The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns Read Online Free PDF

furniture were the huge teak desk and swivel chair at the side wall of the room.
    Off this office was a big bedroom and bath. Here the old man stayed most of the time. It was his personal suite. There two rooms were sometimes locked for a day at a time, with Groman lurking behind the locked portal like an old bear in a private den.
    Beside the big desk lay the man Benson had met as Groman’s secretary. The man with the sleek brown hair, and mild brown eyes and patient, submissive face.
    Hawley had been shot just above the heart. The wound had not been instantly fatal. That could be told because Hawley had had time before he died to leave a message.
    It was a message traced in his own blood, by his dying finger, on the floor next to the rug on which his body sprawled.
    The blood-red letters said: “The devil’s horns—”
    The coroner was in the office, and a big, blustering man who came truculently up to Benson and stared down at him with red, choleric eyes.
    “Who are you, Whitey?” he said.
    The Avenger stared at the man. Smaller, lighter in weight, there was yet something in The Avenger’s still, white face and his icily flaming eyes that put the iron of fear in the bigger man’s soul.
    “Who are you?” Benson countered quietly.
    “I’m Captain of Detectives Harrigo,” said the big man with the red face. Then, realizing that he had been forced by the white-faced man’s will into the position of answering first, he blustered: “You’ll find out who I am! In headquarters!”
    “I’m not going to headquarters,” said Benson.
    “That’s what you—”
    “When was this man killed?”
    “About forty-five minutes ago,” the coroner said, standing near Hawley’s body.
    “Forty-five minutes ago,” Benson said, “I was with Police Commissioner Cattridge. So I won’t be going to headquarters, Captain Harrigo. Where is Groman?”
    Again, while the captain of detectives blustered incoherently, the coroner took it on himself to answer.
    “He’s in the next room. In a pretty bad way, I’m afraid.”

    Benson went into Groman’s bedroom, and shut the door on the two of them.
    The doctor’s words were amply justified.
    Groman lay in his bed with his face drawn in a queer, wooden look. His eyes were dull and seemed almost sightless. The coverlet rose and fell a little with his breathing, but that was the only movement in all his body.
    Benson stepped to the bed, staring hard. He was an accomplished physician himself; indeed, he was author of several textbooks on obscure tropical diseases.
    The Avenger lifted Groman’s right hand and let it fall. It fell like a thing of wood to the coverlet. And the old man stared up at him out of a wooden face, eyes dull and scarcely seeming to see him.
    He had had a second stroke. And this time it had really done for him. He was completely paralyzed.
    Benson’s pale eyes, like ice under a polar sun, flamed in his white, dead face. A wandering clot of blood could cause a stroke.
    So could a sudden, intense nervous shock.
    “Mr. Groman,” he said, “if you can hear me, blink once.”
    His voice, not pitched high, took on a vibrant, piercing quality to stir sluggish eardrums.
    Groman blinked once, with his right lid closing just a little ahead of the left, as though he could no longer synchronize them.
    “So you can hear, at least. Have you had some shock in the last few hours?”
    The eyelids blinked once, laboriously.
    “Was it connected with your secretary’s death?”
    The eyelids blinked once, for yes.
    “Did you happen to be near here when he died?”
    One blink.
    “In this room?”
    One blink.
    The Avenger’s flaming eyes, like colorless jewels, were steady on the drawn, motionless face.
    “Did you see him die? Is that the shock that laid you low?”
    As if the tired eyelids weren’t capable of movement, there was no response for a moment.
    Then—the single blink.
    “You saw him killed, then. Do you know who did it?”
    Two blinks for no.
    “His murderer