The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain Read Free Page B

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