The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (20 page)

The water was roaring out the rift as fast as it came in from the other side.

“Chief! The slab they dropped after them!” came Mac’s cry. “It’s split in a dozen hunks, and the hunks are rrollin’ down the tunnel before the flood!”

“It was intended to split,” said The Avenger, voice as cold and calm as his deadly eyes.

“Whoosh!
’Tis the skullies, themselves, that’ll be drowned like rats in a trap—Fyler and all—not us!”

Ethel spoke up, eyes wide and fascinated on the white water roaring along under the flashlight’s white beam.

“Are you a wizard, Mr. Benson, that you can do such things?”

“Hardly a wizard,” said The Avenger. “It is quite simple. You know, awhile ago, I made a break for the mouth of the tunnel, there, and was driven back. But I wasn’t driven back until I had managed to leave something in the entrance, directly under the slab that could be dropped from the roof.”

Mac exclaimed suddenly.

“Whoosh,
mon! Of course!”

“I see you’ve hit on it, Mac,” said Benson. “Thermite and sodium, set off by the pound of the dropped slab, burning fiercely when wet. It heated the slab, and the water cooled it again—fast. Exactly the principle that was utilized to crack a way into the basalt for the tunnel bore. The expansion and contraction did for the slab that was to seal us in forever—”

Far down the rift, it seemed as if men’s screams could be heard. But none in the Rain God’s cavern could be sure. Any more than you could be sure you heard the piping cries of birds over the tumult of waters in a storm at sea.

But whether or not cries could be heard, the fate of the killers in the passage, headed by the master killer, Fyler, was as clear and inevitable as if written by—well, by the old Rain God, himself.

“Turn out your flash, Mac,” said The Avenger, tone as calm and even as though nothing out of the way had occurred. “We mustn’t waste it. It will be hours before the lake is drained enough so that we can go out the rift. Meanwhile, everything is finished and all right.”

Everything all right.

When they got out, they could have the rest of the gunmen in the camp rounded up and jailed.

Work on the tunnel could be successfully resumed, with that secret gate-valve closed and sealed—though only one partner, Tom Ryan, remained to benefit.

As devilish a murderer as even The Avenger had ever met, was annihilated with several dozen of his cutthroat crew—destroyed by his own hand as Benson had warned he would be.

Everything all right.

But in the flare of Mac’s flashlight, before he put it out to conserve its power, The Avenger’s face and eyes showed no triumph.

The face, dead flesh with the brown-red tint on it that matched that of Yellow Moccasins, was, as ever, a deathly mask. The icy, colorless eyes remained terrible in their impersonal calmness, their lack of triumph.

The Avenger met and overcame the superkillers that dared to cross weapons with him. But the vanquishing of none of them could give him a feeling of triumph. Perhaps he would find triumph only in the death—inevitably to be his some day in his dangerous work—that should release him from a somber world and set him again beside the wife and child the criminal underworld had taken from him.

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