There were angry murmurs and a concerted move for the temporary shacks of the camp.
The men were going to quit!
CHAPTER III
Out of the Sky
The whole tunnel project hung in the balance at that moment. If those men went back to their respective homes and told of the strange deaths at Mt. Rainod, no other men would come to take their place. The world of construction engineering is a small one. News gets around it. And no man wants to work on a hoodoo job.
However, just at that moment when the foreman was thinking that nothing could be done save wring his hands, there was a speck in the sky. The speck turned into a plane in a few moments, and everyone stared at it because there was no other place for a plane to be coming but here.
It circled three or four times, dropped deftly, bumped over the uneven tableland, and came to a stop several hundred yards from the men.
Three men got out. One was a giant, six feet nine and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, all of it solid muscle. The second was a tall, thin Scotchman with big ears and freckled red skin and huge hands and feet. He looked funny till you stared into his bitter, bleak blue eyes. Then you didn’t laugh at him. At least to his face. The third was a Negro, even taller, even thinner, than the Scot.
The three were dressed for work. They had canvas bags over their shoulders with their belongings. Every man in the camp guessed the reason for their coming.
They were three crackmen, trouble shooters, specially hired and specially transported by plane to this job where so much trouble had developed.
Well, the muttering of the men promised, no three trouble shooters were coming in here and expect to stop a scramble out of the Rain God’s territory!
The plane’s motor slammed on. The ship took a short rough run and sailed aloft. The three men from it reached the sullen-looking group.
“Hi, men,” said the big fellow. “When do we go to work?”
He was even bigger than he had looked from a distance. His chest was about the size of a rain barrel, so muscled that his vast arms would not hang straight. His name was Algernon Heathcote Smith — called, by all who wished to stay healthy, by the less provocative nickname, Smitty.
During the altercation with the foreman, the men had been represented by a loud-talking, red-haired hulk with a six-day beard on his face and the look of a chronic kicker in his eyes. He was the bully of the camp.
The red-haired man stared at Smitty with a sneer on his lips. He had fought from Nome to St. Augustine and never met a man, no matter how big, that he couldn’t down. He stared at the other two with the giant and laughed.
The Scotchman, Fergus MacMurdie, as has been said, looked unimpressive till you stared closely at his bleak blue eyes.
And the sleepy-looking Negro looked unimpressive no matter how you took him. Few realized that Josh Newton was an honor graduate from Tuskegee, and could fight like a pack of black tigers when it became necessary.
“When do we go to work?” Smitty called cheerfully again. His full-moon face was very good-natured-looking, and his china-blue eyes seemed as ingenuous as a child’s.
“We don’t go to work at all,” growled the big, red-haired man. “We’re all quittin’. So what do you think you’ll do about that?”
“Why, we’ll stop you, my friends and me,” said the giant, Smitty, still beaming good-naturedly. “That’s what I think about it. We heard there was some crazy stuff here about lightning bolts out of a clear sky; so we came down to see what the joke was all about. Because a thing like that has got to be a joke or—”
“Joke, is it?” the camp cook, a little scraggly man with a stringy mustache suddenly screamed. “I suppose it’s a joke when three guys die! I suppose it’s a joke when the Rain God himself, lookin’ like an old Indian, comes and warns us not to dig into that mountain! It may be a joke, but I’m gettin’ out of here right now!”
He began legging it down the single track that had been laid to the mountain’s flank. Every move he made indicated that he was going to keep on legging it till he was so far away he’d never hear of Mt. Rainod again.
“Come on, guys,” roared the big red-headed malcontent. “We’ll pack and git, too. We’ll take over the work train—”
Smitty was suddenly in front of him, moving faster than anyone would have thought possible after a glance at his ponderous bulk.
“We’re all staying,” said Smitty.
The big red-haired man stared once more at Smitty’s great size. Though he was still sure he could down Smitty, he yelled for aid.
“Jump on the three of ’em! We’ll flatten ’em out, and then take the work train and leave.”
And he jumped for Smitty with an ear-piercing yell of battle.
The redhead had fought in a lot of countries and knew a lot of rough-and-tumble tricks. He was trying a little savate to start.
The leap was supposed to end with his nailed boots in Smitty’s chest, knocking him over on his back. Then the boots would make cat’s meat of Smitty’s moonface. But it didn’t quite work out that way.
One of the most remarkable characteristics of the giant was that in a fight he seldom bothered to fend off any attack. He was so big and so hard that he could just stand and take it. For the same reason he rarely monkeyed with boxing or feinting.
The red-haired man’s boots landed just where they were supposed to, and nothing happened. The heels banged against Smitty’s vast chest with a sound like a club on a bass drum. Smitty, one leg back-braced to take the charge, grinned a little and caught an ankle of the red-haired man. He held it just long enough for the fellow to smash down flat on his back instead of getting his feet under him as he had intended.
“Oomph!” gasped the redhead. And some of the crew snickered a little.
The man was up with murder in his eyes. He bored in again, right fist pile-driving for Smitty’s abdomen. This time Smitty would normally have avoided the fist. But he was playing to get a laugh from the crowd, show them how little this big redhead meant in the scheme of things. So, even though it hurt a little, he stood and took the smack in the stomach, too.
“You tickle!” he said, with his grin broadening. “What are you doing, playing kid’s games?”
The whole crowd chuckled at that, though at the same time they were staring with awe at a man who could take two such blows and apparently not feel them at all.
The red-haired man foamed at the mouth.
“Why, you—” he stammered. “I’ll kill you! I’ll—”
There was a shovel lying nearby. He swooped, caught it up and swung it at Smitty’s head. The thing whistled as it blurred downward. It would have sliced the giant’s skull to the chin if it had hit.
But Smitty saw to it that it didn’t hit. He swayed to one side like a flyweight boxer instead of a man weighing two hundred and eighty-five pounds. The shovel sliced past him and he caught it.
He wrenched it from the man, broke the hickory handle across his vast knee, and then started for the redhead.
Smitty just walked, slowly, a step at a time. And the redhead, eyes wide, retreated the same way, step for step. Smitty wasn’t grinning anymore since the spade episode. His face was a thing to make you feel cold all over.
Evidently the red-haired bully felt just that way. He wasn’t in a battling mood anymore. He went back, step for step. And then his steps began to be a little faster than Smitty’s and finally he turned and began to run a little, looking over his shoulder.
Eventually he stopped looking back, headed straight forward, and concentrated on the business of running. He ran fast, and was still running when he rounded the far bend in the work track and went out of sight.