The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (17 page)

“Don’t he make a pretty picture?” sneered the man in the lead. “But he makes a prettier one tied up like a furled sail and stuck in the back of the Rain God’s house. Get him and take him back.”

The men’s words were telling Benson many things. So many that he made not one move when the men laid violent hands on him.

He stood perfectly still, as the dignified old savage he was pretending to be probably would have done. Since it was apparent that eight young men could overpower one old one, Chief Yellow Moccasins probably would not have lost his dignity by engaging in useless struggle.

The men tied him even more securely than he had tied the old Indian outside. And then there were more steps. And a figure came into the light that made the men swear and blink in awe.

The figure that wove into the light was apparently the same figure that stood tied by the gate-valve. There was the same seamed and ancient face, the same hawk nose and arrogant posture, the same faded overalls.

“Boy, you’re good,” said one of the men holding Benson, as he stared at the second figure.

The Avenger stared, too, eyes icy behind the disguising eye-shells.

Benson knew that the man he had bound and left outside was not this man. Even if he had not known it was impossible for him to be up and around so soon, he would have known because this man had no gash on the top of his skull where Mike’s small slug had bitten.

So there were, with Benson’s own pretense, three old Indians around the glass mountain where only one was supposed to be.

“I think we ought to knock the old duck off,” said one of the men, glaring at Benson. “This is the second time he has worked out of his ropes.”

“No, not yet,” said the other figure in the faded overalls. “Take him back to his cell again.”

“How about this thing?” said a man, nudging the body of the dead partner, Jim Crast, with a callous toe.

“Leave it here.”

“The gat? There’s initials on the butt.”

“Leave it, too. It will be sealed in here forever next time the valve is opened.”

The men followed the one figure in faded overalls back down the rift, half-shoving and half-herding the other, similar figure; that of Benson.

The Avenger said nothing and attempted nothing. He went where he was prodded, all the long way down a slope similar to the one he had climbed from outside the mountain. He got to the great cave Nellie Gray had seen, in which was the weird image of the Rain God.

There he was dragged to a place behind the statue. A rock slab was rolled back, and he was shoved in. The slab was replaced.

Benson had snapped out his flash when he heard sounds while standing at the gate-valve. The men hadn’t bothered to search him, so he still had the flash. He lit it after some time had elapsed, holding it in his bound hands.

He was in a cell about ten feet square. There were remains of food in here, and, on a sharp projection, a wisp of faded blue denim. The old Indian whom he had creased with Mike had obviously been held in here for some time before escaping—to fall into The Avenger’s impersonal way.

The third figure in faded denim? The twin to Chief Yellow Moccasins?

There was the heart of the riddle.

Mac and Josh and Smitty didn’t like men who looked like rats and the new crew hadn’t been around very long when the three got very wise to them.

“There has certainly been a colossal slip-up somewhere,” said Smitty. “These guys are all crooks and killers if ever I saw any.”

Mac nodded somberly.

“They’re certainly not the kind the chief would pick. Nor would any friend of the chief pick them.”

Josh spoke up with some of his dusky philosophy.

“When the lamb finds itself in the wolves’ lair, the lamb should move!”

The other two nodded. They weren’t exactly lambs, but they certainly found themselves in a wolves’ lair at the moment. They walked with death beside them. They sensed that; knew it. Todd had already died. It was quite logical that The Avenger’s aides would be tackled, too. And there were half a hundred of these killers that had come so surprisingly to Mt. Rainod as a workers’ crew.

“Whoosh!
They’ll get us, of course, no matter what we do,” said Mac dourly.

The Scot was the gloomiest soul alive—till things got really desperate. Then, when there didn’t seem a chance of escaping death, for some cockeyed reason he got as sure of success as an optimist drunk on champagne.

“They’ll likely do for us if we stick around,” said Smitty. “My vote is, slip out of camp and make ourselves scarce till the chief shows up.”

“Aye,” said Mac.

Josh nodded, too.

The three were not afraid; it took more than a pack of gunmen to affect them that way. It was simply bad sense to wait around till some rat shot you in the back; good sense to stay alive so you could work some more.

So they slipped out of camp, one at a time, and met again near the Donald Duck outcropping. Here Mac balked at going farther.

“I’m stayin’ here,” he said, “till I see what ails this big dead trrree. ’Tis too much it has moved with us not knowin’ why.”

They examined the “walking” tree.

Others had examined it and found it like any other tree. The three aides of The Avenger didn’t find anything out of the way, either, at first, so cleverly was it done.

Then Josh, who had been scraping away at the shale and earth, exclaimed aloud. He had come to the end of one of the roots. There should have been no end. The root should have kept on extending for yards under the surface.

They found more root ends. Then Smitty, with a grunt, tipped the big thing over. Four average men couldn’t have done it, for the extending roots, short as they had been cut, made a wide base. But the giant, with a heave and a snort, tipped it in a hurry. Then there were more exclamations.

The thing was hollow all the way down. At the base, in the hollow, was a clever arrangement of wheels and levers. By lifting the levers you lowered the wheels, jacklike, till the stump was raised on them a few inches. Then you rolled the great dead thing wherever you wanted it, barring too-great irregularities in the ground.

“But
why?”
gasped Josh.

“Easy,” said Smitty. “This tree was used as a surveyors’ mark in laying out the new roadbed. Somebody knew that. So they moved the mark, which set the tunnel site deliberately at the wrong place. For some reason, the tree-mover didn’t want drilling to start at the correct spot.”

Mac was standing on the big dead stump. He could see farther than the rest from his four-foot elevation.

“Oh-oh!” he said. “A bunch is coming from camp. They’ve found out we left, and they want to locate us.”

“How many?” said Smitty, swelling his giant muscles. “We can take care of any number up to eight.”

“There are a lot more than—Smitty! Look behind you! At the cliff!”

Smitty whirled. And then his bellow of alarm roared out.

Nellie Gray was at the foot of the cliff, at the mouth of an irregular opening that seemed to stop at a great boulder a few feet in. The three were yards from her, but there was no mistaking the diminutive, fragile, feminine figure and the tawny-gold hair, even though Nellie’s back was to them.

Her back was to them because something within the rift had hold of her. They could see a hand, not large, but purposeful, on her throat. They could see her fight wildly, silently.

Then they saw her hauled into the recess out of sight.

Led by Smitty in a mad bull-elephant rush, the three raced toward the fissure. Forgotten were the men coming from the camp. In Smitty’s mind everything else was forgotten, too.

Nellie Gray fighting for her life! That was the payoff for the giant. When he saw a thing like that, there was violent action due.

They got to the recess, and found it wasn’t a recess at all. It was one of the fissures, beginning now to look uncountable in number, leading into the heart of the glass mountain.

They squeezed in. There was no sound from Nellie, and that was bad. That hand at her throat—

They had gone twenty yards over a rough floor when they saw a feminine form again, flitting ahead of them, hanging back as if being dragged.

They rushed to it!

There was a sound behind them like the thudding into place of a bank vault door, magnified many times. Even with Nellie on their minds, the three turned automatically.

They saw that the action which had produced the sound was much as if a vault door
had
thudded into place behind them.

A slab of solid basalt, many feet through, had been dropped from somewhere in the roof of the tunnel, and had smashed ponderously on the rock of the floor. Now it barred the way they had come, rising sheer from floor to roof, and extending from wall to wall of the rift.

They had been sealed in with tons of stuff as hard and obdurate as smooth, black glass.

Smitty swept his flashlight from the newly-fallen mass.

“No freak of nature ever did that,” he said somberly. “That’s a man-made trap.”

The light stabbed along the passage, and lit on the feminine figure whose distress had drawn them in here.

The girl was laughing, if you’d want to call it that. Her face was twisted with laughter, but it was a kind of sobbing sound that came out, bordering on hysteria.

And the girl was not Nellie Gray.

With her hair lightened, and wearing Nellie Gray’s clothes, she looked like Nellie. But at close range the shape of her face and color of her eyes gave her away. It was Ethel Masterson.

“You’ll die!” she screamed. “You’ll all die! I didn’t get your leader with my trick, but at least I got you, his friends. And your deaths will be a part-payment for my father’s murder.”

Smith glared at the girl.

“I tricked you nicely,” she shrilled. “I grasped my own throat, with my own hand, with my back turned to you, and pretended to be dragged forward by someone. I did it all alone, for vengeance.”

“Very clever,” grated the giant.

There was a second ponderous thud, and suddenly a thick wall of black basalt appeared behind the girl, shutting them all into a thirty-foot stretch of the tunnel.

The girl laughed crazily.

“You’ll die! You’re all trapped!”

Smitty’s look and tone softened. The giant knew distress when he saw it. He knew that this girl wasn’t acting in character; she had been driven half-mad by the conviction that The Avenger had killed her father. She was no murderess. She wasn’t responsible for the things she was doing.

Also, it seemed to Smitty, she wasn’t very bright.

“Aren’t you overlooking something?” the giant said.

She stared at him with a little more sanity in her eyes.

From some place not far off came the sound they had heard before, and had learned to dread. The sound of underground water.

“We’re trapped, yes,” said Smitty, “but you seem to be overlooking the fact that you’re trapped, too. Whatever happens to us, will also happen to you!”

Ethel stared back at the second great slab that had dropped from the tunnel roof to block them off. And sudden bewilderment and terror showed in her eyes.

“Why,” she stammered, “why . . . that slab . . . I was to have been on the
other
side when that dropped, shutting you all in—”

From around the bottom and lower sides of the first slab gushed water. In a torrent it began to fill the cave, rushing in freely but with too much pressure behind it to allow it to run out again.

The level rose several inches a minute. In a good deal less than half an hour it would hit the roof. And there was no way out save the two blocked by the basalt slabs.