“All of you,” ordered the cold voice. “In here. Get to work. Are the boats ready to lower? Then open the valves now. Let the ship be settling while we tow her out. Then we’ll leave her, awash, at the last minute. That way, even if she is sighted, no one can get to her in time.”
“That voice,” said Wayne Crimm suddenly. “I’ve heard it before.”
“Yes,” said Benson quietly.
“I can’t quite place the speaker, though—”
“You’ll know in a minute,” said The Avenger, colorless eyes like blazing white agate.
“In a minute,” said Tom, shivering, “we’ll be dead.”
But just then Smitty gave a delighted yell.
“Why, of course!” he boomed. “The valve—”
It happened then. Somebody in the next compartment opened the sea cock.
And there was a heavy thud and a steel bar dropped into place — on Benson’s side of the bulkhead door.
“Whoosh!” shouted Mac jubilantly. “Where were ourrr brrrains? Of course! The safety gadget!”
Careful method in every move of The Avenger. A sea cock could be opened by the wrong hands, or it might corrode and become defective. So on every boat, large or small, that Benson owned, there was the same device.
A safety hook-up that closed the sea-value compartment hermetically when that valve began to admit water. Smitty had had to disconnect that safety hook-up to sink the launch. This gang, naturally, hadn’t dreamed there was anything to disconnect when they opened the Minerva’s cocks.
“Ye knew they were trailin’ ye here to the boat!” Mac accused Benson, staring with suddenly wide eyes. “Ye wanted ’em to do it.”
The Avenger nodded, pale eyes as cold and calm as winter moonlight.
“The leader out there, at Wallach’s house, shot at me with a silenced gun. That shot decided me to let the marksman trail me here — and to a trap. Because possession of that gun will nail him to the cross—”
Yells from the men in the next compartment and sudden banging on the steel doors told that the mob had discovered that they were caught.
“Hey! I can’t get out!”
“How—”
These and other yells came to the ears of those in the aft compartment. Smitty grinned. Then there was a louder hail.
“Shut off that valve! We’ll be drowned ourselves if we can’t—”
A wild clangor cut off this cry. Someone was blasting at the aft bulkhead door with a machine gun!
Benson almost seemed to smile. Though he couldn’t actually, of course.
“Come, we’ll go on deck,” he said.
“But we’re locked in here,” began the veiled girl.
The Avenger’s steely forefinger began counting rivets in the deckplates overhead. He touched one.
A concealed hatchway slid evenly back, showing the pink of beginning dawn.
“This old boat has a lot of tricks,” said Benson calmly. “That’s why I thought it would be a good idea if our enemies did trail me here. We could have gotten out of the other compartment as easily—”
A sharp, vicious spat sounded out, and a bullet glanced from the deck an inch from the white paralyzed face. One man, at least, had not been trapped in the valve compartment: the leader of mobsters and Town Bank stooges alike, the man who had been at Wallach’s with the silenced gun.
“Let me at him!” snapped Mac, trying to push up past Benson.
The Avenger’s hand on his shoulder repressed him. The pale eyes, eyes of an infallible marksman, searched the deck of the Minerva, which was lightening with dawn.
Benson saw a furtive head over the freighter’s bridge rail. There was a mask over the face. The leader in the Ballandale stock plot had easily guessed that blackmail might be in the minds of Fiume and Luckow if the plot were successful, and he was keeping his identity hidden from the mob, even now.
Mike spoke! It was silenced .38 against silenced .22. And Mike won out.
The little pellet from its whispering muzzle creased the head over the masked face, and the man on the bridge sagged forward over the rail.
“Go and get Ballandale, Smitty,” said Benson, voice as calm as the dawn around them.
“Ballandale!” exclaimed Tom Crimm.
His brother Wayne nodded excitedly.
“Of course! Ballandale! It was his voice — only I couldn’t place it. But how did you know?”
The Avenger’s colorless, flaring eyes watched Smitty climb to the bridge, start to descend again with the unconscious man like a sack over his vast shoulder.
“The moment it became apparent that the Town Bank directors were the pawns instead of the king in this death game,” said Benson, “it got pretty clear that the king was Ballandale. Aside from the bank men, the president of the corporation, himself, would be the only one in a position to know of Joseph Crimm’s secret stock purchases, to know just how to wreck the corporation at the stockholders’ meeting. However, just knowing that Ballandale was our man and being able to prove it, were two different things. That was why I let him trail me here with the gangs — to get him red-handed.”
Smitty dumped the masked man on the deck unceremoniously. He took the mask from him, revealing the features of Arthur Ballandale. There was a slight flutter of Ballandale’s eyelids. The gash on top of his head was much shallower than that which Mike usually inflicted.
“And ye have him red-handed?” repeated Mac dourly. “Ye know the power of rich men to evade the law.”
“This will be one who won’t,” said The Avenger quietly. “First there is the silenced gun — which is still in his hand. That will be the gun that killed Haskell, I believe. Then there is Ballandale’s car up the street, with the tell-tale foglights and hinged bar to tie him to Maisley’s death. Finally, the Crimm stock will be in his possession. That will strap him to the chair. Not to mention the V-cut in the rear tire, which can be connected with Crimm’s death—”
The veiled girl screamed. And Ballandale’s silenced gun spat again.
Not at Benson. But at the holder’s own head.
Ballandale had recovered consciousness on his way down from the bridge. Surrounded by hopeless odds, hearing what seemed a sure death sentence read against him, he had jerked the gun to his own head, almost without expression on his face, and pulled the trigger.
Mac spoke the epitaph.
“Whether he could have beaten the rap, we’ll never be knowin’.” He stared at The Avenger’s white, death-mask face. “He has sent himself to the Great Beyond. ’Tis a queerrr habit yer powerful crooks have, Muster Benson, of savin’ the law trouble and expense by disposin’ of themsel’s!”
Benson said nothing to that. He looked down river. Red, in the rising sun, the tug that had been towing them was getting away in a hurry. They’d cut loose when the shots indicated trouble and were fleeing to save their hides.
Mac stirred himself.
“I can get enough steam up to bring the Minerva back to dock,” he said. “I’ll go to the engine room—”
“No!” said Benson quickly.
Mac, and the rest, stared at the white face.
“At the dock,” said The Avenger, “the fine crop of gunmen we have penned securely in the valve compartment are only trouble makers, to be booked as such at police headquarters and soon bailed out. But here on the open river, away from the dock, they can be taken for a charge that will keep the whole lot of them behind bars for years. Piracy! Get to the radio room instead, Mac, and call the river police.”
They all stared in something like awe at the man with the white hair and the deathly white face and the pale eyes.
Ballandale, master crook, dead by his own hand. The two remaining Town Bank highbinders, Wallach and Grand, to be easily convicted for their sins by evidence Ballandale was bound to have in his strongbox. Fiume’s gang and Luckow’s gang, held in a big steel cell below decks, to be imprisoned for piracy.