The Sky Walker

CHAPTER IV The Sky Walker!

As temporary headquarters in Chicago, Benson had rented the entire top floor of a big hotel. Elevator operators had received orders to take no one to that floor who hadn’t phoned up first and gotten an O.K. That was because the underworld was beginning to realize the deadly enemy they had in the pale-eyed Avenger, and many were out to get him if they could.

Benson was up there now, talking to Josh Newton and Rosabel. Smitty and Nellie Gray and MacMurdie listened in.

“Then you have no idea what it was the brothers were working on?” Benson said to Josh.

“No, sir,” said the colored man. “I haven’t. Mr. Max and Mr. Robert kept their secrets to themselves.”

“You say their laboratory was broken into about a month ago, and something very important was taken?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the brothers did not get in touch with the police?”

“No, sir. They didn’t want even the police to know what they were working on.”

“But Max Gant went to police headquarters yesterday evening.”

“Yes, sir. But that was because the pavilion had collapsed, and he was afraid there’d be more disasters if he didn’t tell what he knew — put the city authorities on their guard.”

“Then their inventions were definitely connected with that collapse, and with the noise in the sky,” Benson nodded. “But that’s all you know?”

“Absolutely all, sir.”

“The brothers must have had materials and supplies delivered. And I suppose you took them in occasionally. Can you remember what any of them were?”

“No, sir,” Josh said. But here Rosabel spoke up.

“I remember one thing,” she said. “It was a small package from the Warwick Corporation in New Jersey. I signed for it, and gave it to Mr. Max. He was too eager to wait till he got up to the laboratory with it, and opened it on the way up the stairs. I got a look at the stuff he took from the package. It was a thin, long strip of stuff that looked like glass. But I guess it wasn’t glass, because Mr. Max bent it around in his fingers. And he kept saying: ‘This would do the trick. As tough as steel and as transparent as glass.’ ”

Into Benson’s icy-pale eyes the glitter was coming.

“That strip,” he mused, “would be Glassite, a new Warwick product. It’s a plastic that is as clear as glass, but is unbreakable. Thank you very much, Rosabel. You’ve told me more than, perhaps, you realize.”

MacMurdie spoke, scowling. He was an expert chemist, and knew all about the new product, Glassite. But no perplexity had been cleared from his face by the mention of it here.

“What does all this rigamarole mean to ye, Muster Benson?” he asked.

“It means,” said Benson slowly, his dead white face like a mask of Fate, “that Chicago and the region around it will bitterly regret the day that strip of Glassite was delivered to the Gant brothers for experimentation. Now tell me, Josh, Rosabel, what are your plans for the future?”

Josh looked at his pretty wife. She nodded. The bond between these two was close enough so that looks could substitute for words.

“We could get another position pretty easily, sir,” Josh said respectfully. “Most of Mr. Robert’s and Mr. Max’s friends know about us and could use us. But we’d like to work for you if that’s possible.”

Benson’s unreadable, icy eyes probed the two of them.

Rosabel said: “Those two brothers were the finest men we’ve ever known. And they were murdered in cold blood. We’d like to work for you at least till those murderers have got what’s coming to them. We’ll work for nothing if you don’t feel you can afford us.”

Something almost like a smile touched Benson’s clear, pale eyes. Few people knew how much wealth he had acquired from previous adventuring. In addition, in southern Mexico in a cache known only to him and his associates, was the vast golden hoard of the Aztecs, buried centuries ago from the invading Spaniards, recently discovered by Benson through explorations of Nellie Gray’s archeologist father. That hoard was in Nellie’s name, but she had insisted it be used as an inexhaustible bank account by Benson in his crime work.

Asking if Benson could afford Josh and Rosabel was like asking if the United States mint could afford to hire a new scrubwoman.

“I’ll be glad to have you help us,” Benson said, after a moment. “But there may be danger—”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Josh said quietly. “What comes next?”

They all listened carefully for the answer to that. But Benson only shook his head and said:

“We’ll have to wait for the next break. We haven’t anything to work on at the moment. We know that some gang stole a secret invention — perhaps more than one — from the Gant brothers. We know that, thus armed, the gang has some huge, terroristic plot they’re working on. But — that’s all we do know. We’ll have to wait for the next development.”

The next break was not long in coming. It happened, not in Chicago, but fifty miles out along the lake past Gary, Indiana.

Up around the east side of Lake Michigan from South Chicago to the Catawbi Iron Range in Michigan, runs the Catawbi Railroad. It hugs the water edge, going through barren dune country for much of its length.

For freight, the Catawbi Railroad depends on shipments of ore from the Catawbi iron mines to the South Chicago and Gary, Indiana, steel mills. Passengers come from a score of pretty lake towns along the shore where commuters from Chicago live. The commuters board the Catawbi train, go to South Chicago, and there change to local transportation taking them to downtown offices.

This thing happened along the lake shore in a particularly deserted sand-dune region. It happened at a little after one o’clock in the afternoon. That was fortunate. At that hour, there were less people on the train to which it happened than there would have been during the commuters’ rush hour.

The five-car train of passenger coaches was rattling over the roadbed at a sixty-mile clip. The engineer was looking ahead all right, but not very attentively. There was no reason why he should be especially alert.

He had been over this stretch of right of way, in the other direction, two hours ago, and everything had been O.K. then. There were no crossings to watch out for. The day was clear and sunny, so vision was excellent.

He was looking, rather inattentively, at the roadbed ahead of the speeding engine. Then he jerked straight on the seat in the cab and stared with incredulous eyes. After that, he jammed on the brakes so hard the wheels locked and steel shrieked in anguish on steel.

Ahead, there was suddenly no railroad track to run on!

The track ran on for a few hundred yards more, then sort of melted away. Beyond that, as far as the bewildered eye could see, there were no rails at all.

The ties were there. Even at a moment crowded with horror, the engineer caught a glimpse of spikes in the ties in a line where rails should be. But there was no trace of the rails themselves!

At least two miles of track had vanished as though it had never existed — though it had been there two hours before.

The engineer was swearing in a cracked voice and jerking at the brake lever. The train was grinding along with locked wheels. And it hit the section where there were no rails to run on—

Heavy ties flew and splintered like so many matches. Sand rose in great geysers. The engineer and fireman had tried to jump at the last moment, but before they could the engine crashed over on its side. Broken boilers poured water on the hot fire, and there was a tremendous explosion.

The cars behind, with their hundreds of tons and mile-a-minute momentum, kept on grinding forward, pushing the debris of the engine along and piling in on each other. Then there was silence, punctuated by the crackle of flames and shattered finally by the screams of the passengers.

The conductor and brakeman, who had been in the last coach, were shaken up but otherwise unhurt. They rescued the passengers who were still alive, from the flames. The brakeman began running ahead to the next commuters’ town, over the roadbed from which the long section of rails had been so mysteriously taken.

The conductor raced toward a big man in ragged overalls who had helped in the wreck after appearing over the dunes a short time after the crash.

“Were you around here before the wreck?” the conductor demanded, almost out of his mind. It was the worst wreck in the road’s history. “Did you see anybody around here? Who could have taken a couple of miles of steel rails! And how, and why?”

The farmer blinked eyes that didn’t look very intelligent. He was shambling, shabby.

“I was around here for a coupla hours,” he said. “I didn’t see nobody anywheres near, though. Except in the sky.”

“In the sky?” chattered the conductor. “What are you talking about? What do you mean — in the sky?”

“I was around here lookin’ for a calf that got away,” the man said, blinking in stupid sympathy at the groaning forms laid on the sand. “I got a farm five miles in. I was in from the tracks a half-mile, mebbe. I heard a noise in the sky. It was like what a plane might make. Only there wasn’t no plane in the sky. But there was a man up there, walkin’.”

The conductor literally staggered. Then he cursed.

“Are you a lunatic? This is nothing to joke about. A man walking in the sky! You’d better have a better story to tell when the State police get here!”

“You asked what I seen,” the man said. “So I’m tellin’ you. I got good eyes. The best eyes of anybody in these parts. I see things most people have to have glasses to see. And I saw what I said.”

He shifted from one foot to the other in his earnestness.

“Way up in the sky, a guy was walkin’. Hunder’ yards to a step. He was pushin’ something in front of him. Looked about the size of a barrel. I don’t know what it was, and I don’t know how a guy can walk in the air, but that’s what this guy was doin’. I seen him plain, before he went into the sun and I couldn’t see no more.”

That was the man’s story, and he stuck to it.

He had heard a weird noise in the sky at about the time two miles of solid steel rails had vanished. He had looked for a plane, but had seen no plane. Instead, with a remarkably good pair of eyes, he had seen a man walking up there. Walking, in thin air! And pushing something ahead of him about the size of a barrel.

The crazy tale wasn’t worth paying attention to, of course. But, meanwhile, there was the theft of two miles of rail to clear up — and the thieves to be brought to justice for causing a railroad wreck of disastrous proportions.

The small Catawbi Railroad couldn’t stand many disasters like that wreck. In the small South Chicago office building owned as home office by the road, the president of the board of directors paced his office.

The president was Abel Darcey. He was not really a railroad man. He was a banker and a heavy investor in South Chicago industry, with a big home up along the lake.

The directors of the road weren’t railroad men, either. The Catawbi Railroad had a curious history.

Some years before, all the little shore towns through which the road had passed had decided that railroads were fair game for rich taxes. One after another, the townships had piled special taxes on the road till a point had been reached where its running was no longer profitable.

It had been abandoned. But that stranded several thousand well-to-do commuters with homes on the lake and offices in the city. So the commuters had gotten the taxes rescinded, each in the districts in which they lived; then they had formed their own stock company and taken the road over, with Abel Darcey to head the board of directors.

The road just about paid for itself, which was enough for the owners, since all they wanted was sure transportation. But there weren’t enough finances in its backing to stand shocks like that wreck!

Darcey stopped his pacing long enough to ring for his secretary. He was a clear-skinned man of sixty, with eyes ordinarily calm enough but now very worried indeed.

The secretary, a trim brunette, came in.

“Have you found out who made the offer to buy the road?” Darcey asked her.

“No, sir,” she said. “It came through the Michigan Bank. That’s all anyone knows.”

“Well, I notified all the chief stockholders that an offer had been made and they could get out from under if the wreck scared them off,” Darcey said, looking harassed. “I’m willing to sell and run. Got fifty thousand in the thing. Are the answers in yet?”

The secretary nodded. “One from Colonel Ringset, of Catawbi Iron Range, makes a majority report. I was just coming in with it. They don’t want to sell.”

Darcey sighed.

“I suppose they’re right in their attitude. But I wish I knew who wanted to buy. And I wish I knew what in Heaven’s name could be responsible for the disappearance of two miles — hundreds of tons — of steel railroad rails!”

The newspapers were out by then, with stories of the fantastic theft. All had big front-page headlines. But only one said anything about the sky walker.

A farmer had seen a man walking in the sky, taking hundred-yard strides and pushing something like a barrel ahead of him. The story was too silly for the big dailies to use. Only one, a minor tabloid, mentioned it.