The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard
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Authors: Kenneth Robeson
Also In This Series
By Kenneth Robeson
#1: J
USTICE
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WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY
WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION
F
IRST
P
RINTING
: J
ULY
, 1972
C
OPYRIGHT
© 1939
BY
S
TREET
& S
MITH
P
UBLICATIONS
, I
NC
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C
OPYRIGHT
R
ENEWED
1969
BY
T
HE
C
ONDÉ
N
EST
P
UBLICATIONS
, I
NC
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A
LL
R
IGHTS
R
ESERVED
T
HIS
W
ARNER
P
APERBACK
L
IBRARY
E
DITION
IS
P
UBLISHED
BY
A
RRANGEMENT
W
ITH
T
HE
C
ONDÉ
N
EST
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UBLICATIONS
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NC
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C
OVER
I
LLUSTRATION
BY
P
ETER
C
ARAS
W
ARNER
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APERBACK
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IBRARY
IS A
D
IVISION
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ARNER
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OOKS,
75 R
OCKERFELLER
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LAZA
, N.Y. 10019.
A Warner Communications Company
ISBN: 0-446-64-881-7
Printed in the United States of America
CHAPTER II: Television Work-Out
CHAPTER III: Mexican Bricks—And Murder
CHAPTER VI: The Veil of Mystery
CHAPTER VII: Hollow Hieroglyphs
CHAPTER VIII: Death Strikes Again
CHAPTER XV: Land of The Aztecs
CHAPTER XVII: An “Indian” Makes A Find
CHAPTER XVIII: The Primitive Mint
CHAPTER XIX: The Avenger Plans
THE
YELLOW HOARD
The Human Rat
The building was narrow, four stories tall, and of old brick. It was like most buildings around Washington Square—tall and narrow, once the residence of a rich man, now made over into apartments.
There was no hint of deadliness in the building. There was no hint of deadliness anywhere in the lower New York neighborhood, for that matter.
Kids skated on the curving walks. Nurses wheeled babies and stopped to talk to policemen. Nobody looked at the building at all.
Least of all did a man walking west on the upper end of the square notice it. He didn’t have buildings anywhere, of any kind, on his mind. He was going to the Sixth Avenue drugstore of a friend of his named MacMurdie.
The man walking on the upper end of the square was enormous. He was six feet nine and weighed two hundred and eighty-five pounds, and none of it was fat. He was fifty-three inches around the chest and wore a size nineteen collar. When he walked, his arms hung crooked at his sides. There was too much lumped muscle under them to allow them to hang straight.
He looked as slow-witted as he was big. His face was of the full-moon variety, with peaceful blue eyes like blue china marbles. But he was not slow-witted. He was a radio and electrical engineer of the first rank. His name was Algernon Heathcote Smith. But if you wanted to live, you forgot the first two names and called him Smitty.
Smitty was several hundred yards from the building when it happened. He wouldn’t have noticed the man starting to turn to the stairs from the sidewalk, if it hadn’t been for the man’s looks. He looked like a rat, and Smitty didn’t like men who resembled rats.
But the man’s appearance was no warning of what the innocent-looking building was going to do. There was no warning of that whatever.
Kids skating, nurses wheeling perambulators, Smitty walking toward the Sixth Avenue drugstore. And then the building did it.
The tall, narrow old house seemed suddenly to be on rollers. On two sets of rollers, to be exact, with each set moving in opposite directions and carrying part of the building with it!
The front of the house boosted forward a couple of feet. The rear moved backward. Both sections took parts of the two adjoining buildings with them.
The tall front of the building folded slowly, like a tired man sagging in the middle. Almost like slow motion at first, and then gathering speed, it fell to the street with a colossal crash. Brick chips and dust rose ten stories. After that there was quiet.
As far as the giant, Smitty, could tell, there had been quiet all along. He hadn’t heard any noise when the building moved, or even when the four-story front fell, in a welter of debris.
That, he knew, was because his eardrums had been stunned by the violence of the explosion, in the heart of the building, that had caused the wreckage. He had been instantly deafened by it. And even at that moment, he marveled at it.
He had seen explosions before, but never anything as cataclysmic as this.
Sounds began to come to him, and a closer vision, and coherent realization. He heard children and women screaming, heard a cop running toward the debris, swearing in a hoarse and frantic tone. He saw the ratlike man who had been about to enter the building stagger east along the walk with his hand held before eyes momentarily blinded.
After that he saw something much too horrible for eyes to dwell on for very long. Bodies and fragments of bodies—
Survivors began reeling from the choked mound of what had once been a doorway. Just a few, only three, although there must have been at least a score of people in a building that size.
A man got to the mound, then crawled the rest of the way into the clear on hands and knees, with one leg dragging out behind him. Another man came out, bumping into things because he could not see. A woman was the third. She walked almost steadily, but very mechanically, as if she had been wound up and would keep on walking no matter what was in front of her. She tried to keep on walking when the cop got there and stopped her. She grappled with the cop, and fought him. Then she fainted.
Smitty ran to the cop. He could move fast when he wanted to, for all his size. There was pity as well as shock in his china-blue eyes.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll take the woman and this guy with something wrong with his leg. When the ambulance gets here, send it to MacMurdie’s drugstore, Waverly and Sixth. We’ll give the two first aid till it comes.”
The cop nodded. Two more patrolmen came. They began searching through the wreckage.
“Boiler explosion,” said one of them.
The other nodded, white-faced. “Yeah. Terrible what a boiler explosion can do. The thing’s in the cellar, heart of the building. They take everything when they do let go.”
The giant Smitty knew better. Boiler explosion? No such explosion could have had the extreme, the unbelievable violence of that rending crash he had witnessed.
The crowd around the wreckage gaped at Smitty. He had picked up the woman and now held her cradled in one vast arm. With the other, he swung the man onto his shoulder after lowering to his knees.
He went down the street with them as though they had been two children, one in the crook of his right arm, the other on his left shoulder. But they were not children. They were full-grown adults, weighing plenty.
He went into MacMurdie’s drugstore, stooping to let his burden clear the top of the too-small doorway.