The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain (18 page)

Benson’s ruse had done one thing for him at least. His disguise as the old Indian, Yellow Moccasins, had gotten him to the heart of the mystery of the glass mountain unharmed. However, bound hand and foot and thrust into a solid rock cell, it didn’t look as if he could do much about it.

He set about remedying the situation.

Those slim hands of his that, given time, could beat any bonds, began to work. No larger in circumference—when palms and thumb were compressed—than his wrists, they slowly worked the ropes down over his fingers.

In the dark, he untied the rest of his bonds, and stood free.

He could manipulate his small flashlight better now than when, before, he had held it awkwardly in bound hands after nudging it laboriously from his pocket. He played it on the opening through which he had been brought.

It was closed by a basalt slab. But the slab was not very large. The gang must have thought it plenty safe enough for the Indian that Benson was supposed to be. No ordinary man could have budged it, let alone a man as old as Yellow Moccasins. But Benson was neither old nor ordinary.

Sitting on the floor, he got his feet against the slab. There was enough of a crevice in one place to admit his fingers. So with the full force of arms, shoulders, back and legs, he thrust at the slab. Its five hundred or so pounds grated softly, then slid a couple of feet outward.

He got through the small opening, and stood in the great cave with the statue of the Rain God.

He was struck at once by the thing that had first taken Nellie Gray’s attention. That was the fact that the place, far underground, was dimly lighted. He set out to investigate that first. He soon found the answer. Like the gate-valve, the things were as out of place in this tomb of ancient worship as would be a nightclub on Mt. Everest.

They were ordinary electric-light bulbs, sparsely placed up near the top of the cavern, hidden by stalactites.

Electric-light bulbs!

But The Avenger had known there was some such thing in here. He had known it ever since he had found the short black tube of rubber with the bit of fabric adhering to it. For that little rubbery length had been a bit of insulation from an electric power cable, peeled off when a blade cut the cable to shorten or splice it.

He began following the wires. They led down a rift in the basalt that he had not seen before. As he went, he heard a faint humming. It grew louder till he stepped into a small cavern in the center of which, beside a silently rushing underground stream, was an electric generator.

The motor was brand new; had very recently been set up in here. It was powered by the stream. The Avenger nodded, dead face even more stoical than that of the old Indian he was made up to represent. He started farther along the tunnel—and saw a man.

The man stood facing a slab of basalt that closed off the rift, and seemed to be listening. Benson tensed as the man turned. Then he relaxed as he saw the man look at him with no surprise or apprehension at all. In fact, the fellow was grinning. But the grin was murderous, wolfish.

“Well, we got ’em,” the man said. “All but the guy with the dead pan and the white hair. They’re trapped in there with the water rising. I just turned the water on.”

Benson’s brain was even faster than his body. It caught the whole story in a fraction of a second.

“Turn it off again,” he said instantly, calmly. “I don’t want them killed, yet.”

The man’s mouth went slack with surprise. Evidently, whoever he thought Benson was had spoken differently a short time before.

“But you said—” he began.

“I have changed my mind,” said Benson. “I want them alive for questioning. Shut off the water and raise the slab.”

“O.K. with me,” said the man, sullenly, shaking his head. He turned a wheel set into the basalt wall with concrete reinforcing it. Then he began laboriously to raise the big block into the roof again with a huge hardwood lever that worked up and down in a slot and was the grandfather of all jacks. The wheel was modern; the crude jack, which lifted the block an inch at a time, was ancient.

Those inside weren’t waiting for the full clearance to show. They scrambled under the block when it was hardly a yard up, and out of their watery trap.

Josh and Mac and Smitty stared at their chief without recognition, narrow of eye, wondering what new funny stuff was afoot. But Ethel Masterson looked at him with wild relief, for about a minute.

“Thanks to Heaven,” she said, “it’s you! I knew you had made a mistake in having me brought here, but—”

She stopped, stared over Benson’s shoulder, and cried out huskily.

Behind Benson, four men were coming down the rift, carrying a fifth. The man in the lead—was the old Indian, Yellow Moccasins. But the man the other three carried was the old Indian too; the one whom Benson had left outside after creasing him with Mike. He had been discovered and carted in here. Then, to the eye at least, Benson was the old Indian.

There were three Chief Yellow Moccasins here, where there should have been but one.

Catlike in his swiftness, Benson darted toward the narrow opening under the newly lifted basalt slab.

“No, Chief,” said Smitty quietly. The lightning swiftness of this third “Indian’s” movements had told him his identity. “There’s no way out there. It’s sealed shut.”

Benson stopped. From down the rift, after the four men who carried the real Yellow Moccasins, more men were coming. At least two dozen men, members of the new crew of killers.

They surrounded Benson and his aides, and Ethel Masterson, and took them back to the cave of the Rain God. There, they thrust them into the small cell from which Benson had just escaped.

Benson’s flash, stood on end, was a ghostly white lantern in the somber little death cell. Benson paced slowly back and forth, colorless eyes like chips of polar ice in his dead face. He had taken the disguising eye-shells from his eyeballs, because they were apt to break and injure his eyes if struck. Otherwise, he was still the old Indian, in faded overalls but moving with bewildering youth and agility when you looked at the ancient face.

Like most criminals, the gang here was too stupid to learn very fast. They had preconceived ideas about tying people up, and it was hard for them to unlearn those ideas.

They had tied Benson once, and he had gotten free. They’d thought merely that the man who tied him had been careless, so with childlike trust they had tied him again.

And again, of course, he had slipped his bonds over those unusual hands of his the moment he was left alone. Then he had freed the rest. They sat around the tiny space now, looking at him. Their freedom didn’t mean much. There were many men in the other cave if they tried to roll the slab back from the cell opening and make a dash for it.

The old Indian—the genuine article—was conscious now, and sitting up with the rest. He must have had a devil of a headache, from the gash on the top of his skull. But with the stoicism of his race, he didn’t show it.

He looked at the man who so eerily resembled himself, save for the pale, icy eyes.

“I do not understand,” he said, in slow but good English. “For many days I have been held here by one who looks as I do—and yet not by you, who also look as I do.”

Ethel Masterson stared at him quickly.

“Then it hasn’t been you who has been telling me—the things about my father’s death?”

The old man stared at her with hurt in his eyes if not in his face.

“Your father is dead? I did not know. That is bad. He was a good man. No, it has not been me.”

“Then the man masquerading as you—” Ethel burst out.

“You have been misled from the start,” Benson said quietly. “The men who wanted to kill me and my friends saw in you a possible tool. So they used you as a dupe.”

“And you stole my clothes—” Nellie Gray began indignantly. She was still dressed in the cowgirl’s costume, switched when Ethel took Nellie’s things during the blond girl’s unconsciousness.

But Nellie stopped at the look on Ethel’s face. No accusations could make the cowgirl feel worse than she already did. That was evident.

“Your father,” said Benson, “was investigating Cloud Lake. The water level was fluctuating in the little lake. It had never done that before, and he was curious to know why it should now.”

“That’s right,” said Ethel. “But how did you know?”

“When I was at your ranch, I saw evidence of the changing level on the piling of your little dock. Also, your boat was half out of water, stranded when the water went down. I knew it was beached by the accident, and not on purpose, because it is the type of boat that should never be taken out of water; the seams dry and open if that is done.”

Ethel was staring at him with a new respect. Also with an increase of disillusion and contrition in her pretty face as she realized even more fully how absurd she had been in allowing herself to be set against this man.

“Because your father was getting curious about the changing level of Cloud Lake, he had to be killed before he discovered too much. The killer knew that I was to be called here soon. So, with a white wig, he impersonated me roughly when he shot your father, for the benefit of possible witnesses. When I arrived, I stepped into a complete murder frame.”

Ethel shook her head. She looked puzzled, as did the rest.

“Why should Masterson’s curiosity be so dangerous to this gang, Chief?” said Smitty. “And why
did
the level of the lake shift?”

“The lake level shifted when the water was diverted to run through a channel not far from here and power an electric generator. It shifted again when the tunnel bore was ‘accidentally’ flooded.”

“Whoosh!”
said MacMurdie, staring. “Ye can’t mean that. Cloud Lake is full eight miles from here!”

Benson nodded, icy eyes flaring.

“I know. The distance is what kept people from thinking of it in connection with the flooding. But there is a rift going from the heart of this mountain clear to the lower level of the crater lake. Furthermore, there is a very modern and efficient gate-valve set into the rift so that the bore could be flooded any time desired.”

The Avenger paced the little cell, seeming to flow rather than walk, such was the smooth litheness of his movements.

“It’s all very elaborate and complicated, and yet the stake was high enough to justify it.”

Josh thought back to the report on Joe Bass’ death. Bass had been a prospector, after copper.

“You mean,” he said hesitantly, “there is copper here, and someone knew it and tried to keep the tunnel from being started because it would hit into the vein and—”

“No,” said Benson, “it’s not quite that indirect. I managed to orientate myself pretty thoroughly in the big cave outside, get all my directions down accurately, and those directions told the story.

“The Central Construction Co., along with others, bid on this Mt. Rainod tunnel job. The estimates were based on laborious drilling through a great, solid mass of stuff literally as hard and stubborn as glass. Central Construction got the job at a figure slightly over twenty million dollars. What they did not know was that straight through the heart of the mountain, so close to the line laid out for the tunnel that it is easily usable, there is a
natural
tunnel, or rift, that only needs a little widening in spots to accommodate a double-track roadbed.

“This means that instead of having all the glass mountain to drill through, it is only necessary to drill through a short space at either end, to open up the natural rift. Probably ninety percent of the tunnel has been done for them by nature, countless ages ago. And
this
means that out of the twenty-million-dollar bid, at least fifteen million will be clear profit.”

The pale, all-seeing eyes stared in the direction of the tunnel bore.

“Somebody knew that, secretly. So he set out to bankrupt the Central Construction Co. and take over the valuable contract. First he tried to get drilling operations started in the wrong place by shifting the surveyors’ marks. In that way the bore wouldn’t strike the fissure even if it did get far enough into the mountain. Then he upset the crew and drove them away by the mumbo-jumbo about the vengeance of the Rain God. Also, through the great valve, the waters of Cloud Lake were diverted into the bore, stopping all work. All to break the company.”