The driver was a broad-shouldered, stubby man in dungarees. He had a grin on his face and looked friendly. But he also looked puzzled.
“Hello,” he said. “Are you the guys who phoned us to come out here and pick up a wrecked car? And, if so, where’s the car?”
Mac and Smitty went up to the man, who descended from the cab of the van. Benson stayed a little behind, hands in his pockets.
“We didn’t phone anybody,” said Smitty, looking dull-witted and slow. “When was it you got the call, and what was said about a wrecked car.”
He stopped then. And the van driver laughed a little. He was still looking amiable. But behind him, fanning out from the body of the van in which they had ridden here concealed, were eight men!
It had been cleverly done. They’d popped out like jacks-in-boxes. They’d spread so that no three men, even supermen, could attack them effectively before death came.
And that death was scheduled to come for The Avenger and his aides was quite evident!
The men, about as ill-assorted a mob of thugs as Mac and Smitty had ever seen, held guns with the loose efficiency of experts. And every gun trained at the three!
Mac growled deep in his throat. Smitty showed his teeth in a wolfish snarl. They didn’t like men who looked like rats, as these men decidedly looked.
But it didn’t seem as if they were going to be able to do anything about it here. Eight guns were leveled and, at any moment, they were going to belch lead. There was going to be no more parleying. Just execution!
The men, however, had reckoned without the man with the white, dead face and the icy, pale eyes.
Benson had his hands in his pockets, which was one of the reasons for the haste in which the gunmen obviously meant to act. But their haste didn’t match his.
The Avenger’s hands tilted forward a little, and tiny glints appeared through the fabric of his gray coat.
The glints were the points of little tubes hardly larger than hypodermic needles. But at the other ends of the tubes were syringes, and in these was a liquid of Mac’s contriving.
The Avenger pressed the syringes.
It had all been done much more swiftly than words would indicate: the appearance of the men, their plain intention to shoot, the press of the syringes.
Into the air spread a colorless gas. The liquid from the needles was so volatile that it spread like wildfire, and so powerful that at contact with human nostrils it numbed the brain.
Nine men felt their hands and bodies go numb before they could press triggers. Nine men sagged like cut grain. One managed to shoot, but his gun was hanging almost straight down and the bullet chewed harmlessly into the earth.
Mac and Smitty had whipped handkerchiefs out and pressed them over their faces. The cloths were satuated with a chemical that safeguarded them from the knockout gas; all their handkerchiefs were so treated.
The Avenger had his own handkerchief in service as a mask. He nodded toward the van and then toward the plane. The command was plain to his aides: search the van, then take off in the plane.
They leaped into the van. They had to work fast; the gas, a variation of twilight sleep worked out by Mac in his chemical laboratory, lasted only a few minutes. The very volatility, which made it act so fast, also caused it to dissipate harmlessly in a very short time.
Immediately, Benson saw something that interested him very much, indeed. Two dark spots on the floor of the van. Something had stained the wood there and had been painstakingly scrubbed away. But all the scrubbing had not quite cleaned the patches.
He took scrapings from each patch and put them in envelopes. Into a third envelope went a fused bit of metal. Then he was out and had the van’s hood up.
He took the distributor cap and raced for the plane, with Smitty and Mac close behind. The eight gunmen and the truck driver were already twitching a little with returning consciousness. Benson reached to open the cabin door.
And a voice said,
“No you don’t! Stay right where you are!”
The three whirled. The voice had been a girl’s. The owner was drawing nearer to them now, around the plane’s cabin. The gun in her hand looked like a cannon; it was a .45 automatic, and she was a small girl.
Beyond a wingtip, Smitty now saw part of a car. It was a roadster, cheap and old. In it, the girl had softly coasted to a stop behind the plane while they were in the body of the van.
“You took something from the truck’s motor,” said the girl. “I want it!”
She had large, snapping black eyes that might normally look beautiful; but now they were as cold as jet. She had ink-black, silky hair and was dressed in a rust-colored outfit. Altogether, she rather looked like a fashion model — somehow wandering loose on the salt flat with a cannon in her small hands.
“Give!” she said, extending her left hand.
Benson took an innocent step toward her, drawing the truck’s distributor cap from his pocket.
The girl stepped warily back, too.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t try to get within jumping distance. Just toss it to me.”
The Avenger stared at her with his paralyzed face as emotionless as a metal mask. But his eyes showed that he was considering the situation.
The girl could get at least two of them if they tried to charge her. And the look in her black eyes said that she would get them, too! Behind her, the men from the van were already feebly trying to get to their feet and were groping for the guns they’d dropped. In another half-minute they’d be in the picture again.
The appearance of this black-eyed, black-haired girl was as disconcerting as it was sudden. But, having appeared, it looked as if she would be top dog in the situation.
Benson tossed her the cap. There was nothing else to do. The syringes in his pockets were emptied of the knockout gas.
The girl began backing away, with the cap in her left hand. She turned a little to call over her shoulder to the men by the van,
“Come and get ’em!”
The thugs were willing. They swung unsteadily toward the plane. But with the girl’s gaze off him for a moment, Benson had acted.
His steely hand streaked down and scooped up saline sand from the flat. With the same continuing motion, the stinging stuff flew in a little shower toward the girl’s face. She gasped and choked, and wiped at blinded eyes.
“Into the plane,” snapped Benson.
They hadn’t time to get to the girl. Already, the men behind her were shooting dizzily. They had time only to get into the bulletproofed cabin of the plane.
Slugs spanged off it as Benson started the motor. They starred the heavy glass windows as the plane took its run. Then they were up, and the men were a milling little bunch of ants on the flat, far below.
“I wonder,” said Mac, “where they came from?”
The Avenger nodded downward.
The main highway to Salt Lake City spread like a ribbon below them now. Leading into it, from open earth, were several faint car tracks, made by the van.
The tracks curved onto the highway in the direction of the Pacific. There was only one place to go to, on that line. That was the city.
“The girl,” said Smitty suddenly, “was kind of pretty, wasn’t she?”
“Whoosh!” said Mac. “Nellie Gray should hear that.”
Nellie, diminutive blond bombshell now in New York holding down the Bleek Street headquarters, was another aide of the man with the white, dead face. It was suspected that she regarded the giant, Smitty, as strictly her property.
“I just said the girl was kind of pretty,” Smitty said, at the reference to Nellie Gray.
“So’s a diamond-backed rattler, if you like that kind of good looks,” said the Scot. “Me — I’d prefer the rattler.”