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windpipe.
    Cole wrenched at the iron fingers. He seemed to hear far-off bells ringing. Also, he seemed to hear something that acted on his flagging strength like a shot of adrenalin.
    He seemed to hear men running toward them through the clearing, black smoke. Many men.
    Cole stopped clawing at the throttling hands. He bent his arm back to get the last possible inch of distance for the blow and punched up at the man’s face. It was a ten-inch jab that a champion might have been proud of. It rocked the fellow’s head far back.
    Wilson followed it with a second, felt the choking hands relax and threw the man off. One last punch ended in a sort of cracking sound. And it was Cole who delivered it.
    He saw the blond guy fall limply. But now he heard the running steps close by. Without pause, he leaped for the man’s car. On the front seat was the rolled-up canvas. He snatched it and went back to his unconscious attacker.
    “Harris,” a voice rumbled almost at his elbow. “Where are you? This damned smoke—”
    Wilson picked up the man and sped with him to his own old sedan. He jammed the unconscious body into the right-hand side, then ran around to the driver’s seat.

    They saw him, then. And he saw them. There were a dozen of them. More. Twenty at least, most with guns in their hands.
    “It’s a young army,” rasped Cole. “What is all this?”
    But it didn’t matter what it was. He had won. With exuberance in his grin and triumph in his pumping blood, he slammed the door shut and started the motor. Now to go back to Bleek Street with both man and painting—
    One whiplike revolver shot robbed him of most of his victory!
    Almost as it came, Cole suddenly remembered that the window on the unconscious man’s side was open. He had rolled it down to try to see through the smoke. He whipped across to roll up the bulletproof glass; but then the shot had come!
    Cole cursed as he saw the blond fellow’s head jerk and saw that a bullet had drilled it squarely. Then he was ducking as more shots poured at the raising window. He got it up, and, after that, they could shoot all they pleased. But they’d got his prisoner first.
    Soon, they saw that their shots were wasted, and they stopped firing. As mysteriously as they had appeared, they faded back into the night, and Cole was helpless to stop them.
    He cursed some more on his way back to Bleek Street with the dead man. With no inkling of what the chief had headed him into, Cole sensed that Benson would have given a lot to have this man alive in order to question him.
    There’d be no questions answered now. And that fact, though of course no one of Justice, Inc., could guess that, was to result in tragedy.
    But Cole Wilson had another thing to gnaw at his angry brain as he drove back to Manhattan and to Bleek Street. That was something he thought he had heard just before the shot had finished off his prisoner.
    In fact, he was sure he had heard it.
    Quite distinctly, he had heard the marksman say, “Sorry, my friend.”
    Then the fatal shot.
    It was almost as if the man had, incredibly, been apologizing for murder. But then the man himself had been rather incredible, too. Cole had seen him quite clearly.
    He was a monstrously fat man. He must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds.

CHAPTER V

The Devil’s Yardstick
    The morning sun poured in through the steel slats that protected the windows of the Bleek Street headquarters from bullets. It had been a hectic night, climaxed by Cole Wilson’s chase after the blond man who had called himself Harris.
    They were all in the vast top-floor room now, talking over the affair of the fake painting. By now, it was crystal clear that something tremendous lay behind it.
    On The Avenger’s desk were objects from the dead man’s pockets. The man himself now lay on a slab at the morgue, after an examination of his person that told nothing at all.
    Nellie, Smitty, MacMurdie and Wilson all stared at one thing above all that had come