Though scarcely five feet tall, and weighing little more than a hundred pounds, Nellie Gray could turn a man’s own strength against him so deftly, by jujitsu, that he never knew what happened.
The gaunt high priest stretched infuriated arms for her. Next moment the emaciated figure was staggering beyond the girl, brought up against a stone sarcophagus with an audible smack.
The other two priests — with the faces of Senator Blessing and Dr. Marlowe — got to her.
The first fell heavily as Nellie caught the priestly robe, deftly pulled, and guided his rush so that he tripped over her shapely right leg. But, after all, she was only one person. She couldn’t handle three.
The man with Marlowe’s face got her by the arms.
And then Josh arrived from the distance.
The Negro could fight like a black tiger when he had to. They might nickname him Sleepy, but there was nothing a slumbrous about him in a rough and tumble.
He slammed his fist home against the chest under a flying robe, felt the shape give ground. He heard a shrill sound, like a whistle, from the gaunt shape near the sarcophagus, and paid no attention. He started for that shape.
“Josh!”
It was Nellie’s agitated call. She had chanced to look at the doorway.
Josh turned, diverted from the high priest by the tone of her summons. He saw what had made her cry out.
The shrill wail of the high priest, like a lost soul calling to other lost souls, had been a signal, all right. In answer to it, a horde of white-clad figures were pouring into the Egyptian wing — from where, Josh could not guess.
These wore robes not quite as ornate as the three in the wing. Underlings in priestcraft, evidently. Neophytes. But there were at least a score of them, and they were more to be feared than the dread three because their bodies were those of younger men.
As silently as their superiors, they moved. They converged on Josh and Nellie.
Josh’s long arms were smashing out. His fists were like black hammers as he slowly retreated before a group of the silent attackers.
Nellie had thrown two of them, and was fighting in the grip of three more. It was curtains, and they both knew it.
From just outside the wing came a sudden, scarcely human bellow. The sound filled the great barracks of the museum as if a bull had broken loose in there. It swelled as the maker of it rushed closer.
“Smitty!” shouted Josh, with a relief singing in his heart that went beyond words to describe. True, he didn’t know what even the giant could do against such a horde. But just the presence of Smitty, where he hadn’t been even hoped for, was like a draft of cold water down a parched throat.
The bellowing resounded in the doorway. Then the hulking figure of Algernon Heathcote Smith could be seen there.
The entire silent crew had turned, still holding Nellie and Josh, but no longer trying to hurt them. Two dozen to one — but that one looked as invincible as a battleship as he paused in the doorway.
Smitty began walking toward the horde. He got to the second doorway, made of the four great pillars and the massive lintel brought stone by stone from Egypt.
Josh and Nellie, almost at the same instant, brought into play all their trained litheness and strength, and with a sudden explosion of effort ripped free from their captors.
They streaked to the threshold where Smitty hulked. After them, murderously aroused now, raced the whole fiendish crew of temple dwellers.
Smitty’s great, arms shot out. His vast hands smacked solidly against two of the four pillars. His shoulders compressed, then began slowly to swell to their full, enormous width — forcing his rigid arms out as they did so.
There was a man called Samson. He destroyed himself and his enemies by the incredible feat of pushing two vast pillars apart and bringing a temple crashing down.
Smitty hadn’t quite that terrific a task, because the pillars were set only stone on stone, without cement, and bore only the stone slabs of the lintel instead of an entire building. But he was doing something that perhaps not another man alive could have done, just the same.
Under the mighty power of his massive arms and shoulders, the pillars were moving a little. You could hear the stones grinding together.
The left pillar tilted a very little, and the great stone slabs above slid with the move. And the racing horde of white-clad figures slowed and stared with dull eyes at the lintel.
Then they came on. Impossible for any mortal to move that mass.
Nellie could hear a low, continuous moaning sound of effort from the giant’s lips. She could see a few drops of blood squeeze slowly from around his fingernails as sinew and muscle refused to take that pressure unharmed.
“Get behind me,” panted Smitty.
Josh and Nellie squeezed past the straining form, and into the room beyond the Egyptian wing. There was a final heave of the big fellow’s body, with a snapping of tendons and a ripping sound as his arm muscles tore out the sleeves of his coat.
Then there was a low, beginning rumble.
The charging horde stopped so quickly that they almost fell. Then they began to scramble back.
Back away from the four pillars and the stone slabs.
Smitty leaped backward, too, across the threshold over which Josh and Nellie had just retreated. The giant was a near-three-hundred-pound mass of slabs of muscle, but he could move like a flyweight when he had to.
That agility saved his life now, which made him one up on Samson, who had destroyed himself as well as his enemies.
There was a final grinding noise, and then the roar of pillars and slabs as they smashed down like an avalanche on the museum floor. There was a second roar as the stone floor and the tons of rock fell into the basement.
A hole ten yards across yawned between Josh and Nellie and Smitty, and the white-clad horde. The three were saved. They made their leisurely way, with the temple murderers raging futilely behind them across the chasm, to the big bronze entrance. There they unbolted the ponderous locks and walked out.
CHAPTER XIII
Death From Above
In the case Nellie had carried down from the Bleek Street headquarters at The Avenger’s request, were many odd bits of apparatus. It was so light that a girl could handle it quite easily. And yet it had carefully selected utensils and chemicals that enabled Benson to perform marvelous laboratory feats.
He was performing one now, though his aides could not yet read the answer to the riddle.
The Avenger had set up a small atomic-bombardment cylinder that would have made any professional in the field of scientific research weep with envy and awe. Under the quartz lens at the open end of the light cylinder, on a slightly tilted little platform, Benson had placed a most common object.
It was an ordinary glass water tumbler, thick, plain — of the type to be picked up in any dime store. The tumbler was empty.
Josh and Mac, Smitty and Nellie and Rosabel, had discarded their belt radios. The invisible atomic bombardment would have ruined them if they were too close. But now they were all together, anyhow, so there would be no radio appeal for help from one of their number.
No such appeal as Smitty had barely heard, on his way to join Mac at Blessing’s house, and which had sent the giant racing to Braintree Museum like a vengeful landslide.
The atomic bombardment was snapping and crackling. No light came from the quartz lens, yet you got an impression of something streaming out just the same. That was because the rays given off as a by-product of the breaking down of uranium were invisible to the human eye.
The Avenger was slowly moving the lens back and forth, in a careful straight line, along the tilted side of the glass water tumbler. The molecules of the glass, exposed to the tremendous power of the atomic disruption, were, in theory at least, supposed to be rearranged by that slow and repeated movement. They were supposed to rearrange themselves in countless straight lines, by being, in a sense, “combed” smooth. Much the same result is achieved in polaroid glass by different methods.