The morning papers had all details of the chief’s being held in the clink for murder. The names of Dick Benson’s aides would be publicized, too. It was no time to get picked up for anything — even for disturbing the peace.
They started back to Manhattan with long faces. They had watched all night, gone without breakfast, and taken on a gang of crooks — with no other result than to inadvertently help the man they’d been trailing get away from them.
“Everything’s wrong!” wailed Nellie. “And on top of that, the chief is behind bars for maybe weeks or…”
But they found out that was a mistake when they got to Bleek Street.
“Well, for—” gasped Smitty, as the man with the colorless deadly eyes walked toward them in the huge top-floor room.
Nearby, Josh and Mac grinned at their confusion.
Josh and Mac had reported on Sharnoff, after being equally surprised to find The Avenger here when the papers all gave his pitcure behind bars at headquarters.
Nellie told what had happened.
“The plane was heading north, last we saw it,” she concluded.
Dick’s black-cropped head nodded.
“North. And Josh and Mac say Sharnoff Haygar also took a plane north — an amphibian — after mentioning an island off the Maine coast. The men I tangled with were going north by boat. And there seems to be a Goram Haygar, of the same mysterious clan, living on an island off Maine. So our next step is pretty clear.”
Smitty nodded his somewhat battered head.
“Haygar’s Island,” he said. “It looks as though there is to be a kind of family reunion up there, and I, for one, want to be in on it!”
CHAPTER XI
Wholesale Disaster
The next night, after the moonlit one in which a pack of dogs had reduced a man to a quivering mass of meat, was cloudy and dark. There was wind, and the sea was choppy.
Nevertheless, ten miles south of Haygar’s island, at about ten o’clock at night, a plane began gliding down with the clear intention of landing on the treacherous cross waves.
The plane was very high. Its pilot cut the motor and began using it like an overgrown glider, settling on as long a slant as possible, soaring up now and then as an air current could be taken advantage of.
The pilot was The Avenger. In the cabin with him were Smitty, MacMurdie, and Josh.
The Avenger had been zooming around in the plane half the day, about fifty miles to the south where they would be over the horizon from the island.
They had been waiting for that boat from which Benson had been callously tossed with a hundred pounds of iron as an anchor.
The boat had finally showed, and the plane had gone out to sea till darkness came. Then The Avenger had calculated its speed, waited till it was about due to dock, and turned back.
Now, he was gliding silently down, without lights, from a great distance, to land near the island at about the same time.
“I wonder if the other Haygars are already here,” said Smitty, peering down and ahead through night glasses to get a glimpse of the boat’s running lights.
“Probably they are,” came the calm voice of the man with the flaring, colorless eyes. “They came by plane, as far as we know.”
“And Carmella Haygar?”
The Avenger shrugged a little.
“There is no telling whether she is here, too. She dropped completely out of sight after leaving Bleek Street.”
MacMurdie was frowning and peering out into the darkness with bleak blue eyes.
“What d’ye suppose is behind this gold-medallion stuff?” he ventured.
“Remembering the former greatness of the Haygar family,” said Benson, “it is pretty easy to guess the nature of the thing behind the golden disks.”
Mac subsided into puzzled silence. It might be easy for Benson to guess; it certainly wasn’t easy for Mac!
The Avenger’s infallible pale eyes kept the lights of the boat far on his left. He saw that the plane was going to land before the boat quite reached the island. But that was all right.
He coasted, with a soft air song over the wings, to a point beyond the island, whereas the boat was heading toward the center of it, the dock being there on the sea side.
The plane ripped softly over the tips of the waves, then settled. The shore of the island was quite close. The wind was steady from the southwest — a factor The Avenger had counted on.
“Stay with the plane, Josh,” Benson said. “Let it drift north and to sea until the island is at least five miles away. Then take off and stay around the mainland, nearby, till you get a radio message from us.”
Josh Newton’s dark face registered disappointment at leaving the place where a great deal of excitement was probably going to occur. But The Avenger’s orders were obeyed to the letter by his indomitable little band.
Smitty and Benson and Mac stepped on a wing, put most of their clothes in waterproof bags, and slid into the water. They started swimming toward the dark shore while the plane, already only an indistinguishable dark patch in the night, began drifting slowly north and east till it should get out of earshot.
The three waded silently ashore and put on their clothes. Dick began walking down toward the dock. Smitty’s vast hand suddenly clutched his arm.
There had been a faint sound behind them.
They turned, and the sound continued and became louder. It was a scratching noise, and then it was followed by a snarling to make a man’s hair stand up on the back of his neck.
“Dogs,” whispered Mac.
The owners of the snarls came into view.
“Not dogs,” Mac corrected himself in a low tone as he got a good look at the two mastiffs racing over a clear bit of beach at them. “Mon, they’re prehistorrric monsters!”
The Avenger whipped Mike out of the slim leg holster. But he didn’t think he’d have to use the little special gun, for Mac’s bony right hand was fishing in a large coat pocket.
The two dogs were near enough to leap. Mac made two quick, deft casts. With each flick of his hand something small and shining shot out, to burst on the ground just ahead of the two dogs.
The things were lead-foil capsules containing the deadliest gas Mac had ever contrived. Considering he had invented over fifty quick-dispersing gases of varying deadliness, this was saying a great deal.
One of the dogs stopped as suddenly as if he had run into a stone wall. His barrel-like head went up, neck straining back in silent agony as his wet muzzle picked up the gas and death filtered swiftly into the brain. Then the dog dropped.
The other came on. The gas capsule hadn’t burst in quite the right spot to get it.
Smitty came a step ahead of the other two. He waited, great arms spread, and the dog leaped.
Hands like steam dredges closed on the dog’s throat. Arms like walking beams held the writhing canine body out straight.
The mastiff’s clawing paws ripped up and down in an effort to disembowel this grim enemy, but they couldn’t quite reach. The muzzle quivered and strained, but no sound came out.
Smitty held the violent hundred-and-forty-pound bundle of four-legged death at arm’s length for over a minute, long past the point where the struggling had ceased. Then he dropped it.
“Poor devils,” said Mac, gazing at the two dogs.
But it had had to be done.
The four went on down the shoreline toward the dock.
The dock jutted from the shore at a point where there was only a five-yard strip between the water, at high tide, and a cliff that went up fifty feet or more like the side of a house. There was no chance to get near the dock without being seen, so The Avenger began climbing the cliff two hundred yards above the dock.
The boat was just drifting in when they reached the top, next to a zigzag flight of steps leading from the water to the top of the cliff. They could barely hear the boat bump and see men leap out and secure her.