Read Online The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online

circumstances. The building he lived in was hardly more than a tenement on the East Side. But there were tiny apartments in the tenement, not just single rooms. He was getting along well enough to have more than a single chamber to live in.
    Benson pressed the bell under his name, got no answer, and jabbed the button again.
    Benson went to the top floor of the four-story walk-up building, and found Knight’s door. He knocked. When there was still no answer, he took out a small pocket knife and opened a blade that looked a bit like an old-fashioned buttonhook, except that it was smaller.
    It was not a buttonhook. He inserted the thin, flexible end in the lock, turned experimentally twice, and the door opened. He stepped in—and then shut the door quickly and softly behind him. Shut it on death.
    His call on Alec Knight, brilliant student putting himself through Columbia, was too late.

    Knight, a sturdy, tanned youngster of twenty-one or so, lay next to the shabby day bed, which was the largest piece of furniture in the room. The top of his head was mashed in, as the top of Gray’s head had been. And the room had been searched by someone so thoroughly that it looked as if a tornado had come to call.
    Benson stepped with his tiger tread to the door on the side wall. Opening it, he saw another room, with the big folding doors of a pullman kitchenette at its end. This had been designed as a dining room, perhaps. Now it held a work table cluttered with Indian relics of the more common variety and textbooks.
    Here the room was not so disarranged, and the gray steel man nodded, his face, as ever, expressionless. The fact that blood was still trickling from Knight’s head showed that he had been very recently killed. And the fact that this second room was only a little disarranged hinted that the killer hadn’t had time for a complete search before he’d been frightened off. Probably by Benson’s ring at the bell downstairs.
    With pale eyes full of sympathy at the youth of the dead man, but with a white, still face as dead as the man himself, Benson finished the searching of the second room. No need to go over the part that had already been rifled; anything of importance there would already have been taken.
    Benson found many things relative to Aztec Indians—but no clay brick. Only one thing came to light—in a battered leather portfolio—that caught the notice of the pale, infallible eyes.
    That was a sealed envelope addressed to Professor Archer Gray. It was unstamped.
    Benson opened it. The piece of paper within had just three marks on it—three of the ancient Indian ideographs. That was all.
    Benson put it in his pocket and went back to examine the murdered man. His pockets had been turned out, his shirt had been half removed to make sure he had no secret hiding place next to his skin for anything, like a money belt.
    The position of the body indicated that the youth had been slugged while he lay resting on the day bed. Asleep, probably. The poor devil hadn’t had a chance, had never known what hit him.
    With a reflection of the terrible, cold fury in his pale eyes that had leaped there at the callous act of the man in the brown cap, Benson left the pitiful place of death.
    He went to the Metropolitan Museum.
    As Chandler had noted, Dick Benson knew countless people in many unusual positions. One of his host of friends was old Dr. Brunniger, on the staff of the Metropolitan. Brunniger was an outstanding authority on ancient Mexico.
    “Dick,” said the old man, as Benson found him munching a cold dinner and studying the latest shipment of primitives, “it’s a treat to see you again.”
    Brunniger’s eyes went to Benson’s still, white face and his snow-white hair.
    “You’re . . . different than when I saw you last, Richard. I heard about your loss. I’m . . . sorrier than I can say.”
    A terrible light flared in the deadly, pale eyes. That light came when anything reminded The Avenger of the reason for his