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.
CHAPTER XVII
Fifteen Million Dollars
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.