The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master Read Online Free PDF

you.”
    The last person addressed was a man who had suddenly turned up at the cop’s elbow, and whom the cop treated almost as deferentially as he had The Avenger. He was a tall man, unusually handsome, with graying hair and fine features and an orator’s mobile mouth.
    “Hello, Ritter,” said Benson.
    Wilson blinked. This man seemed to know everyone of prominence.
    Edwin Ritter, well-known politician, stared at The Avenger, then nodded affably.
    “How are you, Benson? Quite a curious thing, all this, isn’t it?” He waved a hand at the gyrating birds around the ledges, then ducked as one winged at his head.
    “Quite curious,” Dick agreed, voice even. “Did you come here expressly to see it?”
    “No,” said Ritter. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood and saw the crowd. Like most of the rest here, I came out of curiosity, to see what was attracting all the attention.”
    Benson’s coat writhed and pulsed with the struggles of the live pigeon. Ritter stared.
    “What in the world—” he gasped.
    “I’m taking one of these abnormal birds to my laboratory for experimentation,” said Dick.
    “I wouldn’t think,” smiled Ritter, “that a man as prominent scientifically as you are would be turned to so small a task.”
    “It might not be small,” The Avenger said.
    Ritter was borne off on a wave of movement, then.
    Benson and Cole went back to the Bleek Street laboratory with the one live pigeon and the one dead one.
    Funny to some in the crowd, frightening to others, the scene seemed ominous in the extreme to Benson.
    Pigeons attacking everything in sight! It was as mad as it was for rabbits to attack a dog.
    And The Avenger had an idea that the two madnesses might possibly have some connection.

    In a small plane, Smitty and Lila Morel neared the Maine laboratory of Lila’s father.
    Dick, before going to the library to have a look at the incredible pigeons, had sent the giant, with Lila, to look around that laboratory a bit.
    “You say there’s no landing place near the laboratory?” Smitty asked the girl.
    “There’re only thick woods all around,” said Lila. “Thick woods and wolves and black flies.”
    “I take it you didn’t enjoy your trips there.”
    “I didn’t,” confessed Lila. “I’m a city gal, I guess. No wilderness for me. But Dad needed me to take care of him—away from a test tube he was as helpless as a child—so I always went.”
    “Would the clearing around the lab be big enough to land in?”
    “I’m afraid not,” said Lila. “We’ll have to walk it from the nearest village.”
    “Or hire a car,” said Smitty hopefully.
    “There’s no road to the lab,” said Lila. “Dad let it grow up with young trees as soon as the place was built and equipped and there was no more need for trucking. The only way through the woods is on foot.”
    Smitty sighed. The big fellow was a Samson by nature and not by exercise. He didn’t like exercise, except the kind requiring huge fists to batter against the faces of crooks. Just out of college, Smitty had been framed into prison by a smooth crook. His main pleasure in life would always be taking that out on all other crooks within reach and making them sorry they’d been born.
    The two didn’t get to the clearing around the lab till dusk. They’d heard Lila’s wolves plenty by then. She stayed very close to the big fellow and looked very thankful for his gigantic size. Smitty swelled his biceps a little under her clutching hand. There was only one girl in the world for him. That was petite Nellie Gray. But that didn’t keep him from admiring other beauty once in awhile.
    Lila went up to the gate.
    “I thought you said the gate could only be opened from inside the laboratory,” Smitty said rather dumbly.
    “You can’t open it from the inside when everybody’s on the outside,” Lila pointed out. “When we leave, we set the inner mechanism so that a secret latch out here will open the gate for us to get back