The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

them.”
    “Would you mind giving me a list of the members of the expedition?”
    “Yes,” said Doolen, “I would mind. If some danger hangs over everyone who was on that expedition, I’m not going to be the one to give that danger direction by naming the men!”
    “It would be pretty easy to get the names from another source,” said Benson. “The State Department will have their visa list. The Mexican border officials would know. The information would be in the newspaper morgues from announcement of the trip before it was begun.”

    Doolen chewed his lip for a while, then shrugged. “I suppose you’re right. Well, here’s the list.” He wrote rapidly on a sheet of paper, and handed it to Benson.
    Benson took it, thanked Doolen, and left. He stepped out of the apartment building door, a limber steel bar of a man—and instantly leaped sideways a dozen yards and back into an areaway with the explosive swiftness of a rocket projectile.
    He was protected there from the explosion.
    Probably any other man alive would have been killed on Doolen’s doorstep. But Benson’s almost colorless eyes had saved him more than once by their instantaneous grasp of separate pictures and their equally instantaneous fitting of them together into a clear and significant whole.
    He had seen the coupé twenty yards from the door and noted that though it was empty the motor was idling. He had seen a man in a brown cap standing just beyond the coupé, near the radiator, and had noted that the man was a little crouched as if ready to duck down behind the bulk of the car. He had seen the man’s hand start up and back the instant he, Benson, appeared on the walk. Up and back in a throwing gesture.
    As the man’s hand had flashed forward, Benson had made his unbelievably swift dash.
    Toward the thrower—not away from him.
    Over his head, as he darted forward, Benson had seen a queer object sail on its flight toward the doorway. He had seen that it was small, longer than thick, and rounded at the ends. It was a dull-gray color. It looked like a large peanut, complete with shell.
    Then, as he whipped around the building recess into the areaway, there was a terrific explosion. The “peanut” had struck the walk in front of the door.
    Windows tinkled down in pieces for many feet around. A crater appeared in the solid cement of the walk. The entire doorway of the apartment building was blown back, leaving only a great jagged hole. All this from a small gray thing, hardly larger than a man’s thumb.
    Benson leaped out of the areaway. Again his eyes caught, in a twentieth of a second, a complete picture. But this was not a picture of danger. It was one of tragedy and horror. And at the same instant his eardrums recovered from the violence of the blast and pathetic sounds came to him.
    There had been a woman and child, and an elderly man, on the walk not far from the doorway. The man was down—and he had no face! The woman was down, too, and the child, by some freak spared from death, was trying to reach her hands and was crying for her to answer. She would never answer anyone again, and she had no hands to reach.
    These people hadn’t seen the move of the man in the brown cap in time to take shelter, as Benson had. Probably they hadn’t seen him at all.
    Benson was streaking for the coupé, eyes awful in his white and moveless face. Death rode in those almost colorless wells.

    The man in the brown cap was behind the wheel. The motor was roaring under his frantic foot, and gears clashed. The back of the coupé was dented in as if by a gigantic hammer, from the explosion, but the car would run enough to get him away from there. And that was what he was devoting every energy to doing, right now.
    The car slid away from the curb. But Benson was on the running board. He got the door open. The frenzied driver had a gun on his knees as he drove. He whipped it toward the man with the flaming pale eyes, and fired. The slug ripped the side of