The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page B

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