The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (16 page)

It went on.

The fourth occurrence was just what Todd had mentioned as a thing they must instantly take steps to guard against: Possible sliding of the rock loosened above the tunnel mouth by the crazy blast inside that wrecked the ammonia coils.

There was a shattering roar, that had grown from a low rumble, and all of a sudden, several hundred tons of rock were blocking the entrance to the flooded bore and were resting on smashed machinery that had been hauled from the water.

Even that wasn’t the end. There was nasty surprise number five. And that concerned Todd himself.

The head engineer was found by Mac, near the Donald Duck outcropping and the puzzling dead tree that seemed to have walked, not once but several times. Todd was dead!

On his back was a great burn, and on the soles of his feet were two more. He had, apparently, been struck by lightning.

One of the workmen said he had seen it happen. He told and retold the story, with the other men staring at him in much the same fashion as the first crew had stared at similar accounts.

“There was a little green cloud, see? It starts toward this guy, Todd. Todd’s bendin’ down, lookin’ at the roots of the dead tree. See? He don’t notice the green mist comin’ up behind him. He straightens, sees it, yells, and starts to run. But the green stuff’s got him by then. See? It rolls back after a couple minutes and shows the guy again. Only now Todd’s lyin’ down. I take about fifteen minutes to be sure the fog ain’t comin’ back again, and then I run to him. He’s croaked. See? What I wanta know—what’s all this about some kinda god killin’ guys with lightnin’?”

Josh contributed a point, here. He had talked with Todd for a minute before the engineer left camp. Josh was probably the last person to see him alive.

“He said a kind of funny thing,” Josh told Smitty in an undertone. “You know the three partners of the Central Construction Co.—Fyler and Crast and Ryan?”

Smitty nodded.

“Well,” said Josh, “Todd said he thought he saw Crast, for a minute, quite a ways off, near the dead tree. He said he was sure it couldn’t really be Crast, because if one of the partners was coming, he’d probably wire. And if he did come without wiring, why would he stay away from camp and act as if he didn’t want to be seen? So Todd was sure it wasn’t Crast, but said he was going to stroll out and see who it was.”

“And Mac strolls out after him,” said Smitty grimly, “and finds him dead. Josh, this business is getting me jumpy.”

The colored man looked at him.

“I’d like to see you jumpy,” he remarked. “It would be like seeing Mount Rainod with a case of nerves.”

Smitty skipped the reference to his vast size.

“I wish the chief would get back,” he said worriedly. “It’s funny he isn’t here already. I rather expected him this morning, before the crew came. And now it’s late afternoon and he hasn’t arrived. I wonder if something—”

It was almost
lese
majesty to wonder if something had happened to that gray steel man called The Avenger; so Smitty didn’t finish it.

He went on with another wonder instead.

“Now where’s Nellie? I haven’t seen her for hours. If she’s gone and got herself in a jam, again, she can just get out of it alone. I’m through losing weight worrying about her.”

“When a man swears he’s through worrying about a woman,” said Josh philosophically, “it means he is on the verge of taking all her worries on his shoulders for the rest of time.”

“Me? Nellie?” exclaimed Smitty. “Not on your life! But I wish I knew where the reckless little witch was. And I wish I knew what was keeping the chief!”

In thinking that Benson, in his faster plane, should have landed near the camp before the other planes with the new crew, Mac and Smitty and Josh had been right. It was in the cards that he should beat them there by hours; and, indeed, he had preceded them.

The sky was light-pink when The Avenger landed, as lightly as a dried leaf, and taxied his plane beyond the curve of the glass mountain, hidden from the camp.

He had coasted down on a long slant for eighteen miles to avoid having his motor heard, for he wanted to land here without anyone knowing it.

He got out of the plane, and came back around the foot of the mountain to where he had first seen Ethel Masterson. The dead rancher’s daughter, it appeared, had met the old Indian, who claimed to be Chief Yellow Moccasins, several times in this vicinity.

The Avenger wanted to meet the old Indian, too. But not just to chat with him.

He had been there for three hours before he heard anything near him. In the meantime, the planes with the new crew had landed, and the camp had filled again.

Then Benson heard a breath of sound some little distance to his right. He stared over that way.

The ancient he wanted to see was just picking a silent way around a rock shoulder. The Indian sat down on a big rock and stared out over the rock-strewn tableland.

So much time had passed that Benson knew he had to move fast. He started creeping up on the man.

He got within fifty yards of the old Indian, unseen and unheard. Then Benson took out Mike.

The special little .22 took a fleeting aim, and a slug whispered from its silenced, venomous little muzzle.

The Indian sagged sideways, without a sound, creased by the bullet. He would be out for hours.

Benson went up to him. In his left hand was a case which he had brought from his plane. It was about the size of an ordinary overnight bag; but when he opened it, the contents were revealed as being far indeed from ordinary.

There was a top tray with dozens of pairs of little glass shells, designed to slip over a human eyeball. Each pair had a slightly different colored pupil on them. There were wigs and plastics and flesh-colored adhesive, and a hundred other aids to make-up. And in the top lid was a small but perfect mirror.

The Avenger propped the deeply unconscious Indian up in a sitting position, and placed the case so that the mirror was next to the Indian’s face. Then Benson went to work on his own paralyzed features—and a miracle was wrought.

Man of a Thousand Faces, able to simulate the appearance of practically any person! His title, it could be seen now, was well-earned.

Steely, slim fingers prodded at the flesh of his face. And where that dead flesh was placed, it stayed, as if made of some sort of plastic itself. For when Benson’s face was paralyzed and his hair whitened by the nerve shock of his tragic loss, more than the nerves of his countenance seemed to have been affected. The flesh seemed to have
lost
life itself, and to have become incapable of springing back to its natural outlines when moved out of them.

A hawk nose appeared, and deep seams of great age, and a slightly narrower jawline. Eye-shells with brown, slightly muddy pupils were slipped over the icily flaring, pale eyes. A small razor took off hair at temples till Benson’s skull was bald high above the forehead as an Indian’s skull is hairless. There was a wig with long, straight black hair containing just a few that were gray.

The Avenger slipped on the redskin’s patched overalls and stood up. He was no longer Benson; he was the old Indian!

He bound the unconscious man’s legs and arms, examined him to make sure he had suffered no serious hurt, and left him in a shallow niche at the foot of the rock where the sun wouldn’t bake him the rest of the day.

With the Indian on ice for many hours to come, Benson went back in the direction from which the redskin had appeared. As he moved, he examined the flank of the glass mountain, inch by inch. He was hunting for a lair, or cave, from which the native might have emerged.

The painted pupils on the eyeshells interfered with vision a bit. But in spite of that, Benson saw what ninety-nine out of a hundred plainsmen would have missed; a spot where a squat, gnarled tree that was hardly larger than a bush seemed to have a darker background at its base than at its top.

He went to it. The tree hid a hole in the base of the rock hardly larger than an incinerator chute. Benson crawled lithely in, and was at once in a labyrinth.

There were burrows like those in a rabbit warren going all over the place. Most of them were irregular and natural; but a few were carved by human hands, though it had been done a long, long time ago.

Benson nodded, the seamed, darkened skin of his made-up face as expressionless as only dead flesh can be. Everything he was seeing was confirming the ideas he had slowly, methodically formed about the glass mountain and its vicinity.

To choose one of the many tunnels to travel along seemed hopeless; but Benson didn’t hesitate more than a few seconds. He stared at the various holes only till he found one going definitely upward. Then he entered that one, with his small but powerful flash, and began a long, steady ascent.

Mt. Rainod was certainly a thing of surprise. No wonder it had a sinister reputation, extending back through the-ages! It was small, as mountains go; but with all these tunnels and age-old shafts piercing its vitals, all sorts of weird things could happen here.

Benson went up and up along the low tunnel. This was one of the artificial ones, painfully hollowed out of the glass mountain by countless savage hands centuries ago. It was quite regular and easy to travel. But even at that, it took him over an hour to get to the end of it.

When he got to the end of the tunnel, he got to the heart of at least one mystery.

The shaft ended in a larger one that was a natural rift in the basalt. And this, in turn, ended in something as unexpected, in this place of nature’s freaks and ancient man’s labor, as would be a night club on top of Mt. Everest.

It ended in an ordinary, modern gate-valve.

The thing was immense with at least a five-foot opening. It was set in tons of concrete, which blocked tightly the space between valve and walls of the rift.

Benson went back to the tunnel he had just left. Beside it, where it entered the bigger rift, was a block of basalt as accurately cut as if by jewelers’ tools. Cut to fit the tunnel mouth and block it from the rift.

The gate-valve was shut, with just a few drops of water oozing under apparently enormous pressure around the edges of the bronze gate. And lying next to it, as if his had been the hand to shut it, lay a man. But the man would not shut, or open, anything any more.

He was dead. And, also, he was familiar.

Benson went swiftly to the body, and knelt down with the flashlight on his face.

The dead man was Crast, from the Chicago office.

Benson was very still. The pale eyes behind the eye-shells glared like ice under a polar moon. Jim Crast, here in this place, though everyone had supposed him to be in Chicago!

Crast had been shot in the back of the head. The gun that had killed him lay beside him. Benson picked it up in hands stained and lined to resemble the hands of the ancient Indian. There were initials on the butt of the revolver.

The initials were T.R. The Avenger knew of only one man, remotely connected with this business, with those initials.

Thomas Ryan.

Benson started to go through Crast’s pockets for a key to his unexpected presence here at Mt. Rainod. Then his hands jerked back, and he got to his feet in one fast, flowing motion.

Steps were sounding down the rift from the big gate-valve. The steps of many men.

Benson stood straight and still beside the corpse, facing in the direction of the sounds. He made no move at all to get away. His flash was off and in his pocket.

Men came into sight down the tunnel. There were eight of them, dressed in working clothes. Benson recognized them. They were of the original crew. Evidently not all had gone to Boise on the work train after they’d quit.

The men stopped short as they saw the erect figure before them—ancient, seamed face, straight body in faded overalls.

“Well, well,” said the man in the lead, “it’s old funny face. How’d he get loose?”

“Maybe it’s—” began another.

“Naw!
He’s
back there. This is the other one, all right. Hey, Chief Yellow Dogs, time to go back to your basket.”

Benson drew himself straighter still, and folded his arms over his chest.