Free The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain by Kenneth Robeson

the fellow Josh had knocked out.
    Then he heard Josh yell: “Mac!” and turned.

    The Scot was climbing laboriously, and a little unsteadily down the rock flank. He came up to them, and they saw that his coarse, freckled face was pale.
    “So you’re the big-league pitcher who saved our lives,” Smitty said. “Good pitching, Mac. A direct hit and a near-hit, from at least fifty yards away.”
    “We heard you were dead, Mac,” said Josh. “How did you get here?”
    “I dinna rightly know,” said Mac, lapsing into broader Scotch than usual. “I was wanderin’ in mind and body, and found myself up there. Then I looked down and saw those skurlies with guns on you, holdin’ you for the green fog to get you.”
    “Which reminds me,” said Smitty. “Where is the green pillar?”
    It wasn’t in view. It had faded from sight as suddenly and temperamentally as it had grown into being.
    “It seems to move around pretty fast,” said Mac. “I was quite a distance from here when it came after me.”
    “You did have a brush with it, then,” Smitty said. “At least there was that much truth in the words of the guy who led us here.”
    “The skurly who led you here,” Mac said somberly, “was the same one that put me in the way of the green pillar. He knocked me on the head; so it was an hour or more before I was thinkin’ straight again. Then he left me for the fog to get.”
    “And?” said Josh.
    “I don’t know yet quite how I got away. By climbin’ the tree, I guess.”
    “Tree?” said Smitty.
    “I was knocked out at the foot of the big dead tree, near the funny outcropping. I came to, a very little, when something wet touched my face. The wetness was the greenish fog of that queer lookin’ pillar. I caught a branch low enough to feel with my hands up, and hauled myself into the tree. I kept on goin’ till I was near the top, though still in the mist. And after a while the pillar went back toward the mountain again, and I got down. There was a blank spell, and now I’m here.”
    “The Rain God walking enveloped in his cloud,” Josh mused. “Striking with a lightning bolt. But it’s odd that merely climbing a tree should fool a god.”
    “Maybe he can’t see in his own cloud any more than others can,” shrugged Smitty.
    Mac wasn’t listening to either of them.
    “I saw him for a minute, in the cloud,” he said.
    They gaped at him.
    “Saw who? The Rain God? Don’t be nuts!”
    “But I did,” said Mac. “And a horrifyin’ thing it was too. I got just a glimpse of his face. An old, old Indian, it seemed to be. But he looked like somethin’ straight out of the Pawnee hell.”

CHAPTER IX

Dead Man’s Ranch
    The Avenger had estimated that it would take half an hour to dislodge enough stone from the entrance of the cave in which he was sealed, to get his body through and out into the open air again.
    It took nearly forty minutes.
    He had worked as long as he could, breathing the rapidly diminishing air in the water-filling cave. Then, when that last four-inch space disappeared, he had snapped into place the apparatus he rarely traveled without.
    The Avenger, with the dead flesh of his face able to be molded into any outline desired, was a master of disguise.
    Man of a Thousand Faces, he was called. And rightly so.
    However, changing a face is not enough. Benson often found himself forced to alter bodily lines, too.
    In order to facilitate that, he had, in the linings of all his suits, thin rubber bladders which could be inflated cleverly to give him more bulk wherever he wanted it. But the bladders served another function.
    Hated by the underworld, The Avenger went in constant danger. The commonest form of attack against him, next to gunfire, was an attempt to get him by deadly gas. So Benson carried always with him a little nose-clip gas mask, and always had oxygen in the disguise bladders.
    The apparatus worked as well for water as for gas. So for over half an hour, The Avenger had been