But in the flaming gray eyes of Benson was command. And in a moment MacMurdie shrugged.
“Ye’re a fool, mon! They’d have done for ye. Now ’tis providence that their own fire should do for them.”
They carried the four out. Down the street a fire siren screamed. Benson laid the four on the lawn and went through their pockets, hands moving so fast they seemed two pale blurs.
There was only one thing he bothered to take from any of them; only one thing of significance. That was a postcard. There was a picture of blue water and an impossibly beautiful island on the card. On the other side, under special-delivery stamp, which is a rarity on a postcard, were two words:
Insulin. Fast.
It was signed “Murdock.”
The two left. As the fire engines drew up before the Andrews home, which was too far gone already to be saved, Benson and MacMurdie were speeding toward the hotel in the fast roadster.
There Benson picked up the telephone. As he used it, he stared at the postcard. The picture was of some island called Farquer’s Knob. But the postmark was Isle Royale.
Benson called Mrs. Martineau’s home and got the name of her regular physician. Then he called the physician. He repeated the process with Andrews, Vincent and Hickock. And there he stopped and stared at Mac.
“Got it,” he said. “Lawrence Hickock suffers from diabetes — has to have insulin.”
He looked again at the card.
“Hickock, a prisoner of this gang, must have insulin or die. So they’ve sent for some. Sent the message from Isle Royale, which is near Kingston, Canada, in the Thousand Island district. The hide-out will be near there Mac. This clue is going to do the trick, I think. And we’d never have gotten it if we hadn’t dragged those rats out of the fire they richly deserved to die in. Virtue sometimes is its own reward.”
CHAPTER XIV
Isle Royale
On the Buffalo-Montreal plane, from which Smitty had been dropped with nothing but two thousand feet of air beneath him and the dark lake, there was scurrying activity. The man with the black pads of hair on his knuckles had seen, far ahead, a tiny pinpoint of light.
That light was the beacon pointing to the gang’s secret lair.
“O.K.,” he grunted.
The man with the perpetual, greasy smile, and another, went to the trunk in the tail. They opened it. The bound, gagged figure of a man showed in the trunk. But the man needn’t have been gagged. He was elderly, frail-looking, and was mercifully unconscious. It was Arnold Leon.
They lifted Leon from the trunk, and put a cork life preserver around his spare shoulders.
“Hurry it! Almost there!” called the pilot through the open front-compartment door, over the motors’ drone.
Hastily they strapped a parachute over Leon’s body. They carried him back to the trapdoor, which two other men already had open.
“Now!” called the pilot. The pinpoint of light was directly underneath.
They let the unconscious man slide down the chute formed by the slanting door.
“Hope that parachute opens all right,” said the man with the meaningless smile uneasily.
“They’ve always opened before. I guess this one will now.”
It had opened as they spoke, though, already far astern, it couldn’t be seen. Leon was dropping toward the surface of Lake Ontario, far below.
And after the huge white mushroom from which dangled Arnold Leon, another, darker shape was plummeting!
Smitty, when he had asked MacMurdie to draw the undercarriage of the S404 strictly to scale, had laid his desperate plan on one thing — the forward-slanting brace of the rear wheel making a tricycle landing gear for the plane. That brace, he believed, could be reached from the rear end of the trapdoor.
He had held his breath when the chloroform was jammed to mouth and nose. But even at that, he had gotten enough of the stuff at the end, when he couldn’t hold on any longer, to fog his brain with beginning unconsciousness.
The deadly slide down the door, however, had cleared his brain again. He was sliding, feet first, on his side. He cleared the door — and whirled.
The plane, traveling better than two hundred feet a second, whipped overhead the instant the air resistance slowed his own initial momentum. But even at that, Smitty caught the rear wheel brace by little more than the tips of his fingers. The screaming gale promptly snapped him back so that he trailed almost straight out like a pennant. But then he had his enormous hands squarely on the brace; and when those hands caught hold of something, they held.
He hung there, great muscles quivering with the strain, till he got over his sick feeling. One thing to plan a try like this — another entirely when it came to putting it into operation! Then he performed the appalling feat of hanging by one great hand while with the other he tore off his coat and a mass of padding in the back.
He shifted hands, and got the coat off over the other sleeve. On his back was revealed a compact parachute. That, plus padding to hide the outlines, was the “hump” on his back. The hump had been only incidentally for a disguise.
He saw the trapdoor come down again. From his place up almost against the belly of the transport, he could not see in the door any more than those inside could see him on the outside. But in a moment he saw a bound body slide through.
The man dropped, and a white cloud of canvas billowed out and broke the fall. Smitty instantly dropped, too, and plummeted down after the white cloud.
“Whew!” he said, shaken and beaded with cold sweat. If ever a guy had looked Death squarely in the eyes — and spat in his face—
He rocked in the swing of his own parachute. This chute was not white. It was black. It blended against the sky so well that only by a blotting out of stars could an observer from below spot it. And there were no stars tonight. A June rain was brewing, and the sky was lowering and black.
A parachute seems to float slowly but it actually falls all too fast. In a very short time the white parachute settled to one side of an unconscious elderly man who splashed deep and then bobbed up on the cork preserver.
Smitty, feet first, to minimize his own splash as much as possible, hit an instant later. He writhed from the ’chute cords at his vast shoulders.
The sound of a motorboat throbbed. It came swiftly toward the spot.
“There’s the ’chute — that white blot,” a man said, from the boat. “Hit it fast Murdock. We want him alive, at least for a little while.”
Smitty swam soundlessly in the ebony water till the boat, from the engine noise, was directly in front of him on a line with the unconscious man. He could see the floating body. In a few minutes he saw the boat, too — without lights, and only a black hulk against black sky and water. There was a grinding sound as the motor was reversed, bringing the boat neatly to a stop alongside the body.
“Up with him!”
From the high side of the boat, a fairly sizeable motor cruiser, a boat hook dipped down. It caught under the strap of the life preserver, was raised, lifted, preserver and body and all.
“Out cold, but still breathin’. Guess he’ll be all right — for as long as we want him,” said the unseen man on the cruiser’s dark deck.
The boat started off, lightless into the darkness of Lake Ontario in the labyrinth of the Thousand Islands region. But there was one more passenger aboard than the skipper reckoned.
Out of the black lake, as the boat halted, two huge arms had reached up. Great hands caught the flukes of the anchor, at the bow. And the hands were followed by a giant’s body as the boat shot forward.
Smitty lay in darkness at the bow, while the motor cruiser went at thirty miles an hour toward the core of the mystery which Benson was scheming like a gray fox to solve—