Free The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels by Kenneth Robeson

flustered. “I thought you—I told you Cass Lake—”
    He stopped and smiled.
    “I see. You were suspicious of my story. Well, I can’t say that I blame you. Anyhow, I’m certainly glad to see you here. Something’s happened to Ormsdale. He has been hurt. I tried to phone the police and found that the phone wire was cut; so I came out to get the police, personally.”
    “Something happened to Ormsdale?” repeated Benson, colorless eyes unrevealing in his expressionless white face.
    “Holdup—or kidnaping attempt,” hazarded Wilson, leading the way into the house. They passed a man in the livery of butler, lying on the floor with a lump on his head.
    Benson flicked the swift glance of a skilled diagnostician at him, saw that he would be all right in a few minutes and went on to a library down the hall.
    It did look like a holdup. The phone wire had been cut, all right. A chair was overturned and a lamp knocked off the desk. And beside the desk lay Ormsdale, unconscious like his butler, but with the lump on his jaw instead of his head. Apparently, he hadn’t been hit as hard as the servant, either, for his eyelids fluttered as the two went up to him.
    Benson bent down, and in a moment Ormsdale was talking, as he lay on a leather divan. He was a heavy man, perhaps fifty, with hard blue eyes under grizzled brows.
    “What happened to me?” He stared at Wilson.
    “You must have been held up, knocked out by burglars, Mr. Ormsdale,” said Wilson sympathetically. “I was riding past, and stopped off to have a word with you. But I saw the door open and came in and found your butler knocked out. Then I came back here and found you on the floor. I went out for the police, and found Mr. Benson just coming in.”
    “We’d better get the police, now,” said The Avenger, voice even. Ormsdale’s hard blue eyes were on him in a way showing that the name was familiar to him,
    “Police?” Ormsdale snapped, struggling up on one arm. “Oh, no. No—no! Not at all.”
    “But—” began Wilson, looking perplexed.
    “Not necessary. Just give me some unwanted publicity,” said Ormsdale. “You can see”—he looked around—“nothing has been taken. No harm done. And I didn’t get a glimpse of whomever it was that knocked me out. So I’d do the police no good—and they’d do me no good.”
    The Avenger’s colorless, all-seeing eyes were on the phone. The instrument was off its cradle just a little.
    “I see you were phoning when you were attacked,” he said. “Do you mind telling me who?”
    “I do, sir,” bristled Ormsdale.
    Benson said nothing to that. He went to the phone and spliced the wires. He got a special operator. And the name of Dick Benson was very potent indeed.
    “So you were trying to trace a man named Robert Mantis, in New York,” he said to Ormsdale, who was now sitting up and looking angry.
    “All right,” he said, “all right. So I was. What business is it of yours?”
    “I have reason to think Mantis is in danger,” said Benson.
    At that, Ormsdale’s manner changed.
    “He is? Oh, my! I’m sorry to hear that. More than sorry.”
    “Why?” said Benson.
    “Because he’s an employee of mine,” said Ormsdale. “Anyway, he was an employee. Nice young fellow and very capable. I’d like to get in touch with him and ask him to come back. He quit in a huff a few weeks ago.”
    He seemed more concerned over Mantis than over his own injuries. And The Avenger watched him with icy, pale eyes, but on his face was no more expression than there is on the frozen face of the moon.

CHAPTER IX

News of the Girl
    Benson had taken the rooms adjoining the one in the names of Mac and Josh and had them thrown into a suite. These would be temporary headquarters in Detroit. He had just opened the traveling laboratory he always took with him—a marvelously compact and complete set of apparatus in a case about the size of a wardrobe trunk.
    And then Mac and Josh came in.
    They looked as if they had been