Read The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master for Free Online Page B

And in the meantime a corner of his mind was concerned with amazement at the presence of this gang at all.
    That fence was supposed to keep everybody out. Hadn’t he seen its impregnability for himself? Yet, here was a band of yeggs enthusiastically trying to kill him and Lila and only kept from shooting them down by the fact that in the darkness they might miss and kill each other. How had they gotten in?
    A shriek from Lila galvanized Smitty into offensive instead of defensive warfare. The shriek was cut off, and he knew it was by a hand over Lila’s lips.
    The giant heaved up from the floor, bench held like a shield. Then he caught the end of it and whirled it around like a monstrous club.
    Yells and smacks delighted him. He jumped for the spot where Lila had cried out. He heard another beginning of a scream, this time near the inner door, and bounded there, barking his shins on things in the blackness. He cursed the method of this gang. They’d turned the yard lights off when they turned the others off. There wasn’t even light from outside shining in to relieve the blackness.
    Smitty heard the rustle of Lila’s dress, moved faster and brought up smack against a wall. But also, he brought up against the light switch.
    He snapped it on, turned in relief to go on with the fight against men he could see, and then he sagged to his knees!
    He wasn’t the only one near that light switch. One of the gang, perhaps the one who had snapped it off in the first place, was there, too. And this one had struck before Smitty could see him.
    A bad clip on the head with a gun barrel.
    Smitty instinctively rolled as he sagged so that the giant was spared the next blow. But he was too dazed to go on. He braced himself for the blow or the shot that should put him out of this world—
    “All right!” yelled a man near the table under which the mouse had been. “I’ve got it.”
    Smitty got one confused glimpse of this man, and then an abrupt change came over the picture.
    The men left.
    Just like that! They poured out of the building. Two men who had been holding Lila, loosed her and beat it so abruptly that she almost fell. The man with the gun on Smitty turned and ran.
    Before the big fellow could get strength back to rise from knees to unsteady feet, the place was empty, save for Lila and himself.
    Lila had nerve. She started toward the door.
    “We can catch them in the woods. I know the country around here better than they can possibly know it. Well, why don’t you come on?”
    Smitty didn’t make a move; he didn’t even answer her. He stood with his head cocked to one side, as if listening intently. Which, as a matter of fact, he was.
    “Do you happen to have a thermocouple around?” he asked. “Or would you know one if you saw it?”
    “Of course I’d know one—a simple little thing like that?” flashed Lila. “But why do you ask at a time like this? Those men in the woods will be—”
    “See if there’s a thermocouple unsmashed,” said Smitty.
    They found one in the living quarters, and hence unbroken. Smitty nodded as he saw it. It was a delicate instrument able to detect the heat from a star. Which was more ability than Smitty needed.
    He set it up and observed its message carefully. Then he nodded.
    “U-huh. Going in and out of this clearing at will, in spite of the fence! I get it.”
    “Get what?” said Lila, exasperated by all this.
    “The heat of a motor would register on this thermocouple, if it was within a mile or two,” said Smitty.
    “No motor could be within a mile or two. I told you there wasn’t a road for cars or trucks through the woods. And no plane could land with the men, and, besides, we’d have heard a plane motor.”
    But the giant was off on another tack. The one glance he had had of the man who had yelled “All right,” was clear in his mind. The man had seemed to be the head of affairs. His yell had sent them all running.
    “You described your father, at Bleek Street, when