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handkerchief.”
    Bang!
    The ponderous metal chair slammed against the steel curtain again. The chair, with the two blows, was beginning to take on the shape of a pretzel.
    Smitty was gasping. He was unable to breathe through his lapel properly and still swing the chair. But he saw, if no one else did, that the steel curtain was giving a very little in the center.
    Bang!
    Dr. Daggit’s eyes were wide. Never before had he seen such a blow. And he didn’t think he ever would again. Under it, the two metal chair legs bent clear around on themselves.
    And the steel shield bellied inward in the middle like the bottom of a dishpan with a hundred-pound rock dropped on it from a second-story window.
    Bang!
    “That does it,” said Smitty, tottering a little with the deadly effects of the gas.
    He whipped his lapel over his nose with his left hand, and got his right into the crack, between steel and window frame, resulting from the bending of the metal.
    He braced his feet against the wall, and with shoulders, legs, and enormous right hand, he pulled.
    The shield bent back into the room like the top of a tin can bent over after it has been two-thirds cut with a can-opener.
    Smitty smashed the glass of the window, and the gas began swirling out. Daggit stared at the big man with eyes that were still wide with wonder.
    “It isn’t possible,” he said. “These metal sheets were designed against just such efforts by strong men. And you could do that to one of them! I sincerely hope you are never brought into this place as a patient, my friend.”
    Smitty grinned. They waited till the head nurse, on her regular round, came to the door and rectified the “mistake” someone had made in shutting the steel door on a staff doctor and a couple of visitors.

    By then it was much too late to get hold of the killer who had tried to murder them all in the room where Janet Weems lay. So Benson didn’t even try.
    While waiting for the door to be opened— that panel was a bit too massive even for Smitty—Benson had gone over the girl’s clothing. And he had seen a dress label that instantly caught his attention.
    The label proclaimed that the frock had been bought in a store in an Ohio town called Marville. And it had brought the diamond glitter instantly to The Avenger’s pale, icy eyes because this was the second time the name of that town had cropped up recently.
    He had partially traced the man who had died at Bleek Street after getting out the strangled words: “Midnight, April 27—” Traced him to Cleveland, then to Marville, Ohio. And he had tentatively fixed the man’s occupation as that of electrician because of tiny fragments of rubber in the welt of his shoe sole, identifiable as the type used in electric-cable insulation, and because of microscopic bits of copper under his fingernails.
    A man racing against death to Bleek Street from Marville, Ohio! Now, a girl coming from the same place, having skirted danger so terrible that it had temporarily deranged her mind, but who was still mumbling that she “must get through to Benson!”
    “Get Mac, Smitty,” Dick said to the giant. “Meet me at the hangar. We’re taking a plane to Marville.”

CHAPTER VI

Plant 4
    By desperate efforts, Grant Utilities had managed to keep the light of publicity off the fantastic failure of their new Plant 4. The papers hadn’t printed the story. But you didn’t have to be in Marville long before you heard about it.
    And a man like Dick Benson didn’t have to hear about such a bizarre thing twice before he was instantly on his way to investigate. About twenty-five minutes after landing in Marville’s small airport, Benson and Mac and Smitty drew up in a rented car before the entrance of the useless power plant.
    They were about two miles from Marville, in a section that, with the shallow gorge in Marville River which made the rapids powering the turbines, was too craggy and wild for other structures. No one lived near the plant; the