The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER XIX The Avenger Plans

It was all Nellie could do to keep from screaming as she saw what the man at the base of the shaft was doing. For the purpose was only too clear. Too terribly clear!

A deep fissure dividing the ridge. A great rock shaft along the fissure, weighing hundreds of tons. Explosives around the base of the shaft!

A shattering explosion, and the fall of that great weight, would almost certainly send that whole side of the ledge, hundreds of thousands of tons of stone, avalanching down on Smitty and Mac. The slide would reach the great tree, sweep it down like a twig, cover it, and go on for another hundred yards or more. They were doomed — everything on that side of the ledge was doomed, if those explosives went off.

Calmly, coldly, the man was coming toward Nellie, dropping a few of the peanut bombs lightly down the fissure, too, just to make sure. They’d be exploded with the blast of the shells around the rock shaft.

He got nearer, lifted his head a little, and for the first time Nellie saw his face in the late afternoon sun. And then she didn’t entirely manage to keep back her exclamation.

The man was Olin Chandler, “carried off” a while ago into the jungle by their enemies!

Chandler heard the girl’s repressed gasp, up there in the silence. He crouched, then began racing toward the bush behind which she was hiding. He had his gun out.

Nellie shot at him. She saw the peak of his coat at the shoulder split a little. He began zigzagging toward her. She shot again, and missed.

She felt like a person in a nightmare. If she didn’t stop this man, there would be an avalanche of rock like an earthquake, and Smitty and Mac would die under tons of stone. Everything rested on her.

Chandler began shooting, now. At every other step he sent a slug tearing through the bush at the person he could not see. He didn’t hit with any of them, but he kept Nellie down where she could not shoot back. And then he was around and on her.

His savage eyes raked her with a little surprise, which was succeeded by murderous fury. He didn’t slow up at all — leaped straight toward her, a hundred and eighty pounds against her fragile-looking hundred and five.

Nellie seemed to dissolve and reappear a foot to the left. She whirled with his rush, hands grasping his outstretched right arm and abruptly letting go again. Chandler smashed on for twenty feet like something out of a slingshot, and fell to the ground.

He was up and back at her like a cat.

Nellie had dropped her gun. She scrambled for it, and couldn’t get it in time. Chandler’s gun crashed down for her head. She ducked, got a glancing blow, and caught at his ankles, dazed with pain.

He fell, but not hard enough to stun him. He got to his knees and struck with the gun barrel again. This time Nellie felt the world go black, though again she had managed to elude the full force of the blow. Only the silky thickness of her hair saved her life.

She fell, and felt herself being dragged over the rocky ledge-top. She was dumped like an empty sack, and a moment later managed to open her eyes.

She had been left midway between the deadly fissure and the edge of the ridge, on the side doomed to split away from the other two-thirds and come crashing down.

Chandler was off at quite a little distance. Dazedly, she saw him hurrying toward a stunted tree, well away from the rock shaft and on the safe side of the ledge. He had a rifle in his hands now.

Her numbed brain was struggling with the meaning of his move, knowing what it portended and yet not able to put it into a clear picture.

She cried out a little, and struggled to move. A gun — explosives at the base of the great shaft — a shot—

Chandler meant to explode the terrible little bombs with a bullet from a safe distance.

He got to the tree. There was a fork in it. He placed the rifle in the fork, for a positive gun-rest. He sighted toward the statue.

Nellie was screaming, without quite being aware of it. She heard her voice keening out, and hardly knew it was hers. Like a crippled thing, she was crawling toward the fissure, unable to stand up, going on hands and knees. And Chandler was sighting long and expertly at several of the little bombs in an exposed heap at the base of the shaft. Even with a gun-rest, it was a difficult shot from the distance he had taken for safety.

Screaming, crawling, Nellie urged her dazed body toward the fissure, to cross it and be on the safe side when the bullet spanged into the little bombs. Chandler flicked a glance at her, saw that she was no menace, and turned back to his long, sure aim.

Nellie was near the fissure. She’d never make it! Yes, she might—

A hand caught her arm and pulled her violently back. She screamed again, and fought the grasp that was robbing her of her fight for life. The hand simply pulled her back some more, farther onto the strip of ledge that was to crash into grinding fragments with the pull of a trigger.

She turned to beat the force preventing her from reaching the fissure.

She got an instant’s glimpse of a red-brown native in tattered pants and cotton jacket — but a native from whose dark features blazed pale, deadly eyes, and whose face had no more expression than a mask of dark clay.

Those icily flaring, colorless eyes — the chief!

She never heard the shot. It was instantly engulfed in a blast that seemed to rock all that part of Mexico. The ground rolled and heaved under them. The roar of the explosion seemed to prolong itself on and on, mingled with the grating sounds made by rock fragments as big as five-story buildings grinding together.

Herself and this “Indian” with Benson’s eyes — riding the falling crest of the ridge strip for a few seconds — to be ground to bits in the slide that would also bury Mac and Smitty as bits of pulp—

But somehow Nellie didn’t feel herself falling. The solid rock beneath her was still doing a devil’s dance. The incredible roar of falling rock, like the thunder of a dozen tidal waves rolled into one, was going on and on.”

But she didn’t seem to be falling.

She opened her eyes.

She was at the sheer edge of a cliff whose face was of glittering, newly exposed rock. Before her, several hundred feet down, was a moving, awful carpet of tremendous rock slabs that hadn’t yet come to rest but was rolling on and on over the jungle growth, engulfing trees as if they’d been grass blades.

On and on over the jungle floor — and over the camp of Borg’s men — and then on some more.

It was the two-thirds of the ridgetop that had slid with the explosion, not the narrower strip of Mac and Smitty’s side. It was Borg’s camp that had been buried by uncountable tons of rock, not their own side. And Chandler?

If he had screamed in mad amazement and horror when he saw that he had sent himself to oblivion by his misguided shot, no one would ever know; for the screams of a city could not have been heard in that uproar.

The world-shattering din slowly subsided as the last of the avalanching rock slabs slid to a stop among crumpled trees over an eighth of a mile from where the slide had begun. Still Nellie couldn’t hear anything; her eardrums were temporarily out of commission. But she could see. And her eyes, wide with awe and horror on the scene in front of her, caught movement at her side out of their corners. She turned.

The “Indian” face as immobile as a thing carved in granite, pale eyes like colorless agate, was standing at her side and looking, too.

She started to say something to him, saw him look down at her — and fainted.

Benson had the brown stuff off his skin. Still in the Indian’s rags because he had no way of getting other clothes for a little while, he was still a more impressive figure than any Nellie had ever seen before as he stood at the top of the freshly made cliff.

Mac and Smitty were there. They had seen the machine gunners fleeing in superstitious terror before the deafening catastrophe that sounded like a world ending. Smitty and Mac had left the tree and raced up the cliff on their side to see what had happened.

“The whole lot of them,” breathed Smitty, staring at the tumbled sea of rock over Borg’s camp. “Their bones will he there till Judgment Day. The whole lot of them! And their own leader snuffed out their lives!”

Mac shook his dour Scots head.

“Chandler! He was the skurlie behind it all! And we asked him to come along with us — to ‘help’ us!”

“It was the easiest way to keep an eye on him,” said Benson, lips barely moving with the words in his dead face.

“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac. “Ye knew Chandler was the man?”

“Yes.” Benson’s brooding, colorless eyes were on the scene of devastation before them. “Many things indicated his guilt. He said he was a zoning engineer working in Guatemala till a ridiculously big armament program took all their money and left none for city planning. The sinister big armaments program was correct. His statement that he was a zoning engineer was not.

“He said he had come with Profesor Gray on Aztec expeditions twice because he learned city planning stunts from the way the ancient Indians laid out their cities. But the Aztec cities, with no traffic of any kind, were not laid out. Buildings were put up haphazard. There was no lesson to be learned there by a modern engineer.

“And on his desk, when I called on him, there was a perfectly made and designed working model of a field gun. An unusual and expensive little ‘sample’ handed out as souvenirs by big munitions companies to just two types of people — those who buy large quantities of arms, and those who sell them.”

Mac whistled. The giant Smitty stared, still not quite getting it.

“Chandler was a munitions salesman, not a zoning engineer. His presence in Guatemala and Mexico was in connection with the mysteriously huge shipments of arms arriving in this part of the world recently.”

“Those little bombs—” Nellie said.

Benson nodded. “Their unbelievable power told the whole story. They are filled with a formula of liquid oxygen, carbon and tung oil, and are the latest thing in wholesale death. Bombers will strew tons of the little peanut bombs, like seeds of death, over cities in the next war. But the point is that only a munitions man could have got hold of those. Which instantly tied Chandler in as the evil spirit behind the entire plot to get the treasure whose key your father discovered.

“It also placed the man commanding Borg — who was known as the arms supplier for gangland. Arms bought from Chandler. And it explains the machine guns and gas bombs with which they attacked you in the big tree — gotten from a munitions cache near here, placed by Chandler.

“However, I confirmed my decision that Chandler was our man. To make it doubly sure, I allowed the man Pinkie Huer, in our Bleek Street headquarters, to reach a phone while he was alone so a trap could be set for me. The trap was laid — at Chandler’s. It was so staged that if it failed — which it did — it would look as if Borg had meant to kill or kidnap Chandler too.”

“Borg almost did kill Chandler when he bottled him up in that hole with us,” said Smitty.

“Yes. That was an attempt at double cross for which Borg would have paid later. Borg was going to keep all the gold himself.”

“He couldn’t have found it, with only four plates.”

“He counted on getting the fifth plate from one of our bodies when we’d been in our tomb long enough to die,” Benson pointed out. “Chandler, of course, didn’t even need to wait that long. He had seen the fifth plate, Alec Knight’s plate, and knew the whole message. He could have gone right to the treasure as soon as he’d killed everybody in his way with the rock slide.”

“You let him set off that explosion,” said Nellie, staring hard at the white, still face.

“Yes, I let him,” said Benson.

“And you knew which way the slide would go. Because you kept me from going to the side I thought was safe.”

“I knew,” Benson nodded quietly. “I scarcely even needed a look at the fissure to know that. Because that small crack was the only visible evidence of the last and greatest Aztec death trap of them all — designed as a last resort to protect their treasure from raiders. And since the hoard was buried on Borg’s side of the ridge, naturally any trap protecting it would be bound to send death on that side, no matter which way it seemed the avalanche would slide from an examination of the top of the ridge.”

The baleful colorless eyes stared at the tumbled tons of rock.

“So I let Chandler destroy himself and his men as the ancient Aztecs would have destroyed them had they been here today to guard their treasure. If he was ruthless enough to scheme our deaths by the twitch of his trigger finger, let him bring on himself the fiendish fate he had hatched.”

The giant Smitty sighed. “Justice & Co.,” he murmured. But Mac had something else in mind.

“Whoosh! How d’ye know the treasure was on that side? Ye hunted on our side this mornin’.”

“I found it,” said Benson, voice as cold and emotionless as his dead face.

“Ye did? Then it’s under all that rock and no man will ever see it—”

“It is — under the third biggest boulder in the middle of the slide,” said Benson. “We can find it quite easily, whenever Nellie Gray wants it. It’s hers.”

Nellie shook her sleek blond head vigorously.

“It’s ours. We share alike. But I’ve a suggestion to make.” She stared very seriously at Benson. “I’d suggest that we leave it where it is as a sort of permanent and tremendous bank deposit, to be drawn on in a perpetual fight against crime. And I’d like to join in that fight. I want to work with you. I could do many valuable things that no man could do. And I… my father—”

She stopped for a moment and composed herself.

“Crime killed my father. I want to wipe that out by working against crime. With you.”

There was a pause. The pale, inexorable eyes searched her to the soul. Then Benson’s hand went out, and the steely fingers gave her hand a man’s grasp.

MacMurdie was his dour self again.

“Ye’re plannin’ great and noble things, my girl,” he glowered sarcastically. “But how’ll we get out to do ’em? We’re stuck here in the jungle. Our plane was blown up. The gang’s plane is under half of Mexico—”

“You pessimistic Scot!” said Smitty. “Haven’t you got feet? We’re hardly a hundred miles from the coast. There’ll be a coast town where we can get a tramp ship to an airport. All we’ll lose is a few days’ time.”

Wrangling amiably, they went to the edge of the cliff and started descending to make camp for the night. Nellie paused a moment beside the man who was now her chief.

He was staring with pale, basilisk eyes over the jumbled thousands of tons of rock. Thinking of the human rats lying beneath, sent to death by their own leader? No. Thinking of the vast wealth lying there to be tapped by themselves alone whenever they should need any of it? No.

Nellie didn’t think either of these things was behind the colorless eyes that flared like ice in a glacial dawn. She thought she knew what he was thinking.

Of a woman for whose sweetness he had lived; of a child for whose promise he had worked. Wife and small daughter, snatched from him by crime.

He was thinking of them — and dedicating his remaining bleak existence anew to the fighting of crime.

Nellie turned and went softly away, leaving him to the chill and dangerous immensity of his thoughts.