Benson nodded acknowledgement. Ryan said gloomily:
“This is something we’ve never bumped up against, before. We’ve had frightened and rebellious men. We’ve had flooded workings. But we’ve never had to fight an Indian god.”
“Don’t be silly!” snorted Crast. “As if there were any such thing—”
A girl came from the general office. There was an urgent, harried look on her face. In her hand was a telegram. She gave it to Crast, who read it with his hands shaking a little.
“Well? Well?” snapped Ryan, voice showing what a strain he was under. “What does it say? It must be very important or Miss Bayliss wouldn’t have interrupted us like this.”
“It is — quite important,” said Crast, moistening dry lips. “Todd says that in the night the ammonia coils burst, flooding the bore with water again. We’ll have to fly new equipment down.”
“That isn’t so terrible,” Fyler said. “We aren’t yet so close to the line financially that we can’t buy—”
“That’s only a little of it,” said Crast. “Todd goes on: ‘This morning all the men quit. They took the work train and transported themselves to Boise.’ All the men. Todd and Mr. Benson’s three men are all that are left in camp.”
The Avenger’s eyes were like little cold steel spindles in his white, glacial countenance.
“That will be taken care of,” he said, rising. “And the financial part will also be taken care of, gentlemen. You run this end of it, and I think you can take it for granted that things at the other end will be duly accomplished.”
He went out, a gray steel figure of a man whose very walk was enough to inspire respect.
He went to South Chicago, to a large new building that was rising for one of the great Illinois steel companies.
The Avenger hadn’t come to Chicago to talk to the three partners. That was incidental. He had come to talk to an old foreman of his, with whom, when hardly out of his teens, Benson had engineered projects in Africa and China. It was because of this purpose of his trip that the news that all the men had left the Mt. Rainod camp left him so unmoved.
The man he wanted to see had a battered old hat on the back of his head and was yelling at a crane man on the building job. He was a big Swede, and when he saw Benson he danced like a trained bear.
“Mr. Benson! You’re a sight for sore eyes! How many years has it been since you bossed me around and gave me hell? Remember the time you yanked me out of the clutches of an Arab band in Morocco and saved my worthless life?”
Benson nodded and his eyes smiled a very little since his face could not. The Swede looked furtively at Benson’s white hair and dead countenance.
“You’ve had trouble,” he said, with awkward sympathy. “I heard about it. Your wife, and the little girl—”
He stopped at once at the look in the flaring, pale eyes.
“What can I do for you, boss? Want anybody killed, or anything?”
“I want a tunnel drilled in a place where death is lurking around,” said Benson quietly. “A crew has already quit to the last man because of the trouble there. Can you turn this job over to a subordinate and go out to Idaho with a picked crew?”
The Swede looked contemptuously at the steel skeleton of the new mill.
“Sure! This is kid stuff. I’ll be tickled to do man’s work again. You tell me where we’re to go, and I’ll bring a gang that’ll fight the devil, himself.”
“It’s something like that you will be fighting,” said The Avenger. “All right. Get as many men as you can. Tunnel men. Fly them to Mt. Rainod, Idaho. And, Johnson — get men you can trust, and watch out for yourself every minute, from now on.”
The Swede nodded at the first bit of advice and snorted at the second.
“For twenty-eight years I’ve been cheating death by a whisker all over the world, Mr. Benson. It won’t get me now!”
The Avenger left. In his small, fast plane, brought on from New York to replace the one the “mail plane” had crashed, he started back west.
And the Swede, jubilant at the idea of exchanging a tame job for a reckless one, arranged to leave his work on the new building.
As he had said, for twenty-eight years, since he’d been a boy of fifteen, he had been cheating death all over the world. In jungle and desert, under water and underground, he had beaten the Dark Monarch.
He was to lose at last in a prosaic city street, where you’d think a man was as safe as he could be on a somewhat troubled planet.
He left the South Chicago district in a dented roadster, with his hat gleefully on the back of his head. He knew where to get his men — hard men, huskies, young and full of hell. He’d have at least fifty by night.
When The Avenger went to the building, a car had followed, far behind. It had swirled off after Benson had been talking to his old foreman for a minute or two.
Now the car trailed the Swede. And on a broad street near the Chicago line, it crept up on the dented roadster.
Johnson never saw it at all. Adventurous, large-caliber men are all too apt to be incapable of understanding the sly murder practiced by the rats in the city’s underworld.
From the sedan, as it was almost abreast of the roadster, came a single shot.
The battered hat on the hard-bitten, veteran foreman’s head tilted back farther than ever. The head under it tilted too, till it rested on the back of the seat, with sightless eyes staring up at the smoky canopy of the sky.
The roadster crashed into the side of a building with a clang that could have been heard for blocks. The sedan halted, picked up Johnson’s dead body, and sped on.
At least fifty men for the new construction crew—
By nightfall fifty-four men in rough clothes stood ready to be flown to Mt. Rainod. But the kind of clothes they wore were not a true index to their characters.
They were fifty-four of Chicago’s coolest gunmen, the cream of half a dozen gangs that ruled the city with machine guns and rackets. There wasn’t one that didn’t have at least three murders to his credit.
Fifty-four of the choicest killers in the Middle West boarded planes for the construction camp at the Mt. Rainod bore, instead of a crew picked by Johnson.
Johnson, however, went along. In a box labeled “Tools.” His body was to be found near the camp so that the story would be that he had been killed after picking his crew and transporting them, rather than before.
CHAPTER XIV
The New Crew
Ethel Masterson seemed to spend most of her time around the construction camp. Whatever business she may have had at her dead father’s Cloud Lake Ranch was surely being neglected.
She was near the camp this morning, watching it with binoculars from a perch on the glass mountain’s flank where no one in camp could see her.
She stayed there till she heard soft steps immediately behind her. Then she jumped and dropped the glasses.
“Oh!” she said, when she saw who it was. “I thought for a minute—”
“You thought perhaps the man with the white eyes and the white hair might have come up behind you?”
“Yes!”
The man who had furtively approached her was the aged Indian who seemed able to appear and disappear like a being from another planet.
“The man with the pale eyes and white hair will not be moving anywhere, very shortly, if you continue to help us,” the Indian said.
Ethel looked at him in a troubled way.
“I am beginning to wonder,” she said, “if he did kill my father.”
The Indian, for all his apparent age, was very straight. He drew himself up even more erectly.
“I say that he did,” he said evenly. “And no one in all the West is able to say so more surely. For no one can read tracks as I can. No one has better eyesight. And I swear to you that the man with the white hair did murder your father.”