The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (9 page)

“They didn’t need me. I’m a driller, an’ they ain’t drillin’ right now. They’re crackin’ the rock.”

“Go ahead!”

“I was near this little valley, an’ just goin’ in when I seen this pillar of cloud everybody’s talkin’ about. It was quite a ways off so I watched it for a while, ready to run if it came my way. Then I seen the guy lyin’ a little ways in front of the mist.”

“MacMurdie? You’re sure?”

“Yeah!”

“And he was just lying there? You mean he was unconscious?”

“Yeah! Sure! He must have been or he’d run—like any sensible guy from that damn green cloud. I didn’t have the nerve to get him. I’ll admit it. Everybody that’s gone near the green fog has died, an’ I didn’t want to be one of the dead ones. So I legged it for camp. Hurry back with me! It’s probably all over, minutes ago. But we might still be in time.”

Josh was shedding his apron. The man began running back, along the foot of the glass mountain.

“Why,” moaned Josh, who hated physical exercise as a cat hates it, “couldn’t they have horses here at camp?”

“What do you think this is?” said Smitty in reply. “A construction camp, or a riding academy? We’ve got a couple trucks, to go to town Saturday nights, but they happen to be away. So we leg it.”

It developed that they weren’t destined to leg it very far.

Ahead of them was one of the jutting slopes that occurred like bastions around Mt. Rainod’s foot at irregular distances. Between each of these, like the space between outstretched arms and a chest, with the mountain being the chest, was a shallow box canyon.

They rounded the natural bastion ahead of them, and abruptly stopped running. The man who had come to them with the urgent message about Mac being in trouble, grinned. He was breathless but triumphant.

There were two men at the other side of the rock outcropping. Each had a gun. Each had stepped suddenly into the way of the running men.

A gun was poking a hole in Josh’s stomach, and another was grinding against Smitty’s hard abdomen.

The giant looked down at the gunman in front of him, and then at the man who had come to camp for them.

“So we weren’t running to help Mac,” he said evenly. He was breathing almost easily in spite of the run in the hot, thin air. And the gunmen noticed that fact, significant of great endurance as well as great strength, and handled their guns even more warily than they had before.

“No,” said the panting man who had guided them into this pitfall, “you weren’t runnin’ to help your Scotch buddy. Nobody can help him. It’s even too late, now, for the guy with the white hair to bring him back to life. He’ll have been dead an hour by now.”

“You seem very sure,” said Smitty.

“Oh, I’m sure enough,” retorted the man, wolfish grin widening. “I oughta be. I’m the guy that turned him over to the Rain God.”

“Then I’m going to be the guy who turns you over to the rats,” said Smitty. “I’ll let you feed your brothers, if they can stand you.”

“You won’t be turnin’ nobody over to nobody,” said the man whose gun was in Smitty’s stomach. “But you’ll see your pal, all right, after the Rain God gets done with you.”

The other man nodded. His gun was not so warily held as was his companion’s. It didn’t seem necessary to watch anyone as sleepy-looking as Josh very closely. Just a scared, dull-witted, harmless Negro.

“March,” said the man with Smitty, “right on along the way you were running. And I’ll blow your spine in two if you make a funny move.”

Smitty and Josh went along the way they’d started, around the next bastion. Behind each marched a man with a gun. And behind the lot of them came the third man, also with a gun out, to rectify any slip either of his two pals might make.

The next shallow, dead-end little canyon had a back end as steep as the wall of a house. In the bottom of it, though, was a crack about twenty feet long and tapering from nothing at each end to about two feet in the middle.

“Turn around!” said Smitty’s man.

The giant stood still.

“You won’t shoot,” he said. “If you’d wanted to, you’d have done it long ago. Either you don’t want the sound of shots to be heard, or you have some reason for not wanting our dead bodies found with bullet holes in them.”

“I’ll lean on this trigger so fast you’ll never know what struck you,” snarled the man, “if you don’t stop stalling, and turn around.”

Smitty’s vast shoulders weren’t hunched for a try at escape any more. Josh had turned, too. They were both acutely conscious of the guns at their spines.

“Holy gee!” Smitty heard one of the men breathe. He caught fear and awe in the speaker’s voice. And he felt the gun waver a bit.

“Here she comes,” said one of the others.

Smitty turned his head enough to see back over his shoulder a little. And out of the tail of his eye, he saw a greenish wisp of vapor, cloud-like and thin. Turning a little more, he saw the pillar, itself.

A solid-looking pillar of green fog. It hadn’t been there before. Nothing had been between them and the black cliff.

“Smitty—” Josh’s voice cracked.

Smitty’s vast shoulders were hunched for a try at escape in spite of the gun. But he knew it was hopeless. It was a hundred to one that he couldn’t move fast enough to evade the murderous muzzle of the automatic.

He didn’t have to try.

There was a scrambling sound from beyond the far rock “arm” forming one side of the shallow little canyon. Then there was a
swish,
almost lost in the hissing noise that came from the green pillar. At the end of it, the man with a gun in Smitty’s back staggered and yelled.

Smitty whirled like a flyweight boxer instead of the vast hulk he was. He got an instant’s glimpse of the man clawing at his face. Blood was streaming down from under his left eye, where a rock had hit him. His gun wasn’t in line for the moment.

The man watching Josh yelled and ducked as another rock sailed in a flat and deadly arc toward his head. So Josh knocked the man out with a wicked loop to the side of his head. And Smitty’s tremendous paw caught the gun wrist of the other man.

The fellow dropped the gun and screamed as the giant put on a little pressure. The third man, the one who had led them here, was looking in all directions at once. He sent a shot at random toward the spot where the rocks had seemed to come from. Then he saw what had happened to his two companions.

He snapped his gun up to shoot Smitty down. But the giant moved first. He jerked the man he held by the arm toward the third fellow. The man whirled a dozen feet over the rocky ground like a snapped melon seed and crashed into the other.

Smitty bounded after the thrown body. He caught the one man by the shoulder, and the other by the nape of the neck. He crashed the two together.

It was not entirely by design that their skulls collided squarely, and with such force as to kill the one who had led the way here and almost kill the other. But Smitty had said he’d feed the guide to his brother rats; and that was the way it turned out.

The Avenger himself never took a human life. It was his subtle code to force the supercriminals he fought to destroy themselves by their own greed. But The Avenger’s aides sometimes found themselves in a position where it was kill or be killed. When they did, they were unable to feel any qualms about it.

Smitty stared with no feeling of guilt, whatever, at the dead guide, and the man with the cracked skull, and the fellow Josh had knocked out.

Then he heard Josh yell: “Mac!” and turned.

The Scot was climbing laboriously, and a little unsteadily down the rock flank. He came up to them, and they saw that his coarse, freckled face was pale.

“So you’re the big-league pitcher who saved our lives,” Smitty said. “Good pitching, Mac. A direct hit and a near-hit, from at least fifty yards away.”

“We heard you were dead, Mac,” said Josh. “How did you get here?”

“I dinna rightly know,” said Mac, lapsing into broader Scotch than usual. “I was wanderin’ in mind and body, and found myself up there. Then I looked down and saw those skurlies with guns on you, holdin’ you for the green fog to get you.”

“Which reminds me,” said Smitty. “Where
is
the green pillar?”

It wasn’t in view. It had faded from sight as suddenly and temperamentally as it had grown into being.

“It seems to move around pretty fast,” said Mac. “I was quite a distance from here when it came after me.”

“You
did
have a brush with it, then,” Smitty said. “At least there was that much truth in the words of the guy who led us here.”

“The skurly who led you here,” Mac said somberly, “was the same one that put me in the way of the green pillar. He knocked me on the head; so it was an hour or more before I was thinkin’ straight again. Then he left me for the fog to get.”

“And?” said Josh.

“I don’t know yet quite how I got away. By climbin’ the tree, I guess.”

“Tree?” said Smitty.

“I was knocked out at the foot of the big dead tree, near the funny outcropping. I came to, a very little, when something wet touched my face. The wetness was the greenish fog of that queer lookin’ pillar. I caught a branch low enough to feel with my hands up, and hauled myself into the tree. I kept on goin’ till I was near the top, though still in the mist. And after a while the pillar went back toward the mountain again, and I got down. There was a blank spell, and now I’m here.”

“The Rain God walking enveloped in his cloud,” Josh mused. “Striking with a lightning bolt. But it’s odd that merely climbing a tree should fool a god.”

“Maybe he can’t see in his own cloud any more than others can,” shrugged Smitty.

Mac wasn’t listening to either of them.

“I saw him for a minute, in the cloud,” he said.

They gaped at him.

“Saw who? The Rain God? Don’t be nuts!”

“But I did,” said Mac. “And a horrifyin’ thing it was too. I got just a glimpse of his face. An old, old Indian, it seemed to be. But he looked like somethin’ straight out of the Pawnee hell.”

The Avenger had estimated that it would take half an hour to dislodge enough stone from the entrance of the cave in which he was sealed, to get his body through and out into the open air again.

It took nearly forty minutes.

He had worked as long as he could, breathing the rapidly diminishing air in the water-filling cave. Then, when that last four-inch space disappeared, he had snapped into place the apparatus he rarely traveled without.

The Avenger, with the dead flesh of his face able to be molded into any outline desired, was a master of disguise.

Man of a Thousand Faces, he was called. And rightly so.

However, changing a face is not enough. Benson often found himself forced to alter bodily lines, too.

In order to facilitate that, he had, in the linings of all his suits, thin rubber bladders which could be inflated cleverly to give him more bulk wherever he wanted it. But the bladders served another function.

Hated by the underworld, The Avenger went in constant danger. The commonest form of attack against him, next to gunfire, was an attempt to get him by deadly gas. So Benson carried always with him a little nose-clip gas mask, and always had oxygen in the disguise bladders.

The apparatus worked as well for water as for gas. So for over half an hour, The Avenger had been digging away at the rock slide in what was literally a miniature diving arrangement.

With the forming of a clear hole at the top of the cavern mouth, the water in the cave began to run out. It washed at the rest of the walls and helped him in his work.

He stepped through the fissure onto rocky ground; then he removed the little mask.

There was no sign of the girl. He’d known, of course, there wouldn’t be. With vengeance satisfied, as far as she knew, she would have gone back to the ranch now held in the name of a dead man.

Benson started walking, but not toward the camp. He had two other objectives he wanted to visit before he returned.

One was the other side of Mt. Rainod.

From around the glass mountain, when he had flown in the first day, had come the mail plane that had so nearly killed him. A phony mail plane, of course. A checkup had revealed that no mail plane in the West had been near Mt. Rainod that day.