And as he thought of the girl, he saw her slim figure coming toward him from around the construction office shack.
CHAPTER VII
Landslide
The last time this girl had faced Benson, she had glared murder at him and had accused him of being a killer. This time she came up to him doubtfully, but not so furiously. In fact, there was almost an air of apology in her walk. Also there was an air of urgency.
She stared at The Avenger’s dead face and pale eyes and prematurely white hair, and in her gaze there seemed to be something that was instantly concealed. But no man, not even Benson, could be sure of that.
“A friend of yours,” she said abruptly, “is in a jam.”
The colorless eyes drilled into her brown ones. They seemed able to keep right on going and read the thoughts in the back of her head.
“Yesterday,” said The Avenger, “you tried to kill me. Today you apparently want to help me — or at least a friend of mine. Don’t you think this is an abrupt change?”
The brown eyes avoided his awesome, colorless ones.
“I’ve changed my mind since yesterday,” the girl said. “And anyhow, the life of an innocent man should not be concerned with whatever may lie between you and me.”
“The life of an innocent man?” repeated Benson.
“Yes, the life of your friend. The Scotchman with the sandy-red hair and the big ears. And big feet and hands,” she added accurately.
“MacMurdie!” said Benson. “What about him? Why is his life in danger?”
“He has been kidnapped, that’s why,” said the girl. “You are his friend, and you seem to be the boss of this place, now; so I came to you about it.”
The pale eyes were probing her. The almost immobile lips were still in the expressionless white face. She went on:
“Three men got him. I saw them, from up on the mountain. He fought them hard, but one knocked him out. Then they carried him away. I know, from their direction, where they carried him to. I know all this section so well that I could travel it in my sleep. I came to you. I’ll lead you to him, so you can rescue him.”
There was absolute sincerity in her tone, and a fear in her eyes that was surely genuine.
“Lead on,” said Benson.
She went toward the Donald Duck outcropping, with The Avenger walking swiftly, effortlessly beside her. He seemed to be going almost at an ordinary man’s run, though he was walking easily enough. The girl began to breathe hard before they’d covered a quarter of a mile.
“Who are you?” asked Benson, pale eyes on the glass mountain, around the foot of which they were skirting.
“My name is Ethel Masterson,” she said.
“You live around here?”
“Yes. At Cloud Lake Ranch, eight miles away. I just rode over this morning to… to—”
“To take another shot at me?”
Ethel Masterson bit her lip and was silent.
“There is a lake near your ranch?” said Benson. “Is that the reason for the name?”
“Yes. There is a lake in an old crater that borders our… my… land, and the ranch next to us. It’s not very big, but it’s absolutely bottomless, as far as any one knows. Dad and I live… lived… there. Then, a few days ago, he was… he was—”
She couldn’t go on.
The colorless, deadly eyes raked hers.
“He was killed?” said Benson.
She looked up at him out of the corners of her eyes.
“Yes! He was killed. I’m all alone, now.”
They covered more ground. She said:
“You didn’t know there was a lake up on the other mountain?”
“No,” said Benson.
“You’ve never been around here before?”
“Never, in quite this territory,” said Benson. His pale, icy eyes met hers for an instant. “It is curious that you should think I was at your ranch, and was the man who had killed your father.”
“I… I don’t think that any more,” said Ethel, avoiding his eyes again. “See there. That black slot in the face of the mountain is a fissure. From it, a deep cave opens. I’m sure that’s the place the three men must have taken your friend. It’s the only place around here where you could hide anybody.”
“We’ll go there,” nodded Benson. “Tell me a little more about your father’s death.”
Ethel’s firm, round chin quivered.
“There isn’t much to tell. He was down at the edge of the lake. I was in the ranchhouse getting dinner ready for him. I heard three shots. They came from the place where Dad was. They weren’t from his gun — I know the sound of that as well as I know his own voice. So I hurried down there.”
Her gaze was straight and hard on the rock before them.
“Dad was lying next to his boat, which he kept moored to a little dock he’d built. He was half in the water, and he was dead. All three shots had gone through his head, at close range. Any one of them would have killed him, of course, but the murderer wanted to make sure of it. I saw him, running, just before he got on a horse and got away.”
“You saw the murderer?”
“Yes. He was a man of average size,”—she was keeping her eyes carefully away from Benson—“and had snow-white hair. I saw that from the back.”
“You notified the sheriff?”
“Yes, but of course a description that vague didn’t do any good.”
“Your father was at the edge of the lake?” The Avenger repeated, with little glints in his eyes. “How high is Cloud Lake, anyway?”
“About eight thousand feet,” said Ethel. “About three thousand feet above the rest of this tableland, I’d say.”
They were at the fissure in the basalt flank of Mt. Rainod.
“You think the men took MacMurdie in here?” said Benson, eyes like pale diamond drills.
“It’s the only place near here, where they could hide him,” she repeated.
Benson sized up the fissure. It was so narrow that his body could barely manage to get through.
“It widens in there?” he asked.
She nodded.
The Avenger wormed into the fissure.
Smitty had once made the remark that Benson seldom avoided a trap. Instead, it was his custom deliberately to walk into them, to see what could be learned. Traps were nearly aways revealing — if they didn’t kill you before you could put your information to use.
However, The Avenger didn’t care much about that. He knew he was going to die some day, in his many fights with superkillers. He knew it, and didn’t bother even to think about it. Death could come any time it liked. Life wasn’t too kind, with wife and daughter taken from him in a criminal plot.
This girl could be giving him the straight dope, with her mistaken idea that he was her father’s murderer buried in her mind by the danger of an innocent man. Or she could be a murderous little actress. It was all one to the man with the dead, white face and the coldly flaming, colorless eyes.
He found that the fissure did widen a bit after he’d gotten in. And it darkened as daylight faded behind him. He got out a small flashlight with a big beam, designed by him for just such emergencies.
He saw a cave extending ahead of him as far as the beam could penetrate. There was a black fissure in its ceiling, which was ten feet or so above his head.. The fissure was toward the rear of the cave.
He went a few steps farther, and saw the end of the cave. And did not see MacMurdie. The place was as empty as a vacant room, and the flash showed that the only way in or out was that fissure behind him.
The pale eyes glittered like ice in a polar dawn. So it was a trap. Benson turned.
The whole mountain seemed to tremble, and a dull roar sounded. At the same moment the crack of light through the fissure blanked out.
There had been a landslide, and it had blocked the opening.