The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

three tough guys, all right,” he said. “I can see why you got to be knocked off.”
    They tied the three securely to the old plush seats of the day coach, using one-inch rope from a big coil in the forward tool locker. They were wary of Mac because of the way his bitter blue eyes burned at them. They moved gingerly around Smitty, awed by his huge size. But they were most careful of all with Benson.
    Something in the pale, deadly eyes, calm and cold in the white deadness of his immobile face, gave them all the shivers. Five covered him with automatics while the sixth passed loop after loop of rope around his compact body.
    Then it was done. In three seats, one behind the other, Benson and Mac and Smitty sat upright with enough rope around each to bind half a dozen men to the seat backs.
    The leader of the murderous crew waved an arm out a window. There was a hiss from the switch engine; then it started backing slowly in the direction from which it had come.
    “Johnny,” the leader said to one of the younger men, “run up to the engine and tell Clay to slow down at the bend where we left the automobiles. We’ll all jump off. Then tell him to lash the throttle full open and jump himself.”
    The man went back toward the engine. Mac saw him swing out the door and weave over the rail-piled flatcars. The gang leader grinned at Benson.
    “Like an accident, we’re supposed to make this. So like an accident it’ll be. There’s a sharp curve eight miles up. So sharp that any big-time railroad would have straightened it years ago. The work train will hit it at about seventy an hour, and I guess it’ll go straight instead of around the bend.”
    Benson said steadily: “The train crew you overpowered to get this train can testify that a wreck at the curve was no accident.”
    The man grinned again. It was a forced grin, however. Obviously, he was anxious to get out of sight of The Avenger’s pallid and deadly eyes and death-white face.
    “We didn’t knock out any train crew. These cars and the engine, with steam up, were at the next town with nobody on it. Everybody was gettin’ orders, I guess. So we just borrowed it. The verdict’ll be that you nosey investigators took it for some cockeyed reason, didn’t know how to run an engine, and wrecked yourselves.”
    There was a brief toot from the engine in the rear, and the cars began to slow. They swung around a bend. Looking out the window, Benson saw four or five automobiles on a dunes road waiting to pick up the men.
    “So long,” waved the mob boss. He went to the door and dropped from the train. The others followed.
    There was a sudden jerk from the rear, and the engine roared as its drivers spun on the tracks. The throttle had been jammed wide open, and the driving wheels wouldn’t take the load without slipping, at first.
    The three-car train rolled down the track, jerking as the spinning wheels caught for a moment, easing off as they slipped again. Benson saw a last pair of men scrambling into the automobiles on the lonely lane. They had acted as fireman and engineer. The roaring locomotive behind them, full throttle, was empty now.
    The rail joints began clicking under them at a swiftly increasing rhythm as the driving wheels slowly stopped spinning and began to make each stroke of the racing pistons count.
    Benson sat straight in his seat, bound tightly, with Smitty ahead of him and MacMurdie behind him. Behind the dead-white face of the Avenger burned the discovery he had made in the debris of the wrecked depot. A discovery it looked as if he might never follow up, now.
    The discovery that in all that pile of old boards and rubble there had been not one screw or nail. All had gone, as though someone, hours before, had removed each with painstaking care, leaving the building to fall like a house of cards the moment a breeze struck the unsecured beams and boards.

CHAPTER VI

Trickery Succeeds!
    If one of the more dignified Chicago newspapers had come out with