Nellie closed her eyes and uttered up some soundless prayers that Smitty and Josh and Mac and the chief would guess this was a trap — and stay away.
Nellie was like that. Rather than risk the lives of the others, she preferred to pass out herself, the hard way.
Even as Nellie was hoping fervently that the others would not show up here where they would be outnumbered six or seven to one, they were stealing through the shaded grounds outside the building.
That is, Mac and Josh and Smitty were. The Avenger, himself, was not with them.
“Wonder when the chief’ll join us?” whispered Josh — a black spot in the late night darkness.
“He didn’t say,” Smitty whispered back. “Just told us to head for here an hour after getting into Shaw’s place.”
The giant’s fingernails were gnawed about to the quick. The inactive wait in the lawyer’s house had been the hardest thing Smitty had ever done. Nellie in danger! And they sat there like lumps on a pickle!
But it had been The Avenger’s orders; and they knew he always had a sound reason behind even the most perplexing of his commands.
Now they were near Braintree, and Smitty was aching for action.
“Whoosh!” whispered Mac suddenly, clutching the giant’s arm.
“Tis company we’re havin’.”
The three sank into the shadow of a great tree. And past them filed the figures Mac had seen a moment ago coming toward them.
Five dim figures in the flowing garb of Egyptian priests.
They went, in a sort of soundless, funereal procession past where the three hid, and approached the great bronze door of the museum. The door opened as they got to it. They passed through, and the door shut again.
“The ghosties are walkin’,” nodded Mac. “That’s where they’ll be havin’ Nellie, all right — in yon barracks. But how are we to get into the place? Those thick doors are—”
Smitty shrugged vast shoulders.
“The chief said the door would open to us,” he reminded them.
And neither Josh nor Mac said a word to that. If The Avenger said a thing would be thus and so, that was always precisely the way it was.
They got to the doors, taking a lot more time than the five priestly shapes, to be sure that unseen eyes in the tree-shadows might not spot them. Smitty softly tried the door.
It swung open, unlocked as Benson had promised.
They stepped into cavernous darkness, lighted only dimly by a few bulbs in concealed place. They skirted the walls of the main rotunda, two succeeding rooms, and got near the door of the Egyptian wing.
“Maybe we’d better wait for the chief here,” whispered Josh.
Mac chewed his lip uncertainly. They’d had no orders on that point.
“First,” said Smitty softly, “we’ll see if Nellie’s all right. That’s the most important thing. I’ll just go on and have a peek through the door—”
The Scotchman’s bony hand clamped on his vast arm.
“No, ye don’t, you man-mountain,” he said. “I know ye. A look at the girrrl, in a little trouble, maybe, and ye’d start tearin’ the buildin’ apart. Then maybe we’d be caught. And we’d do nobody good, captured. Josh, ye can keep your head. You go look through yon doorway, and come back and report.”
The Negro slid wordlessly ahead a little. He got to a big glass case in which half a dozen auks were grouped in a lifelike way. He stared from behind the case into the Egyptian wing. Meanwhile Mac held Smitty’s arm in a firm clutch.
However, the grasp on the giant’s arm was destined to be no more detaining than a spider web to an eagle.
Smitty was watching Josh’s dark face like a hawk for reactions, and he saw one the instant the Negro looked inside.
Josh stiffened, and his jaw stuck out in a furious but frightened line.
It meant just one thing. Nellie was in there, and she was in peril!
That was enough for Smitty.
Mac, trying to retain the grip on Smitty’s arm, found himself sailing bodily through thin air as the giant slung his arm around. Josh, behind the case, saw something like an enraged King Kong streak for the door and inside the Egyptian wing.
“That does it,” said Mac grimly. “The overgrown lump of muscle—”
But there was no hesitation in the Scot’s moves. Nor in Josh’s. Smitty had pulled a boner, leaping in like that. But very promptly they followed, to help him out of it if possible.
They found that it wasn’t possible.
Very neatly, and with no word of command necessary, the bizarre figures, within, shut the trap they had baited with Nellie’s bound body.
After Smitty had charged roaring under the pillars and stone lintel, and Josh and Mac had followed, a dozen of the priestly shapes marched from a side wall and shut the door of the wing. They ranged themselves in front of it. Another fourteen or fifteen, beyond the three, wheeled and started marching toward them.
A small army ahead of them, a small army behind them cutting off escape! That was what Smitty’s mad rush had resulted in.
The trap was sprung and the trap was unbeatable!
CHAPTER XVI
Vengeance of Taros
Josh and Mac and Smitty hadn’t time to get their guns out — and the others of course had no guns. Guns weren’t in existence by some thousands of years when Egypt was young.
The priestly horde had the weapons of their ancient priestcraft, but even these they did not draw, for some reason. Like a crew of crazed fanatics they rushed on the three temple intruders to tear them apart barehanded.
That suited Smitty right down to the ground. Where bare-handed tearing was concerned, he was well equipped to take part.
He didn’t wait for anybody to reach him. He stepped forward toward the rush, to be overwhelmed and knocked down as a bear is overwhelmed in the surf by a great wave.
But even as the bear presently emerges on the other side, swimming strongly, so Smitty soon emerged.
As he went down, he had found a throat with one hand and a thigh with the other. It had taken a little regretful effort to squeeze on the throat with a little less pressure than on the thigh. But he had managed it. If he hadn’t, the neck in his grasp would have snapped like a match stick.
As it was, the man grabbed by the neck went suddenly limp, while the man grabbed by the thigh suddenly screamed in pure frenzy as it seemed to him that all the muscle of his upper leg was squeezed quivering through the skin.
What Smitty took hold of usually disintegrated.
He released the two, and got two more men, by the shoulders this time. The heads of the two priests of old Egypt proved just as fragile — when knocked together — as the heads of anybody in 1940 A.D.
Meanwhile, Mac was swinging fists like bone mallets, and Josh was putting up his usual black-tiger fight.
Mac smashed a grinning face beyond all hope of comely repair, and then got in a heart blow on another man. The two retreated for a much-needed intermission.
Josh tripped a too-enthusiastic figure in flowing white and there was a scream as that figure fell on a copper dagger strapped at its waist. The Negro swung from his knees with his flashing right fist, and broke the jaw of the grim shape next to the first one.
And still none of the temple servers drew their daggers or other ancient weapons.
Smitty had worked up to his feet again, a perfect mound of struggling humanity as men clung to his legs and arms and broad back to tear him down. He mashed two against the wall by lunging backward, and shook off two more by swinging his arms together so that the man on the right knocked the breath from the body of the man on the left, and vice versa. He got to Mac and Josh.