Read Online The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online

There was only one course, now. Try to bluster it out. The man standing in the hall doorway was broad of shoulder and hairy of hands. He had on white like an interne, but he looked, Burnside thought in terror, more like a butcher.
    Beside the big man in white was a little fellow, middle-aged, with a kind of happy smile on his face as if he went around continually with a secret joke in his mind that he didn’t intend to share with the rest of the world.
    “Senator Burnside!” the little man chirped, rubbing his hands together. The hands looked like bird claws. “You surely weren’t trying to go out the window, were you? Or were you? That wouldn’t be a reasonable thing to do when there are doors to use.”
    “Of course I wasn’t trying to go out the window,” said Burnside stiffly. “I merely wanted a little fresh air in the room and was raising the window to get it. Who are you, sir?”
    “My name is Sherman,” said the little man. “Dr. Sherman, of the Washington Board of Psychiatrists. We—the board, that is—want to have a little talk with you. So I came in the car, which the board has at its disposal, to get you. If you will just get your hat and coat—”
    “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Burnside thickly. When you’ve dreamed of something like this for days, and then it happens, the fact tends to clog your throat a little and make it hard to talk.
    “We merely want to talk to you a bit,” soothed the birdlike little man who called himself Dr. Sherman. His jolly smile beamed out. “We understand you have been having a little trouble lately with—your eyes. You see things. So if you will just come along with us—”
    Burnside lost all reason, then. He forgot about trying to act pompous and authoritative.
    Fram, he thought wildly, had betrayed him. He had gone to Fram with a story of a “friend of his” seeing the little red man with the green dog. Fram, after saying that anyone seeing such things could not be sane, had deduced that Burnside was talking about himself and not any mythical third party. Then Fram had gone to the Washington Board of Psychiatrists about him.
    Probably Burnside wouldn’t have gone so completely to pieces if he hadn’t entertained such grave doubts in the last two weeks as to his own sanity. He didn’t need anyone to insinuate that perhaps he didn’t have all his buttons; he was increasingly afraid of it himself.
    And now—an asylum wagon, an attendant, and a horribly smiling little psychiatrist!
    Burnside screamed and leaped for the dining-room door in spite of the steps he had heard there a moment ago. He was confronted by his butler, who stepped into view when Burnside charged.
    Burnside was hopelessly aware that his servants had been looking askance at him for days—realizing that he was acting very queerly indeed. The butler had never, for example, swallowed that story about Burnside’s gun going off in the dead of night because he had been “cleaning” it.
    The servants thought he was crazy, too. So the butler promptly closed with Burnside and kept him from getting out of the living room into the dining-room.
    The Senator lashed out wildly with his fists. The servant went down. But by then the white-coated man had him. He got the Senator down and held him by sitting on his head, as one would hold an unruly horse.
    “I’m not crazy!” screamed Burnside. If he wasn’t, it was exactly the wrong thing to yell. “I swear I’m sane!”
    “There, there,” soothed the little doctor, never losing his smile or his professional composure for a moment. “Of course you’re sane. Of course you’re not crazy. But we just want to ask you a few questions— Oh, you would, would you!”
    Burnside had tried to grab Sherman’s legs. So the little birdlike doctor nodded to the big man sitting on Burnside’s head, and the man smacked the Senator in the jaw.
    Burnside wasn’t out, but he was unable to move when they hoisted him out the door and into the