The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (2 page)

That, it turned out, was his major mistake.

The old straps seemed to coil around his left ankle like malevolent snakes. They tripped him. He fell headlong and lay there dazed for a minute!

When he got his wits enough to scramble to his knees, it was too late. The green mist was on him!

And the nauseating-looking mist rolled over him silently, smoothly, like a wave over an exhausted swimmer.

There was no sound from Joe Bass, who hadn’t believed in the Rain God. No sound at all!

The pillar went back again in a leisurely way. As its thinning edges retreated, like a witch’s skirts, Joe could be seen.

He lay on the rock-flawed ground like a man asleep. Very still.

The greenish pillar retreated to the dead tree. It got between the tree and the rock outcropping that was shaped like a duck. Then it slowly faded into nothingness.

But Joe lay on, still and stark. He would never prospect any more. There was a round black spot on his shoulder blade where a bolt of lightning had hit. There was a similar area on the sole of each foot where the bolt had grounded itself after coursing its deadly way through his old body.

Joe Bass had come too close to the black glass mountain called Rainod; so a pillar of cloud had enveloped him, and a small and personal bolt of lightning had killed him.

He lay there with the dusk finally gathering, faced toward the big old stump as though even in death he meant to keep on going toward it.

Night came, and morning. Joe Bass hadn’t moved. He was facing the same way. But somehow he was no longer staring at the dead tree with his dead, glazed eyes.

The tree was a hundred and fifty yards to the right of the Donald Duck outcropping.

It seemed to have walked there in the night.

From the construction camp, a mile away, two young surveyors set out after a breakfast of thick black coffee and beans and fried potatoes. They had a transit with them. They started for the thing Joe Bass had headed for yesterday: the big dead tree. Also, secondarily, the curious outcropping of black basalt.

The man with the transit was Tommy Ainslee. The other youngster, who was his helper, was Fred Nissen. This short excursion in the clear morning air was Ainslee’s idea. He was going to do a bit of checking on his own.

“The new roadbed hits the proposed tunnel site after a long, flat curve, at a spot about eighty yards to the left of the dead tree and sixty from the outcropping,” Ainslee said. “But it looks to me as if the site where the men have cleared away to start drilling the tunnel, if connected with the site of the camp on a parabola, makes a whole lot sharper curve than the chief engineer intended!”

Nissen laughed.

“Trusting your own eyesight against a transit and rod-work?” he taunted.

“At least we can go over it again,” said Ainslee. “Mistakes have been made before now in surveying.”

“But not a mistake of a couple of hundred yards,” argued Nissen.

Ainslee shrugged, located the peg two-thirds of the way from construction camp to proposed tunnel site, and adjusted his transit till the point of the plumb bob hung directly over it. Then he swung his transit to the proper direction.

Nissen, meanwhile, ambled on ahead to mark the exact spot on the flank of the glass mountain which would be the center of the tunnel if that was drilled to conform to the curve planned for the new roadbed.

Ainslee looked through the transit tube and then scowled in bewilderment.

The present site was charted as being eighty yards and a fraction to the left of the dead tree. But now, as he stared through the transit, the crossed lines centered right on the tree itself.

He had conceived the idea that the tunnel site was off about two hundred yards to the left of where it should be, landmarks or no landmarks. Now he found it was eighty yards to the right of where it should be!

He waited till Nissen should reach the flank of the mountain, swearing softly to himself. He saw the greenish pillar of mist forming off near the Donald Duck outcropping and remarked on it as a curious thing, but that was all. He didn’t even pay much attention when the funny little cloud seemed to move toward the dead tree from one side at about the same pace employed by Nissen from the other. He was too busy wondering how such a colossal mistake could have come out of the engineering department.

Nissen got near the tree, a little figure in the distance. The pillar of mist was near the tree, too. Ainslee looked through the transit tube to wave directions to his assistant.

He looked harder. For some reason he couldn’t see Nissen. There was the dead tree and the greenish pillar of mist. But no Nissen.

The pillar was standing still now. And it looked oddly solid. So solid that it cloaked Nissen from view. Feeling uneasy and puzzled, Ainslee waited for the mist to go away.

It did, and he saw Nissen.

Nissen lay on the ground at the foot of the big dead stump. One of the tree’s skeleton arms was out directly over his head as if in benediction.

“Nissen!” shouted Ainslee, with a great fear stirring in him.

But Nissen didn’t move.

Ainslee started running. He went stumbling at top speed over the shale-strewn ground, shouting as he went. And he saw the greenish pillar of mist that had been fading out and retreating back toward the rock outcropping, get more solid again and come back once more toward the tree.

It was a race now. Ainslee knew it was a race. Something was hellishly wrong with that pillar of mist. He knew it now. He must get to Nissen’s prone body before it enveloped him again.

He ran with the speed of a man not long out of college and track-trained. The greenish pillar of vapor moved only about as fast as a man could dogtrot. But the pillar was much closer at the start.

Man and pillar got to the body at about the same time. No chance now to shoulder Nissen and get him away from whatever that mist pillar happened to represent in the way of bizarre peril.

Instinctively, Ainslee crouched and threw up his fists in self-defense. But you can’t defend yourself against vapor.

The greenish pillar drifted back once more toward the outcropping. This time it left two prone bodies behind it, one sprawled over the other.

Two dead men!

Ainslee and Nissen lay, electrocuted, as if struck down by two small but tremendously powerful bolts of lightning lurking in the heart of the little cloud as bigger lightning lurks in the hearts of summer thunderheads.

It was the Chicago & Portland Railroad that was running the new roadbed west through Idaho. The biggest single piece of construction on the right of way was the proposed tunnel through the very heart of Mt. Rainod.

Bids had been submitted on the tunnel, and the job had been won by the Central Construction Co., offices in Chicago, at a price of $20,180,000.

Now, in the Central Construction offices, the three partners of the company were closeted in the small conference room. They were talking things over, and talking very pessimistically.

“It’s certainly rotten luck, at the very start of a job in which we’ll need all the luck we can get,” said Jim Crast, oldest of the three. He was a stocky, gray-haired man, still strong from his early years as a driller. He had a jaw like the foot of a granite cliff and narrowed, indomitable gray eyes.

Tom Ryan nodded gloomy agreement. Ryan was an ex-foreman, admitted into the partnership through sheer display of ability. He was over six feet, thin but wiry, and his thin face bore the sallow remnants of a tan that he would never quite lose.

“But what kind of a freak local storm could strike those two boys by lightning?” marveled Arthur Fyler, third partner. Fyler was an indoors man, white of skin and soft of hand. He was the legal and money end of the Central Construction Co.

“Apparently it wasn’t a local storm,” said Jim Crast, chewing the stub of his dead cigar. “It was something odder than any freak storm.”

“Lightning—storms,” shrugged Ryan. “It has to be that way.”

“But Harry Todd, chief engineer, insists that the sky was cloudless all that morning. And there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, apparently, the afternoon before, when that old prospector died.”

“So lightning struck out of a cloudless sky,” snapped Fyler. The nerves of all the men were raw. Ryan started to snap back an angry retort, but Jim Crast held up his hand.

“No sense in getting all disorganized over this. We are here to talk over what can be done, not quarrel because our nerves are shot.”

“What the devil
can
be done?” barked Ryan. “You know how a couple of hoodoo deaths can upset a gang of workmen. They’re all superstitious, anyway. And here we have three deaths, in country where there’s an old legend about a Rain God that walks around in a cloak of mist and kills with a lightning bolt! That tunnel job has started just about as badly as it is possible for a job to start.”

“We’ve got to pull it off, though,” said Ryan. “The future of the company depends on it—”

The phone on the conference table rang. Crast picked it up.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes! Send him in at once!”

He replaced the phone on its cradle, and there was a look of intense relief in his eyes. It was as if he had suddenly had a shot of stimulant.

“Why,” demanded Ryan angrily, “do you let anybody in when we’re in a conference like this? This is important.”

“So is our visitor,” said Crast.

“Who is he?”

“Dick Benson,” said Crast.

“Benson?” said Ryan.

“Benson!” exclaimed Fyler.

They looked as if they had had a shot of something soothing and reassuring, too.

There were several reasons for that.

Richard Henry Benson was not primarily an engineer; but as a youth he had done several jobs for the French Railway in North Africa that were more complicated than any jobs the Central Construction Co. would ever do. So he might give highly valuable advice on how to tunnel through a mountain that was practically made up of one solid piece of black glass.

It wasn’t so much for his engineering ability, however, that the three faced the door with pleased smiles. Benson had many other abilities.

Incalculably wealthy, he had devoted his life to investigating the bizarre and deadly, and to fighting crime. There didn’t seem to be anything criminal here, but there was certainly something very bizarre—and very deadly. It would be advantageous to talk it over with him.

“When did you get in touch with Benson?” asked Ryan.

“Late last night,” said Crast. “He’s an old friend of mine. When I phoned him in New York and told him of the strange deaths in Idaho and begged him to advise us, he promised to take a plane at once. So here he is.”

“We’ll retain him no matter what fee he asks,” said Fyler.

Crast smiled.

“Any fee we could afford to pay him would be funny. Benson could buy us and throw us away and not know he had spent any money. He doesn’t work for cash—”

The door of the conference room opened and the man they had been talking about stepped in.

Richard Henry Benson was a young man; but his hair was snow-white. Also, his face was dead. Literally dead. The facial muscles were so completely paralyzed that never again would any emotion be expressed on it.

From the awesome, white, dead face peered eyes that were so pale they were almost totally without color. They looked like stainless-steel chips in his unchanging countenance.

Looking at Benson, you could understand why the underworld whispered fearfully about him and called him—The Avenger.

Benson shook hands with Crast and was introduced to Fyler and Ryan, to whom he was only a name.

After the greeting and some explanations, Crast said:

“So there you have it. Three men have been electrocuted near the construction camp at about the proposed site of the new Mt. Rainod tunnel.”

The Avenger’s pale deadly eyes studied Crast’s face.

“Electrocuted?”

“Yes, literally. The report we got was that the three were struck by lightning. Yet the same report said that there was no storm at the time, not even any clouds in the sky.”

The Avenger’s eyes remained fixed like pale diamond drills.