Tuned for Murder

CHAPTER X Two Faces of Death!

Death’s face loomed close in that dark basement under the left wing of the Cranlowe castle.

There was the cellar room, perhaps forty by sixty feet, illuminated only by an unshaded electric bulb at each end. There was the curious chasm running through the center, lengthwise; beginning with a mere crack in the earth at one end of the basement, broadening to ten-foot width in the center, and narrowing to a crack again at the other end.

And there, on the brink, was the man pretending to be John Blandell, with two men gripping each arm.

“Have you anything to say before you’re thrown in there?” snapped Cranlowe.

“Just this,” said Benson quietly. “I’m a friend, not an enemy. I came out here to help you.”

“You sneaked out, made up as an old friend of mine and worked your way in here like a snake into a hole — because you wanted to ‘help’ me?” jeered Cranlowe. “That’s a good one! You came out here to steal my secret. And now you’re going to pay for it with your life. But I’ll take last messages, if you like.”

“There are no last messages,” said Benson steadily.

The cold wind from the river, far below, was dank on his made-up, paralyzed face. The four men looked at Cranlowe, who nodded. Their muscles tightened to force this man over the edge of the chasm.

Cranlowe yelled suddenly. But so fast had it all occurred, that his yell followed the thing he yelled about at least three seconds after it had happened.

Only about five feet eight, The Avenger weighed hardly a hundred and sixty-five pounds. But every one of those pounds had that queer muscle-quality now and then found in a great athlete which is more effective than muscle-quantity can ever be.

With the tensing of the grip of the four, Benson had moved, and moved fast! Backward — not forward. Had he swept his arms forward he might have thrown a couple of the four into the pit, and he didn’t want to do that. They were acting out of loyalty. They did not deserve death.

He swept his arms backward with a suddenness and violence that no one could have dreamed lay in his average-sized body. One of the four holding him fell flat. Another had his grip torn loose, staggered back a few feet, and fought with waving arms to keep his balance. The other two still retained a precarious grip on arms that seemed to have turned to steel bars in their hands.

Benson flung his arms forward, now. He was far enough away from the chasm. And the two remaining men smashed together with a force that knocked both breathless.

The man who had managed to keep his balance leaped in with sawed-off shotgun swinging down like a club! But the figure he aimed at had slid two feet to one side, like an elusive shadow. The gun stock grazed past harmlessly and smashed against the earth floor before the man could stop it. The stock splintered.

The man who had fallen was aiming his gun. Benson jumped for him. Not angry, he was simply trying to get out of a deadly situation with as little hurt as possible. His heels jammed down on the stubby barrel, and it discharged its flood of slugs into the earthen floor.

Benson kept on toward the door after the flashing movement. He seemed to flow toward the exit, rather than run like a normal man. Cranlowe got in his way.

Benson didn’t harm the inventor at all. He caught a thrusting arm and whirled the man around, and then he was at the door. He leaped out, and slammed the portal. There was a bolt on it. He shot that and ran on. The men in the cellar pounded fiercely. Then there was a shot, and half the panels splintered.

One more shotgun blast, and they were free. Benson raced up the stairs.

There was apparently no way out of here. Armed men in the house. Armed men roaming the grounds. Savage dogs loose. Iron fence encircling the place. But The Avenger had picked the one way out even before he had been dragged to the chasm.

The garage of the place was next to the north wing, attached to the castlelike house. He ran down a hall in that direction, felling a servant who first gaped at him and then tried to draw guns. He leaped over the body, slammed through a door at the end of the corridor and raced into the garage.

There was a roadster and a large sedan. The sedan sagged lowest on its tires. Armor-plated, bulletproofed, built to protect a man who had jeopardized his life with an announcement of his super war weapon.

Benson got in and kicked the starter. The motor roared to life. The garage door into the house flung open, and one man fired a shotgun; another let go with an automatic in each hand. The slugs spanged against steel and bulletproof glass — and did not penetrate.

The Avenger had the heavy car rolling. The big front door of the garage was only half opened. No chance to roll it back. So Benson hit it with the car, and tore it half off on his way out! He sped down the driveway.

Ahead of him was the iron fence, and the great iron gate. He had slipped off the special eye-shells as he ran up the basement stairs, because the tissue-thin things might be broken in a fight and injure his eyes. Now his unmasked eyes, colorless and icy and deadly, stared at the gate ahead of him and at the fence beside it.

He made his decision in about a tenth of a second. The fence didn’t look as strong as that gate. So, twenty feet from the gate, he whirled the heavy car to the left.

It jammed into the iron fence beside the gate with a whanggg that could have been heard for half a mile. Jammed into it, rolled through with a sound like tearing paper magnified a thousand times, and then sagged at the front end and stopped like a tired rhinoceros coming to its knees. Both front wheels had been jammed sideways and back, putting the car out of commission.

So many men were running down the driveway after him that it looked like a young army. Ahead of them were loping the dogs.

Benson got out of Cranlowe’s car and jumped into the rented one that he had left at the gate, seeming to be a whisking streak of light rather than a man. He started away from the gate.

Not bulletproofed, this car. Just an ordinary automobile, He took a long look at the straight road ahead, noting that there was a ditch at each side not deep enough to wreck a car but quite pronounced enough to let you know if you hit it. Then he slid out from behind the wheel, and down.

Crouched on the floor between gear-shift lever and right front door, he drove with a hand stretched up to the wheel. Drove blind, with the car dipping into the shallow ditch first on one side and then the other and being brought back to the unseen road again by the deft steely hand.

The back window of the sedan flashed out. The windshield seemed to explode and disappear! Holes ripped into back and front cushions. Then there was neither sound nor violence. He had gotten out of range.

He raised back up to the driver’s seat just in time to avoid a head-on collision with another car in which women were screaming at sight of an apparently driverless machine rocketing toward them. He roared on till the shot-riddled gas tank was empty; then he left the car and went back to town in an obliging farmer’s produce truck.

In a grim, dark cellar, the face of death grinned fiendishly from a deep, black chasm which led to an underground river. But death has many faces. It showed another the next afternoon, at a place where its grimacing features had been seen before.

At the Garfield Gear plant.

Josh Newton had been told to look around the plant, and keep an eye on the executives. On the face of it, that would seem to be an impossible job. The place was guarded and fenced because of the war orders it handled. How could a Negro get in and watch the officials? But Josh handled it very simply.

He picked up a shoe-shine stand in the morning; the kind of portable box in which are polishes, brushes and rags, and on which is a foot-standard. He showed up at the plant gate at noon. He asked humbly for permission to take care of the shines within the office — and got it.

So now he was in the general office, at work. He had shined the shoes of the superintendent, a young hard-jawed driver who barked orders to underlings while he shifted his feet for Josh to work on. He had taken care of the black high-tops of the old office manager. And now he was in the office of the president, Mr. Jenner.

There were three men in the office — Jenner, Josh and the anemic-looking secretary. And Jenner was dictating a letter while Josh began on the right foot.

Josh tapped the right foot, to indicate that he was through with that. Jenner raised it, and then the left, while Josh slid the stand under it. And with the move, the plant president seemed, for the first time, to become really conscious of the Negro’s presence.

“Are you a newcomer to Garfield City?” he asked pleasantly.

“Yas, suh,” replied Josh, with a wide grin.

Though an honor grad of Tuskeegee and as intelligent as most professors, Josh always acted as people expect a Negro to act — when he was with strangers. Good protective coloration, he called it.

“You seem to be the first with initiative enough to think of working up a little business out here. It’s a nice idea, too. We’re on the edge of town, and it’s hard to get in for a shine.”

“Ah hopes to give full sat’sfaction, suh,” said Josh, polishing industriously.

“Is there anything else, Mr. Jenner?” asked Grace, the president’s secretary.

“No, that’s all,” Jenner said.

Stanley Grace went out to type the letter to Washington.

“I’m sure you’ll give satisfaction,” said Jenner to Josh. “And I hope you will come regularly — be, in a way, one of the plant employees.”

“Thank you, suh.”

Jenner’s smile deepened a little.

“It might not be a bad idea for you to look over some of the plant you’ll be visiting regularly,” he said. “I have a little time. Would you like to see it?”

“Very much, suh,” said Josh, who was thoroughly bewildered behind his sleepy-looking face, but naturally didn’t want to refuse such a thing.

It all seemed extremely kindly and democratic.

Jenner led the way through departments where gears were being stamped, ground or cut, depending on precision required and temper of alloy used. He went leisurely on into the plant’s big foundry.

“We make all our own castings,” the president said genially to the increasingly perplexed Negro. “See — there’s a cauldron that will handle forty tons of molten steel.”

The huge kettle in question was being swung by a crane at the moment. It came toward a row of forms where the metal was to be poured into molds. Next to the forms was a stairway, up an end wall, with a catwalk about ten feet up.

“We can see them pour from the catwalk,” said Jenner pleasantly. “It’s quite a sight. Come on up.”

Josh decided it was the most peculiar thing that had ever happened to him. But he went up, with Jenner beside him, talking, as if piloting any regular plant visitor around.

They got to the catwalk as the swinging cauldron of molten metal stopped over the forms. It was terrifically hot on the catwalk; the cauldron was very near. Josh stared down into its white-hot incandescence.

Jenner smiled beside him. And then his arms shot out.

“Look out! Don’t fall!” he screamed.

And he pushed Josh powerfully off the catwalk, straight toward the terrible cauldron a little below and beyond!

It was the last thing in the world Josh was expecting. It caught him completely off guard. It was simply impossible that any man, high or low, would have the ruthless nerve to try murder in a shop full of men. Impossible-but it had happened.

The only thing that saved Josh, where it looked as if nothing could possibly have saved him, was the fact that tons of molten metal in a ponderous pot need suspension. A great chain, in this case, stretched taut and quivering by the weight it bore.

Josh’s body shot out and down toward the white-hot, molten surface. And it seemed as if he must plummet into it. But Josh had the strength and quickness of a black panther.

In midair, his body, like a cat’s body, turned a little so that he was facing in the direction of his wild fall. His arms snapped out and his hands clawed for the chain.

There was an instant of searing heat and reeking gas as he shot over the cauldron. There was an instant of blinding pain as his hands gripped the chain, almost red-hot itself. Then he had swung himself beyond, twenty feet past the waiting forms on the foundry floor.

He lit running like a black streak, but with his face taking on a grayish tinge as he realized just what he had almost come to. He kept on running, out of the foundry, through the plant and out the gate.

This face of death — where death seemed utterly fantastic and out of picture — had worn so fiendish a look that Josh knew he’d be a long time getting over it. But that knowledge didn’t slow him any as he sped to report to the man with the white hair and blazing, colorless eyes that was to Josh like some kind of God.