The sounds of paper rustling.
Mac leaped in and to one side to duck any bullets. Josh followed him two seconds later, leaping to the other side. All very efficient, and all designed to conquer any man or men lurking within the room with guns.
But there weren’t any gunmen in there.
There was one small man with outstanding ears seated in an easychair reading a newspaper through horn-rimmed glasses. The man blinked owlishly, peaceably at them over the specs.
“For Heaven’s s-s-sake,” stuttered Mac, feeling about as foolish as he ever had in his life. Then he stared harder.
“Xisco!” he said, recognizing the little man they had met in Montreal.
“Why, hello,” said Xisco, beaming at him. “I remember you now. You were investigating the death of Veck. A great man, Veck. But what are you doing here in my house?”
“Your house?”
“Yes. You’re welcome of course. But just why are you here at this hour of the night?”
“Wheah was yo’ a few minutes ago?” asked Josh, looking sleepy and dull. “We was all through de house and we didn’t see nobody.”
“That must have been when I stepped out to look at my water pump,” said Xisco. “Annoying things, pumps. Always breaking down—”
“How,” said Mac bluntly, “d’ye light your house — and heat it — without gas or electricity?”
“Without— Oh, you must be rather mistaken. I have the usual—”
The scream came then!
It was a cry of agony, eerie, sending shivers up and down their spines. It came from near the road; and if it wasn’t the call of a dying man, then Mac would never trust his big, homely ears again.
The three raced out of the house and toward the sound. The maker of the sound could be seen plainly. All too plainly, in the darkness of surrounding night!
He could be seen because something like an intermittent halo of soft white fire surrounded his head where he lay on the ground.
The man was the fellow who had anonymously guided Mac and Josh here, and he was almost dead. He had doubled in the agony of a man poisoned. But from lips and nostrils, with each last breath he drew, came fire!
It steamed out as if the man had been turned into a wick. It hissed in the dew-wet grass. It blackened and curled his lips.
Then it stopped — because his breathing had stopped. The man was dead!
The sound of a car being driven stealthily but rapidly away was heard. Mac started to run toward the sound. The shrill cry of Xisco whirled him back again.
“My house!” the little man screamed. “Look what’s happened! Look at that! My house!”
They had left the place seemingly in perfect shape. But now, so rapidly that it could scarcely be credited, the whole building was being enveloped in flame!
Streamers of fire shot four stories high. It was as if the structure had been soaked with gasoline and ignited in a hundred spots at once.
“My house — fire! Put it out!” wailed Xisco.
Mac and Josh raced toward the line of dense small trees marching in a rather sloppy line across open fields. The line indicated a creek. They got to it, splashed in it, turned to call to Xisco for buckets.
But they saw that water on that flame would be even more futile than it looked at first. A fire brigade could not have handled it.
Then there wasn’t any more flame to fight. There was a soft, roaring bellow, and the house went up in a thousand pieces. It settled down, the flaming fragments darkening soon.
Josh and Mac looked at each other and started back toward the road. Josh tripped, looked down. His exclamation drew Mac’s attention. And Mac, too, went rigid with surprise.
The two went back to pick up Xisco and take him to Bleek Street. The Avenger wanted to talk to the man who had passed the water pitcher in the Montreal hospital.
But Xisco wasn’t anywhere around.
“Wonder where he went?” Mac mused.
“I wonder, too, who was in that car we heard sneak away?” said Josh.
The car that had sneaked away had carried the girl with the ink-black hair and the cold black eyes. But even if they had known that, Mac and Josh wouldn’t have been as impressed as they were by the strange discovery at the creek.
The thing Josh had tripped over had been a half-buried length of half-inch iron pipe. Exactly the kind that had led into the base of the rusty old furnace. And this pipe had seemed to go on and on toward the house.
A pipe leading, not from furnace to oil tank buried in the yard, but to a meandering little creek.
Both decided the pipe was just a loose length that happened to be lying here. That’s all it could be.
CHAPTER X
Bath of Fire
It began to look, with the second violent attack on a man of great wealth, as if some force had arisen in New York that was determined to wipe out the city’s magnates.
First Lorens Singer, then Pratt Henderlin.
Pratt Henderlin was a heavy-set man with grizzled eyebrows like little cupolas, an oversized jaw and a mole on the left side of his fleshy nose. The domineering, fighting face had often been pictured in the newspapers.
He was almost as wealthy as Singer, being head of the Henderlin Holding Corp. that owned about a third of the nation’s oil fields and the pick of the coal mines.
Henderlin was not in a garden, at a distance, when catastrophe hit his place!
The coal and oil baron lived in a large apartment building that was one of his many real estate holdings, and atop which was his penthouse. That is, he lived there till the evening of the day Singer’s home went up in smoke. At that time, early, because he was tired from an extra-heavy day at the office, the rich man unfortunately decided to take a relaxing bath before going to bed at half-past nine.
That was his last known act. The next thing to occur was a soft but frightening roar, a sheet of white flame! Half the penthouse was blown off the roof and most of the floor beneath destroyed.
Roar and flame came from the bathroom into which Henderlin had gone to relax.
They extinguished the fire pretty fast, but that didn’t enable them to collect any of Henderlin. There just was no trace of the magnate at all among the heaps of debris, in which it seemed all the cops in the word scurried around.
All the cops in the world. And The Avenger.
Many people could be found who would swear that the man with the pale, deadly eyes and the white, still face was the more to be feared!
The whole rooftop was a mess, of course. But the thing most terrifically battered and burst was Henderlin’s bathtub. It was as if that had been the focal point of the whole thing.
If the tub had been filled with high-test gasoline, for instance, the result would have been much the same.
Benson went up to Henderlin’s valet. In this case, the results of the Singer affair had been reversed. There, the master had lived, and the servants died. Here, Henderlin’s quarters had demolished, including the room in which his wife had been sitting, while the servants’ part of the penthouse remained intact.
Henderlin’s man was shivering as if with a chill, and was being kept from collapsing by a hypodermic shot given now and then by the medical examiner. But he managed to talk fairly coherently with Benson.
“You say Henderlin came home exhausted from the office and decided to retire early?” Benson asked, voice quiet but vibrant with power and authority.
“Yes, s-sir,” chattered the valet.
“And he thought a warm bath would help him to get to sleep more quickly?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was this a usual procedure of his?”