Free The Avenger 17 - Nevlo by Kenneth Robeson Page B

was holding his breath and facing the stairs. They’d heard the other’s howl, down there, and were rushing up to look into the matter!
    Smitty’s fist got the first one and he fell back, spilling three others as he did so. But a fourth, holding himself far to one side, escaped the tumble and lunged upward. He got the giant by the ankles, and Smitty fell.
    The house shook. So did the stairs. For Smitty had fallen so that he joined the rest at the foot of the steps in a scrambling, unlovely tangle.
    What he didn’t know was that fragments of the glass pellet rode down with him on his coat tail, and that with the fragments were evaporating droplets of the terrifically concentrated liquid which made the numbing gas.
    So Smitty drew in a deep breath as he got two men with a hand on the neck of each.
    Drew in the breath and felt instantly as if he had been drained of all strength.
    He knew at once what had happened then. But it was too late. He held his breath again to keep from inhaling any more of the stuff, but the one whiff had almost paralyzed him. He could just barely keep his hands on the two throats and raise a weak foot to keep back a third man who was trying to crawl over prone bodies and get at him.
    The only saving feature of the thing was that the precious gang of killers in here were as bad off as he was.
    No! They weren’t. Not all of them. Smitty suddenly saw, with a sense of doom in his heart that could not be translated into action, that a man down there at the other end of the basement was not under the numbing spell of the gas.
    This one stood next to the bound girl and the mad gorilla form. The gas would get down there soon, but the stuff hadn’t reached him yet. He was perfectly capable of drawing his gun—and was doing so.
    Smitty, dragging toward the fellow with hopeless slowness like a leaden-footed person in a nightmare, saw a .38 automatic come forth in a leisurely, unhurried way. In the same manner, it leveled at his head.
    Not at his body, which was protected by a bulletproof garment of The Avenger’s devising—but at his head!
    Smitty saw a cold, dark eye behind the gunsight, saw a cold, tooth-revealing grin on the lips under the eye, saw the muzzle of the .38 yawn like a thing capable of being mounted on a battleship’s turret.
    He saw sure death!
    And then he saw the man abruptly collapse, with a small gash suddenly appearing on the exact top of his skull. It was as if someone had suddenly clubbed him down. Only there was no one around to club him.

CHAPTER X

Murder Mansion
    The Avenger, as has been said, never took human life. In his extreme youth, when he was piling up a fortune in far corners of the earth, he had been forced to kill a man. The memory of that still bit and cut.
    Instead of killing, therefore, he disabled—as that man who had been about to murder Smitty was disabled.
    Benson had two weapons that at first glance didn’t seem to amount to much when stacked up against the machine guns and pineapple bombs of the underworld.
    One was a razor-edged, needle-pointed little knife with a hollow tube for a handle—one of the world’s best throwing knives. This, Dick holstered at the calf of his left leg and called, with chilling affection, Ike.
    Mike was holstered below his right knee. Mike was a slim little .22, specially built, with only a slight curve for a handle and with a cylinder holding only four cartridges to keep it streamlined and small. Mike had a silencer, so that when he spoke he whispered politely.
    But with each whisper a man went down.
    The man went down—not dead, but creased, hit glancingly on the top of the head so that he was stunned instead of killed. It was a shot requiring eighth-inch precision, but one that Benson had mastered to perfection.
    At the basement window, where he had stopped on his encirclement of the house to which Smitty’s call had drawn him, he had pressed Mike’s diminutive trigger just in time.
    Smitty and all the rest seemed