The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online

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