Read Online The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online Page B

limbs. In another home, over a big delicatessen store with a foreign-sounding name on it, half a dozen men suffered and died of the frosted death without daring to call doctors at all.
    These latter were those of the crowd that had jumped Smitty and Benson in the laboratory. They hadn’t been told the full nature of their task and had ignorantly touched the dead pig.
    An epidemic slowly, ominously getting started that would be worse than the Black Plague of the Middle Ages if it were not stopped. It was like a black storm cloud—no, a white, smothering one—that was slowly spreading a pall over the city and obscuring the clear and healthy sun.

    While all this was going on, a man sat at the soda fountain in MacMurdie’s drugstore, and methodically and endlessly consumed maplenut sundaes.
    The man was a tall, gangling Negro, and so sleepy-looking that he was instantly nicknamed Sleepy.
    “Ah’ll take ’nuther one,” Sleepy said. The boy behind the fountain looked at him in awe. He had had four maple-nut sundaes already. And his long, skinny, Negroid body was so thin you’d have thought they would show.
    “They’s sho’ good,” the colored man added.
    He didn’t have to talk like that. Joshua Elijah Newton was an honor graduate from a famous college. He could talk as excellent English as any professor, and he did when among friends. But when with strangers or in public places, Josh talked and acted as people expect Negroes to talk and act. It was good protective coloration.
    “It’s only when a houn’ dawg barks that folks pay attention to him,” he often said. “When he sleeps in the sun, they let him alone.” For Josh was a dusky philosopher with a deep store of wisdom.
    Furthermore, Joshua Elijah Newton, no matter what he looked like, was one of The Avenger’s aides—and an invaluable one. Josh and his pretty wife, Rosabel, had helped in many a desperate fight with criminals too brilliant for the regular police to handle.
    It was Josh’s habit, when waiting for orders, to hang around in Mac’s drugstore. And while he was there, he saw no reason for not indulging in his consuming passion—maplenut sundaes. He downed them till, as Mac sometimes said: “Mon, ’tis a wonder ye don’t look like a string of beads with all those sundaes in ye, one on top of the other.”
    Mac appeared at the door of the rear room now.
    “Josh,” he called softly.
    There were no customers in the store. If there had been, Mac would not have openly called and Josh would not have openly entered the laboratory. As it was, Sleepy eyed the last third of the maplenut sundae sadly, and left it to go to Mac. Mac shut the big lab door behind them. The dour Scot was red-eyed from continuous work.
    “I’ve got it!” he said.
    Josh instantly shed his sleepy look. His eyes shone with clear intelligence—and with an admiration too great to be put into words.
    “You have? You’re sure?”
    “I’m sure!” said Mac.
    “If that is true, you should have statues put up in your honor all over New York! You’re a great man, Mac.”
    “There’ll be no statues, because no one’ll ever know,” Mac said Wearily. “As for bein’ great—I’d call it just stubborn, that’s all.”
    Josh looked at a dozen cuts of meat on Mac’s lab workbench. Each was covered with the powdered sugar that spelled death—except the last one. That one was fresh and clear, without the white mold.
    “You’ve found the exact nature of the stuff?” he said.
    “Yes,” nodded Mac.
    A fine brain had been snuffed out when that first doctor, the one who attended John Braun, died. He had guessed immediately the type of thing that had smothered Braun. He had deduced the species of fungus, if not the exact type.
    “It’s a new thing, Josh,” Mac said. “But very, very close to a well-known one. Selectively cultivated from it, I should say. In all but appearance and action, the mold is identical with saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s yeast