“It’s the jail,” he said crisply. “And there’s a yelling mob around it,” he added, a moment later.
“Nellie and Mac are supposed to be at Morel’s laboratory, miles from here,” Cole said uncertainly.
But The Avenger kept right on going down toward the blazing building. When there was trouble in a district, with his aides anywhere in the vicinity, the trouble was apt to be whirling right around the aides.
And a mob is always a murderous thing to be stopped.
The Avenger’s steely right hand went out to stop them; went toward the instrument panel where a small knob glistened among innumerable dials. The dials were standard for planes of this type. The knob was not. Only this one plane had that knob.
The Avenger pulled it out on a sliding rod and zoomed down straight for the milling people. Some looked up, saw the plane and shook fists at it in blind frenzy. The rest paid no attention at all. They cavorted like maniacs around the building.
Now, Cole and Benson could see two figures crowded back toward the rear of the roof, away from the fiercest flames. Nellie and Mac.
The plane roared over the crowd scarcely twenty feet above them. It rolled sharply, banked and came back.
Twice, this maneuver was repeated; and each time the plane zoomed over the crowd, from its leading wing edges came fine spray, released by the tug at the knob. It was like spraying a potato field for bugs. But this spray was a different thing, and the creatures on which it acted were not bugs.
“Chief!” gasped Cole, for once in his life trembling in every limb. “They’re not— Look!”
There was no more surflike roar of fury from the mob. There was no sound or movement at all. On the street around the blazing building, instead, were hundreds of prone bodies. It was as if the whole town had suddenly sighed, yawned and lay down in their tracks to sleep.
“They’re not… dead?” quavered Cole. “All those people— They’re not—”
“Quantity production of Mac’s sleeping gas,” said The Avenger. And his eyes had never been colder nor his voice more calm. The street rose as the plane nosed toward it. The wide main street would barely land a ship, with such wizardry as The Avenger’s at the controls. “They’ll be all right in a few hours.”
Cole saw Mac and Nellie drop in a hurry from the roof of the one-story building. Nellie had on the nose clip, and Mac was breathing through his lapel as they ran for the plane. Both had known, at sight, the meaning of Dick’s swoops with the plane and the way the people lay down.
“I think not,” said The Avenger. He gunned the motors. “My experiments lead me to believe that the effect of the drug is quite temporary when it is taken internally. Injected, the effect lasts much longer and is more serious. So many people must have had it given them internally, in food or water. It would be impossible to inject them all. I think they’ll be all right soon— What is it, Nellie?”
“There was a deputy in that blazing building,” Nellie said in a low, stricken tone. “We had no chance to get him out. Unconscious — in those flames—”
“When a mob of people are possessed by hate,” said Dick, with his voice as icily calm as ever and yet holding profound sadness in it, “that is the sort of thing that happens. There was nothing to be done about it. Where is Lila?”
Nellie pointed toward the old mill, too shaky to speak. By a miracle of piloting, The Avenger got the plane up off the avenue, then flew to the wheatfield where the ship Nellie had flown here was staked.
Cole took the controls of that plane, with Lila beside him, after they’d called her from her hiding place in the mill building. The two ships zoomed back to the city.
It was stalemate. The jaws of the death trap had clicked shut on emptiness. But Mac and Nellie had learned nothing from their hazardous experience.
Nellie and Mac were in the laboratory at Bleek Street with The Avenger.
Dick had a small vial of ruby-red liquid. The stuff glinted evilly in the light as if it had a life of its own. A satanic life.
“That’s a duplication of Morel’s drug?” asked blond Nellie.
“Yes,” nodded Dick, pale eyes fixed on the evil red fluid. “I was pretty sure of it before. Now, I am certain it is an exact duplication.”
The Avenger’s pale eyes had never been so coldly flaring. They were like chips of polar ice under moonlight.
Then the door opened and Smitty came in, bulking gigantic in the apparatus-crowded lab.
“Smitty!” said Nellie, with a soft shine in her eyes, which told for a fleeting instant her true feelings for the giant. But the soft shine was instantly wiped out and she looked covertly and self-consciously at Mac and at Dick.
“About time you showed up, Gargantua,” she said crisply. “We work around here. Remember?”
