Three Gold Crowns

CHAPTER VI Fiery Baptism

Robert Beall had a rather magnificent home out on Long Island. It was set on an acre of ground, and the acre was mostly shrubbery and rare plants.

Which made it tough for Cole Wilson.

Wilson had picked up Beall’s trail at Salloway’s office on Mac’s radioed information of the conference there. He had followed Beall to his home, and lurked around here ever since.

Wilson had done an excellent job of trailing. In fact, it looked as if Wilson could do an excellent job with most anything. That was why he had been invited to join Benson’s little crime-fighting band.

Wilson was so fast with his compact muscles and so swift of brain that he had almost beaten The Avenger himself. So Benson had welcomed him as an aide.

But Cole Wilson was to find that all his powers were needed on this job!

It was just about dusk, and the thickly covered ground of the estate made his investigation difficult. A young army could slink around between those bushes, in this light, without being seen.

So Wilson decided to get closer.

He was sitting in his car a block away, under a drooping willow. He was leaning far back with his blazing black eyes almost closed. Anyone passing would think he had merely pulled up for a nap. Now he abandoned those tactics.

He got out of the car, moving swiftly, almost as compact and powerful a figure as The Avenger. He went toward the Beall place.

He pulled himself up and over the high iron fence, as quickly and easily as an athlete scaling parallel bars, and dropped on the other side.

He went toward the house.

Twice since he had been parked back there, he had done this. He had prowled the bushes; had even peered in cautiously through the windows. He had seen nothing. Beall had apparently just gone in — and buried himself. There hadn’t been a sign of the man, of a servant or anyone else.

Cole went through the procedure again, looking in all reachable windows, prowling through the shrubbery. It was nearly dark when he got around the house to the rear. And there he swiftly slunk back out of sight as he saw his first sign of life.

There was a four-car garage back there. And a man was at one of the doors.

The door was open. The man, in chauffeur’s rig, was bending over the hood with a watercan in his hand, filling the radiator. He didn’t see Wilson. And Wilson got out of there fast, back to his car.

It looked very much as if Beall, or somebody, was about to drive out, and his job was to follow if it was Beall.

Down the line was a big house with a “For Rent” sign on it. Wilson started his motor and rolled the car toward the driveway of that house. He intended to back in, and from there he could follow no matter which way a car from Beall’s place went. Where he’d been, he’d have had to take time to turn around, if the chauffeur had driven by him instead of away from him.

A methodical man, Wilson. And a good watcher. He could be morally sure that no one had entered the Beall estate since he’d been there.

What he couldn’t know, of course, was that there had been visitors before he got there. And that these visitors had heliographed a message to others, over four blocks away, before the sun went down.

Just before Wilson got to the driveway, he saw a light go on in an upper window, and then wink out again. His wary black eyes narrowed.

It had been a regular electric light, regularly turned on, and then turned off. But it could have been a signal—

The instant he heard the motor roar behind him, he twirled his wheel to get his car up over the curb. But he wasn’t fast enough. Just after the front wheels bounced over the curbing, the car behind him rammed into him, viciously, deliberately!

Wilson’s head was jerked back on his neck, but he had the car door open and was out on the strip of lawn between the street and sidewalk in a second. And in that second he had his gun out.

Four men were piling from the car that had rammed his. His gun spat! One of them staggered backward with red streaming from his shoulder. Only his shoulder. The Avenger had told Cole the code of Justice, Inc.: “Try always not to kill.” Though the telling hadn’t been necessary. Cole, too, would do anything rather than take life.

So one was out, wounded, but the other three were very much alive. And as their guns leaped in their hands, Cole had to jump sideways and back to get the bole of a tree between him and death!

He had to perform this maneuver backward, with his eyes on the guns. So the first thing he knew of men behind him, at that tree, was when a clubbed gun raked down on his head, and another whistled an inch from his ear as he ducked.

He heard the scream of another car’s tires as they whirled out of Beall’s driveway, and saw the car as it came toward him. The chauffeur was at the wheel, and there were two men in the rear.

One of the two had adhesive tape over his lips.

The three men with the guns had turned on their heels and were racing for their machine again. But the two with Wilson were bending all their efforts toward killing him.

Cole managed to roll from another blow; then two shots from the other man caught him squarely in the chest. He cried out, swayed, and fell. So the two men raced for the car that had rammed Cole’s, too.

The car wasn’t damaged too much to run. It roared around in a U turn, straightened out, and trailed the other machine — the one with the gagged man in it — down the suburban street.

But on the back bumper, clinging hard to a taillight on a nickel standard, was Cole Wilson!

About the first thing The Avenger had done when Cole joined up was to hand him a bulletproof garment and insist that he wear it always. It was fashioned of a substance of Benson’s own invention, called celluglass.

The two slugs fired point-blank at him had made bruises he’d have for days, but that was all. However, it had seemed like a good idea to Cole to play dead, and then try to grab onto the rear of the ramming car when it turned to speed after the chauffeur-driven one.

So now he knew what it meant to have a bull by the tail!

Cole hung on with one hand and with the other felt for the tiny radio at his belt. He began tapping a message, over and over, with his fingernail?

“On gang car going north from Beall’s. On car going north from Beall’s. Following kidnaped man. Following kidnaped man. Wilson.”

He hadn’t tapped this many times when the car slowed. It turned right, then left, then into a junkyard.

The instant the car had stopped, Wilson hopped off the rear bumper and slid behind a head-high pile of scrap iron. And it was lucky he did so, for hardly had the car ceased moving when a man appeared near where Wilson was hiding, and closed the swinging gate in the high board fence around the yard.

It was quite dark now. But in the light from the cars, Wilson saw the men drag a form from that first car. The man who was bound and gagged. He saw them lay this man on the refuse-littered ground. And in the meantime he was tapping on the tiny radio transmitter again.

He had seen a street sign two blocks before the car reached the yard. He gave this street over and over. And then he followed the men when they carried their victim, whoever he was, into a low shed without windows and half falling apart.

Wilson went to the rear of the shed. He was wondering who the kidnaped man was. Beall? It didn’t seem likely. Beall was one of the blackmailers. A visitor to Beall’s house, then?

Cole started a little as the possibility occurred to him that the man might be Farquar himself. But as he thought these things, he was working at a loose plank in the rear of the shed.

The men hadn’t bothered to pick a sound building to toss their victim into, because he was bound. Their carelessness made it easy for Cole. The shed was about ready to tumble, anyhow. He got two wide planks off almost without noise, let alone effort.

He went into the shed. The form of the bound man could barely be seen on the floor. Cole put his lips close to the man’s ear.

“Don’t yell. It’s a friend.”

Then he untied the man’s bonds, and took off the gag.

“Farquar?” he whispered, trying to see the man’s features in the darkness.

There was not to be an answer to that question.

A yell came from the rear of the shed, close.

“Cover the front, you guys! There’re planks off the back! Somebody’s in there!”

Cole leaped to the front door, which wasn’t secured because the prisoner had been bound and helpless. He opened the door a crack, and hastily shut and barred it. Three men were running toward it with drawn guns.

Cole went to the rear and stuck his head out the slot where the planks were out. He stuck it back again even more quickly as a shot spanged next to his nose!

He had loosed the bound man, and thought everything under control. And now it was all haywire. He crouched in the darkness, listening to the rescued man’s breathing — and to words from outside.

“Who’s in there?”

“How would I know? How’d he get in? That’s the question.”

“Must be he slipped past Fritz at the gate. But that ain’t the real question. Question is — what do we do with him?”

Somebody laughed without mirth.

“We give him a hunk of lead and send him home in a special car, of course.”

“No, I know he has to be rubbed out, but how do we do it without gettin’ the cops around? It was a boner to fire those shots. We better not fire any more.”

“We do it like this—” There followed a buzz that Wilson couldn’t hear, strain his ears as he would.

He heard steps, heard one of the cars start, heard it come in fast toward the shed.

There was a sudden splintering grind, and half of one wall was out. At the same time, light swept on from a dozen arc lamps in the yard.

In the white blaze, Cole looked into the muzzles of half a dozen guns.

Short and sweet, was Cole’s grim inward comment. I just start with The Avenger — and I’m stopped almost in the next minute.

Because, of course, no one could get to him fast enough to help him out!

One of the men with the guns did a surprising thing. He cried out suddenly, threw up both arms, and slumped to the ground with his gun sagging from his fingers as he fell.

The others — including Wilson — stared in open-mouthed, amazement. Nobody was around save the man’s own pals. Yet he looked as if he had suddenly been clubbed down. And to bear out that impression, there was a shallow gash on the top of his head from which blood dripped lightly.

Before the paralysis of surprise could break, another man fell to the ground, flat on his face. And then a third man screamed and grabbed at his ear. The ear was half gone, as if a knife had appeared out of thin air and sliced it in two.

“The rest of you,” came a calm, icy voice, “put your hands up. Drop your guns.”

Instead, the survivors made a wild dash for another shed, twenty yards off. And Cole heard the voice again. The Avenger’s voice.

“Cole! Yard gate!”

Cole looked around for the ex-prisoner of this crew and couldn’t see him. The man, it seemed, had gone out the back where the planks yawned wide, clipped a man with a gun on the way, and was now free.

Wilson sprang for the gate. It was The Avenger. He still couldn’t believe it.

“Did you fly?” he gasped. “I can’t see how you got way out here so soon after I radioed the location of this yard.”

“I was beginning an investigation of my own,” said Dick Benson, pale eyes cold as polar ice. “I was in a fast car when I got your first message. I started for Beall’s estate immediately, and went on past and here when your second message came. I was within five miles of this spot when you gave the exact location.”

Dick Benson was looking at something in his right hand. It was a weapon, the strangest Cole had ever seen. It was a streamlined little .22 revolver, equipped with a silencer of The Avenger’s own invention. In Dick’s eyes was something nearer to anger than Cole had seen there before.

“Missed!” Dick said. “I aimed to crease that third man; glance a bullet off the top of his skull and knock him unconscious instead of killing him — and I missed. I hit his ear instead.”

Cole followed him into a car, a big, rather shabby-looking coupé that looked like an old lady’s car; but it had a power plant like that of a locomotive under the innocently worn hood.

“I don’t think you have any complaints about missing,” Cole said. “Shooting at that range, by electric light, you could hardly expect to make an eighth-inch shot like that, three times running.”

“I have to make them every time,” said Dick, colorless eyes somber. “If I miss once in a while, I might kill a man. And I missed back there!”

Cole could only stare at the almost legendary figure at the wheel of the speeding coupé. So feared by the underworld, famous in so many branches of activity, and yet so young! Bitterly self-reproaching himself because he could not perform a miraculous feat of marksmanship ten times out of ten, instead of only two times out of three.

He stared sideways at the pale, icily calm eyes and was almost afraid. To hide it, he began telling what had happened: the watch on Beall’s home, the brush with the gang, the kidnaped man, whose identity he still did not know.