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

were pale holes of fury in his white, dead face. But, as always, the face itself could express none of that fury. And its very immobility was more frightening than any grimace of anger could have been.
    Hauled along by one hand as easily as if he’d been a child, was a man in a brown cap. He was half again as big as Benson, but his wildest twisting and fighting couldn’t shake the gray man’s one-handed grip by a hair. Indeed, the gray steel figure seemed hardly aware that the man was fighting and twisting.
    Quality in muscle, as well as quantity! Now and then a man appears whose muscle fiber, ounce for ounce, is so much more powerful than that of ordinary men that he seems of another race. Benson was such a man.
    Eyes flaming so that even Smitty and Mac felt chill shivers run up and down their spines, Benson flipped his wrist. The man with the cap shot away from him, half turned as he tried to catch his balance, and ended up against the back of a great leather chair.
    “Sit there,” said Benson, voice silken and quiet, but with something in it that again sent shivers down the spines of Mac and Smitty.

    The man glared around the tremendous room like a mad rabbit in a death trap. He calculated the chance of making a break for the door, looked into the almost colorless eyes of death set in a dead, white face, and decided to do as he was told. He sat.
    “Who’s your friend?” said Smitty, looming gigantic over the cowering man in the big chair.
    Benson, lips barely moving in his paralyzed face, told them who his friend was—and what he had done.
    Mac and Smitty went white with fury. And from the lips of the still unreconciled girl was wrung a gasp of pity.
    “He threw a bomb that killed an old man and a young mother who just happened to be walking near?” Smitty ground out. “Why, I’ll—”
    He got one enormous hand on the man’s throat. His hand went almost completely around it.
    A terrified squeak came from the man’s lips. His eyes, insane with terror, stared up and up Smitty’s vast bulk. Six feet nine and as big as the side of a barn. Then his eyes popped half out as Smitty just started to squeeze.
    “No!” snapped Benson.
    Smitty reluctantly—very reluctantly—opened his ponderous fingers.
    “I want him alive. He’ll tell us things before we’re through. You see—the explosion was caused by one of the little peanut-things he tossed. He’ll explain, in due time.”
    Nellie, eyes wide on the cowering man who could throw death and destruction around so heedlessly in his effort to kill the white-faced man, said:
    “Why didn’t you turn him over to the police, at once? He’s the murderer of two people. Caught red-handed.”
    “He’d be out on bail in a day or less,” said Benson.
    “A proven murderer?” said Nellie. “There is no bail in such cases. As I should know!”
    “There is no proof of murder.”
    “You saw him, with your own eyes.”
    “Simply my word against his. One against one. The law could not convict on that.”
    Benson went to a corner, where a queer thing of bars was standing. It looked like a gigantic canary cage.
    “The law, my dear, has perhaps necessarily become a very involved and complicated thing. So complicated that sometimes it can’t function according to the fines of justice. As in this case, where money could bail this man out and let him escape. That’s why our little firm of Justice & Co. has been formed. Come here, you!”
    The last words were to the man who sat in the chair and gasped for breath, staring with terrified eyes at Smitty.

    The man got up, sidled around the giant, yelled—and leaped to one side as Smitty’s hand raised. He fairly ran to where Benson stood by the cage. Benson opened the barred door.
    “Get in!”
    “Hey! Me get in there? I won’t—”
    The almost colorless eyes—eyes of a deadly marksman—stared calmly at him. His words broke in the same squeak that had sounded when Smitty’s hand encircled his throat.
    “What are