The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (4 page)

“That might have been a signal,” he said, “if the thing happened to your father that you evidently fear. That is—kidnaping!”

“I’m sure of it,” nodded Lila. “Something dreadful has happened to Dad. I
know
it!”

“But how,” puzzled Josh, “could a kidnap gang get into and out of a place which is without entrance or exit?”

“That,” suggested Dick quietly, “may probably not be cleared up till the rest of this odd business can be explained. Go on, Lila.”

“I wanted to do something right away to help Dad,” said the girl, “but I didn’t know which way to turn. Then I remembered that Edwin Ritter, the well-known politician, is one of Dad’s closest friends. I went to Mr. Ritter’s Hudson River home to see if he had heard anything from my father. He had not. I left the place, drove several miles along the river toward New York and found I had been trailed to Mr. Ritter’s. A gang caught me and almost killed me. They drove my coupé into the river, with me at the wheel. They thought I was unconscious, but I wasn’t. I swim pretty well; so I managed to get out of the car, underwater, and swim away in the dark.”

Smitty’s vast hands clenched, giving some slight hint of what would happen should he ever catch any of the members of a gang that would do such a thing.

“After I got away,” said Lila, “I hurried and got my dog, Prince. I brought it back to the spot where the gang had left me; thinking Prince might be able to trail the men to their hide-out—”

“They were on foot?” interrupted The Avenger, pale eyes like ice in moonlight.

“No, they were in a truck. Of course, Prince couldn’t trail that. But I thought it barely possible that one or more of them might have gone to the gang lair on foot, if the place happened to be nearby. And I guess that must have happened because Prince led me to a house in Scarsdale, a short distance away. And it was there that . . . that—”

“That it was killed,” nodded The Avenger. “Did you get into the house?”

“I just got the door open. It was unlocked. The . . . the rabbits jumped out and went for Prince. I thought I was seeing things or going crazy.”

“You have the address of the place?”

Lila told it to him. Dick turned to Mac, with the unspoken command to go out and look the place over. Mac left. The Avenger turned to Lila again.

“You said you’d sent for Packer, your servant, to come down from the Maine laboratory to your town apartment?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Lila. “He should be there by now.”

“Bring him here, Cole,” Dick said to Wilson.

And then the door opened and Nellie Gray came in.

Nellie Gray was another of The Avenger’s aides. She was tiny—barely five feet tall and weighing a little over one hundred pounds. You’d never dream, to look at her pink and white blondness that she was as valued a crime fighter, in her way, as even the giant Smitty was in his.

“What goes on?” demanded Nellie indignantly. “Are you leaving me out of some excitement? Can’t a girl go out to get a new hat without being shoved in the discard?”

“Yeah,” said Smitty, “if you thought less of excitement and more of your neck you wouldn’t always be getting into messes and make me come and get you out again.”

“Why, you,” gasped Nellie, “you ten-ton truck! If I had a nickel for every time I’ve saved
your
hide—”

“Tell her about the rabbits,” Josh broke in impatiently.

So Nellie was brought up to date, and she fussed sympathetically over Lila Morel. Then Wilson came back with the Morel servant, Packer, in tow.

And Packer disagreed with Lila.

“I think your father left the laboratory of his own free will, Miss Lila,” he said mildly. As always there was the faint smile on his lips. “I don’t think there is anything wrong.”

“But we haven’t heard from him, and there was that attack on me,” said Lila.

Packer shrugged.

“Do you remember last year when he left the New York apartment without explanation and was gone for six weeks?”

“That was different,” said Lila miserably.

Dick Benson took over, pale eyes on Packer’s.

“Do you happen to know what Morel was working on at the time he disappeared?” he asked. “Miss Morel doesn’t know.”

“Neither do I, sir,” said Packer. But Benson’s pale, infallible eyes caught a flicker of the man’s pupils.

“You do not
know,
perhaps, but you have—guessed?”

Packer hesitated, looking into the pale orbs. Then he nodded. “I have come to tentative conclusions.”

“And they are?”

“I think Mr. Morel was working along bio-chemical lines. Something requiring the use of live animals. He injected something into guinea pigs just before he left the laboratory that night.”

“What effect did the injections have?”

“None that I could see, at the time,” said Packer. “But I left shortly after that, at Miss Lila’s bidding, to inquire around the country for Mr. Morel. Then I came to New York.”

Benson nodded and stopped questioning the man. The Avenger seemed satisfied as to his complete innocence, as far as you could tell from his icy, inscrutable eyes.

Mac came back after awhile. He shook his sandy head.

“The place at Scarsdale is cleared out,” he said. “My guess is that it wasn’t lived in for a long time. These men who tackled Miss Morel must have been in only once or twice, using it as a temporary headquarters.”

It was then that The Avenger got the telephone call about the pigeons. The call was from the public library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. It was made by a sharp-eyed newsboy, who, with hundreds of his fellows in the great city, worked with The Avenger by always calling the Bleek Street headquarters if anything queer were observed.

And, Heaven knew, this was queer enough!

“Boss,” came the lad’s voice, “this is Stinky Williams. The pigeons down here at the library are goin’ nuts.”

“How do you mean?” asked The Avenger.

“They think they’re eagles or somethin’. They’re fightin’ each other, and even going after people on the sidewalks.”

“What?”

“As I live and breathe,” said the boy earnestly. “The men bat ’em off and don’t know whether to laugh or run. A lot of dames is hysterical. I tell you them birds are goin’ completely screwy. Fightin’ pigeons! Ain’t that one for the book?”

“I’ll be down immediately,” said Dick Benson.

There are always throngs of people in front of the New York Public Library’s main branch. Not that the city is so starved for book learning; but the building happens to be in almost the exact center of town.

The broad walk in front of the library was in an uproar, now, crowded densely, with more crowds coming all the time to see what was up. Some people were laughing and ducking around. Others looked stupefied with amazement. All were staring upward.

Through the crowd and around the fringes, were traffic cops, sweating with a fruitless effort to get people to break it up and move along.

Dick Benson got to the curb, with Wilson beside him. And then the two got a taste of what it was all about.

A pigeon charged them!

That sounds funny, but it wasn’t.

The bird came at Wilson like a mad-winged javelin, its little red eyes gleaming like jewels. Like a thrown projectile, it struck almost before Cole could get his hands up; and on Cole’s cheek a long shallow gash appeared where the bird’s beak had ripped past.

The Avenger could move so fast it baffled the eye.

He moved that way now, one hand going out like light. The hand caught the bird as deftly as a hawk snares a chick.

Regretfully, Benson flipped his hand and broke the bird’s neck. He had to have it for experimentation. He slipped the dead pigeon into a big inner pocket, then went to the nearest cop.

Every police officer in the country either knew The Avenger or knew of him, by now. The man nodded respectfully.

“Move along now, will you?” he yelled at the milling people. “Haven’t the lot of you ever seen pigeons before? There have been pigeons at the library as long as the joint’s been standing.”

“But not like these,” he confessed in a lower tone to Dick Benson. “Do you know what’s causing this?”

The Avenger shook his head, and all three men ducked as a crazy bird lanced at them out of the blue. Once more Dick’s hand darted out, fast as the dart of a hummingbird. Another pigeon was caught; but this one he got alive. It went into the inner pocket, where it struggled but could do no harm.

“Not all of the birds are like that, I see,” said Dick, gazing up at the building ledges.

“No, sir,” said the cop. “Just some of them. The devil’s in ’em, all right.” A couple of normal pigeons fell from the ledges, pecked to death by their maddened fellows. The cop looked as if he might cross his fingers any minute. “Move on, all you guys— Oh, I beg your pardon; I didn’t mean
you.”

The last person addressed was a man who had suddenly turned up at the cop’s elbow, and whom the cop treated almost as deferentially as he had The Avenger. He was a tall man, unusually handsome, with graying hair and fine features and an orator’s mobile mouth.

“Hello, Ritter,” said Benson.

Wilson blinked. This man seemed to know everyone of prominence.

Edwin Ritter, well-known politician, stared at The Avenger, then nodded affably.

“How are you, Benson? Quite a curious thing, all this, isn’t it?” He waved a hand at the gyrating birds around the ledges, then ducked as one winged at his head.

“Quite curious,” Dick agreed, voice even. “Did you come here expressly to see it?”

“No,” said Ritter. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood and saw the crowd. Like most of the rest here, I came out of curiosity, to see what was attracting all the attention.”

Benson’s coat writhed and pulsed with the struggles of the live pigeon. Ritter stared.

“What in the world—” he gasped.

“I’m taking one of these abnormal birds to my laboratory for experimentation,” said Dick.

“I wouldn’t think,” smiled Ritter, “that a man as prominent scientifically as you are would be turned to so small a task.”

“It might not be small,” The Avenger said.

Ritter was borne off on a wave of movement, then.

Benson and Cole went back to the Bleek Street laboratory with the one live pigeon and the one dead one.

Funny to some in the crowd, frightening to others, the scene seemed ominous in the extreme to Benson.

Pigeons attacking everything in sight! It was as mad as it was for rabbits to attack a dog.

And The Avenger had an idea that the two madnesses might possibly have some connection.

In a small plane, Smitty and Lila Morel neared the Maine laboratory of Lila’s father.

Dick, before going to the library to have a look at the incredible pigeons, had sent the giant, with Lila, to look around that laboratory a bit.

“You say there’s no landing place near the laboratory?” Smitty asked the girl.

“There’re only thick woods all around,” said Lila. “Thick woods and wolves and black flies.”

“I take it you didn’t enjoy your trips there.”

“I didn’t,” confessed Lila. “I’m a city gal, I guess. No wilderness for me. But Dad needed me to take care of him—away from a test tube he was as helpless as a child—so I always went.”

“Would the clearing around the lab be big enough to land in?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Lila. “We’ll have to walk it from the nearest village.”

“Or hire a car,” said Smitty hopefully.

“There’s no road to the lab,” said Lila. “Dad let it grow up with young trees as soon as the place was built and equipped and there was no more need for trucking. The only way through the woods is on foot.”

Smitty sighed. The big fellow was a Samson by nature and not by exercise. He didn’t like exercise, except the kind requiring huge fists to batter against the faces of crooks. Just out of college, Smitty had been framed into prison by a smooth crook. His main pleasure in life would always be taking that out on all other crooks within reach and making them sorry they’d been born.

The two didn’t get to the clearing around the lab till dusk. They’d heard Lila’s wolves plenty by then. She stayed very close to the big fellow and looked very thankful for his gigantic size. Smitty swelled his biceps a little under her clutching hand. There was only one girl in the world for him. That was petite Nellie Gray. But that didn’t keep him from admiring other beauty once in awhile.

Lila went up to the gate.

“I thought you said the gate could only be opened from inside the laboratory,” Smitty said rather dumbly.

“You can’t open it from the inside when everybody’s on the outside,” Lila pointed out. “When we leave, we set the inner mechanism so that a secret latch out here will open the gate for us to get back in.”

Smitty looked at the fence. A full two stories high, of heavy mesh, with barbed wire slanting outward on the top. It was as impossible to negotiate as the fence around a munitions factory. The big fellow didn’t see how anyone could ever disappear from within
that
barrier!

Lila twisted something near the ground beside the gate. There was a small flash as the current was shut off. Then her hand moved again.