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

dropped beside the body simply to implicate her. There were no prints on this lipstick, were there?”
    “Well, no,” admitted Hogarth reluctantly.
    “So she dropped it beside the man she had murdered—but first wiped her prints from it!” Benson said. “I think there’s enough here, without going any farther, to break your charge. Certainly there’s enough doubt to justify letting her out on bail.”
    “It’ll cost at least twenty-five thousand, if I know the judge,” growled Hogarth, seeing a perfect, fast murder conviction fading from his grasp.

    It cost fifty thousand dollars, put up by Benson in the form of a certified check which scarcely made a dent in the balance he carried in just that one bank. He had deposits in a dozen others.
    Free and on the street, Nellie Gray looked at Benson with, if anything, increased bitterness and suspicion.
    “You’re even more powerful than I thought,” she said. “You must be the head of the gang himself.”
    “I think you’re going to get over at least some of your quite natural suspicion of me very shortly,” Benson said. He took her arm and guided her around the corner.
    After them, from the sidewalk crowds, three men, walking fairly close together, followed.
    Around the corner Nellie Gray, who had walked with Benson this far because her uncertainty was overbalanced by his impelling manner and his hand under her arm, stopped and jerked free.
    “Where are you trying to take me? Is this why you got me free—so you could take me away some place and make me answer questions?”
    Benson didn’t answer. He didn’t have time to. The three men were on them then.
    It was smoothly done. There were people all around. The plan had been for one man to knife Benson efficiently and unobtrusively in the back and for the other two to get the girl to a waiting car before the people around knew what had happened. But that nice plan went overboard.
    With machinelike precision, the two men got Nellie by each arm just as the knife in the hand of the third flashed toward Benson’s back. But the back was no longer there. The man found himself blinking in utter amazement into a white, still face from which pale eyes glared like gray flame. A man couldn’t turn that quickly! But Benson had.
    Benson’s hand flashed up and caught the wrist behind the descending knife. The knife stopped descending. Benson’s steely forefinger found a spot a little above the wrist and in the center of the forearm. The finger pressed, and the man shrieked wildly and dropped the knife.

    A crowd was already pressing around.
    Benson laced out with his right to the man’s jaw, and then turned his back on him, serenely confident that he’d have no more trouble from that source.
    He saw a curious thing when he faced the girl.
    One of the two men who had grabbed her arms was on the sidewalk, staring at her with pop eyes. The other man executed a back flip over her extended leg as Benson took a step toward her, and crashed beside the first on the sidewalk. Nellie Gray didn’t need help.
    Benson steered her forward.
    “Into my car,” he said.
    It was an odd-looking car for a rich man to have. It was a big, dull sedan at least four years old and of a not very expensive make. That was the story the outside told. But under the exterior there was a motor capable of a hundred and thirty miles an hour. The shabby sides of the car were bulletproofed, and the tires were filled with petroleum jelly instead of air.
    Nellie got into the car in order to get away from the gaping crowd in a hurry, regardless of whether or not she was still suspicious of Benson. And that she still was, came out in a moment.
    “You knew those men were following us!” she said. “It was all a play, to make me think you were on the level.”
    “What makes you think I knew?” said Benson.
    “You were walking on the balls of your feet, like a tiger ready to leap,” she said. “You were just waiting for that attack.”
    Benson