The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (5 page)

It had been pale, flesh pink. Now it was deep red. Ruby red. With an inner glow like that of a great ruby with a tiny light in it.

The Ring of Power had been renewed in the life blood of a sacrificed victim. For another forty-eight hours it would give its wearer omnipotent power, and preserve its existence.

The Ring of Power. The ring of blood!

Richard Benson, The Avenger, was known to every police official in America. He was beginning to be known, by sight at least, to almost every patrolman and plainclothes man too.

It was out of that knowledge, that Gunther Caine finally managed to catch up with him.

Benson had friends in high places all over the world. It was only natural that he should have even more than usual in the nation’s capital, where affairs of great moment were constantly being hatched.

A very good friend of Benson’s was a retired manufacturer with a mansion on Sixteenth Street near Embassy Row. The friend was in Europe at the moment, and had cabled Benson to make the place his own, whenever he chose.

Benson had gone there from Caine’s home, with the bewildered Smitty.

“I never knew what hit me,” repeated Smitty. “This tall, skinny shape in the priest’s robe raised both hands, as if he was calling down a curse on me. I felt as if I’d been suddenly bathed in acid or something that prickled and burned. Then I went out like water down a drain.”

“The thing was dressed like a high priest of ancient Egypt?” said The Avenger. His colorless eyes were as glittering as diamond drills and as cold as the Antarctic.

“That’s right,” said Smitty.

“And it had a thin, lantern-jawed face, and was hairless?”

“Yes.”

“The nose?”

“A regular bird-beak of a thing.”

Benson stared not so much at Smitty as through him. As if seeing strange things very far away.

“An exact description of the old priest Taros, as given by Egyptian hieroglyphs,” he said.

Smitty started to grin, and changed his mind.

“It’s impossible of course,” the giant said. “But I will say this: if there really could be anything in this reincarnation business, if the ancient dead can come to life again—this guy was it. He didn’t just act like an old Egyptian priest. He
was
one! I can’t tell you why I felt that so strongly, but I did. And the girl was just as authentic.”

“Yes, the girl,” Benson said. “That was more fantastic than the other. You say she bowed down to him?”

“Yes! As if old Taros’ double had given her some kind of an order.”

Smitty remembered the gauzy raiment worn and the shapeliness revealed underneath. Then he remembered something else.

“Funny a ghost would wear a ring,” he said, more to himself than to Benson.

“What?”

Smitty found himself staring breathlessly into two colorless wells that suddenly had the flash of naked steel. Well as the giant knew the man with the paralyzed face, he was still unable to repress an icy feeling along the backbone when those terrible eyes turned on him like that.

He moistened his lips.

“I just said, it’s funny a ghost would wear a ring—”

“Describe it!” the cold voice cracked out.

“Well, I couldn’t see it very well in the darkness, and the guy wasn’t close till he raised his arms in that curse thing that knocked me out. But the ring seems to be pinkish, with a funny light to it—”

The Avenger was halfway to the door. Smitty had to jump to keep up with him.

“Where—” began Smitty.

“Police headquarters,” said Benson. “That was the Ring of Power, Smitty. And it’s supposed to be in Caine’s strong-box—was supposed to be there at that moment. So we’ll see if thefts have been reported.”

But that was where The Avenger’s description to the nation’s cops came in. For the first person they saw outside the Sixteenth Street mansion was a patrolman; and the patrolman had just received orders from the desk to try to find Benson and tell him Gunther Caine wanted him.

The glittering big car started at seventy an hour through the deserted streets.

Smitty spoke just once on the way.

“Chief, I called the guy in the funny robe Taros’ double. Do you suppose—this reincarnation stuff—would it be possible that the boy with the bald dome and the eagle beak really
is
Taros, alive again after all these thousands of years?”

The Avenger only said: “Faster, Smitty.”

Gunther Caine, curator of the Braintree Museum, looked like a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. His unpressed suit was more than ever like a suit of pajamas, after his night’s anxiety. His fuzzy brown eyes were dull with exhaustion and worry. He caught Benson’s arm, which was about like catching hold of a length of steel cable.

“Mr. Benson, you must help me! We must get the relics back! My reputation, my whole life, hang on that!”

He didn’t give the man with the white hair and linen-white face a chance to get in a word.

“It’s my ruin,” he babbled on. “See my position. I personally was entrusted with the Taros amulets and the ring. I personally am responsible for the loss. Now, there are collectors, like the famous lawyer, Farnum Shaw, who would give up to half a million dollars for those things. I will be branded as a thief if we don’t get them back. People will say I sold out to someone like Shaw.”

The Avenger was walking through the man’s library as Caine babbled, through it and to the small den where he had seen Caine place the box at a little before midnight.

The box was there, empty, on the table where it had been when Benson’s pale eyes last rested on it. The Avenger strode to the table.

“Where does that door go?” he said, pointing.

“To the hall,” replied Caine, swallowing noisily.

“And that one?”

“To the drawing room beyond. But that door is always shut. It has a bolt on it that is rusted to the catch. It hasn’t been used in years.”

“And that door I just came through leads to the library,” nodded The Avenger. “So a person could leave the library, step into the hall, walk to the hall door of this room—”

Caine eyed him intently, hopefully. But Benson did not go on. He was looking at the table. Then he bent down and looked at the floor around the table.

There was a deep-piled green rug on the floor. The Avenger’s steely fingers went down, picked up something from the thick nap.

It was a tiny, flattened flake of wax.

“No one left the library while we were talking over the relics,” Caine said, mopping his pale forehead. “So your idea of someone’s leaving, and slipping down to the hall door of the den has no foundation.”

“Yes,” said Benson, “someone did leave.”

“But I remember distinctly. Moen and Evans and Spencer—”

“Your son left the room,” said Benson quietly. “I’d like to talk to him, please.”

The Avenger was one of the finest judges of men who ever lived. He looked at Harold Caine, son of Gunther Caine, and had a complete character portrait in about three seconds.

Here was a young fellow who had never grown up. He was about fourteen instead of being his actual age. But there were good potentialities in the shallow blue eyes and the vacuous face. Some day he might turn out all right.

Meanwhile, the lad was capable of any foolishness.

“You dance a good deal, don’t you?” said Benson.

His voice was even and quiet. But there was a quality in it that would have made any of The Avenger’s aides know that something important was behind that question.

“Yes,” said Harold Caine. He was defiant in look and tone. “Why not?”

“No reason why not,” said Benson. “I merely asked. You danced either yesterday afternoon or during the dinner hour. Probably the latter.”

Harold Caine hesitated. His shallow blue eyes tried to avoid the terrible, colorless ones, and couldn’t.

“Yesterday evening,” he mumbled acknowledgment.

“The floor was freshly waxed,” said Benson.

Caine nodded.

“Yeah! Terrible job. There were little lumps of wax all over the floor. How can a guy swing his stuff on a floor like that? But how did you know?” he ended swiftly.

“I found a flake of the wax,” said Benson.

Harold Caine was suddenly breathless. He stared like a person hypnotized at the awesome, white face from which peered the pale, infallible eyes.

“I found the little flake,” said Benson, “in the carpet next to the table in the small den. The table from which the Taros relics disappeared.”

They were in the library—Gunther Caine, his son, The Avenger. Gunther Caine suddenly spoke up.

“See here, Mr. Benson, you can’t make insinuations like that! My own son—this is ridiculous! I asked you to help me, but if you persist in such a line—”

His voice died. No man could speak that blusteringly before the paralyzed, grim countenance of The Avenger.

Benson didn’t even raise his voice as he said:

“I have made no insinuations. The facts make those. Harold Caine was near the table on which were the relics. And Harold Caine left this library—alone among all of us—a short time before you discovered the loss of the amulets and ring.”

“I didn’t go into the den,” said Harold.

“Where did you go?” Benson’s pale eyes held their diamond drill look.

“I went upstairs for a minute. I went to Dad’s room to get some aspirin from the medicine chest. I don’t keep any aspirin in my bathroom. I never had a headache before.”

“You had a headache last night?”

“Yes!” Caines’ eyes took on their-queer, glazed look for an instant. “It was a pip. Almost as bad as a hangover headache.”

“What would give you a headache, do you suppose?” said The Avenger, voice vibrant with some inner stirring that was beyond Gunther Caine and his son.

“I don’t know. It was a funny kind of a headache.”

“What was queer about it?” Benson shot out.

“Why, it felt like my brain was on fire inside my head,” said Harold unsteadily. “My scalp prickled all over. Things went kind of fuzzy in front of my eyes.”

“You went up, took aspirin, and came back down? That is all?”

“That’s all,” insisted Harold.

“But at least a quarter of an hour passed between the time you left the room and the time we left the house.”

“Look here—” Gunther Caine shouted, ranging himself alongside his son.

Again he stopped blustering at the glance of the pale and deadly eyes. But he appeared badly shaken, as if sorry he had asked this man with the virile white hair and the death mask of a face for help.

Benson asked a question of the father instead of the son.

“You have reported the loss of the Taros relics to the police?”

“No,” said Caine. “I haven’t. All I told headquarters was that I must get in touch with you on an important matter. I can’t tell the police. It would become public at once, that the relics have been stolen or lost—and that would finish me.”

Benson turned toward the door.

“If any bit of news comes up, get in touch with me,” he said.

“You are going now?”

Both father and son looked relieved that the questions, backed by the authority of the awesome, colorless eyes, were to be stopped. Yet they looked worried, too.

“Yes, I’m going,” said Benson. “I have learned all I can here, I think.”