He was in a dining room. The table had been pushed against a far wall, leaving most of the room clear. In the center of it was a chair. And to it was roped MacMurdie.
The Scot was bound at arms and legs and waist to the heavy chair. He was gagged. At the sides of the cloth that went around his head to keep the gag in place, his large red ears stuck out like distress signals. Over the gag his frosty blue eyes blazed.
But there was more in them than fury or fear. There was in them some kind of terribly urgent message.
Benson stepped toward him — and two doors opened.
From one, at the side hall, came two men. From the other, opening into a front room, another stepped. And then, from the swing door he had just entered, a fourth appeared.
Each of the four had a gun. And in the eyes of each was murder. The whole thing had been a trap, and a devilishly perfect one.
Benson stood stone-still. To have done otherwise, with four guns pointing at his body at close range, would have been silly. But his eyes were pale flame; and each of the four gunmen, meeting that pallid, deadly glance, felt something like a shock strike him.
MacMurdie’s face — what you could see of it for the gag — was one bony, red picture of contrition at having got Benson into this jam. But Benson didn’t stare at it long. He looked at the four killers.
They closed in even more on him.
“Go over him,” said one, the tallest.
One of the other three stepped to Benson, and around him. Coming up warily from the back, so Benson couldn’t possibly grab him and use him as a shield, he ran his hands over Benson’s body from neck to knees.
“No rod,” he said, “The guy’s a sap.”
The tall man jerked his head to another of the dining-room chairs. There were two in the set of eight that had arms. Mac sat in one. Benson was to sit in the other.
He sat down. Again, it would have been crazy not to. And Benson didn’t do crazy things. From behind a rope was looped around his body, and he was all through.
They tied him at wrists and ankles and waist to the chair, as MacMurdie was tied. The Scots eyes were terrible in their fury and self-reproach as he watched. One of the killers grinned and leveled his gun.
The tall man knocked his arm aside.
“You dummy! If somebody found a slug in one of ’em, the whole show would be off.”
So they didn’t shoot the gray man with the white face that, even at such a moment, did not move a muscle. And that was their mistake.
“Scatter around, you guys. You know what to do.”
The men left, swiftly, going out different doors. Each door was bolted as they went. Benson and the Scot could possibly move around a little, taking the chairs with them, but that, the gang thought, wouldn’t do any good with the doors locked.
And that was another mistake.
The moment they were alone, Benson began shoving his chair. With his ankles tied to the chair legs, he could only move the chair by pushing, a little at a time, with the tips of his toes. It was like trying to push an automobile only with the tips of your fingers. But Benson had steel cables for muscles. The calves of his legs rippled — and the chair moved along the floor.
He got to MacMurdie and edged around so that his left side was at the Scot’s right. Then he tipped back in his chair. Not just a little — all the way back.
The chair banged to the floor and left him with his head down and his legs up. His left leg, strapped to the chair leg, was almost parallel with MacMurdie’s right arm, strapped to the arm of the chair.
One of the doors opened in a hurry as a man, drawn by the sound of the falling chair, poked his head in to be sure everything was all right. The man grinned murderously at Benson’s helpless, upside-down position, and went out again.
But if Benson’s position was helpless at the moment, it was designed to bring help swiftly. And the quickwitted Scot caught on at once.
MacMurdie could move his hand only a little, what with the rope around his wrist. But he could move it enough to inch Benson’s trousers leg up over his calf — and get at Ike, the razorlike throwing dagger, at the bulge of Benson’s leg.
He slashed the rope at Benson’s left ankle; then, as Benson whirled the chair around with his free leg, cut the rope at his right. Legs untied, by a miracle of coordination, Benson tipped upright again, chair and all.
They were free in half a minute after that.
“Mon, I’m so sorry I dragged ye here,” Mac whispered, when his gag was off. “They caught me. I got loose for a minute and got to a phone. I didn’t realize ’twas just what they wanted — for me to call you.”
“Forget it, Mac,” Benson said. “We’d better get out the window—”
The swinging door from the kitchen flew open. A man stood on the threshold, startled eyes lining on Benson’s chest over the sights of an automatic. Behind the man something blue and misty curled up in the kitchen.
Benson’s arm came forward with seemingly no back-swing as a preliminary at all. Ike flew from his whipping hand. The slim, deadly needle of steel with the light, hollow handle, streaked almost as fast as a bullet toward the man in the doorway.
The man had been squeezing the trigger. He tried to shoot and side-step, too, and accomplished nothing constructive in either direction. His shot missed the man with the white, dead face, and his body did not miss Ike. The knife ended its whispering flight in the fleshy part of the man’s right arm.
“Pete—” the man yelled.
MacMurdie’s mallet-like, bony fist got him then. The Scot knocked him cold, but the harm was done. There were running steps.
No time for the window, now. Benson and MacMurdie backed up to a door apiece, so that the swinging panels would hide their bodies, and waited. And as they waited they smelled smoke and heard the ominous crackle of flames licking at dry wood.
They didn’t wait long. The other three men were in the room in answer to the cry for help in only a few seconds. All came in the door behind which Benson lurked.
The tall man snapped his gun up to kill the Scot. Benson’s flashing toe cracked his wrist and sent the gun flying. Another shot at MacMurdie, too hastily, and whirled to shoot Benson down. He went down himself, with a broken jaw. The third man ran.
“Get him!”
MacMurdie didn’t need the command. The Scot’s bony figure was flying after the fellow. His huge feet were eating up the hallway three yards to the gunman’s one. He got him at the front door. The man went down — and stayed down.
And then it was time to get out of there.
In four different places, the gang had set the Andrews house afire. The house, of wood throughout with a shingled exterior, would go up in twenty minutes or less, razed to the foundations. To speed the fire, gasoline had been used. That was why the men hadn’t shot MacMurdie or Benson. The two were supposed to have been consumed untraceably in the flames. But their bodies might be found, and bullets in them would have tipped the show that the deaths were murder and not accidental, due to fire.
“Out!” snapped Mac, fumbling with the front door.
“These men, Mac!”
On the Scot’s face was a terrible look. He stared at the nearest flames, and he thought of his drugstore, bombed with his wife and boy in it. Then he thought of the trip to the undertaker for wife and son.
“Let ’em burn!” he rasped. “Death’s too good for rats like these!”
“But death by fire, Mac—”
“It’s still too good for ’em. Come on out!”
Benson caught the Scot’s furious arm.
“Come along. We’ll carry them out.”
“I’ll na’ have naught to do wi’ the skurlies!” swore the Scot, burr broadening with the stress of the moment.