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anything more, to repay him—”
    Ahead was a gully recently washed in the road. Rocks lay in it, forcing a very slow speed. Beyond the gully, a hundred yards or so, the road skirted the edge of an abandoned quarry. There was a rail along the road here that wasn’t very heavy. The quarry had filled with water, as most do, making a small, deep-edged lake.
    “It doesn’t look like anybody in his senses would mark this road out for a detour,” Smitty grumbled. “Particularly a detour for a big highway like 232.”
    “Chief— look out!” yelled Josh.

CHAPTER VI

Into the Depths!
    Dick Benson had made his millions by professional adventuring, in the days when he was a warm, normal human being, before crime’s tragedy had made him into a machine to fight crime.
    In his teens he had spotted rubber in South American jungles, led native armies in Java, made aerial maps in the Congo. In his twenties he had mined amethysts in Australia and emeralds in Brazil; found gold in Alaska and diamonds in the Transvaal. He had done these things so successfully that while still a very young man he was very wealthy.
    But the point was that Benson had made his life a series of narrow escapes from death. And in a routine like that, you get to such a fine point that almost no danger can approach you without some split-second warning.
    The warning yell of Josh Newton was not needed by The Avenger.
    About a second and a half before the Negro shouted, Benson had seen all that he needed to know with one quick flash of his colorless eyes.
    He had seen three little glints of light on something metallic peeping over two logs that lay in a shallow V at the side of the road. He had seen the glints move ever so little to follow the movement of the car.
    And his steely white finger had flashingly pressed a button.
    The bulletproofed glass windows of the sedan could be rolled up and down by hand, like ordinary windows. But in time of emergency, they could be flashed into place.
    With the press of that button, every open window of the sedan shot up into closed position with the release of powerful springs. And as they thudded into place, there was a sound like the beginning of a young war.
    Three submachine guns poured streams of lead at the huge, old-looking car. And the car acted toward the lead pellets much as a duck’s back acts toward drops of rain.
    There was a clangor like that of three riveting machines at work on a steel boiler. And the car rolled slowly and steadily along with no damage whatever, save for cloudy patches on the windows where the bullets struck.
    The Avenger could have rolled on past with no discomfort. But he didn’t choose to do that.
    He turned the wheel hard left, waddled the car up the dry gully like a tank, straight at the felled trees.
    There were yells from the unseen gunners behind the tree trunks. They kept on firing at the pointed, armored snout of the car. Then, at the last minute, they broke and ran.
    But they didn’t run far!
    Benson and Smitty and Josh and Mac could have shot all three of them as easily as you’d shoot clay pigeons on a shooting range. But they didn’t. Benson, himself, never took a human life. His aides did now and then, when absolutely forced into it. But on this occasion they didn’t feel forced.
    The Avenger’s white finger pressed another button.
    From a small tube opening just under the breather-cap on the radiator, shot a slim little cylinder. It was like a miniature torpedo shooting from the tiny tube of a miniature sub.
    The cylinder arced gracefully over the head of the running men, and plopped to the ground before them.
    “Lam! Tear gas!” yelled Gargantua.
    But the little cylinder didn’t contain anything so prosaic as tear gas. In it was a composition devised by Mac, who was one of the country’s finest chemists in addition to being a brilliant bacteriologist and pharmacist.
    The gas in the tiny projectile was so powerful that a whiff knocked a man out for an hour; and so