The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER XIII The Trap

“DARING BANK ROBBERY A FAILURE,” the headlines said.

The account in the papers ran on:

In the Bleek Street headquarters, Dick Benson stood like a gray steel statue and read that account, which was in a paper lying on the table in front of him. Nellie Gray was at his side. Smitty filled to overflowing a specially built, oversized chair nearby.

“So they’ve got the brick — and the gold belt plate inside it — that dad gave to Dr. Barker for safe-keeping,” said Nellie.

“Of course,” said Benson. “That was the purpose of the explosion.”

Nellie’s pink-and-white fists doubled hard.

“Everywhere they’re succeeding. Everything they do, they get away with! And what are we doing to stop them — to get dad’s murderer? Nothing!”

Benson said nothing to that. He looked at the paper again.

“ The bandit… fled… leaving nearly a million dollars in securities, jewels and cash in the vault,’” he read again. His pale and steely eyes went to the girl’s face.

“By taking a little more care, the gang might have worked it so they got that cash and the jewels. But they didn’t care whether they got it or not. The brick in Dr. Barker’s safety box was worth more to them than all the rest of the valuables in the vault.”

Nellie’s eyes suddenly avoided Benson’s pale flares.

“Well, you’ve seen one of the plates,” she murmured. “Solid gold, with a big emerald—”

“The entire belt, bringing museum prices, wouldn’t be worth as much as the stuff the bomber passed up in that vault,” Benson said steadily.

Nellie Gray’s porcelain cheeks colored faintly. The gray steel man said in his silken voice:

“There is far more to that belt than just the great intrinsic value of its gold and emeralds. Do you care to tell me what it is?”

Nellie bit her lip and stared pleadingly at him.

“I… I simply don’t dare… even to you.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” said Benson. “The belt, valuable as it is, is only a key to something so much more valuable that it makes its own worth seem like small change in comparison.”

The icily flaming eyes were on her in that probing manner that seemed able to search the very depths of a person’s mind.

“The key lies in the ideographs on the backs of the belt plates. Put all those plates together, and the picture writing tells a complete message. The message is a description of a secret place where something tremendously valuable may be found. Is that right?”

With his words, Nellie had been growing more and more tense. Now she breathed deeply and relaxed.

“How did you know?” she said in a low tone.

“Because I can decipher Aztec hieroglyphs, to some extent. Not quite as well as the late Dr. Brunniger.” His steely fingers shut hard at mention of the gentle old man so cold-bloodedly murdered. “But well enough. I read the ideographs on the back of the plate we got from Knight’s rooms. There is just enough of the message to hint at the real secret of the belt.”

Nellie sighed.

“I might have known before now that nothing could be hidden from you. Yes, that is right.”

She stared at the table, not seeing it. Before her eyes was the face of her father, killed for the possession of this thing The Avenger had shrewdly guessed.

“I told you about the night we found this belt in the tomb of Montezuma the Second. I didn’t tell you quite all.

“When we got back to dad’s tent, from the tomb, he went over the belt. He read the ideographs rapidly enough to grasp the meaning of their story — but didn’t dare take the time to get the story in every little detail; he had to bake the plates into bricks before daylight so no one but his few intimates would ever know of the discovery.

“The story he got was colossal.

“As you know, the Spaniards invaded Mexico in 1520. They killed off the Aztecs — with the help of subject Indian tribes who hated the Aztecs anyway. But the Spaniards, while they got a lot of gold, didn’t find the real, central hoard. They knew they hadn’t found it, and for decades afterward they searched. They had heard legends of whole temple floors of gold, of big statues of solid gold. Tons of the stuff. And these things they didn’t get.

“The reason, which again they suspected from the start, was that the Aztec priests hid this huge hoard just before the Spaniards got into the ancient city that is now the site of Mexico City. None of the priests could be tortured into revealing it.”

Smitty was staring at the girl with his china-blue eyes popping.

“And that belt tells where all this gold is hidden?” he spluttered.

Nellie nodded.

“Directions for finding it are on the back of the belt — if all the plates are together in their proper order. The biggest treasure, perhaps, in the history of the world. A treasure probably larger than King Solomon’s itself. Now do you see why I didn’t tell even you — till now — about it?”

There was silence in the big room, broken finally by Smitty. Benson was pacing slowly up and down, face as dead as a mask of snow, eyes vital and flaring.

“The gang after this belt knows its real meaning, and the size of the treasure, too,” said Smitty finally. “That’s proved by the way they treated a bank vault full of valuables as if the stuff were so many pennies. All they wanted was Dr. Barker’s brick.”

Nellie said nothing. She watched Benson. There was something like awe in her pretty eyes.

Benson thought aloud.

“They have almost enough. They have the two plates Professor Gray kept in his own possession. They have Olin Chandler’s plate. They have Dr. Barker’s plate. Four out of five. With four fifths of the message, they may be able to guess the meaning of the last fifth.”

Nellie said: “I hadn’t told you till now… I have the picture writing that was on the backs of dad’s two plates. He made a copy of it.”

“And we have Knight’s brick — the only one the gang hasn’t got hold of, here,” said Benson slowly. “They have four out of five. We have three out of five.”

Nellie’s eyes shone softly.

“I am quite sure that you can learn more from three bricks than they could from four,” she said.

Benson looked as though he might have smiled, had his face been able to move. His eyes lightened a little, then went bleak and deadly again.

“Whether we can or not, we’ll have to try,” he said. “Because the next move of the gang is pretty easy to guess. With four-fifths of the message in their hands, they’ll try at once to locate the treasure, instead of waiting around and trying to get the fifth brick. Particularly since they must have learned by now that it will not be too easy to get that brick from its present location — this building. They will go at once to Mexico.”

Smitty and the girl looked their question, though from the expression on their faces it was evident that they had half guessed.

“Our only move,” said Benson, in the silken-quiet voice that was more impressive than another man’s shout, “is to get there, too, and take the whole lot of them. The leader himself will be with them on this trip. That’s all we’ve been waiting for.”

He turned to Nellie. “Get your copy of the hieroglyphs on the back of Professor Gray’s plates, please.”

Nellie colored a little again. She went to a corner of the room where the tall television cabinet hid her from Smitty and Benson — and from the sulking Pinkie Huer in the big cage. She came back with the front of her dress a bit disarranged, and handed a piece of paper to Benson.

Benson put the paper next to the glittering plate taken from Knight’s brick. With his pale eyes like flaming holes in his dead, white face, he studied the hieroglyphs.

Thirty-five minutes later, he looked up from the three-fifths of the message worth such a king’s ransom.

“I know a little more of the interior of Lower Mexico than most,” he said. “I know a bit more of Aztec history, from original stone tablets now destroyed, than you’ll find in history books. And I think I’ve gotten every last bit of meaning out of these plates. By putting them all together, I believe I can come within five miles of a secret place where the dying Aztec race hid its gold. Of course, you could search a five-mile square for the rest of your life, in the jungle, without actually finding the hoard. The man who wrote the message on the plates took care of that.”

“But at least,” said the giant Smitty, “you could come close enough to locate this gang of cutthroats if they got the approximate spot on the map from their four plates.”

“Yes,” said Benson.

He began his slow pacing again, moving with the lithe, tiger tread that could make you catch your breath at the smooth power and tremendous vitality expressed in it.

“You copied the hieroglyphs on the two plates,” he said to Nellie. “It is barely possible that Dr. Barker, or Olin Chandler, or both, took their bricks apart, copied their plates, too, and put the bricks together again. Barker is almost to Europe now, so we can’t question him — I think I’ll have a talk with Chandler again.”

He went out, a gray steel figure with a white mask of a face in which burned pale and awesome eyes.

On the second floor of the bizarre Bleek Street building were luxurious lounging and bedrooms. Smitty went to his quarters down there, and Nellie went to the dainty rooms turned over to her.

Pinkie Huer was left alone in his cage.

Huer was a second-rate gunman who was only valuable if he had somebody to tell him what to do. But he was not entirely without brains. For a long time he had been looking at a couple of things and scheming what he’d do with them if ever he was left alone for a minute and had the chance.

He was alone now, with the things.

They were a portable hand-set telephone plugged into a socket not far away, with the phone on a table about eight feet from the cage. And a long, slim glass tube that had a bit of rubber hose on one end and a crook, almost like that of a cane, in the other. The glass tubing was part of apparatus used in the gray steel man’s many chemical experiments. But Huer didn’t know that. Nor care. He was going to use it for something a lot different — if he could reach it.

The long section of tubing stood in the corner a little more than a yard from the side of the cage. Huer put his arm between the bars and pushed his body against them till his shoulder was wedged through as far as he could get it.

He couldn’t reach the tube, and whimpered curses came from his lips. Then it occurred to him that a leg is longer than an arm. He turned and wedged his leg between the bars.

His toe just touched the end of the tubing.

Sweat burst out on his forehead. If he moved so that the glass tube fell, it would probably break, and then he’d be done before he got started. With infinite care he moved the tubing.

It slid down from its upright position in the corner and fell. But it fell on his outstretched leg and did not break. A whistling sigh of relief came to Huer’s lips. He drew the tubing within reach with his toe.

With the crooked end of it around the leg of the table, he hauled table and phone and all to the cage. Then the phone was in his hand. He dialed desperately, got a number the police would have given much to know.

“Yeah, it’s Pinkie. Damn you, it’s really me — not the other guy. The white-haired mug has just left for Olin Chandler’s. Yeah, the guy who had one of the things you’re after. And do I know something about that! You can trap the white-headed guy there, if you work fast. After you’ve got him out of the way. for gosh sakes come up here and get me outta this bird cage before they bump me off or I go nuts!”

Huer pushed the table to its former position with the long tube, then slid the tube over the floor, with a flick of his wrist, till it lay under a far workbench as if it had fallen there unnoticed a long time ago and had nothing whatever to do with the man in the cage a full five yards away.

After that, Pinkie Huer relaxed and sat in the cage looking as innocent as it is possible for a man to look when he has the brand of Cain stamped in his face and vicious murder glinting permanently in his eyes.

At the Forty-second Street office of the zoning and city-planning engineer, Benson’s pale eyes bit like knives into the eyes of the girl at the information desk.

“Mr. Chandler just left here and went home?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl. Something in the silken voice of this man with the white, still face made her feel almost afraid. Certainly it made her feel very, very obedient.

“It’s not yet noon,” said Benson. “Is he accustomed to leaving his office and going home at this hour?”

“No, sir. But he just had a telephone call from the man at his apartment, asking him to come home in a hurry. I took the call, as I take all Mr. Chandler’s calls, and I recognized his servant’s voice before plugging in to Mr. Chandler’s desk. The man seemed very excited. Or maybe he was frightened about something.”

Benson turned from the desk. Then he was out, in the hall. The girl blinked. It hadn’t seemed to her that the man with the snow-white hair and pale eyes was running. Yet he’d got out the door faster than most men could if they’d been leaping for their lives.

The giant motor under the hood of the old-looking car thrummed with more than its usual lazy song as Benson went from Forty-second Street to Chandler’s address on West End. Half a dozen cops stared at the speeding car with the intention of chasing it, then saw the expressionless, chalk-white face over the steering wheel and did not. Benson hadn’t been in the big city long, but already word was trickling from precinct-station captains to plain-clothes men to rookies on the beat that the man who looked like a limber gray steel bear was to be let alone no matter how many ordinary ordinances he cracked.

There was a doorman in front of Chandler’s building entrance, talking to a pretty maid in a French lace apron and cap. Everything looked all right. But with the same uncanny speed with which he had left the zoning engineer’s office, Benson hurried into the building.

The elevators were automatic. He stepped into one and began rising.

The cage stopped at the eighth floor. Benson flashed open the door and stepped out. A gun ground into his side, held by a man who had stood so flattened against the wall next to the elevator doorway that only a crystal gazer could have known he was there.

“Keep your hands by your sides,” the man said to Benson in a low tone, “and walk to Chandler’s layout. If you yell, you’ll get it right now. If you don’t, you’ll live maybe another ten minutes. Take your choice!”