Read The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs for Free Online Page B

recognize you—although it is barely possible that descriptions were wired ahead. I have checked the telegraph offices and the phone records and can find no trace of such a warning. Still, it is possible.”
    “I haven’t seen anybody such as Phelps described, around here,” said Smitty. “A bony guy with a scar on his forehead.”
    “Scar?” repeated Benson quickly, pale eyes like colorless jewels in his dead face.
    “Phelps thought it was a scar. But he wasn’t sure. There was just a line down over his temple, he said.”
    The Avenger’s eyes took on the brooding look that came when he was co-ordinating past reports. “There was a heavy trash basket thrown at the murderer of Sheriff Aldershot, it is believed. That could have produced a mark on the man’s temple. It is possible that you had a brush with the killer of Aldershot and Sewell. Go on!”
    The Scot recalled the sores on the flanks of the jack-rabbit and deer.
    The Avenger’s face was as dead as the face of the moon, but his eyes grew colder and more brilliant. He made no comment, but it was plain that he was very much interested in the peculiar disease.
    Mac told of Smitty’s picking up the handbag. Benson was looking it over as the Scot spoke. A plain black bag with a gunmetal clasp. There was nothing in it. There was no identifying mark on it.
    “And then we saw the little red man leading the green dog,” said Smitty, twisting his huge forefinger uncomfortably between his collar and his columnar neck. Even with the chief, he was afraid of being thought demented when he mentioned that crazy sight. “A little bit of a thing; he was no more than a yard high. And the dog he was leading was smiling. I’ll swear to that.”
    “It’s true, Muster Benson,” said Mac seriously. “Even though it sounds mad.”
    “You saw the man and dog in the steam column?” The Avenger said.
    “Yes! I know nothing could live in that steam. But that’s where we saw them.”
    “You saw this vision just after you had picked up the handbag, Smitty?” Benson did not look at the giant as he spoke. He was looking at a long scratch in the gun-metal clasp of the bag.
    “Yes, that’s right,” Smitty said.
    The Avenger rose, with the box of mineral deposit from Lost Geyser. He went to the traveling laboratory.
    Eight minutes later he explained his conclusions. “The scrapings from the sheriff’s shoes reveal thirty percent salt, eight percent sulphur and the rest miscellaneous debris,” he said. “The sample from Lost Geyser has precisely the same percentages. That is where Aldershot went just before hurrying to Washington, all right.”
    The gray steel bar of a man with the paralyzed face began to pace slowly up and down the room. Even in this unconsidered, leisurely movement, there was revealed a bit of the enormous physical power compacted in that average-sized body.
    “Burnside and Cutten, from Montana,” he mused, “have frequented Dr. Fram’s office. So have Senators Hornblow, Wade and Collendar. It just happens that all those men are outstanding in one field of government activity: soil conservation. They are leaders in reforestation projects, dam building, prevention of erosion. It was Burnside and Cutten, in fact, who sponsored the bill, ten years ago, making Bison a national park.”
    Mac spoke up then. “We heard something that might interest you, Muster Benson. In Bison Park there are known deposits of helium. Did ye know that?”
    “Yes,” said Benson, “I knew that”
    Mac subsided. Would he never learn, he asked himself bitterly, that The Avenger apparently knew everything about everything?
    Benson went to the phone and called his personal headquarters in New York.
    In a tremendous top-floor room there, a diminutive blonde whose eyes were fogged at the moment with sleep took the call. This was Nellie Gray, fifth of Benson’s assistants.
    “Nellie,” said Benson, “there is a well-known psychiatrist by the name of Fram maintaining offices