Yells and smacks delighted him. He jumped for the spot where Lila had cried out. He heard another beginning of a scream, this time near the inner door, and bounded there, barking his shins on things in the blackness. He cursed the method of this gang. They’d turned the yard lights off when they turned the others off. There wasn’t even light from outside shining in to relieve the blackness.
Smitty heard the rustle of Lila’s dress, moved faster and brought up smack against a wall. But also, he brought up against the light switch.
He snapped it on, turned in relief to go on with the fight against men he could see, and then he sagged to his knees!
He wasn’t the only one near that light switch. One of the gang, perhaps the one who had snapped it off in the first place, was there, too. And this one had struck before Smitty could see him.
A bad clip on the head with a gun barrel.
Smitty instinctively rolled as he sagged so that the giant was spared the next blow. But he was too dazed to go on. He braced himself for the blow or the shot that should put him out of this world—
“All right!” yelled a man near the table under which the mouse had been. “I’ve got it.”
Smitty got one confused glimpse of this man, and then an abrupt change came over the picture.
The men left.
Just like that! They poured out of the building. Two men who had been holding Lila, loosed her and beat it so abruptly that she almost fell. The man with the gun on Smitty turned and ran.
Before the big fellow could get strength back to rise from knees to unsteady feet, the place was empty, save for Lila and himself.
Lila had nerve. She started toward the door.
“We can catch them in the woods. I know the country around here better than they can possibly know it. Well, why don’t you come on?”
Smitty didn’t make a move; he didn’t even answer her. He stood with his head cocked to one side, as if listening intently. Which, as a matter of fact, he was.
“Do you happen to have a thermocouple around?” he asked. “Or would you know one if you saw it?”
“Of course I’d know one — a simple little thing like that?” flashed Lila. “But why do you ask at a time like this? Those men in the woods will be—”
“See if there’s a thermocouple unsmashed,” said Smitty.
They found one in the living quarters, and hence unbroken. Smitty nodded as he saw it. It was a delicate instrument able to detect the heat from a star. Which was more ability than Smitty needed.
He set it up and observed its message carefully. Then he nodded.
“Get what?” said Lila, exasperated by all this.
“The heat of a motor would register on this thermocouple, if it was within a mile or two,” said Smitty.
“No motor could
But the giant was off on another tack. The one glance he had had of the man who had yelled “All right,” was clear in his mind. The man had seemed to be the head of affairs. His yell had sent them all running.
“You described your father, at Bleek Street, when you were talking to us,” Smitty said, looking hard at the girl.
Her lips opened, shut without words, and she only nodded.
“You said he had graying blond hair, blue eyes and was husky-looking, though a bit stooped at the shoulders from work over test tubes and beakers,” he said.
Lila didn’t even nod this time. She stared at him with her eyes wide.
“The man who ran this little raid,” said Smitty, “looked husky, though stooped at the shoulders, and he had light-blue eyes and graying blond hair.”
Lila seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to go on.
“That man,” said Smitty, “was your father, wasn’t he? Your own father, busting in here and raiding his own laboratory!”
“He… he wasn’t,” stammered Lila, white-faced.
“Oh, yes, he was. Your looks show it.”
“No! He… I never saw that man before!”
Smitty dropped it and went to the bench under which the red pool had been.
The drying red puddle of some stuff that had turned a mouse into a miniature lion when it partook of it. The coagulating little pool that was like blood in color if not in texture.
And there was no sign of that pool, now!
The puddle had been so meticulously scraped up that there were marks of whatever blade had been used deep in the cement of the floor. There was not one trace of it left for Smitty to take to The Avenger’s laboratory.
“That proves it,” he said. “Only your father would have known the significance of a puddle of spilled chemical on the floor. No one else would have had the sense to remove that, when the gang came back to make sure no clues had been left.”
“He wasn’t my father! He
