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

it was barely past the noon-day one. He had to start early, because sixty or sixty-five workmen eat a lot of potatoes.
    Josh didn’t like peeling potatoes. His sleepy-looking face didn’t show it, but his actions did. He was slicing a sharp knife along the skins with much more energy than was necessary.
    Smitty had the power generators and other electrical equipment in the excellent order that only an electrical wizard such as himself could have achieved. So he was at the camp with Josh.
    “For a dead man,” the giant remarked cheerfully, “you show a lot of pep at potato peeling.”
    Josh shivered a little.
    “Don’t even joke about it,” he said, recalling the bad moment when he had come to, to find himself on one end of a seesaw plank with The Avenger looking down at him.
    “You sure were dead,” mused Smitty. “How does it feel?”
    “To be dead?” said the Negro, shivering again. “It doesn’t feel at all.”
    “You didn’t have any visions or anything?”
    “No. It was just like unconsciousness, that was all. Something hit me on the shoulder like a falling mountain, and then everything went dark. Just like unconsciousness.”
    Smitty watched the too energetic potato peeling some more. Then he said, “What do you suppose all this nonsense is about the chief being a murderer?”
    “I don’t know,” said Josh, “but somebody has been very methodical in spreading the rumor. Evidently some person living in the neighborhood has been killed recently, and they’re trying to pin it on Mr. Benson.”
    “Well, that seems pretty silly.” Smitty picked up a small raw potato and began to gnaw on it. The giant took a lot of food, more than he could usually pack away at regular mealtimes. His big frame needed a great deal of fuel.
    “Silly things can occasionally cause a lot of trouble,” observed Josh. He was a dusky philosopher, in his way. “It’s the senseless things that stir the crowd. Logic is too coarse to get in between the skull bones. Where’s Mac?”
    “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since before the chief went off with that girl.”
    “Who is the girl, anyway?” asked Josh, pausing in his peeling long enough to wipe his dark countenance with the tail of the white apron he had donned on taking over the camp cook’s job.
    “I don’t know. From some ranch eight or ten miles away, I think. She has something to do with the crazy yarn about Mr. Benson’s being a murderer.”

    Off against the mountain flank, at the new and accurate tunnel site pegged by The Avenger, was a miniature edition of Hades.
    Great piles of wood had been heaped and set afire next to the glass mountain’s sharp rise. The flames roared, making an inferno of the already hot air, heating the dense, black basalt to intolerable temperature.
    There was a hiss, and an increased roar as water was hosed on the hot mass. Then there were cracking sounds like the breaking up of a glacier. Little chasms a foot or more wide and going far back into the glass mountain appeared as heat expansion and cold contraction rent the stuff into a thousand fragments.
    “Boy, we’ll get some place in a hurry with that cracking process,” gloated Smitty. “There’ll be hardly any work for the drills—”
    One of the workmen was running toward them.
    “Now, why isn’t this guy at his post?” Smitty said.
    “Oh-oh!” said Josh. “Trouble coming. I can smell it. On a hot day a man only runs for a maid or a murder. And there are no girls around—”
    The man stopped, panting, before them. He was the big fellow who had overpowered Mac when the Scot had succeeded in downing the other two assailants. But not being seventh sons of seventh sons, Josh and Smitty could not know that.
    “The Scotchman!” gasped the man, gulping for air as if he had run a mile at top speed. “He’s in trouble! He’s a pal of yours, ain’t he?”
    The giant Smitty nodded. He had leaped to his feet. His vast hand fastened on the man’s shoulder with an