“Well, how’d we know he had a lot of dough, and was a tough customer? He was just a sap who got in the way, to us. Like some others we’ve put out of the way before now — and a lot of others we’ll probably have to knock off before we’re through.”
“This is big stuff, ain’t it?” said the driver, with a note almost of fright in his voice.
“I’ll say it’s big! If the cops ever got a gander at it, they’d lay eggs! But there’s big guys behind it, so don’t go getting scared. We got a million dollars’ worth of protection any time we need it.”
“What’s it about, anyhow?” asked the driver.
All Benson’s functioning seemed to be in those acute ears of his. If this question were answered—
But it wasn’t.
“I don’t know myself,” said the flabby man, complainingly. “The big shots don’t take us guys into their confidence much. All I know is, Old Ironsides is one of the—”
“Watch it!” snapped the driver. “That stooge detective of Benson’s might be awake.”
There was silence. Then a toe ground into Benson’s ribs. Benson’s pale-gray eyes flamed with a deadly anger behind closed lids, but he stayed moveless.
“Out like a light,” said the flabby man.
But he didn’t say any more. Neither did the driver.
The car sped on. No way of telling how far. Benson couldn’t check on the speed. Somewhere between ten and twenty miles, the last mile or so of which was over a bumpy dirt road. He judged he had been taken to a very secluded place. And in a moment the car stopped and he saw that he was right. “Dump him out!”
Benson was hauled out of the car by the legs and allowed to fall on neck and shoulders in the gravel of a lane. Tree toads shrilled and crickets fiddled around him. The night was filled with the noisy silence of the country.
He opened his eyes a little again. He saw the dark bulk of a frame farmhouse, the slanting line of an old barn.
“In the barn,” said the flabby man. “Then we’ll bury him under the floor. You said there was an old cistern there, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we’ll throw him in there and put a couple of loads of dirt over him and then nail the floor back. After that this Benson guy can call out the bloodhounds for his investigator — and see how much good it does him.”
“You guys don’t care how many chances you take on my place, do you?” said the driver bitterly. Benson could see him now. He was a blocky man in the white work coat of a shop foreman. Wings were on the coat. Evidently he was the head mechanic from the airfield.
“We’re taking no chances,” soothed the flabby man. He leveled his gun.
“Hey! We’re a mile from the nearest house. But you got no idea how sound carries out here! Don’t use a slug.”
“O.K., then,” said the flabby man. “Where’s a good thick club? We’ll knock him on the head like a steer.”
“I got better than a club. Wait.” The man in the white work coat disappeared, came back with something in his hand. It was a heavy hatchet, rusted, but with quite a sharp edge. “Here you go.”
The flabby man took the hatchet. His manner was as impersonal as that of an executioner wielding a headsman’s ax. The taking of a life was obviously no novelty to him.
He raised the hatchet, grunted a little with the preliminary effort of the blow to be struck, and brought it whistling down.
Benson, with an explosive move as violent and efficient as it was totally unexpected, writhed to one side.
The blade fairly whistled past his ear, missing it by less than an inch. The hatchet buried itself in the ground almost up to the handle. And then Benson had the wrist behind the weapon.
The airfield mechanic was yelling and charging now. Benson pulled the flabby man forward onto his face with one powerful jerk — and jerked himself erect at the same time and with the same move. His fist caught the mechanic’s flying body just over the heart, and the man staggered back, moaning.
The flabby man was on his knees with his gun in his hand. Benson’s leg came out with the lithe move of a dancer’s, multipied by ten in point of power. His toe caught the man’s elbow. There was a little snap, and the gun flew thirty feet away while the flabby man grabbed at his arm.
The airport man took a step back to charge again. But he stopped. In the dimness of the night he could still see Benson’s face — still and icy-white and with no more expression than if Benson were merely talking about the weather. It was indescribably unnerving, such utter lack of emotion on a face at such a time. And the deadly pale eyes that glared from the moveless white mask were equally unnerving.
The man’s ratlike courage melted like sugar in a rain. He cried out almost like a child in fear, turned, and ran from that terrible countenance of vengeance.
The flabby man, broken forearm clutched in his agonized left hand, had already started toward the car. Both were getting away.
Benson jerked the hatchet from the ground. He threw it.
In a long flat arc it flashed after the mechanic. The throw was a beautiful thing. No Indian could have thrown a tomahawk like that. It was all the more perfect in that it missed the man’s head in precisely the way Benson intended.
Had the blade edge struck, it would have sliced the running man’s skull almost in two. Had the flat edge hit, it would have crushed his head like an eggshell. But it was the handle that struck, at the base of the skull, and knocked the man unconscious for many minutes to come, without actually killing him.
Benson was in motion the instant the hatchet left his steely fingers. In motion, and racing after the flabby man, Benson got to the car just as it screamed into motion. He caught the spare tire and hauled himself up onto the chrome bumper.
Fast as his body had moved in that crowded half-minute, his brain had worked still faster. He had perfected a plan, full-born, and was now following it. That was to let the flabby fellow get away — and follow him to whomever he reported to. He would probably go at once to some superior to report the fiasco here at the farm. Benson wanted very much to see who that superior was.
The mechanic didn’t count. Obviously he was a day laborer in crime and knew nothing whatever of the sinister central plot of this business. So Benson had merely put him on ice with the flying hatchet handle.
Queer, he thought, how a man’s personal history repeats itself. Those two, if they’d only known, had played into his hands by the choice of a hatchet as death weapon.
Benson had nearly been killed, in his teens, by a madman with a hatchet in Australia. He had used now the tactics that had instinctively saved his life then. And after the narrow escape in Australia, he had monkeyed with hatchets himself. He had learned to throw one so he could split a knot at thirty feet. He could throw an ax almost as accurately—
He saw a headlight approaching the swaying car which the flabby man was blindly driving with one broken arm limp by his side. He wondered who in the world that could be, approaching this desolate spot on a back road.
A second later he heard the flabby man scream, and felt the car swerve as he jammed the brakes. Instantly Benson released his hold and dropped to the lane. And less than two seconds later there was a crash that seemed to fill the quiet country night with sound for miles around.
Benson doubled catlike to his feet and leaped around the car.
It had been rammed by a taxicab, a thing looking odd and lonesome out here far from the city pavements. The cab, built like a truck for long life, as most cabs are, had plowed into the sedan so hard that the motor was shifted back on its mountings.