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volatile that it could fill a ten-yard space in a little less than a second.
    So the three running men didn’t yell again. There wasn’t time.
    They dropped their guns, staggered a moment and then fell. They lay very, very still!
    Benson and the other three put on nose-clip masks and walked over to them. They walked warily. Most men would have been careless; would have figured that they had won their battle and the danger was over. But not these four. Without a word being exchanged, they all had the same thoughts:
    “The gun must have come here in some sort of vehicle. Where was their car? And was there another man in it and perhaps training gunsights on them?”
    Nothing happened, however, and no sound could be heard. They bent over the three.
    “So they tapped Sessel’s telephone wire, and knew we were coming!” said Smitty.
    “And prepared a welcome committee,” nodded Benson. “In doing that, since they had failed, they did a stupid thing. We came here more or less blindly, not knowing if there was a real reason for investigation. Now we do know, since someone thought it important enough, to prevent investigation, to kill us before we could look around.”
    “You knew something like this was ahead of us,” said Josh.
    Again The Avenger nodded.
    “The detour gag is a pretty old one. And so much a matter of routine to guard against that before we started I phoned the highway commission and found that there were no detours at present between New York and Garfield City. But I followed along the road pointed out by the fake sign to see if we could find out anything.”
    “We don’t seem to be findin’ out much,” gloomed the pessimistic MacMurdie.
    And, indeed, they didn’t seem to be.
    The pockets of the three were all emptied now. In none of them was there an identifying article. Besides, all labels had been taken from their hats and clothing. It was the usual gangland preparation when gunmen departed for a risky job.
    Benson stared at the guns. They were the standard tommy guns of the underworld and had no tale to tell. He went back to the felled trees. And there he found one object.
    That object was a “pineapple” bomb which none of the three had kept his head enough to toss when the car unexpectedly drove straight at their ambush. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyhow. The big sedan could take such small bombs in its stride.
    “Look at the fuse!” said Smitty.
    On the metal fuse case were the letters:
    GARFIELD GEAR
    “That’s a standard army casing,” said Josh, eyes narrowing.
    “Garfield Gear makes army and navy parts,” Benson said. “But I don’t know that one of their fuse casings means anything here. It might have been stolen, or bought from a crooked workman.”
    They went back to the car. As they went, Mac cast murderous looks at the three men lying on the ground. They were rats. And Mac had a frenzied hatred of men who were in the rat class. As always, it wrenched him to leave adversaries lying loose. Yet he knew the realistic wisdom of the chief’s philosophy.
    You couldn’t kill a defenseless man in cold blood, crook or not. You could turn them over to the police, but in jobs of the size The Avenger always tackled, there were bound to be superiors who could get them free on bail in a few hours.
    Therefore, forget about them and concentrate solely on getting the superiors.

    The four got into the sedan. Benson backed it onto the road, and they crossed the gully.
    Ahead and to the right was the quarry they had noticed before the excitement at the gully. There had been a lot of quarries in their drive, and this seemed to be just one more. It was filled with water, and was quite pretty.
    Josh and Mac and Smitty stared at it in relaxed appreciation as the sedan rolled along the road with only a thin guard rail between. Even Benson glanced at the little lake for an instant out of the corners of his pale, deadly eyes.
    No man can be superhuman. The Avenger came about as close to it as a