The Sky Walker

CHAPTER III Death Masks a Secret!

The house was huge, old-fashioned, of frame. It was set in a woodlot, the trees of which cut off sight and sound from the nearest habitation. The men who moved furtively among the trees knew all about that. They had studied this place, north and west of Chicago, before coming out. When you plan to murder somebody, you look over the spot beforehand if you are good at your trade as killer. And these men were good!

They slid in the midnight darkness among the trees as silently as Indians. Each had a gun in his hand!

A man’s shape suddenly loomed in front of one of the four killers as the house was neared. The man was in overalls, was gardener here. He started to let out a startled shout. The man nearest him brought his gun barrel down on the gardener’s head. The gardener fell, killed instantly by the heavy blow. The four men went on.

In the house, there was worried silence. There were three people in there. One was a very tall, very thin colored man in a white housecoat. Another was a slenderly rounded Negress with intelligent, liquid eyes — his wife. The third was master of the house.

This third man looked a great deal like the little fellow with the thick glasses who had been taken away from police headquarters in the fake asylum car. He was taller and heavier, but he had the same nearsighted black eyes and the same lank gray hair. He was the murdered little man’s brother, Robert Gant. And the thing he was worrying about now was the continued absence of that brother.

“He should have been back, or at least have phoned, long before now, Joshua,” he said to the colored man.

“Yes, sir, he should,” nodded the colored man. There was no accent or Southern slurring of his words. He spoke like an educated person — as, indeed, he was. Joshua Elijah Newton had graduated with high honors from Tuskegee Institute. So had Rosabel, his wife.

“He said he was going straight to police headquarters, and would come straight back,” worried Robert Gant.

Joshua only nodded again. Normally Josh moved so slowly, and kept his eyelids dropping over his eyes so somnolently that he was nicknamed Sleepy. Normally, too, he talked with the “suhs” and the “Ahs” instead of “ers” that most colored people use.

But now his speech was crisp and correct, and his dark face was alert and shrewd with the worry he shared with his master.

Rosabel, the pretty Negress who, with Josh, took care of the two childlike brothers who spent their lives inventing things, broke in.

“Don’t you think you’d better phone the police, Mr. Gant?”

Gant bit his lip. His face was a study in indecision.

“Well, Rosabel, you know how we feel about the police,” he said at last. “We haven’t wanted anyone — not even the police — to get a hint of what we’re working on. So we’ve left them severely alone. Even after that outrageous theft of a month ago, we didn’t notify the police. We’ve been trying on our own to get the things back. I hate to break that policy now.”

“But Mr. Max Gant went to headquarters intending to tell all about it,” Rosabel pointed out. “So why wouldn’t it be all right for you to phone them now?”

Gant shook his head uneasily.

“I suppose it would. But if the world should learn— What was that?”

He was listening intently. Joshua and Rosabel listened, too.

“What was what, sir?” Josh said, after a moment.

“I thought I heard someone at the door.”

“We have Peter, the gardener, stationed outside on the grounds,” Josh said. “If anyone were trying to get at the door, Pete would have sounded an alarm.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Gant murmured. “When you own a secret such as we do, the least sound is suspicious.”

He had been pacing up and down the living room on the first floor. He went to the hall door.

“I’m going up to the laboratory. You watch down here. If you hear anything, call for help. I’ll phone Chicago headquarters promptly at twelve o’clock — in fifteen minutes, that is — if Max isn’t back.”

He went out, and they heard his steps on the stairs.

Josh’s long dark hand went out to cover Rosabel’s lighter one. There was a very close bond between these two.

“We’re in danger,” Josh said to his wife. “I can positively smell it. We’ve been in danger since somebody broke into the house and took what Mr. Robert and Mr. Max were working on, a month ago. But it’s worse tonight.”

“Why would it be worse tonight?” said Rosabel, trim and competent-looking in her maid’s white apron with a small white cap on her black hair.

“I believe they’ve been watching this house — whoever they are,” said Josh. “I believe they knew when Mr. Max went out to go to the police. If that’s true, they might decide to shut Mr. Max and Mr. Robert up, forever, tonight.”

“Then Mr. Robert should have phoned the police hours ago!”

“I think he should have, honey,” Josh said. “But we can’t try to tell him his business—”

He stopped, and the two stared at each other with the whites of their eyes showing, and then stared toward the hall.

There had been a hard, brisk knock at the front door.

“Josh— Don’t go to it!”

“It may be Mr. Max coming back. I’ve got to go.”

“He has a key.”

“You know how he is,” said Josh, almost like a parent speaking of a child. “He’s always forgetting his keys. I’ll just call through the door. I won’t open it.”

He went to the hall, thin and spindling and six feet two, with pretty Rosabel after him.

“Who’s deah?” he called through the door.

When Joshua Elijah Newton was uncertain of the person he was talking to, he instinctively dropped into the kind of talk you expected from a colored man, and looked rather slow-witted and stupid. So did Rosabel. It was good protective coloration. It threw others off their guard.

“Josh! It’s me. Open up.”

“It’s Mr. Max,” said Josh with a sigh of relief. His long thin hand went toward the door bolt.

Rosabel caught it almost fiercely.

“That’s not Mr. Max’s voice!” she whispered.

“It sounded like him—”

From the living room they had just left came a thin snap of breaking glass, where a windowpane had been cut and then tapped out. But the two did not hear, with their attention distracted by the man at the door.

“Josh! Open up, I said,” came the call through the door. “I forgot my keys.”

“You’re right,” Josh whispered to Rosabel. “It’s not Mr. Max’s voice. Run and phone the police, honey. I’ll try to hold him out there till they come.” He raised his voice, “Yas, suh, Mr. Max. But I haven’t the key, myself. Mr. Robert has it. I’ll go up and get it.”

Rosabel was racing for the phone. Her path lay past the living-room doorway.

As she passed the door, arms reached out. A hand was clamped over her lips, and a forearm was crooked brutally around her slim dark throat.

Another man passed her and the fellow holding her and sneaked toward Josh, who had his back toward the hall. Josh was making stamping noises with his feet, like a man going up the hall. This was to fool the person outside into thinking he was going for the doorkey.

With a furious burst of lithe energy, Rosabel got clear of the hand over her lips for just an instant.

“Josh!” she screamed.

Josh whirled. But he was just a little late. The man who had been skulking toward him was within leaping distance. His gun hit Josh’s head a glancing blow. He got the door unbolted.

Josh fought like a black cat, but he hadn’t a chance. Two more men came in the front door. The man who had caught Rosabel dropped her limp body, as she went unconscious from strangulation. The four steam-rollered over the colored man and he, too, lay unconscious on the floor.

One of the four pointed his gun speculatively.

“Do we blast these two smokes?” he said.

Another hesitated, then shrugged. “Guess not. No use making any more noise than we have to. They wouldn’t know what goes on in the laboratory upstairs. The guy, Gant, is all we’re told to get. We got the brother; now we’ll take him, and the job’s done.”

They trooped up the stairs.

The laboratory of the Gant brothers was on the top floor of the three-story house under the eaves. It was a big room with workbenches around the walls. Robert Gant was near the door.

“Josh?” he said inquiringly, as the knob turned.

It was the last sound he ever made.

Killers who know their trade take no chances. Three of the four gunmen shot him from the door, pouring lead into his staggering body from their guns.

They stepped over him and went methodically around the laboratory smashing things. They broke apparatus and tubes and jars. They upset tables and benches. But because they themselves didn’t know quite what it was they were to destroy, they left a couple of things that they should have ruined.

One was a large, flat pan with colorless fluid in it. The other was a stack of oblong glass panes, about four inches long and one inch wide, next to the pan.

These things seemed meaningless so they didn’t destroy them or disturb their juxtaposition.

“That’s all,” said the leader of the four. “We better lam now. Those shots must have been heard around here.”

They fled down the stairs. There was a flat roar of a gun, and the leader fell without a twitch, with a bullet in his head.

The gun was in the hands of Josh Newton.

There is a fierce loyalty in men, if they are the right sort. And this long, thin colored man, who looked sleepy and slow-witted under normal circumstances, was very much the right sort.

He had come to in time to hear the last of the crashing destruction on the top floor. He must have known that his employer lay dead. Hence there was nothing more he could do. Common sense should have told him to take to his heels and save himself.

But the colored man wasn’t built that way.

There was an old-fashioned .38 revolver in the library. He’d gotten that. And now one of the four men had paid with his life for what he had done.

The other three swore with murderous surprise and cut down on him. Josh stood by the door, making no effort to hide his thin body. The shot of one of the three went over his head. Another sliced past his side. The third had had a better aim and might have drilled his head. But just before the third was dispatched, Rosabel rose up beside the stairs, where the banisters had hidden her.

She had a vase in her tapering, competent hand. The vase broke over this third man’s head, and his shot went into the hall ceiling. But that was the end.

Both men left on their feet took their time on the next aim. This would get the colored man.

There was an almost inaudible but vicious little spat of sound from the library doorway, and one of the men went down with a gash on the exact top of his head where a small-caliber bullet had creased him.

The second man jerked around in fright and fury. There was another little spat. And he fell, too; again with the small gash in the exact center of the top of the head.

It had been the end, but not for Josh.

The colored man stared at the library doorway with the whites of his eyes showing. That intervention in the face of certain death had seemed like something from heaven. But the intervener was mortal, it seemed. Though a most unusual mortal.

A man stepped lithely from the library and stared at Josh out of almost colorless eyes that were icily flaming in a dead, white face. In his hands this man had the most curious gun Josh had ever seen. It looked more like a slim length of blue-steel pipe than a gun, with a slight bend for a handle and a small bulge where a cylinder held four shells.

But more terrible than any gun was the man’s absolutely immobile countenance — like a wax mask of death in which steel-gray eyes glared forth.

Following this man came a giant whose head seemed to scrape the ceiling, and whose muscular bulk was such that his massive arms could not hang straight down. After the giant stepped a man with dour Scotch blue eyes and sandy-red hair; a man about as tall as Josh and almost as thin.

Josh stared at the three, and Rosabel ran to his side. They’d downed the gunmen, but she couldn’t be sure they were not enemies, too.

The man with the deadly, pale eyes spoke crisply.

“You two are the servants in this house?”

“Yas, suh,” said Josh.

“Where is Robert Gant?”

“I’se skeered he’s daid, upstairs,” said Josh.

“And Maximus Gant hasn’t come back yet?”

“No, suh.”

The man with the dead face turned to the giant.

“Max Gant is dead, then,” he said to the big fellow. “When I radioed headquarters from the plane before landing, and they told me about the lunatic being taken away, I was certain of it. And now we’ve come here too late to save the brother.”

“It’s obvious that they were killed to keep some secret, but what it was, we’ll never know,” the giant said pessimistically.

“Maybe we can learn something in the laboratory.”

“They-all busted up the lab’tory somethin’ turrible,” said Josh to the man with the awesome eyes.

The eyes turned on him in all their clarity, and the colored man had the swift feeling that they were going clear through him.

“You don’t have to talk that way,” the man said to Josh. “You’re very well educated.”

“I’se talkin’ nachral—”

“The little gold key I see between the third and fourth buttons of your jacket tells a different story.”

Josh hurriedly shoved the mentioned article back under his house coat. Then he relaxed.

“Very well, sir. These murderers, I’m afraid, have completely wrecked the laboratory. May I ask who you are?”

“My name is Henry Benson.”

It was enough. Josh was as well informed in current events as he was in scholastic subjects. He stared with rolling eyeballs at the grim, white mask of a face.

“The Avenger!” He and Rosabel looked at each other.

“Some call me that,” said Benson. “Now we’ll have a look at that laboratory, before the police get here.”

In the big, wrecked room, the pale, all-seeing eyes dwelt briefly on the dead body of Robert Gant and on the wrecked apparatus. Then Benson strode swiftly to the one thing left untouched: the flat pan. He sniffed the colorless fluid in it.

It was plain water.

He looked at the little stack of glass strips beside the flat pan of water. In his pale, deadly eyes was a dawning glitter.

There was one other thing that roused that glitter. This, he found in the closet off the lab. And the object — or rather twin objects — was a pair of old shoes.

The soles were off the uppers, and the heels were off both. That was because there were no nails in the shoes. Each nail had been taken neatly from its hole, leaving only dissociated pieces of shoe leather.

It looked as though the killers who had wrecked the place might at the same time have stolen the nails from one of the Gant brothers’ shoes. But this made no sense at all!

Or — did it?