The Glass Mountain

CHAPTER XIII Frozen Cure

Almost at dawn, the ammonia coils had come by plane to the construction camp. With every man working at top speed, Benson placed the coils.

He had thoroughly explored the water-filled portion of the bore, acting like a diver with his nose-clip mask and oxygen bladders, and had found where the water came from. It was from a narrow but long rent in the rock at the very end.

Into the fissure went the coils.

“We’ll freeze the water into a solid plug of ice that will keep any more from getting into the workings,” said The Avenger. “Then we can pump the rest out.”

“But we may be freezin’ Smitty and Nellie and Josh into ice plugs, too,” moaned Mac. “If they’re still alive, as ye seem to think.”

“I’ve told you I heard a shot in there yesterday afternoon,” said Benson. “People don’t shoot at corpses. They must have been alive then. It’s just possible they still are.”

Mac said nothing. He had heard no shot; but he knew the uncanny sharpness of The Avenger’s hearing.

Pipe had been laid from the water-pocketed bore to the outside. Pumps were running with deep and sonorous rhythm, pumping out the water, and pumping ammonia around the coils in the fissure.

Ammonia works fast. The ice was forming in the narrow fissure very shortly. Soon there was a rough-ended plug of it jamming the place where the water was coming from, and there was a three-foot space under the rent in the top of the roof instead of a space of merely a few inches.

Benson and Mac went toward that. Enough water had been taken out to show that, if the ones they were after had gone anywhere out of the bore, it must have been up there.

The two hadn’t gone half the distance when The Avenger held up his hand for silence. That acute hearing of his was bringing him sounds that Mac couldn’t hear at all.

For an instant he paused that way, then he began to race as hard as he could toward the fissure — but keeping the noise of his passage through the water down as much as he could.

Mac was fast on his feet; but the flashing speed of the gray steel figure of a man he called his chief left him ten yards behind. But as Mac got to the fissure, with Benson already halfway up its thickness, he too heard what Benson had heard.

There was a hissing up there like that of a dozen deadly serpents coiled to spring. The sound made the shivers rasp up and down the Scotchman’s spine.

The Avenger’s white, paralyzed face showed above the top of the rift, like the face of a figure in a waxworks. His pale, infallible eyes took in, at a glance, a picture to haunt the memory forever.

At the opposite wall of a little cave from the rift, were Smitty and Nellie and Josh, illuminated by the last of Josh’s phosphorus pellets. Nellie was half-behind Smitty’s giant bulk. Josh was a little to one side, crouched in a fighting posture.

Smitty was to the fore, with his great arms half-extended, and his body leaning forward for a desperate charge at a pillar of greenish vapor about fifteen feet through and towering to the rock roof.

The pillar was within ten feet of the three, and advancing at a steady pace. From its swirling, misty heart was coming the hissing sound.

“Chief!” yelled Nellie, seeing the white, still face and the deadly colorless eyes. Next instant she bit her lip in a frenzy for having given Benson’s sudden presence away. But it made no difference.

The Avenger had Mike in his hand. The little silenced gun seemed like a pea shooter as a weapon with which to attack this supernormal thing that killed as if with lightning bolts. But the hand that clutched it made it a great deal more effective than it looked.

Mike whispered, and a slug went to the heart of the little green cloud. There was another spat, and another and another, as the four shots in the small cylinder went into the mist.

Trying to harm the Rain God with bullets! Trying to drive a thing like that away with lead!

Four shots went into the mist. In answer to two of them, from the heart of the greenish vapor came brilliant blue flares, like lightning flashes. As if the god were striking back: lightning bolts to bullets.

And then the pillar began to retreat toward one of the tunnels leading out of the small cavern!

Mac and Josh and Smitty and Nellie watched the slow retreat with bulging eyes. The god, it seemed, had been driven off with human weapons, with four small slugs from the special .22!

Smitty leaped toward the retreating pillar of mist, lips curled back from his teeth, plainly intending to charge in and try to get his hands on whatever was in the fog.

Benson’s voice came as a whiplash.

“No!”

Smitty stopped, and stared at the pale, dead face of his chief, showing in the last dying flare of Josh’s pellet.

“Down the fissure, all of you,” said Benson, in a tone that was low but no less commanding.

Smitty and the others reluctantly saw the mist fade from sight down the tunnel darkness. They followed Benson back down the fissure to the tunnel bore. The water was only knee-deep down there, now.

“Why didn’t you let me charge the thing?” asked the giant, still furious at his lost chance.

The pale, inexorable eyes of The Avenger stared at him without, it seemed, really seeing him.

“A god,” said Benson, “might have more than two lightning bolts in his quiver. And you’re much more useful living than dead.”

After the stalking terror at Mt. Rainod, the city streets of Chicago seemed safe and sane and humdrum. But when Benson had traveled through them from the airport, next day, to the offices of the Central Construction, he found — stalking terror.

The three partners, Crest and Fyler and Ryan, were gray-faced with worry and fear.

They faced Benson over the little conference table with gaze questioningly on the dead, white face and the brilliant, colorless eyes.

The Avenger reported, quietly, impassively, what had happened. Crast nodded. He seemed the strongest and most unconquerable of the three.

“It’s about what Todd has reported to us, only more complete,” he said. “The idea of the ammonia coils was good.”

“Not good enough,” said Ryan shakily. “It will take more than that to keep us going. I got hopeful when the bore went so fast with the fire-and-water method of cracking into the mountainside. But water! That’s the worst thing that could happen. We’ll go brankrupt on this, I tell you!”

Fyler shook his head. He was staring hopefully at Benson. The one man of the three partners who was an indoors worker and who hadn’t had actual construction experience, he seemed best able to judge men swifdy and correctly.

“If anyone can save us,” he said, “Mr. Benson can. I feel quite confident that everything will be all right.”

Benson nodded acknowledgement. Ryan said gloomily:

“This is something we’ve never bumped up against, before. We’ve had frightened and rebellious men. We’ve had flooded workings. But we’ve never had to fight an Indian god.”

“Don’t be silly!” snorted Crast. “As if there were any such thing—”

A girl came from the general office. There was an urgent, harried look on her face. In her hand was a telegram. She gave it to Crast, who read it with his hands shaking a little.

“Well? Well?” snapped Ryan, voice showing what a strain he was under. “What does it say? It must be very important or Miss Bayliss wouldn’t have interrupted us like this.”

“It is — quite important,” said Crast, moistening dry lips. “Todd says that in the night the ammonia coils burst, flooding the bore with water again. We’ll have to fly new equipment down.”

“That isn’t so terrible,” Fyler said. “We aren’t yet so close to the line financially that we can’t buy—”

“That’s only a little of it,” said Crast. “Todd goes on: ‘This morning all the men quit. They took the work train and transported themselves to Boise.’ All the men. Todd and Mr. Benson’s three men are all that are left in camp.”

The Avenger’s eyes were like little cold steel spindles in his white, glacial countenance.

“That will be taken care of,” he said, rising. “And the financial part will also be taken care of, gentlemen. You run this end of it, and I think you can take it for granted that things at the other end will be duly accomplished.”

He went out, a gray steel figure of a man whose very walk was enough to inspire respect.

He went to South Chicago, to a large new building that was rising for one of the great Illinois steel companies.

The Avenger hadn’t come to Chicago to talk to the three partners. That was incidental. He had come to talk to an old foreman of his, with whom, when hardly out of his teens, Benson had engineered projects in Africa and China. It was because of this purpose of his trip that the news that all the men had left the Mt. Rainod camp left him so unmoved.

The man he wanted to see had a battered old hat on the back of his head and was yelling at a crane man on the building job. He was a big Swede, and when he saw Benson he danced like a trained bear.

“Mr. Benson! You’re a sight for sore eyes! How many years has it been since you bossed me around and gave me hell? Remember the time you yanked me out of the clutches of an Arab band in Morocco and saved my worthless life?”

Benson nodded and his eyes smiled a very little since his face could not. The Swede looked furtively at Benson’s white hair and dead countenance.

“You’ve had trouble,” he said, with awkward sympathy. “I heard about it. Your wife, and the little girl—”

He stopped at once at the look in the flaring, pale eyes.

“What can I do for you, boss? Want anybody killed, or anything?”

“I want a tunnel drilled in a place where death is lurking around,” said Benson quietly. “A crew has already quit to the last man because of the trouble there. Can you turn this job over to a subordinate and go out to Idaho with a picked crew?”

The Swede looked contemptuously at the steel skeleton of the new mill.

“Sure! This is kid stuff. I’ll be tickled to do man’s work again. You tell me where we’re to go, and I’ll bring a gang that’ll fight the devil, himself.”

“It’s something like that you will be fighting,” said The Avenger. “All right. Get as many men as you can. Tunnel men. Fly them to Mt. Rainod, Idaho. And, Johnson — get men you can trust, and watch out for yourself every minute, from now on.”

The Swede nodded at the first bit of advice and snorted at the second.

“For twenty-eight years I’ve been cheating death by a whisker all over the world, Mr. Benson. It won’t get me now!”

The Avenger left. In his small, fast plane, brought on from New York to replace the one the “mail plane” had crashed, he started back west.

And the Swede, jubilant at the idea of exchanging a tame job for a reckless one, arranged to leave his work on the new building.

As he had said, for twenty-eight years, since he’d been a boy of fifteen, he had been cheating death all over the world. In jungle and desert, under water and underground, he had beaten the Dark Monarch.

He was to lose at last in a prosaic city street, where you’d think a man was as safe as he could be on a somewhat troubled planet.

He left the South Chicago district in a dented roadster, with his hat gleefully on the back of his head. He knew where to get his men — hard men, huskies, young and full of hell. He’d have at least fifty by night.

When The Avenger went to the building, a car had followed, far behind. It had swirled off after Benson had been talking to his old foreman for a minute or two.

Now the car trailed the Swede. And on a broad street near the Chicago line, it crept up on the dented roadster.

Johnson never saw it at all. Adventurous, large-caliber men are all too apt to be incapable of understanding the sly murder practiced by the rats in the city’s underworld.

From the sedan, as it was almost abreast of the roadster, came a single shot.

The battered hat on the hard-bitten, veteran foreman’s head tilted back farther than ever. The head under it tilted too, till it rested on the back of the seat, with sightless eyes staring up at the smoky canopy of the sky.

The roadster crashed into the side of a building with a clang that could have been heard for blocks. The sedan halted, picked up Johnson’s dead body, and sped on.

At least fifty men for the new construction crew—

By nightfall fifty-four men in rough clothes stood ready to be flown to Mt. Rainod. But the kind of clothes they wore were not a true index to their characters.

They were fifty-four of Chicago’s coolest gunmen, the cream of half a dozen gangs that ruled the city with machine guns and rackets. There wasn’t one that didn’t have at least three murders to his credit.

Fifty-four of the choicest killers in the Middle West boarded planes for the construction camp at the Mt. Rainod bore, instead of a crew picked by Johnson.

Johnson, however, went along. In a box labeled “Tools.” His body was to be found near the camp so that the story would be that he had been killed after picking his crew and transporting them, rather than before.