River of Ice

CHAPTER XII Mysterious Cauldron

Had Benson been piloting the plane in which Mac and Josh sped to British Columbia, it would have followed the map line of Smitty’s direction-finder with rulerlike precision. But Mac was piloting it. Mac was an excellent pilot; but he hadn’t the genius of The Avenger. Hence, he came out at the Pacific coast nearly a hundred miles north of the line. He spotted it quickly enough, with the sun’s rise. And he found that the mileage wasn’t wasted after all.

Two glaciers, Benson had said, within a hundred and ten miles of the line. They were almost at the most northern of the two; so Mac swung still farther north, and they located it. The glacier, from twelve thousand feet, was like a wide ribbon of white in the dark earth. But it wasn’t that smooth when they zoomed down. It was a tumbled mass, with great hillocks and slashing cracks. It poked its foot into the sea itself; and even as the two winged down, a huge section splashed off into the sea.

“Very interestin’,” said Mac indifferently. “But I don’t see what we’re lookin’ for, Josh. Signs of recent crackin’ that might expose somethin’ long hidden.”

Josh shook his dark head. He didn’t see any such signs, either. Of course, any of the crevasses in the white ribbon beneath them might have been freshly formed. But from a low altitude, they could see that none of them were accessible. Had Brent and Lini Waller discovered something in any of them, they’d never have been able to climb out to tell about it.

Mac flew low along the foot of the glacier, where the clear ice of its middle mass was to be seen. But that’s all there was at the foot of the glacier — just ice, no openings of any kind. He turned the plane’s nose south, and gunned the twin motors. They rocketed along the ocean. Josh caught the Scot’s arm and pointed down.

Mac looked down too, banking so he could see out a window. What he saw wasn’t very exciting. It was a little collection of a dozen or so huts in a clearing in the fir forests. An Indian settlement. Instantly, Mac started to spiral down, with the same thought in mind that Josh had. Perhaps through the Indians in this vicinity they would get a closer line on the Wallers’ last movements.

There was a long cleared spot near the settlement. Mac swooped low, judged he could land all right, came back and settled down as lightly as if the plane had been butterfly weight instead of weighing nearly two tons.

Men came from the settlement, wearing the mackinaws of the North Woods. Indians. They stared curiously at Josh. It was seldom they saw a Negro here. “Probably think ye’re a second cousin, Josh,” Mac grinned out of the corner of his mouth.

A big Indian with a scar under his left ear was in the lead. It developed that he knew a few words of English, and that planes were no novelty to these natives.

There was none of this big-devil-bird-from-the-sky business. Instead, the big Indian said, “What you want? We no got gas here.”

“We don’t want gas,” said Josh. “We are looking for a friend. A man who was probably guided by one of you who live in this section.”

The big Indian’s eyes narrowed a very little, though in no other way did emotion express itself on his stolid face. “Friend?” he said. “Here?”

Josh had caught that slight flicker of eyelids, and followed it as deftly and swiftly as any psychology professor. It told him he was on a very hot scent. “Yes. You guided him yourself, maybe? His name is Brent Waller.”

“Me guide him?” said the Indian, looking stupid. “No guide. Hunter. Trapper.” And he looked askance at MacMurdie.

Josh Newton’s brain was as quick as a mongoose. He said to Mac, softly, “Take a walk, will you, Mac?”

“Walk?” said Mac, staring.

“Yes. I have a hunch this man knows something. And I have a hunch he might talk to me because I’m black and rather akin to himself. But I don’t think he’ll talk with you around.”

Had The Avenger some such thought in his amazing mind when he sent Josh with Mac? The Negro knew that it was probable. “You guided Brent Waller?” he asked the big Indian when Mac had gone back to the plane in the clearing.

“No guide,” said the Indian. “No guide down there. Next ice river.”

“Along the shore?”

“No guide near water,” said the Indian, nodding. He was trying to be very, very shrewd about it, with rather unsuccessful results. He had left the man whose name sounded like Waller. A guide should not leave anyone in the forests. He might get in trouble for that. At the same time the Indian felt inclined to answer this man whose skin was even darker than his own. So he was quite specific about the exact place to which he did not guide the man. Thus, later, this black man could not accuse him of anything.

“No guide near water — other side of ice. No fix tent hard against storm. No tell about bad spirits. Old spirits. No leave when he not come too.”

Josh nodded. “I get it. Well, I wish I could set you up with a nice maple-nut sundae or something. Thanks. Other side of the glacier, on the shore. You haven’t been back there?”

“No go back ever,” said the Indian. “Bad danger! Old spirits. You say I say; I say I no say,” he concluded, promising to deny he had admitted anything if Josh should try to make trouble for him.

Josh went to the plane. “Glacier, south, Mac.”

Mac took off, and in twenty minutes they were over the southern-most glacier along the coast. In three more, Josh exclaimed and stared at the foot of the ice stream. “That’s it!” he said. “See that low cliff? I’ll bet that hasn’t been exposed for a long time. The Indian said something about a storm. Probably a big chunk of it was cracked off then.”

“I don’t see any cave entrances in the cliff,” objected Mac.

But when they had landed the amphibian on the water and taxied in to the shore, Mac’s bleak blue eyes caught the thing Lini Waller had seen: worn spots on a rock slab set flush with the cliff, where countless fingers had pressed, countless ages ago.

He pressed on the two spots, and the slab swung. “We’ve hit it right on the nose!” he exulted. “This is it!”

Josh didn’t say anything in answer. He was walking in, and instantly being astounded by something the Wallers had not noticed at first. “Light in here!” Josh said. “Light, Mac! It isn’t possible!”

“Say, there is, at that,” the Scot said. “And ’tis na comin’ from the entrance, either.”

Josh climbed up to look into the rock niches, so like concealed lighting ledges, that Brent Waller had investigated.

“Hexagonal rods, like fused quartz,” he said. “They give off a fluorescent glow. They’re stone-cold.”

They knew the final meaning now of Lini Waller’s babble concerning ice caves with a “bright white light.” But they couldn’t figure out what made the light. The seven doors beckoned. They opened the first and went into the cave piled high with gold. Ornaments and statues and slabs of the stuff.

Behind them, across the first cave, another door opened very slowly!

“It’s immense, unbelievable,” breathed Josh, as they went from cave to cave.

“ ’Tis all of that,” said Mac. “But where is the brother of Lini Waller?”

There didn’t seem to be any answer to the question. Wonders aplenty, they saw. But all thousands of years old. There was no living thing. That is, they didn’t think there was any living thing! Twice, Josh thought he saw a mummified, long-dead sentry move. But he didn’t have the nerve to mention it till Mac blurted, “Josh, d’ ye think there’d be any way one of these fifty-thousand-year-old spear toters in here could move?”

They were in the fifth cave. Josh eyed the bizarre figure of the guard in there, who had apparently seated himself thousands of years ago and never got up again. “Of course it isn’t possible,” he said. “But I thought I saw the arm of the dead man in the last cave move.”

Mac shivered, then squared his shoulders. “ ’Tis nuts we’re goin’. Plain daft!”

They hadn’t a word for it when they saw the mastodon in the seventh cave. They stared in speechless awe at its gigantic form, and had to feel it to believe it. Wordlessly they walked around the cave, studying the pictures painted on rock that depicted the hunting scenes of the ancient race. Wordlessly, till Josh let out a kind of squawk. “Mac, is the mastodon moving now? I thought I saw its tail twitch!”

“Brrr!” said Mac. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back to the sixth cave. That’s an odd lookin’ kettle in there. I’d like to see it some more.” They went into the sixth cave. And across the way, another of the seven doors began very slowly to open!

This sixth cavern held the greatest enigma of all, as Brent and Lini Waller had previously discovered. There was just one thing in here, a thing that looked like a complicated and gigantic machine. There was a great coil of the stuff that looked like fused quartz. Within this was the odd looking kettle to which Mac had referred.

Only, it was hardly a kettle. It was a cauldron as big as a beer vat. And within that was still another seemingly endless coil of the glasslike rods. They looked the same as the rods which glowed white in the other caves. But no light came from the coils. In one spot, at the start of the big outer coil, there was a gap. A section of rod about the size of the gap lay off to one side.

“It beats me,” said Mac.

It beat Josh too. Finally he shrugged. “Waller’s radio is in the cave of the mastodon,” he said. “Let’s go back and see if we can contact Mr. Benson. It’ll save us going out to the plane to our own radio.”

It also saved them, had they known it, the dubious knowledge of finding that there wasn’t any plane in the sullenly heaving ocean at the foot of the ice wall. Where they had set the amphibian down, there was only empty ocean, now.

They re-entered the cave of the mastodon, and went toward the radio left by Waller. It was good enough to be able to transmit over their own secret wave length. They bent over it, absorbed in the effort to contact someone at Bleek Street.

And behind them crept doom!