The farmer stared out over the water for a minute, eyes narrowing.
“Sure!” he said. “She’s the City of Cleveland.”
Benson nodded. The name of the boat was correct, though few eyes could have been telescopic enough to make out the letters. Benson’s pale eyes could read them quite easily at that distance. It was obvious that this farmer had a rare pair of eyes almost as good.
And he had seen a man walking in the sky.
Benson and Smitty and MacMurdie left him and began walking up the railless roadbed. They left the wrecked cars, being cleared away by a work train, behind them. They entered a dune section where only the sand hills, like the rolling dunes of the Sahara, surrounded them. In a short time they were as cut off from the scene of tragedy, behind, and from any trace of human habitation, as though on an actual desert.
Benson examined the roadbed. His face, as ever, was as expressionless as a wax mask. But in his icily clear eyes was a look of surety, as if he knew in advance any story which might be told by the eerie disappearance of miles of solid steel. And in those coldly terrible eyes was death for the forces that had caused the disappearance of the rails.
The ties were there, on the roadbed. In them were the rusted spikes which had secured the rails. The rust on the spikes was absolutely undisturbed; there was no sign that they had been sledge-hammered over to get the rails up. In fact, there was no way under the sun in which those rails could have been taken.
Yet they weren’t there any more.
“There’s where they start again,” Smitty said, after nearly a half-hour of walking. He pointed along the roadbed. In the distance, the twin gleam of steel could be seen again. A little beyond that point there was a minor depot, of the sort that is locked and tenantless, save in rush hours.
“We’ll see what the ends of the rails look like,” Benson said, leading the way.
He seemed to flow along the rough ties — not a big man, weighing only around a hundred and sixty-five pounds — but possessed of some mysterious quality of muscle that far outmatched in power sheer quantity. The giant Smitty moved lightly behind him, for all his bulk. And last trailed MacMurdie, with the bleak fighting gleam in his bitter blue eyes at the thought of the broken bodies behind them.
They got to the place where the rails resumed their ruler course. Here, the rails ended bluntly. There was no fading or melting off into nothingness. There were no rails, then there were rails, with the rail ends square and untouched.
A little beyond, several rails were missing, but beyond that, again, they were whole.
Benson stooped and looked at the rail end.
“I’d like a piece of this to have analyzed, Smitty,” he said.
The giant bent down. The rails were old; had been in use a long time. Countless car wheels pounding over them had flattened them a little and forced the steel out in ragged little scallops at the edges. It is a formation to be found on most old rails.
Smitty put gigantic thumb and forefinger on one of the thin splinters, twisted hard, straightened up. He handed the fragment to Benson, who put it carefully in his pocket.
The gray fox of a man had ears as miraculous as his eyes, and so he heard the sound first. But Mac and Smitty heard it, too, very shortly after that.
The sound in the sky.
From somewhere overhead could suddenly be heard a faint, monotonous drone. The three of them searched the sky with their eyes for the sight of a plane. The noise was much like that which a plane motor might make.
They couldn’t see anything up there!
It was about five o’clock by now, and the western sky was a red glare. Even Benson could not have seen if a man were “walking,” if he happened to be in the western heavens.
Thus, none of the three saw anything. But all of them heard the droning noise. It seemed very far up, very far away. It went on and on while they stood there craning their necks.
Smitty saw the next thing first. He was peering in all directions, and he happened to stare down the railroad track near the horizon.
“Look!” he said, clutching Mac’s ropelike arm with one hand and pointing with the other.
He was pointing and staring with stupefied eyes at the little depot down the line.
The depot was an old building, about as big as a six-room house. It had been built in the era of gingerbread architecture. There was a silly little cupola on it, which served no purpose. The rest of the frame structure was bare and unadorned, squatting like a crate beside a wooden platform bordering the track.
The cupola was the first to go. It was leaning drunkenly when Smitty exclaimed aloud. After his cry, it seemed to melt, like a big cube of sugar. And under it the building began to dissolve, too.
It was not quite a collapse; not like the account they had read of the pavilion in Lincoln Park. The thing just fell slowly, almost gracefully, to pieces, and it finally ended in an unsightly stack of old boards, beams, and slate shingles. There hadn’t even been much noise connected with it; just a low rumble like that of a colossus muttering in his sleep.
They ran toward it.
The noise in the sky was fading out, toward the west, over the open lake. It was gone by the time they reached the collapsed depot.
They searched swiftly in the wreckage for people, with Smitty hauling beams and timbers with the strength of a bull elephant. They soon discovered there had been no one inside. Then they began to look around.
Benson seemed to be hunting for something specific. Board after board he picked up and searched carefully. He sighted along each, looked at the ends of each, his pale eyes taking on a look of microscopic concentration.
“So that’s it,” Smitty heard him whisper to himself, dead lips barely moving in his dead face. But what “it” was, Smitty could not imagine.
There was a puffing in the distance. They stared that way.
Along the whole trackage, beside the shimmering lake, a work train was coming to help clear the wreckage down the line. There was a small and rather ancient switch engine, followed by two flatcars loaded with rails with which to start rebuilding the track, and ending in an ancient day coach for the repair crew.
The three-car train stopped at the collapsed station. It would have had to stop anyway, because part of the melting structure had spilled out over the rails and blocked the way. But the manner in which a man leaped from the rear car and strode toward Benson and his two aides told that the train would have stopped anyhow, at sight of them, to investigate.
The man had a gun in his hand, which was leveled at him. He was hard-jawed, broad-shouldered, with a battered felt hat. His whole appearance spelled track foreman.
“All right, you guys,” he bellowed, as he neared them. “Who are you? What’s the idea, blowing up this station? I guess the three of you’d better come along with us for some fancy questioning.”
More men were pouring from the old day coach, behind. They came threateningly toward the three. Some had guns, some had ax handles, some were armed with crowbars.
Smitty hunched his huge shoulders warily. The situation looked tense. He could handle any four average men, but there were sixteen or eighteen in this railroad mob. Those were odds too great even for him.
“I’m investigating the loss of the rails, back up the line, and also the destruction of this depot,” Benson said quietly. “I have credentials, if you’d care to see them.”
The man with the battered hat calmed down a little.
“Hand ’em over,” he grunted.
Benson did so. There was a letter from Chicago’s police commissioner to whom it might concern, and one from the governor of New York State.
The man read slowly, carefully, and as he did so, the rest crowded close. It all looked very natural and innocent. It was so smoothly done, that no one could have guessed the transformation that was to come.