It was, of all things, a lady’s handbag.
“So we think we’re such good mountain climbers,” he said to Mac. “Yet some woman’s been here before us. An elderly one, too, from the look of the bag.”
He picked it up. It was large, dull-black, with a gun-metal clasp.
“Yes, the kind a woman over fifty would carry. Conservative, durable and—”
He stopped and stared at Mac. The Scot wasn’t listening, that was obvious. Mac was staring at something instead — staring with his bleak blue eyes very wide indeed.
He was staring at the steam column. “Smitty,” he croaked. “Smitty!”
“Well?” said the giant peevishly.
“Am I goin’ mad, or do you see it, too?”
Now it was Smitty’s turn not to answer, but just to stare with his eyes sticking out so you could have hung canes on them.
He was looking at the steam column, too. Or, rather, at something in the live, hot heart of it.
A man was in there. A little man, scarcely three feet high. The man was dressed in frock coat and striped trousers; on his head was a silk topper.
The little man hadn’t a normal skin. He was bright, blazing cerise in color.
In his small hand was a leash made of some kind of flowers braided together. At the end of the leash was a dog. Smitty’s huge hand closed crushingly on the Scot’s shoulder as he looked at the dog.
It was a dachshund. It was brilliant green — grass-green. And it was smiling! An unmistakable smile, sly, furtive, was to be made out on the dog’s face — if a dog can be said to have a face.
A little red man, leading a smiling green dog. And standing in the heart of that steam where no living thing could endure.
“It isn’t there,” said Smitty hoarsely.
The little man and the dog were coming steadily toward them, out of the steam.
“We’re both crazy,” said Smitty.
Mac yelled and leaped. Straight toward the apparition. When in doubt, charge. That was Mac’s motto.
Smitty saw him get within ten feet of the little red man and the green dog, in spite of the terrific heat from the steam column. Then man and dog faded back into the heart of the steam and disappeared.
Smitty and Mac got out of there. They looked at each other, sidewise, many times as they climbed to the top of the crater’s rim.
Just once, Mac put into words the thing those looks expressed.
“Nonsense!” he said stoutly. “We aren’t crazy, Smitty. We both saw it, didn’t we?”
“No matter how many see a thing,” said the giant, “if that thing’s impossible — if it just couldn’t have been there to be seen — then—”
There were three horses, now, where they had left their two. In a minute the owner of the third horse appeared. It was Deputy Phelps.
“I followed you,” the lanky deputy said. “Good thing, too. Seems we got horse thieves around.”
A squirt of tobacco juice hit a pebble eight feet away.
“I got here just in time to see a guy tryin’ to get away with your horses. He got away before I could do more’n take a coupla shots on the fly.”
“What did he look like?” said Mac, eyes bleak.
“Kind of a bony guy with a scar or somethin’ on his forehead. That’s all I can say. I didn’t get very close.”
Mac stored that meager description for future reference, with his hands meanwhile making grim, throttling motions.
Smitty sighed with relief. He’d had visions of their horses being taken by the marksman and of their trudging twenty miles on foot to Bison, dodging long-range bullets as they did so.
“Well, you guys find anythin’ important?” said the deputy.
Smitty carefully avoided looking at Mac. Neither of them had any idea of telling what they had seen.
A little red man leading a green dachshund right out of a column of live steam?
“Nothing important,” mumbled Smitty. “Just — sulphur and salt.”
CHAPTER VI
The Black Book
It was about three o’clock in the morning. Smitty and Mac had streaked back from Montana in one of The Avenger’s fastest small planes at a rate that bid fair to beat the official transcontinental record. They had gone straight to their chief.
Three in the morning. But Benson was dressed in his usual unobstrusive gray, and he looked as if sleep were the farthest thing from his mind. As far as anyone could tell, the gray fox of a man seemed able to get along on about three hours’ sleep a day.
He looked at the two objects Smitty and Mac had brought back with them from Bison Park. The little box with the salt and sulphur from the mineral spring and the shabby old handbag Smitty had picked up.
“Go over what happened at the park again,” he said, his voice even and emotionless.
Mac repeated the tale of their morning and half-afternoon at Bison Park and of the shots taken at them.
“Since you’ve never been out here before,” said Benson, “the chances are the marksman is from Washington. He must have seen you here to be able to recognize you — although it is barely possible that descriptions were wired ahead. I have checked the telegraph offices and the phone records and can find no trace of such a warning. Still, it is possible.”
“I haven’t seen anybody such as Phelps described, around here,” said Smitty. “A bony guy with a scar on his forehead.”
“Scar?” repeated Benson quickly, pale eyes like colorless jewels in his dead face.
“Phelps thought it was a scar. But he wasn’t sure. There was just a line down over his temple, he said.”
The Avenger’s eyes took on the brooding look that came when he was co-ordinating past reports. “There was a heavy trash basket thrown at the murderer of Sheriff Aldershot, it is believed. That could have produced a mark on the man’s temple. It is possible that you had a brush with the killer of Aldershot and Sewell. Go on!”
The Scot recalled the sores on the flanks of the jack-rabbit and deer.
The Avenger’s face was as dead as the face of the moon, but his eyes grew colder and more brilliant. He made no comment, but it was plain that he was very much interested in the peculiar disease.
Mac told of Smitty’s picking up the handbag. Benson was looking it over as the Scot spoke. A plain black bag with a gunmetal clasp. There was nothing in it. There was no identifying mark on it.
“And then we saw the little red man leading the green dog,” said Smitty, twisting his huge forefinger uncomfortably between his collar and his columnar neck. Even with the chief, he was afraid of being thought demented when he mentioned that crazy sight. “A little bit of a thing; he was no more than a yard high. And the dog he was leading was smiling. I’ll swear to that.”
“It’s true, Muster Benson,” said Mac seriously. “Even though it sounds mad.”
“You saw the man and dog in the steam column?” The Avenger said.
“Yes! I know nothing could live in that steam. But that’s where we saw them.”
“You saw this vision just after you had picked up the handbag, Smitty?” Benson did not look at the giant as he spoke. He was looking at a long scratch in the gun-metal clasp of the bag.
“Yes, that’s right,” Smitty said.
The Avenger rose, with the box of mineral deposit from Lost Geyser. He went to the traveling laboratory.
Eight minutes later he explained his conclusions. “The scrapings from the sheriff’s shoes reveal thirty percent salt, eight percent sulphur and the rest miscellaneous debris,” he said. “The sample from Lost Geyser has precisely the same percentages. That is where Aldershot went just before hurrying to Washington, all right.”
The gray steel bar of a man with the paralyzed face began to pace slowly up and down the room. Even in this unconsidered, leisurely movement, there was revealed a bit of the enormous physical power compacted in that average-sized body.