The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (8 page)

“Who are you?” asked Benson, pale eyes on the glass mountain, around the foot of which they were skirting.

“My name is Ethel Masterson,” she said.

“You live around here?”

“Yes. At Cloud Lake Ranch, eight miles away. I just rode over this morning to . . . to—”

“To take another shot at me?”

Ethel Masterson bit her lip and was silent.

“There is a lake near your ranch?” said Benson. “Is that the reason for the name?”

“Yes. There is a lake in an old crater that borders our . . . my . . . land, and the ranch next to us. It’s not very big, but it’s absolutely bottomless, as far as any one knows. Dad and I live . . . lived . . . there. Then, a few days ago, he was . . . he was—”

She couldn’t go on.

The colorless, deadly eyes raked hers.

“He was killed?” said Benson.

She looked up at him out of the corners of her eyes.

“Yes! He was killed. I’m all alone, now.”

They covered more ground. She said:

“You didn’t know there was a lake up on the other mountain?”

“No,” said Benson.

“You’ve never been around here before?”

“Never, in quite this territory,” said Benson. His pale, icy eyes met hers for an instant. “It is curious that you should think I was at your ranch, and was the man who had killed your father.”

“I . . . I don’t think that any more,” said Ethel, avoiding his eyes again. “See there. That black slot in the face of the mountain is a fissure. From it, a deep cave opens. I’m sure that’s the place the three men must have taken your friend. It’s the only place around here where you could hide anybody.”

“We’ll go there,” nodded Benson. “Tell me a little more about your father’s death.”

Ethel’s firm, round chin quivered.

“There isn’t much to tell. He was down at the edge of the lake. I was in the ranchhouse getting dinner ready for him. I heard three shots. They came from the place where Dad was. They weren’t from his gun—I know the sound of that as well as I know his own voice. So I hurried down there.”

Her gaze was straight and hard on the rock before them.

“Dad was lying next to his boat, which he kept moored to a little dock he’d built. He was half in the water, and he was dead. All three shots had gone through his head, at close range. Any one of them would have killed him, of course, but the murderer wanted to make sure of it. I saw him, running, just before he got on a horse and got away.”

“You saw the murderer?”

“Yes. He was a man of average size,”—she was keeping her eyes carefully away from Benson—“and had snow-white hair. I saw that from the back.”

“You notified the sheriff?”

“Yes, but of course a description that vague didn’t do any good.”

“Your father was at the edge of the lake?” The Avenger repeated, with little glints in his eyes. “How high is Cloud Lake, anyway?”

“About eight thousand feet,” said Ethel. “About three thousand feet above the rest of this tableland, I’d say.”

They were at the fissure in the basalt flank of Mt. Rainod.

“You think the men took MacMurdie in here?” said Benson, eyes like pale diamond drills.

“It’s the only place near here, where they could hide him,” she repeated.

Benson sized up the fissure. It was so narrow that his body could barely manage to get through.

“It widens in there?” he asked.

She nodded.

The Avenger wormed into the fissure.

Smitty had once made the remark that Benson seldom avoided a trap. Instead, it was his custom deliberately to walk into them, to see what could be learned. Traps were nearly aways revealing—if they didn’t kill you before you could put your information to use.

However, The Avenger didn’t care much about that. He knew he was going to die some day, in his many fights with superkillers. He knew it, and didn’t bother even to think about it. Death could come any time it liked. Life wasn’t too kind, with wife and daughter taken from him in a criminal plot.

This girl could be giving him the straight dope, with her mistaken idea that he was her father’s murderer buried in her mind by the danger of an innocent man. Or she could be a murderous little actress. It was all one to the man with the dead, white face and the coldly flaming, colorless eyes.

He found that the fissure did widen a bit after he’d gotten in. And it darkened as daylight faded behind him. He got out a small flashlight with a big beam, designed by him for just such emergencies.

He saw a cave extending ahead of him as far as the beam could penetrate. There was a black fissure in its ceiling, which was ten feet or so above his head.. The fissure was toward the rear of the cave.

He went a few steps farther, and saw the end of the cave. And did
not
see MacMurdie. The place was as empty as a vacant room, and the flash showed that the only way in or out was that fissure behind him.

The pale eyes glittered like ice in a polar dawn. So it was a trap. Benson turned.

The whole mountain seemed to tremble, and a dull roar sounded. At the same moment the crack of light through the fissure blanked out.

There had been a landslide, and it had blocked the opening.

Benson went swiftly to the fissure. A glance told him that it would take at least a half hour to dig away the rocks that had sealed him into the cave. But they could be dug away. The girl, it would seem, had underestimated his strength.

She had led him in here, by a bit of devilishly clever acting; then, no doubt, she had scurried to a point above the fissure and started the rock slide, figuring that it would entomb him forever.

The Avenger didn’t waste any more time thinking about her or the slide. When in a trap, learn all you can before fighting your way out.

He went to the rear of the cave. It tapped the mountainside about eighty feet before it tapered to nothingness. He stood under the fissure in the ceiling.

It seemed to him that he could hear faint rumblings up there. However, the sound was so far off, and so doubtful, that even with his keen hearing he could not be sure.

He shot his powerful little flash upward. The fissure was wide enough for a man to get through, if he had a ladder or some other means of getting up to it.

He sent the flash around the rest of the cave. Near the back, among the rock debris, was something that looked like a stubby black worm. It was quite thick, though only a couple of inches long.

He went to it, and picked it up. It was a bit of hollow, rubbery stuff, ragged at the ends—like two inches of small, rubber pipe. A shred of greenish fabric adhered to it.

The rumbling from the fissure overhead was unmistakable now. Benson listened to it with eyes like ice flakes in his dead face. Then he dropped the little black pipe and leaped for the entrance where the rocks sealed him in.

He began to tear at them with all the phenomenal strength residing in his average-sized body.

That rumble could be identified, now. And he knew it was caused by one of the most fearsome things facing a man held underground with no escape.

Water!

He could get out of here in thirty minutes or so of gigantic labor. But what if he were not allowed the thirty minutes?

The rocks rolled as if endowed with volition of their own, under the impetus of his steely hands. And a thin stream of water trickled from the fissure, to splash innocently on the cavern floor.

But the trickle swiftly increased to a roaring flood, and then the water was coming through the fissure in a solid flood that filled the cavern at the rate of two feet or more a minute.

Long before The Avenger had an appreciable amount of the rocks rolled from the entrance, it was within six inches of the cave’s roof. And up there, with just room for his nose to break the surface for life-giving air, the Avenger trod water in pitch blackness, with his flashlight dark and useless on the cavern floor.

Josh was peeling potatoes for the evening meal, though it was barely past the noon-day one. He had to start early, because sixty or sixty-five workmen eat a lot of potatoes.

Josh didn’t like peeling potatoes. His sleepy-looking face didn’t show it, but his actions did. He was slicing a sharp knife along the skins with much more energy than was necessary.

Smitty had the power generators and other electrical equipment in the excellent order that only an electrical wizard such as himself could have achieved. So he was at the camp with Josh.

“For a dead man,” the giant remarked cheerfully, “you show a lot of pep at potato peeling.”

Josh shivered a little.

“Don’t even joke about it,” he said, recalling the bad moment when he had come to, to find himself on one end of a seesaw plank with The Avenger looking down at him.

“You sure were dead,” mused Smitty. “How does it feel?”

“To be dead?” said the Negro, shivering again. “It doesn’t feel at all.”

“You didn’t have any visions or anything?”

“No. It was just like unconsciousness, that was all. Something hit me on the shoulder like a falling mountain, and then everything went dark. Just like unconsciousness.”

Smitty watched the too energetic potato peeling some more. Then he said, “What do you suppose all this nonsense is about the chief being a murderer?”

“I don’t know,” said Josh, “but somebody has been very methodical in spreading the rumor. Evidently some person living in the neighborhood has been killed recently, and they’re trying to pin it on Mr. Benson.”

“Well, that seems pretty silly.” Smitty picked up a small raw potato and began to gnaw on it. The giant took a lot of food, more than he could usually pack away at regular mealtimes. His big frame needed a great deal of fuel.

“Silly things can occasionally cause a lot of trouble,” observed Josh. He was a dusky philosopher, in his way. “It’s the senseless things that stir the crowd. Logic is too coarse to get in between the skull bones. Where’s Mac?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since before the chief went off with that girl.”

“Who is the girl, anyway?” asked Josh, pausing in his peeling long enough to wipe his dark countenance with the tail of the white apron he had donned on taking over the camp cook’s job.

“I don’t know. From some ranch eight or ten miles away, I think. She has something to do with the crazy yarn about Mr. Benson’s being a murderer.”

Off against the mountain flank, at the new and accurate tunnel site pegged by The Avenger, was a miniature edition of Hades.

Great piles of wood had been heaped and set afire next to the glass mountain’s sharp rise. The flames roared, making an inferno of the already hot air, heating the dense, black basalt to intolerable temperature.

There was a hiss, and an increased roar as water was hosed on the hot mass. Then there were cracking sounds like the breaking up of a glacier. Little chasms a foot or more wide and going far back into the glass mountain appeared as heat expansion and cold contraction rent the stuff into a thousand fragments.

“Boy, we’ll get some place in a hurry with that cracking process,” gloated Smitty. “There’ll be hardly any work for the drills—”

One of the workmen was running toward them.

“Now, why isn’t this guy at his post?” Smitty said.

“Oh-oh!” said Josh. “Trouble coming. I can smell it. On a hot day a man only runs for a maid or a murder. And there are no girls around—”

The man stopped, panting, before them. He was the big fellow who had overpowered Mac when the Scot had succeeded in downing the other two assailants. But not being seventh sons of seventh sons, Josh and Smitty could not know that.

“The Scotchman!” gasped the man, gulping for air as if he had run a mile at top speed. “He’s in trouble! He’s a pal of yours, ain’t he?”

The giant Smitty nodded. He had leaped to his feet. His vast hand fastened on the man’s shoulder with an unconscious force that made the fellow cry out.

“Where is he?” snapped Smitty. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s a little valley around the left end of the mountain,” panted the man. “I was there a little while ago and—”

“How is it you were around the foot of the mountain?” Smitty caught him up. “Why weren’t you at the tunnel site?”