The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER I The Human Rat

The building was narrow, four stories tall, and of old brick. It was like most buildings around Washington Square — tall and narrow, once the residence of a rich man, now made over into apartments.

There was no hint of deadliness in the building. There was no hint of deadliness anywhere in the lower New York neighborhood, for that matter.

Kids skated on the curving walks. Nurses wheeled babies and stopped to talk to policemen. Nobody looked at the building at all.

Least of all did a man walking west on the upper end of the square notice it. He didn’t have buildings anywhere, of any kind, on his mind. He was going to the Sixth Avenue drugstore of a friend of his named MacMurdie.

The man walking on the upper end of the square was enormous. He was six feet nine and weighed two hundred and eighty-five pounds, and none of it was fat. He was fifty-three inches around the chest and wore a size nineteen collar. When he walked, his arms hung crooked at his sides. There was too much lumped muscle under them to allow them to hang straight.

He looked as slow-witted as he was big. His face was of the full-moon variety, with peaceful blue eyes like blue china marbles. But he was not slow-witted. He was a radio and electrical engineer of the first rank. His name was Algernon Heathcote Smith. But if you wanted to live, you forgot the first two names and called him Smitty.

Smitty was several hundred yards from the building when it happened. He wouldn’t have noticed the man starting to turn to the stairs from the sidewalk, if it hadn’t been for the man’s looks. He looked like a rat, and Smitty didn’t like men who resembled rats.

But the man’s appearance was no warning of what the innocent-looking building was going to do. There was no warning of that whatever.

Kids skating, nurses wheeling perambulators, Smitty walking toward the Sixth Avenue drugstore. And then the building did it.

The tall, narrow old house seemed suddenly to be on rollers. On two sets of rollers, to be exact, with each set moving in opposite directions and carrying part of the building with it!

The front of the house boosted forward a couple of feet. The rear moved backward. Both sections took parts of the two adjoining buildings with them.

The tall front of the building folded slowly, like a tired man sagging in the middle. Almost like slow motion at first, and then gathering speed, it fell to the street with a colossal crash. Brick chips and dust rose ten stories. After that there was quiet.

As far as the giant, Smitty, could tell, there had been quiet all along. He hadn’t heard any noise when the building moved, or even when the four-story front fell, in a welter of debris.

That, he knew, was because his eardrums had been stunned by the violence of the explosion, in the heart of the building, that had caused the wreckage. He had been instantly deafened by it. And even at that moment, he marveled at it.

He had seen explosions before, but never anything as cataclysmic as this.

Sounds began to come to him, and a closer vision, and coherent realization. He heard children and women screaming, heard a cop running toward the debris, swearing in a hoarse and frantic tone. He saw the ratlike man who had been about to enter the building stagger east along the walk with his hand held before eyes momentarily blinded.

After that he saw something much too horrible for eyes to dwell on for very long. Bodies and fragments of bodies—

Survivors began reeling from the choked mound of what had once been a doorway. Just a few, only three, although there must have been at least a score of people in a building that size.

A man got to the mound, then crawled the rest of the way into the clear on hands and knees, with one leg dragging out behind him. Another man came out, bumping into things because he could not see. A woman was the third. She walked almost steadily, but very mechanically, as if she had been wound up and would keep on walking no matter what was in front of her. She tried to keep on walking when the cop got there and stopped her. She grappled with the cop, and fought him. Then she fainted.

Smitty ran to the cop. He could move fast when he wanted to, for all his size. There was pity as well as shock in his china-blue eyes.

“Here,” he said. “I’ll take the woman and this guy with something wrong with his leg. When the ambulance gets here, send it to MacMurdie’s drugstore, Waverly and Sixth. We’ll give the two first aid till it comes.”

The cop nodded. Two more patrolmen came. They began searching through the wreckage.

“Boiler explosion,” said one of them.

The other nodded, white-faced. “Yeah. Terrible what a boiler explosion can do. The thing’s in the cellar, heart of the building. They take everything when they do let go.”

The giant Smitty knew better. Boiler explosion? No such explosion could have had the extreme, the unbelievable violence of that rending crash he had witnessed.

The crowd around the wreckage gaped at Smitty. He had picked up the woman and now held her cradled in one vast arm. With the other, he swung the man onto his shoulder after lowering to his knees.

He went down the street with them as though they had been two children, one in the crook of his right arm, the other on his left shoulder. But they were not children. They were full-grown adults, weighing plenty.

He went into MacMurdie’s drugstore, stooping to let his burden clear the top of the too-small doorway.

The druggist vaulted a corner counter and ran to him, to help him.

“Whoosh, Smitty!” he said. “I heard the explosion. And I heard windows next door break with it. These two were in it?”

The giant nodded, and went to the back room with the two. They laid them on two couches there and worked over them.

“There must have been others, mon,” MacMurdie said. “Where are they?”

“Any others in there will go straight to the undertakers, Mac,” Smitty said. His voice, usually rather high for a man of his bulk, was gruff with sympathy. “What an explosion! You never saw the like. What would make one so violent? Dynamite? No. Even TNT wouldn’t go off like that.”

The woman stirred, and the man with his leg broken ceased moaning. The police ambulance came and got them. Then, with the store quiet and normal again, Smitty faced the druggist.

Fergus MacMurdie was about six feet tall, bony, with coarse red hair and bleak blue eyes. His skin was splotched with great, dim freckles. His hands were like bone mallets when he doubled them into fists. He had a pair of ears that stood out like sails, and the biggest feet Smitty had ever seen.

But there was nothing funny about Fergus MacMurdie when he looked as he was looking now.

“Crooked business, Smitty?” he asked. His eyes were like hard blue stones. Like Smitty, he didn’t care for men who resembled rats. But his hatred of all things criminal went deeper than the giant’s. For MacMurdie, years before, had had his wife and small son killed in one of his drugstores by a racketeer’s bomb.

Smitty slowly nodded.

“I think so, Mac. No honest, accidental explosion could have had the force that one had. There’s something very screwy about it.”

“Do we get in touch with the chief?”

“I don’t know, Mac. There doesn’t seem to be anything definite to report about—”

He stopped and grabbed the Scotsman’s bony arm with a force that made the homely freckled face draw up in pain.

“Ye big baboon, leave go my arm—”

“Mac! See that guy out the Sixth Avenue window?”

“What about him?” said Mac, rubbing his arm.

“He was just about to go into the building that blew up, when the explosion stopped him,” said Smitty rapidly. He studied the face of the man walking outside. Rodent chin and nose, beady eyes set too close together. And there was a cut on his cheek which he pressed now and then with a dirty handkerchief. That clinched it.

“That is the man, Mac! If we could get him back here, and see why he was going into that building, we might learn something!”

MacMurdie didn’t even wait to nod. He darted to the pharmaceutical counter, dipped thumb and finger into a wide-mouthed jar there, and went out to the sidewalk. The man was past the store by now. Mac hurried up to him, trouser legs flapping around his bony shins. He caught the man’s shoulder and turned him around.

“Mon,” he said, “ye’ve been hurt. In the explosion, was it? Let me help ye into my store.”

The sidewalk was crowded, as the Sixth Avenue sidewalks usually are. Several people stopped to stare at the two.

The man jerked at Mac’s friendly — but insistent — hand.

“Lemme loose, you Scotch ape!” he snarled.

“But ye’re hurt. Ye’re apt to fall over in a faint if ye don’t take care of yourself.”

“I’ll slug you if you don’t—”

Mac’s thumb and second finger snapped lightly under the man’s nose. With an odd, vacant expression in his beady eyes, the man tried to say something and couldn’t, tried to walk away and couldn’t.

Suddenly he fell, and would have hit the walk if the Scot’s arm hadn’t been ready to catch him.

“See?” Mac said, as if to the people around. “I knew he was on the point of collapse. I’ll take him into my store—”

He carried the man back, and the people moved on. No soul dreamed that when Mac had snapped his fingers so unobtrusively under the man’s nose he had released a volatile anaesthetic of his own manufacture so powerful that a whiff of it knocked a man out in less than three seconds.

In the store, Mac nodded to his helper, a boy of nineteen with intelligent brown eyes and a commendable habit of being absolutely incurious about all the queer things that went on in that store.

“Take over, Bob,” Mac said. “I may be in with this skurlie for an hour.”

He carried the man to the back room, with Smitty following. Smitty locked the door, and they began a strange procedure.

MacMurdie’s drugstore was like no other drugstore in New York City — or in any other city, for that matter.

The store part took up less than a third of the total floor space the venture covered. Two-thirds made up this room in the back. And big as the room was, it seemed overcrowded.

Along one wall was a bench cluttered with all the equipment of a fine chemist’s laboratory. Beakers and retorts and Bunsen burners jostled glass tubing and jars of mysterious compounds.

Along the other wall was a somewhat similar bench with all the paraphernalia that could have been dreamed of by an advanced electrical engineer. And that was Smitty’s side of the big room.

At the rear, taking up about equal spaces, were results of the work of the two. There was a cabinet full of vials containing drugs such as no chemist knew existed — because they were the product of MacMurdie’s genius and were known to no one but him. Beside this was another cabinet which did not open, but which had a curious screen making up its entire front.

This was a television set, designed by Smitty. In it, he had put the work of other men, changed and bettered by his own work, and principles and devices of his own invention. The result was television such as none of the big radio companies had as yet equaled.

Smitty went to the set and turned on the current. He started to warm up the sending apparatus, then said:

“Maybe we’d better see, first, if you can open this guy up, Mac.”

MacMurdie was insulted.

“Whoosh, mon! I can make a statue talk. You should know that by now.”

The man with the rat’s nose and chin and the beady eyes was beginning to move a little and mumble incoherently. Mac carried him to a deep chair in front of the monster television set, and propped him in it.

Before the man’s nose he hung an object that seemed to have come out of a strange dream. And then began a procedure that would have mystified most people — though not if those people had an advanced knowledge of psychiatry.