The Glass Mountain

CHAPTER I Lightning Bolt

Old Joe Bass was commonly called Fish-eyes. That was partly because of his name, and partly because he had that kind of eyes. They stuck out a little, were far apart in his rather narrow face, didn’t ever seem to blink, and had a glazed look.

Joe Bass dressed in overalls that were ninety percent patches faded to all different shades of blue, had skin like leather from years of exposure to sun and wind, and left an almost unbroken trail of tobacco juice behind him wherever he went. His friends said he could live on tobacco, and sometimes it seemed that he must live on nothing else. For sometimes he was completely broke, instead of having two or three dollars in his pocket with which to buy food.

He was that way, now: completely broke. Four years ago he had nearly a hundred thousand dollars, but that was gone now, so he was out hunting more. He was going to get it out of the ground.

Old Joe Bass was one of the few genuine old-time prospectors left. He could go out with a pack on his back, not even with a burro, and usually come up with something that would keep him in chawin’ tobacco for a few more years.

He was prospecting for copper now.

Many years ago, he had suddenly recalled, he had been in this part of Idaho looking for gold and had found an old Indian arrow head crudely hammered out of virgin copper. The copper might have come from near here, or it might have been brought up, several hundred years ago, from as far as New Mexico. But it was worth looking around here to see if it was local.

Joe Bass was inclined to think it was local. That was because of the Indian history of the place.

Straight ahead of him, towering up with remarkable regularity in the clear, dry afternoon air, was the forbidding dark pile called Mt. Rainod.

Rainod was a contraction of the two words, Rain God.

The mountain was of smooth black basalt, which is just about as flinty and obdurate as glass. Black glass. And legend had it that in this black glass mountain the old Rain God of the Pawnees kept his residence.

He was a fierce old guy. Every now and then some individual incurred his displeasure. Then something extremely unpleasant happened to the individual. He died at the wrong end of a lightning bolt — if a lightning bolt can be said to have any other than a wrong end.

The Rain God would stroll from his glass mountain wrapped majestically in a little cloud. The cloud would envelop the person the god didn’t like, roll on after a while, and there that person would lay, electrocuted.

All of which didn’t bother Joe Bass much. He was as superstitious as anyone else; but he figured that the Rain God had left these parts long ago, when his children, the Pawnees, had vanished.

Joe squinted the sun out of his eyes and headed toward a dead tree.

It was a very big dead tree, or rather, the twenty-foot stump of one with a few dead branches sticking out like skeleton arms. It was this dead tree that he had fixed in his mind as a landmark years ago, when he found the crude, copper-flake arrowhead.

As Joe plodded over the high rocky tableland, he decided he’d have to be very careful if he did make a strike. There was a confounded railroad-construction camp only a mile off. If any of the men caught wind of a copper strike they’d try to jump his claim. Doggone it, why would anyone want to put a railroad through here, anyhow?

Joe shifted the heavy pack on his back and kept trudging for the dead tree, with the slow, plodding tread that seemed so snail-like and yet which had carried him over most of the West. Then he slowed and stared — hard.

The big dead stump was right next to the high flank of the glass mountain. Just behind it was a strange rock outcropping. The outcropping looked a little like Donald Duck on a gigantic scale.

Between this outcropping and the dead tree it seemed to Joe that a faint cloud was forming. A very small cloud, of very thin mist.

He blinked, decided that his old eyes weren’t what they used to be, and went on.

“Thought for a minute the old Rain God might be a-walkin’,” he chuckled to himself. “All wrapped in his cloud and everythin’.”

He plodded, head down, eyes on the rock-strewn ground. He went about fifty yards before he looked up again. And then he stopped dead. Because then he knew he was seeing it. It wasn’t any mirage or hallucination or flaw in his sight.

Behind the dead tree, between it and the Donald Duck outcropping, there was a small cloud! Rather like a pillar of mist twenty feet high and fifteen feet through. The mist was so thick that it seemed like a solid thing. And it was faintly greenish in the bright, glaring sunlight.

“Phoo!” said Joe Bass, though a little shakily. “It’s a new steam geyser, or somethin’.”

He stayed put for several minutes, looking at the greenish mist pillar and thinking. He wanted to get away from there. Every instinct developed over a lifetime in the open told him there was something badly wrong.

But, hang it, his mark was that old tree. Half a mile due south from it was where he’d found the strange arrowhead; and he told himself at the time that the flank of the glass mountain near the great stump was the place to look around.

He decided that no green pillar of mist was going to drive him away. Rain God?

“Phoo!” he said again, and went forward.

The green pillar seemed to be advancing to meet him. But that, of course, was surely imagination. He was sure it was imagination — till the pillar got between him and the dead tree. Then he knew it wasn’t imagination. It had moved, and toward him!

Joe Bass stood still then. But the green pillar did not It kept on coming toward him. So he turned to run.

At first he kept his pack. He hated to lose his old tools, with no money to buy more. But you can’t run with eighty pounds on your shoulders; so after a few steps he slid out of the pack straps and dropped his burden.

That, it turned out, was his major mistake.

The old straps seemed to coil around his left ankle like malevolent snakes. They tripped him. He fell headlong and lay there dazed for a minute!

When he got his wits enough to scramble to his knees, it was too late. The green mist was on him!

And the nauseating-looking mist rolled over him silently, smoothly, like a wave over an exhausted swimmer.

There was no sound from Joe Bass, who hadn’t believed in the Rain God. No sound at all!

The pillar went back again in a leisurely way. As its thinning edges retreated, like a witch’s skirts, Joe could be seen.

He lay on the rock-flawed ground like a man asleep. Very still.

The greenish pillar retreated to the dead tree. It got between the tree and the rock outcropping that was shaped like a duck. Then it slowly faded into nothingness.

But Joe lay on, still and stark. He would never prospect any more. There was a round black spot on his shoulder blade where a bolt of lightning had hit. There was a similar area on the sole of each foot where the bolt had grounded itself after coursing its deadly way through his old body.

Joe Bass had come too close to the black glass mountain called Rainod; so a pillar of cloud had enveloped him, and a small and personal bolt of lightning had killed him.

He lay there with the dusk finally gathering, faced toward the big old stump as though even in death he meant to keep on going toward it.

Night came, and morning. Joe Bass hadn’t moved. He was facing the same way. But somehow he was no longer staring at the dead tree with his dead, glazed eyes.

The tree was a hundred and fifty yards to the right of the Donald Duck outcropping.

It seemed to have walked there in the night.

From the construction camp, a mile away, two young surveyors set out after a breakfast of thick black coffee and beans and fried potatoes. They had a transit with them. They started for the thing Joe Bass had headed for yesterday: the big dead tree. Also, secondarily, the curious outcropping of black basalt.

The man with the transit was Tommy Ainslee. The other youngster, who was his helper, was Fred Nissen. This short excursion in the clear morning air was Ainslee’s idea. He was going to do a bit of checking on his own.

“The new roadbed hits the proposed tunnel site after a long, flat curve, at a spot about eighty yards to the left of the dead tree and sixty from the outcropping,” Ainslee said. “But it looks to me as if the site where the men have cleared away to start drilling the tunnel, if connected with the site of the camp on a parabola, makes a whole lot sharper curve than the chief engineer intended!”

Nissen laughed.

“Trusting your own eyesight against a transit and rod-work?” he taunted.

“At least we can go over it again,” said Ainslee. “Mistakes have been made before now in surveying.”

“But not a mistake of a couple of hundred yards,” argued Nissen.

Ainslee shrugged, located the peg two-thirds of the way from construction camp to proposed tunnel site, and adjusted his transit till the point of the plumb bob hung directly over it. Then he swung his transit to the proper direction.

Nissen, meanwhile, ambled on ahead to mark the exact spot on the flank of the glass mountain which would be the center of the tunnel if that was drilled to conform to the curve planned for the new roadbed.

Ainslee looked through the transit tube and then scowled in bewilderment.

The present site was charted as being eighty yards and a fraction to the left of the dead tree. But now, as he stared through the transit, the crossed lines centered right on the tree itself.

He had conceived the idea that the tunnel site was off about two hundred yards to the left of where it should be, landmarks or no landmarks. Now he found it was eighty yards to the right of where it should be!

He waited till Nissen should reach the flank of the mountain, swearing softly to himself. He saw the greenish pillar of mist forming off near the Donald Duck outcropping and remarked on it as a curious thing, but that was all. He didn’t even pay much attention when the funny little cloud seemed to move toward the dead tree from one side at about the same pace employed by Nissen from the other. He was too busy wondering how such a colossal mistake could have come out of the engineering department.

Nissen got near the tree, a little figure in the distance. The pillar of mist was near the tree, too. Ainslee looked through the transit tube to wave directions to his assistant.

He looked harder. For some reason he couldn’t see Nissen. There was the dead tree and the greenish pillar of mist. But no Nissen.

The pillar was standing still now. And it looked oddly solid. So solid that it cloaked Nissen from view. Feeling uneasy and puzzled, Ainslee waited for the mist to go away.

It did, and he saw Nissen.

Nissen lay on the ground at the foot of the big dead stump. One of the tree’s skeleton arms was out directly over his head as if in benediction.

“Nissen!” shouted Ainslee, with a great fear stirring in him.

But Nissen didn’t move.

Ainslee started running. He went stumbling at top speed over the shale-strewn ground, shouting as he went. And he saw the greenish pillar of mist that had been fading out and retreating back toward the rock outcropping, get more solid again and come back once more toward the tree.

It was a race now. Ainslee knew it was a race. Something was hellishly wrong with that pillar of mist. He knew it now. He must get to Nissen’s prone body before it enveloped him again.

He ran with the speed of a man not long out of college and track-trained. The greenish pillar of vapor moved only about as fast as a man could dogtrot. But the pillar was much closer at the start.

Man and pillar got to the body at about the same time. No chance now to shoulder Nissen and get him away from whatever that mist pillar happened to represent in the way of bizarre peril.

Instinctively, Ainslee crouched and threw up his fists in self-defense. But you can’t defend yourself against vapor.

The greenish pillar drifted back once more toward the outcropping. This time it left two prone bodies behind it, one sprawled over the other.

Two dead men!

Ainslee and Nissen lay, electrocuted, as if struck down by two small but tremendously powerful bolts of lightning lurking in the heart of the little cloud as bigger lightning lurks in the hearts of summer thunderheads.