Had there been a lot of fallen leaves around, he would have watched his step more closely. But there weren’t. So he was careless enough to step on a fallen twig to which half a dozen dry leaves adhered.
They rustled like paper and sounded loud in the stillness.
The figure of the high priest whirled and sprang toward Smitty, its gaunt arms raised high as if in an invocation — as if bringing down a curse.
Smitty felt as if he had been dumped bodily into a vat of nettles. He burned and prickled all over. Then the world began to go even blacker than the midnight darkness warranted.
He yelled once, hoarsely, hardly conscious that sound was coming from him. He got one more glimpse of a shapely shadow in gauzy mist, like the robe of a priestess.
Then the ground came up and hit him!
Back in Caine’s home, the phone was ringing.
Gunther Caine started toward the library, where the downstairs phone was located. So did Harold, eyes glazed and dull, his face queerly frightened.
“I’ll answer it,” said Caine to his son. “You go on to bed.”
It was unusual, thought Caine, as he closed the library door, that Harold was home at all, at this hour. Usually he was out till dawn, running around with a pack of kids younger than himself. At times Caine despaired of his son’s ever growing up and becoming a responsible citizen.
“Hello,” he said into the phone, wondering who was calling him at this hour.
It was Casey, museum watchman and night caretaker.
Caine listened for a moment to wild words, sitting more and more rigid in his chair. Then he exploded harshly into the instrument:
“Get a grip on yourself, man. Talk sense. Nothing like that could have happened.”
“But it did!” came Casey’s agitated voice. “It did, I tell ye! The mummy talked!”
“The mummy of Taros’ son?” said Caine.
“Yes. Yes! It talked.”
“How could it talk? And if it did, how could it be heard through that glass lid?”
“Sure, an’ how would I be knowin’ that? Anyhow, talk it did. It was perfectly plain. It said, ‘They’re gone. My father’s charms against evil are gone. And the Ring of Power. They must be retrieved.’ Or somethin’ like that.”
“Casey, you’ve been drinking!”
“I swear, sor, I haven’t. Not a drop.”
“Then you need a rest. You’ve been working too hard.”
“I’m as sound as a ten-dollar gold piece, sor. But the reason I called—” There was a pause, then Casey’s voice went on with a rush. “The mummy said the things were gone, Mr. Caine. I’d like to ask ye, did ye get them amulets and things, tonight, like ye thought?”
“Yes,” said Gunther Caine crisply. “They came several hours ago. They’re in my small den, now, in a steel box.”
“Well, look now, sor. The mummy seemed dommed sure the things were gone. Stolen, that must mean. And wouldn’t that mummy be in a position to know? I mean — the son of the old boy that first had the ring and the other stuff — wouldn’t he know if anything had happened to them?”
Caine, in spite of himself, looked uneasy.
“Go back to your beat, Casey,” he said.
“But ye’ll look an’ see if ye’ve still got the stuff, Mr. Caine?” Casey said, almost pleadingly.
“Yes, I’ll look. Good-by.”
Caine, in spite of himself, looked and then got up. With a look of amusement for Casey, and half of one for himself, he went into the next room. The small den.
It was time to put that steel box in the safe, anyhow. And while he was carrying it to the safe, it wouldn’t hurt to look. Though of course there couldn’t be anything to the Irishman’s yarn.
There was a slide top on the box, strong enough so that a steel jimmy would have had to be used to open it if locked. But he hadn’t locked it when he set it on the desk in here.
He slid the top back. And the box dropped from fingers suddenly as limp as if made of wet cotton.
The box was empty. Amulets and ring were gone!
“Harold!” he tried to cry out, to get his son’s help.
Not a sound could he force from his numbed lips. The priceless Taros relics gone—
He staggered to the front door and opened it.
The Avenger was gone, too. His car was no longer at the curb.
It was speeding away with Benson at the wheel and the giant just coming out of his coma in the back seat, where Benson had put him after finding him alone and unconscious in the center of the vacant lot. But Gunther Caine couldn’t know that.
He began phoning frantically, all the places he could think of where The Avenger might be reached in Washington.
He had asked the white-haired man down here as a great Egyptologist. Now he needed him desperately in his grim capacity as crime fighter.
But he didn’t know where Benson was staying, or, indeed, if the man with the stainless steel chips of eyes was not at this moment driving back toward his New York headquarters.
The Taros relics gone — and the one man on earth who might help him, gone too.
Gunther Caine sat on the porch steps and put his face in his hands.
CHAPTER IV
Bloody Cornelian
In the beginning dawn, headquarters in Washington began getting the craziest reports a police headquarters ever received.
The sergeant at the desk, after the fourth phone call, turned a bewildered face toward a lieutenant of detectives who was leaning over his shoulder.
“It’s mad, these folks are!” he complained. “Four loonies, all with the same idea.”
“What idea?” asked the detective lieutenant, playing with ideas of hot dogs and coffee before going home to a daytime sleep.
“Four people — three men and a woman — have phoned that they’ve seen a person runnin’ around in a kind of nightie. Each has given a different description; so it looks as if there are four people in nighties loose in Washington. That is, if these telephoners ain’t as nuts as they sound.”
“Nighties?” said the cop, beginning to forget the dogs and coffee.
“That’s what the descriptions sounded like. Anyhow, it sounded that way from three of ’em. They’re ordinary folks, goin’ off to a dawn job or comin’ home from a night one. But this last guy was different. He’s a high-school teacher who was workin’ all night on some research of his own. A highbrow. He says this nightie was the robe of an Egyptian priest.”
“You mean one of them mullahs or muezzins, or whatever they got in Egypt to keep the Arabs quiet?”
The sergeant looked as disgusted as he dared, to a lieutenant of detectives.
“Naw! Not a priest of Egypt, now. A priest of Egypt in the time when them mummies at Braintree were walkin’ around under their own power.”
“Why would any one want to wear an outfit like that?” said the plainclothes man fretfully.
“How would I know?” snapped the desk sergeant.
“Maybe it’s a masquerade.”
“Mebbe. But if it is, it must be a magician’s ball. Because this last guy, the teacher who knows Egyptian clothes when he sees ’em, says the mug he saw wearin’ ’em disappeared.”
“Huh?”
“Disappear! Vanish! Phht!” said the sergeant.
“He’s dotty.”
“Well, that’s what I said,” shrugged the sergeant. “But I suppose we oughtta radio a squad car to cruise around there — South-East — and see what can be seen.”
This was at dawn, with gold just lightening the pink of five-thirty in the morning.
Dawn, with the night’s work of Bill Casey, watchman at Braintree, almost over.
Casey was in the Early-American Indian room, punching his last station for the night. Wax figures with long, feathered headdresses, in front of replica wigwams, stared at him out of big class cases. Tomahawks and flint knife-blades studded the walls over his head.