The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (15 page)

He went on.

Dick Benson had the muscles of a giant, and only the weight of an average man. It was like powering a small fighter plane with the motor of a giant bomber. He could do things no ordinary man would dream of.

Certainly no ordinary man could have traveled even a few yards in the treetops forming the jungle roof. Dick traveled that way—and fast, in midair the pale, cold eyes seemed able to spot the right handhold for swing after next, so that at no instant did he stop between arial plunges to look for a place to light. His movement was an even, swift flow among the branches.

He flashed away from the gang below. They’d stopped shooting, now, not being able to see anything to shoot at, and they were fanning out in a wide spread to find him again.

Dick traveled in a big circle and came around behind them. From there, he could see over the cliff enough to view the pool down there, but not the ledge. However, his quick ears detected sounds of voices there, and he concluded that Marge Stahl and his aides were alive, at least.

So he concentrated for the moment on Heber and his choice crew of killers.

They searched for him for nearly an hour. Then they straggled back, furious, soaked with perspiration. They got together almost under the tree in which The Avenger crouched fifty feet from the ground.

“Missed him,” growled Heber. “But it’s all right. He can’t do anything against so many of us. And he can’t get far in this jungle. Eventually, the native boys’ll get him, and that will be that.”

“Unless they get us first,” said the yellow-haired man gloomily.

“I told you the answer to that,” snapped Heber. “The natives here are a bunch of dopes. The only guy with brains is that leader of theirs, and he isn’t back yet. Without him, they’ll believe what I tell them.”

“And what’s that?” said Gleason. The lenses of his glasses were steamed up now. He took them off and wiped them.

“I told them we were their friends. I said to prove it we’d give them a crack at some folks due to appear who were their enemies. Said we’d help capture these folks, and then they could toss them into that nice smooth pool. The old guy who leads them while the big shot is away said all right, if we do that we can have what we want and go free. If we don’t, they’ll get us with poisoned darts before we can get back to the Negro River.”

“The leader would never fall for that,” said the big fellow. “He’s smart. He’d kill us as fast as he’d kill the rest.”

“The leader,” Heber pointed out, “ain’t here.”

“We’d better see to it that we’re finished and gone before he
is
here!” exclaimed the yellow-haired man. “Which means no more stalling around after the guy that got away.”

Heber nodded.

“We’ll go to the village and tell the old boy that his sacrifice victims are at the pool just waiting to be shoved in. That’ll empty the whole village. They’ll all come to see the fun. With the place to ourselves, we’re all set.”

“Where’s the village?”

“South and east. Follow me.”

The group started, with Heber a few steps in the lead. For a few yards, they went along a kind of animal trail that was clear enough for them to progress if they bent down. But then it became the usual man-killing travel of the deep jungle: sidle around tree-boles, duck under creepers, climb over rotting logs eight and ten feet high, chop through vegetation too thick to be avoided.

The Avenger started south and east, traveling with the ease and swiftness of a bird when compared with the sweating, cursing work beneath. In five minutes Heber’s men were so far behind that he couldn’t even hear them any more.

The Avenger smelled the village before he saw it. Native villages are usually like that, though the stench of this one was not as bad as many Dick had encountered.

He went more slowly and a lot more cautiously, eyes and ears alert to spot possible monkey men in the trees nearby. There were none. And then he saw the village, a collection of huts that would look like animal lairs to most civilized eyes, but which The Avenger realized to be quite superior dwelling places, in their way. The educated leader of the monkey men was evidently raising the standards of living of his tribe.

Now, Benson went with the silence and caution of a great snake.

In the hard-packed open space in front of the biggest hut were half a hundred of the little black men. They were squatting with faces all turned toward the ancient city. They’d heard the shots and the noise there, but hadn’t slid up to investigate. It bore out Heber’s boast that he had come to an understanding with them.

In the entrance of the hut was an old native so withered and seamed that he looked to be a hundred years old. This would be the oldster who led them while the young leader was away.

Dick slid noiselessly out on a great branch, overhanging the spot. Above was solid jungle canopy, showing why he hadn’t been able to see the village from the air. And the usual mass of vines and creepers looped and fell from every spot.

The Avenger stopped at one of the thickest, which hung down like a handy rope to within fifteen feet of the headman’s hut. He had made no slightest noise so far. He grasped the liana and lowered himself.

He slipped down so swiftly that it was almost like a fall, but at the last moment he braked a little with his steel-strong fingers and dropped like a plummet, light as a feather, right in the middle of the squatting group, between the oldster and the rest.

He had outdone the natives themselves in junglecraft. He had arrived with not even their ears hearing his approach. The first they knew of the alien’s presence was when he appeared among them, and they were so stunned with surprise that they continued to sit there, staring at him with rolling eyeballs.

The old man slowly rose. And the rest, recovered now from surprise, reached furtively for their bamboo tubes.

Dick, as if by chance, moved so that he was in line with the headman and stood with his bare hands behind him.

One of the little black men just in front of him spoke.

“Is this one of the white men who came when the sun was straight overhead?”

“No, this is not one of them,” quavered the oldster.

Benson had the dialect, then. He knew it quite well, though it had been years since he had learned it.

“I am a friend,” he said. “Your leader, now up north after your white captive’s niece, would know that if he were here.”

There was a stir. The fact that this stranger knew of their absent leader was something to make the bamboo tubes in gnarled black hands pause a moment.

“The white men you talked to earlier are your true enemies,” said Benson. “They will be here again, very soon, and they will talk again. They will say that they can prove they are friends by giving to you my friends to be tossed into the pool.”

There was another stir. This man, who could move even more silently than they themselves could, seemed to know a great deal about them.

“I say—they are your real enemies,” The Avenger’s calm, cold voice rang out. “They want your treasure. They will bring others back here for more treasure, which is just what your leader works to stop. My friends and I do not want your treasure, and we will never return, once we have what we seek.”

The old man spoke, then, quaveringly. “What is it you seek?”

“Your white prisoner. He is an old friend. A blood brother.”

There was an angry stir among the men, and half a dozen of the bamboo tubes were used. Darts shot toward The Avenger! He stood perfectly still. If one pricked throat or face or legs . . .

But the men had aimed for the body, the easiest target. The darts hung there in his clothing, stopped by the celluglass. The natives, of course, knew nothing of that flexible fine armor underneath. All they knew was that the stranger was totally unmoved at the piercing of their deadliest weapons. They began to show fear.

“You must let your prisoner come with me,” Dick repeated. “He will sicken and die here. This is not his home. He must live in his own home, even as you must live in yours.”

“He was here before we captured him,” retorted the old man, with a touch of earthy common sense hard to beat.

“He was here on a visit, soon to go back home.” The Avenger raised his voice. “Stahl! Alden Stahl! Are you here?”

Off beyond the cluster of huts was another slightly larger one, almost as large as the headman’s. From this now stepped a scarecrow of a man, deeply burned by the sun, but obviously white. He stared at Benson, then gave a great cry and ran to him. Benson had to put his arms around him to hold him up.

“Dick! Dick Benson!” Stahl exclaimed. “I heard some of the monkey gibberish out here, but I’ve never understood it and just thought it was another native powwow. But it was
you!”

He looked around, then, out of bleared gray eyes. His joy faded.

“But look here, you’re in a spot, my friend. How’d you get here? Don’t you know these lads kill every white man they catch, to keep their country for themselves?”

“I came with friends, and with someone else you’ll be glad to see,” Benson responded. His head was turned a bit to catch all sounds from the north and west. “We’ll get you away.”

Stahl’s knees sagged. He was in terrible shape from the monkey disease. The natives were twisted to ape form by it, but were otherwise unharmed by their centuries of immunity to it. Stahl was more grotesquely apish than they, and his tremors and color told that he was soon going to die of it.

Benson took the needle and the vial of amber-colored liquid from his pocket.

“Here—let me give you a dose of this, first thing. It’s antitoxin.”

Stahl bared his arm. And as The Avenger worked, he told a little of his capture and imprisonment.

“They haven’t hurt me. The leader is a smart little devil. He has picked my brains for my engineering skill. A bit of mining, among other things.”

“But not for radium,” said Benson.

Stahl swore. “No, not for radium. That fiend, Heber, told me there was radium here and produced a native with sores I thought were radium sores. But I got here and found what he really wanted.”

For minutes The Avenger had heard sounds in the jungle, drawing nearer. Now the source of the sounds reached the clearing.

Heber and his band of men stopped short, with eyes bulging at sight of The Avenger here ahead of them. Then, with guns out, they ran for him and Stahl.

Benson’s chill, pale eyes were on the oldster’s undecided face.

“If these men kill us, your leader will be very angry,” The Avenger said.

Heber’s gun barked, and Benson’s body jerked a little as a slug caught him in the chest. That was all the damage it did—jarred him a little.

The old man quavered a command, and fifty or sixty little bamboo tubes raised and leveled at the men. The tubes looked laughably crude and ineffective compared to modern guns. But Heber and his crew stopped stone still at the threat, and sweat poured out of their faces. They knew all about the tubes.

Heber used the dialect.

“Why are you now unfriendly to us?” he said plaintively. “We have done as we said. We have delivered these others, your true enemies, to you.”

The old man didn’t bite. He shook his head. “This man came to us freely. You did not give him to us.”

“I meant the others,” Heber said glibly. “His friends. We have them for you. They are waiting at the pool.”

There was an excited howl from the main body of the ape men. They began milling around like ebony monkeys. The old man scowled; then the scowl cleared. He had evidently come to a decision that appealed to him as being just about perfect.

“You may not kill these two,” he said sternly, pointing to Benson and Stahl. “We will hold them till our leader decides what to do. The others, we will throw into the pool now!”

“My men will help,” said Heber quickly. “I shall stay, with one friend, along with your men, to watch these two. The rest of my band shall go to the pool with you.”

The protest, when it came, was not from the oldster, who seemed carelessly content with the suggestion. The howl came from the yellow-haired man.

“Listen, Heber, if you have some idea of double-crossing us—”

“Use your head,” said Heber. “A couple of us
must
stay here. It’s what all the planning was for.”

“Well . . .” mumbled the yellow-haired man. He shrugged. “Okay. But see that you’re here when we get back.”

“See that you get back fast,” Heber countered. “I don’t want to be around when the little snake that leads this gang gets home!”

The scores of monkey men stood close to Stahl and Benson, covering them with their bamboo tubes so they didn’t dare move. The oldster then lashed the two men to two upright stakes, solidly sunk into the hard-packed ground. The presence of those stakes was grim. So were the dark splotches on them.

When The Avenger and Stahl had been bound so tightly that they couldn’t possibly get away from the stakes, the monkey men and the balance of Heber’s gang started for the pool. They were going to get back to the pool faster than Heber had come from it; the ape men knew dim native trails where they could twist along bent almost double but without having to chop their way through.