The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (15 page)

The Swede looked contemptuously at the steel skeleton of the new mill.

“Sure! This is kid stuff. I’ll be tickled to do man’s work again. You tell me where we’re to go, and I’ll bring a gang that’ll fight the devil, himself.”

“It’s something like that you
will
be fighting,” said The Avenger. “All right. Get as many men as you can. Tunnel men. Fly them to Mt. Rainod, Idaho. And, Johnson—get men you can trust, and watch out for yourself every minute, from now on.”

The Swede nodded at the first bit of advice and snorted at the second.

“For twenty-eight years I’ve been cheating death by a whisker all over the world, Mr. Benson. It won’t get me now!”

The Avenger left. In his small, fast plane, brought on from New York to replace the one the “mail plane” had crashed, he started back west.

And the Swede, jubilant at the idea of exchanging a tame job for a reckless one, arranged to leave his work on the new building.

As he had said, for twenty-eight years, since he’d been a boy of fifteen, he had been cheating death all over the world. In jungle and desert, under water and underground, he had beaten the Dark Monarch.

He was to lose at last in a prosaic city street, where you’d think a man was as safe as he could be on a somewhat troubled planet.

He left the South Chicago district in a dented roadster, with his hat gleefully on the back of his head. He knew where to get his men—hard men, huskies, young and full of hell. He’d have at least fifty by night.

When The Avenger went to the building, a car had followed, far behind. It had swirled off after Benson had been talking to his old foreman for a minute or two.

Now the car trailed the Swede. And on a broad street near the Chicago line, it crept up on the dented roadster.

Johnson never saw it at all. Adventurous, large-caliber men are all too apt to be incapable of understanding the sly murder practiced by the rats in the city’s underworld.

From the sedan, as it was almost abreast of the roadster, came a single shot.

The battered hat on the hard-bitten, veteran foreman’s head tilted back farther than ever. The head under it tilted too, till it rested on the back of the seat, with sightless eyes staring up at the smoky canopy of the sky.

The roadster crashed into the side of a building with a clang that could have been heard for blocks. The sedan halted, picked up Johnson’s dead body, and sped on.

At least fifty men for the new construction crew—

By nightfall fifty-four men in rough clothes stood ready to be flown to Mt. Rainod. But the kind of clothes they wore were not a true index to their characters.

They were fifty-four of Chicago’s coolest gunmen, the cream of half a dozen gangs that ruled the city with machine guns and rackets. There wasn’t one that didn’t have at least three murders to his credit.

Fifty-four of the choicest killers in the Middle West boarded planes for the construction camp at the Mt. Rainod bore, instead of a crew picked by Johnson.

Johnson, however, went along. In a box labeled “Tools.” His body was to be found near the camp so that the story would be that he had been killed after picking his crew and transporting them, rather than before.

Ethel Masterson seemed to spend most of her time around the construction camp. Whatever business she may have had at her dead father’s Cloud Lake Ranch was surely being neglected.

She was near the camp this morning, watching it with binoculars from a perch on the glass mountain’s flank where no one in camp could see her.

She stayed there till she heard soft steps immediately behind her. Then she jumped and dropped the glasses.

“Oh!” she said, when she saw who it was. “I thought for a minute—”

“You thought perhaps the man with the white eyes and the white hair might have come up behind you?”

“Yes!”

The man who had furtively approached her was the aged Indian who seemed able to appear and disappear like a being from another planet.

“The man with the pale eyes and white hair will not be moving anywhere, very shortly, if you continue to help us,” the Indian said.

Ethel looked at him in a troubled way.

“I am beginning to wonder,” she said, “if he
did
kill my father.”

The Indian, for all his apparent age, was very straight. He drew himself up even more erectly.

“I say that he did,” he said evenly. “And no one in all the West is able to say so more surely. For no one can read tracks as I can. No one has better eyesight. And I swear to you that the man with the white hair did murder your father.”

Ethel continued to stare at him with trouble in her brown eyes.

“Your father knew me for many years,” the Indian went on. “You yourself have known me all your life, though you have not seen me often. What I say can be believed.”

Anger flooded back into the girl’s face.

“Yes, I believe you. And I will keep helping you till the cold-blooded murderer, Benson, has paid with his own life. And if the girl and the men with him are forced to share his fate, that won’t be too bad either.”

“It is well,” said the Indian gravely.

Ethel stared at him with her face paling a little.

“There have been stories,” she faltered. “Some have said you weren’t as human as you seem, that you are the Rain God—”

“That could not be possible, could it?” the Indian murmured. “I am going now. Please keep facing this way.”

“But I . . . you— Why?” said Ethel.

“Please keep facing this way.”

The Indian went around behind her, to the edge of the black basalt. And Ethel kept facing the way she was, looking out away from the mountain.

Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer. She turned.

A last shred of greenish mist was just fading out of existence, and the old man was gone. She gasped at the implication of the thing. Then she got up and began skirting the foot of the mountain in the direction of Cloud Lake Ranch. She had left her horse there.

About a hundred yards behind her, as stealthily as the old Indian, himself, could have done it, was a trailer. The trailer was a girl, too, small and slim and blond and dainty-looking—Nellie Gray.

If Ethel Masterson was awed and puzzled by the disappearance of the Indian, Nellie was even more so. For Nellie had been looking right at him when he left, while Ethel was obediently facing away from him. Nellie had seen everything.

She had seen a pillar of greenish mist rapidly form just behind where the Indian stood. She had seen the Indian walk calmly into the little cloud as a man might step into a closed car. Then the pillar of fog had rapidly faded away, and there was no Indian there.

Nellie was telling herself furiously that there wasn’t anything but trickery in such an exit. It couldn’t be what it seemed to be. Just the same, she felt as if she had swallowed a couple of ice cubes when she remembered how the little cloud had faded, and the Indian had faded, too.

Ethel rounded a rock, as big as a five-story building, that had cracked off the flank of the glass mountain ages ago. Nellie had let her get farther ahead to be sure she wouldn’t be seen.

So, when the thing happened, Nellie wasn’t seen—or heard, either—by the girl she had been trailing.

The thing that happened was the emergence of a fist from the narrow space between mountain and big rock as Nellie crouched next to it. The fist came out fast, and it stopped just as fast. Stopped against Nellie’s outraged jaw.

For a second time a man had smacked her with a man’s blow when she wasn’t looking for it. Later she would be furious, but right now she wasn’t anything but unconscious.

Dick Benson had wired the camp that the new crew could be expected immediately. Therefore Todd and the aides of The Avenger were on the lookout for the planes flying them in.

What they did not expect was the series of accidents that arrived promptly with the men.

“These guys,” Todd said to Smitty after he had looked them over, “either have never worked on this kind of job before, or have been laid off for a long, long time.”

“Yeah?” said Smitty. It didn’t seem to jibe with the sort of men The Avenger would be sending in such a situation. “How can you tell?”

“Hands,” said Todd succinctly.

Fingers and palms show toil. Calluses and fingernails tell a complete story. You don’t get calloused from shooting a gun; so the hands of this new crew weren’t right to Todd’s discerning eye. The men’s fingernails were grimy enough, heaven knew. But they didn’t have that horny, ridged look that comes with years of hard work at manual jobs.

“The guy in charge of them seems fair,” grumbled Todd. “At least he talks the language. The one who says he came out as Johnson’s understudy. I wonder where Johnson is? I know of him. He’s a good man—”

The answer to that was to come very fast. A man had said that Johnson landed some hours before in a separate plane. The same man stumbled up at a run, with his face screwed up.

“Somebody got the boss!” he panted. “Johnson—some guy shot him. Must have been right after he came here.”

Todd ran after the man, with Smitty following. They came to the corpse which had been planted on the rock-strewn ground to hide the fact that the foreman had been dead before the crew was assembled in Chicago.

“There he is. Shot just once, in the left side of the head.”

Todd and Smitty bent over the still form. Smitty’s huge hand went out.

“He’s cold. Must have come about dawn, and started to look the ground over on his own before the crew got here.”

“Yeah!” agreed the man. “It must have been like that.”

That was nasty surprise number one.

Number two had to do with the ammonia coils. They were new ones, just placed, brought in to replace the ones that had unexplainably burst just before the original crew left. There was a hollow boom from the tunnel bore, and then the too familiar sight of men racing from the tunnel mouth with their clothes dripping.

Todd raced into the bore and came out white-faced with fury.

“What fool did that?” he roared.

There was no answer from the men. Todd turned to Smitty.

“Somebody set off a blast in there,” he raged. “It cracked the ice plug formed by the new coils, and it widened the mouth of the fissure the water comes from till now it’s impossible to plug it with ice any more. It’s lucky it didn’t bring the whole roof of the bore down. As it is, it cracked the surface outside so that we’ll have to shore up the slope above the tunnel mouth or we’ll be having a landslide.”

He had hardly finished speaking when Mac came running up with nasty surprise number three.

“Smitty,” he panted, “the motors—somethin’s wrong with them.”

Something was very wrong indeed, as the giant discovered the moment he set eyes on the equipment.

Somehow, the motors had been burned out. It didn’t seem possible that enough of an overload could have been applied to blow them, so Smitty examined them more closely.

He finished the examination with his face ashen with anger and his big hands trembling with a desire to choke somebody.

The motors had deliberately been burned out by shorting the armatures. It meant a great deal more delay, and more heavy equipment to be flown in.