Read The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker for Free Online Page B

and timbers with the strength of a bull elephant. They soon discovered there had been no one inside. Then they began to look around.
    Benson seemed to be hunting for something specific. Board after board he picked up and searched carefully. He sighted along each, looked at the ends of each, his pale eyes taking on a look of microscopic concentration.
    “So that’s it,” Smitty heard him whisper to himself, dead lips barely moving in his dead face. But what “it” was, Smitty could not imagine.
    There was a puffing in the distance. They stared that way.
    Along the whole trackage, beside the shimmering lake, a work train was coming to help clear the wreckage down the line. There was a small and rather ancient switch engine, followed by two flatcars loaded with rails with which to start rebuilding the track, and ending in an ancient day coach for the repair crew.
    The three-car train stopped at the collapsed station. It would have had to stop anyway, because part of the melting structure had spilled out over the rails and blocked the way. But the manner in which a man leaped from the rear car and strode toward Benson and his two aides told that the train would have stopped anyhow, at sight of them, to investigate.
    The man had a gun in his hand, which was leveled at him. He was hard-jawed, broad-shouldered, with a battered felt hat. His whole appearance spelled track foreman.
    “All right, you guys,” he bellowed, as he neared them. “Who are you? What’s the idea, blowing up this station? I guess the three of you’d better come along with us for some fancy questioning.”
    More men were pouring from the old day coach, behind. They came threateningly toward the three. Some had guns, some had ax handles, some were armed with crowbars.
    Smitty hunched his huge shoulders warily. The situation looked tense. He could handle any four average men, but there were sixteen or eighteen in this railroad mob. Those were odds too great even for him.
    “I’m investigating the loss of the rails, back up the line, and also the destruction of this depot,” Benson said quietly. “I have credentials, if you’d care to see them.”
    The man with the battered hat calmed down a little.
    “Hand ’em over,” he grunted.
    Benson did so. There was a letter from Chicago’s police commissioner to whom it might concern, and one from the governor of New York State.
    The man read slowly, carefully, and as he did so, the rest crowded close. It all looked very natural and innocent. It was so smoothly done, that no one could have guessed the transformation that was to come.
    The man who looked like a foreman handed the credentials back to Benson and pocketed his gun.
    “I guess you’re O.K.,” he said.
    At that moment, with the three men completely off guard so that they could not possibly have drawn weapons in time, the railroad crew became a mob of killers.
    Into the hand of each leaped an automatic; all of them were leveled at Benson and Smitty and Mac. The ax handles and crowbars had been only so much stage setting; now they were shifted to left hands while rights held guns.
    “So you’re investigating these things,” the mob leader mimicked Benson. “Well, you won’t investigate any more. Into that last car, you guys.”
    Benson stood still, with his deadly, pale eyes raking over the men. They shifted uneasily under that icy gaze. They were six to one, and had guns; but something in this man’s colorless stare made them nervous.
    “Maybe we better bump ’em now and have it over with,” one of the mob mumbled.
    The leader heard and shook his head.
    “No! We follow orders. A slug in the skull shows right away something besides an accident happened. And this has to look like an accident. Go on! Go on, get into the end car.”
    Benson and Smitty and Mac let themselves be prodded up the steps of the end car. Their capturers crowded in after them.
    The man who had played the role of foreman stared at the captives.
    “You look like