The Smiling Dogs

CHAPTER X The Cryptogram

The Avenger never wasted energy in getting angry. He occasionally became coldly, glacially furious at a particularly rotten criminal act. But he never became plain angry, as other men do.

Had he indulged in such nerve-wasting emotion, he would have been angry, now, at the Washington police sergeant who had had charge of the wallet from Sheriff Aldershot’s pocket. The wallet in which the cryptogram had been found.

From the start, The Avenger had known that the cryptogram was incomplete. If it hadn’t been, he could have solved it. So, for that matter, could have the government expert, Drake.

But it wasn’t complete. There were a lot more numbers that should have been among the meaningless string on the folded bit of paper.

Benson had gone through that wallet with microscopic care, and found no trace of a key to the thing. Then the hapless sergeant had idly mentioned an odd fact — that three bills out of the several dozen in the wallet had been in a separate compartment.

After mentioning that, the sergeant had felt himself shrivel to pinsize under an icy, colorless stare that seemed to go through him like a couple of diamond drills. But Benson only said quietly, “What three bills?”

So the two, the five and the ten-dollar bills had been handed over to him. And with them, the key to the message. The serial numbers on the bills.

Benson had drawn up the code arrangement he was convinced had been used in the message.

It was one of the easiest of all codes. But it was a senseless scramble if a lot of the figures in a given message were held out.

Smitty was staring over The Avenger’s shoulder.

“You know how the code would work, of course,” said the man with the dead white hair and the pale, icy eyes. “A would be 16 or 61; B, 17 or 71. You can reverse the numbers now and then to mix it up more. Cat, for instance, would be 81 61 64. Or 18 61 46, if you preferred it that way. But take out some numbers and make it 1 1 6, or just 1 6, and it isn’t anything. Not till you put the missing numbers in. Which these bills do for this message.”

Benson had arranged the bills in the order that made sense out of their serial numbers.

The numbers on the cryptogram were:

7 7 6 39 4 7 3 2 7 7 9 0 0 0 7 7 9 82 46 38 10 1 9 47 6 7 7 84 0 1 1 50.

The serial number of the two-dollar bill was 43162993; of the ten-dollar bill, 23132322; of the five-dollar bill, 63133169.

“Now we’ll put them together,” said Benson.

The resultant figures were: 74 73 61 39 46 72 93 92 37 72 39 10 30 02 73 72 29 82 46 38 10 16 39 47 61 73 37 84 10 61 91 50.

The Avenger could read it almost like print. The message was:

Smitty growled disgustedly. “So we finally get the thing unscrambled,” he complained “and what do we have? Another cryptogram! Slanting line of light! What line, what light? And what is it that’s ready when the line of light slants?”

The Avenger’s prematurely white head shook a little. “I don’t know yet. But we’ll find out, Smitty. We’ll find out. Two men were killed for this. It must have importance.”

He got up. “Sheriff Aldershot probably intercepted that message. Then he took it, in his wallet, into the Capitol Building. But did he show it to Burnside and Cutten, or tell them anything about it? We’ve got to know.”

Burnside, in The Avenger’s own hideout, was most accessible for questioning. So Benson went to his secretly held office suite with the windowless storage room so conveniently fixed as a bedroom.

But he did no questioning. For Burnside wasn’t accessible after all.

Benson opened the door, started to go into the first room of the suite, and stopped with his icy eyes taking on their crystalline glitter.

On the floor of this room lay Rosabel Newton. The pretty negress was deeply unconscious. The cause of the unconsciousness was plain enough: it was a deep welt on the side of her head where she had been slugged.

There was no sign of Josh. Nor was there any trace of Senator Burnside.

Both were gone! The Avenger went swiftly through the two rooms and the storage room, and found that out in a hurry.

Gone! But where? Why?

He went back to Rosabel. From his pocket, the pale-eyed man who was as eminent in the field of medicine as in all other fields, drew a small hypodermic case. The needle went deftly into Rosabel’s arm.

In two or three minutes Rosabel’s soft dark eyes opened. They rested on the white, dead face of The Avenger. She struggled up with a cry.

“Josh! Where’s Josh?”

It was typical of Rosabel. The first thought of Josh Newton was for her — always. And that went double for Rosabel.

“Josh isn’t here,” said Benson gently. “What happened? Why are he and Burnside gone?”

“Some men came.” Rosabel closed her eyes in pain and moaned a little. “They must have taken Josh out with them. And Senator Burnside, too. But they hit me when they first came in; so I can only guess.”

“Some men?” repeated Benson. “But how could they have located Burnside here?”

“He telephoned,” said Rosabel.

“Telephoned!” Benson’s pale eyes were steely chips. “Why on earth did he do that? He was hiding out. Didn’t it occur to him that there was a big chance of this place being discovered by his enemies if he went phoning all around Washington?”

“Josh and I tried to stop him,” said Rosabel. “But we’d have had to knock him down and tie him to keep him from it, he was so determined. And you hadn’t left any orders about it—”

“It’s not your fault,” Benson said, “but Burnside — he should have known better.”

He stepped to the phone. In a few seconds the exchange was tracing that call, spurred on by the magic name of Richard Henry Benson.

“He telephoned Congressman Coolie,” said the Avenger, after a moment. “Coolie is also from Montana, near Bison. And he is also interested in conservation projects, as Burnside himself is. How soon were you raided after the call?”

“Less than half an hour,” said Rosabel.

Benson’s pale eyes had been darting around the room. They rested now on a little white thing under a table. He went to it and picked it up.

The little white thing was half a handkerchief. In it were four pennies.

Four pennies and half a handkerchief. The Avenger’s pale eyes glittered. Josh had left these as a message.

“Get Mac and Smitty over here. They’re at the hotel. Tell them to go after Josh. They’ll know what to do when they see these. Are you all right?”

“Yes. But—”

The Avenger was gone, seeming to move slowly, such was his perfect coordination of mind and muscle, but actually getting out the door before Rosabel could utter another word.

The reason for his hurry was the swiftness with which the man had come to get Burnside after that phone call. Less than half an hour! It could only mean one thing. That was that the men had been near Coolie’s phone when Burnside called. In no other way could the call have been traced so quickly.

Coolie’s home was in the top-floor apartment of a big building overlooking Rock Creek Park. The building had no lobby or desk where Benson could get a pass key.

The Avenger went to the cliff side of the building. There was ornamental design in the side of the building, formed by the familiar method of placing alternate rows of bricks endways instead of lengthways and letting the ends protrude a half inch. Benson went up the side of the building.

It was a hundred feet down to jagged rock. But he didn’t look down. Apparently he didn’t even think of that sheer drop. Up he went, as easily as if climbing a ladder, till he got to the top floor.

He opened a window and climbed noiselessly into a bedroom. But there was no need for soundlessness in the apartment of Congressman Coolie.

There was nobody in it but Coolie, and Coolie would never show interest in anything any more.

The Congressman lay in a pool of his own blood, with a knife blade sticking out of his chest. The Avenger’s deductions had been all too sound.

Burnside would have been rash to make any phone call at all. As luck would have it, this particular call had been more than indiscreet. It had been suicidal. He had chanced to telephone a person in the clutches of the very men he was hiding from.

Coolie had, perhaps, been dead, and his voice had been imitated by one of the men. Or perhaps he had been forced to talk, and then had been murdered later.

That point suddenly struck the cold brain behind the icy, colorless eyes as important.

Coolie’s body was clad in a bathrobe. One tassel of the robe lay in the blood, reddened a couple of inches up its length. The other tassel was on top of the body, and dry.

The Avenger put the dry tassel in the pool of blood, and watched it with his watch in hand.

It took sixteen minutes for the tassel to suck up blood to the point reached by the other tassel that had landed in the pool when Coolie fell.

The Congressman had been murdered thirty-two minutes ago. That was after Burnside had been safely taken into custody again. They had not killed him till they knew they had Burnside where they wanted him.

The Avenger looked at his watch again. It was twenty minutes past ten at night.