The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns Read Online Free PDF

she stood. Her little flash showed that.
    Harriet seemed to forget some of her terror in this discovery. She bent low over the line where the dirt had been brushed aside. She went along it inch by inch, with the flash busy every instant.
    She saw that, in patches, the floor was actually clean; had been recently scrubbed. And then she saw one ragged round dot in the dirt. And she knew why the other patches had the scrubbed look.
    That little dot was the rusty brown of dried blood.
    The tiny flash started on. It stopped within a foot of the object that had slid from Smathers’s pocket when his body was dragged through here three nights ago. But the flash never quite reached the object.
    Just then she snapped it out!
    Harriet held the darkened little tube with ice-cold fingers while her heart pounded in her ears. She thought she’d heard a sound again—behind her.
    When she whirled, she could see nothing. Small as the light from the flash was, it had broken that accustomed-to-darkness phase of her eyes, at least temporarily.
    She couldn’t see a thing in the direction of the doorway. She couldn’t even see the door itself. Thus, she didn’t see that shadow that was only vaguely of the shape and size of a human being; didn’t see it reaching toward her! Reaching—
    If the shadowy figure had gotten her at that moment, she might have had some small chance. Because she was facing toward it, and she might have beaten it off long enough to at least scream.
    But at that moment her nerve cracked, and she decided to try a dash for the side window.
    She took two steps toward it, and hands got her by the throat!
    She did try to scream then—tried wildly, horribly. But the iron fingers choked back sound as well as breath. Her body writhed convulsively, and then she was still.
    She could see again, a little, when her eyes opened once more. She didn’t know how long she had been unconscious, but she had an idea it was at least five minutes.
    She came back to a full horror of her position, with no merciful seconds in which to wonder where she was or why she was there.
    She came to with the realization that she was tightly bound, wrists and ankles, and that the rope smelled of kerosene.
    And she realized instantly why she could see a bit now, where she hadn’t been able to before. Now there was light.
    It came from little tongues of flame, very small and feeble tongues of flame! They were flickering up from little piles of rags, which also gave off the odor of kerosene; and the little piles were around the walls of the room.
    Sound from the doorway drew her gaze. Her eyes turned in that direction just in time to see a kind of shadow drifting out of the room.
    Out and down the hall. And then she faintly heard the creaking of the front window, rising and lowering, as the shadow left the building.
    She shrieked and heard the sound only as a mumble against her gagged lips. She stared at the flames, leaping high now, about to make an incinerator of the room in which she lay helpless; of the whole house, in fact, in about five minutes.

CHAPTER V

Buried Clue
    When Nellie started out to do The Avenger’s bidding and look through the office of Markham Farquar for clues as to Smathers’s destination three nights ago, she had every intention of being quite peaceful and law-abiding about it.
    Nellie was always peaceful. At least, that is what she herself always claimed. If you asked anyone else, however, Smitty for example, he’d have told you that Nellie lived for excitement and never was peaceful if she could possibly help it.
    Nevertheless, she had every intention of being peaceful in her methods this time.
    She started by phoning around to find Farquar and have him meet her at his office and open up for her to make a search.
    And she couldn’t find him.
    He wasn’t at the office. He wasn’t at his home on Riverside Drive. So she just went to the office building housing the suite in which he worked, intending to have the building