The sheriff went out; the deputy grinned at his two prisoners and sat down in the chair.
There was silence. The deputy looked sleepy and closed his eyes for a minute. It was getting on toward midnight. And then it happened!
It didn’t seem like much at first.
A rat nosed in from somewhere in the rear, and scuttled toward the deputy’s chair. The first thing Mac and Nellie noticed, looking through the bars of their doors, was that the rat was singularly fearless. It ran right up to the chair.
Then they both held their breaths as the rodent circled the chair once.
“Ouch!” yelled the deputy, opening his eyes in a hurry. “What the hell—”
He jumped to his feet. The rat’s teeth had viciously slashed at his ankle.
The deputy roared with anger and pain and snapped out his gun. The youngster was a good shot. The revolver lanced flame, and the rat became a kind of fringe of red flesh.
But then two more rats scuttled in, and then a dozen, and then—
“Mac!”
There were, seemingly, hundreds of rats. They swarmed up the now horrified deputy’s body and seeped into the cells between the bars.
The deputy was yelling and shooting. And Mac and Nellie were kicking frantically at the crazed rodents. They’d had the presence of mind to leap to the windows, which were set high in the walls, and jump up and catch the bars.
They hung there with their feet drawn up a yard from the floor. But rats can climb a seemingly impossible steep wall; so they were kept busy kicking.
The deputy hadn’t thought to do any such thing. And now he couldn’t. He lunged blindly around the room, like a person whose clothes are in flames and hasn’t wit enough to lie down and roll.
And then the man was down, and it was frightful! Mac and Nellie shuddered as the squeaking, slashing mass waved over him.
This was something out of an inferno! An attack by rats! There were many such attacks on record, but always the rodents had been maddened by starvation into attacking humans.
And these rats weren’t starving. They were fat and healthy-looking.
Mac had finally gotten something out of an inner pocket. Fortunately for the sheriffs deputy, the sheriff hadn’t found the thing when he searched Mac.
It was a little glass gas bomb, about the size of a plum.
“Watch it, Nellie!” Mac yelled.
Then he threw the little bomb between the bars of the cell door and into the space beyond.
It plopped on the floor and a pale-greenish cloud spread instantly. And almost as instantly, the rats began dropping like flies sprayed with insecticide.
The gas was not a death-dealer. It produced deep unconsciousness. That is, it did to humans. Whether it would produce death to smaller animals, Mac didn’t know. He hoped it would.
The luckless deputy, a dreadful sight but at least still alive, lay in grateful unconsciousness. The gas had spread to the cells, now, and the rats in there were out of it, too.
Mac took another instrument from an inside pocket. It was a small clip with a kind of tiny sponge at the curve of it.
“Nellie!” said Mac, at the door, exhaling as he called so that he wouldn’t get any of the gas.
He managed to toss the clip so that it fell in front of her door. He saw her manacled hands reach out and pick it up. She’d be all right, with the clip over her nostrils. The spongelike mass was impregnated with a chemical which counteracted the gas.
Mac himself needed no clip. The lapel of his coat was impregnated with the same chemical.
Holding his head down so that he breathed through the lapel, Mac pressed close to the door. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. The rats had done one thing at least.
They had sent the deputy, in his blind gyrations, so close to the cells that, when he fell, he was within reach of Mac’s cell door.
Mac, by squeezing so hard against the bars that most of the hide was scraped from his shoulders and chin, could just get his fingertips under the man’s belt. Then it was short work to drag him closer, and almost as short to get the keys the sheriff had turned over to him. Keys to handcuffs as well as doors.
Mac had thought he heard something, while he was freeing Nellie and himself. The sound was a little like that of distant surf, a queer, growing roar.
The gas was out of the room, now, with windows thrown open. Mac could dispense with the coat lapel, and Nellie removed the nose clip.
“We’ve got to get a doctor for this poor fellow, right away,” said Nellie, looking at the deputy, still unconscious from the gas.
Mac nodded. Getting help gravely increased the risk of not completing their getaway. But it had to be done, of course.
“Voices!” exclaimed Nellie suddenly, listening hard.
So then Mac understood that curious, surflike roar. It was quite close, now.
Voices, of course! Many voices! Many people, roaring in dull fury and advancing on the jail.
“A mob!” said Mac. “What in the worrrld—”
He went to the window and looked out.
The road sign gave the population of Kinnisten as twenty-four hundred. It looked as if every one of the population was outside the jail. Then the Scot saw that the mob was mostly men, though a few women raved their inexplicable fury among them.
One thing all had in common. A fury, a very insanity of hatred seemed to possess them. More than one mouth had white flecks of foam on it as the mad crowd stormed toward the jail.
Now, individual shouts could be made out.
“Bring ’em out!”
“They killed Morel! We’ll kill them!”
“String ’em to the nearest tree!”
Nellie stared at Mac. “Mac — the rats, those people! They’ve been treated with some of the hate serum Morel invented!”
“Looks like it,” said Mac. “Maybe in the town water supply. Ye were right. This jail is the real trap. If we were missed by the rats, we were to get hung by the crazy mob outside.”
“Mac, what are we going to do!”
The Scot shook his head. “I ha’ no more gas pellets save a couple that produce death instead of unconsciousness. We can’t kill anyone in that crowd. They’re decent citizens, turned crazy by Morel’s drug. It’s not their fault.”
No, not their fault; but it would be Nellie and Mac’s death if the mob got their hands on the two!
There was a sudden battering at the door. The portal split clear down the center. They had a battering-ram or something outside.
“String ’em up, they murdered Morel! Sheriff said so.”
“Kill ’em! Kill—”
Incarnate hatred held that mob. Murderous hatred!
“So?” said Nellie evenly.
“I guess the trap has worrrked,” burred Mac, eyes steady, though his freckled face was pale.
CHAPTER XIII
Dollar War
“Wouldn’t it,” said Cole Wilson, “have been better if we had come up with Mac and Nellie instead of sending them on ahead?”
He and The Avenger were in the cabin of another of Benson’s planes, with Kinnisten, Maine, just over the skyline.
Dick shook his head, pale eyes fixed on the altimeter.
“You were out, and I couldn’t leave my laboratory for several more hours; so I sent Nellie alone. I wouldn’t have come up with you, now, but there have been no reports from them. I don’t care so much for that.”
“It was a dangerous thing to try — walking right into a trap,” sighed Cole.
Wilson was absolutely fearless, himself. Walking into a trap was precisely the sort of thing that appealed to his reckless nature. But, like so many fearless persons, he could always feel fear for others’ safety. The Avenger himself was like that.
“Some day,” said Dick evenly, pale eyes lambent and icy-clear, “all of us will have to die. Now or fifty years from now. Fifty years is a short span in the history of the human race.”