The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers Read Online Free PDF Page B

ragged doorway into the cavernous darkness of the place. Her voice echoed inside and came faintly back: “— have to look.”
    Benson took a powerful small flashlight from his pocket. Its cold white ray went through the ragged opening and played over a once smooth, but now weathered, floor, with supporting pillars scattered every few feet. It showed scarred walls with tattered posters of prize fights long forgotten, a pile of planks at the end that must have been set up for benches.
    The three stepped inside. Far to the left there was dim light where the roof had collapsed and was open in slits to the sky. But it was quite dark and seemed ever darker because their eyes were still conscious of daylight.
    Mac felt a finger touch his wrist, and felt a code in varied pressure. A message from Benson to him. It said: “Others are here.”
    Mac looked swiftly at the girl, who was only a dim blur. The Avenger would have spoken that aloud, obviously, if he hadn’t wanted to keep it from Edna Brown. Therefore, he did not trust her. Mac wondered why. He couldn’t imagine that the daughter of Dillingham Brown would be working against them, and hence working against her own father.
    Mac’s bony hand suddenly caught Benson’s arm, and not in any code pressure, either.
    “Did ye hear?” he whispered.
    “Yes,” said Benson.
    It came again, the sound that had so agitated Mac. It was a laugh.
    From back there in the deepest darkness, near the piled planks, it sounded. A grating, maniacal chuckle that was at once followed by a peal of laughter that echoed around the great empty auditorium as if a crowd of devils were there.
    Mac began to sweat. He knew all too well the caliber of that laughter. It was the same senseless, spine-shivering sound that had come from the lips of the man who had tried to murder him and Cole at the store!
    Like the call of one weird bird of prey to another, an answering laugh came from another dark corner of the place. And then there was the shuffle of footsteps. How many, they could not say.
    “I’m . . . I’m going to get out of here,” whispered the girl, her teeth chattering.
    Benson said nothing; he allowed her to slip out through the plank opening without raising a hand to stop her. For an instant her slim body was silhouetted in the opening.
    There was a fiendish laugh and the bark of a gun!
    Splinters flew from the side of the opening almost under the girl’s hand. She screamed and leaped out. And Mac and The Avenger whirled toward the spot where the orange lash of the gunshot had blossomed.
    “ Tis a trrap!” snapped Mac. “She led us into a tr—”
    Then half a dozen more shots snapped at the sound of his voice. Several of them hit Mac, but the marvelous bulletproof stuff which Benson had invented, called celluglass, worn under his clothes, stopped the slugs.
    The two of them leaped forward, weaving as they ran, heading straight toward the piled planks. That was The Avenger’s way. He would walk into a trap, open-eyed, on the chance that he could learn something. If an enemy tried to ambush him, he would charge the ambush.
    No telling how many were behind those planks, but it sounded like a lot; the screams of laughter might have come from a score of throats. The two men charged anyway, and when they got near, Mac tossed one of his glittering little gas pellets so that it fell between the planks and end wall.
    It should have stopped things right there, but it so happened that the ambushers were on the move at that second. They poured from behind each end of the pile of boards, and fanned toward Mac and Benson. They didn’t know of the knock-out mist they were leaving behind, but the move saved them as efficiently as if they had known all about it and acted accordingly.
    Mac reached for another glass pellet, but the nearest man, laughing so that tears streamed down his face, reached him and began throttling him, so the Scot had to use both hands to protect himself.
    He heard a slight crack