“Chief,” pleaded Smitty, “let me rush ’em. I could get at least three or four—”
“No!” said The Avenger, icy eyes on the tunnel entrance.
There was a scraping sound. Then one more of the great basalt slabs dropped from the top of the rift. The last man out had released it.
Now there was only one opening into the cave of the Rain God. That was the one down which sounded the furious rushing of water. A sound that was very near, now.
All the other exits were hopelessly blocked with tons of the glasslike basalt.
Suddenly the lights went out. They were in pitch darkness. And the sound of the flood was a booming roar in their ears.
Ethel screamed wildly.
Nellie said: “Oh! That’s worse than anything else. This darkness.”
“The water has flooded the generator,” said Benson, voice quiet in the dark. “The gate-valve from Cloud Lake has been fully opened, for the last time. Everybody, start climbing the statue of the Rain God.”
“Where is the statue? I can’t feel—” Ethel cried.
“Here,” said Benson, tone vibrant but calm.
He felt the girl’s hand, and guided her to the back of the statue where irregularities allowed a person to climb.
He guided them all, one by one, before starting up, himself.
And before them the flood had burst from the one rift left open. It came with a roar that was shattering to the eardrums, driven by all the hideous pressure of Cloud Lake, eight miles off and at least a thousand feet higher than this death trap.
“They’ve been gone about four minutes,” said Benson. “It will take at least twenty-five for them to get to the fissure dropping down into the tunnel bore, which is the only exit to that tunnel. The water in here is coming faster than a horse can run.”
The others listened to his voice in the dark, with a silence as blank as their faces no doubt were. Was The Avenger mad? What did he mean?
“I warned Fyler,” said Benson. “I told him that when I worked against a murderer, that murderer sealed his own fate in the end. But he would not be warned. He let loose the flood—”
The water had slammed clear across the cave of the Rain God. It curled in a great breaker up against the slab blocking the passage down which Fyler and all his thugs had gone.
Then there were sounds like half a dozen field guns in war — and the water went rushing on out of the cavern again.
After the men who had left them there to die.
Benson had left his flashlight in the cell. But Mac had one, equally powerful. Its beam split the darkness. It centered on the rift leading toward the tunnel bore, shifted in the opposite direction to the hole where the water gushed out as if from a gigantic hose, came back to the rift.
The water was roaring out the rift as fast as it came in from the other side.
“Chief! The slab they dropped after them!” came Mac’s cry. “It’s split in a dozen hunks, and the hunks are rrollin’ down the tunnel before the flood!”
“It was intended to split,” said The Avenger, voice as cold and calm as his deadly eyes.
“Whoosh! ’Tis the skullies, themselves, that’ll be drowned like rats in a trap — Fyler and all — not us!”
Ethel spoke up, eyes wide and fascinated on the white water roaring along under the flashlight’s white beam.
“Are you a wizard, Mr. Benson, that you can do such things?”
“Hardly a wizard,” said The Avenger. “It is quite simple. You know, awhile ago, I made a break for the mouth of the tunnel, there, and was driven back. But I wasn’t driven back until I had managed to leave something in the entrance, directly under the slab that could be dropped from the roof.”
Mac exclaimed suddenly.
“Whoosh, mon! Of course!”
“I see you’ve hit on it, Mac,” said Benson. “Thermite and sodium, set off by the pound of the dropped slab, burning fiercely when wet. It heated the slab, and the water cooled it again — fast. Exactly the principle that was utilized to crack a way into the basalt for the tunnel bore. The expansion and contraction did for the slab that was to seal us in forever—”
Far down the rift, it seemed as if men’s screams could be heard. But none in the Rain God’s cavern could be sure. Any more than you could be sure you heard the piping cries of birds over the tumult of waters in a storm at sea.
But whether or not cries could be heard, the fate of the killers in the passage, headed by the master killer, Fyler, was as clear and inevitable as if written by — well, by the old Rain God, himself.
“Turn out your flash, Mac,” said The Avenger, tone as calm and even as though nothing out of the way had occurred. “We mustn’t waste it. It will be hours before the lake is drained enough so that we can go out the rift. Meanwhile, everything is finished and all right.”
Everything all right.
When they got out, they could have the rest of the gunmen in the camp rounded up and jailed.
Work on the tunnel could be successfully resumed, with that secret gate-valve closed and sealed — though only one partner, Tom Ryan, remained to benefit.
As devilish a murderer as even The Avenger had ever met, was annihilated with several dozen of his cutthroat crew — destroyed by his own hand as Benson had warned he would be.
Everything all right.
But in the flare of Mac’s flashlight, before he put it out to conserve its power, The Avenger’s face and eyes showed no triumph.
The face, dead flesh with the brown-red tint on it that matched that of Yellow Moccasins, was, as ever, a deathly mask. The icy, colorless eyes remained terrible in their impersonal calmness, their lack of triumph.
The Avenger met and overcame the superkillers that dared to cross weapons with him. But the vanquishing of none of them could give him a feeling of triumph. Perhaps he would find triumph only in the death — inevitably to be his some day in his dangerous work — that should release him from a somber world and set him again beside the wife and child the criminal underworld had taken from him.