The Glass Mountain

CHAPTER IX Dead Man’s Ranch

The Avenger had estimated that it would take half an hour to dislodge enough stone from the entrance of the cave in which he was sealed, to get his body through and out into the open air again.

It took nearly forty minutes.

He had worked as long as he could, breathing the rapidly diminishing air in the water-filling cave. Then, when that last four-inch space disappeared, he had snapped into place the apparatus he rarely traveled without.

The Avenger, with the dead flesh of his face able to be molded into any outline desired, was a master of disguise.

Man of a Thousand Faces, he was called. And rightly so.

However, changing a face is not enough. Benson often found himself forced to alter bodily lines, too.

In order to facilitate that, he had, in the linings of all his suits, thin rubber bladders which could be inflated cleverly to give him more bulk wherever he wanted it. But the bladders served another function.

Hated by the underworld, The Avenger went in constant danger. The commonest form of attack against him, next to gunfire, was an attempt to get him by deadly gas. So Benson carried always with him a little nose-clip gas mask, and always had oxygen in the disguise bladders.

The apparatus worked as well for water as for gas. So for over half an hour, The Avenger had been digging away at the rock slide in what was literally a miniature diving arrangement.

With the forming of a clear hole at the top of the cavern mouth, the water in the cave began to run out. It washed at the rest of the walls and helped him in his work.

He stepped through the fissure onto rocky ground; then he removed the little mask.

There was no sign of the girl. He’d known, of course, there wouldn’t be. With vengeance satisfied, as far as she knew, she would have gone back to the ranch now held in the name of a dead man.

Benson started walking, but not toward the camp. He had two other objectives he wanted to visit before he returned.

One was the other side of Mt. Rainod.

From around the glass mountain, when he had flown in the first day, had come the mail plane that had so nearly killed him. A phony mail plane, of course. A checkup had revealed that no mail plane in the West had been near Mt. Rainod that day.

But even phony mail planes have to have landing fields, of a sort. And radio-controlled ones also have to be near some source of power.

Where had that plane been kept? And how had its radio control been operated? Benson wanted to find out.

He seemed utterly unconscious of his wet clothes and the recent terrific ordeal he had undergone.

It was nearly six miles around the glass mountain to the side opposite from the tunnel mouth. Benson made it in a shade less than an hour. His clothes had dried on him by then in the hot, dry air.

All the land around the glass mountain was as flat as a table top, and looked like one. Only it was strewn with countless rock fragments, from fist size to house size. However, after rounding the foot of the mountain, half a mile ahead, Benson saw one strip that was mysteriously cleared of rocks.

That, he knew, would be the landing field.

A person looking at that bare table formation would have sworn that nothing could take cover on it for any length of time. But The Avenger could hide himself where you’d think nothing larger than a squirrel could keep out of sight.

Lengthwise behind a rock hardly bigger than a pumpkin, crouching behind boulders lower than waist-high, flitting shadowlike to rocks behind which he was able to stand erect, The Avenger got to the edge of the rough landing field so that the eyes of a hawk could hardly have spotted him.

Certainly the one pair of eyes, human, near the field didn’t see him.

There was a rather artificial-looking cave mouth at the mountain end of the cleared strip. At the entrance to this a man sat on a rock and gazed rather vacantly at the landscape. Near him was tethered a horse with an Eastern saddle.

Beyond him, The Avenger’s keen eyes could just make out the tip of a plane. A mate to the crashed mail plane, hangared in the cave.

Benson was curious. The construction camp was comparatively near. How did the man with the horse think that plane could stay out of sight if anybody blundered close?

He let his foot scrape against a rock. The sound carried clearly in the thin air.

The man jumped as if a wasp had stung him. His arm flashed out, and suddenly there wasn’t any cave mouth. There was a sheer section of rock where it had been.

Only eyes as good as the pale, icily flaring ones of The Avenger could have seen that the new stretch of rock was a heavy canvas backdrop, beautifully shaded to match the black basalt around it.

The man’s hand had snapped back from whatever pressure it was that released the canvas curtain, and grabbed his gun out of its holster. He stood now, facing this way and that, obviously not certain that a human foot had made that scraping noise, but not wanting to take any chances.

So Benson removed him from the world of conscious men for a while.

The Avenger had two of the world’s most curious weapons. One was a little, silenced .22 revolver. It was so streamlined that it seemed nothing but a length of slim, blued pipe with a slight bend for a handle and a little bulge where an undersized cylinder carried four special bullets. This he called Mike; and he wore it in a holster strapped to the calf of his right leg.

Strapped to the calf of his left leg, since a quick search of a man for weapons rarely goes below the knee — was a needle-pointed, razor-sharp little throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle, which he called Ike.

He drew Mike now, seemed not to aim at all, and pressed the hair-trigger. There was a hushed, little spat from Mike’s silenced muzzle. And the man at the cave mouth fell over on his face — but not dead.

Mike’s leaden pea had neatly creased him on the top of the skull so that he was knocked out as if hit on the head with a club. It was shooting requiring infinite skill, but it was an eight-inch shot which Benson had practiced till he never missed.

He walked to the unconscious man, face as cold and calm as a glacier’s surface, stainless-steel chips of eyes reflecting no emotion whatever.

He had seen about all he needed to, he thought, after a quick glance into the cave had revealed nothing but plane and drums of gas and oil.

There was an airplane here. There was a guard. That was all.

He flipped onto the man’s horse and started toward the larger, more sprawly mountain next to Mt. Rainod.

Crater lakes are always spectacular things. They look like a giant’s drinking cups, perched high in the sky with steep cliffs for banks. The water in them, welling up under subterranean pressure from somewhere deep in rock that once belched lava, is nearly always crystal clear.

The lake in the crater of the mountain next to Rainod, called appropriately Cloud Lake, was not quite as clear as some. Leaves from clustered trees along its fringe, and ages of water vegetation and algae, had turned it slightly greenish. But it was no less beautiful; and its sheer sides were no less spectacular.

But one bank of the lake didn’t have a sheer cliff. That section was low, looking like a large cup with a bite chewed out of one side. Evidently, ages ago when this was an active volcano, the belching lava had torn down one rim of the inner cavity and escaped that way.

On the rim of the lake, here, was a sprawling, comfortable-looking ranchhouse, with outbuildings and corral fences. Stretching away from it on a long slant down, was the land belonging to it.

The Avenger rode his horse down a slope to a trail winding along the side of the cliff beneath him. He followed the trail to the house.

It was here that Ethel Masterson must dwell — the girl who had twice made such determined attempts on his life, and whose father he was supposed to have killed.

Benson didn’t go to the house at once.

On the lake rim, a hundred yards from the house, were a boat and a little dock. Ethel had mentioned these. It was here that her father had died, shot three times in the head. The pale eyes of The Avenger dwelt on the boat and dock, and then he reined his horse that way.

He dismounted with his icily flaring eyes more glittering than ever.

The dock’s piling showed that the lake was at an ebb slightly lower than usual. The boat showed it, too. It was partially beached, though it was the type that should never be out of the water because, unless submerged, its seams dried and opened.

Benson vaulted back onto the horse and went at a walk toward the house.

The structure ahead of him seemed absolutely deserted. The shades were drawn against the Idaho sun, there was no sign of life anywhere around, and his marvelous ears could catch no sound.

It looked as if the girl had let the normal ranch hands go when her father died and lived on here alone. And it looked now as if even the girl were not here.

Yet The Avenger felt eyes on him.

He kept on his way, hands in plain sight, taking a chance against a sudden bullet if his hunch were right. It wasn’t likely that anybody would cold-bloodedly shoot from ambush unless some rat from the underworld happened to be crouching in that still, vacant-seeming building.

He got to the door without hearing a sound or seeing a thing. He had an idea by now of why Ethel Masterson’s father might have met his death — down at the shore of Cloud Lake. If that idea was right, Masterson might have left some sort of notation, or written word, before he was murdered. Benson wanted to look through the house for such a notation.

He tried the door. It was unlocked, of course, out here. He opened it, stepped into a room that was dim from the window shades.

And four forms closed slowly in on him as he stood there, with four guns pointed straight at his body.

“Jest stand steady, stranger,” drawled one of the four.

Benson stood steady. The four men were lanky, squint-eyed, capable Idaho cowhands. He knew the breed. They shot fast and they shot straight. No man could evade death from the guns of men like these if he disobeyed orders.

Three guns remained on him while the fourth man went over him for weapons. Mike and Ike were not found, but it didn’t seem to matter. Not with these men facing him.

“O.K.,” drawled the searcher. “Got yer rope, Les?”

The four looked curiously at Benson’s face. The absolute lack of expression in the dead, white flesh baffled and awed them, as it did all men. And the cold, pale eyes plainly made them uneasy, even though it was four to one and that one unarmed.

“Yeah, I got the rope, greased an’ handy,” said the one called Les.

“Why are you holding me at gun point?” said Benson, voice quiet but compelling. “Who do you think I am?”

Les said: “That’s a good one! This lousy killer asks who we think he is!”

“Killer?” said Benson.

“Yeah! We been waitin’ twenty hours to see if you’d come back. They say a killer allus comes back to the scene of his killin’, an’ it looks like yuh did.”

“I’ve never been to Cloud Lake before,” said Benson.

“Naw? That’s a hot one! Well, say yuh ain’t been here before. Say yuh didn’t kill Masterson down by the lake. Then why are yuh here now, bustin’ into Masterson’s ranch-house like a damn burglar?”

The Avenger said nothing, his cold, colorless eyes looking for a way out. His reason for being here was so fantastic that it would be worse than useless to give it.

“I’ll tell yuh why you’re here,” said Les. “Yuh came back to be shore yuh didn’t leave nothin’ around that would tie yuh up with Masterson’s death.”

“I can only repeat,” said Benson, “that I have never been here before. I have letters and documents that will establish my character to the satisfaction of everyone, I believe.”

His hand went for his inner coat pocket.

“Keep yore hands up!”

“I only wanted to show—” Benson began. He shrugged. “You went over me for weapons and found none.”

“We ain’t takin’ no chance of lettin’ yuh get yore hand in yore coat. Yuh may have some trick thing we don’t know about.”

“Aw, what’re we waitin’ for?” growled another of the men. “Tie his hands and hobble his ankles.”

Benson’s hands were tied behind his back. At no time were there less than three guns on him. He hadn’t a chance of resisting.

“March!” said one, when wrists had been lashed together and ankles hobbled so that he could only step a foot at a time. “Head out to that tree with the nice big branch about nine feet up. We’re goin’ to hang yuh, mister. The description we got of Masterson’s killer ain’t enough fer the law, the sheriff tells us. But it’s plenty enough fer us. Loop that rope for him, Les.”