The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer Read Online Free PDF Page A

scientific eyes with a magnetic field for a lens. It could magnify up to a hundred thousand diameters. With the blood sample from the sick man downstairs, The Avenger went to this machine.
    Mac, a floor below, knocked at the door of the suite given to Heber, got an answer, and went in.
    The apelike figure of their guest was stretched on a bed. Heber opened his eyes as the Scot entered, but he didn’t move. He just looked questioning.
    “Too tired to talk a little more?” said Mac.
    “No. What’s on your mind?”
    “In my store,” said Mac, “while ye were gettin’ over that clout on the head, ye said somethin’ about emeralds. A bucket of emeralds. Nothin’ about radium—just emeralds.”
    Heber smiled faintly.
    “Did I say that? I guess I was scrambled in the top story. I was going back to something Stahl told me in Brazil. I said he got me to guide him by offering a lot of money. He did offer me a lot, but it wasn’t enough to make me start for the kingdom of the green killer. I guess he saw that, so he put out this hot air about emeralds. He said a witch doctor near where we were going was said to have a whole lot of raw emeralds, and there’d be no reason why I couldn’t grab them off on the trip. That, plus the money, was enough to get me to go with him.” He grinned ruefully. “There weren’t any emeralds. He admitted it the last day out, before the monkey men captured him.”
    “Oh!” said Mac. Then: “Got any idea who tried to kill ye?”
    “No,” said Heber, looking puzzled. “If Indians had tried to get me, I’d have known. But this gang weren’t natives; they were whites. Nobody I’d ever seen before.”
    “How do ye mean, if Indians had tried it, ye’d have known?”
    The sick man explained.
    “There’s a definite tribe around that section—the monkey men who hold Stahl. They’ve got more brains than most of the natives. At their head is a young Indian who has been to school in England—”
    “What?” exclaimed Mac.
    “Yeah. Smart boy,” said Heber bitterly. “He knows the answers, all right. For one thing, he knows that when the outside world comes into the jungle—the natives go out. So this young leader is seeing to it that no white gets in. When anyone does come near, members of the tribe follow him out, if it’s to the ends of the earth, and kill him, so he won’t go back again or lead anyone else back.”
    “Nice boys,” said Mac thoughtfully.
    “Very nice. There’s a squad of them in New York, now. Followed me up, I guess. One of them was found killed near your store, I hear. That has me stumped. Who’d kill him? Unless it was one of the gang that tackled me. But why would they kill an Indian, and why did they go after me, and who are they? It’s got me licked.”
    Then he got indignant.
    “Also, why did that girl try to drill me with an arrow? What’s she got against me? I never saw her before in my life.”
    All of which were questions with no answers, as far as Mac was concerned. In fact, the Scot gloomily decided there’d probably never be any answers, particularly for the completely goofy conduct of the girl.

    Nellie was just coming back into the laboratory after going over the girl’s shapely white body carefully, as instructed. She went to the giant electron microscope, where The Avenger was busy.
    “There are two tiny punctures in the skin of her left shoulder,” Nellie said.
    Benson nodded as if he’d expected that. But he thrust pencil and paper toward her.
    “Draw them.”
    Nellie made two little dots, close together. “They slant in a little toward each other,” she added.
    “The bite of one of the giant South American spiders,” he said. “No antidote. Even in a body as large as a human’s, it causes total paralysis for a few hours. The motor nerves recover first, so that the victim can move. But in some way not yet explained by scientific investigation, the conscious will remains numbed for long after that.”
    “So our guest