The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (12 page)

Les’ lips compressed.

“Yuh could have forged these—or swiped ’em somewhere.”

“The man who killed Masterson apparently had white hair. I also have white hair. So you have leaped to conclusions. I’d like the benefit of the doubt, and I know you’ll be fair enough to give it to me.”

“Why’re yuh in these parts if yuh didn’t have anythin’ to do with Masterson’s death?” snapped Les.

Benson hesitated, then told as much as he could and still be believed.

“There is trouble in the construction camp over at Mt. Rainod. I was sent to end it. At the same time, I am sure, I will find out who did kill Masterson. Now, if you will give me your word not to make trouble I’ll turn you loose and get back to my work.”

“Yuh can’t stand there holdin’ that rope on us all day, an’ yuh don’t dast turn us loose,” jeered the man to Les’ right. “Got a tiger by the tail, ain’t yuh?”

“No,” said Benson, “I haven’t. I could easily knock you unconscious one by one and leave here.”

“Guess yuh could,” acknowledged Les grudgingly. “All right, turn us loose. We won’t try nothin’.”

Benson released his hold on the rope. The three men stepped, sheepish and furious, from the tree. Their hands went longingly to their guns, but they did not draw.

“O.K.,” Les drawled, tone and eyes deadly. “Mebbe yuh’ll be sorry yuh didn’t kill the lot of us. Because I promise yuh this, mister; if yuh
don’t
turn up somebody else yuh can tag as Masterson’s murderer in about four days, we’re comin’ for yuh. An’ we’re comin’ shootin’.”

Benson nodded. That was all. His dead, awesome face was as expressionless as white metal. His eyes were as unmoved as burnished chromium. He turned and walked to his horse and rode away.

The man The Avenger had knocked out, moaned and stirred a little. Les stared absently at him, intently at the figure on horseback disappearing in the direction of Mt. Rainod, and spoke for the four of them.

“Guess we made kind of a mistake, boys, when we thought we was goin’ to trap
that
guy! It’d be a sight easier to try an’ trap a hurricane.”

Nellie Gray lived through about six lifetimes in the three seconds it took the section of cliff to fall on her. She saw all of her past as a drowning person is supposed to see it, and came to the conclusion that there were a great many things she would have done differently had she known she was to come to such an untimely end. Being nicer to Smitty was one of them.

Then the cliff fell on her. And she wasn’t smashed after all!

Afterward she was never sure of just what it was all like. But she had a vague feeling that someone had thrown the whole top of a three-ring-circus tent over her slender body, pinning it to the ground under hundreds of pounds of strangling weight.

It wasn’t a thirty-foot slab of rock that hit her. It was a great big piece of canvas, cleverly painted to resemble the black basalt of the mountain.

She was held as tightly as a fish in a net. Like a fish, she flopped frantically to get free, but couldn’t.

The canvas rippled up in a fold near her. Someone was moving toward her under the fabric. The person was burrowing under the thing like a mole under the surface of a lawn. Like a mole’s passage, the passage of this burrower was marked by the humped-up canvas moving as he moved, and leaving a permanently raised trail behind him.

Then the burrower reached Nellie.

Arms like a gorilla’s were suddenly around her, and she was being dragged off.

She tried to struggle, and the net result was a smash in the jaw that put her right out for an unguessable time.

When she came to she was still being carried, but wasn’t under the canvas any more. She was in a tunnel or something, leading on a level line into ever deeper blackness.

Her brain was still fogged by that ungentlemanly sock on the jaw, so she was only dimly conscious of the fact that at long last she was dumped like a meal sack on hard rock, like a cement floor.

There were steps and her bearer went away. She was left alone.

The place in which she had been left alone was immense. She could sense that. It gave you the same feeling you get in an enormous cathedral, the height of which dwarfs a human being. In a minute more she had her wits back enough to confirm this. She began looking around; and she decided she was still in a dream—or a nightmare. For surely there wasn’t really any such place as this.

In the first place, she was able to look around by dim light, where there should have been no light.

You don’t expect to find light in a cave that is many hundreds of yards from outer air. She knew this cave was a long way into the heart of Mt. Rainod, yet it was about as light as late dusk in there. And she couldn’t see where the light came from. It apparently emanated from up high, near the irregular arch of the ceiling, but came from behind stalactites and things so that she couldn’t see the actual source.

However, the puzzle of the light quickly dropped from her mind at the things the light revealed to her.

She had likened the vastness of this place to that of a cathedral when she first opened her eyes. The simile deepened as she stared around. It
was
like a cathedral; but a cathedral dedicated to devil worship.

In the center of this vast place was a rough stone statue, looking small in comparison to its surroundings even though it was actually huge. It was the statue of an Indian. An old, old Indian. Yet such was the skill of the unknown savage sculptor that there was contained in the seamed rock face and carved eyeballs a look of immortality such as no human ever wears.

The statue was very, very old. Hundreds of years old. Nellie’s experience with her archaeologist father told her that. Also, it had been dragged in here from some far place; the rock of which it was composed was not at all like the black basalt that glittered like dull glass all around the walls of the cavern.

In front of the statue was something very familiar to Nellie, with her training in the lore of old mythologies. It was also very sinister.

There was a black basalt slab that could have only one function; use in sacrifices. And the sacrifice, from the savage, hideous expression of the statue and the glass-bladed knife nearby could only be one kind: human.

Nellie’s heart began to pound. Had she been brought in here to be a human sacrifice to the Rain God? For that, of course, was the personage the statue depicted.

Mt. Rain God! With the god supposed to dwell in its glassy black heart! Well, here was the source of the legends. Centuries ago men had worshipped the Rain God here, had sacrificed human beings to him, and the legends of those days had persisted to the days of the more modern Pawnees. So, Mt. Rain God, then Mt. Rainod.

But were the ancient days to be revived by some unknown descendants of those old-timers and Nellie carved to bits on the black slab with the huge knife?

She looked around. There didn’t seem to be a soul in the vast cavern. There were five or six entrances to it, a few looking smooth and artificially—though anciently—carved, the rest rough, natural fissures. She started toward the nearest. If she went down it she would be almost certain to wander, lost, in a labyrinth of caves and tunnels till she died. But even that was better than staying here by the basalt altar in the shadow of the Rain God.

She got almost to the exit, then stopped, rigid with horror.

A figure was coming from it into the great cavern. The sight of it constricted Nellie’s throat so that what she had meant for a cry came out only as a feeble squeak.

The man approaching her with measured tread, erect in spite of an obvious great age, was an old, old Indian. He was, indeed, the Indian she had seen talking to Ethel Masterson.

But he hadn’t had the expression then that he had now. A look of appalling ferocity, though there was something very impersonal in it. A look of savagery to make a person’s blood feel like ice water in his veins. And that look gave him an appearance which was what had brought the aborted cry to Nellie’s lips.

This man was the living image of that frightful stone statue of the Rain God.

Smitty, in the construction camp, was uneasy. He was always uneasy when diminutive, lovely Nellie Gray was helling around, on some dangerous job. He thought the present job more dangerous than anything yet; and he was consequently even more uneasy than was to be expected under the circumstances.

Also, it seemed to him that Nellie had been gone for a very long time now. Certainly long enough to have observed all that was necessary about Ethel Masterson.

He stared unseeingly at the yawning new tunnel mouth.

With the new process suggested by The Avenger, the work was going very rapidly. Fire and water, heat and cold, cracked a way into the glass bulk of Mt. Rainod at an astounding pace. There was nearly eighty yards of rough hole into the mountain now. Over a month’s work with the drillers, had they been forced to use only them. The Central Construction Co., was due to make a nice profit on this job, for they and everyone else had figured on drilling only.

Far in the new bore, Smitty saw lights wink out as water poured with a hissing roar on heated basalt. He heard the usual cracking sounds, the break-up of a small glacier. Then he heard something else. Cries of the men above the cracking sounds!

The men started pouring from the bore like disturbed ants. Smitty leaped to his feet and ran toward where the group of them gathered outside the yawning hole.

“What’s the matter?” he said to the nearest one as he ran up. “Did some of the roof crack down when you hosed the rock?”

“We didn’t hose the rock,” said the man. His face was white with the terror of his narrow escape.

“What are you talking about?” snapped Smitty. “I saw the fires go out and I heard the water that put it out—”

“There was water,” said the man, “but we didn’t hose it. The water’s gushin’ from some spring or somethin’.”

Several more men came out, soaked to the skin.

“It looks pretty bad,” said one of them. Smitty recognized the drill foreman. “The bore slopes down at a four-percent grade, as you know, in order to come out at the right elevation on the other side. The water’s pocketed down there, and it’s up to a couple feet from the top of the bore. We can’t work in that stuff, and it’s coming in too fast to be pumped out.”

Smitty swore fervently. Their purpose in coming here had been twofold, he knew. The Avenger was out to see why men died from lightning bolts wielded by some “god” walking in a pillar of green mist. Also he was personally pushing this job through so that his old friend, Crast, wouldn’t go bankrupt.

The latter part of the endeavor was blocked, now, with the water.

A last man staggered from the bore. On his face was a look unlike that of any of the others. A look of fear that went beyond normal fear and into the supernatural.

“There’s somebody in there,” he said. “Somebody trapped between the water and the end of the bore. I heard her scream!”

“Her?”

Smitty’s vast paw was a vise on the man’s arm. The man yelled and sank to his knees. Smitty realized belatedly that he was a little too urgent with his clasp, and released him. The man got slowly to his feet again.

“Yeah, a woman,” he repeated, rubbing his numb arm. “I heard her.”

“You must be hearing ghosts, then,” said the drill foreman impatiently. He hadn’t heard of Nellie’s arrival at camp, yet. “No one could get in there to be trapped by the water, let alone a woman—”

He stopped. Might as well save his breath. The mad giant had entered the black bore.

Smitty splashed in water ankle-deep almost the instant he got inside. He sloshed in a turgid, knee-deep flood before many more feet had been traversed. It went to waist, shoulders. Then he could see where the roof dipped into water, and paused a moment. It was where the new section had been cracked out that roof sloped down to water. The roof would be higher when the bore was completed; but it wasn’t high enough now to save a rat from drowning—if the rat were silly enough to keep on going.

Smitty clenched his great hands in torment.

The man might have been wrong, of course. There might have been no scream. But Nellie had been gone from camp too long, and—