The Avenger

Captain Mike Brixan had certain mild and innocent superstitions. He believed, for example, that if he saw a green crow in a field he would certainly see another green crow before the day was out. And when, at the bookstand on Aix la Chapelle station, he saw and purchased a dime novel that was comprehensively intituled Only an Extra, or the Pride of Hollywood, he was less concerned as to how this thrilling and dog-eared romance came to be on offer at half a million marks (this was in the days when marks were worth money) than as to the circumstances in which he would again hear or read the word “extras” in the sense of a supernumerary and unimportant screen actress.

The novel did not interest him at all. He read one page of superlatives and turned for relief to the study of a Belgian timetable. He was bored, but not so bored that he could interest himself in the sensational rise of the fictitious Rosa Love from modest obscurity to a press agent and wealth.

But “extra” was a new one on Michael, and he waited for the day to bring its inevitable companion.

To say that he was uninterested in crime, that burglars were less thrilling than golf scores, and the record of murders hardly worth the reading, might convey a wrong impression to those who knew him as the cleverest agent in the Foreign Office Intelligence Department.

His official life was spent in meeting queer continentals in obscure restaurants and, in divers roles, to learn of the undercurrents that were drifting the barques of diplomacy to unsuspected ports.

She had been sleeping two hours, though it did not seem two seconds. A sense of impending danger wakened her, and she sat up in bed, her heart thumping wildly. She looked round the room. In the pale moonlight she could see almost every corner, and it was empty. Was it somebody outside the door that had wakened her? She tried the door handle: it was locked, as she had left it. The window? It was very near to the ground, she remembered. Stepping to the window, she pulled one casement close. She was closing the other when, out of the darkness below, reached a great hairy arm and a hand closed like a vice on her wrist.

She did not scream. She stood breathless, dying of terror, she felt. Her heart ceased beating, and she was conscious of a deadly cold. What was it? What could it be? Summoning all her courage, she looked out of the window down into a hideous, bestial face and two round, green eyes that stared into hers.

The man’s head was hastily withdrawn, the window slammed down, and such a long interval passed that Michael thought that the baronet intended denying him admission. This view, however, was wrong. At the end of a dreary period of waiting the door was opened, and, in the light of the hall lamp, Sir Gregory Penne presented an extraordinary appearance.

He was fully dressed: around his waist were belted two heavy revolvers, but this fact Michael did not immediately notice. The man’s head was swathed in bandages; only one eye was visible; his left arm was stiff with a surgical dressing, and he limped as he walked.

“I’ve had an accident,” he said gruffly.

“It looks a pretty bad one,” said Michael, observing him narrowly.

“I don’t want to talk here: come into my room,” growled the man.

In Sir Gregory’s library there were signs of a struggle. A long mirror which hung on one of the walls was shattered to pieces; and, looking up, Michael saw that one of the two swords was missing.

“You’ve lost something,” he said. “Did that occur in course of the ‘accident’?”

Sir Gregory nodded.

Something in the hang of the second sword attracted Michael’s attention, and, without asking permission, he lifted it down from its hook and drew the blade from the scabbard. It was brown with blood.