The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns by Kenneth Robeson

was a case in point.
    The Avenger had schemed brilliantly and perfectly to get Smitty out of trouble. He had marvelously played the part of Sisco.
    But one bit of ill fortune had bobbed up.
    The four men in the car that had stopped at the jail gate behind The Avenger’s car, just happened to be Sisco’s men. And Sisco’s men just happened to know where Sisco was at that moment.
    Since the spot was a long way away from here, they knew that the man with the giant could not be Sisco, no matter how much he resembled him. So they acted accordingly!
    Smitty turned in the front seat as Benson shot the car forward, toward the open country.
    “They’re after us, chief,” he said.
    Benson merely nodded, face as cold and emotionless as a thing of marble; eyes taking on that deadly glacial look, like bits of polar ice under a gray dawn.
    “They’ve got a faster car than we have,” said Smitty. The giant was calm in the face of danger, too. He could see the ugly snouts of three machine guns snugged in the lowered windows of the pursuing car, but the sight didn’t shake his voice any.
    The Avenger nodded again. The accelerator was down to the floor. In spite of the fact that they were going up a steep hill, the car was hitting over sixty.
    But the car behind was catching up!
    The Avenger left little to chance. When he had planned the jail delivery, he had gone over the road he would leave Ashton City jail by. So he knew every foot of it for fifteen miles.
    Because of that knowledge, the glint of death in his flaring, colorless eyes grew more pronounced.
    “They’ll be drawing even with us in a minute,” said Smitty. Then his voice got perplexed. “That’s funny. The guys are putting their guns up! And they could nail us easy, in about two shakes!”
    The Avenger knew the reason for that. Or, rather, the two reasons. One was that for all the men behind knew, this car had bullet-proof windows. The other reason—
    Well, that was tied in with Benson’s knowledge of the road—and with the glints of death in his eyes.
    A curious machine of vengeance was this man with the snow-white hair and the paralyzed face. He was death and destruction to crooks. Many had gone to their just doom through him. Yet Benson could still say that his hand had not killed. In every case he had put the killers in a position where they had wrought their own destruction by trying murderously to take the lives of others.
    The car had been speeding up a long hill and was almost to the top. At the crest, there was a sheer drop down; a cliff from the brink of which you could see Ashton City like a big map at your feet.
    “They’re nose to tail with us,” said Smitty.
    “Don’t look at them,” said Benson, voice cold and clipped as if death were not at their very elbows. “Let them think the noise of our motor drowns theirs out so that we don’t realize how close they are.”
    Smitty nodded, and stared straight ahead. The Avenger did, too. But out of the corners of those marvelous eyes, he could see the front bumper of the gangsters’ car creeping forward. He had already spotted two of the four men in that car.
    They were the two killers who had been caught in Groman’s place, sprung already. The smaller of the two had bandages on his right hand, where Ike, the throwing-knife, had bitten deep.
    The man at the wheel of the pursuing car was tensed for fast, split-second work. And Benson knew why.
    The crest of the long hill, where the road ran at the very edge of the three-hundred-foot cliff, was just ahead of them. If the men behind could nudge The Avenger’s car over the cliff, the result would seem to be an accident. There would be no bullet holes to spell murder.
    Smitty was still calm. But it was with the composure of an iron will. He knew, too, what the plan was. It was only too easy to guess. And—it might succeed.
    The giant saw the car beside them sweep up a little more, till the hood was two feet ahead of their own. Then he saw the driver,