Eyes like holes in glacier ice, Benson returned to the third man, who was clawing to get out from under the hampering bulk of his unconscious partner.
Unable to get his gun in line, the man kicked frantically at Benson’s head. And that was a mistake.
The slim and terrible right hand went out. The steely-white fingers caught the calf of the vicious leg. And Benson squeezed. That was all, just squeezed.
The man yelled out and dropped his gun. Up his body, from vital nerve points streamed pain too great to be borne. He yelled again and, yelling, dropped. He did not move when Benson took his hand away.
The cab driver came timorously closer. It was very still, there on the deserted section of road. Had anyone been around to hold a stop watch on the proceedings, he would have found that less than ten seconds had elapsed from the time Benson got the sedan door open to the time when the third man dropped senseless from the deft and awful pressure on the great nerves of his leg.
“Gee!” whispered the cab driver. He seemed to search for other words, staring, meanwhile, at the dead, white face of the man who had done these things — a face all the more awe-inspiring in that even at this crowded moment, not one line of it altered in the least. “Gee!”
Benson took the three to the Buffalo police station. Then he went to his hotel.
And in less than half an hour he got a phone call.
The three men had been sprung.
Someone — who, no one at headquarters knew — had sent one of Buffalo’s best lawyers to get writs of habeas corpus. Someone had put up cash bail as if thousands were small change.
And the three gunmen were free.
Benson hung up with pale-gray eyes like ice in a glacial dawn. Not the fault of the police. Some power too big even for them was behind all this. But he wouldn’t make this mistake again.
Because the police are sometimes hampered more than helped by law, those three had been turned loose. And Benson knew that he’d probably never see them again.
CHAPTER IV
Benson’s Ally
His name was Fergus MacMurdie. He was over six feet, and had coarse red hair and bitter blue eyes and hands that doubled into fists like bone clubs. His feet were the biggest Benson had ever seen, and they made the bony legs above them look even bonier.
The man from the airport had come, and stood now before him with his hat in his raw, red left hand. In the last few days Benson had become accustomed to the sight of men viewing his white and terrible face with a trace of fear in their eyes. But this man did not. He didn’t look as if he’d ever be afraid of anything. With the deep lines of his freckle-splotched face, and the grim, stony look of his intensely blue eyes, he gave the impression of a man who had had all fear burned from him in some travail of the soul.
“MacMurdie,” Benson said, “you saw me get aboard the plane with my wife and little girl?”
“Of course, mon,” said MacMurdie.
“They stayed aboard with me? They didn’t get off before we left?”
“Sure, they stayed aboard with ye.”
Benson looked at the Scot’s mallet-like right hand. There was skin missing from the knuckles. At the edge of the Scotchman’s sandy hair line the blue of a bruise showed.
“What happened?” said Benson.
MacMurdie’s bitter blue eyes narrowed.
“Some at the airfield guessed I’d said something to ye, I’m thinkin’. Anyhow, outside, two men jumped me. I left ’em there.”
Benson’s set, white face remained as still as a thing in death. But his eyes were puzzled.
“Power behind this,” he said, lips barely moving. “Money. Many men. People bribed, the forces of the law overcome — just to prove to the world that I got on the plane alone — that I never had a wife and daughter. You know that’s what they tell me, don’t you, MacMurdie?”
“I know,” said the dour Scot.
The pale-gray eyes played coldly over his face.
“Why didn’t you turn your two attackers over to the police, MacMurdie?”
“I’ve done wi’ the police,” the Scot said grimly.
“You mean — a jail sentence in your past?”
“No. ’Tis not because of that. The police are all right, as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. At least, they didn’t wi’ me.”
The pale-gray eyes expressed the question that the rest of the face could not.
“You see me a field attendant,” said MacMurdie, spreading his bony red hands. “Not much more than a laborer. But I wasn’t, once. I owned four drugstores. I’m a licensed pharmacist. I attended three years medical school, but I was too poor to finish.”
The bitter blue eyes matched the cold gray ones, flame for flame.
“I had a wife, too. I had a boy. And men came round and said to me, ‘MacMurdie,’ they said, your stores are likely to be bombed some night if you don’t take out a memberhip in our protective association, which costs two hundred dollars a month for four fine stores like yours.’ So I told ’em where they could go, and I told ’em twice. And then—”
The knobby, huge hands clenched and quivered.
“My biggest store was bombed. It was at six at night. Mrs. MacMurdie was there and so was my boy.”
The look in Benson’s ice-gray eyes was gentler than it had been since the terrible plane ride.
“The police did what they could,” MacMurdie went on. “I’ll say that for ’em. But nobody seemed to do anything. No one but the undertaker. I let the stores slide. Since then I’ve drifted. When I get the chance, I smash the crooked skurlies like the two that jumped me outside the airport. But call in the police? What for? It’d do me no good now, or ever again.”
Benson stared into the stony-blue eyes for a long time. He was a judge of men, and he could see no deceit in this man’s dim-freckled face.
“It seems we’ve both lost all a man has to lose, MacMurdie. And it seems we’re both beyond the power even of the police to help. But maybe we can help each other. Will you help me in this?”
“Gladly, if I can,” said the Scot.
“Then tell me, have you any idea what’s behind this? Why were my wife and little girl spirited away? What plan did I interrupt when I got aboard that plane? Who hired the men who attacked you, and three more who also attacked me a while before that?”
MacMurdie shook his sandy-red head.
“I’d tell ye, mon, if I could. But I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.”
“Then you know nothing at all?”
“Whoosh! I wasn’t sayin’ that. I know a few things that I’ve thought about more than once. One is that about that same crowd has booked the Buffalo-Montreal plane solid four times in the last three weeks. Another is that always every seat is bought — but two or three are always empty when the plane goes up. A third is that always there’s a trunk goes aboard, though ’tis seldom folks travel in planes wi’ trunks. What is it, mon?”
Benson had gotten up from his chair with one tigerish surge of muscle. He was glaring at the Scot, with his eyes like gray holes in his white, dead face.
“A trunk! I saw one in the tail when I searched for my wife! She — they — could have been hidden and taken off at Montreal in that—”
Then, slowly, he sat down again. He had remembered something more.
He had seen that trunk, and it had been open, with the lid thrown back — and empty. This hope, at least, of sometimes seeing Alicia and little Alice again, was futile.
“Maybe they’re dead,” he whispered. “I’m afraid they are dead. If not — I’ll find them. If they are — I’ll make that gang of crooks, whoever they are, wish they’d never been born!”