Free The Avenger 15 - House of Death by Kenneth Robeson Page B

built when he was forced to let servants go, one after another, and was forced to watch the building, still quite new, fall into disrepair because there wasn’t money to keep things up.
    At the end, he had been absolutely alone, no servants at all, when death took him. Then the estranged son had come back. The huge man had come to the island announcing that he, Goram Haygar, would take over. And one old servant had come back—the wisp of a man with Goram, now—to help.
    The servant didn’t look as though he got much fun out of working for the human elephant who stared at a cracked leather case and grumbled about the way things were going to pieces.
    “Are all the dogs unchained?” asked the big man. His little eyes seemed never to blink, but to remain glassily open at all times.
    “Yes, sir,” said the servant.
    “The doors are all bolted?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Good. There is always the chance that someone other than the visitors we are expecting may come to see us. And in that case . . .”
    The huge man chuckled, and it was not a humorous sound. In fact, the wisp of a servant shivered a bit.
    The big fellow caught it.
    “You’re a timid soul, Morgan,” he grinned. “I sometimes wonder why you work out here for me. Certainly, the pay is low.”
    The servant shrugged deferentially.
    “It is not too easy to get other places, sir. And this place, decayed as it now is, represents a lot to me. I have known the Haygar family since babyhood. Where they are, there is my home—all the home I can ever expect.”
    “I sometimes wonder just how much of that is truth,” said the huge man phlegmatically. “You certainly didn’t remember me when I came home, Morgan.”
    “You left home when you were a child, Master Goram, to live with your aunt in Hungary. The man is often so different from the child as to be quite unrecognizable—”
    Morgan stopped. Both men lifted their heads suddenly. Then they stared at each other, the servant pallid, the master grim-faced.
    “Sounds as if the dogs had found something, Morgan.”

    The man swimming from mainland to island did not know of the dogs. That was apparent the moment he set foot on the shore. If he had known of them, he would have climbed a tree at once, or gone along a small stream flowing from a spring on the west slope to the sea.
    At least he would have taken some precaution about his trail. And he took none.
    He pulled from the water and lay in darkness on the handiest flat rock while he rested. The best of swimmers feel a six-mile drag.
    After a moment he got up and dressed, taking clothes from a roll in a waterproof sheet that he had carried tied to his neck. Then he started toward the house.
    He was a solidly built fellow, and the clothes he had put on were quite good. But there was a practiced furtiveness in his movements that hinted that he might not be unknown to the police.
    He had gone a hundred yards toward the clearing in which the sinister-looking house squatted when there was a sound from the spot where he had come out of the water.
    The howl of a big dog.
    The man’s face whitened. He drew a gun, which had been in the waterproof roll along with the clothes. The gun had a silencer on it. While he had had no chance to case the island and didn’t know of the mastiffs, he had come quite prepared to meet a dog. Even two dogs.
    There was a faint sound from behind. The man whirled. A huge brute was just taking off at him, seeming to soar rather than leap. Slavering fangs showed as he drove without a sound for the intruder’s throat!
    The man gasped in fear and fired. The dog veered as the slug hit his massive shoulder, but kept coming on. The man fired again, and again whirled as behind him came the howl of the dog that had caught his scent on the flat rock.
    Able to deal with a dog, or even two dogs. But the man hadn’t dreamed of the mad pack of brutes on this island.
    Two more dogs closed suddenly in on him from the right, and there was an approaching