The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (5 page)

The five-car train of passenger coaches was rattling over the roadbed at a sixty-mile clip. The engineer was looking ahead all right, but not very attentively. There was no reason why he should be especially alert.

He had been over this stretch of right of way, in the other direction, two hours ago, and everything had been O.K. then. There were no crossings to watch out for. The day was clear and sunny, so vision was excellent.

He was looking, rather inattentively, at the roadbed ahead of the speeding engine. Then he jerked straight on the seat in the cab and stared with incredulous eyes. After that, he jammed on the brakes so hard the wheels locked and steel shrieked in anguish on steel.

Ahead, there was suddenly no railroad track to run on!

The track ran on for a few hundred yards more, then sort of melted away. Beyond that, as far as the bewildered eye could see, there were no rails at all.

The ties were there. Even at a moment crowded with horror, the engineer caught a glimpse of spikes in the ties in a line where rails should be. But there was no trace of the rails themselves!

At least two miles of track had vanished as though it had never existed—though it had been there two hours before.

The engineer was swearing in a cracked voice and jerking at the brake lever. The train was grinding along with locked wheels. And it hit the section where there were no rails to run on—

Heavy ties flew and splintered like so many matches. Sand rose in great geysers. The engineer and fireman had tried to jump at the last moment, but before they could the engine crashed over on its side. Broken boilers poured water on the hot fire, and there was a tremendous explosion.

The cars behind, with their hundreds of tons and mile-a-minute momentum, kept on grinding forward, pushing the debris of the engine along and piling in on each other. Then there was silence, punctuated by the crackle of flames and shattered finally by the screams of the passengers.

The conductor and brakeman, who had been in the last coach, were shaken up but otherwise unhurt. They rescued the passengers who were still alive, from the flames. The brakeman began running ahead to the next commuters’ town, over the roadbed from which the long section of rails had been so mysteriously taken.

The conductor raced toward a big man in ragged overalls who had helped in the wreck after appearing over the dunes a short time after the crash.

“Were you around here before the wreck?” the conductor demanded, almost out of his mind. It was the worst wreck in the road’s history. “Did you see anybody around here? Who could have taken a couple of miles of steel rails! And how, and why?”

The farmer blinked eyes that didn’t look very intelligent. He was shambling, shabby.

“I was around here for a coupla hours,” he said. “I didn’t see nobody anywheres near, though. Except in the sky.”

“In the sky?” chattered the conductor. “What are you talking about? What do you mean—in the sky?”

“I was around here lookin’ for a calf that got away,” the man said, blinking in stupid sympathy at the groaning forms laid on the sand. “I got a farm five miles in. I was in from the tracks a half-mile, mebbe. I heard a noise in the sky. It was like what a plane might make. Only there wasn’t no plane in the sky. But there was a man up there, walkin’.”

The conductor literally staggered. Then he cursed.

“Are you a lunatic? This is nothing to joke about. A man walking in the sky! You’d better have a better story to tell when the State police get here!”

“You asked what I seen,” the man said. “So I’m tellin’ you. I got good eyes. The best eyes of anybody in these parts. I see things most people have to have glasses to see. And I saw what I said.”

He shifted from one foot to the other in his earnestness.

“Way up in the sky, a guy was walkin’. Hunder’ yards to a step. He was pushin’ something in front of him. Looked about the size of a barrel. I don’t know what it was, and I don’t know how a guy can walk in the air, but that’s what this guy was doin’. I seen him plain, before he went into the sun and I couldn’t see no more.”

That was the man’s story, and he stuck to it.

He had heard a weird noise in the sky at about the time two miles of solid steel rails had vanished. He had looked for a plane, but had seen no plane. Instead, with a remarkably good pair of eyes, he had seen a man walking up there.
Walking,
in thin air! And pushing something ahead of him about the size of a barrel.

The crazy tale wasn’t worth paying attention to, of course. But, meanwhile, there was the theft of two miles of rail to clear up—and the thieves to be brought to justice for causing a railroad wreck of disastrous proportions.

The small Catawbi Railroad couldn’t stand many disasters like that wreck. In the small South Chicago office building owned as home office by the road, the president of the board of directors paced his office.

The president was Abel Darcey. He was not really a railroad man. He was a banker and a heavy investor in South Chicago industry, with a big home up along the lake.

The directors of the road weren’t railroad men, either. The Catawbi Railroad had a curious history.

Some years before, all the little shore towns through which the road had passed had decided that railroads were fair game for rich taxes. One after another, the townships had piled special taxes on the road till a point had been reached where its running was no longer profitable.

It had been abandoned. But that stranded several thousand well-to-do commuters with homes on the lake and offices in the city. So the commuters had gotten the taxes rescinded, each in the districts in which they lived; then they had formed their own stock company and taken the road over, with Abel Darcey to head the board of directors.

The road just about paid for itself, which was enough for the owners, since all they wanted was sure transportation. But there weren’t enough finances in its backing to stand shocks like that wreck!

Darcey stopped his pacing long enough to ring for his secretary. He was a clear-skinned man of sixty, with eyes ordinarily calm enough but now very worried indeed.

The secretary, a trim brunette, came in.

“Have you found out who made the offer to buy the road?” Darcey asked her.

“No, sir,” she said. “It came through the Michigan Bank. That’s all anyone knows.”

“Well, I notified all the chief stockholders that an offer had been made and they could get out from under if the wreck scared them off,” Darcey said, looking harassed.
“I’m
willing to sell and run. Got fifty thousand in the thing. Are the answers in yet?”

The secretary nodded. “One from Colonel Ringset, of Catawbi Iron Range, makes a majority report. I was just coming in with it. They don’t want to sell.”

Darcey sighed.

“I suppose they’re right in their attitude. But I wish I knew who wanted to buy. And I wish I knew what in Heaven’s name could be responsible for the disappearance of two miles—hundreds of tons—of steel railroad rails!”

The newspapers were out by then, with stories of the fantastic theft. All had big front-page headlines. But only one said anything about the sky walker.

A farmer had seen a man walking in the sky, taking hundred-yard strides and pushing something like a barrel ahead of him. The story was too silly for the big dailies to use. Only one, a minor tabloid, mentioned it.

Even without mention of the noise in the sky, Benson would have sped to the scene of the wreck with the first tick of the news teletype flashing news to the papers—and to him. The wreck was precisely the sort of thing he was half expecting as the next break.

But the tabloid’s account made him question the farmer first of all. The man repeated his account.

Benson’s pale eyes had no intimation of unbelief in them. Smitty and MacMurdie were looking askance at the man, but not Benson.

“You say the man was—
walking
—way up in the sky?” Benson said, paralyzed lips barely moving in his dead face.

“Uh-huh,” said the farmer.

“And he seemed to be pushing something ahead of him? Anyway—something was ahead of him?”

“That’s right.” The man grew belligerent. “Say, if you think I’m nutty, too—”

“I don’t think that,” said Benson quietly. “Now, you say he was walking very fast—taking huge strides up there.”

“It looked like he was takin’ a hunder’ yards to a step.”

“Mightn’t he, do you think, have been going even faster than that?”

“Yeah, he might. But he sure wasn’t goin’ any slower.”

They were standing near the wrecked cars. The roadbed, minus rails, was at one side of them. A few yards away, down a twenty-foot sand bluff, glittered the expanse of Lake Michigan, on the other side.

Several hundred yards out from shore a big lake steamer trailed a plume of smoke on its way toward Chicago.

“Can you,” said Benson, “read the name on that boat out there?”

The farmer stared out over the water for a minute, eyes narrowing.

“Sure!” he said. “She’s the
City of Cleveland.”

Benson nodded. The name of the boat was correct, though few eyes could have been telescopic enough to make out the letters. Benson’s pale eyes could read them quite easily at that distance. It was obvious that this farmer had a rare pair of eyes almost as good.

And he had seen a man walking in the sky.

Benson and Smitty and MacMurdie left him and began walking up the railless roadbed. They left the wrecked cars, being cleared away by a work train, behind them. They entered a dune section where only the sand hills, like the rolling dunes of the Sahara, surrounded them. In a short time they were as cut off from the scene of tragedy, behind, and from any trace of human habitation, as though on an actual desert.

Benson examined the roadbed. His face, as ever, was as expressionless as a wax mask. But in his icily clear eyes was a look of surety, as if he knew in advance any story which might be told by the eerie disappearance of miles of solid steel. And in those coldly terrible eyes was death for the forces that had caused the disappearance of the rails.

The ties were there, on the roadbed. In them were the rusted spikes which had secured the rails. The rust on the spikes was absolutely undisturbed; there was no sign that they had been sledge-hammered over to get the rails up. In fact, there was no way under the sun in which those rails could have been taken.

Yet they weren’t there any more.

“There’s where they start again,” Smitty said, after nearly a half-hour of walking. He pointed along the roadbed. In the distance, the twin gleam of steel could be seen again. A little beyond that point there was a minor depot, of the sort that is locked and tenantless, save in rush hours.

“We’ll see what the ends of the rails look like,” Benson said, leading the way.

He seemed to flow along the rough ties—not a big man, weighing only around a hundred and sixty-five pounds—but possessed of some mysterious quality of muscle that far outmatched in power sheer quantity. The giant Smitty moved lightly behind him, for all his bulk. And last trailed MacMurdie, with the bleak fighting gleam in his bitter blue eyes at the thought of the broken bodies behind them.

They got to the place where the rails resumed their ruler course. Here, the rails ended bluntly. There was no fading or melting off into nothingness. There were no rails, then there were rails, with the rail ends square and untouched.

A little beyond, several rails were missing, but beyond that, again, they were whole.

Benson stooped and looked at the rail end.

“I’d like a piece of this to have analyzed, Smitty,” he said.

The giant bent down. The rails were old; had been in use a long time. Countless car wheels pounding over them had flattened them a little and forced the steel out in ragged little scallops at the edges. It is a formation to be found on most old rails.

Smitty put gigantic thumb and forefinger on one of the thin splinters, twisted hard, straightened up. He handed the fragment to Benson, who put it carefully in his pocket.

The gray fox of a man had ears as miraculous as his eyes, and so he heard the sound first. But Mac and Smitty heard it, too, very shortly after that.

The sound in the sky.

From somewhere overhead could suddenly be heard a faint, monotonous drone. The three of them searched the sky with their eyes for the sight of a plane. The noise was much like that which a plane motor might make.

They couldn’t see anything up there!

It was about five o’clock by now, and the western sky was a red glare. Even Benson could not have seen if a man were “walking,” if he happened to be in the western heavens.

Thus, none of the three saw anything. But all of them heard the droning noise. It seemed very far up, very far away. It went on and on while they stood there craning their necks.

Smitty saw the next thing first. He was peering in all directions, and he happened to stare down the railroad track near the horizon.

“Look!” he said, clutching Mac’s ropelike arm with one hand and pointing with the other.

He was pointing and staring with stupefied eyes at the little depot down the line.