The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (4 page)

There was consternation. The cook is as important a citizen in a construction camp as the chief engineer.

Josh Newton shambled forward.

“I’se the cook,” he announced, looking sleepy and good-natured and slow. “An’ I’se de best cook you-all evah see. Wait an’ find out.”

The men cheered and the work started.

A second plane was nearing the tunnel site. It was not a transport, as had been the one bearing Smitty and Josh and Mac to the camp. It was a tiny two-seater job with a small enclosed cabin. In it was the man for whom the three were working.

Benson had half a dozen planes. This was his smallest; a slim bullet with stubby wings capable of snarling through the heavens at five and a half miles a minute. It was set at about top speed now.

The man at the controls, white face looking like a death mask rather than a human countenance, stared down and ahead. The glass mountain had been in sight for some minutes now. It was about thirty miles off, at present. It looked like pictures of Vesuvius, except that the peak was sharp and not chewed out, as is the peak of Vesuvius.

Suddenly the pale eyes of The Avenger, like chips of stainless steel in his immobile white face, glittered like ice under a polar moon.

From behind Mt. Rainod’s sharp peak had appeared another plane. It was an ordinary open-cockpit ship, not very new—the type used to fly the mails on secondary routes. It was heading toward Benson’s little plane.

The mail plane wasn’t going at half Benson’s speed; but the combined speed of the two was such that in about a minute and a half they were going to pass.

It would be natural to expect that the passage would occur many yards apart. But for some reason the pilot of the oncoming plane didn’t veer. He was heading straight for The Avenger’s ship.

Benson held the controls straight. His face was like a thing of ice. His eyes were pale holes into which you could peer and see—death!

Murder was whistling toward him from Mt. Rainod. That was perfectly apparent in the way the pilot held his course instead of veering at once for a wide margin of safety.

The Avenger altered his own course at last. He flipped a little to the right.

The plane ahead changed course so that it was still heading right at him. And now there were only seconds left. It was going to ram him!

Benson’s hands were like steel hooks on the controls. He waited till the last minute, then zoomed almost straight up. But just as swiftly, the oncoming plane went up, too.

So Benson yanked at a third lever.

The two planes hit in midair with a combined speed of nearly nine miles a minute. There was a crash and an explosion that seemed could be heard in Denver. It was like the disappearance in a flash of light of a great explosive rocket. Then fragments rained down. None of them were bigger than a man’s fist.

As they fell they passed the man with the pale and deadly eyes and the immobile countenance.

When The Avenger had pulled that third lever, the bottom of his plane fell away, and he fell with it, seat and all. He had been close enough to where the planes collided to be whirled every which way by the resulting cross-gales of disturbed air, but he swung evenly now in the sling of his parachute.

He settled to the ground. There was a ring of workmen around who had seen the amazing crash and the even more amazing escape, just before, of the faster plane’s pilot.

They caught the parachute and helped Benson out.

Harry Todd, the wide-shouldered engineer on the job, got Benson’s shoulder. Even in such a moment he marveled at the steely feel of The Avenger’s arm.

“My heavens, man!” Todd gasped. “I thought it was all over for you. That madman in the mail plane! But he has certainly paid for it with his life.”

Benson nodded. It was an awesome thing to see his white death-mask of a face—as cold and unmoved as if he had just stepped from a streamlined train instead of out of the jaws of murder.

“We’ll search the debris.” said Todd. “We’ll see if we can identify the plane or the pilot—”

Benson nodded to Smitty. “Let the big fellow look.” The Avenger turned back to Todd. “Where can we talk?”

Todd took him to the little board shack which he had set up as an office. And in there he told what he could about the three deaths.

“You say the two surveyors and the prospector really were struck by lightning?” said Benson at the man’s conclusion. “Well, that confirms what I heard in Chicago, at the Central Construction offices. I’d been thinking that perhaps your report had been garbled in the telegraph office.”

“No, that’s what really happened,” said Todd. “The men were electrocuted just as if struck by lightning. Just as if,” he added, “the mad tales of the Rain God were true.”

“You think they’re true?” said Benson, pale eyes like diamond drills on the engineer’s face.

“No! No, of course not,” said Todd.

“Then what’s your theory about the three deaths?”

Todd was silent for a long time.

“Maybe,” he said, “there is some magnetic influence emanating from the heart of this strange glass mountain. Maybe there are spots where iron outcroppings lie close to the surface, and if a man walks along them there is some sort of static electricity generated that is strong enough to kill him. There has been mention of a sort of vapor that has surrounded the victims before they died. Possibly the moisture from that was enough to build up the static electricity to lethal strength.”

Benson nodded. He didn’t bother to mention that though Todd might be an excellent civil engineer, he was certainly ignorant where electro-physics was concerned. His theory was an utterly impossible one.

And yet three men had been killed by lightning, or some such force.

“That mail plane,” said the engineer suddenly. “It occurs to me, now that I think it over, that I haven’t seen any mail planes fly over here before.”

“Perhaps the pilot was off his course,” Benson said, colorless eyes very still and cold in his white, still face.

He went out to find Smitty.

“There wasn’t any pilot in the mail plane,” the giant reported. “There hadn’t been from the time the thing took off. It was radio-controlled. I found enough bits in the wreckage to know that.”

Benson nodded. Smitty was an electrical engineer of the first rank. His report on such a matter would be final.

“Somebody knew you were coming, Chief,” said Smitty. “Somebody sent the ship up just before you were due to arrive. Somebody kept it circling on the other side of the mountain out of sight till you came in view. Then it was sent straight at you by somebody directing it with the aid of powerful binoculars.”

“The Rain God,” said Benson, “seems to have turned very modern indeed. Gyroscopic controls, radio-run planes, binoculars.”

“And yet,” said Smitty soberly, “there certainly seems to be something to the legend. The old fable has it that the Rain God walks abroad in a pillar of mist and from it strikes with a lightning bolt anybody who has made an enemy of him. Three men died just like that.”

The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes looked like bits of ice in an arctic dawn.

“We’ve fought humans who killed other humans,” he said. “I guess we can fight murderous gods, too.”

Josh had dished out a breakfast such as the construction crew had seldom seen before. From drillers to water boy they were licking their chops. Then Josh took on another job at the command of Dick Benson.

The new job was that of assistant on a surveyor’s task.

Ainslee, dead now, had had an instinctive feeling that no matter what was down on the chart, the tunnel site cleared for the drillers’ work was not in the right place. Benson
knew
it was not.

Those pale and infallible eyes were better than most instruments. He didn’t have to guess at the inaccuracy here. He could look at the curve of the roadbed over the last mile and know that it did not hit the glass mountain for the tunnel where it should for the fast trains of the present day.

So he was going out with Josh and a transit to check, even as Ainslee and Nissen had gone out. But first he had worked out his own conception of the curve the track should take.

The present location of the surveyor’s peg, wedged in the mountain’s flank for the tunnel mouth, was a little over eighty yards to the left of a big dead tree. So Josh was ambling in the direction of the tree, looking sleepy and slow-witted and harmless.

While he was on his way to a spot not far from a queer rock outcropping that looked like a giant duck, Benson checked the original right-of-way.

And he found that, as marked, it hit the mountain side nearly three hundred yards to the
right
of the dead tree. So that the original survey had been wrong not only from the standpoint of a practical railroad curve, but also even in the matter of landmarks.

There was a glitter in his pale eyes as he found that out. Because he knew, as Nissen had remarked, that such a thing is practically impossible in surveying. Particularly in such a short distance.

You simply can’t make a mistake of three hundred yards. Yet one had been made here in the matter of landmarks.

Josh was near the dead tree now. Benson, having checked as much as he needed to, without Josh’s aid, was about to call on him to take up his station where the tunnel site should be—far to the right, several hundred yards from the site cleared. Then The Avenger saw that there was some kind of commotion where the workmen were.

The commotion was another visit of the ancient Indian who insisted he was Chief Yellow Moccasins, in spite of the fact that the claim, if true, would make him out to be close to two hundred years old.

The Indian had appeared out of nowhere and talked to the men again.

Smitty was busy with the electrical apparatus, seeing to it that the power generators and motors for the drills were all in order; so he hadn’t seen the Indian’s approach or heard him sound off.

Mac had, but Mac didn’t seem able to counteract the ancient’s croaking speech.

“You are going ahead with your work in spite of all warnings,” the Indian said balefully, looking impressive in spite of his patched overalls and great age. “That means that more will be killed.”

“We want none of ye and yer predictions, mon,” MacMurdie shouted in his Scotch brogue.

The old Indian faced him squarely.

“You are a murderer’s tool, paleface,” he said. “Oh, I know you. You and the Negro and the big man who came in from the sky yesterday are all tools of the murderer.”

“Hey—who’re ye callin’ mur-r-r-r-derer-r-r?” burred Mac, eyes flashing blue flame.

Back came the answer.

“The man who is young but has white hair. The man whose face is dead and never moves. The man whose eyes are like spots of no color, in which death dwells. He is the murderer. He has killed. One of the simple folk in this countryside has fallen under his murdering hands.”

Mac considered knocking what few teeth the old man had down his throat. But he couldn’t hit a bag of bones that skinny and ancient.

“Ye’re plain loony, mon,” he said.

The Indian turned to the men, who had started to mutter again. There was something about that old, old redskin to shake the stoutest nerve.