The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

similar bench. But the first long table had chemical apparatus laid out on it, while this second one was cluttered with all the things an electrical engineer might need for the most advanced experiments.
    At the back of the room, taking up about equal spaces, were finished results from the two long tables. There was a cabinet full of vials containing drugs and chemicals such as no ordinary chemist dreamed existed. Beside this was another cabinet which did not open but which had a screen for a front. This was a television set more perfect than any commercial laboratory would be able to put out for years to come.
    At the chemist’s side of the strange room was working the proprietor of the freak drugstore, Fergus MacMurdie.
    Mac was about six feet tall but looked taller because he was so angular and bony. Knees and elbows were knobbed and protruding. Protruding, too, were his ears, which were like sails. His skin was reddish and coarse, with big, dim freckles just under the surface. His eyes, though, took away any humor of appearance.
    MacMurdie’s bleak, hard blue eyes, set like stones in his homely Scotch face, reflected the tragedy of his life; loss of his family when a racket bomb exploded in one of his drugstores. Since then, he had worked for The Avenger against crime, having been set up in this drugstore by the immensely wealthy Benson.
    Mac had the glass Mason jar, brought by Benson from Braun’s apartment, on the workbench. Beside it were ranged a super-mircroscope, weighing half a ton, various gelatins used for bacterial culture, and an ordinary piece of beefsteak covered, it seemed, with fine snow crystals: the same stuff that had made a snow man out of Braun.
    He turned.
    “Whoosh, mon!” he exclaimed. “ ’Tis altogether the most dreadful stuff I’ve ever seen under a lens.”

    The man he addressed, lounging in a chair in front of the big cabinet that had a screen over the front, was named Algernon Heathcote Smith. But if you wanted to stay in one piece, you never called him that. You called him Smitty.
    Smitty was a Hercules. He stood just three inches short of seven feet tall, and weighed two hundred and eighty-five pounds. He had a fifty-three-inch chest and reduced haberdashers to despair by calling for size nineteen collars. He looked as dumb and good-natured as he was big; but the looks didn’t mean anything.
    The underworld could have testified as to how good-natured he was! As to looking dumb—Smitty was an outstanding electrical engineer. It was for his genius, indeed, that the bench across from MacMurdie’s had been outfitted; and it was his genius that had devised the marvelous television set at the rear of the room.
    “It fairrr gives me the shiverrrs,” the Scotchman burred, scowling at the snowy stuff.
    “Looks like ordinary confectioner’s sugar to me,” said the giant, Smitty. “Or dandruff,” he added.
    “Heaven grant ye never have dandruff,” Mac said.
    “Got a report on it yet?” said Smitty, glancing at a high window in one wall of the lab. The things that went on in here were not for public view; therefore the windows were set more than head high. It was dawn outside.
    Mac nodded his sandy-reddish head.
    “Yes, I have a report. Will ye get the chief for me?”
    Smitty switched on the television set. He waited a moment for it to warm up. Then he said, at the screen:
    “Smitty and Mac reporting, chief.”

    There was a minute in which nothing happened. Then the screen seemed to fog over. The fog gathered into form and became a face.
    The face of The Avenger.
    White as linen, dead as wax, terrible as a poised sword, the paralyzed face stared from the screen. In it, steady and emotionless, the eyes burned forth.
    “Yes, Smitty, Mac.”
    “I’ve analyzed the stuff ye sent me, chief,” Mac said. “Leastwise, I’ve got a sort of preliminary report as to its nature.”
    “Well?”
    “It’s impossible, chief. If I hadn’t seen it, I’d not have believed it. The