“Hey!” said Smitty indignantly. “If you think I haven’t been working you’re out of your head. Josh and I just got to town, chief. We trailed Ritter here from Detroit. Seems to me I haven’t slept for months. Josh is after Ritter, now. I left him at the airport and came to report.”
Dick Benson nodded.
“Catch some sleep, Smitty. There’s nothing more to be done for a while. Josh can take care of Ritter, wherever he may be, now.”
Ritter, at the moment, was in Wall Street. To be more specific, he was in the Palmer Building on Wall Street. This small building was the heart of the nation’s financial system. For it housed the biggest banking promoting and financing company in the world.
Ritter had gone into these portals, and Josh, following like a dark shadow half a block behind, was stuck. It was about as easy to get into the Palmer Building as it would be to stroll whistling into Fort Knox without a pass and a guard beside you.
Josh, however, didn’t give up too easily in anything. He looked thoughtfully at the building across the street. This building was a standard skyscraper with batteries of windows facing the Palmer Building. Josh entered it and walked up four flights of stairs.
The main corridor on each floor ended at the street side in a window. So Josh went to the window on the fourth floor and looked across the narrow canyon of a street.
There was no sign of Ritter in any of the offices he could look into. He went down a floor.
As soon as he looked across from this floor he knew he was looking at the important offices of the Palmer Building because the windows over there, on that floor, were opaque. You couldn’t see through their frosted expanses.
It was an unreasonably warm day, however; so most of the windows were open a few inches. Normally you couldn’t see in. But The Avenger’s crew went prepared for the abnormal.
Josh drew out a small telescope that was a marvel of its kind. The world’s finest lens maker had ground the lenses for this little cylinder. When he looked at the middle window again, through the narrow crack at the bottom, faces leaped at him.
They were faces every newspaper reader knew.
One was Ritter’s. The other three were the faces of the top three partners of the great financial house. And Josh had caught them at a moment when something of unusual import must have happened. For the three faces were twisted in an insanity of hate and anger.
The faces were brought so near by the little telescope that it seemed silly that Josh couldn’t hear the words spoken. But of course he couldn’t. He could just see lips writhe and twist in furious words tossed from partner to partner, but he could hear not one syllable.
Ritter simply sat there, in the big office, looking distressed. Now and then, he opened his mouth to speak, as though he would say something to calm the three down. But he didn’t get a chance to put in any words.
He read enough of one sentence to gather that it was a hot accusation of chiseling thrown by one partner at another. He gathered that the other made a furious offer to buy up the first man’s share of the business so that he could get out if he didn’t like the way it was ran. Then the third partner’s lips moved in words so menacing that Josh hated to believe he had read them right.
It seemed that this third one, the most powerful of the lot, was threatening to split the firm wide open and drive the other two out and to hell with them.
At this point, Ritter got up, said a few words resignedly and left. So Josh had to leave, too, almost holding his breath over that third partner’s speech.
He couldn’t have gotten that right! It wasn’t possible!
Civil war in this vast institution that controlled billions of dollars in money and physical assets? Why, that would crack the nation’s whole financial structure to bitter fragments! It would produce a panic on the Exchange; alter the economic structure of the land almost as drastically as real war itself could alter it.
Ritter came out the doorway of the Palmer Building, and Josh slid from the door across the street. Josh felt murder stir in his heart as he saw that a little smile was on the politician’s lips.
Ritter had caused that vital conflict in there. He had gone to the Palmer Building only to make trouble. And he had succeeded. Several million people would be unemployed, thousands of small companies would go broke, great hardship would be suffered, because of this gently smiling, handsome man who would be president.
The combination of a hellish drug and a ruthless monster of ambition was shaping into the worst scourge the United States had ever suffered from. For there was no doubt the drug had subtly been used back there. In no other way could the terrible quarrel between partners, each of whom in sane moments
