The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER VI The Veil of Mystery

In the huge room on the third floor of Benson’s unique headquarters in Bleek Street, were Nellie Gray, Smitty, and MacMurdie.

The girl, slim and dainty and pink-and-white as a Dresden doll, was staring around as she had several times before.

“To get a layout like this,” she said, “you must rob the United States mint itself about twice a year.”

Mac had just come from his store. He stared at Smitty, with his sandy ropes of eyebrows going up over his frosty-blue eyes, and his sandy-red hair wrinkling down on his freckled forehead.

“She thinks we’re crooks,” the giant Smitty explained.

Nellie sniffed.

“She thinks we’re the ones who are after the Mexican bricks,” Smitty added.

MacMurdie shook his dour Scots head.

“She’s seen the chief, and still thinks we’re crooks?” He took a step toward Nellie. “Whoosh! Ye’re a very suspectin’ kind of gurrrl, I’m thinkin’.”

“Suppose,” said Nellie Gray, “you stop where you are, my Scots friend. You could shoot me, from a distance, but you won’t, because you want me alive to question me. But you’d better not lay a hand on me.”

“Take the advice, Mac,” said Smitty, grinning. “She looks little and harmless, with those big innocent eyes. But she can toss men around like a juggler keeping three billiard balls in the air at the same tune.”

“Ye’re joking,” said Mac, staring at the slim and dainty-looking Nellie Gray.

“Try it,” said Smitty.

“See here!” snapped Nellie, with glints in the “big innocent” eyes. “I’m no guinea pig to experiment on.”

But Mac was curious. He grabbed her left arm, just to see what in the world Smitty was talking about.

He saw. Stars.

Nellie Gray whirled. Mac, feet in a forward line from his last step, perforce whirled, too. He was in balance frontward and backward, but not sideways. He toppled sideways, pawing the air with his free hand as he swayed. But Nellie didn’t stop there. She kept right on turning, and Mac, with one ankle swept from under him by a dainty No. 3 patent-leather pump, loosed her arm before his own should break and smashed in a long slide on the floor against the carved leg of a davenport.

He got up, rubbing his arm, too incredulous to be angry.

“Whoosh!” he said, staring at the softly rounded, slim figure with bulging blue eyes. “Ye didn’t do that! Ye couldn’t have! It would take a man’s strength to toss my weight like that.”

“A man’s strength did it,” said Nellie.

“Whose? Not Smitty. He was clear over there all the time—”

“You did it,” said Nellie. “Yours was the man’s strength that tossed you. You lunged at me like a clumsy ox, and I added a little new direction to your weight and the strength of your lunge and, like the song says, you came out there.”

“They call it jujitsu, Mac,” said Smitty.

“If ye don’t wipe the grin off yer silly face, ye overgrown clown,” burred Mac, “I’ll wipe it off for ye!”

“You mean you will if you get our little friend to help you,” taunted Smitty.

The Scot was about to retort to that one when the door opened. All three swung toward it.

Benson came in. His eyes were pale holes of fury in his white, dead face. But, as always, the face itself could express none of that fury. And its very immobility was more frightening than any grimace of anger could have been.

Hauled along by one hand as easily as if he’d been a child, was a man in a brown cap. He was half again as big as Benson, but his wildest twisting and fighting couldn’t shake the gray man’s one-handed grip by a hair. Indeed, the gray steel figure seemed hardly aware that the man was fighting and twisting.

Quality in muscle, as well as quantity! Now and then a man appears whose muscle fiber, ounce for ounce, is so much more powerful than that of ordinary men that he seems of another race. Benson was such a man.

Eyes flaming so that even Smitty and Mac felt chill shivers run up and down their spines, Benson flipped his wrist. The man with the cap shot away from him, half turned as he tried to catch his balance, and ended up against the back of a great leather chair.

“Sit there,” said Benson, voice silken and quiet, but with something in it that again sent shivers down the spines of Mac and Smitty.

The man glared around the tremendous room like a mad rabbit in a death trap. He calculated the chance of making a break for the door, looked into the almost colorless eyes of death set in a dead, white face, and decided to do as he was told. He sat.

“Who’s your friend?” said Smitty, looming gigantic over the cowering man in the big chair.

Benson, lips barely moving in his paralyzed face, told them who his friend was — and what he had done.

Mac and Smitty went white with fury. And from the lips of the still unreconciled girl was wrung a gasp of pity.

“He threw a bomb that killed an old man and a young mother who just happened to be walking near?” Smitty ground out. “Why, I’ll—”

He got one enormous hand on the man’s throat. His hand went almost completely around it.

A terrified squeak came from the man’s lips. His eyes, insane with terror, stared up and up Smitty’s vast bulk. Six feet nine and as big as the side of a barn. Then his eyes popped half out as Smitty just started to squeeze.

“No!” snapped Benson.

Smitty reluctantly — very reluctantly — opened his ponderous fingers.

“I want him alive. He’ll tell us things before we’re through. You see — the explosion was caused by one of the little peanut-things he tossed. He’ll explain, in due time.”

Nellie, eyes wide on the cowering man who could throw death and destruction around so heedlessly in his effort to kill the white-faced man, said:

“Why didn’t you turn him over to the police, at once? He’s the murderer of two people. Caught red-handed.”

“He’d be out on bail in a day or less,” said Benson.

“A proven murderer?” said Nellie. “There is no bail in such cases. As I should know!”

“There is no proof of murder.”

“You saw him, with your own eyes.”

“Simply my word against his. One against one. The law could not convict on that.”

Benson went to a corner, where a queer thing of bars was standing. It looked like a gigantic canary cage.

“The law, my dear, has perhaps necessarily become a very involved and complicated thing. So complicated that sometimes it can’t function according to the fines of justice. As in this case, where money could bail this man out and let him escape. That’s why our little firm of Justice & Co. has been formed. Come here, you!”

The last words were to the man who sat in the chair and gasped for breath, staring with terrified eyes at Smitty.

The man got up, sidled around the giant, yelled — and leaped to one side as Smitty’s hand raised. He fairly ran to where Benson stood by the cage. Benson opened the barred door.

“Get in!”

“Hey! Me get in there? I won’t—”

The almost colorless eyes — eyes of a deadly marksman — stared calmly at him. His words broke in the same squeak that had sounded when Smitty’s hand encircled his throat.

“What are you gonna do to me? Who are you guys, anyhow? Why’re you sticking your bills in this—”

“Get in, please.”

The man stumbled into the six-by-six cage, looking more dead than alive.

“What are you gonna do to me? You turn me over to the cops! You hear? If you don’t—”

“You can shout as loudly as you like,” said Benson. “The place is thoroughly soundproofed. But I’d advise you not to.”

He went back to the others, with the caged man’s awed and panic-glazed eyes following his lithe body and smooth tiger tread.

Benson drew out the list he had gotten from Doolen.

“Here,” he said, “are the men who accompanied Professor Gray on his last trip. Some one of them — perhaps more than one — must know what this is all about.”

He read the list aloud:

“Michael Bower, retired manufacturer; Basil Doolen, importer; Olin Chandler, engineer; Rex Orto, Jr., no occupation; Harry Armitage, sales manager; John Sanderson, manufacturer; Cole Tega, advertising artist; Alec Knight, student; Mortimer Barker, physician.”

Benson glanced at Nellie Gray.

“You needn’t answer if you don’t want to, Miss Gray. We can go ahead without any help. But you might tell me if this list is complete or if any have been left out.”

Nellie stared a long time into the gray eyes, like pale ice in a polar dawn. You could fairly see her thinking it out:

This is a world of greed. No one does anything unless he’s going to get something out of it. Therefore, Benson must be mixing in because he expects a reward. His claim that he is only doing it to help the cause of justice is, by all logic, silly.

And yet — she was beginning to think, foolish as it sounded, that he was really on the level.

“The list is complete,” she said, in a low, troubled tone.

Benson nodded.

“Three of these,” he said, “have little check marks after them, meaning that on the expedition they were the particular intimates of Professor Gray. The three are Dr. Barker, Olin Chandler, and Alec Knight. Right, Miss Gray?”

The girl nodded, uncertain, still not knowing how much trust to place here.

“Dr. Barker has been our personal physician for years. Olin Chandler has worked with Columbia, and with dad, on Aztec stuff, and was on an expedition with dad two years before, in Yucatan. Al Knight is a brilliant student working his way through Columbia now. They were the three father knew best. Two were with him when he discovered—”

She stopped abruptly.

“When he discovered what?” said Benson. “The bricks?”

She would not answer. She had gone as far as she dared go, at the moment.

What was her secret, that it was so gigantic she dared not, even yet, lift a corner of the veil of mystery for Benson to gaze at?

The pale-gray flames of eyes turned from her face to the faces of MacMurdie and Smitty.

“Mac, call on Rex Orto and Harry Armitage. Smitty, visit John Sanderson and Cole Tega. Learn from them what you can. I’ll take Professor Gray’s three intimates — Olin Chandler, Dr. Barker, and Alec Knight. Then we’ll all get together and see what we’ve turned up.”

A sound, methodical plan. But even the plans of Dick Benson, The Avenger, could fail if the proper factors — beyond any human influence — appeared.

One such factor being death—