Phelps fixed him with a sour stare. “Got any idea how big that park is, mister?” he said. “A guy could wander in it for weeks and never see the same thing twice.”
“The sheriff was riding?”
“Sure! We don’t walk around here, much.”
Mac’s bleak blue eyes followed a squirt of tobacco juice on its accurate way from Phelps’ lips to the milk bottle.
“Lots of mineral springs in the park, aren’t there?” he said.
“Uh-huh,” said Phelps. “Lots of other things, too. Among ’em, a nice-size helium deposit. But I suppose you know that.”
Mac and Smitty hadn’t known. They made a careful note of it.
“Any mineral springs in the park where you find both salt and sulphur?”
Phelps shrugged again. “I ain’t no chemist,” he said, “but I can say there are a couple dozen with salt and sulphur. They call ’em mineral springs, don’t they? And mineral springs have minerals in ’em, don’t they?”
Smitty’s face didn’t change expression, but his vast hands curled a little. Phelps added hastily: “There’s about six have more deposits around ’em than most.”
“Do a lot of tourists visit them?” asked Mac.
“Tourists crawl around five of ’em,” said Phelps. “The sixth ain’t easy to get at, so only a few but the rangers ever see it. That’s a hot spring called Lost Geyser.”
“How would you get to Lost Geyser?”
The deputy produced a map, somewhat fly-specked and tattered but still readable. “Here’s the main road into the park, just outside town. See? Take this left fork, into the center of the park. Them’s the Rooney Hills. See? When yuh get to ’em, branch right. Yuh’ll end up in a box canyon with a dead end. Only it ain’t a dead end. Climb the blank wall, and yuh’ll find yoreself lookin’ down into a kinda big cup. It used to be a volcano crater, I reckon. The Lost Geyser is down in there.”
“Thanks,” said Mac.
Phelps was incurably sour. “Don’t thank me. Yuh’ll want an ambulance fer a coupla busted legs before yuh ever see Lost Geyser. Not six people a year bother with it.”
“Which makes it a good one to start investigating,” Smitty decided, when they were outside on the street. “If there’s a mystery about any of these springs, it probably wouldn’t stay a mystery long if a hundred tourists a day were scrambling around.”
They headed toward a stable to rent a couple of horses.
“It’ll take a dinosaur to carry you, though,” Mac growled, looking at Smitty’s huge bulk. “Ye were never built for ordinary horses to carry—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he jumped into a doorway so fast that he seemed a blur. Smitty was not far behind. They’d gotten clear into the doorway when a faint sound in the distance drifted to them. The sound of a shot. Mac took off his hat and looked grimly at a hole in the crown. A nice, neat bullet hole. “Whoosh!” he snapped. “Some skurlie’s a good shot. That slug must have come from near half a mile away, and it didn’t miss more than an inch and a half.”
“Anything down to the ears would be a miss,” said Smitty unkindly. “You wouldn’t feel it at all.”
But Smitty, grinning, was going toward the stable again. They didn’t even consider going after the marksman. All they knew of his whereabouts was that he had shot from somewhere south and east. So they kept buildings between them and that direction.
When they got horses, they reined northwest. That way lay their path, anyway; so they weren’t going out of their way to avoid giving the shooter a better chance at them.
However, the marksman, a bony man with a half-healed gash on his temple where a trash basket had hit him, mounted a horse, too, with his telescopic rifle in its sheath, and started after the two.
There wasn’t another encounter, however, till about two and a half hours had passed. Then Mac and Smitty were in a very bad spot for it.
They’d reached the end of the blind canyon described by Phelps. They’d thrown the reins over their horses’ heads and started to climb the end wall. Halfway up, they rested on a ledge. Above them was a surface so steep that only superlative athletes such as The Avenger’s aides could have dreamed of climbing it. Below them was a surface almost as sheer.
Smitty was resting a little, flattened against a rock wall.
Far off, a bit of whitish smoke drifted up. Just a puff. At the same instant, rock chips flew about a foot to his left. A half-second later, the sound of the shot came to them.
They scrambled upward again. And Mac exclaimed aloud as he felt something like a mule’s kick in the back.
The Avenger had devised bullet-proofed garments for himself and his assistants. They were made out of woven plastic which Benson also had invented and which he called celluglass. At this long range it would stop even a high-velocity rifle bullet, but the impact was going to leave a bruise on the Scot’s back.
“The skurrrlie!” he burred, panting his way upward. “If I get my hands on him—”
They got to the top, but not before Smitty had felt the kick of a bullet against his side and Mac had winced under another on his shoulder. Then they were over a ledge and half sliding, half running down a steep slant.
They were in the crater of an extinct volcano, all right. It was as steep as the sides of a giant’s shaving mug.
But it was not entirely dead, at that. In the center was a column of steam that ascended lazily for a few hundred yards before losing itself in the air. The steam was yellowish.
“There’s yer hot spring, or geyser, or whatever,” said Mac, rubbing his shoulder. “And the tint of the steam whispers of sulphur, Smitty. Also the smell.”
They made their way toward it. For the time being, the marksman could be put out of mind. It would take him a long time to catch up with them by climbing over the route they had followed. Meanwhile, they were safe down here.
There was movement ahead of them, near the spring. Mac instantly squatted down.
Smitty laughed. “Ducking jackrabbits now, Mac?” he jeered.
“Oh, a rabbit,” said the Scot, getting to his feet again and turning a little red.
“Yes — and tame. Things don’t come in contact with humans enough to get scared of them in here, I guess.”
Mac eyed the rabbit, which was making a slow way toward the steam column. “No,” he said, after a moment, “ ’tis not that he’s tame. He’s not feeling so good.”
The giant saw that, too, after a moment.
The rabbit acted like a sick animal. They saw him more clearly for a moment, saw that there were sores along his mangy flanks. Queer-looking sores, open and apparently incurable. Then the animal was around the steam column and out of sight.
“And there’s another sick beastie,” said Mac, pointing.
This one was a young buck. It hopped away from them, toward scrub underbrush at the far side of the big cup. On the deer’s flanks, too, were the strange sores.
“Must be some funny kind of disease,” said the Scot, frowning. “Or else, maybe the water here slowly poisons anything drinking it steadily.”
“Must be,” said Smitty vaguely. He wasn’t interested in funny diseases. He was interested in sulphur and salt, and in a marksman who might be showing over the rim of the crater at any moment, now.
He went on toward the steaming hot spring. The thing had built bulwarks around itself, through the centuries. The bulwarks were of glistening, yellow-white mineral deposit. The spring looked as if surrounded by a lot of little pulpits, climbing up and up to the steam.
Smitty bent down and scraped up some of the stuff. He put it in a small tin box he had brought for the purpose. He started to straighten up, and saw something a little farther ahead.
The object was quite a curious one to find here in an out-of-the-way place.