Mac was not far from where Benson had almost been shot by the girl. He was near the camp, yet out of sight of it because of an outthrust of the glass mountain’s flank.
MacMurdie was sitting up weakly when Benson got there.
“Everything’s all right, Chief,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear his wits. “I’ve got on the rubber-soled shoes ye told us to wear. I guess that’s what saved me. Though even at that it was a near miss. Whoosh! I felt as if I’d been hit with a giant’s club!”
Benson nodded to the workman who had come to him. The nod meant to go back to the others. And the man obeyed without a word, such was the tremendous authority expressed by the pale, infallible eyes and cold, dead face.
When the man had gone Benson looked at Mac.
“I don’t know a thing of what it’s all about,” Mac answered the questioning look. “I can tell ye a bit more about the pillar of green mist that Josh mentioned, but that’s all.”
He unbuttoned his work shirt and slid it down over his shoulder. There was an angry burn there.
“I came out here to look around just before I saw ye go into the telegraph shack. I wanted to see where the dickens that old Indian might have gone when he vanished. But instead of seein’ any hole he might have ducked into, I saw a little cloud. As I got around the rock outcropping, there it was, as solid and still as if made of rock itself.”
He rubbed his shoulder.
“I thought ’twas about time we found out what the thing really was, so I went toward it — and it came toward me.”
“Describe it exactly,” said The Avenger, pale eyes like ice in his death mask of a face.
“It was maybe twenty feet tall and a little less through. It hung together, but fringed a little at the very edges. It was slightly greenish — kind of a bilious color. It moved about as fast as a mon might walk.”
“Did you hear the hissing sound Josh told of?”
Mac nodded, big sail ears moving a little as his head moved.
“Sounded almost like wind whisperin’ through leaves,” he said. “But it came from the center of the pillar of fog, and there are no leaves on this bare rock pile to rustle, and there was no breeze at the moment.”
“Go on!”
“I got scared,” the Scot admitted simply. “But I kept on goin’ toward the thing. When it almost touched me I jumped straight toward the heart of it. And that’s all I know. There was somethin’ like all the lightning bolts of the entire West rolled into one and hittin’ straight at me, and then I was sittin’ up rubbin’ my shoulder and you were comin’ toward me. And there was no more cloud.”
“It was a real lightning bolt?”
“Felt real to me,” said Mac.
The Avenger didn’t say any more. One of the workmen was running around the bastion that cut off this section from view of the camp. He veered toward Benson as he saw him.
His face was sheet-white and his legs were trembling a little under him.
“Say!” he gasped as he got near. “Say! You guys know that big dead tree we used as a marker?”
Benson nodded, flaming eyes steady on the man’s agitated face.
“Well,” said the man, lifting a trembling hand to his face. “That big dead tree — I just saw it moving. It was—walking!”
CHAPTER VI
Walking Tree
Against the side of sinister Mt. Rainod, the men had cleared a new tunnel site, as marked out by Dick Benson. It was many yards from the first false start. The move had been made with Engineer Todd’s full agreement. Todd had heard, before even looking at the white emotionless face and into the pale, marksman’s eyes, of the engineering exploits of this man. He was prepared to take anything The Avenger said as gospel.
But, while the error had been corrected and work was now going on where it should, Benson was in the shack used as an office, looking over the original survey maps.
The landmarks mentioned in all of them were the outcropping of rock that looked like a duck — and the great dead tree.
The tree that the workman had said he’d seen walking.
This tree had twice been found in different places than originally described in the survey. And then Benson had gone out and checked, and found it in still another place.
Three surveys could have been wrong, one after the other — or the tree could actually, incredibly, have moved.
“But, Chief,” remonstrated MacMurdie, “trees don’t walk. ’Tis insane, such an idea.”
“Three surveys of the same right-of-way don’t come out with three different tunnel locations, either,” said The Avenger, eyes brooding and pale.
“So?” said Mac.
“So you will have a good look at this tree that walks, Mac.”
His steely, slim hand touched the Scot’s shoulder for an instant in one of the rare demonstrations of the affection he felt for the men who worked for him.
“Watch yourself, Mac,” Benson said. “There’s something here more fiendish than anything we’ve come against before.”
Mac ambled toward the big dead-tree stump. As he went he studied it with puzzled eyes.
It looked like any other dead tree. It was grayish from long exposure. It was perhaps twenty feet tall, with a rotten cavity showing at the top. It had four or five long, broken stubs of branches. Gnarled roots showed at its base.
It didn’t walk, of course. No tree walks, ever. The very idea was crazy.
Yet Mac had an uncomfortable conviction that the big dead stump was not where it had been an hour ago; and a suspicion that an hour ago it was not where it had been the day before.
Mac tilted the wide brim of his hat a little more over his coarse-skinned, freckled face. It was hot as blazes, though the air was so thin and bone-dry that you didn’t notice it too much.
He was pretty near the big stump now. It was in a sort of bay, to the left of the Donald Duck outcropping. It was that which made him sure that the tree had moved; even though logic told him that such a move was impossible.
A while ago the dead tree had been to the right of the freak outcropping and not so near to it. At least, that was his thought. He was prepared to doubt his own senses on the point.
He climbed a little ridge. The ridge was of the black basalt forming the bulk of the mountain itself.
The rock around here was hard enough — but that black basalt! It was exactly of the texture of inferior glass, almost as smooth and dense as metal. Tunnelling through that was going to be a real job!
He looked at the tree again.
“Whoosh! I’m balmy with the heat,” he said aloud.
The tree had been right beside a boulder, shaped a little like a decayed skull. Now it was in front of the boulder.
Mac told himself that as he himself had moved, his line of vision had altered enough to account for the change. But he didn’t believe it for a minute.
“It did move!” he admitted finally.
Then he saw three men.
There was no place the men could have come from, without Mac’s having seen them before. The mountain’s side was smooth in front of him, with no rock big enough to hide the three. The camp was quite a distance off. The three men would have to spring from the ground, itself, to get so near Mac so fast. That was as absurd as the thought of a tree walking.
But there the three men were.
They were dressed as were the construction crew. But Mac couldn’t place them. That didn’t mean for sure that they weren’t from the camp, because about sixty men were on the rolls, and the Scot couldn’t be dead sure of that many faces.
Nevertheless, he was disquieted a little because he couldn’t recognize them, and he moved warily as he neared them.