The Glass Mountain

CHAPTER XIV The New Crew

Ethel Masterson seemed to spend most of her time around the construction camp. Whatever business she may have had at her dead father’s Cloud Lake Ranch was surely being neglected.

She was near the camp this morning, watching it with binoculars from a perch on the glass mountain’s flank where no one in camp could see her.

She stayed there till she heard soft steps immediately behind her. Then she jumped and dropped the glasses.

“Oh!” she said, when she saw who it was. “I thought for a minute—”

“You thought perhaps the man with the white eyes and the white hair might have come up behind you?”

“Yes!”

The man who had furtively approached her was the aged Indian who seemed able to appear and disappear like a being from another planet.

“The man with the pale eyes and white hair will not be moving anywhere, very shortly, if you continue to help us,” the Indian said.

Ethel looked at him in a troubled way.

“I am beginning to wonder,” she said, “if he did kill my father.”

The Indian, for all his apparent age, was very straight. He drew himself up even more erectly.

“I say that he did,” he said evenly. “And no one in all the West is able to say so more surely. For no one can read tracks as I can. No one has better eyesight. And I swear to you that the man with the white hair did murder your father.”

Ethel continued to stare at him with trouble in her brown eyes.

“Your father knew me for many years,” the Indian went on. “You yourself have known me all your life, though you have not seen me often. What I say can be believed.”

Anger flooded back into the girl’s face.

“Yes, I believe you. And I will keep helping you till the cold-blooded murderer, Benson, has paid with his own life. And if the girl and the men with him are forced to share his fate, that won’t be too bad either.”

“It is well,” said the Indian gravely.

Ethel stared at him with her face paling a little.

“There have been stories,” she faltered. “Some have said you weren’t as human as you seem, that you are the Rain God—”

“That could not be possible, could it?” the Indian murmured. “I am going now. Please keep facing this way.”

“But I… you— Why?” said Ethel.

“Please keep facing this way.”

The Indian went around behind her, to the edge of the black basalt. And Ethel kept facing the way she was, looking out away from the mountain.

Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer. She turned.

A last shred of greenish mist was just fading out of existence, and the old man was gone. She gasped at the implication of the thing. Then she got up and began skirting the foot of the mountain in the direction of Cloud Lake Ranch. She had left her horse there.

About a hundred yards behind her, as stealthily as the old Indian, himself, could have done it, was a trailer. The trailer was a girl, too, small and slim and blond and dainty-looking — Nellie Gray.

If Ethel Masterson was awed and puzzled by the disappearance of the Indian, Nellie was even more so. For Nellie had been looking right at him when he left, while Ethel was obediently facing away from him. Nellie had seen everything.

She had seen a pillar of greenish mist rapidly form just behind where the Indian stood. She had seen the Indian walk calmly into the little cloud as a man might step into a closed car. Then the pillar of fog had rapidly faded away, and there was no Indian there.

Nellie was telling herself furiously that there wasn’t anything but trickery in such an exit. It couldn’t be what it seemed to be. Just the same, she felt as if she had swallowed a couple of ice cubes when she remembered how the little cloud had faded, and the Indian had faded, too.

Ethel rounded a rock, as big as a five-story building, that had cracked off the flank of the glass mountain ages ago. Nellie had let her get farther ahead to be sure she wouldn’t be seen.

So, when the thing happened, Nellie wasn’t seen — or heard, either — by the girl she had been trailing.

The thing that happened was the emergence of a fist from the narrow space between mountain and big rock as Nellie crouched next to it. The fist came out fast, and it stopped just as fast. Stopped against Nellie’s outraged jaw.

For a second time a man had smacked her with a man’s blow when she wasn’t looking for it. Later she would be furious, but right now she wasn’t anything but unconscious.

Dick Benson had wired the camp that the new crew could be expected immediately. Therefore Todd and the aides of The Avenger were on the lookout for the planes flying them in.

What they did not expect was the series of accidents that arrived promptly with the men.

“These guys,” Todd said to Smitty after he had looked them over, “either have never worked on this kind of job before, or have been laid off for a long, long time.”

“Yeah?” said Smitty. It didn’t seem to jibe with the sort of men The Avenger would be sending in such a situation. “How can you tell?”

“Hands,” said Todd succinctly.

Fingers and palms show toil. Calluses and fingernails tell a complete story. You don’t get calloused from shooting a gun; so the hands of this new crew weren’t right to Todd’s discerning eye. The men’s fingernails were grimy enough, heaven knew. But they didn’t have that horny, ridged look that comes with years of hard work at manual jobs.

“The guy in charge of them seems fair,” grumbled Todd. “At least he talks the language. The one who says he came out as Johnson’s understudy. I wonder where Johnson is? I know of him. He’s a good man—”

The answer to that was to come very fast. A man had said that Johnson landed some hours before in a separate plane. The same man stumbled up at a run, with his face screwed up.

“Somebody got the boss!” he panted. “Johnson — some guy shot him. Must have been right after he came here.”

Todd ran after the man, with Smitty following. They came to the corpse which had been planted on the rock-strewn ground to hide the fact that the foreman had been dead before the crew was assembled in Chicago.

“There he is. Shot just once, in the left side of the head.”

Todd and Smitty bent over the still form. Smitty’s huge hand went out.

“He’s cold. Must have come about dawn, and started to look the ground over on his own before the crew got here.”

“Yeah!” agreed the man. “It must have been like that.”

That was nasty surprise number one.

Number two had to do with the ammonia coils. They were new ones, just placed, brought in to replace the ones that had unexplainably burst just before the original crew left. There was a hollow boom from the tunnel bore, and then the too familiar sight of men racing from the tunnel mouth with their clothes dripping.

Todd raced into the bore and came out white-faced with fury.

“What fool did that?” he roared.

There was no answer from the men. Todd turned to Smitty.

“Somebody set off a blast in there,” he raged. “It cracked the ice plug formed by the new coils, and it widened the mouth of the fissure the water comes from till now it’s impossible to plug it with ice any more. It’s lucky it didn’t bring the whole roof of the bore down. As it is, it cracked the surface outside so that we’ll have to shore up the slope above the tunnel mouth or we’ll be having a landslide.”

He had hardly finished speaking when Mac came running up with nasty surprise number three.

“Smitty,” he panted, “the motors — somethin’s wrong with them.”

Something was very wrong indeed, as the giant discovered the moment he set eyes on the equipment.

Somehow, the motors had been burned out. It didn’t seem possible that enough of an overload could have been applied to blow them, so Smitty examined them more closely.

He finished the examination with his face ashen with anger and his big hands trembling with a desire to choke somebody.

The motors had deliberately been burned out by shorting the armatures. It meant a great deal more delay, and more heavy equipment to be flown in.

It went on.

The fourth occurrence was just what Todd had mentioned as a thing they must instantly take steps to guard against: Possible sliding of the rock loosened above the tunnel mouth by the crazy blast inside that wrecked the ammonia coils.

There was a shattering roar, that had grown from a low rumble, and all of a sudden, several hundred tons of rock were blocking the entrance to the flooded bore and were resting on smashed machinery that had been hauled from the water.

Even that wasn’t the end. There was nasty surprise number five. And that concerned Todd himself.

The head engineer was found by Mac, near the Donald Duck outcropping and the puzzling dead tree that seemed to have walked, not once but several times. Todd was dead!

On his back was a great burn, and on the soles of his feet were two more. He had, apparently, been struck by lightning.

One of the workmen said he had seen it happen. He told and retold the story, with the other men staring at him in much the same fashion as the first crew had stared at similar accounts.

“There was a little green cloud, see? It starts toward this guy, Todd. Todd’s bendin’ down, lookin’ at the roots of the dead tree. See? He don’t notice the green mist comin’ up behind him. He straightens, sees it, yells, and starts to run. But the green stuff’s got him by then. See? It rolls back after a couple minutes and shows the guy again. Only now Todd’s lyin’ down. I take about fifteen minutes to be sure the fog ain’t comin’ back again, and then I run to him. He’s croaked. See? What I wanta know — what’s all this about some kinda god killin’ guys with lightnin’?”

Josh contributed a point, here. He had talked with Todd for a minute before the engineer left camp. Josh was probably the last person to see him alive.

“He said a kind of funny thing,” Josh told Smitty in an undertone. “You know the three partners of the Central Construction Co. — Fyler and Crast and Ryan?”

Smitty nodded.

“Well,” said Josh, “Todd said he thought he saw Crast, for a minute, quite a ways off, near the dead tree. He said he was sure it couldn’t really be Crast, because if one of the partners was coming, he’d probably wire. And if he did come without wiring, why would he stay away from camp and act as if he didn’t want to be seen? So Todd was sure it wasn’t Crast, but said he was going to stroll out and see who it was.”

“And Mac strolls out after him,” said Smitty grimly, “and finds him dead. Josh, this business is getting me jumpy.”

The colored man looked at him.

“I’d like to see you jumpy,” he remarked. “It would be like seeing Mount Rainod with a case of nerves.”

Smitty skipped the reference to his vast size.

“I wish the chief would get back,” he said worriedly. “It’s funny he isn’t here already. I rather expected him this morning, before the crew came. And now it’s late afternoon and he hasn’t arrived. I wonder if something—”

It was almost lese majesty to wonder if something had happened to that gray steel man called The Avenger; so Smitty didn’t finish it.

He went on with another wonder instead.

“Now where’s Nellie? I haven’t seen her for hours. If she’s gone and got herself in a jam, again, she can just get out of it alone. I’m through losing weight worrying about her.”

“When a man swears he’s through worrying about a woman,” said Josh philosophically, “it means he is on the verge of taking all her worries on his shoulders for the rest of time.”

“Me? Nellie?” exclaimed Smitty. “Not on your life! But I wish I knew where the reckless little witch was. And I wish I knew what was keeping the chief!”