Benson leaped to one of the basement windows. As he moved, he ripped off Murdock’s old sweater. He draped it over the window, shutting out nearly all light.
Instantly, without a word said, Smitty went to the other window and shaded that with his shirt. He may have looked as slow-witted as he was big, with his full-moon face and his too-good-natured-looking, not-very-intelligent blue eyes. But actually his mind was as fast as his fists.
The basement door burst inward. The men outside jumped in yelling — and stopped in utter surprise.
They had jumped into blackness. The basement, in spite of a little light still leaking in the windows, was Stygian in comparison with the outer light. In that completely unexpected blackness, three men waited for them — one a giant who could throttle a man with one hand, another a man with death residing permanently in his flaming, almost colorless eyes, a third with great knobby fists like bone mallets.
“Back out!” one of them yelled, with the utter terror of a trapped animal. “I can’t find the light switch—”
There was a stampede, but they were not allowed to get out and scheme all over again. Smitty hit the group.
From the giant’s ankles dangled lengths of chain that struck at legs like the death scythes on the wheels of a Roman chariot. On his wrists were the metal cuffs, so that if a sledge-hammer blow of his fist missed its target in the darkness, the metal gyve was apt to slash straight across a face.
Beyond, Benson was at the door, keeping anyone from getting back out. Those pale eyes could see a little in the dark, like a cat’s. Methodically his lashing fists downed men escaping from the giant.
To Smitty’s left was MacMurdie, battering away with sanguine Scotch howls.
Three against seven. But you could have searched the country over and not have found another three like them. And with the darkness aiding them, and making the guns of the seven useless, they pared odds down — till no odds at all remained, and they alone were on their feet.
Benson went to the windows, white dead face as devoid of expression as a death mask. He took the coverings, and light came in.
All there gasped and looked hurriedly away from him. He lifted his hand to his face and discovered why. A blow in the fight had landed on the dead flesh of his right cheek. The flesh had taken the imprint of the fist, and had stayed flattened, making his countenance lopsided.
He massaged the insensitive, plastic cheek. It came into normal shape — but now one side of his face was in the cast of Murdock, and the other was in the mold of Benson.
“Bind them,” he said to Smitty and Mac. He didn’t care about his face. In all the world he only cared about one thing now. A woman had screamed. Was it Mrs. Martineau lying in a corner in a dead faint? Or was it—
He ran up to the first floor.
“Alicia!”
He ran through room after room, dim from the boarded windows.
“Alicia! Darling!”
He went to the second floor, the third, the attic. Room after room. And all were empty.
Then, slowly, moving wearily, he returned to the basement. The five kidnap victims crowded around him, thanking him for their delivery, promising him anything he wanted.
He looked at them without seeing them.
Buffalo.
Leon and Mrs. Martineau went to a hospital. Hickock and Vincent went to their homes. Andrews, whose home was burned, went to a hotel.
Benson left Smitty and MacMurdie at the hotel. Then the gray fox of a man with the pale and deadly eyes absented himself, with no word of explanation.
He was gone for over an hour. It was nearly nine in the evening before he came back, as enigmatically as he had left. He sat down near the telephone stand in the room, hand ready to pick up the instrument.
The bony Scot and the moon-faced giant were bursting with curiosity. MacMurdie cracked first.
“If ye don’t mind questions, Muster Benson — have ye found out anything?”
“The whole thing,” nodded Benson, hand near the phone. “Though a lot of it I’ve known, of course, for some time.
“Buffalo Tap & Die Works is the stake. Or, I should say, the cash reserve of Buffalo Tap & Die. By a freak of the recession, the total outstanding stock of the company has sunk to a value on the board of about five and a half million dollars. But the company actually has — aside from all its other assets — over fourteen million dollars in liquid cash in the bank! That means that you could buy the company on the stock market for five and a half million, throw the factory buildings and plant equipment away — and still get back fourteen millions by simply withdrawing the cash the company has deposited in the banks. A quick, sure profit of nearly nine million dollars.
“If the stockholders would sell at the present figure.
“The little stockholders could be frozen out easily. But the big stockholders, owning a majority of the stock, were a different proposition. Being in the main sound business people, they wouldn’t think of selling. So they were kidnapped and forced to sign ‘sell’ orders to their broker.
“That is what was behind these kidnappings and murders. Nine million in cash!”
MacMurdie whistled.
“Whoosh! Nine million dollars! Armies have been slaughtered for less than that. But who is the mon behind—”
The telephone rang. Benson snatched it up. A voice said quietly: “They’re there. They just went in. Their private office.”
Benson hung up, and rose, pale, deadly eyes flaming coldly.
“Come on. It’s the last act. We’ve got them.”
In the fast roadster, Benson drove toward the business district.
Both MacMurdie and Smitty stared at the dead, white face. Benson stared straight ahead, with words slipping from his almost moveless lips like slow, deadly knives.
“As you said, Smitty, they are rich, powerful, respected. They could hire brilliant legal talent, drag out a trial for months — perhaps even get off in the end by shoving all the charges on the cheap gunmen who did their dirty work for them. No, they will not be arrested.”
“Ye mean to kill them?” said MacMurdie, with entire approval in his harsh Scotch voice.
The deadly pale eyes flamed and dulled.
“No. I’d like to, with my bare hands. I’d like to watch them die slowly under my fingers. But… I’m no executioner.”
“If ye don’t kill them, or have them arrested,” said MacMurdie, perplexedly, “what will ye do?”
“They’ll get justice done to them. You’ll see. At least, I think you will. It’s on the slight chance that things won’t work out as planned that we are on our way to their office now.”
“I wonder,” said Smitty, “if Carney and Buell have any idea what’s happened to their plans?”
The ground-floor offices of the brokerage firm were dark. So was all the rest of the office building at this time of night. All but one office, high up. That was the private office of the partners.
They sat in there, waiting for a third member to show up.
Buell leaned back in the swivel chair at his desk, gimlet eyes glittering with the greed of a miserly man about to acquire great stacks of additional gold to fondle and count.
Carney, at his own rosewood desk, a heavy-set man with a country-club complexion, dreamed of a bigger yacht and a twenty-acre estate for sale for only seven hundred thousand dollars.
“Tonight should see the end,” Buell said contentedly.
Carney nodded. “They’ll be getting that last signature at Thornacre Island about now. We ought to get the ‘sell’ order before closing tomorrow. Then… we’re done.”
Doubt shaded Buell’s acquisitive face for an instant.
“If anyone ever found out our part in this—”