The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (8 page)

Mac and Smitty leaped to obey even though, for a few seconds, the meaning behind the strategy didn’t become clear to them. At the open door of the speeding car, Smitty caught Mac by the thighs and lifted him straight up till the Scot could grasp the shank of the old hand-brake wheel atop the car. The shrieking rush of air caused by the train’s speed helped hold Mac in place.

Smitty tossed Benson up the same way, then swarmed up himself like a great gorilla. For just an instant his eyes rested speculatively on the hand brake, but he knew the thing had no meaning here. He could twist it clear off, and the speed of the train wouldn’t be slowed enough, in the short distance left to the curve, even to notice.

“Here we go!” his great voice loomed.

The roar of the locomotive behind them had risen to a steady shriek. The flatcars loaded with rails were doing a kind of devil’s dance along the track, seeming almost to leave it at times, such was the pace.

They had almost reached the sharp curve ahead!

Benson was crouching on the sloping left side of the car roof, the lake side. Smitty and Mac had taken similar positions, several yards apart.

They swayed there on the balls of their feet, on the lake side of the jerking car. Benson hadn’t had to simplify his orders any more. Their quick brains had understood when they were on the car top.

The old day coach hit the beginning of the curve. With its first awful lurch, Benson and Smitty and Mac jumped.

Like three stones shot from a sling, their three bodies whirled out, away from the track, over the twenty-foot drop, a dozen feet out into the lake. The terrible snap of the car at the curve, plus their own impetus, had catapulted them an unbelievable distance.

They hit—not hard earth as they would have struck had they leaped before—but waist-deep water. Hitting even this, with such force, was a little like being rolled over granite paving blocks. But at least it wasn’t sure death.

They plowed like surfboards over the water for a dozen yards, then sank, but came to the surface again in time—so short had been the elapsed interval—to see the last of the work train.

For an instant it had seemed that the three cars and the engine would actually make the curve, in spite of the terrible speed. But the instant hadn’t endured. Halfway around, the old day coach tore from its forward truck and launched out over the embankment into the lake. The three flatcars and the locomotive followed it, like obedient sheep following a leader’s change of course, while the loose truck and car wheels went skimming on end around the curve and off down the track.

The coach struck the water with a geyser splash like the eruption of Old Faithful. It kept on going.

On the flatcars behind, the chains holding the tons of rails did queer, snaky things, and the rails began to cascade forward, driven by their original impetus.

The rails went into the rear end of the wooden coach, and on through and out the front end, like giant needles piercing through tissue paper. And behind them came the engine. Hundreds of tons of train, going at well over a mile a minute, takes a lot of stopping.

The day coach was shoved out till it was clear under water before the forward movement ceased. By then it was so pierced by rails that it looked like a giant’s pincushion. And then the water hit the locomotive’s firebox—and that was that. The whole west beach of Lake Michigan seemed to rise up into the air, spit out rails and sand and pieces of car wheels. And then there was silence.

Mac stood up in water about breast-high and wiggled both arms. They seemed to work all right. He moved his neck and legs. He was apparently unfractured anywhere; and Smitty and Benson seemed that way, too. It had been a narrow squeak indeed, but now all seemed clear sailing. Whereupon, the Scot instantly began to view the world with gloomy pessimism.

Even his pessimism was put to it to function after such an escape. But finally he found something to croak about.

“Whoosh!” he said, wringing at his wet coat sleeves and scowling bleakly. “We’re through now. Ye know, we’ll catch our death of colds in this water if we don’t watch out.”

Benson had the map of the railroad’s course in his mind.

“Rosemont is about five miles up,” he said. “It’s one of the bigger shore towns. We can get a car there—maybe a plane.”

But they weren’t to get to Rosemont without a short delay.

They saw the great dark bulk of the shore when they’d rounded a headland about a mile up. A huge thing like a long, flat box with the ends undercut, weather-beaten and shabby.

It was a car ferry. On the sides were still the letters, “Catawbi Railroad.” It was high on the beach, but such was its length that the far end extended quite a distance out into the water. Its condition suggested that it had long outlived its usefulness, and hence had simply been beached and abandoned. So there the great scow stood, like a tremendous cake of soap half in and half out of the lake.

Benson’s icy, pale eyes probed the vast hulk as they approached it. When they were even with it, Smitty and Mac started to swing on, but Benson stopped them.

“I think we’ll have a look at that,” he said.

They covered the hundred yards from track to water, and walked around the part on the beach.

At end and sides, the heavy timbers rose like an unbroken cliff, offering no way into the thing. It was just what it seemed, an abandoned barge on the beach. But Benson still was not satisfied. The opposite end, out in the lake, was out of sight of anyone standing at any point on the shore.

“We’ll wade out,” he said.

They waded, then swam. And Benson’s thoroughness was justified. In the lake end of the ferry, which loomed up at least twenty feet from the water, was a thin crack which ran on and on till the eye took in the fact that it was the edge of a gigantic door.

A portal taking up almost the whole end.

Down at the side, near the water, a plank was broken in what seemed an innocent way. But as they swam nearer they saw that the jagged resulting hole was ample to take a man’s body.

The broken plank made a little door beside the huge one.

The three went in, with Smitty having a little trouble forcing his great bulk in the small opening. Inside, the feeling was that which you get in a big cave. All was darkness; the fragment of light coming in where the plank was broken away did not extend for more than a few yards.

Benson took out a small flash whose case was waterproof and whose bulb had withstood the shock of hitting the water. He played it around.

The tiny ray didn’t begin to penetrate the length and breadth of the ferry. But it did light on something that brought instant identification to all three men.

That object was a length of small, narrow-gauge track running at a slope down into the water at the lake end of the ferry. On the track was a small wooden cradle mounted on flanged wheels. It was the sort of runway which is used to haul surfboats out of the water and up on a drydock.

Or amphibian planes.

“This may have been abandoned once,” said Smitty. “But it isn’t any more. It’s being used as an airplane hangar now.”

“For once, ye’re right,” said the Scot. Between him and the giant had developed a habit of biting repartee that might have made a stranger think they disliked each other very much. But the stranger would have been wrong.

Benson eyed the track with thoughtful, pale eyes. In the icy clarity of those eyes was grim urgency. Many lives had been lost in the affair of the man who walked the sky. Every fiber of the dynamic body impelled Benson to fast action lest many more be lost.

“I’ve got to get back to the city,” he said, dead lips, as usual, barely moving in his paralyzed face. “But just the same, this place ought to be investigated thoroughly. Smitty, you look around and come back to me with a complete report. Mac, you’d better come with me.”

The gray fox of a man went out the broken-plank exit, followed by Mac. Smitty was left alone in the vast interior of the barge.

When the human dynamo, whom men called The Avenger, had gone, it seemed as if a light had been turned out in the place, leaving it darker than before.

In Chicago, people were still chuckling over the sensational newspaper’s foreign-invasion hoax. An unnamed enemy ready secretly to invade the United States in the vicinity of Chicago? Hooey!

In a lunchroom downtown, several men were laughing about it to the proprietor. One, a big fellow with a gold front tooth, gesticulated.

“I guess if anybody
did
invade this country, it wouldn’t be secret. And I guess we’d know in advance who the enemy’d be. Besides, how could anybody invade us, and us not know it until after the damage was done?”

“Well, there was that pavilion in Lincoln Park,” the other man said. “Kind of funny how that fell down.”

“Aw, it didn’t have anything to do with an enemy invasion. The girders were rotten, that’s all. The city engineers said so.”

“The whole business is nutty,” said the proprietor of the lunchroom. “Wonder where the paper got that crazy story, anyhow?”

Someone else was wondering that. And that person was a lithe, powerful figure of a man with icily flaming gray eyes. The Avenger.

Benson was in the office of the managing editor of the sensational sheet now. Benson, who knew an amazing number of people in all walks of life, was acquainted with the owner of the paper. The owner didn’t like Benson much, but he was afraid of the pale-eyed man. And when Benson had quietly demanded authority to question the reporter of the paper who was responsible for the invasion yarn, the owner granted it.

Benson was probing the fellow now.

The reporter, a not-too-clean man of forty-five or so, stood like an uneasy schoolboy before Benson in the managing editor’s office.

“Your superior,” Benson said quietly, “disclaims all knowledge of the source of that story. He says it isn’t up to him to question news sources. He gets stories from his reporters, and passes them if they look interesting. He got this yarn from you, decided it would sell out the issue, and printed it. But he insists he doesn’t know where you got hold of it.”

“That’s right,” said the managing editor quickly.

“So now you can tell me where
you
picked it up,” said Benson.

“It was a source of information that can’t be divulged,” the reporter began, sweating under the gaze of the icy, pale eyes.

“It will be divulged in this case,” Benson said. The reporter knew that the dead-white face, with its awesome lack of expression, was going to follow him around in nightmares.

“I . . . I don’t know the name of the m-man who told me,” he stuttered.

“You don’t know the name of the man who gave you a story like that?”

“No! I got it in a bar, from this guy—”

The managing editor broke in, voice weary and daunted.

“This man”—he jerked his head toward Benson—“seems to be a buddy with everybody from the President of the United States down. Apparently he can call out the United States army if he wants to. Open up!”

The reporter cleared his throat.

“I really did get the story from a guy in a bar,” he said. “But I have an idea the man was there because I usually hit that bar at that hour, and he knew it. He was a young fellow, smooth-looking. Said his name was Carlisle. He spilled the foreign-invasion stuff, and it sounded like a circulation getter to me.”

Benson’s eyes, cold as ice in a polar sea, went from the reporter to his boss.

“All right! You got the story. It sounded like a circulation getter. But you wouldn’t have printed a thing like that without some sort of confirmation. What was it?”