The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard Read Online Free PDF Page A

going to the rescue of innocent damsel’s. That’s a likely story.”
    “What do you think is the reason for my call here?” said Benson patiently.
    “You’re one of the crooks,” Nellie Gray jerked out. “Your crowd has killed my father—and made it look as if I did it. You got the two bricks he had. Now you want the rest. And you think you’ll get them through me.”
    She stared around the small cell, gazing bitterly at the barred door.
    “You must have some influence, too,” she said, “to be able to come in here and talk to me.”
    Benson didn’t explain that he knew the district attorney, and that a phone call from headquarters had been all he needed to walk into her cell. He didn’t blame the girl for being suspicious of his call. But he had to beat that suspicion down somehow.
    “Strange as it may seem,” he said, “I’m just what I appear to be—a person interested in helping you because I know injustice is being done. Also, I’m interested because I want to save possible future victims of this gang that killed your father.”
    “How splendid!” said Nellie witheringly.
    “But to do that, I must have more information. And so far you have refused to give me any—”
    “I’m going to keep right on refusing.”
    “I can bring some pretty responsible citizens to vouch for me.”
    “I don’t care if you bring the mayor. You’re playing for big stakes, and you’d naturally be a large-caliber crook.”
    “Then you won’t tell me about the Mexican bricks?”
    Nellie Gray’s lips tightened and she was silent.
    “Do you know anything about the exploding peanuts?”
    “Exploding peanuts!” That took her out of her stubborn silence. “Are you crazy?”
    “Evidently you don’t know anything about them,” sighed Benson. “And equally evidently you aren’t going to tell me what you do know. I can’t blame you.”

    He started toward the cell door. A guard outside began unlocking it.
    Nellie stared curiously at the man with the dead, white face from which vital, pale eyes flared like beacons. Her gaze went over his prematurely white hair and his explosively powerful body that, even in repose, suggested swift and terrible action.
    “What are you going to do now?” she said.
    “I’m going to get you out of here,” said Benson.
    She laughed again, mirthlessly.
    “You evidently don’t know all the things they’ve got against me. You and your gang couldn’t bail me out of here with a million in cash.”
    Benson’s dead face couldn’t move, but his eyes seemed to smile a little at that. He went to Lieutenant of Detectives Hogarth.
    Hogarth, a square-jawed official afraid of neither man nor beast, knew a little of Benson. He looked curiously at the average-sized, white-faced man who was credited with doing such impossible things.
    “About Miss Gray,” Benson said. “Why is she held without bail?”
    “Because we’re sure she killed her old man,” said Hogarth. “We haven’t given that out to the papers yet, but we’re sure enough.”
    “Why?”
    Hogarth ticked off points on his muscular fingers.
    “One, Professor Gray was killed in a room that could be entered only by the door. There’s a window, but nothing under it for three floors. No way to climb up to it. And the girl, by her own admission, was alone in the apartment with her father. Anyone coming in the regular front door would have had to pass the room she was in, and she would have seen him. She says she saw no one.
    “Two, beside the chair in which was the body, we found a lipstick exactly matching the one in her purse.
    “Three, nobody could have got around behind Gray, from which position he was hit, except someone he knew and paid no attention to—like his daughter.
    “Four, there’s about a twelve-thousand-dollar inheritance—”
    “That’s enough, I think. You’ve proved her innocent already.”
    “What?” said Hogarth, not knowing whether to be mad or mystified. He decided to be mystified. You