The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (5 page)

“The man with the white face and pale eyes would lead you to your deaths,” he said, almost chanting it. “He would lead you once more against the Rain God, whom none can withstand. I tell you to rise and strike him down. Kill the man with the white hair and the lying voice, lest you be killed yourselves.”

“Let’s get to work, men,” said Mac. “There’s profit to no one in listenin’ to this fool.”

But the men
were
listening, and they kept right on listening.

“Here is what you shall do,” said the old man. “See for yourselves if the Rain God is to be cowed by this man with the white eyes. Make the man challenge the Rain God openly, defy the god to make his answer known. By the result of that shall you know whether to follow the man any more or kill him and leave the mountain.”

A squat man with long arms and a face that wasn’t too bright said:

“That’s fair enough. Get the white-haired guy here and we’ll see what we’ll see.”

“Ye’re a fair pack o’loonies,” barked MacMurdie. “Do ye believe in ghosts as well as spirits?”

But the damage was done. Work was demoralized till this new subtle barb of the ancient Indian could be turned away.

Mac stared off toward where Benson, at that moment, was standing beside his transit. He waved. But The Avenger had already seen, and he had sensed the meaning of the men’s behavior. He started toward the tunnel site.

He could see Josh, at that point, and he could see the men and machines. But an out-thrust bastion of the glass mountain kept Josh from seeing the men, or vice versa.

He saw that the Negro was sitting on a rock now, near the Donald Duck outcropping, waiting for further orders.

The Avenger got to where the men waited, sullen-faced.

Smitty was with them now. He shook his head at his chief.

“They’ve sure got a crazy one now,” he snorted. “Mac was just telling me.”

The Scot’s lips were thin with disgust and anger.

“They want ye to play Ajax defyin’ the lightnin’, Muster Benson,” he said. “That crazy old Indian—”

“Where is he now?” asked Benson, pale eyes on the muttering men.

“Ye’ll do me a favor if ye can tell me that,” Mac shrugged. “He did the most complete disappearin’ act I’ve ever seen. One minute he was here—the next he was no place.

“Anyhow, he tells the men to see whether you are the master here, or the Rain God. You’re to challenge the Rain God, to show his hand. Like I say, it’s to be like Ajax defyin’ the lightnin’ to strike him down. Can ye think of a sillier thing?”

But The Avenger did not laugh at the fantastic proposal. His face seemed whiter than ever, and his eyes colder, as the flaming genius behind them tackled the problem.

“There’s a curious method in all this,” he mused at last.

“Method?” said Smitty.

“Yes. There must be. It is desired that I go through a theatrical procedure of defying the Rain God. Why? There must be some good reason; or, rather, a very bad reason.”

“Ye think it’s some kind of trap, Muster Benson?” said the Scot.

“Yes—I do! But a trap so fantastic and unusual that its meaning is not yet even to be guessed at. Well, let’s—”

He walked toward the knot of workmen.

Smitty and Mac followed anxiously. “Ye’re goin’ to do it?” said Mac.

The Avenger nodded, eyes never colder or paler.

“Yes! I’d like to see what happens. Something is certainly scheduled to occur if I defy the Rain God. There would be no point in goading me into doing it otherwise.”

“But, mon,” pleaded Mac, “ye mustn’t do it. If somethin’s planned by somebody, it’d be planned against the mon who did the defyin’ act.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes didn’t even flicker.

“Of course,” he said. “Otherwise, if my act placed someone else in danger, I wouldn’t do it.”

He was within shouting distance of the workmen by now. They had seen the giant and the sandy-haired Scot talking to him and guessed it was about what the Indian had said.

“Well,” called the squat man with the not-too-bright face, “have you got the guts to do it?”

Benson came on without answering.

“The Indian said if you’d challenge the Rain God you’d see who was strongest here,” yelled another man. “Let’s see you try.”

Still Benson didn’t say anything.

“He ain’t got the nerve,” a third man jeered. “He’s too yellow.”

There was a low flat rock in the middle of the crew. The Avenger was making for that. He got to the ring of men. Now, closer to them, the pale, cold eyes seemed to slash at them like knife blades. The tremendous power subtly proclaiming itself in Benson’s average-sized body awed them. No one man wanted to jeer at him now. They realized that it was pretty ridiculous to call
this
man afraid of anything.

They gave way respectfully before him. And Benson got to the low, flat rock. He stood on it, a little above the heads of the men.

The Avenger didn’t treat the matter as a joke. He knew how grave it was to these workmen, still under the spell of the Indian’s words.

“You have been told,” he said quietly, but with his vibrant voice heard distinctly by everyone there, “that tunneling into his mountain is to displease an Indian spirit called the Rain God. You have been told that he can strike with lightning, and that three men found dead near here were so struck. You have been told that others will die if the work goes on.”

“Yes—yes!” came the answers.

“You have also been told that if the Rain God is challenged he will answer that challenge with some stroke that all may recognize as a direct reply.”

“That’s right,” said the squat man with fear on his face.

“I think,” said The Avenger in his quiet but compelling voice, “that such a challenge should be made. And I shall volunteer to make it—now! Then we shall see what answer is made by this powerful spirit.”

Mac stirred restlessly and whispered up at Smitty’s ear:

“ ’Tis not like the chief. It is a tr-r-rap of some kind, and he’s fallin’ right into it.”

“He doesn’t fall into traps,” replied Smitty stoutly. “He walks into ’em, open-eyed, and comes out with results—always.”

But there was trouble in the giant’s eyes. He was suddenly more afraid for Benson than he ever had been before. After all, three men
had
been struck dead near here by lightning coming from no man knew where.

The Avenger spoke.

“Draw back from me, men. I’ll be alone in this, with no chance of a mishap to any of you.”

The men drew back, breathless, watching. It wasn’t necessary, Benson was sure. But, master of psychology, he felt that it was good to use theatricals. It would rivet their attention on him even more firmly.

With a thirty-foot circle clear around the low rock on which he stood, Benson stood straight and taut as a figure of metal. Wearing gray, as he usually did, and with his snow-white hair and his dead, pale face and flaming eyes, he looked like a man of gray steel rather than of flesh to the workmen.

He raised his hand in a sort of salute to the heavens. He stared upward.

“Rain God of the Pawnees,” he said, “if you can hear, listen. We shall defy you by going ahead with this work into the glass mountain where your soul is supposed to reside. We shall pierce the mountain in spite of you. This is a challenge, and I am the challenger.”

No man there knew quite what he had expected. A bolt from the cloudless heaven? A bolt that no one could see, suddenly laying this indomitable figure low before them? Some other strange and awful phenomenon?

But none of these happened. At least, not to Benson.

From around the jutting basalt bastion cutting Josh off from sight of the men came a cracked shout of agony and fear. There was death in that cry.

Everyone whirled, and from his rock, Benson stared, too. There was grim apprehension in his eyes. He had meant to risk only his own life, not that of another. But it seemed that the challenge had been accepted and hurled back—on the head of Josh Newton.

“Quick! Help him!” snapped Benson, leading a rush around the jutting rock toward the spot where he had left the Negro.

All saw it as they rounded the natural bastion.

There were faint wisps of greenish vapor, fading even as they first set eyes on it, but plainly the remnants of a compact pillar of mist. And under the fog shreds lay Josh.

He lay very still, body twisted in an unnatural fashion on the rough ground. There was no need of a closer approach to tell that he was dead!

Richard Benson had defied the Rain God and the Rain God had struck one of his men dead in instant answer. That was the conclusion in every white face in the crew.

But it wasn’t what The Avenger was thinking. In the quick mind behind the pale, deadly eyes was no surrender to the tomb, but only lightning plans to cheat the tomb.

“Smitty! Run a cable to him at once. Start the generators. Rheostat! Only ten or a dozen volts.”

The giant raced back toward the machinery.

“Mac, get a plank and put it over a rock next to Josh, see-saw fashion.”

The Scot raced off in his turn. And The Avenger went on to his man.

Josh was dead, all right. There was a black burn on his neck, and there were black areas on the soles of his shoes. He had been electrocuted, just as Ainslee and Nissen and Joe Bass had been electrocuted. The workmen stared in something like horror at Benson. He must be mad to work in this frenzy around a man who was undoubtedly dead.

The Cable was run from the generators to Josh. Mac set up the plank over the rock.

The Avenger, pale eyes like holes in his immobile face, put Josh on one end of the plank.

“Move him up and down slowly,” he snapped.

Mac, at the empty end of the plank, set up a gentle see-saw motion. Josh went slowly up and down.

“What’s that for?” whispered one of the workmen to another. His tone was almost frightened. This all looked like a conjuration, with the white-haired man as the wizard.

“I don’t know,” his pal whispered back. “Maybe it’s to get the blood to circulatin’ again, or somethin’.”

Which happened to be exactly right.

Benson, moving his hands deftly to follow the slow see-saw motion, placed a bared end of the power cable against Josh’s chest just under the heart.

In hospitals they use elaborate electric needles for the purpose. Benson used the crude wire end. No regular hospital attendant, however, had the surgical and medical skill that Benson had. He timed the impulses just right.

By electrical energy Josh had died. By electrical energy Benson proposed to make him live again. An electrical impulse applied to the heart muscles at just the right time for a beat, withdrawn, applied again. Each twitch of the cable should twitch at the heart muscles, as a frog’s leg, though only dead meat, jumps with the application of an electric current.

On one of those little artificial beats the heart should catch and beat, too—and keep on beating. When it did, the blood was already circulating a little from the see-saw movement of the plank, ready for the resuming heartbeats.

As he worked, Benson’s sensitive left hand was on the chest of the Negro. He felt the heart beat three times of its own volition.

He dropped the cable, nodded to Mac to stop the plank’s movement, and began working Josh’s lungs in and out as he would if the Negro had drowned. In and out, in and out—

He felt the pulse again, finally, and stopped.

And then Josh’s eyelids fluttered and a distinct moan came from his lips.

The workmen sighed in a sort of ragged concert and stared at Benson with open mouths. Artificially he had started a heart. Artificially he had caused blood to circulate. Artificially he had made lungs pump air in and out.

And here was a live person instead of a dead one!