The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (6 page)

Josh opened his eyes.

“Where am I?”

“Not in heaven, anyhow,” said Smitty, words jesting but voice gentle. There was a strong bond among the aides of The Avenger.

Benson watched with his pale eyes hawklike. Things can happen when a man is dead. And Josh had been literally dead. There might be bad after-effects.

But Josh wavered to a sitting position in a moment and looked weakly around. He was even in command of himself enough to lapse into his deliberate Negro inflection.

“I’se still seein’ de angels,” he said.

“Mon, ye cer-r-r-tainly shook hands with ’em,” said Mac in heartfelt tones.

Smitty was the one whose mind came to the present necessities first. There was work to be done.

“Well, men,” he called to the dumbfounded crew, “the Rain God hit this man with everything he had. And Mr. Benson brought him around again. That puts us one up on the Rain God, don’t you think?”

A few nodded. The rest looked as if they didn’t know what to think—except that the guy with the white hair was certainly a great man.

“How about going back on the job?” said Smitty, suiting the words by starting back to the tunnel site.

And the men followed.

Benson called Mac and gave him a short order, which he was to repeat to Smitty. It was simple: Wear rubber-soled shoes from now on, such as linemen wear, at their work.

Mac went to catch Smitty, and Benson stayed with Josh.

“How did it happen, Josh?” The Avenger said quietly.

Josh shook his head. “I don’t know.”

He looked toward the Donald Duck outcropping.

“I was sitting here waiting for you to come back to wave me where you wanted me to drive the tunnel peg. I heard a sort of hissing behind me. I turned and couldn’t see anything. So I turned away again, and didn’t pay any more attention. It was about the noise a slight breeze would make in the vegetation around here. But finally I did turn again, and I saw something coming toward me.”

He shivered and clenched his hands weakly.

“It was a column of greenish fog, or mist, about twenty feet high and nearly as thick. It was almost a solid thing; you couldn’t see into it at all. It came down on me before I had a chance to
jump to my
feet. It rolled over me, and seemed like any other mist. It was wet to the touch, and I noticed drops of moisture on my sleeves. Then—that’s all I did notice. The world stopped for me right there.”

He rubbed at the burn on his shoulder.

“Can you walk yet, Josh?” said Benson. “Better go and tend to that, then. I’ll stay here awhile.”

The man who had been dead walked slowly, taking his time, around the basalt bastion toward camp. Benson sat there, pale eyes intent in thought, white face like something chiseled out of steel.

He turned to look at the glass mountain. Then he ducked sideways like a streak of light. And as he did so, there was the sharp
snap
of a small-caliber but high-powered rifle, the thud of a bullet on a rock behind him in line with where his head had been, and the shrill scream of the deformed slug as it ricocheted off toward the sun.

High on the mountain’s flank, he had seen a tiny stone dislodged near a rock about the size of a trunk. The stone hadn’t even started to fall yet, really; had just begun its downward slide when he saw it, knew a furtive foot had loosened it, and ducked.

He was up and flashing to the right in a second. There was another sharp crack, and a bullet slammed into stone a few inches behind him. Then no more came. He was out of sight of the person behind the trunklike rock.

He climbed the other side of the bastion. It was a smooth slant you’d think a mountain goat couldn’t negotiate; but Benson went up it as if it had been a sidewalk. He got to a point a little above the rock, slid over the hump, narrower here, and jumped.

He lit on a narrow platform where the marksman still crouched behind the trunklike stone.

“Oh!” said the marksman. “You can’t—”

Benson took the gun in a hand whose movement made the dart of a snake’s head look like slow motion. Then his pale, steely eyes drilled into the shooter.

It was a girl, about twenty-two, in whipcord riding pants and khaki shirt. But the rough attire could not hide the beauty of her figure, and the wide-brimmed hat could not droop low enough to conceal the loveliness of her face.

But it was a furious face at the moment. Her brown eyes glared at The Avenger’s dead countenance. Her red lips were twisted hard. If looks could have killed, Benson would have fallen deader than Josh had been.

“All right,” she panted, “you’ve got me. Why don’t you kill me, like you killed my father? You murderer!”

The Avenger’s dead face was as motionless as though the girl had merely remarked about the weather instead of making this inexplicable, mad accusation.

“Killed your father?” he repeated.

“Yes! Oh, I know all about it. So does everyone else around the Cloud Lake Ranch.”

As she spoke her slim right hand was touching the fold in her whipcord riding pants at the side. Benson apparently did not notice.

“I’m afraid you have made a mistake,” he said. “I haven’t been a mile from the construction camp since I came here. And I know there is no place, within a mile, called the Cloud Lake Ranch—”

Her hand flashed from the little sheath at the fold of her riding breeches. In it had appeared a slender little hunting knife. It slashed toward Benson.

She was very quick, but she had no chance of hurting this man with the cougar-lithe body.

He moved three inches to the left so the knife blade almost slashed his coat, then caught the girl’s slim wrist. She dropped the knife. He stooped to pick it up, and she whirled and ran.

Benson let her go. There wasn’t much he could have done with her if he had caught her. She was the victim of some queer delusion, that was all. Murdered her father, at the Cloud Lake Ranch—

He went back to the camp and to the temporary telegraph set-up. He knew people, and he knew that this girl with the blazing brown eyes and the firmly rounded chin wasn’t through with the person she thought was her father’s murderer.

She would appear again; and if there were to be women messing in this he wanted a woman to handle it.

He wired to Nellie Gray, who was also an aide of his, to come at once from their Bleek Street headquarters in New York.

He was turning from the instrument when one of the workmen rushed up. It was significant that, as short as was the time Benson had been there, the men already were coming to him if there was trouble, instead of to Chief Engineer Todd.

And there was trouble here.

“There’s another guy dead,” the man panted. “The Scotchman with the big ears. The Rain God got him.”

The Avenger followed the man fast. But he wasn’t so tensely alarmed as he had been when Josh got hit. For now, if orders had been followed, the danger from the curious lightning bolts was not so great. And The Avenger knew that those working for him always followed orders.

Mac was not far from where Benson had almost been shot by the girl. He was near the camp, yet out of sight of it because of an outthrust of the glass mountain’s flank.

MacMurdie was sitting up weakly when Benson got there.

“Everything’s all right, Chief,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear his wits. “I’ve got on the rubber-soled shoes ye told us to wear. I guess that’s what saved me. Though even at that it was a near miss.
Whoosh!
I felt as if I’d been hit with a giant’s club!”

Benson nodded to the workman who had come to him. The nod meant to go back to the others. And the man obeyed without a word, such was the tremendous authority expressed by the pale, infallible eyes and cold, dead face.

When the man had gone Benson looked at Mac.

“I don’t know a thing of what it’s all about,” Mac answered the questioning look. “I can tell ye a bit more about the pillar of green mist that Josh mentioned, but that’s all.”

He unbuttoned his work shirt and slid it down over his shoulder. There was an angry burn there.

“I came out here to look around just before I saw ye go into the telegraph shack. I wanted to see where the dickens that old Indian might have gone when he vanished. But instead of seein’ any hole he might have ducked into, I saw a little cloud. As I got around the rock outcropping, there it was, as solid and still as if made of rock itself.”

He rubbed his shoulder.

“I thought ’twas about time we found out what the thing really was, so I went toward it—and it came toward me.”

“Describe it exactly,” said The Avenger, pale eyes like ice in his death mask of a face.

“It was maybe twenty feet tall and a little less through. It hung together, but fringed a little at the very edges. It was slightly greenish—kind of a bilious color. It moved about as fast as a mon might walk.”

“Did you hear the hissing sound Josh told of?”

Mac nodded, big sail ears moving a little as his head moved.

“Sounded almost like wind whisperin’ through leaves,” he said. “But it came from the center of the pillar of fog, and there are no leaves on this bare rock pile to rustle, and there was no breeze at the moment.”

“Go on!”

“I got scared,” the Scot admitted simply. “But I kept on goin’ toward the thing. When it almost touched me I jumped straight toward the heart of it. And that’s all I know. There was somethin’ like all the lightning bolts of the entire West rolled into one and hittin’ straight at me, and then I was sittin’ up rubbin’ my shoulder and you were comin’ toward me. And there was no more cloud.”

“It was a real lightning bolt?”

“Felt real to me,” said Mac.

The Avenger didn’t say any more. One of the workmen was running around the bastion that cut off this section from view of the camp. He veered toward Benson as he saw him.

His face was sheet-white and his legs were trembling a little under him.

“Say!” he gasped as he got near. “Say! You guys know that big dead tree we used as a marker?”

Benson nodded, flaming eyes steady on the man’s agitated face.

“Well,” said the man, lifting a trembling hand to his face. “That big dead tree—I just saw it moving. It was—
walking!”

Against the side of sinister Mt. Rainod, the men had cleared a new tunnel site, as marked out by Dick Benson. It was many yards from the first false start. The move had been made with Engineer Todd’s full agreement. Todd had heard, before even looking at the white emotionless face and into the pale, marksman’s eyes, of the engineering exploits of this man. He was prepared to take anything The Avenger said as gospel.

But, while the error had been corrected and work was now going on where it should, Benson was in the shack used as an office, looking over the original survey maps.

The landmarks mentioned in all of them were the outcropping of rock that looked like a duck—and the great dead tree.

The tree that the workman had said he’d seen walking.

This tree had twice been found in different places than originally described in the survey. And then Benson had gone out and checked, and found it in still another place.

Three surveys could have been wrong, one after the other—or the tree could actually, incredibly, have moved.

“But, Chief,” remonstrated MacMurdie, “trees don’t walk. ’Tis insane, such an idea.”

“Three surveys of the same right-of-way don’t come out with three different tunnel locations, either,” said The Avenger, eyes brooding and pale.

“So?” said Mac.

“So you will have a good look at this tree that walks, Mac.”

His steely, slim hand touched the Scot’s shoulder for an instant in one of the rare demonstrations of the affection he felt for the men who worked for him.

“Watch yourself, Mac,” Benson said. “There’s something here more fiendish than anything we’ve come against before.”

Mac ambled toward the big dead-tree stump. As he went he studied it with puzzled eyes.

It looked like any other dead tree. It was grayish from long exposure. It was perhaps twenty feet tall, with a rotten cavity showing at the top. It had four or five long, broken stubs of branches. Gnarled roots showed at its base.

It didn’t walk, of course. No tree walks, ever. The very idea was crazy.

Yet Mac had an uncomfortable conviction that the big dead stump was not where it had been an hour ago; and a suspicion that an hour ago it was not where it had been the day before.

Mac tilted the wide brim of his hat a little more over his coarse-skinned, freckled face. It was hot as blazes, though the air was so thin and bone-dry that you didn’t notice it too much.

He was pretty near the big stump now. It was in a sort of bay, to the left of the Donald Duck outcropping. It was that which made him sure that the tree had moved; even though logic told him that such a move was impossible.

A while ago the dead tree had been to the
right
of the freak outcropping and not so near to it. At least, that was his thought. He was prepared to doubt his own senses on the point.

He climbed a little ridge. The ridge was of the black basalt forming the bulk of the mountain itself.