The Glass Mountain

CHAPTER XVI Two Nellie Grays

Mac and Josh and Smitty didn’t like men who looked like rats and the new crew hadn’t been around very long when the three got very wise to them.

“There has certainly been a colossal slip-up somewhere,” said Smitty. “These guys are all crooks and killers if ever I saw any.”

Mac nodded somberly.

“They’re certainly not the kind the chief would pick. Nor would any friend of the chief pick them.”

Josh spoke up with some of his dusky philosophy.

“When the lamb finds itself in the wolves’ lair, the lamb should move!”

The other two nodded. They weren’t exactly lambs, but they certainly found themselves in a wolves’ lair at the moment. They walked with death beside them. They sensed that; knew it. Todd had already died. It was quite logical that The Avenger’s aides would be tackled, too. And there were half a hundred of these killers that had come so surprisingly to Mt. Rainod as a workers’ crew.

“Whoosh! They’ll get us, of course, no matter what we do,” said Mac dourly.

The Scot was the gloomiest soul alive — till things got really desperate. Then, when there didn’t seem a chance of escaping death, for some cockeyed reason he got as sure of success as an optimist drunk on champagne.

“They’ll likely do for us if we stick around,” said Smitty. “My vote is, slip out of camp and make ourselves scarce till the chief shows up.”

“Aye,” said Mac.

Josh nodded, too.

The three were not afraid; it took more than a pack of gunmen to affect them that way. It was simply bad sense to wait around till some rat shot you in the back; good sense to stay alive so you could work some more.

So they slipped out of camp, one at a time, and met again near the Donald Duck outcropping. Here Mac balked at going farther.

“I’m stayin’ here,” he said, “till I see what ails this big dead trrree. ’Tis too much it has moved with us not knowin’ why.”

They examined the “walking” tree.

Others had examined it and found it like any other tree. The three aides of The Avenger didn’t find anything out of the way, either, at first, so cleverly was it done.

Then Josh, who had been scraping away at the shale and earth, exclaimed aloud. He had come to the end of one of the roots. There should have been no end. The root should have kept on extending for yards under the surface.

They found more root ends. Then Smitty, with a grunt, tipped the big thing over. Four average men couldn’t have done it, for the extending roots, short as they had been cut, made a wide base. But the giant, with a heave and a snort, tipped it in a hurry. Then there were more exclamations.

The thing was hollow all the way down. At the base, in the hollow, was a clever arrangement of wheels and levers. By lifting the levers you lowered the wheels, jacklike, till the stump was raised on them a few inches. Then you rolled the great dead thing wherever you wanted it, barring too-great irregularities in the ground.

“But why?” gasped Josh.

“Easy,” said Smitty. “This tree was used as a surveyors’ mark in laying out the new roadbed. Somebody knew that. So they moved the mark, which set the tunnel site deliberately at the wrong place. For some reason, the tree-mover didn’t want drilling to start at the correct spot.”

Mac was standing on the big dead stump. He could see farther than the rest from his four-foot elevation.

“Oh-oh!” he said. “A bunch is coming from camp. They’ve found out we left, and they want to locate us.”

“How many?” said Smitty, swelling his giant muscles. “We can take care of any number up to eight.”

“There are a lot more than — Smitty! Look behind you! At the cliff!”

Smitty whirled. And then his bellow of alarm roared out.

Nellie Gray was at the foot of the cliff, at the mouth of an irregular opening that seemed to stop at a great boulder a few feet in. The three were yards from her, but there was no mistaking the diminutive, fragile, feminine figure and the tawny-gold hair, even though Nellie’s back was to them.

Her back was to them because something within the rift had hold of her. They could see a hand, not large, but purposeful, on her throat. They could see her fight wildly, silently.

Then they saw her hauled into the recess out of sight.

Led by Smitty in a mad bull-elephant rush, the three raced toward the fissure. Forgotten were the men coming from the camp. In Smitty’s mind everything else was forgotten, too.

Nellie Gray fighting for her life! That was the payoff for the giant. When he saw a thing like that, there was violent action due.

They got to the recess, and found it wasn’t a recess at all. It was one of the fissures, beginning now to look uncountable in number, leading into the heart of the glass mountain.

They squeezed in. There was no sound from Nellie, and that was bad. That hand at her throat—

They had gone twenty yards over a rough floor when they saw a feminine form again, flitting ahead of them, hanging back as if being dragged.

They rushed to it!

There was a sound behind them like the thudding into place of a bank vault door, magnified many times. Even with Nellie on their minds, the three turned automatically.

They saw that the action which had produced the sound was much as if a vault door had thudded into place behind them.

A slab of solid basalt, many feet through, had been dropped from somewhere in the roof of the tunnel, and had smashed ponderously on the rock of the floor. Now it barred the way they had come, rising sheer from floor to roof, and extending from wall to wall of the rift.

They had been sealed in with tons of stuff as hard and obdurate as smooth, black glass.

Smitty swept his flashlight from the newly-fallen mass.

“No freak of nature ever did that,” he said somberly. “That’s a man-made trap.”

The light stabbed along the passage, and lit on the feminine figure whose distress had drawn them in here.

The girl was laughing, if you’d want to call it that. Her face was twisted with laughter, but it was a kind of sobbing sound that came out, bordering on hysteria.

And the girl was not Nellie Gray.

With her hair lightened, and wearing Nellie Gray’s clothes, she looked like Nellie. But at close range the shape of her face and color of her eyes gave her away. It was Ethel Masterson.

“You’ll die!” she screamed. “You’ll all die! I didn’t get your leader with my trick, but at least I got you, his friends. And your deaths will be a part-payment for my father’s murder.”

Smith glared at the girl.

“I tricked you nicely,” she shrilled. “I grasped my own throat, with my own hand, with my back turned to you, and pretended to be dragged forward by someone. I did it all alone, for vengeance.”

“Very clever,” grated the giant.

There was a second ponderous thud, and suddenly a thick wall of black basalt appeared behind the girl, shutting them all into a thirty-foot stretch of the tunnel.

The girl laughed crazily.

“You’ll die! You’re all trapped!”

Smitty’s look and tone softened. The giant knew distress when he saw it. He knew that this girl wasn’t acting in character; she had been driven half-mad by the conviction that The Avenger had killed her father. She was no murderess. She wasn’t responsible for the things she was doing.

Also, it seemed to Smitty, she wasn’t very bright.

“Aren’t you overlooking something?” the giant said.

She stared at him with a little more sanity in her eyes.

From some place not far off came the sound they had heard before, and had learned to dread. The sound of underground water.

“We’re trapped, yes,” said Smitty, “but you seem to be overlooking the fact that you’re trapped, too. Whatever happens to us, will also happen to you!”

Ethel stared back at the second great slab that had dropped from the tunnel roof to block them off. And sudden bewilderment and terror showed in her eyes.

“Why,” she stammered, “why… that slab… I was to have been on the other side when that dropped, shutting you all in—”

From around the bottom and lower sides of the first slab gushed water. In a torrent it began to fill the cave, rushing in freely but with too much pressure behind it to allow it to run out again.

The level rose several inches a minute. In a good deal less than half an hour it would hit the roof. And there was no way out save the two blocked by the basalt slabs.

Benson’s ruse had done one thing for him at least. His disguise as the old Indian, Yellow Moccasins, had gotten him to the heart of the mystery of the glass mountain unharmed. However, bound hand and foot and thrust into a solid rock cell, it didn’t look as if he could do much about it.

He set about remedying the situation.

Those slim hands of his that, given time, could beat any bonds, began to work. No larger in circumference — when palms and thumb were compressed — than his wrists, they slowly worked the ropes down over his fingers.

In the dark, he untied the rest of his bonds, and stood free.

He could manipulate his small flashlight better now than when, before, he had held it awkwardly in bound hands after nudging it laboriously from his pocket. He played it on the opening through which he had been brought.

It was closed by a basalt slab. But the slab was not very large. The gang must have thought it plenty safe enough for the Indian that Benson was supposed to be. No ordinary man could have budged it, let alone a man as old as Yellow Moccasins. But Benson was neither old nor ordinary.

Sitting on the floor, he got his feet against the slab. There was enough of a crevice in one place to admit his fingers. So with the full force of arms, shoulders, back and legs, he thrust at the slab. Its five hundred or so pounds grated softly, then slid a couple of feet outward.

He got through the small opening, and stood in the great cave with the statue of the Rain God.

He was struck at once by the thing that had first taken Nellie Gray’s attention. That was the fact that the place, far underground, was dimly lighted. He set out to investigate that first. He soon found the answer. Like the gate-valve, the things were as out of place in this tomb of ancient worship as would be a nightclub on Mt. Everest.

They were ordinary electric-light bulbs, sparsely placed up near the top of the cavern, hidden by stalactites.

Electric-light bulbs!

But The Avenger had known there was some such thing in here. He had known it ever since he had found the short black tube of rubber with the bit of fabric adhering to it. For that little rubbery length had been a bit of insulation from an electric power cable, peeled off when a blade cut the cable to shorten or splice it.

He began following the wires. They led down a rift in the basalt that he had not seen before. As he went, he heard a faint humming. It grew louder till he stepped into a small cavern in the center of which, beside a silently rushing underground stream, was an electric generator.

The motor was brand new; had very recently been set up in here. It was powered by the stream. The Avenger nodded, dead face even more stoical than that of the old Indian he was made up to represent. He started farther along the tunnel — and saw a man.

The man stood facing a slab of basalt that closed off the rift, and seemed to be listening. Benson tensed as the man turned. Then he relaxed as he saw the man look at him with no surprise or apprehension at all. In fact, the fellow was grinning. But the grin was murderous, wolfish.

“Well, we got ’em,” the man said. “All but the guy with the dead pan and the white hair. They’re trapped in there with the water rising. I just turned the water on.”

Benson’s brain was even faster than his body. It caught the whole story in a fraction of a second.

“Turn it off again,” he said instantly, calmly. “I don’t want them killed, yet.”

The man’s mouth went slack with surprise. Evidently, whoever he thought Benson was had spoken differently a short time before.

“But you said—” he began.

“I have changed my mind,” said Benson. “I want them alive for questioning. Shut off the water and raise the slab.”

“O.K. with me,” said the man, sullenly, shaking his head. He turned a wheel set into the basalt wall with concrete reinforcing it. Then he began laboriously to raise the big block into the roof again with a huge hardwood lever that worked up and down in a slot and was the grandfather of all jacks. The wheel was modern; the crude jack, which lifted the block an inch at a time, was ancient.

Those inside weren’t waiting for the full clearance to show. They scrambled under the block when it was hardly a yard up, and out of their watery trap.

Josh and Mac and Smitty stared at their chief without recognition, narrow of eye, wondering what new funny stuff was afoot. But Ethel Masterson looked at him with wild relief, for about a minute.

“Thanks to Heaven,” she said, “it’s you! I knew you had made a mistake in having me brought here, but—”

She stopped, stared over Benson’s shoulder, and cried out huskily.

Behind Benson, four men were coming down the rift, carrying a fifth. The man in the lead — was the old Indian, Yellow Moccasins. But the man the other three carried was the old Indian too; the one whom Benson had left outside after creasing him with Mike. He had been discovered and carted in here. Then, to the eye at least, Benson was the old Indian.

There were three Chief Yellow Moccasins here, where there should have been but one.

Catlike in his swiftness, Benson darted toward the narrow opening under the newly lifted basalt slab.

“No, Chief,” said Smitty quietly. The lightning swiftness of this third “Indian’s” movements had told him his identity. “There’s no way out there. It’s sealed shut.”

Benson stopped. From down the rift, after the four men who carried the real Yellow Moccasins, more men were coming. At least two dozen men, members of the new crew of killers.

They surrounded Benson and his aides, and Ethel Masterson, and took them back to the cave of the Rain God. There, they thrust them into the small cell from which Benson had just escaped.