“Which reminds me,” said Smitty. “Where is the green pillar?”
It wasn’t in view. It had faded from sight as suddenly and temperamentally as it had grown into being.
“It seems to move around pretty fast,” said Mac. “I was quite a distance from here when it came after me.”
“You did have a brush with it, then,” Smitty said. “At least there was that much truth in the words of the guy who led us here.”
“The skurly who led you here,” Mac said somberly, “was the same one that put me in the way of the green pillar. He knocked me on the head; so it was an hour or more before I was thinkin’ straight again. Then he left me for the fog to get.”
“And?” said Josh.
“I don’t know yet quite how I got away. By climbin’ the tree, I guess.”
“Tree?” said Smitty.
“I was knocked out at the foot of the big dead tree, near the funny outcropping. I came to, a very little, when something wet touched my face. The wetness was the greenish fog of that queer lookin’ pillar. I caught a branch low enough to feel with my hands up, and hauled myself into the tree. I kept on goin’ till I was near the top, though still in the mist. And after a while the pillar went back toward the mountain again, and I got down. There was a blank spell, and now I’m here.”
“The Rain God walking enveloped in his cloud,” Josh mused. “Striking with a lightning bolt. But it’s odd that merely climbing a tree should fool a god.”
“Maybe he can’t see in his own cloud any more than others can,” shrugged Smitty.
Mac wasn’t listening to either of them.
“I saw him for a minute, in the cloud,” he said.
They gaped at him.
“Saw who? The Rain God? Don’t be nuts!”
“But I did,” said Mac. “And a horrifyin’ thing it was too. I got just a glimpse of his face. An old, old Indian, it seemed to be. But he looked like somethin’ straight out of the Pawnee hell.”
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.