“I glued a little bead, from that steel-bead purse you gave me, to my scalp.” said Nellie. “The man felt it, and thought it was the end of the needle.”
“And I thought it was the end of you!” howled Smitty. “If only you’d have a little consideration for a guy with a weak heart—”
The rock-slab door of their cave swung open. In the opening stood the man with the dark glasses; coat collar up and hat brim down as concealingly as ever. The man stared at them for a moment, nine people trussed like fowl for slaughter, sitting on the rock floor and leaning back against the wall.
“So,” he said at last. “The great Richard Benson — who has the crust to call himself The Avenger — has finally put himself into a spot from which there is no escape.”
Never in his life had Benson called himself The Avenger. That grim title had been bestowed on him by others, principally members of the underworld. But the man with the white, death mask face and the colorless, deadly eyes did not bother to correct the statement. Benson’s hands were working behind his back, steely wrists straining to spread his bonds.
“At least,” said the man, “you are to have a fitting tomb, you and all your friends: these caves. And you will have a colossal headstone, the glacier above us.”
A voice came from outside. “Hurry it up, will you? The stuff’ll all be out to the ship in another ten or fifteen minutes. We’re about done here.”
The man with the glasses chuckled. And then he went to the nearest wall, reached up and took from its rock niche the glowing rod set there. He held it in his bare hands, and the effect was bizarre. The hexagonal rod looked like a giant crystal of some sort. It glowed in the man’s nut-brown hands like the lighted baton of an orchestra leader, only much, much brighter. It bathed him in cold, white light. He went around the cave, taking each rod as he came to it. In his hands they continued to glow, a bundle of sticks afire, but burning white and giving off no heat.
The last rod was in a niche directly over Benson’s white head. The man with the dark glasses relaxed from his tiptoed reach for the thing. And then he yelled suddenly and sat down on the rock floor with a thump, scattering the coldly glowing rods in all directions. One broke, and the two pieces continued to glow.
But the man wasn’t watching the pieces. He was fighting for his life, The Avenger’s one free hand tearing at his throat. Just one hand. But it looked as if it would be enough. Then the man got a chance for a shrill, terrified yell. That did it! Three men jumped into the cave, and one of the three leaped to where the two were struggling.
Only one hand free and legs still bound, and helpless. The Avenger couldn’t take on more than one assailant at a time. He ducked his head to the whistling blow that was aimed at it with a gun barrel, but got enough of the thing to send him reeling back to the floor. They bound his hands again, more tightly than before. Smitty was bellowing and straining cablelike muscles but couldn’t break loose to help Benson. The rest stared in helpless rage.
The scene was as it had been before. Only now the man with the dark glasses — unsteadily settling them back in place on his nose — was standing at a safe distance at the door.
“Damn you,” he raged. “I was going to put a bullet through your skull before I left. But for that attack on me, you’ll live to know your whole fate; live as long as thirst and starvation will let you; live to go mad in the darkness here.”
“Come on! Come on!” urged one of the pair who had rescued him. “The ice’ll be coming down without that blast in a minute.”
“You hear?” cried the man with the dark glasses, voice still insane with anger. “Blast! That’s your fate. When we leave here, we’ll set a bomb at the foot of the glacier, timed to go off in half an hour. When it does — you will be buried so deeply under ice that an army of engineers couldn’t get you out in a month. You will be buried for another fifty thousand years.”
He went out, and the rock-slab door turned into place. It was hardly to imprison them more securely; that was unnecessary. It was only to add to their tortures by putting them in total darkness. All the light rods had been taken from this cave; and closing the door had shut out light from the outer cavern.
The door slammed, and after a long moment a laugh rang out. It was Rosabel’s, and it was not a natural sounding laugh. Josh’s voice snapped out, more sternly than any of the little group could ever remember his having addressed his pretty wife. “Easy, Rosabel! No hysterics! That won’t help any!”
There was silence again. Silence for many moments. Each was probably thinking the same thing: maybe there wouldn’t be a blast after all. Maybe the man with the dark glasses had promised that fate only to torture them mentally. Maybe—
There was a cracking explosion somewhere outside. It sounded like a heavy sigh to the group deep inside the cavern. There was silence for perhaps a heartbeat, and then it commenced: the tremendous rumble of the ice as the foot of the glacier collapsed over the low cliff along an eight-hundred-foot front, burying the ancient entrance once more under countless tons of the enduring ice.
“So that’s that,” came Smitty’s heavy voice after a moment. He added flippantly, “It’s dark in here. Anybody got a match?”
“Will a flashlight do?” came the quiet voice of The Avenger.
Next instant, within the group whose hands had been bound so tightly that the ropes could not possibly be broken or slipped, shone the steady, powerful beam of one of Smitty’s flashlights.
CHAPTER XVIII
Death For All
The Avenger had acted in a manner typical of him. Before the killers had left the caverns, he had not tried to free himself with the help of another because the act would almost certainly have been seen and the helper murdered promptly along with Benson.
He had acted alone in an attempt to free his own hands because if he had been caught he alone would have died for it. But the instant the little group was left alone, with no eyes to spy on attempts at freedom, Ike came into play.
Below Benson’s left knee, Ike, the little razor-sharp throwing knife, was holstered. And it’s seldom that a searching hand feels for weapons below the knee. So Ike had been left undisturbed. A moment after the light was taken and the cave door shut, MacMurdie felt bound feet touch his hands lightly and then felt the steel muscles of The Avenger’s legs under his fingers. He knew what to do.
The Scot’s hands were bound but his fingers were free. They fumbled Ike out of the sheath. And then with Benson rolling closer, he could reach the Avenger’s wrists and slash with the knife. So it was that when Smitty jokingly asked if anyone had a match, the flashlight had shone in Benson’s freed fingers. In a moment they were all standing and rubbing cramped muscles. Benson opened the door and they were in the light again — the light from the queer, quartz-like rods in the outer cave.
“That’s fine,” rumbled Smitty pessimistically. “We can now die in seven caves instead of one. With that mountain of ice between us and daylight—”
“As long as we’re not actually dead,” said Mac, with his lopsided optimism, “we’re all right.”
Nellie shook her head. “That’s bad, Mac. When you go Pollyanna on us, instead of croaking doom, we’re really in a bad way!”
The Avenger’s pale, brilliant eyes went to Mac’s face. Their colorless glitter indicated that he was not really looking at the Scot, but thinking out something that had not yet occurred to the rest. It was something he had dwelt on before. “I wonder,” he said slowly, “if they took everything from these caves?”
“They didn’t take the mastodon, anyhow,” shrugged Josh. “We saw that.”