grinning with effort, rise half out of his seat as he whirled the steering wheel straight toward the edge of the road.
And The Avenger slammed home the brakes.
No animal, in extreme emergency, is quicker than man, himself. The driver of the death car had timed every move perfectly. When he turned ahead of the sedan, the sedan should have plowed into the front of the attacking car, and should have been deflected hard right over the cliff.
But Benson, with his miraculously swift coordination, had outmaneuvered the men by about two-fifths of a second. His car, with the wheels locked, didn’t hit the front of the other machine. It slowed just enough so that the gangsters’ car shot almost clear ahead of the sedan and was hit in the rear by it instead of the front.
So it was the attackers who went over.
The man at the wheel, white with horror, was wrenching to overcome the fatal direction of the car. But there wasn’t time. The right front wheel dipped through the railing and over the edge.
A hundred yards farther on, The Avenger stopped the car. He brought it to a stop just as the car with the four men in it landed upside down on top of a house three hundred feet below. There was that one awful crash, then silence in the winter night. The headlights of the falling car, that had rayed out in thin air like the desperate tentacles of a dying monster, had been snuffed out.
So, too, had the lives of four underworld rats. They had died through their own maneuvers to take the lives of others.
The Avenger’s face, as moveless as marble, turned from the cliff-edge to the road. He backed the car around and started going wordlessly down the hill and back to town.
Smitty wiped sweat from his hands and neck, and said nothing. For the moment, even the iron-nerved giant did not trust his voice.
The big sign on the front of the largest of the group of three big buildings said: “Sweet Valley Contracting Co.”
The three buildings were warehouses, with a part of the front building divided into offices. But the meeting was in the basement of the warehouse farthest from the street.
The men in the car that had tailed The Avenger’s had known The Avenger wasn’t Sisco—because they had known where Sisco was.
He was here!
The four had known that, though they had not known just where in the three buildings he was, or what he was up to.
That was because of the masks.
As the ruthless Lila Belle had finally learned from Buddy Wilson, the town of Ashton City had been taken over by five men, in a group, when Oliver Groman had lost his political throne through age and infirmity. And these five met masked, whenever there was an emergency threatening their crooked rule.
They were meeting tonight, in the basement of that warehouse farthest from the street.
The basement was cluttered with contracting supplies: reinforcing bars, sacks of cement, great beams used in temporary construction. But one corner had been walled off. And in here was only a large, rough table with five chairs around it.
In the chairs sat the five masked men.
The masks they wore were of black cloth and went from foreheads clear down over collars. So that, due to hat and mask, each of the five was absolutely unidentifiable from the shoulders up.
At the end of the table sat a big bulk of a man with eye-slits in the mask so narrow that you couldn’t even note the color of his eyes. On his right and left were two each of the remaining four. A single, unshaded light bulb hung over the middle of the oval table and bathed the crude room in raw light.
One of the masked five, at the leader’s left, clenched his hands and said in a quavering voice:
“Everything has gone wrong lately. Everything! We’ve got to do something about it.”
That was Sisco. You could tell his dry, deadly tone.
The man next to him spoke up.
“Yeah, we got to do something about it, all right. And what we got to do is throw everything else out the window for a week or so and concentrate
And The Avenger slammed home the brakes.
No animal, in extreme emergency, is quicker than man, himself. The driver of the death car had timed every move perfectly. When he turned ahead of the sedan, the sedan should have plowed into the front of the attacking car, and should have been deflected hard right over the cliff.
But Benson, with his miraculously swift coordination, had outmaneuvered the men by about two-fifths of a second. His car, with the wheels locked, didn’t hit the front of the other machine. It slowed just enough so that the gangsters’ car shot almost clear ahead of the sedan and was hit in the rear by it instead of the front.
So it was the attackers who went over.
The man at the wheel, white with horror, was wrenching to overcome the fatal direction of the car. But there wasn’t time. The right front wheel dipped through the railing and over the edge.
A hundred yards farther on, The Avenger stopped the car. He brought it to a stop just as the car with the four men in it landed upside down on top of a house three hundred feet below. There was that one awful crash, then silence in the winter night. The headlights of the falling car, that had rayed out in thin air like the desperate tentacles of a dying monster, had been snuffed out.
So, too, had the lives of four underworld rats. They had died through their own maneuvers to take the lives of others.
The Avenger’s face, as moveless as marble, turned from the cliff-edge to the road. He backed the car around and started going wordlessly down the hill and back to town.
Smitty wiped sweat from his hands and neck, and said nothing. For the moment, even the iron-nerved giant did not trust his voice.
The big sign on the front of the largest of the group of three big buildings said: “Sweet Valley Contracting Co.”
The three buildings were warehouses, with a part of the front building divided into offices. But the meeting was in the basement of the warehouse farthest from the street.
The men in the car that had tailed The Avenger’s had known The Avenger wasn’t Sisco—because they had known where Sisco was.
He was here!
The four had known that, though they had not known just where in the three buildings he was, or what he was up to.
That was because of the masks.
As the ruthless Lila Belle had finally learned from Buddy Wilson, the town of Ashton City had been taken over by five men, in a group, when Oliver Groman had lost his political throne through age and infirmity. And these five met masked, whenever there was an emergency threatening their crooked rule.
They were meeting tonight, in the basement of that warehouse farthest from the street.
The basement was cluttered with contracting supplies: reinforcing bars, sacks of cement, great beams used in temporary construction. But one corner had been walled off. And in here was only a large, rough table with five chairs around it.
In the chairs sat the five masked men.
The masks they wore were of black cloth and went from foreheads clear down over collars. So that, due to hat and mask, each of the five was absolutely unidentifiable from the shoulders up.
At the end of the table sat a big bulk of a man with eye-slits in the mask so narrow that you couldn’t even note the color of his eyes. On his right and left were two each of the remaining four. A single, unshaded light bulb hung over the middle of the oval table and bathed the crude room in raw light.
One of the masked five, at the leader’s left, clenched his hands and said in a quavering voice:
“Everything has gone wrong lately. Everything! We’ve got to do something about it.”
That was Sisco. You could tell his dry, deadly tone.
The man next to him spoke up.
“Yeah, we got to do something about it, all right. And what we got to do is throw everything else out the window for a week or so and concentrate
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