The Avenger 15 - House of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

necessity for quick action back there off the parkway.
    “Concussion,” judged MacMurdie.
    Benson, an unparalleled physician himself, nodded.
    “I’d judge so, too. I’m glad you’re here, Mac. I want you to work on him.”
    “I’d rather work on the girrrl,” burred Mac, with a twinkle in his eyes that brought an answering wan smile to the lips of the dark-haired beauty.
    “The man swallowed something,” said Benson. “Get a stomach pump and see what it was.”
    “I can tell you that, I think,” said the girl. “It was a gold medallion.” She pointed to the coronetlike roll of her black hair, disarranged over the right ear. “I had it in my hair. While I was being driven in the car I felt a hand take it.”
    “Gold medallion?” said Benson, turning his pale, agate-bright eyes on her.
    “I—yes.” She stopped. “It was for the medallion that I was kidnapped, I think. It’s death! I had death in my hair.” She finished with the dramatic sense of her Latin ancestry.
    “Why would the gold medallion be so important?”
    The girl bit her lip.
    “Will you think it terrible? I do not want to tell you. Not even you, Mr. Benson. Oh, I thank you so much for the quickness that let you trace me, and the cleverness that enabled you to rescue me.”
    “You don’t care to tell me about the gold medallion?”
    “Please. No. I tried to telephone you to ask you to hide me from death for forty-eight hours. Only that. Then I am to meet other members of my family, and I shall be safe.”
    “Your family?”
    The girl’s dark head went up and back.
    “Very, very pretty,” whispered Smitty to Nellie.
    The fragile-looking little blonde shot the girl a nasty glance and the giant a venomous one.
    “Hm-m-m!” was all she said.
    “I am from Spain. My name is Carmella Haygar,” the dark beauty said.
    “Haygar?” repeated The Avenger, his eyes like chips of stainless steel in his calm face. “Of the international business-and-banking family of that name?”
    “Yes.” There was regal bearing to Carmella’s head.
    “A shining clan,” said The Avenger softly.
    Some of the proud lift went from the dark head.
    “It was a shining clan. Cut now—broken. Ruined! My branch of the family, the one that has lived in Spain for two hundred years, is typical. My father and brother were killed in the revolution there. Our fortune and lands were expropriated. I am the only one of the great Spanish Haygars left. I escaped to this country barely with my life and with a few meaningless keepsakes, such as the gold medallion I spoke of.”
    “So meaningless,” snapped Nellie Gray in an aside to Smitty, “that men kill each other like flies to get it.”
    The Avenger did not dwell on that fact.
    “You are to meet others of the Haygar family in two days, you say?”
    “Yes,” said the girl.
    MacMurdie came in.
    “Mon, even unconscious, he was reluctant to give it up,” he said. “But here it is.”
    With an eager cry, Carmella took possession of the disk in Mac’s hand. The little gold medallion.
    “May I see it?” said Dick, voice calm but compelling.
    “Yes.” Carmella handed it to him. “Just a keepsake, as I said. But it is very valuable to me for . . . for sentimental reasons.”
    The eyes of The Avenger expressed nothing as he examined the gold disk. They were as blank as bits of glacier ice, and as cold.

CHAPTER V

The Former Great
    The building was on a shabby street just off Eleventh Avenue. On one side was a rope-and-cord factory, on the other a cheap candy company whose odors were guaranteed to make the passers-by decide never again to eat anything sweet.
    The two-room space on the second floor in the rear of the building got the noise of the rope shop and the smells of the candy factory all day and most of the night. Now, at four o’clock in the afternoon, both were at their peak.
    The name under the bell of the two rear rooms—a bell that had not been in working condition for at least ten years—was