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following was her missing uncle. Why, then, hadn’t he paid her any attention at all?
    “Even if it’s not Uncle Val, and I know it is,” she said to herself, “I don’t see why he didn’t stop. He must be aware of my following him.
    She took hold of the doorknob. “I know this is the right door.” The door opened toward her.
    The hall beyond was different. Not white like all the others, but a dim gray. Not much light, either, only a few small-watt bulbs in infrequent sockets along its length.
    Taking another deep breath, Jennifer stepped across the threshold. The door closed silently behind her.
    “Uncle Val,” she said aloud.
    Only silence.
    She moved ahead, but more slowly. There were no other doors, nothing but the blank gray walls.
    At the end of the hall she came to another door. She opened it. A stairway, leading down.
    Even less light down there, only that one small bulb way off there. Jennifer’s stubbornness took hold now. She’d come this far. She knew that was Uncle Val she’d seen.
    She started down the wooden steps.
    And after the next corridor there was another stairway. After that a winding, very narrow, passageway. All gray, dimly lit, and silent.
    “Jenny, old girl,” she said to herself, “this is all getting very strange. Maybe you ought to head for fresh air. Wait until the Avenger arrives, and tell him about this.”
    She turned back and went around the gray passage. The door she’d entered by would not open now. Jennifer turned the knob again and again, and rattled the door. It would not open.
    “Well, that pretty much decides my direction,” she told herself. “Downward, ever downward.”
    She retraced her steps and came again to the end of the winding passage way. This door opened.
    And there was Uncle Val, standing against the far wall.
    “Uncle Val!” she said, starting toward him.
    The three other men in the room did not let her reach him.

CHAPTER X

The Avenger on the Scene
    The highway exploded.
    Straight across its entire width. Great chunks of paving spewed up into the air, swirls of dust and smoke.
    “Whoosh!” MacMurdie gave the steering wheel a violent twist. The nose of their car was not more than ten feet from the explosion.
    Rock and asphalt pounded down on the machine as it went zigzagging toward the edge of the road.
    “Up the boulder over there,” warned Smitty, who occupied the seat next to Mac. “I spotted somebody.”
    “Get us behind that other spill of boulders,” ordered the Avenger from the back seat.
    Mac guided the bucking auto across the gritty desert, dodging giant cactuses. “Do ye think we’re in the midst of a Western-style ambush?”
    “It’s some kind of ambush, sure as hell,” said the giant.
    “By the Sacred Waters of Loch MacQuarrie!” exclaimed Mac while their car sluiced around a large joshua tree and then skidded to a stop behind a pile of dusty-orange boulders.
    “Scatter!” Benson dived out the back door before the engine even died.
    Smitty, tugging out an automatic, trotted into a cleft between two mammoth rocks.
    Mac took up a position nearby. “Mot these be the same lads who tried to send ye off to the sweet by and by?”
    “The survivors of that bunch, anyhow.” Smitty ducked down.
    An instant later, machine-gun slugs were zinging through the afternoon.
    “ ’Tis nae the most cordial welcome I’ve ever had.”
    Four members of the Justice, Inc., crime-fighting team had arrived in southern California an hour earlier. They had flown west in one of the Avenger’s own planes, landing at a small private field. Smitty met them, and was driving the Avenger and MacMurdie into Manzana. Cole and Nellie, the little blonde none too pleased at the prospect, were heading together in another direction to book accommodations at one of the desert resorts.
    Two, possibly three, men were fortressed in a mound of boulders some twenty yards to the south. The man with the tommy gun, like some lethal jack-in-the-box, would pop up, fire