The Glass Mountain

CHAPTER VIII Face of the Rain God

Josh was peeling potatoes for the evening meal, though it was barely past the noon-day one. He had to start early, because sixty or sixty-five workmen eat a lot of potatoes.

Josh didn’t like peeling potatoes. His sleepy-looking face didn’t show it, but his actions did. He was slicing a sharp knife along the skins with much more energy than was necessary.

Smitty had the power generators and other electrical equipment in the excellent order that only an electrical wizard such as himself could have achieved. So he was at the camp with Josh.

“For a dead man,” the giant remarked cheerfully, “you show a lot of pep at potato peeling.”

Josh shivered a little.

“Don’t even joke about it,” he said, recalling the bad moment when he had come to, to find himself on one end of a seesaw plank with The Avenger looking down at him.

“You sure were dead,” mused Smitty. “How does it feel?”

“To be dead?” said the Negro, shivering again. “It doesn’t feel at all.”

“You didn’t have any visions or anything?”

“No. It was just like unconsciousness, that was all. Something hit me on the shoulder like a falling mountain, and then everything went dark. Just like unconsciousness.”

Smitty watched the too energetic potato peeling some more. Then he said, “What do you suppose all this nonsense is about the chief being a murderer?”

“I don’t know,” said Josh, “but somebody has been very methodical in spreading the rumor. Evidently some person living in the neighborhood has been killed recently, and they’re trying to pin it on Mr. Benson.”

“Well, that seems pretty silly.” Smitty picked up a small raw potato and began to gnaw on it. The giant took a lot of food, more than he could usually pack away at regular mealtimes. His big frame needed a great deal of fuel.

“Silly things can occasionally cause a lot of trouble,” observed Josh. He was a dusky philosopher, in his way. “It’s the senseless things that stir the crowd. Logic is too coarse to get in between the skull bones. Where’s Mac?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since before the chief went off with that girl.”

“Who is the girl, anyway?” asked Josh, pausing in his peeling long enough to wipe his dark countenance with the tail of the white apron he had donned on taking over the camp cook’s job.

“I don’t know. From some ranch eight or ten miles away, I think. She has something to do with the crazy yarn about Mr. Benson’s being a murderer.”

Off against the mountain flank, at the new and accurate tunnel site pegged by The Avenger, was a miniature edition of Hades.

Great piles of wood had been heaped and set afire next to the glass mountain’s sharp rise. The flames roared, making an inferno of the already hot air, heating the dense, black basalt to intolerable temperature.

There was a hiss, and an increased roar as water was hosed on the hot mass. Then there were cracking sounds like the breaking up of a glacier. Little chasms a foot or more wide and going far back into the glass mountain appeared as heat expansion and cold contraction rent the stuff into a thousand fragments.

“Boy, we’ll get some place in a hurry with that cracking process,” gloated Smitty. “There’ll be hardly any work for the drills—”

One of the workmen was running toward them.

“Now, why isn’t this guy at his post?” Smitty said.

“Oh-oh!” said Josh. “Trouble coming. I can smell it. On a hot day a man only runs for a maid or a murder. And there are no girls around—”

The man stopped, panting, before them. He was the big fellow who had overpowered Mac when the Scot had succeeded in downing the other two assailants. But not being seventh sons of seventh sons, Josh and Smitty could not know that.

“The Scotchman!” gasped the man, gulping for air as if he had run a mile at top speed. “He’s in trouble! He’s a pal of yours, ain’t he?”

The giant Smitty nodded. He had leaped to his feet. His vast hand fastened on the man’s shoulder with an unconscious force that made the fellow cry out.

“Where is he?” snapped Smitty. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s a little valley around the left end of the mountain,” panted the man. “I was there a little while ago and—”

“How is it you were around the foot of the mountain?” Smitty caught him up. “Why weren’t you at the tunnel site?”

“They didn’t need me. I’m a driller, an’ they ain’t drillin’ right now. They’re crackin’ the rock.”

“Go ahead!”

“I was near this little valley, an’ just goin’ in when I seen this pillar of cloud everybody’s talkin’ about. It was quite a ways off so I watched it for a while, ready to run if it came my way. Then I seen the guy lyin’ a little ways in front of the mist.”

“MacMurdie? You’re sure?”

“Yeah!”

“And he was just lying there? You mean he was unconscious?”

“Yeah! Sure! He must have been or he’d run — like any sensible guy from that damn green cloud. I didn’t have the nerve to get him. I’ll admit it. Everybody that’s gone near the green fog has died, an’ I didn’t want to be one of the dead ones. So I legged it for camp. Hurry back with me! It’s probably all over, minutes ago. But we might still be in time.”

Josh was shedding his apron. The man began running back, along the foot of the glass mountain.

“Why,” moaned Josh, who hated physical exercise as a cat hates it, “couldn’t they have horses here at camp?”

“What do you think this is?” said Smitty in reply. “A construction camp, or a riding academy? We’ve got a couple trucks, to go to town Saturday nights, but they happen to be away. So we leg it.”

It developed that they weren’t destined to leg it very far.

Ahead of them was one of the jutting slopes that occurred like bastions around Mt. Rainod’s foot at irregular distances. Between each of these, like the space between outstretched arms and a chest, with the mountain being the chest, was a shallow box canyon.

They rounded the natural bastion ahead of them, and abruptly stopped running. The man who had come to them with the urgent message about Mac being in trouble, grinned. He was breathless but triumphant.

There were two men at the other side of the rock outcropping. Each had a gun. Each had stepped suddenly into the way of the running men.

A gun was poking a hole in Josh’s stomach, and another was grinding against Smitty’s hard abdomen.

The giant looked down at the gunman in front of him, and then at the man who had come to camp for them.

“So we weren’t running to help Mac,” he said evenly. He was breathing almost easily in spite of the run in the hot, thin air. And the gunmen noticed that fact, significant of great endurance as well as great strength, and handled their guns even more warily than they had before.

“No,” said the panting man who had guided them into this pitfall, “you weren’t runnin’ to help your Scotch buddy. Nobody can help him. It’s even too late, now, for the guy with the white hair to bring him back to life. He’ll have been dead an hour by now.”

“You seem very sure,” said Smitty.

“Oh, I’m sure enough,” retorted the man, wolfish grin widening. “I oughta be. I’m the guy that turned him over to the Rain God.”

“Then I’m going to be the guy who turns you over to the rats,” said Smitty. “I’ll let you feed your brothers, if they can stand you.”

“You won’t be turnin’ nobody over to nobody,” said the man whose gun was in Smitty’s stomach. “But you’ll see your pal, all right, after the Rain God gets done with you.”

The other man nodded. His gun was not so warily held as was his companion’s. It didn’t seem necessary to watch anyone as sleepy-looking as Josh very closely. Just a scared, dull-witted, harmless Negro.

“March,” said the man with Smitty, “right on along the way you were running. And I’ll blow your spine in two if you make a funny move.”

Smitty and Josh went along the way they’d started, around the next bastion. Behind each marched a man with a gun. And behind the lot of them came the third man, also with a gun out, to rectify any slip either of his two pals might make.

The next shallow, dead-end little canyon had a back end as steep as the wall of a house. In the bottom of it, though, was a crack about twenty feet long and tapering from nothing at each end to about two feet in the middle.

“Turn around!” said Smitty’s man.

The giant stood still.

“You won’t shoot,” he said. “If you’d wanted to, you’d have done it long ago. Either you don’t want the sound of shots to be heard, or you have some reason for not wanting our dead bodies found with bullet holes in them.”

“I’ll lean on this trigger so fast you’ll never know what struck you,” snarled the man, “if you don’t stop stalling, and turn around.”

Smitty’s vast shoulders weren’t hunched for a try at escape any more. Josh had turned, too. They were both acutely conscious of the guns at their spines.

“Holy gee!” Smitty heard one of the men breathe. He caught fear and awe in the speaker’s voice. And he felt the gun waver a bit.

“Here she comes,” said one of the others.

Smitty turned his head enough to see back over his shoulder a little. And out of the tail of his eye, he saw a greenish wisp of vapor, cloud-like and thin. Turning a little more, he saw the pillar, itself.

A solid-looking pillar of green fog. It hadn’t been there before. Nothing had been between them and the black cliff.

“Smitty—” Josh’s voice cracked.

Smitty’s vast shoulders were hunched for a try at escape in spite of the gun. But he knew it was hopeless. It was a hundred to one that he couldn’t move fast enough to evade the murderous muzzle of the automatic.

He didn’t have to try.

There was a scrambling sound from beyond the far rock “arm” forming one side of the shallow little canyon. Then there was a swish, almost lost in the hissing noise that came from the green pillar. At the end of it, the man with a gun in Smitty’s back staggered and yelled.

Smitty whirled like a flyweight boxer instead of the vast hulk he was. He got an instant’s glimpse of the man clawing at his face. Blood was streaming down from under his left eye, where a rock had hit him. His gun wasn’t in line for the moment.

The man watching Josh yelled and ducked as another rock sailed in a flat and deadly arc toward his head. So Josh knocked the man out with a wicked loop to the side of his head. And Smitty’s tremendous paw caught the gun wrist of the other man.

The fellow dropped the gun and screamed as the giant put on a little pressure. The third man, the one who had led them here, was looking in all directions at once. He sent a shot at random toward the spot where the rocks had seemed to come from. Then he saw what had happened to his two companions.

He snapped his gun up to shoot Smitty down. But the giant moved first. He jerked the man he held by the arm toward the third fellow. The man whirled a dozen feet over the rocky ground like a snapped melon seed and crashed into the other.

Smitty bounded after the thrown body. He caught the one man by the shoulder, and the other by the nape of the neck. He crashed the two together.

It was not entirely by design that their skulls collided squarely, and with such force as to kill the one who had led the way here and almost kill the other. But Smitty had said he’d feed the guide to his brother rats; and that was the way it turned out.

The Avenger himself never took a human life. It was his subtle code to force the supercriminals he fought to destroy themselves by their own greed. But The Avenger’s aides sometimes found themselves in a position where it was kill or be killed. When they did, they were unable to feel any qualms about it.

Smitty stared with no feeling of guilt, whatever, at the dead guide, and the man with the cracked skull, and the fellow Josh had knocked out.

Then he heard Josh yell: “Mac!” and turned.

The Scot was climbing laboriously, and a little unsteadily down the rock flank. He came up to them, and they saw that his coarse, freckled face was pale.

“So you’re the big-league pitcher who saved our lives,” Smitty said. “Good pitching, Mac. A direct hit and a near-hit, from at least fifty yards away.”

“We heard you were dead, Mac,” said Josh. “How did you get here?”

“I dinna rightly know,” said Mac, lapsing into broader Scotch than usual. “I was wanderin’ in mind and body, and found myself up there. Then I looked down and saw those skurlies with guns on you, holdin’ you for the green fog to get you.”

“Which reminds me,” said Smitty. “Where is the green pillar?”

It wasn’t in view. It had faded from sight as suddenly and temperamentally as it had grown into being.

“It seems to move around pretty fast,” said Mac. “I was quite a distance from here when it came after me.”

“You did have a brush with it, then,” Smitty said. “At least there was that much truth in the words of the guy who led us here.”

“The skurly who led you here,” Mac said somberly, “was the same one that put me in the way of the green pillar. He knocked me on the head; so it was an hour or more before I was thinkin’ straight again. Then he left me for the fog to get.”

“And?” said Josh.

“I don’t know yet quite how I got away. By climbin’ the tree, I guess.”

“Tree?” said Smitty.

“I was knocked out at the foot of the big dead tree, near the funny outcropping. I came to, a very little, when something wet touched my face. The wetness was the greenish fog of that queer lookin’ pillar. I caught a branch low enough to feel with my hands up, and hauled myself into the tree. I kept on goin’ till I was near the top, though still in the mist. And after a while the pillar went back toward the mountain again, and I got down. There was a blank spell, and now I’m here.”

“The Rain God walking enveloped in his cloud,” Josh mused. “Striking with a lightning bolt. But it’s odd that merely climbing a tree should fool a god.”

“Maybe he can’t see in his own cloud any more than others can,” shrugged Smitty.

Mac wasn’t listening to either of them.

“I saw him for a minute, in the cloud,” he said.

They gaped at him.

“Saw who? The Rain God? Don’t be nuts!”

“But I did,” said Mac. “And a horrifyin’ thing it was too. I got just a glimpse of his face. An old, old Indian, it seemed to be. But he looked like somethin’ straight out of the Pawnee hell.”