The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (17 page)

If an attempt had been made to disarm him and the other two, they’d have shot, even if they had to kill Borg to get Benson. If Benson had tried to shoot them down, the survivor or survivors would have done the same thing. But the mere escape of the engineer and the man with the pale eyes was an alternative the gunman didn’t know how to handle.

He didn’t know whether to shoot through Borg to prevent
that
or not.

“Don’t,” gasped Borg, reading the deadly uncertainty in his man’s eyes. “Leave ’em go. Don’t drill me!”

Benson was at the door by now, with Chandler opening a window. So the question was decided of itself. Benson shoved Borg away from him, toward the guns of the three, and slammed the bedroom door and locked it. Then he joined Chandler at the fire escape.

The engineer was admirably calm, though his eyes still reflected the shadow of death.

“I thought you’d given in, Benson. But . . . you hadn’t. That was a good stunt with the phone cord.”

He was running down the iron treads, with Benson behind. The door would stand the battering of the men long enough to let the two get to the bottom.

“Where now?” asked Chandler, on the last flight, panting from eight floors of swift descent.

“My place on Bleek Street,” Benson said. He wasn’t even breathing quickly. “You’ll be safer there than anywhere else.”

A little later, in the great top-floor room, Chandler told about it.

“They got into my apartment and overpowered my servant. They must have held a gun on him and made him phone me at the office. He told me to hurry home, as there had been another robbery and he was afraid some valuables I keep at home were taken. He didn’t know what I’d had, so I’d better hurry and check up and report to the police. Then, I guess, they slugged him.”

Chandler’s lips were stiff with anger. “My man was killed by them. And I guess I would have been, too, if you hadn’t showed up. Although . . . I’m not sure of that—”

“You think perhaps they had other plans for you besides murder?” Benson said.

Chandler nodded thoughtfully.

“They knew, somehow, that you were coming. They waited there for you, with the black-haired man out by the elevators. While they waited, they talked a little. Something about ‘the other guy who was with old Gray’ not being too well up on Mexico, and maybe I would know my way around down there better because I had been there twice.”

“I see,” Benson said. “There’s logic there. Those men are going to Mexico and—”

“In connection with Gray’s secret?” said Chandler, eyes intent. “You mean—they’ve guessed it?”

“Yes,” said Benson. “Apparently you have, too, from the expression on your face. They know the secret of the belt. They have most of the links. They are going down to find the cache described by the hieroglyphs. It was rather smart of them to think of forcing you to go, too, and help them locate it. You’ve been down twice, you’re familiar with Central America and South Mexico, and your engineering and survey work would make you a good trail finder.”

Benson’s pale flares of eyes were steady on Chandler’s face.

“In fact, it’s such a good idea that I think I’ll borrow it—and ask you to go down there with
us,
and help us.”

“You’re going, too?” exclaimed Chandler.

“Yes. They have four direction plates. We have three and a slightly superior knowledge. I think we can come as close to the spot as they can. And if we both
do
hit near—we’ll capture the gang there in the jungle and bring the lot of them to justice.”

“By George, I believe you’re capable of it!” said Chandler, staring into the inexorable, pale eyes.

“Want to go with us and help?” said Benson.

“By all means!”

Benson nodded approval. Then he said:

“When you mentioned the talk of Borg’s gang, you said one of them said something about ‘the other guy who was with old Gray’ not being too well acquainted with Mexico. Who do you suppose they meant?”

“I don’t know,” said Chandler, slowly. “But I’m afraid they meant some one of the men who were on the last expedition with Gray. Though I’d have bet my life they were all decent, sound citizens.”

“Yes, one of them must be our man,” Benson replied thoughtfully. “Though it’s pretty confusing to try to guess who it could be. A man of mine named MacMurdie has been checking on the movements of Bower, Doolen, Rex Orto, Harry Armitage, John Sanderson, Cole Tega—six of the nine members of the expedition besides Gray and his daughter. They all seem harmless enough. Alec Knight was killed at about the same time you were robbed of your brick, so he’s out. Only Dr. Mortimer Barker is unaccounted for. But he can’t figure in any of this, of course, for he’s on the high seas, on his way to Europe.”

Mexico City had been left behind a long time ago. They were far south and east of it.*

* (
For reasons that will become obvious, Dick Benson has requested that the precise location be withheld.
)

Benson’s twin-engined plane was soaring at an altitude of over thirty-two thousand feet. The tail of the moon, with dawn about to break through, lighted the earth far below.

Benson cut off his motors. He had reached the great height so that he could ride silently down on a long slant for the last thirty miles and land unheard.

In the hermetically sealed cabin were Nellie Gray, the giant Smitty, MacMurdie, and Olin Chandler. Nellie was staring down at thick foliage.

“The jungle here is unbroken,” she said, “but the trees don’t get very tall.”

“That’s because of the soil formation,” Benson said absently. He was handling the great plane glider-fashion, riding the air currents. He probably had no peer on earth as an all-around pilot. “The soil is thin, with a limestone-and-shell base. It was sea bottom once. The soil isn’t thick enough for big trees, except in earth pockets.”

Far ahead, barely to be seen against the pearl-gray dawn rising in the east, was a low, flat ridge through the jungle. On this was a protuberance seeming from this distance, to be about the size of a man’s thumb. Benson was shooting for that as a target.

“Where will you land?” said Nellie, staring down.

“On this side of the ridge,” said Benson, “there is a small rock elevation too bare for trees. We ought to be able to sit down there if we’re careful about it.”

“You seem to know every foot of this territory!”

“Quite a few years ago,” said Benson, “I charted most of the lower peninsula for the Mexican government.”

The plane slid down its long slant, with no lights and with little noise. Ahead, the tiny ridge had grown to a four-hundred-foot sheer rock wall. On it the little protuberance was a rock shaft at least thirty feet high. It was a strange freak of nature—a natural statue grotesquely like a human being standing with arms at sides and head tilted back a little to stare into the sky.

“This will be it,” said Benson quietly. “The one mention of the ‘rock that stands like a man,’ at the tail end of one of Gray’s plates, placed it for me. There can’t be two natural monuments like this in Mexico.”

The plane dipped. Down and ahead was a bare rock patch, not too even, looking like a handkerchief laid in the surrounding immensity of the wilderness.

Tensity held the others. It was impossible for a man to set a plane down on that rough rock surface, in the dim gray of early dawn. They clutched their seats.

But Benson did it. His pale, infallible eyes saw the spot like a camera, and remembered each rough outcropping so that when the wheels touched he could line them along the smoother ridges though he could no longer see them.

“Camouflage,” Benson ordered, as they got out in the cool dawn.

There were two small axes. Smitty and MacMurdie took them, cut bales of branches from saplings and big-leafed plants nearby, and strewed them over the plane so it could not be spotted from the air.

Benson and Chandler looked at the high wall of the ridge, just ahead of them, with the great natural figure of a grotesque human looming at the top. Then they looked once more at a sheet of paper Benson spread out. On the sheet were co-ordinated all the hieroglyphs of the three plates of Professor Gray and Alec Knight.

“We must be close to the cache right now,” Chandler said in a low, awed tone.

“You think it’s on this side of the ridge?” said Benson, pale and deadly eyes on the almost unscalable wall up to the huge figure.

“I’m sure of it,” said Chandler. “Look. The last symbol we have here is one for the setting sun. It comes right after the ideograph representing that statue. It must mean that the spot described in the next plate—which we haven’t got—is on the afternoon side,
this
side, of the ridge. At the statue’s right hand, so to speak.”

“I have an idea about that,” said Benson. “I’ll outline it a little later. In about,”—he stared at the pink sky eastward—“an hour and a half. Is this where you all camped on Gray’s last expedition?”

Chandler shook his head. “They found the tomb of Montezuma the Second far northwest of here. This particular locality is strange to me.”

Nellie Gray had been wandering at a little distance. She came up, trim in riding breeches and khaki shirt.

“We’ve hidden the plane,” she said. “Don’t you think we ought to hide ourselves, too? The gang may be here any minute.”

Benson nodded.

“There’s a thick grove, over there. We’ll have some breakfast in it. Watch out for snakes. The boas get pretty big in this section.”

“I’d rather see a hundred boas than Borg and his men,” said Nellie with a little shiver. “When we face them I want to be way behind the rest of you!”

She stared at the high ridge, like a two-mile wall before them. And it was too bad the wall wasn’t made of glass, so they could see the other side.

Borg, the ratlike brothers, the man with the reddish hair, a big fellow with a twisted nose, and three Indians as vicious-looking as any of the white men, were over there. The big fellow with the twisted nose was preparing to light a fire, over which some food would be prepared.

A fourth Indian slid into their camp. He said something in dialect. One of the other Indians interpreted to Borg.

“He say, they come. Big bird like your bird come down quiet like hawk on other side of wall. Four men and a woman. One man with old, old hair, but man young.”