Free The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master by Kenneth Robeson

been bound together when he had been gagged. But the job had been hasty, and no one had bothered to tie his arms to his sides at the same time.
    Josh got a double handful of the slack in the seat of the man’s pants with his two bound hands. He heaved up hard.
    The man yelled, and pitched forward out of the cabin on his face. There was one more resounding blow outside, then the sound of panting as loud and heavy as that of a locomotive that has stopped to take on water.
    When Josh had gotten out of the window, after loosening his bonds, a man’s body blocked out the night sky to his right. Only one body that Josh knew anything about was that big.
    “Smitty! What— How’d you get here?”
    “Just . . . puff . . . a minute . . . puff, puff,” gasped Smitty. “I . . . uh—”
    He drew great breaths into his bellowlike lungs for a couple of minutes, and then was in better shape. Meanwhile, the three men who had been downed by the big fellow’s blows, lay right where they had fallen. When Smitty hit ’em, they stayed hit.
    The giant had his wind back and was shaking his head reproachfully at Josh.
    “Couldn’t you have gotten tossed into something a little easier to follow than a blimp?” he demanded. “Phew! Try following one, drifting with an eight-or nine-mile wind, straight across country, over fences and up and down hills. I got in about four miles on somebody’s bicycle I commandeered from in front of a farm house, when the bag drifted along a road. But the rest was on foot.”
    Josh said just one word.
    “Thanks.”
    They didn’t make much fuss about saving each other’s lives, these members of The Avenger’s indomitable band. In their perilous business, somebody was always getting into deadly danger and needing a helping hand.
    Josh was curious, though.
    “How’d you do it?” he demanded. “Bring the blimp down, I mean. Or did it just happen?”
    “Mac would explode over that,” chuckled Smitty. “Saying it ‘just happened,’ I mean. Mac’s responsible. I had one of his acid bullets in a compressed-air gun in the car. I got out, after turning where you dropped your hat, just as the blimp was taking off, and I had a chance to send that bullet at the bag. It took all this time for the acid to eat a big enough hole.”
    “Ritter?” said Josh.
    “I couldn’t follow his town car and the blimp, too; so I went after the blimp, because you were in it. There’s one thing, though. We know Ritter’s up to his ears in this business—whatever it is. He either got some message from these three in the blimp or gave them one. Then he hit back for town.”
    “It begins to clear up a little,” said Josh thoughtfully. “We can make some close guesses. Morel invented some kind of drug up in his Maine laboratory that makes creatures fight. Men, too. Ritter got hold of it and of Morel. Now Ritter is using that serum—kind of a hate serum you’d call it—to make trouble which he later can smooth down.”
    “Looks like it,” nodded Smitty.
    “The blimp tells how Morel was taken from his Maine place, too. It just drifted over the clearing, with no noise; then men went down a rope ladder, knocked Morel cold and hauled him back up.”
    Smitty didn’t say anything to that. He had known it before. He had guessed, when he and Lila were at the Maine place, that exit and entrance must have been by air. That was why he had asked for the thermocouple. And the thermocouple had revealed the heat presence of motors nearby. The motors couldn’t have been plane motors or car motors; hence there must be a silent, lighter-than-air ship around.
    There was a road not far away. Smitty picked up two of the unconscious men, Josh took the other, and they went to the road.
    “We’ll turn these guys over to the local police,” said Smitty. “Then we’ll trace that blimp if we can.”

CHAPTER X

Strange Call
    The Avenger was practically living in his laboratory these days, and only taking a few hours sleep now and then