The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

you were talking to us,” Smitty said, looking hard at the girl.
    Her lips opened, shut without words, and she only nodded.
    “You said he had graying blond hair, blue eyes and was husky-looking, though a bit stooped at the shoulders from work over test tubes and beakers,” he said.
    Lila didn’t even nod this time. She stared at him with her eyes wide.
    “The man who ran this little raid,” said Smitty, “looked husky, though stooped at the shoulders, and he had light-blue eyes and graying blond hair.”
    Lila seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to go on.
    “That man,” said Smitty, “was your father, wasn’t he? Your own father, busting in here and raiding his own laboratory!”
    “He . . . he wasn’t,” stammered Lila, white-faced.
    “Oh, yes, he was. Your looks show it.”
    “No! He . . . I never saw that man before!”
    Smitty dropped it and went to the bench under which the red pool had been.
    The drying red puddle of some stuff that had turned a mouse into a miniature lion when it partook of it. The coagulating little pool that was like blood in color if not in texture.
    And there was no sign of that pool, now!
    The puddle had been so meticulously scraped up that there were marks of whatever blade had been used deep in the cement of the floor. There was not one trace of it left for Smitty to take to The Avenger’s laboratory.
    “That proves it,” he said. “Only your father would have known the significance of a puddle of spilled chemical on the floor. No one else would have had the sense to remove that, when the gang came back to make sure no clues had been left.”
    “He wasn’t my father! He wasn’t! ” cried Lila. And then she burst into tears, leaving a perplexed and dismayed giant with the prospect of getting a hysterical damsel ten miles through woods, at night, on foot.

CHAPTER VII

Motor Meeting
    The Avenger had a laboratory that could not have been beaten even by the great commercial laboratories. And he could use that lab as few men ever born could use scientific equipment. He was one of the world’s leading scientists, pick any branch you please.
    But Dick Benson was being baffled, now.
    He had a pigeon that thought it was an eagle and tried to attack everything moving, and he couldn’t find what had made it savage.
    He had taken one live and one dead pigeon from the public library. He had tested and vivisected the dead bird in every way known to man, and he could find no variance from normal in it. So he was now concentrating on the live one.
    And this one was certainly something to write home about.
    The bird was in large cage. It kept to the side of the cage nearest to anything moving. Then it flew at the bars—most of the feathers were out of its head from beating against the wires—and tried to get at what made the movement, regardless of the size of the thing.
    “ ’Tis strrrange,” burred MacMurdie, who was working with The Avenger. Of course, Mac, though an outstanding scientist himself, was only a capable helper when his knowledge was compared to the knowledge of Dick Benson.
    “You bird’s mad,” said Mac dourly. “Yet, ’tis a consistent kind of madness. It acts as if it would like to destroy every livin’ thing except itself.”
    The Avenger’s head, with its virile, heavy black shock of hair, nodded slowly.
    “It almost seems,” Dick said, “as though the pigeon has a fiendish hate for everything alive; as if the brain or nervous system were subtly deranged. But there was no sign of injury in the other bird.”
    Mac shrugged.
    “ ’Tis sick in the head—but only the head, Muster Benson. Ye’ll obserrrve that the pigeon is healthy enough. It eats when ye feed it—after ye’ve drawn back so it doesn’t try to fly at you.”
    “Yes, it’s healthy enough,” conceded Dick, colorless eyes like wells of ice in his impassive face.
    The Avenger paced slowly up and down the laboratory. Mac stared. It was the first time he had ever seen Dick