The Sky Walker

CHAPTER II The Avenger!

At thirty thousand feet, a big plane lanced along a beautifully deft straight line from New York toward Chicago.

The ship was much like the new army bombers, the flying fortresses. But it was a private plane, and it had new features that even the bombers don’t possess. For one thing, the cabin was hermetically sealed, and there was an oxygen-manufacturing machine behind the instrument panel that was better than any oxygen-making apparatus seen before. This enabled the plane to fly high in the stratosphere.

For another thing, the motors had not only the last word in superchargers, but also had variable-control cooling systems, so that in the subzero temperatures of great altitude some of the cooling surfaces could be cut out and the cylinders kept hot.

Finally, the plane was equipped with special, four-bladed, variable-pitch propellers designed by one of the world’s great experts in aerodynamics, Richard Henry Benson.

Dick Benson was at the controls of the flying marvel now.

Even seated, the man called The Avenger was an impressive figure. He had lost his beloved wife and small daughter in the callous machinations of a criminal ring — which loss had impelled him to dedicate his life and his great fortune to the fighting of the underworld. The tragedy had turned his coal-black hair dead white. Also, the nerve shock had paralyzed his facial muscles in some curious way which made the dead flesh like wax; it could not move at the command of his nerves, but when his fingers moved it, it stayed in whatever place it was prodded. Thus he became a man of a thousand faces, for he could mold the obedient plastic of his countenance into the shape of the faces of others, and pass as them.

From the dead-white, immobile face under the snow-white hair, pale-gray eyes flamed forth. They were awe-inspiring, those pallid, deadly eyes. They were as cold as ice in a polar dawn and as menacing as the steel of dagger blades. They were the almost colorless orbs of an infallible marksman and of a person without pity for enemies.

They were, in a phrase, the eyes of a machine rather than a human being.

Benson got up from the controls, and went back into the hermetically sealed cabin, allowing the ship to fly itself. It could do so very easily, such were the automatic devices standing ready to take over stabilization and course charted.

The man with the dead face and the silver-white hair went back to where the others in the plane sat in a group. These others, associates of his, were as remarkable in their way as he was in his.

There was Smitty, fully named Algernon Heathcote Smith and hating it. Smitty was colossal — six feet nine inches tall, weighing just short of three hundred pounds.

The vast barrel of his chest was so muscled that his arms wouldn’t hang straight at his sides, but were crooked like those of a gorilla. With china-blue eyes beaming from a moon-face, he looked as harmless as he was huge; but appearances in his case were very deceptive indeed.

There was Fergus MacMurdie, a dour Scot with bitter blue eyes and sandy-red hair and great dim freckles that could be seen under the surface of his reddish skin. He had the biggest feet and the biggest and most formidable fists in captivity. MacMurdie had been set up in business in New York’s strangest drugstore by Benson. But when a battle against crooks loomed near, Mac left the store in a hurry. He had suffered from criminals as much as his chief, and he was as grimly glad to fight them as Benson was.

Finally, there was a figure looking as dainty and fragile as a Dresden doll when seen next to the tremendous bulk of Smitty and the gangling length of MacMurdie. This was Nellie Gray, whose kindly professor father had been murdered by the underworld, and who had become one with this small band of bitter crime fighters. She was just a shade over five feet in height and just a little over a hundred pounds in weight, and she was pink-and-white and helpless-appearing.

But men have been known to lay hands on her and get a sudden impression that they had grasped a stick of dynamite.

Smitty and Nellie were staring out the double windows and down at a world bathed in nine-o’clock darkness. It was still dusk at thirty thousand feet.

MacMurdie was looking at a news report that had come to Benson at seven o’clock. The Avenger was on the cable and wire list of every news-gathering agency on earth. Their reports went to newspapers, state department — and Benson.

“I’ve never seen ye make up your mind to move so fast as ye did tonight, Muster Benson,” Mac said in his thick Scotch burr. “Ye seem very sure something big and deadly hangs over Chicago.”

Benson sat down in the seat next to him. Though not a large man, Benson gave an impression of tremendous power. He moved like a gray cougar; and when he relaxed, he seemed to sink into a dynamic repose that could be shattered with violent action in a fraction of a second.

“I’m sure of it, Mac,” he said. His voice was vibrant and compelling. “Here is a brand-new steel structure. It is only two stories in height, so there is no great stress on it. It is designed to hold several hundred people, and it collapses under the weight of only a few dozen. The report is that the girders were faulty. But steel girders couldn’t possibly be as faulty as that.”

“Do you think the weird noise from the sky has something to do with it?” asked Nellie, in her sweet, soft voice.

Benson’s eyes were pale, cold flames.

“The sound was odd and unexplainable. The collapse of the pavilion was odd and unexplainable. The two things occurred only a short time apart. The inference is that they were tied in together. The inference also is that the two things were cold-bloodedly planned. And seventeen are now dead because of it! So we’re on our way to look around and possibly prevent the deaths of seventeen — or seventy — more—”

At Chicago police headquarters a maniac was trying to see the commissioner.

He was a little man with a big head and bifocal glasses so powerful that they made his black eyes seem to bulge out till they could have been knocked off with a stick. He had thin gray hair and no hat. He didn’t have a coat on, either, and a chemical-stained vest was his only protection against the fall-night coolness.

“I tell you I’ve got to see him!” the little man cried to the sergeant barring his way in the first-floor hall. “If he’s at home at this hour, I’ll go there—”

“He’s not at home; he’s here,” the sergeant admitted. “But he’s too busy to see anybody. He’s got some city engineers and a brace of steel men up in his office. He’s workin’ on that pavilion collapse.”

“But it’s about that that I must see him!” the little man shrilled. “That, and the noise in the sky. I can tell him things about both that he must know.”

“You know something about them,” said the sergeant. It was not unnatural that his voice and face were suspicious. So many cranks come to a big-city police headquarters. Let a notorious murder be done, and a dozen crackpots rush in to tell all about it. Many of them even confess to it — only the psychologists know why.

“I know all about them,” said the little man. “They are inventions. But I must see the commissioner. He’s the man who should know these things.”

“I tell you—” the sergeant began doggedly.

The little man’s hair was standing on end. He passed a frenzied hand through it, further increasing its wild disorder.

“But this can’t wait! No matter what he’s doing — he must drop it and listen to me! There may be more tragedies if he doesn’t!”

“Who are you, anyway?” the sergeant growled.

“I’m Maximus R. Gant, inventor. I live with Robert Gant, my brother. He’s an inventor, too.”

The sergeant rasped at his jaw with an uncertain hand.

“You’re meanin’ to say that some invention was what made the noise in the sky? And it made the pavilion collapse?”

“Yes!”

“And you and your brother have something to do with the inventions?”

“We have everything to do with them. And I’ll tell the commissioner all about it if you’ll just get me into his office.”

The sergeant sighed. “So help me, if this isn’t as important as you say, it’ll be my head. But I’ll interrupt him on the chance—”

The door swung. From the main hall the sergeant could see a white car outside. It was like a small truck, but it had windows, and the windows had heavy grating over them.

The door had opened to admit two men who had come from the white car. The men were in white, too. They looked like internes from a hospital, but they had on white caps. They were muscular men with hard faces.

“Uh-huh,” one said. “There he is. I thought he’d break for headquarters.”

“We’re going to have to keep him in a strait jacket if he doesn’t stop escaping,” the other said. “He’s a clever one, all right.”

The two men in white were walking toward the little man with the thick glasses and the sergeant. But their eyes were only on the little man, and their eyes were wary. The little man stared back with almost stupid surprise in his face.

“Hey!” exclaimed the sergeant. “What—”

He stopped there. His face showed that he’d gotten the whole story with one look at the white uniforms of the men.

“What has Thomas Edison been telling you?” said one of the two attendants. They had stopped on each side of the little man, and had a hand on each of his scrawny arms.

“Thomas Edison?” repeated the sergeant.

“Sure! That’s who he thinks he is — Edison. So we give him some chemicals to mess with and cogwheels to play with, and everybody’s happy. Except that now and then the little runt climbs over the wall and gets away.”

“You mean he’s a lunatic?” said the sergeant.

On the little man’s face the expression of startled surprise was giving way to fear. An awful fear!

“No!” he gasped suddenly. “These men are lying! I’ve never seen them before. I’m not mad — and they’re not from any asylum.”

“Come along, Tommy,” wheedled one of the men in white, impelling him toward the door.

The little man began to struggle wildly.

“No! No! Officer, don’t let them do this! They’re going to kill me!”

One of the men in white shrugged, and grinned a little at the sergeant, who drew a profound breath of relief.

“And I was just goin’ in to the commissioner with this nut’s story! And him busy as an ant in a wasp’s nest! I’m sure glad you boys came along when you did.”

“You’ve got to listen!” shrieked the little man. “These two are murderers! You hear? They want to get me away before I can tell what I know. They mean to kill me! You’ve got to stop them. Call the institution they’re supposed to be from. You’ll find no one like me is registered there. And you’ll find that no one like these two works there. Please! That’s the least you can do.”

“Now, Tommy,” soothed one of the men, “come along and stop calling us names. We’ve got a new pot of chemicals for you to experiment with, and you haven’t yet finished that job on perpetual motion—”

They had him, screaming and dragging back, at the outer door. The sergeant rasped his jaw undecidedly, then winked at them.

“Hope you don’t have too much trouble gettin’ him back,” he said.

“We won’t,” one of the men in white retorted, doubling a thick arm suggestively.

They got the little man into the whitewalled car. His frantic face appeared at the grated window nearest the sidewalk.

“Help! Help!” his muffled voice came to passersby who had stopped to watch out of curiosity and sympathy.

The padded truck rolled away.

Up at the wheel, one of the men in white sent the car north. In the body of the car, with the little man, the other fellow in white suddenly lashed out with a malletlike fist. The little man’s glasses splintered and cut his face, and he went down, a pathetic, small figure sprawled on the padded floor of the asylum ambulance.

“Going to spill the beans, eh?” the man snarled at the prone figure. “Just about to cut in on the commissioner, eh? Two more minutes— But we got to you in time.”

The light truck went north and then west. When it had come to a wooded spot twenty miles out, the man in the rear got an automatic from under his white jacket. He waited. In a few minutes a single toot from the horn showed that the driver had looked up and down the road and no other machine was in sight.

The man shot the little fellow through the head.

The car turned into a woods road a few miles farther on. There was a sedan there. The men got out of their whites and left them in the white car. They got into regular clothes, climbed into the sedan, and drove off.

Not for nearly ten hours was the car, stolen from the Belgrade Sanitorium, discovered with the dead man in it. One key that might have unlocked the riddle of the noise in the empty sky was destroyed.