A car barn, unexpectedly out in the middle of no place because of an ancient feud with village elders! Car barns are big. Plenty big enough for a small blimp.
It took them well over an hour to find it because they didn’t want to ask any more questions of anybody, and because they went the wrong way along the river on their first attempt.
The car barn, it seemed, was in the opposite direction.
It was well along in the afternoon when Smitty stopped the car under a tree.
They had been following, not a regular road, but the old grass-grown twin roadbed where ties and rails had once been. The roadbed went on ahead of them, to end at the river — and something else.
“There she is,” said Smitty.
The huge old red-brick structure was on a leveled area among small hills along the river. Behind it were only bits of another building that had been a power house. The whole area was in a bay of thick woods.
It was a swell place in which to hide that almost impossible creation to be hidden — a blimp. And indications told that this was where it had been hidden, all right.
The building had a flatly arched roof. Wide doors had covered the front, but these had long since been ripped off by looters. In addition, now, as if it had just happened to fall at some time in the past, the section between the peak of the roof and top of the vast door sills had fallen in, leaving the whole end open. Even this building could barely take a small blimp since there was no room for door sills.
“So?” said Josh.
Smitty scratched his jaw. It was clear sunlight, broad daylight. No one could get to the car barn without being seen, if there was anyone inside to see. But the giant felt disinclined to wait through the long hours till night.
“Let’s just go right up to it,” he said. “Pick up any stray pieces of iron you see around. If anyone’s in there, he’ll think we’re gathering scrap to sell.”
It sounded pretty thin to Josh, but he didn’t feel like waiting, either. They walked openly forward; Josh saw an old piece of car spring and picked it up. Smitty, a few paces farther along, saw an iron rod and stooped for it. There wasn’t much around. For years kids must have come here for junk to sell in order to make a few cents for candy bars.
They got quite near. They could see through the vast open front of the building. It was cave-dark in there but not too dark for Smitty, finally, to see a man’s figure flit from shadow to shadow, within.
“I’ll be an ant’s grandmother!” he breathed.
“What’s the matter?” said Josh.
“That guy in there. That was Morel!”
“What?”
“I’m dead sure of it. I saw him in Maine, with Lila. She swore it wasn’t her father, but in such a way that I knew it was. And here he is again—”
A pretty thin subterfuge — to pretend they were a couple of junkmen out looking for scrap iron. They found out how thin before Smitty could finish his sentence.
There was a rattle of sound like that of a giant typewriter, and grass and bushes suddenly were sheared to their right! Another rattle, and the same thing happened to their left.
“Next time,” came a voice from near the open front of the building, “we’ll shoot straight ahead, unless you guys stick your hands up high and keep ’em there.”
Then they saw it, hugging the right-hand corner of the opening — the muzzle of a machine gun! And in a moment a dozen grinning men had come from left and right, where they had been out of sight of Josh and Smitty.
The men came toward the two, with a lane between them down which the machine gun could fire, if necessary. They got to the sides and behind the two aides of The Avenger.
One of them was the man who had mentioned the car barn at the lunch counter. Smitty and Josh had been
“Walk into the joint, you two,” the man jeered.
Smitty and Josh, by common consent, stayed where they were.
“Jack!” the man yelled to the gunner.
They saw his fingers move a little; so Smitty and Josh started forward.
“What are you going to do to us?” stalled Josh.
“You’ll find out,” said the man who had roped them in so neatly at the lunch counter.
But another of the men was more talkative.
“There are pits where they used to work under the old cars, see? Like grease pits in a garage. We’ll herd you guys into one of them, and
Josh and Smitty didn’t know just what the
“Ritter,” said Smitty, “wouldn’t like that.”
“Oh, yeah?” jeered the man. “Ritter said we were to knock off you two, and some others he described, wherever we caught up with you. And here you’re nice enough to walk right into our mitts while we’re waiting for the blimp to come back.”
Smitty and Josh kept from looking at each other. The gang still didn’t know the blimp had been brought down and their pals jailed.
“So Morel is in on this, too,” said Smitty. “We got the word that he was kidnaped, but it doesn’t look so much like that, now.”
