Read The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring for Free Online

Gunther Caine and his son.
    “I don’t know. It was a funny kind of a headache.”
    “What was queer about it?” Benson shot out.
    “Why, it felt like my brain was on fire inside my head,” said Harold unsteadily. “My scalp prickled all over. Things went kind of fuzzy in front of my eyes.”
    “You went up, took aspirin, and came back down? That is all?”
    “That’s all,” insisted Harold.
    “But at least a quarter of an hour passed between the time you left the room and the time we left the house.”
    “Look here—” Gunther Caine shouted, ranging himself alongside his son.
    Again he stopped blustering at the glance of the pale and deadly eyes. But he appeared badly shaken, as if sorry he had asked this man with the virile white hair and the death mask of a face for help.
    Benson asked a question of the father instead of the son.
    “You have reported the loss of the Taros relics to the police?”
    “No,” said Caine. “I haven’t. All I told headquarters was that I must get in touch with you on an important matter. I can’t tell the police. It would become public at once, that the relics have been stolen or lost—and that would finish me.”
    Benson turned toward the door.
    “If any bit of news comes up, get in touch with me,” he said.
    “You are going now?”
    Both father and son looked relieved that the questions, backed by the authority of the awesome, colorless eyes, were to be stopped. Yet they looked worried, too.
    “Yes, I’m going,” said Benson. “I have learned all I can here, I think.”

    He went out, and Smitty looked questioningly at him.
    “Nothing—at the moment,” said Benson quietly. “But there may be something very shortly. Drive around the next corner and park.”
    The big closed car stopped at the designated place. Benson watched the corner.
    He hadn’t misjudged Harold Caine’s agitation in the least. Within ten minutes a roadster swept by, with young Caine behind the wheel.
    Smitty, without a word, followed. It was still not quite six o’clock in the morning. Strange hour for a young fellow to be making a hurry call.
    Harold didn’t go far. There was a big new apartment building, of the type put up by the score for modestly paid government employees, about eight blocks away. Harold jammed on the roadster’s brakes in front of this, and hurried in.
    Smitty and Benson followed.
    Harold went to the floor below the top floor and rang a bell there. From the stairwell, Benson and Smitty watched. There was a long pause; then a girl opened the door a foot.
    And Smitty clenched his hands hard.
    The girl was tall and slender but well-rounded. She had dark-brown hair. Her face was of an exotic type: from the widow’s peak at the forehead down in an absolutely straight line went the slope of forehead and nose. It gave her the look of having stepped off an Egyptian frieze.
    The ordinary, flimsy nightgown she wore had much the transparent effect of the high-priestess’ robe, and this clinched the memory for Smitty.
    “Chief!” he gasped. “That’s the girl I saw with old Taros last night! The priestess. And Gunther Caine’s son is calling on her!”
    Benson didn’t say anything in reply. He watched Harold talk to her, saw her frown first in a bewildered, then in an angered fashion. He could see Harold’s face for just a glimpse, long enough to read his lips as he said: “last night.” Then Harold had his back turned again and he saw no more.
    But he could see the girl’s face, and he saw that she was giving Harold scant satisfaction in whatever matter had brought him here at such an hour.
    She didn’t look like an Egyptian priestess now. She looked like just a normal girl, with a slightly exotic cast of countenance, who was resentful at being awakened by an acquaintance at six o’clock in the morning.
    Harold left, finally, shaking his head and looking as if he’d like to wring his hands, too.
    Benson went to the door the instant the elevator had shut on