The Glass Mountain

CHAPTER VI Walking Tree

Against the side of sinister Mt. Rainod, the men had cleared a new tunnel site, as marked out by Dick Benson. It was many yards from the first false start. The move had been made with Engineer Todd’s full agreement. Todd had heard, before even looking at the white emotionless face and into the pale, marksman’s eyes, of the engineering exploits of this man. He was prepared to take anything The Avenger said as gospel.

But, while the error had been corrected and work was now going on where it should, Benson was in the shack used as an office, looking over the original survey maps.

The landmarks mentioned in all of them were the outcropping of rock that looked like a duck — and the great dead tree.

The tree that the workman had said he’d seen walking.

This tree had twice been found in different places than originally described in the survey. And then Benson had gone out and checked, and found it in still another place.

Three surveys could have been wrong, one after the other — or the tree could actually, incredibly, have moved.

“But, Chief,” remonstrated MacMurdie, “trees don’t walk. ’Tis insane, such an idea.”

“Three surveys of the same right-of-way don’t come out with three different tunnel locations, either,” said The Avenger, eyes brooding and pale.

“So?” said Mac.

“So you will have a good look at this tree that walks, Mac.”

His steely, slim hand touched the Scot’s shoulder for an instant in one of the rare demonstrations of the affection he felt for the men who worked for him.

“Watch yourself, Mac,” Benson said. “There’s something here more fiendish than anything we’ve come against before.”

Mac ambled toward the big dead-tree stump. As he went he studied it with puzzled eyes.

It looked like any other dead tree. It was grayish from long exposure. It was perhaps twenty feet tall, with a rotten cavity showing at the top. It had four or five long, broken stubs of branches. Gnarled roots showed at its base.

It didn’t walk, of course. No tree walks, ever. The very idea was crazy.

Yet Mac had an uncomfortable conviction that the big dead stump was not where it had been an hour ago; and a suspicion that an hour ago it was not where it had been the day before.

Mac tilted the wide brim of his hat a little more over his coarse-skinned, freckled face. It was hot as blazes, though the air was so thin and bone-dry that you didn’t notice it too much.

He was pretty near the big stump now. It was in a sort of bay, to the left of the Donald Duck outcropping. It was that which made him sure that the tree had moved; even though logic told him that such a move was impossible.

A while ago the dead tree had been to the right of the freak outcropping and not so near to it. At least, that was his thought. He was prepared to doubt his own senses on the point.

He climbed a little ridge. The ridge was of the black basalt forming the bulk of the mountain itself.

The rock around here was hard enough — but that black basalt! It was exactly of the texture of inferior glass, almost as smooth and dense as metal. Tunnelling through that was going to be a real job!

He looked at the tree again.

“Whoosh! I’m balmy with the heat,” he said aloud.

The tree had been right beside a boulder, shaped a little like a decayed skull. Now it was in front of the boulder.

Mac told himself that as he himself had moved, his line of vision had altered enough to account for the change. But he didn’t believe it for a minute.

“It did move!” he admitted finally.

Then he saw three men.

There was no place the men could have come from, without Mac’s having seen them before. The mountain’s side was smooth in front of him, with no rock big enough to hide the three. The camp was quite a distance off. The three men would have to spring from the ground, itself, to get so near Mac so fast. That was as absurd as the thought of a tree walking.

But there the three men were.

They were dressed as were the construction crew. But Mac couldn’t place them. That didn’t mean for sure that they weren’t from the camp, because about sixty men were on the rolls, and the Scot couldn’t be dead sure of that many faces.

Nevertheless, he was disquieted a little because he couldn’t recognize them, and he moved warily as he neared them.

“Hello,” he said. “Some kind of work goin’ on here, too?”

The biggest of the three smiled ingratiatingly.

“It’s noon hour,” he replied. “We’re just strollin’ around a little to get the rock chips out of our lungs.”

Mac nodded. It was lunch time, all right. But most of the men spent that period right at the tables now being served by Josh. The Scot’s wariness increased.

He kept on toward the tree that was his goal. He was pretty close, and it seemed to him that there were signs of fresh dirt or, rather, fine shale, around the gnarled roots.

The men kept on, too — toward Mac.

He debated shouting to the camp, but decided it would be foolish to holler before he was hit. And the men seemed quite good-natured. It was the natural decision of a man who doesn’t want to risk looking like a fool. And it was a wrong decision, this time.

Mac got to the tree just as the men did. The biggest of the trio grinned at Mac with all the amiability in the world. At the same time he said to the two others:

“All right, take him!”

It was done with such two-faced, treacherous swiftness that Mac, even though he’d had a slight apprehension of trouble, wasn’t ready for it.

A man got him from the right and another from the left. He felt a fist club under his ear, and another rake across his cheek.

The Scot had fists, himself. Doubled, they were like big bone mallets. Dazed as he was by the blow under the ear, he lashed out and knocked the man to his left sprawling. He doubled the other man up with a blow to the stomach.

The third, the biggest fellow, rammed him. There was a smack as knuckles contacted with Mac’s jaw, and a thud as a heavy boot caught him in the thigh. He sank to the ground feeling as if his legs had been broken. Then the big fellow picked up a rock and hit Mac with it.

The Scotchman went out as if dropped into a black ocean, after seeing a million lights explode behind his eyeballs.

“Kind of tough, ain’t he?” said one of the men, getting up from the ground and rubbing his jaw.

“All the guys who work for that dead-pan they call The Avenger are tough,” said the big fellow.

He was bending over Mac’s feet. From them he was taking the rubber-soled shoes that had saved his life from a lightning bolt awhile ago.

“But this one,” he said, when the Scot’s feet were sheathed only in socks, “won’t be tough enough to shed lightning, I think.”

As he was speaking, from near the duck outcropping, a pillar of fog was swiftly forming. The appearance of the thing was like the slow emergence from its hole of a great serpent, when other beasts — or men — have killed and left the victim near it.

The pillar solidified, turned greenish. Then, at a pace about as fast as a man can walk, it rolled toward Mac. The three men ran stumbling in fright from it. In a way they were working with the thing; but they feared it as much as the keepers of a great beast might fear the thing even as they fed it.

The pillar of greenish mist didn’t go after them. It advanced straight toward the one goal; the unconscious man lying with bared feet.

As it moved, a faint hissing sounded from its center, like the hissing of a mighty reptile. Or, perhaps, of an enraged god?

But Mac didn’t hear that, or anything else. He lay as helpless as a child before the advancing pillar.

A dusty touring car had come to the edge of the camp. At the wheel was a man who seemed, from a distance, to be a cattleman from the vicinity. Wide-brimmed hat, tieless shirt, dusty coat, he appeared to be a typical rancher. But he was not a cattleman. It was Jim Crast, from Chicago.

The Avenger went to the car, got in, and the two drove off a little distance. Crast was here secretly. He had wired Benson before coming. He didn’t want anyone in the camp to know of his visit.

“Well?” he said anxiously, looking at the masterful, dead face and the strange, pale eyes of The Avenger. “Has anything been found out?”

“Nothing definite,” said Benson. “Plenty has happened. The Rain God has walked abroad several times, enveloped in his cloud, and has struck down with lightning bolts.”

Crast stared at him.

“You mean you believe—”

“But no fact has yet emerged to really work on,” Benson continued. “I have some ideas of what is going on. Most amazing ideas. But they are still — only ideas.”

“I was hoping things were clearing up,” sighed Crast. His face was suddenly old with worry. “Everything we have is tied up in the Mt. Rainod tunnel. The least trouble will bankrupt us. We… we’re about four million dollars under the next lowest bid. That’s how close we shaved it.”

“That’s a big discrepancy,” said Benson.

“We figured we could do it all right. Fyler made up the total, and he’s a good man with figures. But even if everything goes smoothly, we have our work cut out for us. Drilling through a mountain of glass is a terrific job.”

“I have a suggestion there,” Benson said. “A way to short-cut the drilling. This stuff is glass. Therefore, treat it like glass. Don’t drill it — crack it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Crast.

“Build fires,” ordered Benson. “When the basalt is hot, play cold water on it. The stuff will crack just as a hot tumbler cracks when cold water is poured in it.”

“Holy codfish!” said Crast reverently. “Why couldn’t I have thought of that? But I’ve always known you were the world’s greatest engineer—”

The Avenger cut in: “Can you trust the people in your organization, Jim?”

Crast looked troubled.

“Why, I suppose so. Most of them have worked for us for a long time. Why do you ask?”

“Because there has been treachery on the part of some one in the Chicago office,” said Benson, eyes like steel splinters.

“You’re sure?” gasped Crast.

“Very sure,” said The Avenger. “Someone knew all about the arrival here — and sent a radio-controlled plane to ram my ship and kill me. Someone knew all about the arrival of my aides, and their connection with me. That could only have come from the Chicago office.”

Crast was looking a little sick.

“What’s the matter?” said Benson.

“Ryan,” said Crast. “But that’s impossible.”

The Avenger’s face was a frightening mask. His eyes had the glitter of diamond drills.

“Tom Ryan went out of the conference room just after you left,” Crast went on. “I remember, now. He telephoned. I know that much. It might have been to his wife. It might have been — to a confederate who could notify someone at this end.”

The Avenger’s eyes were ice-cold, but fair.

“It would be more logical that he would phone much later, after getting entirely away from the office, if he had crooked work in mind,” he said. “The phone call may be coincidence, no indication at all that he is the leak in the Chicago office.”

“Of course, of course!” said Crast, fairly grasping at the words. “It—must have been just coincidence! Ryan, my own partner? No, he couldn’t be mixed up in anything crooked.”

He lit a cigar with a trembling hand.

“Run me back to the edge of the camp,” said Benson. “Then you might as well go back to Chicago. There is nothing you can do here.”

Benson got off near camp, and Crast drove away in a cloud of dust. Some of the men eyed The Avenger sideways as he passed them on his way to the office shack. And The Avenger saw their lips move.

The things they were saying, he had seen the men say before, in the past few hours. They were calling him a murderer; even as the girl had called him one, and for no more reason that Benson could see.

And as he thought of the girl, he saw her slim figure coming toward him from around the construction office shack.