But she didn’t seem to be falling.
She opened her eyes.
She was at the sheer edge of a cliff whose face was of glittering, newly exposed rock. Before her, several hundred feet down, was a moving, awful carpet of tremendous rock slabs that hadn’t yet come to rest but was rolling on and on over the jungle growth, engulfing trees as if they’d been grass blades.
On and on over the jungle floor — and over the camp of Borg’s men — and then on some more.
It was the two-thirds of the ridgetop that had slid with the explosion, not the narrower strip of Mac and Smitty’s side. It was Borg’s camp that had been buried by uncountable tons of rock, not their own side. And Chandler?
If he had screamed in mad amazement and horror when he saw that he had sent himself to oblivion by his misguided shot, no one would ever know; for the screams of a city could not have been heard in that uproar.
The world-shattering din slowly subsided as the last of the avalanching rock slabs slid to a stop among crumpled trees over an eighth of a mile from where the slide had begun. Still Nellie couldn’t hear anything; her eardrums were temporarily out of commission. But she could see. And her eyes, wide with awe and horror on the scene in front of her, caught movement at her side out of their corners. She turned.
The “Indian” face as immobile as a thing carved in granite, pale eyes like colorless agate, was standing at her side and looking, too.
She started to say something to him, saw him look down at her — and fainted.
Benson had the brown stuff off his skin. Still in the Indian’s rags because he had no way of getting other clothes for a little while, he was still a more impressive figure than any Nellie had ever seen before as he stood at the top of the freshly made cliff.
Mac and Smitty were there. They had seen the machine gunners fleeing in superstitious terror before the deafening catastrophe that sounded like a world ending. Smitty and Mac had left the tree and raced up the cliff on their side to see what had happened.
“The whole lot of them,” breathed Smitty, staring at the tumbled sea of rock over Borg’s camp. “Their bones will he there till Judgment Day. The whole lot of them! And their own leader snuffed out their lives!”
Mac shook his dour Scots head.
“Chandler! He was the skurlie behind it all! And we asked him to come along with us — to ‘help’ us!”
“It was the easiest way to keep an eye on him,” said Benson, lips barely moving with the words in his dead face.
“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac. “Ye knew Chandler was the man?”
“Yes.” Benson’s brooding, colorless eyes were on the scene of devastation before them. “Many things indicated his guilt. He said he was a zoning engineer working in Guatemala till a ridiculously big armament program took all their money and left none for city planning. The sinister big armaments program was correct. His statement that he was a zoning engineer was not.
“He said he had come with Profesor Gray on Aztec expeditions twice because he learned city planning stunts from the way the ancient Indians laid out their cities. But the Aztec cities, with no traffic of any kind, were not laid out. Buildings were put up haphazard. There was no lesson to be learned there by a modern engineer.
“And on his desk, when I called on him, there was a perfectly made and designed working model of a field gun. An unusual and expensive little ‘sample’ handed out as souvenirs by big munitions companies to just two types of people — those who buy large quantities of arms, and those who sell them.”
Mac whistled. The giant Smitty stared, still not quite getting it.
“Chandler was a munitions salesman, not a zoning engineer. His presence in Guatemala and Mexico was in connection with the mysteriously huge shipments of arms arriving in this part of the world recently.”
“Those little bombs—” Nellie said.
Benson nodded. “Their unbelievable power told the whole story. They are filled with a formula of liquid oxygen, carbon and tung oil, and are the latest thing in wholesale death. Bombers will strew tons of the little peanut bombs, like seeds of death, over cities in the next war. But the point is that only a munitions man could have got hold of those. Which instantly tied Chandler in as the evil spirit behind the entire plot to get the treasure whose key your father discovered.
“It also placed the man commanding Borg — who was known as the arms supplier for gangland. Arms bought from Chandler. And it explains the machine guns and gas bombs with which they attacked you in the big tree — gotten from a munitions cache near here, placed by Chandler.
“However, I confirmed my decision that Chandler was our man. To make it doubly sure, I allowed the man Pinkie Huer, in our Bleek Street headquarters, to reach a phone while he was alone so a trap could be set for me. The trap was laid — at Chandler’s. It was so staged that if it failed — which it did — it would look as if Borg had meant to kill or kidnap Chandler too.”
“Borg almost did kill Chandler when he bottled him up in that hole with us,” said Smitty.
“Yes. That was an attempt at double cross for which Borg would have paid later. Borg was going to keep all the gold himself.”
“He couldn’t have found it, with only four plates.”
“He counted on getting the fifth plate from one of our bodies when we’d been in our tomb long enough to die,” Benson pointed out. “Chandler, of course, didn’t even need to wait that long. He had seen the fifth plate, Alec Knight’s plate, and knew the whole message. He could have gone right to the treasure as soon as he’d killed everybody in his way with the rock slide.”
“You let him set off that explosion,” said Nellie, staring hard at the white, still face.
“Yes, I let him,” said Benson.
“And you knew which way the slide would go. Because you kept me from going to the side I thought was safe.”
“I knew,” Benson nodded quietly. “I scarcely even needed a look at the fissure to know that. Because that small crack was the only visible evidence of the last and greatest Aztec death trap of them all — designed as a last resort to protect their treasure from raiders. And since the hoard was buried on Borg’s side of the ridge, naturally any trap protecting it would be bound to send death on that side, no matter which way it seemed the avalanche would slide from an examination of the top of the ridge.”
The baleful colorless eyes stared at the tumbled tons of rock.
“So I let Chandler destroy himself and his men as the ancient Aztecs would have destroyed them had they been here today to guard their treasure. If he was ruthless enough to scheme our deaths by the twitch of his trigger finger, let him bring on himself the fiendish fate he had hatched.”
The giant Smitty sighed. “Justice & Co.,” he murmured. But Mac had something else in mind.
“Whoosh! How d’ye know the treasure was on that side? Ye hunted on our side this mornin’.”
“I found it,” said Benson, voice as cold and emotionless as his dead face.
“Ye did? Then it’s under all that rock and no man will ever see it—”
“It is — under the third biggest boulder in the middle of the slide,” said Benson. “We can find it quite easily, whenever Nellie Gray wants it. It’s hers.”
Nellie shook her sleek blond head vigorously.
“It’s ours. We share alike. But I’ve a suggestion to make.” She stared very seriously at Benson. “I’d suggest that we leave it where it is as a sort of permanent and tremendous bank deposit, to be drawn on in a perpetual fight against crime. And I’d like to join in that fight. I want to work with you. I could do many valuable things that no man could do. And I… my father—”