The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (3 page)

“It puts us in a jam,” admitted Crast. “We have staked everything on the Mt. Rainod tunnel. It’s a big job. But we won’t even get started if this kind of thing happens again. There’s a silly sort of legend out there—”

“I know,” nodded Benson, face as still and white as ice. “The legend of the Pawnee Rain God.”

Later the three partners would learn that, apparently, The Avenger knew everything about everything; but just now they looked surprised.

“I know you’re busy,” said Crast, clearing his throat. “Yet I ventured to call on you for help—”

“I’m glad you did,” said Benson. “In the first place, I’m not forgetting the time you saved my life in Australia. In the second, this sounds like precisely the sort of thing that should be investigated at once. So I’ll proceed to investigate it. I have already sent some of my aides out to Idaho to begin looking around.”

“I certainly hope they find something,” said Ryan fervently. “The morale out there, I understand, is pretty lousy.”

Lousy was a mild word for the spirit reigning in the construction camp at the glass mountain. In fact, there wasn’t any morale at all, lousy or otherwise.

The men had set up camp at the flank of Mt. Rainod, and that was all they had done. The gasoline-power generators were ready. The drills were assembled. All was set to start on the tunnel.

But the men were not starting on anything—unless it was a trip home. It had been all Harry Todd, engineer in charge, could do to keep them from leaving the place.

Three dead! Struck by lightning out of a clear sky! And nobody could guess how many more might be treated the same way if that mountain continued to be disturbed!

The old Indian didn’t help matters.

He looked to be a hundred years old. And a cowhand from thirty miles south had drifted past and insisted that he was Chief Yellow Moccasins, and in reality two hundred years old. He had a face so wrinkled that it looked like soil erosion. However, he stood and walked as erect as an arrow, and he talked all too glibly.

He was on a small flat rock now, exhorting a group of the loafing workmen.

“Oh, friends,” the old Indian was saying, “heed the warning of the Pawnee Rain God. Thrice has he struck. There will be many, many more if you keep displeasing him.”

One of the men who was not quite so cowed as the rest spoke up.

“What’s displeasing your danged Rain God, anyhow? What have we ever done to him?”

“He is angry because the mountain, which is his soul and home, is to be pierced by your tunnel. It is as if you had driven a shaft to his very heart. He will not allow it. As long as you persist in drilling here, you will be stricken with his lightning bolts.”

“How’s he do it, anyway?” said another man, half skeptical and half fearful.

“The Rain God cloaks himself in mist,” said the old Indian. “Walking thus, invisible to the eyes of men, he strikes with a lightning bolt carried like a spear inside the mist. And, indeed, you all saw the marks of the lightning on the dead men’s bodies and on the soles of their feet.”

The men muttered uneasily. They had seen—all of them.

“The new railroad must go around the glass mountain. Modern civilization has struck against the ancient force of the Rain God. And modern civilization will be powerless. You must leave the mountain alone and go around it.”

The drill foreman, who had been valiantly trying to make the men go to work, shouted:

“We can’t go around. All you men know that. There’d be so many tunnels and trestles that the whole railroad would have to be given up. We have to go through Mt. Rainod. It’s the shortest point. Don’t listen to this old windbag.”

The ancient Indian drew himself up to full height. He was in ordinary overalls and checked shirt; but he looked for a moment like an old chief in full war regalia.

“Chief Yellow Moccasins will not forget that insult. Chief Yellow Moccasins wants only to warn you. For that aid he does not expect blows.”

“Fine lot of help you are!” howled the enraged foreman. “Look, you guys, you’ve got to get on the job!”

The men paid no attention to him. One stared at the old Indian fearfully.

“Say, I heard you were the Rain God himself. I heard he takes on a man’s look when he wants to be with humans—and that you’re him.”

The Indian stared at the man for a long time before replying. He only said, however:

“I am a mere mortal, though very old. The Rain God is a god.”

“The Rain God won’t do half as much to you bums as Crast and Fyler and Ryan will,” bellowed the foreman. “I’m tellin’ you, you better get on the job unless you all want to be fired right away.”

The moment he had said that he realized he had made a mistake. There was probably nothing more the men wanted right now than that very thing—to be fired. They wanted to get away from this region where men were found struck dead by lightning bolts, though no cloud had been in the sky at the time of their deaths.

There were angry murmurs and a concerted move for the temporary shacks of the camp.

The men were going to quit!

The whole tunnel project hung in the balance at that moment. If those men went back to their respective homes and told of the strange deaths at Mt. Rainod, no other men would come to take their place. The world of construction engineering is a small one. News gets around it. And no man wants to work on a hoodoo job.

However, just at that moment when the foreman was thinking that nothing could be done save wring his hands, there was a speck in the sky. The speck turned into a plane in a few moments, and everyone stared at it because there was no other place for a plane to be coming but here.

It circled three or four times, dropped deftly, bumped over the uneven tableland, and came to a stop several hundred yards from the men.

Three men got out. One was a giant, six feet nine and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, all of it solid muscle. The second was a tall, thin Scotchman with big ears and freckled red skin and huge hands and feet. He looked funny till you stared into his bitter, bleak blue eyes. Then you didn’t laugh at him. At least to his face. The third was a Negro, even taller, even thinner, than the Scot.

The three were dressed for work. They had canvas bags over their shoulders with their belongings. Every man in the camp guessed the reason for their coming.

They were three crackmen, trouble shooters, specially hired and specially transported by plane to this job where so much trouble had developed.

Well, the muttering of the men promised, no three trouble shooters were coming in
here
and expect to stop a scramble out of the Rain God’s territory!

The plane’s motor slammed on. The ship took a short rough run and sailed aloft. The three men from it reached the sullen-looking group.

“Hi, men,” said the big fellow. “When do we go to work?”

He was even bigger than he had looked from a distance. His chest was about the size of a rain barrel, so muscled that his vast arms would not hang straight. His name was Algernon Heathcote Smith—called, by all who wished to stay healthy, by the less provocative nickname, Smitty.

During the altercation with the foreman, the men had been represented by a loud-talking, red-haired hulk with a six-day beard on his face and the look of a chronic kicker in his eyes. He was the bully of the camp.

The red-haired man stared at Smitty with a sneer on his lips. He had fought from Nome to St. Augustine and never met a man, no matter how big, that he couldn’t down. He stared at the other two with the giant and laughed.

The Scotchman, Fergus MacMurdie, as has been said, looked unimpressive till you stared closely at his bleak blue eyes.

And the sleepy-looking Negro looked unimpressive no matter how you took him. Few realized that Josh Newton was an honor graduate from Tuskegee, and could fight like a pack of black tigers when it became necessary.

“When do we go to work?” Smitty called cheerfully again. His full-moon face was very good-natured-looking, and his china-blue eyes seemed as ingenuous as a child’s.

“We don’t go to work at all,” growled the big, red-haired man. “We’re all quittin’. So what do you think you’ll do about that?”

“Why, we’ll stop you, my friends and me,” said the giant, Smitty, still beaming good-naturedly. “That’s what I think about it. We heard there was some crazy stuff here about lightning bolts out of a clear sky; so we came down to see what the joke was all about. Because a thing like that has got to be a joke or—”

“Joke, is it?” the camp cook, a little scraggly man with a stringy mustache suddenly screamed. “I suppose it’s a joke when three guys die! I suppose it’s a joke when the Rain God himself, lookin’ like an old Indian, comes and warns us not to dig into that mountain! It may be a joke, but I’m gettin’ out of here right now!”

He began legging it down the single track that had been laid to the mountain’s flank. Every move he made indicated that he was going to keep on legging it till he was so far away he’d never hear of Mt. Rainod again.

“Come on, guys,” roared the big red-headed malcontent. “We’ll pack and git, too. We’ll take over the work train—”

Smitty was suddenly in front of him, moving faster than anyone would have thought possible after a glance at his ponderous bulk.

“We’re all staying,” said Smitty.

The big red-haired man stared once more at Smitty’s great size. Though he was still sure he could down Smitty, he yelled for aid.

“Jump on the three of ’em! We’ll flatten ’em out, and then take the work train and leave.”

And he jumped for Smitty with an ear-piercing yell of battle.

The redhead had fought in a lot of countries and knew a lot of rough-and-tumble tricks. He was trying a little savate to start.

The leap was supposed to end with his nailed boots in Smitty’s chest, knocking him over on his back. Then the boots would make cat’s meat of Smitty’s moonface. But it didn’t quite work out that way.

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the giant was that in a fight he seldom bothered to fend off any attack. He was so big and so hard that he could just stand and take it. For the same reason he rarely monkeyed with boxing or feinting.

The red-haired man’s boots landed just where they were supposed to, and nothing happened. The heels banged against Smitty’s vast chest with a sound like a club on a bass drum. Smitty, one leg back-braced to take the charge, grinned a little and caught an ankle of the red-haired man. He held it just long enough for the fellow to smash down flat on his back instead of getting his feet under him as he had intended.

“Oomph!”
gasped the redhead. And some of the crew snickered a little.

The man was up with murder in his eyes. He bored in again, right fist pile-driving for Smitty’s abdomen. This time Smitty would normally have avoided the fist. But he was playing to get a laugh from the crowd, show them how little this big redhead meant in the scheme of things. So, even though it hurt a little, he stood and took the smack in the stomach, too.

“You tickle!” he said, with his grin broadening. “What are you doing, playing kid’s games?”

The whole crowd chuckled at that, though at the same time they were staring with awe at a man who could take two such blows and apparently not feel them at all.

The red-haired man foamed at the mouth.

“Why, you—” he stammered. “I’ll kill you! I’ll—”

There was a shovel lying nearby. He swooped, caught it up and swung it at Smitty’s head. The thing whistled as it blurred downward. It would have sliced the giant’s skull to the chin if it had hit.

But Smitty saw to it that it didn’t hit. He swayed to one side like a flyweight boxer instead of a man weighing two hundred and eighty-five pounds. The shovel sliced past him and he caught it.

He wrenched it from the man, broke the hickory handle across his vast knee, and then started for the redhead.

Smitty just walked, slowly, a step at a time. And the redhead, eyes wide, retreated the same way, step for step. Smitty wasn’t grinning anymore since the spade episode. His face was a thing to make you feel cold all over.

Evidently the red-haired bully felt just that way. He wasn’t in a battling mood anymore. He went back, step for step. And then his steps began to be a little faster than Smitty’s and finally he turned and began to run a little, looking over his shoulder.

Eventually he stopped looking back, headed straight forward, and concentrated on the business of running. He ran fast, and was still running when he rounded the far bend in the work track and went out of sight.

Smitty turned back to the men, with his easy grin still on his face. He looked unconquerable, big enough to lick a landslide—certainly big enough to lick a Rain God.

The men were guffawing at the redhead’s flight.

“Well,” said Smitty, “when do we get to work?”

They all looked at each other. Then an old-timer spit on his hands and grabbed up a pick.

“Right now, far’s I’m concerned,” he said. “Anybody else?”

“I reckon all of us,” said another man. “But—hey! We ain’t got a cook! He’s halfway to Boise by now. We got to have a cook.”