The Avenger 22 - The Black Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

was calling. “Hurry! Here! Please! A lady—”
    He didn’t go on because, by then, Smitty and Mac were in the store, too, and could see for themselves.
    Stretched out cold on the floor was a girl. “She st-staggered in here like she was d-drunk,” the frightened boy stammered. “She yelled. I guess you heard it. She looked all around, kind of wild. And then she went limp. I didn’t have time to catch her. I think she bumped her head when she fell. You don’t think she was d-drunk, d-do you? She looks too nice to get like that.”
    She did look nice. Smitty, always susceptible to feminine beauty, could testify to that. He stared admiringly at her.
    She was young, little more than twenty. She was rather tall and had on a silk dress under a spring coat that revealed all the expected curves. Her hair was dark-brown, and you felt that the eyes, closed now, would be of the same color.
    “Water!” yelled Smitty gallantly. “Spirits of ammonia. Whiskey! Do something for her. You’re supposed to be a doctor.”
    But Mac hadn’t time or need to do anything, because the girl stirred.
    She opened her eyes, and they were dark-brown. Also, they were engagingly beautiful, even though they didn’t have a very intelligent expression at the moment.
    She didn’t say a word. No “Where am I?” or “What place is this?”
    She stared at Smitty without much expression, then looked the same way at Mac. Then, before they could move to help her, she got up.
    “Feeling better, now?” said Smitty, with his hand under her arm.
    She didn’t say anything. She moved her arm away and started for the soda fountain. She reached over it and touched the spigots there. She looked at them like a child who has never seen such things as soda fountain spigots. She opened one, closed it again.
    Smitty looked his perplexity as he watched. He looked at Mac, who shrugged as if to say: “See what she does. Let her alone.”
    “She’s been socked on the knob or something. She’s wacky,” breathed the boy clerk.
    Smitty and Mac felt the same way, too. But they wanted to help; and they thought that just by watching they could get a clue to her trouble.
    “Maybe she lost something very valuable that drove her out of her mind,” whispered Smitty to Mac. “Maybe she’s subconsciously searching for it here.”
    Full of the spirit of helpfulness, they let her alone.
    She certainly seemed to be searching for something.
    Vacant of eye, she went from the fountain to a counter where alarm clocks were stacked in their square boxes. She opened a box, took out a clock, put it back. She went on toward the rear to a counter where talcum powders were arrayed. She looked at one of these.
    Then she jumped.
    Lithe as a deer, with nothing vacant whatever about her lovely eyes now, she flashed to the rear door, flashed through and shut the thing.
    The ponderous bang of the metal portal seemed to echo out the store and along the block. It snapped shut like Mac’s surprise-parted jaws. As one, he and Smitty raced for that door.
    It was bolted from the inside. And no one knew better than they did how heavy that bolt was.
    “Hey!” Smitty yelped. “Hey!” It was about all he had in him.
    “We’ve got to get her out of there!” moaned Mac. “Our equipment! All the lovely, delicate things! A crazy girl in there—”
    They banged futilely at the door. And then Mac said abruptly: “Perrrhaps she was not so crazy. Did ye see her eyes when she raced in? They seemed to clear remarkably.”
    Smitty nodded glumly. The giant was beginning to feel that something was very sour about the actions of their beautiful and “helpless” visitor. He began to smell a rat as big as a cathedral.
    “We’ll have to torch that door down,” he said. “We can’t break it in.”
    “Maybe,” conceded Mac, hurrying for the front door. “But we’ll try the rear firrrst.”
    They galloped around the corner to the narrow areaway leading to the rear of the store. The door back