They plowed like surfboards over the water for a dozen yards, then sank, but came to the surface again in time — so short had been the elapsed interval — to see the last of the work train.
For an instant it had seemed that the three cars and the engine would actually make the curve, in spite of the terrible speed. But the instant hadn’t endured. Halfway around, the old day coach tore from its forward truck and launched out over the embankment into the lake. The three flatcars and the locomotive followed it, like obedient sheep following a leader’s change of course, while the loose truck and car wheels went skimming on end around the curve and off down the track.
The coach struck the water with a geyser splash like the eruption of Old Faithful. It kept on going.
On the flatcars behind, the chains holding the tons of rails did queer, snaky things, and the rails began to cascade forward, driven by their original impetus.
The rails went into the rear end of the wooden coach, and on through and out the front end, like giant needles piercing through tissue paper. And behind them came the engine. Hundreds of tons of train, going at well over a mile a minute, takes a lot of stopping.
The day coach was shoved out till it was clear under water before the forward movement ceased. By then it was so pierced by rails that it looked like a giant’s pincushion. And then the water hit the locomotive’s firebox — and that was that. The whole west beach of Lake Michigan seemed to rise up into the air, spit out rails and sand and pieces of car wheels. And then there was silence.
Mac stood up in water about breast-high and wiggled both arms. They seemed to work all right. He moved his neck and legs. He was apparently unfractured anywhere; and Smitty and Benson seemed that way, too. It had been a narrow squeak indeed, but now all seemed clear sailing. Whereupon, the Scot instantly began to view the world with gloomy pessimism.
Even his pessimism was put to it to function after such an escape. But finally he found something to croak about.
“Whoosh!” he said, wringing at his wet coat sleeves and scowling bleakly. “We’re through now. Ye know, we’ll catch our death of colds in this water if we don’t watch out.”
Benson had the map of the railroad’s course in his mind.
“Rosemont is about five miles up,” he said. “It’s one of the bigger shore towns. We can get a car there — maybe a plane.”
But they weren’t to get to Rosemont without a short delay.
They saw the great dark bulk of the shore when they’d rounded a headland about a mile up. A huge thing like a long, flat box with the ends undercut, weather-beaten and shabby.
It was a car ferry. On the sides were still the letters, “Catawbi Railroad.” It was high on the beach, but such was its length that the far end extended quite a distance out into the water. Its condition suggested that it had long outlived its usefulness, and hence had simply been beached and abandoned. So there the great scow stood, like a tremendous cake of soap half in and half out of the lake.
Benson’s icy, pale eyes probed the vast hulk as they approached it. When they were even with it, Smitty and Mac started to swing on, but Benson stopped them.
“I think we’ll have a look at that,” he said.
They covered the hundred yards from track to water, and walked around the part on the beach.
At end and sides, the heavy timbers rose like an unbroken cliff, offering no way into the thing. It was just what it seemed, an abandoned barge on the beach. But Benson still was not satisfied. The opposite end, out in the lake, was out of sight of anyone standing at any point on the shore.
“We’ll wade out,” he said.
They waded, then swam. And Benson’s thoroughness was justified. In the lake end of the ferry, which loomed up at least twenty feet from the water, was a thin crack which ran on and on till the eye took in the fact that it was the edge of a gigantic door.
A portal taking up almost the whole end.
Down at the side, near the water, a plank was broken in what seemed an innocent way. But as they swam nearer they saw that the jagged resulting hole was ample to take a man’s body.
The broken plank made a little door beside the huge one.
The three went in, with Smitty having a little trouble forcing his great bulk in the small opening. Inside, the feeling was that which you get in a big cave. All was darkness; the fragment of light coming in where the plank was broken away did not extend for more than a few yards.
Benson took out a small flash whose case was waterproof and whose bulb had withstood the shock of hitting the water. He played it around.
The tiny ray didn’t begin to penetrate the length and breadth of the ferry. But it did light on something that brought instant identification to all three men.
That object was a length of small, narrow-gauge track running at a slope down into the water at the lake end of the ferry. On the track was a small wooden cradle mounted on flanged wheels. It was the sort of runway which is used to haul surfboats out of the water and up on a drydock.
Or amphibian planes.
“This may have been abandoned once,” said Smitty. “But it isn’t any more. It’s being used as an airplane hangar now.”
“For once, ye’re right,” said the Scot. Between him and the giant had developed a habit of biting repartee that might have made a stranger think they disliked each other very much. But the stranger would have been wrong.
Benson eyed the track with thoughtful, pale eyes. In the icy clarity of those eyes was grim urgency. Many lives had been lost in the affair of the man who walked the sky. Every fiber of the dynamic body impelled Benson to fast action lest many more be lost.
“I’ve got to get back to the city,” he said, dead lips, as usual, barely moving in his paralyzed face. “But just the same, this place ought to be investigated thoroughly. Smitty, you look around and come back to me with a complete report. Mac, you’d better come with me.”
The gray fox of a man went out the broken-plank exit, followed by Mac. Smitty was left alone in the vast interior of the barge.
When the human dynamo, whom men called The Avenger, had gone, it seemed as if a light had been turned out in the place, leaving it darker than before.
CHAPTER VIII
Cold Extra!
In Chicago, people were still chuckling over the sensational newspaper’s foreign-invasion hoax. An unnamed enemy ready secretly to invade the United States in the vicinity of Chicago? Hooey!
In a lunchroom downtown, several men were laughing about it to the proprietor. One, a big fellow with a gold front tooth, gesticulated.
“I guess if anybody did invade this country, it wouldn’t be secret. And I guess we’d know in advance who the enemy’d be. Besides, how could anybody invade us, and us not know it until after the damage was done?”
“Well, there was that pavilion in Lincoln Park,” the other man said. “Kind of funny how that fell down.”
“Aw, it didn’t have anything to do with an enemy invasion. The girders were rotten, that’s all. The city engineers said so.”
“The whole business is nutty,” said the proprietor of the lunchroom. “Wonder where the paper got that crazy story, anyhow?”
Someone else was wondering that. And that person was a lithe, powerful figure of a man with icily flaming gray eyes. The Avenger.
Benson was in the office of the managing editor of the sensational sheet now. Benson, who knew an amazing number of people in all walks of life, was acquainted with the owner of the paper. The owner didn’t like Benson much, but he was afraid of the pale-eyed man. And when Benson had quietly demanded authority to question the reporter of the paper who was responsible for the invasion yarn, the owner granted it.