Cole looked on in wonder. And instantly the men were in a milling bedlam, concerned only with themselves, paying no attention to their prisoners.
It was fantastic and horrible. It ended with one of the gunmen clubbing another down with the barrel of his gun. And that one would never move again. A pal turned his gun on the clubber and blasted him through the chest.
“Out of here, fast!” said The Avenger, tone low.
Cole got the terrified, dazed Lila, and rushed her to the side door. The Avenger came after. There was a sound of shots in the room behind them like a miniature battle of the Marne.
“That liquor bottle!” exclaimed Cole suddenly, staring hard at The Avenger as the three ran across the fields back toward the autogyro, after Dick had retrieved Mike.
“Yes,” said Dick. “I had some of Morel’s drug with me. I had just synthesized it in the lab. Before I started using Mike through the open window, I poured the lot of it into the bottle. I thought they might drink from it. If they hadn’t we might have been in trouble.”
Cole felt wonder, and something like awe, fill him. He knew well enough The Avenger’s code now. Don’t take life, but place opponents in such a position that if they try to slaughter you, they are themselves annihilated.
But along with this wonder, Cole suddenly felt red rage creeping through him.
“You and your plots!” he yelled suddenly, stopping at the fringe of the woods. “This one happened to turn out all right, and there probably won’t be a man left alive back there in the farmhouse. But suppose it hadn’t come out right? We’d have paid with our lives for your silly scheme!”
Lila looked at him with wide eyes. The Avenger stared with eyes like cold fire opals.
“You ought to be beaten up within an inch of your life,” snarled Cole. “You ought to be—”
And then he leaped, murderously, treacherously, with hate-filled eyes. But Dick was more than ready.
The Avenger took a short step to the side, about the movement a bullfighter makes when he sways six inches to right or left so that the bull’s horn grazes him. Thus did Cole’s maddened fist miss Dick’s head by a half inch. And then Benson’s fist got Cole in the jaw, almost gently, with just enough scientifically applied force to knock him cold.
Dick picked up Cole as if he had weighed nothing at all and went on through the woods. But he looked hard at Lila, with a question in his eyes. And the girl nodded, suddenly, biting her lips.
“Yes,” she said. “I remember, now. One of the men — I think he was half drunk to start with — forced some of the liquor from that bottle down Cole’s throat while he was unconscious. He said Cole ought to be awake to know what was going to happen to him, and then he laughed.”
She shivered. “The poor boy got some of Dad’s drug. Mr. Benson! My father! What has happened to
They were at the little field where Cole had landed the plane. Lila saw another plane, now. A larger one, with unique wind flaps allowing such a low landing speed that Benson could set it down in almost as small a space as the gyro. From this plane, Mac grinned at Lila, but with sympathy in his bleak blue eyes. She saw why.
Her father lay, in bonds, on the floor, eyes filled with the lust to kill.
“I had an idea you and Cole might be followed,” said The Avenger to Lila. “So Mac and I came after you, just in time to see the gang sneak into the farmhouse. I got your father, and Mac brought him to this plane; then I went back. The rest you know.”
The pale, icily calm eyes went to Mac.
“Better take the gyro, with Wilson. It’s easier to take out of this small field than the plane.”
They tied Wilson hand and foot. Before they were finished he was conscious. And he was a hideous example of what Morel’s drug could do to a man. He raved and writhed to get free; to get at Mac and Dick and Lila; to kill them.
“Mon, mon!” said Mac. “Muster Benson—”
“Watch him carefully, Mac,” was all Dick said. “He’ll strike like a cobra if he gets a chance. Now — back to Bleek Street and the lab.”
There were more headlines in the newspapers — bigger ones than had been in before, with the same name:
Edwin C. Ritter.
The man was becoming an American idol overnight. For this time, it seemed, he had settled a squabble in the ranks of the great financial institution at the Palmer Building on Wall Street.
There had been no previous hint of a fight here, as there had been in the motor business. The implications of a financial civil war were so vast that the papers hadn’t dared print it.
The story would have precipitated a panic that would have lowered the combined values of stocks and bonds by billions of dollars overnight.
Only now, when the fight was settled, did it come out, with the name of Edwin Ritter as the pacifier.
