Read The Avenger 17 - Nevlo for Free Online

exploded. He’s dead!”
    “You must get through to Benson,” The Avenger repeated. “Yes. That’s right. And when you see him you are to tell him—what?”
    But it was over. She wasn’t going to talk any more.
    She turned her pretty face away, and her hands were stilled.
    The Avenger straightened up.
    “I think she’ll come out of this pretty soon,” he said to Dr. Daggit. “I defer to your more thorough examination, of course. But it seems to me there is no indication of brain fever or anything with lasting effects. Simply amnesia resulting from a great shock—”
    There was a heavy clanging sound from the door.
    “Good heavens!” exclaimed Daggit.
    The Avenger said nothing. He moved, quick as fluid light, toward the one window of the room. No need to tell Benson what had happened; he knew.

    General Hospital is equipped to handle mental cases.
    Janet Weems, brought into the place either delirious or more permanently mentally deranged, had been taken to a room equipped to take care of violent patients.
    It was equipped with a solid metal door outside the regular wooden one, which could be slid closed if necessary.
    That outer metal door had just been banged shut. Hard!
    Daggit’s exclamation had been one of sheer surprise, not of apprehension. But The Avenger had leaped for the window because he was much more than surprised. He knew that the closing of the door could not have been an accident. It must have been deliberate. But the window—
    He had almost reached it when there was a snap here, too, and from a slot in the sill a metal plate covered the glass pane.
    The metal was to keep raving maniacs from breaking the glass and injuring themselves, just as the metal door was to keep them from breaking out and injuring others.
    But the steel of the barriers made no distinctions. Sane or insane, anyone in the room would be hopelessly kept in that room when the plates banged shut.
    Daggit grabbed for the room phone. “Operator. Operator!”
    The line was dead. The wire had been cut just outside the wall somewhere.
    “I . . . I seem to have trouble in breathing—” Daggit said.
    Dick Benson had noted the difficulty a few seconds before the doctor. Gas had been let into this room, from some opening, with the closing of door and window.
    They were caught in a trap, to die of gas, unless—
    “Smitty!” said Benson.
    He didn’t say any more. He nodded his black-cropped head toward the window, and the giant went to it, picking up a chair as he moved.
    Benson took a handkerchief from his pocket and went to the bed. He pressed it over the nostrils and mouth of the girl there, who made no protest but only looked at him with blank, grave eyes.
    Smitty, noticing, took out his own handkerchief and tossed it to Daggit.
    Gas was a much-used weapon in the fight of the underworld against The Avenger and his crew, so each of them went always prepared. Each kept a coat lapel saturated with a chemical of MacMurdie’s invention that would nullify the effects of gas and, in addition, carried at least one handkerchief similarly saturated.
    But the chemical could only stall off the effects of a lethal gas for a short time before becoming useless, and it looked as if they would be in that room a very long time before breaking out.
    “You can’t batter that steel down,” said Daggit to Smitty. “It was designed to withstand just such assaults.”
    Smitty said nothing. He raised the chair. It was of metal and very strong.
    “Big as you are—” began Daggit, pessimistically.
    The chair fairly whistled through the air as Smitty’s vast arms swung it.
    It hit against the metal shield like a steam hammer on a boiler plate.
    And nothing seemed to happen.
    “I told you,” said Daggit. “Good heavens! Who could have done such a thing? Right in the hospital! This is chlorine gas—deadly! And we can’t get out—”
    “You had better,” said The Avenger calmly, “save your breath and inhale through the