Kenneth Robeson
The Glass Mountain
CHAPTER I
Lightning Bolt
Old Joe Bass was commonly called Fish-eyes. That was partly because of his name, and partly because he had that kind of eyes. They stuck out a little, were far apart in his rather narrow face, didn’t ever seem to blink, and had a glazed look.
Joe Bass dressed in overalls that were ninety percent patches faded to all different shades of blue, had skin like leather from years of exposure to sun and wind, and left an almost unbroken trail of tobacco juice behind him wherever he went. His friends said he could live on tobacco, and sometimes it seemed that he must live on nothing else. For sometimes he was completely broke, instead of having two or three dollars in his pocket with which to buy food.
He was that way, now: completely broke. Four years ago he had nearly a hundred thousand dollars, but that was gone now, so he was out hunting more. He was going to get it out of the ground.
Old Joe Bass was one of the few genuine old-time prospectors left. He could go out with a pack on his back, not even with a burro, and usually come up with something that would keep him in chawin’ tobacco for a few more years.
He was prospecting for copper now.
Many years ago, he had suddenly recalled, he had been in this part of Idaho looking for gold and had found an old Indian arrow head crudely hammered out of virgin copper. The copper might have come from near here, or it might have been brought up, several hundred years ago, from as far as New Mexico. But it was worth looking around here to see if it was local.
Joe Bass was inclined to think it was local. That was because of the Indian history of the place.
Straight ahead of him, towering up with remarkable regularity in the clear, dry afternoon air, was the forbidding dark pile called Mt. Rainod.
Rainod was a contraction of the two words, Rain God.
The mountain was of smooth black basalt, which is just about as flinty and obdurate as glass. Black glass. And legend had it that in this black glass mountain the old Rain God of the Pawnees kept his residence.
He was a fierce old guy. Every now and then some individual incurred his displeasure. Then something extremely unpleasant happened to the individual. He died at the wrong end of a lightning bolt — if a lightning bolt can be said to have any other than a wrong end.
The Rain God would stroll from his glass mountain wrapped majestically in a little cloud. The cloud would envelop the person the god didn’t like, roll on after a while, and there that person would lay, electrocuted.
All of which didn’t bother Joe Bass much. He was as superstitious as anyone else; but he figured that the Rain God had left these parts long ago, when his children, the Pawnees, had vanished.
Joe squinted the sun out of his eyes and headed toward a dead tree.
It was a very big dead tree, or rather, the twenty-foot stump of one with a few dead branches sticking out like skeleton arms. It was this dead tree that he had fixed in his mind as a landmark years ago, when he found the crude, copper-flake arrowhead.
As Joe plodded over the high rocky tableland, he decided he’d have to be very careful if he did make a strike. There was a confounded railroad-construction camp only a mile off. If any of the men caught wind of a copper strike they’d try to jump his claim. Doggone it, why would anyone want to put a railroad through here, anyhow?
Joe shifted the heavy pack on his back and kept trudging for the dead tree, with the slow, plodding tread that seemed so snail-like and yet which had carried him over most of the West. Then he slowed and stared — hard.
The big dead stump was right next to the high flank of the glass mountain. Just behind it was a strange rock outcropping. The outcropping looked a little like Donald Duck on a gigantic scale.
Between this outcropping and the dead tree it seemed to Joe that a faint cloud was forming. A very small cloud, of very thin mist.
He blinked, decided that his old eyes weren’t what they used to be, and went on.
“Thought for a minute the old Rain God might be a-walkin’,” he chuckled to himself. “All wrapped in his cloud and everythin’.”
He plodded, head down, eyes on the rock-strewn ground. He went about fifty yards before he looked up again. And then he stopped dead. Because then he knew he was seeing it. It wasn’t any mirage or hallucination or flaw in his sight.
Behind the dead tree, between it and the Donald Duck outcropping, there was a small cloud! Rather like a pillar of mist twenty feet high and fifteen feet through. The mist was so thick that it seemed like a solid thing. And it was faintly greenish in the bright, glaring sunlight.
“Phoo!” said Joe Bass, though a little shakily. “It’s a new steam geyser, or somethin’.”
He stayed put for several minutes, looking at the greenish mist pillar and thinking. He wanted to get away from there. Every instinct developed over a lifetime in the open told him there was something badly wrong.
But, hang it, his mark was that old tree. Half a mile due south from it was where he’d found the strange arrowhead; and he told himself at the time that the flank of the glass mountain near the great stump was the place to look around.
He decided that no green pillar of mist was going to drive him away. Rain God?
“Phoo!” he said again, and went forward.
The green pillar seemed to be advancing to meet him. But that, of course, was surely imagination. He was sure it was imagination — till the pillar got between him and the dead tree. Then he knew it wasn’t imagination. It had moved, and toward him!
Joe Bass stood still then. But the green pillar did not It kept on coming toward him. So he turned to run.
At first he kept his pack. He hated to lose his old tools, with no money to buy more. But you can’t run with eighty pounds on your shoulders; so after a few steps he slid out of the pack straps and dropped his burden.
That, it turned out, was his major mistake.
The old straps seemed to coil around his left ankle like malevolent snakes. They tripped him. He fell headlong and lay there dazed for a minute!
When he got his wits enough to scramble to his knees, it was too late. The green mist was on him!
And the nauseating-looking mist rolled over him silently, smoothly, like a wave over an exhausted swimmer.
There was no sound from Joe Bass, who hadn’t believed in the Rain God. No sound at all!
The pillar went back again in a leisurely way. As its thinning edges retreated, like a witch’s skirts, Joe could be seen.
He lay on the rock-flawed ground like a man asleep. Very still.
The greenish pillar retreated to the dead tree. It got between the tree and the rock outcropping that was shaped like a duck. Then it slowly faded into nothingness.
But Joe lay on, still and stark. He would never prospect any more. There was a round black spot on his shoulder blade where a bolt of lightning had hit. There was a similar area on the sole of each foot where the bolt had grounded itself after coursing its deadly way through his old body.
Joe Bass had come too close to the black glass mountain called Rainod; so a pillar of cloud had enveloped him, and a small and personal bolt of lightning had killed him.
He lay there with the dusk finally gathering, faced toward the big old stump as though even in death he meant to keep on going toward it.
Night came, and morning. Joe Bass hadn’t moved. He was facing the same way. But somehow he was no longer staring at the dead tree with his dead, glazed eyes.
The tree was a hundred and fifty yards to the right of the Donald Duck outcropping.
It seemed to have walked there in the night.