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

Josh went along the way they’d started, around the next bastion. Behind each marched a man with a gun. And behind the lot of them came the third man, also with a gun out, to rectify any slip either of his two pals might make.
    The next shallow, dead-end little canyon had a back end as steep as the wall of a house. In the bottom of it, though, was a crack about twenty feet long and tapering from nothing at each end to about two feet in the middle.
    “Turn around!” said Smitty’s man.
    The giant stood still.
    “You won’t shoot,” he said. “If you’d wanted to, you’d have done it long ago. Either you don’t want the sound of shots to be heard, or you have some reason for not wanting our dead bodies found with bullet holes in them.”
    “I’ll lean on this trigger so fast you’ll never know what struck you,” snarled the man, “if you don’t stop stalling, and turn around.”
    Smitty’s vast shoulders weren’t hunched for a try at escape any more. Josh had turned, too. They were both acutely conscious of the guns at their spines.
    “Holy gee!” Smitty heard one of the men breathe. He caught fear and awe in the speaker’s voice. And he felt the gun waver a bit.
    “Here she comes,” said one of the others.
    Smitty turned his head enough to see back over his shoulder a little. And out of the tail of his eye, he saw a greenish wisp of vapor, cloud-like and thin. Turning a little more, he saw the pillar, itself.
    A solid-looking pillar of green fog. It hadn’t been there before. Nothing had been between them and the black cliff.
    “Smitty—” Josh’s voice cracked.
    Smitty’s vast shoulders were hunched for a try at escape in spite of the gun. But he knew it was hopeless. It was a hundred to one that he couldn’t move fast enough to evade the murderous muzzle of the automatic.
    He didn’t have to try.
    There was a scrambling sound from beyond the far rock “arm” forming one side of the shallow little canyon. Then there was a swish, almost lost in the hissing noise that came from the green pillar. At the end of it, the man with a gun in Smitty’s back staggered and yelled.
    Smitty whirled like a flyweight boxer instead of the vast hulk he was. He got an instant’s glimpse of the man clawing at his face. Blood was streaming down from under his left eye, where a rock had hit him. His gun wasn’t in line for the moment.
    The man watching Josh yelled and ducked as another rock sailed in a flat and deadly arc toward his head. So Josh knocked the man out with a wicked loop to the side of his head. And Smitty’s tremendous paw caught the gun wrist of the other man.
    The fellow dropped the gun and screamed as the giant put on a little pressure. The third man, the one who had led them here, was looking in all directions at once. He sent a shot at random toward the spot where the rocks had seemed to come from. Then he saw what had happened to his two companions.
    He snapped his gun up to shoot Smitty down. But the giant moved first. He jerked the man he held by the arm toward the third fellow. The man whirled a dozen feet over the rocky ground like a snapped melon seed and crashed into the other.
    Smitty bounded after the thrown body. He caught the one man by the shoulder, and the other by the nape of the neck. He crashed the two together.
    It was not entirely by design that their skulls collided squarely, and with such force as to kill the one who had led the way here and almost kill the other. But Smitty had said he’d feed the guide to his brother rats; and that was the way it turned out.
    The Avenger himself never took a human life. It was his subtle code to force the supercriminals he fought to destroy themselves by their own greed. But The Avenger’s aides sometimes found themselves in a position where it was kill or be killed. When they did, they were unable to feel any qualms about it.
    Smitty stared with no feeling of guilt, whatever, at the dead guide, and the man with the cracked skull, and