The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER II Television Work-Out

“You are asleep,” said Smitty, softly, to the man in the chair. “You are asleep, but you can hear and answer questions. You understand?”

The man made no sound or sign.

“You’d better give him another shot, Mac.”

MacMurdie stared at the giant.

“Ye know that’s not necessary.” He tapped a vial he had brought from the cabinet. Beside it was a hypodermic needle. “In here is my own refinement of the stuff that makes twilight sleep. It never fails. He’ll come around, slow, but willin’.”

Smitty twirled the object Mac had hung before the man’s face at eye level. This was a globe, about eighteen inches through, covered with small round mirrors. The mirrors overlapped, so that at no point in the sphere could anything but mirror be seen. As it turned, it shot little glints of light on walls and ceiling. The glints went around and around the room in a dreamy, dizzying march.

Smitty spoke to the man again.

“You are asleep, but you can hear me and answer me. You understand. You are asleep, but—”

“I am asleep,” the man said suddenly. His eyes were wide open. He sat rigidly upright.

“But you can hear me.”

“I can hear you.”

“And you can answer me.”

“I can answer you.”

Smitty twirled the ball again, to keep it moving and hold the man in his trance for a moment. He switched on the big television set.

“Chief, this is Smitty,” he said into the transmitter. “Are you there?”

There was a pause. The screen in the front of the cabinet suddenly took on a clouded look. The clouds faded, and a face stared into the back room of the drugstore.

It was a face to make any man stop and look.

It was as white as linen, as white as silver in a blue light. In it were set eyes of such pale, steely gray as to seem almost colorless. Over the face was a thick mane of snow-white hair, although the man owning it was obviously not elderly. Two things about the countenance set it apart from all others. One was the eyes, pale and deadly, like ice in a dawn at the pole. The other was the absolute immobility of feature. As though carved from white metal that face confronted you, changeless, moveless — dead.

“Chief,” said Smitty to the awesome face, “I think we may have something. There was an explosion a while ago—”

“At 25 Washington Square North,” said the face. The words came from lips that scarcely moved. “I know of it.”

Smitty didn’t ask how the man with the white, dead face knew. That man knew many things, with no person being able to discover how.

“This guy in the chair,” said Smitty, “was about to enter the building when it went up. Shall we see if he can tell us anything about it?”

“Yes,” said the man with the still, white face.

The screen faded. It was ready to transmit images, now, instead of receiving them. Smitty wheeled up a stand on which was his visualizing device.

Standard transmission of images by television is done by passing an electric eye swiftly back and forth across the object to be pictured. Smitty had worked out a multiple-eye device whereby hundreds of miniature photoelectric cells caught an entire scene at one time and instantly sent it whole to the receiver. This was functioning now, as he took up his stand beside the man in the chair. That man stared at the slowly revolving sphere of mirrors, eyes wide and blank.

“Your name,” said Smitty.

“Edward Carp,” said the man, in a voice as mechanical as a phonograph’s.

“You were going into the building that exploded.”

“Yes,” said the man.

“Why were you going in there?”

“To see the guy who hired me yesterday.”

“What did he hire you for?”

“I don’t know yet. He hadn’t told me.”

“What,” said Smitty, “made that explosion?”

“Peanuts,” said the man, voice dull and lifeless.

“Peanuts! What do you mean?”

“They look like peanuts, only a little bigger.”

“The explosion was caused by something looking like large peanuts?”

“Yes.”

“What was the name of the man you were to see?”

“They call him Red. That’s all I know.”

“Did he die in the explosion, or come out of the debris after I left?”

“Red must have died. He stayed in the basement. The explosion must have been an accident, and he must have died.”

“What was the explosive for?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t with Red long enough to be told anything much.”

“Was it for any definite purpose at all?”

“Sure. I don’t know what for. But it was going to be used.”

“Anytime anything like that is used, it will cause more death and destruction, won’t it?”

“Red said a few people might be bumped off, but it would be worth it.”

“What would be worth it?”

“Mexican bricks.”

“What about Mexican bricks?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t told.”

“Now that Red is dead, whom will you be working for?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s a little mon,” said Mac, in a low tone. “Some big-shot crook’s hired boy, that’s all.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Smitty. “But we’ve got a little out of it. That explosion was caused by the mishandling of some terribly deadly weapon of crime. And there may be more explosions that aren’t accidents!”

He went back to the man.

“You and Red were going to wreck and murder — for Mexican bricks. Can’t you tell me any more than that? What kind of bricks? Why are they worth so much?”

“I don’t know.”

A voice came from the cabinet. The voice of the man with the dead, white face.

“That’s all you will get from him, I think, Smitty.”

“Orders, chief?”

“Turn him loose. If Mac’s hypnotic drug works as well as it usually does, he will wake remembering nothing of this. Trail him. See where he goes. We seem to have the start of something huge and deadly here, but we haven’t enough, as yet, to be of value.”

“Right,” said Smitty.

There was in his voice, and in the homely face of MacMurdie, no faintest question of the authority of the man with the dead face and the snow-white hair. Which was as it should be.

The man whose arresting, dangerous countenance had stared from the screen for an instant was Richard Henry Benson, known, since the tragedy that had robbed his life of human meaning, as The Avenger. That tragedy was the loss of his wife and little daughter in a criminal plot. The loss had dedicated him to the smashing of crime everywhere he came in contact with it. And to his grim battle with the underworld he brought the weapons of genius, super-human strength and quickness, and a fortune gained in earlier days from a life of adventure.

Benson had taken on the giant Smitty as his personal aid. MacMurdie had been set up in business in this weird drugstore by Benson in payment for the help he had given the man with the white hair and paralyzed face when he was trying to get back his wife and child through the destruction of the gang that had caused their disappearance.

When Benson commanded, Smitty and Mac moved. And shortly thereafter someone in a high position in some criminal venture was doomed to suffer exceedingly.

The man who had given his name as Edward Carp had closed his eyes again. He was moving convulsively in the chair. Smitty put the mirrored ball out of sight and lifted the man, big chair and all, to another part of the room.

Carp’s eyes opened. Now they weren’t wide and blank. They were wary and narrowed, but also bewildered.

“What am I doin’ here? Where am I? What you guys—”

Mac helped him up out of the chair.

“Ye’re all right now, mon. Ye fainted on the sidewalk. Don’t ye remember? I brought ye in here.”

“Fainted, huh! I never fainted in my life.” But the man’s voice was without conviction. He remembered nothing of the mesmeric trance. Not remembering that, he had no ground for suspicion of the giant and the red-haired Scot.

“Thanks for lugging me in here,” he said grudgingly. “But I got to beat it now. Unless you got some objection.”

He glared at them, all suspicion again; but the suspicion died soon as Smitty grinned and said, mild blue eyes peaceful and not too intelligent-looking:

“You can run right along, any time you please. We just wanted to help you out a little.”

The man left. Not till he’d got out of sight beyond the Sixth Avenue window did Smitty slide out after him. He left a Scotsman as puzzled as any who had ever come from Bruce’s kingdom.

“Whoosh! It’s mad. There’s no meanin’ in it. The explosion was caused by big peanuts. And there’s to be more. For what? Mexican bricks! It makes no sense in any direction at all!”

In the street, Smitty trailed the man as deftly as if he’d been a midget instead of a giant. He kept a full block behind him till the man turned a corner, about three blocks east of where he’d started. Then Smitty edged up closer and peered around the corner.

The man had stopped. He was standing in front of a big building that had once been a railroad magnate’s home. In the gay 90’s. Now it was an exclusive school for the very young tots of the rich.

Smitty’s pulse began to pound faster as he recognized the place in front of which lounged the ratlike Carp. Children of the rich! A crook hanging around! It smelled like kidnap to Smitty.

Though he couldn’t figure out where kidnap and explosives had anything in common.

The doors of the school opened. It was a little after three in the afternoon. Boys and girls from four to six came out. Several had governesses with them, ladies who stayed right at the school with their charges till time to take them home.

Some of the kids went to limousines at the curb, where chauffeurs waited. Some went to cars almost as impressive, in which doting young mothers were ready to drive them home.

One, a little boy with black hair, came out with a girl of twenty-three or so who was so beautiful that even from that distance she made Smitty blink.

She had yellow-bronze hair and gray eyes and the finest pink-white skin you’d ever care to see. She looked like a dish of peaches going somewhere to be eaten with cream. But her dress — smart and trim, but not expensive — told that she was not a rich young matron. She was one of the instructoresses of the school.

With the appearance of the dainty, lovely miss with the black-haired little boy, Carp suddenly straightened. He looked this way and that, and then stepped toward the two. And Smitty began to go there from the corner with space-devouring strides. The way Carp had acted showed he was up to something.

Smitty was still too far away to hear what was said. But he saw Carp’s lips move. And then Carp put a hand on the dainty blonde’s wrist.

Smitty could never afterward figure out quite what had happened.

At one moment Carp had a none-too-clean paw on the girl’s arm. At the next he seemed to have leaped into the air in an attempt at a backward flying somersault. An attempt that didn’t come off very well, because he lit on his back and shoulders with a grunt.

Then Smitty really put on steam. He began running as fast as he could. He had seen the car waiting in the areaway next to the school, and from it he had seen three men come.

All got near Carp and the girl at about the same time. The only difference was that Smitty saw the three men and the three men were too engrossed in the girl to see Smitty.

They were made aware of his presence very soon.

The giant got one of the three by the nape of the neck, like a kitten. He jerked back, hard, and opened his hand. The man kept on going back along the sidewalk, to fall finally and slide for a couple of yards on the cement.

Smitty caught a second of the three by the shoulder. And then the third, snarling, whipped out a gun. In his murderous little eyes was the plain intent to use it, and use it to kill.

Smitty really got mad, then. He didn’t have time to get to the man with the gun, so he smashed the fellow whose shoulder he still gripped against him. The gunman staggered and tried to get his gun back into line. While he tried, Smitty caught his right forearm in a tremendous hand and turned it very quickly, as though the arm were a baton which he mean to twirl.

There was a thin, high crack. The gun thudded to the sidewalk. And the man began to scream while he held his right arm tenderly in his left hand.

A whistle was going mad at the corner. There were pounding feet. A cop was coming up, drawing his gun as he came.

The man who had been smashed to the sidewalk began racing for the car. Carp was already in it, at the wheel. The other two went for the car, also. They leaped in. The car veered over the walk, doors still open from the mad retreat. Down the line a squad car, called by the patrolman’s whistle, gave a siren wail.

The cop got up to Smitty and the girl and the little black-haired boy.

“You all right, miss?” he said solicitously. “You and the kid?”

“We’re all right,” the girl said, perfectly calm. Smitty stared in amazement. She looked as little and delicate as something made out of porcelain. But a scene that might well have excited any man — and which had excited the cop, as his face showed — left her completely unruffled.

At the curb a big coupé had stopped with a white-faced woman in it. The woman’s features were like the small boy’s. She was one of the rich mothers, a bit late in coming to school for her child. She opened the door and came toward them.

“We’ll get those guys in the car,” the cop said confidently. “And when we do—”

The mother had the little boy. With no look at the blond instructoress or the patrolman, she carried sonny to the overstuffed coupé. The cop went with her.

“Well! That was nice while it lasted,” Smitty said to the girl.

Her lovely gray eyes went over his vast bulk.

“You’re rather strong,” she said.

“A little,” said Smitty. “But you — say! What happened to the guy who put his hands on you?”

“What do you mean, what happened?”

“It looked like you tossed him over your shoulder. But you couldn’t throw a grown man around. Or could you?”

“He must have tripped on something,” murmured the girl, dimpling.

“Anyhow, he was one kidnapper who made a mistake. Who is the little boy?”

“Franklin Wellington Course, the Third,” said the girl.

Smitty whistled.

“Of the steel and oil Courses, eh? No wonder there was an attempted kidnap! Can I do anything for you? You all right?”

“Perfectly,” said the girl. “And you’ve already done enough. Thank you.”

She turned and started away. There was purpose and finality in her shapely back. Smitty knew he was dismissed. He hesitated, then started back to Mac’s drugstore.

And there, though he didn’t dream it at the time, he made a mistake. One which, probably, the subtle genius, Dick Benson, would not have made. But then Smitty, for all his horsepower, was not Dick Benson. There was only one Avenger.