The Glass Mountain

CHAPTER III Out of the Sky

The whole tunnel project hung in the balance at that moment. If those men went back to their respective homes and told of the strange deaths at Mt. Rainod, no other men would come to take their place. The world of construction engineering is a small one. News gets around it. And no man wants to work on a hoodoo job.

However, just at that moment when the foreman was thinking that nothing could be done save wring his hands, there was a speck in the sky. The speck turned into a plane in a few moments, and everyone stared at it because there was no other place for a plane to be coming but here.

It circled three or four times, dropped deftly, bumped over the uneven tableland, and came to a stop several hundred yards from the men.

Three men got out. One was a giant, six feet nine and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, all of it solid muscle. The second was a tall, thin Scotchman with big ears and freckled red skin and huge hands and feet. He looked funny till you stared into his bitter, bleak blue eyes. Then you didn’t laugh at him. At least to his face. The third was a Negro, even taller, even thinner, than the Scot.

The three were dressed for work. They had canvas bags over their shoulders with their belongings. Every man in the camp guessed the reason for their coming.

They were three crackmen, trouble shooters, specially hired and specially transported by plane to this job where so much trouble had developed.

Well, the muttering of the men promised, no three trouble shooters were coming in here and expect to stop a scramble out of the Rain God’s territory!

The plane’s motor slammed on. The ship took a short rough run and sailed aloft. The three men from it reached the sullen-looking group.

“Hi, men,” said the big fellow. “When do we go to work?”

He was even bigger than he had looked from a distance. His chest was about the size of a rain barrel, so muscled that his vast arms would not hang straight. His name was Algernon Heathcote Smith — called, by all who wished to stay healthy, by the less provocative nickname, Smitty.

During the altercation with the foreman, the men had been represented by a loud-talking, red-haired hulk with a six-day beard on his face and the look of a chronic kicker in his eyes. He was the bully of the camp.

The red-haired man stared at Smitty with a sneer on his lips. He had fought from Nome to St. Augustine and never met a man, no matter how big, that he couldn’t down. He stared at the other two with the giant and laughed.

The Scotchman, Fergus MacMurdie, as has been said, looked unimpressive till you stared closely at his bleak blue eyes.

And the sleepy-looking Negro looked unimpressive no matter how you took him. Few realized that Josh Newton was an honor graduate from Tuskegee, and could fight like a pack of black tigers when it became necessary.

“When do we go to work?” Smitty called cheerfully again. His full-moon face was very good-natured-looking, and his china-blue eyes seemed as ingenuous as a child’s.

“We don’t go to work at all,” growled the big, red-haired man. “We’re all quittin’. So what do you think you’ll do about that?”

“Why, we’ll stop you, my friends and me,” said the giant, Smitty, still beaming good-naturedly. “That’s what I think about it. We heard there was some crazy stuff here about lightning bolts out of a clear sky; so we came down to see what the joke was all about. Because a thing like that has got to be a joke or—”

“Joke, is it?” the camp cook, a little scraggly man with a stringy mustache suddenly screamed. “I suppose it’s a joke when three guys die! I suppose it’s a joke when the Rain God himself, lookin’ like an old Indian, comes and warns us not to dig into that mountain! It may be a joke, but I’m gettin’ out of here right now!”

He began legging it down the single track that had been laid to the mountain’s flank. Every move he made indicated that he was going to keep on legging it till he was so far away he’d never hear of Mt. Rainod again.

“Come on, guys,” roared the big red-headed malcontent. “We’ll pack and git, too. We’ll take over the work train—”

Smitty was suddenly in front of him, moving faster than anyone would have thought possible after a glance at his ponderous bulk.

“We’re all staying,” said Smitty.

The big red-haired man stared once more at Smitty’s great size. Though he was still sure he could down Smitty, he yelled for aid.

“Jump on the three of ’em! We’ll flatten ’em out, and then take the work train and leave.”

And he jumped for Smitty with an ear-piercing yell of battle.

The redhead had fought in a lot of countries and knew a lot of rough-and-tumble tricks. He was trying a little savate to start.

The leap was supposed to end with his nailed boots in Smitty’s chest, knocking him over on his back. Then the boots would make cat’s meat of Smitty’s moonface. But it didn’t quite work out that way.

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the giant was that in a fight he seldom bothered to fend off any attack. He was so big and so hard that he could just stand and take it. For the same reason he rarely monkeyed with boxing or feinting.

The red-haired man’s boots landed just where they were supposed to, and nothing happened. The heels banged against Smitty’s vast chest with a sound like a club on a bass drum. Smitty, one leg back-braced to take the charge, grinned a little and caught an ankle of the red-haired man. He held it just long enough for the fellow to smash down flat on his back instead of getting his feet under him as he had intended.

“Oomph!” gasped the redhead. And some of the crew snickered a little.

The man was up with murder in his eyes. He bored in again, right fist pile-driving for Smitty’s abdomen. This time Smitty would normally have avoided the fist. But he was playing to get a laugh from the crowd, show them how little this big redhead meant in the scheme of things. So, even though it hurt a little, he stood and took the smack in the stomach, too.

“You tickle!” he said, with his grin broadening. “What are you doing, playing kid’s games?”

The whole crowd chuckled at that, though at the same time they were staring with awe at a man who could take two such blows and apparently not feel them at all.

The red-haired man foamed at the mouth.

“Why, you—” he stammered. “I’ll kill you! I’ll—”

There was a shovel lying nearby. He swooped, caught it up and swung it at Smitty’s head. The thing whistled as it blurred downward. It would have sliced the giant’s skull to the chin if it had hit.

But Smitty saw to it that it didn’t hit. He swayed to one side like a flyweight boxer instead of a man weighing two hundred and eighty-five pounds. The shovel sliced past him and he caught it.

He wrenched it from the man, broke the hickory handle across his vast knee, and then started for the redhead.

Smitty just walked, slowly, a step at a time. And the redhead, eyes wide, retreated the same way, step for step. Smitty wasn’t grinning anymore since the spade episode. His face was a thing to make you feel cold all over.

Evidently the red-haired bully felt just that way. He wasn’t in a battling mood anymore. He went back, step for step. And then his steps began to be a little faster than Smitty’s and finally he turned and began to run a little, looking over his shoulder.

Eventually he stopped looking back, headed straight forward, and concentrated on the business of running. He ran fast, and was still running when he rounded the far bend in the work track and went out of sight.

Smitty turned back to the men, with his easy grin still on his face. He looked unconquerable, big enough to lick a landslide — certainly big enough to lick a Rain God.

The men were guffawing at the redhead’s flight.

“Well,” said Smitty, “when do we get to work?”

They all looked at each other. Then an old-timer spit on his hands and grabbed up a pick.

“Right now, far’s I’m concerned,” he said. “Anybody else?”

“I reckon all of us,” said another man. “But — hey! We ain’t got a cook! He’s halfway to Boise by now. We got to have a cook.”

There was consternation. The cook is as important a citizen in a construction camp as the chief engineer.

Josh Newton shambled forward.

“I’se the cook,” he announced, looking sleepy and good-natured and slow. “An’ I’se de best cook you-all evah see. Wait an’ find out.”

The men cheered and the work started.

A second plane was nearing the tunnel site. It was not a transport, as had been the one bearing Smitty and Josh and Mac to the camp. It was a tiny two-seater job with a small enclosed cabin. In it was the man for whom the three were working.

Benson had half a dozen planes. This was his smallest; a slim bullet with stubby wings capable of snarling through the heavens at five and a half miles a minute. It was set at about top speed now.

The man at the controls, white face looking like a death mask rather than a human countenance, stared down and ahead. The glass mountain had been in sight for some minutes now. It was about thirty miles off, at present. It looked like pictures of Vesuvius, except that the peak was sharp and not chewed out, as is the peak of Vesuvius.

Suddenly the pale eyes of The Avenger, like chips of stainless steel in his immobile white face, glittered like ice under a polar moon.

From behind Mt. Rainod’s sharp peak had appeared another plane. It was an ordinary open-cockpit ship, not very new — the type used to fly the mails on secondary routes. It was heading toward Benson’s little plane.

The mail plane wasn’t going at half Benson’s speed; but the combined speed of the two was such that in about a minute and a half they were going to pass.

It would be natural to expect that the passage would occur many yards apart. But for some reason the pilot of the oncoming plane didn’t veer. He was heading straight for The Avenger’s ship.

Benson held the controls straight. His face was like a thing of ice. His eyes were pale holes into which you could peer and see — death!

Murder was whistling toward him from Mt. Rainod. That was perfectly apparent in the way the pilot held his course instead of veering at once for a wide margin of safety.

The Avenger altered his own course at last. He flipped a little to the right.

The plane ahead changed course so that it was still heading right at him. And now there were only seconds left. It was going to ram him!

Benson’s hands were like steel hooks on the controls. He waited till the last minute, then zoomed almost straight up. But just as swiftly, the oncoming plane went up, too.

So Benson yanked at a third lever.

The two planes hit in midair with a combined speed of nearly nine miles a minute. There was a crash and an explosion that seemed could be heard in Denver. It was like the disappearance in a flash of light of a great explosive rocket. Then fragments rained down. None of them were bigger than a man’s fist.

As they fell they passed the man with the pale and deadly eyes and the immobile countenance.

When The Avenger had pulled that third lever, the bottom of his plane fell away, and he fell with it, seat and all. He had been close enough to where the planes collided to be whirled every which way by the resulting cross-gales of disturbed air, but he swung evenly now in the sling of his parachute.

He settled to the ground. There was a ring of workmen around who had seen the amazing crash and the even more amazing escape, just before, of the faster plane’s pilot.

They caught the parachute and helped Benson out.

Harry Todd, the wide-shouldered engineer on the job, got Benson’s shoulder. Even in such a moment he marveled at the steely feel of The Avenger’s arm.

“My heavens, man!” Todd gasped. “I thought it was all over for you. That madman in the mail plane! But he has certainly paid for it with his life.”

Benson nodded. It was an awesome thing to see his white death-mask of a face — as cold and unmoved as if he had just stepped from a streamlined train instead of out of the jaws of murder.

“We’ll search the debris.” said Todd. “We’ll see if we can identify the plane or the pilot—”

Benson nodded to Smitty. “Let the big fellow look.” The Avenger turned back to Todd. “Where can we talk?”

Todd took him to the little board shack which he had set up as an office. And in there he told what he could about the three deaths.

“You say the two surveyors and the prospector really were struck by lightning?” said Benson at the man’s conclusion. “Well, that confirms what I heard in Chicago, at the Central Construction offices. I’d been thinking that perhaps your report had been garbled in the telegraph office.”

“No, that’s what really happened,” said Todd. “The men were electrocuted just as if struck by lightning. Just as if,” he added, “the mad tales of the Rain God were true.”

“You think they’re true?” said Benson, pale eyes like diamond drills on the engineer’s face.

“No! No, of course not,” said Todd.

“Then what’s your theory about the three deaths?”

Todd was silent for a long time.

“Maybe,” he said, “there is some magnetic influence emanating from the heart of this strange glass mountain. Maybe there are spots where iron outcroppings lie close to the surface, and if a man walks along them there is some sort of static electricity generated that is strong enough to kill him. There has been mention of a sort of vapor that has surrounded the victims before they died. Possibly the moisture from that was enough to build up the static electricity to lethal strength.”

Benson nodded. He didn’t bother to mention that though Todd might be an excellent civil engineer, he was certainly ignorant where electro-physics was concerned. His theory was an utterly impossible one.

And yet three men had been killed by lightning, or some such force.

“That mail plane,” said the engineer suddenly. “It occurs to me, now that I think it over, that I haven’t seen any mail planes fly over here before.”

“Perhaps the pilot was off his course,” Benson said, colorless eyes very still and cold in his white, still face.

He went out to find Smitty.

“There wasn’t any pilot in the mail plane,” the giant reported. “There hadn’t been from the time the thing took off. It was radio-controlled. I found enough bits in the wreckage to know that.”

Benson nodded. Smitty was an electrical engineer of the first rank. His report on such a matter would be final.

“Somebody knew you were coming, Chief,” said Smitty. “Somebody sent the ship up just before you were due to arrive. Somebody kept it circling on the other side of the mountain out of sight till you came in view. Then it was sent straight at you by somebody directing it with the aid of powerful binoculars.”

“The Rain God,” said Benson, “seems to have turned very modern indeed. Gyroscopic controls, radio-run planes, binoculars.”

“And yet,” said Smitty soberly, “there certainly seems to be something to the legend. The old fable has it that the Rain God walks abroad in a pillar of mist and from it strikes with a lightning bolt anybody who has made an enemy of him. Three men died just like that.”

The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes looked like bits of ice in an arctic dawn.

“We’ve fought humans who killed other humans,” he said. “I guess we can fight murderous gods, too.”