The Smiling Dogs

CHAPTER XIII Color Blind

It was the wee small hour of the morning again. But again The Avenger was not in the least concerned with sleep.

He was slowly pacing the room at the office suite which had been rented secretly by him for his Washington visits. And his pale eyes were jewel-like in their concentrated brilliance.

Congressman Coolie had been slain at a few minutes past ten. An hour or so after that — so soon afterward as to indicate a clear connection between the two acts — the unfortunate toy salesman had been slain so as to get his disruptive office lights out.

First the death of Coolie, then the signal of the slanting lights.

It looked very much as if Coolie had been a stumbling block in the Bison Park plans. As soon as he had been put out of the way, the “go-ahead” signal had been flashed.

The Avenger had sent Josh Newton for a short history of Congressman Coolie. Biographical facts on all the representatives of the nation are available if you know where to go for them.

He pored over the short biography now.

Congressman Coolie. Twice elected representative from Montana. Mild liberal record. Interested in soil conservation and reforestration. Sponsor of nine such bills into the House. Fifty-four years old, married and divorced, three children. Color blind—

The Avenger stopped right there.

So Congressman Coolie was color blind. Benson’s icy, brilliant eyes half closed. It was as if little, shining moons were being partially eclipsed. That fact seemed to strike him as one of the most important things he had found out to date.

He turned from Coolie’s short description to reports on the phychiatrist, Dr. Fram.

Fram was in Who’s Who as eminent in his profession. He was the author of a small book on psychiatry as applied to wayward girls. His reputation was excellent. There was no hint of an interest, however, in pressing through a law forcing couples to take a sanity test before being given marriage licenses. Not a mention of that had been made, till about six weeks ago.

Then, abruptly, the distinguished doctor had begun to live, seemingly, for nothing else. He had suddenly packed and gone to Washington to lobby for the bill.

His trip had occurred the day after Tetlow Adams had come to see him — ostensibly about his son — for the third time.

Did the psychiatrist’s sudden trip have anything to do with Adams’ last call? Or was it sheer coincidence?

The Avenger went to the big home of Tetlow Adams, out near Wardman Park.

There was a half acre of ground around the house. It was enclosed by a high spiked iron fence. There was a heavy gate — and the gate was barred. That would seem to indicate that Adams carefully guarded himself and that he was afraid of something.

It was after two o’clock in the morning, a very suspicious time to call. The Avenger didn’t even attempt to explain to the guard, who came to the gate when he pressed the night bell, what his reasons were for wanting to see Adams. He knew his entrance would be refused.

The guard stared through heavy iron bars. His right hand was at his belt, and Benson saw a holster there.

“What you want at this time of night, bud?” he demanded truculently.

Benson didn’t say anything. He just stared at the man.

“Well? What’s the matter?” the guard said. “Can’t y’u talk?”

Benson stared into the man’s eyes, with his pale orbs like misty crystal.

“Beat it,” said the man. But his voice was uncertain, and his face was getting a queer blank look. “You can’t get in… get in here—” He stopped, jerkily, like a rundown clock.

Benson stared a moment longer, with eyes like naked steel blades. The man was profoundly hypnotized.

“You will open the gate for me,” said The Avenger, voice quiet but vibrant with power.

The man opened the gate, moving like something that acted only when a button was pressed. The Avenger went in; then he shut the gate himself.

He left the man there, standing as erect as a sentry, but standing like a wooden thing, too, carved only to resemble a sentry.

Benson went down a driveway. There were bushes lining it. He heard a stealthy movement a little ahead and to his right but kept on walking.

A figure catapulted over the line of bushes and straight at Benson’s body. That figure would have instantly bowled over anyone not warned of its coming. A short, murderous club in its right hand told what would happen after that.

But The Avenger had been warned by his marvelously acute sense of hearing. So he was prepared.

He side-stepped a foot, seeming to move slowly. But there are men whose actions are so fast that they make the maneuvers of ordinary men seem to have been done in slow motion. Benson was one of those rare few.

The man crashed to the driveway, got up snarling and leaped again.

The Avenger’s right fist flicked out. It caught the man on the side of the jaw, and the fellow went down. He would be out, The Avenger calculated from the impact, between twenty minutes and a half hour.

Benson went on.

He tapped on the door, two knocks, and then two more. It wouldn’t matter what the code knock was to get into the guarded house, or even if there were no code at all. Whoever was at the portal would be almost certain to figure that it was one of the guards wanting to get in.

The man at the door, a husky butler, opened it all right. But he opened with a gun in his hand, taking no chances. At least he thought he was taking no chances. But it developed that the gun might just as well have been a toy.

With the first movement inward of the door, Benson caught the glint of light on steel, and his hand snapped forth. It caught the gun in a vise-like grip and swirled it around in the man’s hand till it pointed at his own body.

Then the butler’s main concern was not to pull the trigger. Then The Avenger got second finger and thumb of his left hand at the back of the man’s neck in that swift pressure which could bring unconsciousness, or, if not released in time, even death.

The butler sagged, and Benson leaped over his body and reached the stairs just as three more men in servants’ livery appeared at doors down the first-floor hall.

The Avenger sped up the stairs. At the front room near the head of them, a healthy-looking man of sixty in rumpled pajamas had his head poked out the door, gazing sleepily into the hall.

Benson wrenched that door back and stepped in. “You are Adams? Sorry I had to come in this way. I hadn’t time to wait till morning and—”

“Who are you, sir?” snapped Adams, purpling with anger. “Get out! I’m not seeing anyone!”

“It was because I thought it wouldn’t do any good to send in my name that I entered in this manner,” Benson said quietly. “I wanted to talk with you, at once.”

“I told you to get out of here! If you don’t—”

“Sit down,” said The Avenger.

“Wait till my men get here—” sputtered the mining magnate.

“Sit down!” snapped Benson. There was the crack of a whiplash in his voice.

Almost without realizing what he was doing, Adams sat down on the edge of his bed. He stared with wide eyes at the death-mask face of The Avenger.

There was a banging at the door. Benson had locked it, hand behind him, when he walked into the room. The guards were trying to get in now.

“Tell them everything is all right and to go away,” Benson ordered.

Adams had intelligence, and he was wide awake by now. Obviously, he reasoned that if his life were in danger, it would be the easiest thing in the world for this white-haired young man to kill him if he tried to call for help.

“You, out there in the hall,” he growled. “I’m all right. This is a friend. Go and take your guard positions again.”

“You sure you don’t need help, boss?”

“No! Go away!” yelled Adams, at the look in the chill, colorless eyes.

Footsteps faded down the hall. The Avenger nodded. “That’s better. And I assure you you’re in no danger. I’ll introduce myself. I am Richard Henry Benson.”

Adams was a mining and railroad power. In both circles he had heard of the vastly wealthy Benson. Also it would seem that he had heard of The Avenger’s more widely known activity of crime fighting. For his face paled a little.

“Mr. Benson! If you had just sent your name in—”

“You would have told me, if I were the President himself, that I’d have to wait till morning to see you,” said Benson calmly. “And as I said, I have no time to spare. What do you know of the psychiatrist, Dr. Fram?”

“Dr. F-Fram?” sputtered Adams, caught off-balance by the unexpectedness of the question. “Why, he is a fine nerve and brain specialist and a great psychiatrist. That is all I know of him.”

“You have seen him several times recently.”

“Yes. About my son,” said Adams.

“But you have never brought the boy into Fram, personally.”

“That’s right.” Adams seemed very anxious indeed to answer all questions openly. “I don’t take Robert out if I can avoid it.”

“I would like to see your son, please.”

Adams attempted bluster again. “Surely you can take my word for it that it was about Robert that I visited Fram—” he began. His voice faded out.

“That will be easy,” he resumed in a different tone.

“My boy sleeps in the adjoining room, where I can keep an eye on him.”

Adams stepped to a doorway, reached in the next room and clicked on a light. Benson watched over his shoulder.

A youngster of nineteen or so had been asleep in a tousled bed. He was blinking now, looking at his father.

The Avenger needed only a glance. Fram might be a fine psychiatrist. The Avenger was a great one. He needed only a glimpse of the boy’s wide, vacant eyes and too-bulging forehead and fluttering, uncertain hands to know that there was a person in need of mental attention.

“Thank you,” he said.

Adams clicked out the light and closed the door.

“If you don’t mind, tell me what this is about,” he said, with a certain dignity.

“It’s about the Bison Park steal.” As he said the words, Benson’s eyes took on their diamond-drill hardness. Few could meet those eyes and lie.

Adams met them squarely. “I know of Bison Park,” he said. “But what is this about a steal?”

The Avenger’s steely fingers drummed lightly for a moment while he searched the eyes of the mining man. Then, with surprising candor, he told him.

“Somebody is trying to have Bison Park opened to private bidding and to grab it off, to obtain a deposit of helium located there,” he said. “They are trying to frighten certain senators into getting legislation through that will remove the park from government control. Your name has come into the deal several times.”

“My name? I swear Bison Park could never be anything to me, no matter what the government did with it. But how could anyone scare senators into that kind of a bill? It’s not a well-known park; so, no doubt, a few men could jam it through. But later, when the public found out and learned that a helium supply had been given away, those men would be all through politically! What possible fear could make senators commit political suicide by proposing such legislation?”

The Avenger did not answer that one. But he knew.

It had to do with little red men, scarcely three feet high, and smiling green dogs.

At almost that exact moment, Nellie Gray and Nan Stanton were seeing one of these incredible creations. It was in the hall of the hotel where The Avenger had reserved half a floor for himself and his aides.

The two girls had come out of the big living room in Benson’s suite. They were about to separate and go to their respective rooms for some sleep. High time, too; it was getting on toward dawn.

“Want me to stay in your room with you?” said Nellie. “Are you afraid?”

Any stranger hearing that would have smiled. Frail, dainty, pink-and-white Nellie Gray looked as if she could not have protected a lump of sugar from the onslaughts of a butterfly. But Nan Stanton had seen her in action and took the offer seriously — and gratefully.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t believe there is any danger—”

She stopped, and stared over Nellie’s shoulder down the hall. She glared with bulging eyes in which there was a colossal fear; a horror even greater than had been in them when she was bundled into that sedan to die of carbon-monoxide gas.

Nellie whirled, and a gasp came from her own soft, red lips.

Down there, plainly to be seen in the hall light, was something that just shouldn’t be. Something that obviously couldn’t be. Only — there it was.

A bright-red man with a dog!

The man was a miniature, scarcely a yard high. He was soberly dressed in striped trousers, cutaway, wing collar; and this sartorial perfection was topped by a glossy silk hat.

The dog he was leading — on a leash made of some sort of flowers braided together — was green. And it was smiling!

It practically leered at the two astounded girls, as if it knew a secret that was very funny, if a little grim, which it did not intend to share with anyone.

A smiling green dog led by a little bright-red man!

“Do… do you see it?” whispered Nan, with a chattering of even white teeth.

Nellie did not reply.

The diminutive blond bombshell had one cardinal rule of life: When you see anything inexplicable, investigate it as promptly as possible.

She sprang down the hall toward the crazy vision. And Nan, who had courage herself, given this example of fearlessness, ran after her.

Then the little man and smiling green dog weren’t in the hall any more. But there had been a whisking open and shut of the door to the hall stairs.

“They’re taking to the stairs!” panted Nellie. “After them! Don’t let them get away!”

“And if they really aren’t there… to get away?” gasped Nan.

“Then I want to know that, too,” said Nellie grimly.

Her small white hand was on the knob of the hall-stairs door. She jerked the door open and jumped onto the stair landing, with Nan at her dainty heels.

The two leaped straight into oblivion. Light, sounds and intelligence faded out in their numbing brains and they fell.