch when Smitty and Benson entered the ancient office-building doorway at one o’clock in the afternoon.

“Ratty old place,” Smitty observed, as they got into an ancient elevator.

The operator, a bleary-eyed man as old as his cage, sent the contraption upward. It creaked and jerked and groaned ominously. The colonel’s office was on the top, the ninth floor.

At the door with the marking, CATAWBI MINES INC., on it, Benson stopped the giant with a gesture.

“Stay in the outer office, Smitty. Look around while I’m inside with Ringset.”

“Look around for what?”

Benson’s eyes were lambent, cold flame.

“Look for orders, for any kind of material whatever, sent to the Warwick Corporation in New Jersey.”

Benson opened the door, then, and walked into a large but dingy outer office with a deserted desk and chair in it. He went on through to the door marked PRIVATE.

Smitty stood so that he wouldn’t be seen when that door opened.

Benson tapped on it.

“Come in, come in,” snapped an irascible voice.

The gray fox of a man opened the door, went in, and shut the door behind him again.

“Who are you?” said the hawk-nosed old man at the desk. He went on without giving a chance for an answer. “If you want to buy Catawbi ore, you’ll have to compete with the others in the regular way. People have found out what good steel the ore makes, now. A lot of ’em want to buy. And the supply is limited. Send me a letter stating the price you’ll pay and I’ll compare it with the rest—”

“I don’t want to buy steel,” Benson said quietly. “I came for a few words with you about the skyscraper that collapsed yesterday. And the Lincoln Park pavilion that went down. And the missing two miles of track and the wrecked depot on the Catawbi Railroad.”

Colonel Ringset stared at the man with the snow-white hair and dead, white face with his savage old eyes unreadable. He was a man who would play a marvelous game of poker.

“Why come to me about these things?” he barked. “I don’t know anything about them.”

“I came,” said Benson, “because the accidents are so complimentary to Catawbi steel.”

The cold glare from Benson’s colorless eyes and the deadly expressionlessness of his white face were beginning to eat at the colonel’s will like acid on metal. But he tried to bluster it off.

“What the devil do you mean?”

“In the case of the building collapse, some sound girders were found — of Catawbi steel. The same thing was true of the pavilion collapse. In the case of the missing rails, toward the end of the section where they’d vanished, a few rails were lying untouched. They were, I discovered later, of Catawbi steel.”

“Well?”

“It has not yet been determined what has caused the steel made from competing ore to fail,” said Benson. “But whatever it is, it leaves Catawbi steel untouched. That means that the market for Catawbi ore will suddenly skyrocket. You’ll be able to see all you can mine, at your own figure.”

The colonel’s veined old face began to get purple.

“These catastrophes will leave you a very rich man,” Benson said quietly. “That’s why I came to see you about them.”

“Why, you young—” the colonel choked. “You’re insinuating that I had something to do with those things that have taken several dozen lives — just to increase the market for Catawbi ore? Get out of here before I throw you out, old as I am.”

It was a fine exhibition of honest rage. Benson faced it with his dead face as immobile as wax, and with his cold, pale eyes unmoved.

Meanwhile, those inexorable eyes were ranging the old office.

There was an iron rack in a corner. A water-cooler stood next to a screen which surrounded a washbasin. Several chairs were placed around the walls. Near the window was the great mahogany desk at which Ringset was seated in a heavy, old-fashioned swivel chair.

Benson’s purpose was to see if there was any filing cabinet or other hiding place of business papers in here. There was none. All were in the outer office where Smitty soundlessly searched. No telling, of course, what was in the furious old man’s desk; but that was the only place in the room where documents could be concealed.

The colonel’s eyes had grown almost as cold as Benson’s own, though in their depths could be seen a lurking, growing fear of the man with the dead face.

“I won’t ask you by what authority you come here and say such things,” he barked. “I assume you have such authority or you wouldn’t dare such a thing. But I do say this: no matter if you’re from the mayor’s office, or from the police commissioner — or whoever is backing you — you’ll find, if you don’t get out of here, that I can swing enough influence to break you.”

Benson paid no attention at all to the angry words. His deadly pale eyes bored into Ringset’s.

“Skywalker,” he said.

The colonel blinked.

“What?” he mumbled, looking bewildered.

“The man who walks the sky,” said Benson. “The sound from the sky. These things are the secret of the tragedies — which will make you rich.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Skywalker! No man can walk in thin air. Or isn’t that what you mean?”

The perplexity on the colonel’s face seemed genuine. Then it faded into wrath again.

“But no matter. It isn’t important what’s in your mind, behind your raving. I’ve told you to get out! And if you don’t—”

He reached for his desk phone.

Benson had done what he came to do. All he’d wanted was to anger the colonel to the point where slight noise of a search in the next room would not be apt to be heard. He had succeeded in that. And Smitty must be through by now.

“All right, I’ll go,” said Benson, continuing to play the part of a blundering regular investigator behind whose bluster was no real information. “But I’ll be back — if there are any more failures of competing steel with more lives lost.”

He went out, leaving Ringset utterly speechless with justified outrage.

Smitty was in the hall. They went to the rickety old elevator together. Benson glanced at the giant, question in his eyes.

“No record of any contact whatever with the Warwick Corporation,” Smitty said. “Nothing else that seemed the least bit incriminating, either.”

The elevator door clanged open. They stepped into the cage.

“Down,” Benson said, tone absent, pale and deadly eyes absorbed.

The cage groaned and shivered, started down—

The aged elevator operator screamed suddenly, high and shrill like a trapped animal.

Now and then a man is molded whose coordination of eye and body, brain and sensory perception and muscles, is so perfect and instantaneous that he seems able to make the movements of all other men seem like slow motion. Dick Benson was such a man.

His mind was intensely occupied with things having no connection whatever with an old elevator cage. Just the same, in a fraction of a second his brain caught the deathly significance of a sudden lurch that was more abrupt and extreme than any previous jerk of the elevator had been. He divined the meaning of it even before the old operator, who had been running elevators so long that he could fairly feel something the matter almost before it could happen.

But whereas the operator simply screamed in horror when he felt the parting of the cable that held up the cage, Benson moved.

The man had started the cage downward before he had quite closed the ninth-floor doors, as most operators do. The doors were open six inches or so when the elevator gave that sickening lurch in its worn slides. Benson got his hands in that opening, with steely fingers clamping down on the metal sill of the sliding doors.

The cage fell eight inches, and stopped. It stopped because the top of it banged on Benson’s head and shoulders, and those shoulders and head were held by Benson’s vicelike grip on the ninth floor sill.

The cable had parted above the cage. Only one thing kept it from falling ninety or a hundred feet to the bottom of the shaft. That one thing was Benson’s tormented grasp. Benson hung by little more than his fingertips. The elevator, with two other men in it, hung on Benson.

“Smitty—” the white-haired man gasped, his paralyzed features remaining expressionless.

The giant, face white with realization of how Benson must have been dazed by the sag of the elevator on head and shoulders, reached to open the elevator doors a little more and get his own great hands through.

“Move… very… gently—” said Benson, in a ghost of a whisper.

The giant was across the elevator as smoothly as a ballet dancer. The operator stayed at the useless controls, not daring to breathe.

Smitty got the sliding doors open another foot, and took on Benson’s inhuman burden, just in time. The white, strained fingers slipped, with the long drop to the bottom of the shaft seeming to reach up and drag the car.

Now Smitty hung like Atlas, with the cage-top pressing down on his vast bowed shoulders, and with only the grip of his two hands thwarting the deadly fall.

Benson took several great breaths, then was at the giant’s side. Together they heaved up a little.

No other two men in the city — perhaps in the entire country — could have done it: could have raised the unsupported cage with only the straining muscles of their arms alone. But these two did.

They got the cage up so that instead of a three-inch crack between its top and the ninth-floor sill, there was an eighteen-inch opening.

“Can you hold it here, just a little while?” said Benson.

“I… think… so,” panted the giant. His hands were as white as chalk with the strain, and his arms were trembling like great bass-violin strings.

Benson writhed out of the opening onto the floor of the corridor.

Had Smitty’s hold weakened then, his chief would have been sliced in two between car-top and sill. But the giant hung on.

Benson raced to the roof, to the elevator-cable control room. The end of the supporting cable had snapped back up ten feet when it broke. Benson’s deadly eyes flamed like ice under an arctic moon as he saw the broken end.

It had been cut by a hacksaw through nearly three-fourths of its thickness, so that the slightest extra strain — like that of starting the old car down from the ninth floor — would snap the steel strands.

“Smitty — get ready to take just a little more,” Benson called down.

And he dropped lightly on the roof of the cage.

He had won clear, and was safe. Now, by lowering himself to the car’s top he was putting his head into the jaws of death again. But a leader does that kind of thing for the safety of his men, if he deserves the title, chief.

Anyone who has ever tried to tie a knot in steel cable knows what a long-drawn-out, almost impossible task it is. But Benson’s incredibly strong fingers got the broken end of the elevator cable under the top supporting girder, and twisted the woven steel strand into a single pretzel-shaped bow, in about the time it would take an ordinary person to do the same thing with wrapping twine.

“All right, Smitty!”

Benson heard the giant groan; then the cage was dropping as the great hands were withdrawn and the cage was unsupported.

It dropped a foot, jerked to a stop as the loose bow in the tied cable tightened. Steel shrieked on steel as the bow continued to knot in on itself and as the elevator continued the slow sinking downward. Then its passage was stopped. The knot held.

Benson helped the shaky giant out of the cage on the eighth floor. He hauled the operator out bodily; the man had fainted minutes before.

Smitty managed a trembling grin.

“We tell Mac and Nellie to watch out because somebody might trail ’em and try to kill ’em,” he said, “and we get it in the neck ourselves. I wonder how—”

He said no more.

Steel cable is slippery stuff. The large bow Benson had bent in it had been quivering into a smaller and smaller knot under the elevator’s weight with each passing second. Now the sawed end of the cable had slipped at last through the loop of the knot, and let the cage go!

With a squeal against ancient slides, it rocketed downward. And then, far below, it hit! There was a smash that rocked the building, and the wood and steel of the cage became a sort of dreadful porridge of crushed wreckage.

In the center of that porridge there would have been three pulped bodies had it not been for Benson’s superhuman swiftness, and Smitty’s gigantic strength.