The Sky Walker

CHAPTER VI Trickery Succeeds!

If one of the more dignified Chicago newspapers had come out with the headlines, the city might have paid more attention to them. But they appeared only in a sensational sheet whose owner was notorious for getting news scoops by the simple process of making up his news as he went along.

Because of that, most people smiled at the screaming headlines. But under the smile there was uneasiness, too. After all, a pavilion at the south end of Lincoln Park had collapsed.

That was the idiotic headline in the sensation sheet. The account went on even more idiotically.

It seemed, according to the correspondent who had gotten his news from a source that “cannot be divulged,” that an unnamed foreign power was going to hold up the United States for some vast bit of international booty, as yet unspecified. Perhaps for the rich province of Alaska. Perhaps the demand would even include the Western coast with the States of Oregon, Washington, and California.

This unnamed enemy was going to invade the interior of the United States. Chicago and vicinity, to be precise. The enemy claimed to be able to destroy at will, with no man able to learn the source of the destruction. There would be no way of fighting back; the country would have to give up whatever territory was demanded, or see its rich inland cities turned into collapsing charnel houses.

The managing editor of the Chicago Record studied his rival’s scoop and finally relaxed.

“Hooey!” he said. “No enemy nation can strike unseen. And if one could strike, the East coast would be the target, not the Middle West. The intimation is that the Lincoln Park pavilion was a sample of the destruction. But we all know that the reason for that collapse was structural failure of the girders. The steel corporation sold the city bum goods, that’s all.”

The city editor agreed with him. It was good policy, of course, to agree with him; but in this case the city editor could nod wholeheartedly.

“For thirty years that rag has pulled a phony war scare every so often to jack up its circulation. It’s just doing the old trick again.”

Up in the Avenger’s temporary headquarters, Nellie Gray and Josh and Rosabel Newton studied the sensational headlines.

“I wish Mr. Benson were here,” Nellie said, her pink-and-white face twisted with worry. “An enemy invasion? It doesn’t sound right. But he could probably read a meaning in the account that no one else could.”

“He’s a great man,” said Josh. White-jacketed as a standard servant would be, he was now moving at his normal pace — which was very slow. And his thin, dark face had taken on the deceptive, somnolent look that had caused him to be nicknamed Sleepy.

“You feel, when you’re near him, like you feel in a powerhouse, standing next to a dynamo,” nodded Rosabel.

“I’m almost afraid of him,” Josh mused. “Yet I’d do about anything he asked me to do.”

“He’ll never ask you to do anything unreasonable or that he wouldn’t try himself,” Nellie said. “You can depend on that—”

There was a buzz of the telephone. She picked up the receiver. On her lovely face was a look of extreme wariness.

Dick Benson interested himself only in cases beyond the powers of the police to handle. Such cases necessarily meant that men were involved who were far more intelligent than the usual criminal. And such men were quick to find out precisely who was fighting them so efficiently — and to try with every sinister means at their command to wipe out The Avenger and his helpers before they, themselves, were wiped out.

Every ring at phone or doorbell might be the preliminary to some murder attempt.

This ring seemed all right, however.

“A Mr. Carlisle to speak to Miss Gray,” came the voice of the hotel’s switchboard operator. “Concerning Mr. Benson,” she added.

Then the voice of the man in question.

“Miss Gray?” He spoke urgently, hurriedly. “May I come up for a moment? I have an important message for you, from Mr. Benson. Or, if you like, you can come down to the lobby.”

Nellie decided on the first suggestion.

“Come up, please.”

The elevator boys, drilled by Smitty, had a code when they stopped at this top floor occupied only by Benson and his associates. When they brought someone up, they were to clang the door for every passenger in the car. They were to stop the cage just a bit off line, start to open the door, clang it shut and send the cage up or down a fraction to correct the mistake. It was easy and unsuspicious. One clang for a single visitor, two for a couple, three for more than that.

Nellie heard the door clang only once. Then there were quick steps, and a tap at their door. Josh opened it. He had slid into his role of a sleepy, harmless Negro.

“Yas, suh?” he said inquiringly.

“To see Miss Gray,” came a man’s voice. Then the man stepped in.

He was young and well dressed and blond. He looked like a bank teller or some such person. He turned quickly to Nellie Gray, hat in hand.

“I’m John Carlisle, private secretary to the superintendent of the Catawbi Railroad,” he said. “I was sent here by Mr. Benson, with orders to come and get you and a certain chemical he wants, and return as soon as possible. He is out along the roadbed and needs it.”

“The chemical?” Nellie asked.

“Some concentrated sulphuric acid. He wants to make a rough analysis of the track steel. You’re to come, too, because he intends to stay in the town of Rosemont, nearby, overnight, and has work for all of you in the early morning.”

Wherever Benson went, three large trunks went with him. In the trunks, which were miracles of compactness, were racks of chemicals and of delicate apparatus. It was a complete traveling laboratory.

Nellie Gray hurried to one of the opened trunks and got a vial of the super-sulphuric mentioned by the man. It was deadly, terribly stuff, this concentrated acid.

She glanced at Josh in indecision. His quick intelligence caught her unspoken question.

“If Mistah Benson wants ever-body to be on hand early in the mohnin’,” Josh said sleepily, “mebbe me an’ mah wife oughta come ’long with Miss Gray.”

Carlisle shook his head. “Mr. Benson said you were to stay and take any phone calls that might come.”

“But if he wants all of us—”

Carlisle seemed unconcerned.

“I’ll leave that up to you. Mr. Benson said for you to stay. But if you feel you should join him, that, of course, is your lookout. I’m not familiar with his methods.”

“You’d better stay, Josh,” Nellie said. She was hurriedly putting on a poker chip of a hat and thrusting the little vial of concentrated sulphuric acid into her purse.

She caught up the sensational newspaper on the way out. At the elevator, she showed it to the man.

“Has Mr. Benson seen this, do you know?” she said.

Carlisle shrugged.

“I don’t know. But I wouldn’t put much stock in it, myself. An enemy invasion! It seems pretty ridiculous.”

They went down through the crowded lobby and to the street. Carlisle’s sedan was near the door. It was black, streaked with the dust of the dune region.

“We’ll go by car to South Chicago and by speedboat from there,” Carlisle said. “That’s the fastest way. Will you sit in the back, Miss Gray?”

Nellie nodded, and got into the rear of the car. Carlisle slid under the wheel, and the sedan began humming south over the boulevards. They got out to South Chicago in short order, and turned toward the lake.

And suddenly Nellie felt herself growing overpoweringly sleepy!

It was such a natural feeling of drowsiness that for a few seconds she didn’t question it. But after that, she felt wild alarm flood through her. Something was the matter! Something was happening!

She tried to get up, and couldn’t. She fumbled weakly for the handle of the rear window, but her fingers fell from it after a bare touch.

She saw that Carlisle, at the wheel, had the lapel of his coat up and that his head was twisted sideways. He was breathing through the lapel. Probably the fabric had been chemically treated to counteract whatever fumes were making her so sleepy.

She saw the lake, at the street end ahead. And then she slumped against the side of the car with her sleek gold hair against the window.

But Nellie Gray wasn’t quite out.

The rear windows of the sedan were of the type which slide backward an inch, with a turn of the handle, and then lower.

Her one touch at the window handle had slid the glass back a quarter of an inch or so. And when she slumped, she managed to do so in a manner that brought her pert nose to this crack.

So she was not quite unconscious when the car stopped at a small, rickety dock, but she might as well have been, for the fumes had made her too weak to put up a fight.

At the dock there was a motor cruiser almost large enough to be called a yacht. Two men were on deck. They grinned at Carlisle as he opened the car door. They were hard-looking customers, but in Carlisle’s smooth face was now a look harder even than theirs.

“Got her, huh?” said one of the men as Carlisle picked Nellie up and carried her to the cruiser. The speaker caught the girl rough by the arms and dragged her over the rail and aboard. “Good going! Now we’ve got ’em all in a bag.”

Carlisle went back to the sedan.

“See you at the ferry,” he said. “So long.”

The sedan moved off and the boat moved out. It was getting along toward dusk. One of the men lit the boat’s riding lights. The other stepped to where Nellie lay.

She was drawing in lungfuls of fresh air, and was snapping out of it rapidly. But not rapidly enough! She still hadn’t the strength to put up a battle.

The man picked her up like a sack of meal and took her below. She felt herself dropped into darkness. Forward, she heard the loud roar of the marine motor and knew she was very close to it. Under her, right next to her ear, it seemed, she heard the rush of water as the boat forced itself ahead at thirty miles an hour.

Over her, the last crack of light went out as a stout hatch was closed. She was held in the tiny hold of the cruiser, caught as securely as any prisoner behind bars in a penitentiary.

Carlisle’s demand for her to bring a chemical to Benson had been just natural enough for her to be caught off guard. And it looked as if she were going to pay bitterly for that.