Free The Avenger 8 - The Glass Mountain by Kenneth Robeson Page A

digging away at the rock slide in what was literally a miniature diving arrangement.
    With the forming of a clear hole at the top of the cavern mouth, the water in the cave began to run out. It washed at the rest of the walls and helped him in his work.
    He stepped through the fissure onto rocky ground; then he removed the little mask.
    There was no sign of the girl. He’d known, of course, there wouldn’t be. With vengeance satisfied, as far as she knew, she would have gone back to the ranch now held in the name of a dead man.
    Benson started walking, but not toward the camp. He had two other objectives he wanted to visit before he returned.
    One was the other side of Mt. Rainod.
    From around the glass mountain, when he had flown in the first day, had come the mail plane that had so nearly killed him. A phony mail plane, of course. A checkup had revealed that no mail plane in the West had been near Mt. Rainod that day.
    But even phony mail planes have to have landing fields, of a sort. And radio-controlled ones also have to be near some source of power.
    Where had that plane been kept? And how had its radio control been operated? Benson wanted to find out.
    He seemed utterly unconscious of his wet clothes and the recent terrific ordeal he had undergone.

    It was nearly six miles around the glass mountain to the side opposite from the tunnel mouth. Benson made it in a shade less than an hour. His clothes had dried on him by then in the hot, dry air.
    All the land around the glass mountain was as flat as a table top, and looked like one. Only it was strewn with countless rock fragments, from fist size to house size. However, after rounding the foot of the mountain, half a mile ahead, Benson saw one strip that was mysteriously cleared of rocks.
    That, he knew, would be the landing field.
    A person looking at that bare table formation would have sworn that nothing could take cover on it for any length of time. But The Avenger could hide himself where you’d think nothing larger than a squirrel could keep out of sight.
    Lengthwise behind a rock hardly bigger than a pumpkin, crouching behind boulders lower than waist-high, flitting shadowlike to rocks behind which he was able to stand erect, The Avenger got to the edge of the rough landing field so that the eyes of a hawk could hardly have spotted him.
    Certainly the one pair of eyes, human, near the field didn’t see him.
    There was a rather artificial-looking cave mouth at the mountain end of the cleared strip. At the entrance to this a man sat on a rock and gazed rather vacantly at the landscape. Near him was tethered a horse with an Eastern saddle.
    Beyond him, The Avenger’s keen eyes could just make out the tip of a plane. A mate to the crashed mail plane, hangared in the cave.
    Benson was curious. The construction camp was comparatively near. How did the man with the horse think that plane could stay out of sight if anybody blundered close?
    He let his foot scrape against a rock. The sound carried clearly in the thin air.
    The man jumped as if a wasp had stung him. His arm flashed out, and suddenly there wasn’t any cave mouth. There was a sheer section of rock where it had been.
    Only eyes as good as the pale, icily flaring ones of The Avenger could have seen that the new stretch of rock was a heavy canvas backdrop, beautifully shaded to match the black basalt around it.
    The man’s hand had snapped back from whatever pressure it was that released the canvas curtain, and grabbed his gun out of its holster. He stood now, facing this way and that, obviously not certain that a human foot had made that scraping noise, but not wanting to take any chances.
    So Benson removed him from the world of conscious men for a while.
    The Avenger had two of the world’s most curious weapons. One was a little, silenced .22 revolver. It was so streamlined that it seemed nothing but a length of slim, blued pipe with a slight bend for a handle and a little bulge where an undersized