The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker Read Online Free PDF

next?”
    They all listened carefully for the answer to that. But Benson only shook his head and said:
    “We’ll have to wait for the next break. We haven’t anything to work on at the moment. We know that some gang stole a secret invention—perhaps more than one—from the Gant brothers. We know that, thus armed, the gang has some huge, terroristic plot they’re working on. But—that’s all we do know. We’ll have to wait for the next development.”

    The next break was not long in coming. It happened, not in Chicago, but fifty miles out along the lake past Gary, Indiana.
    Up around the east side of Lake Michigan from South Chicago to the Catawbi Iron Range in Michigan, runs the Catawbi Railroad. It hugs the water edge, going through barren dune country for much of its length.
    For freight, the Catawbi Railroad depends on shipments of ore from the Catawbi iron mines to the South Chicago and Gary, Indiana, steel mills. Passengers come from a score of pretty lake towns along the shore where commuters from Chicago live. The commuters board the Catawbi train, go to South Chicago, and there change to local transportation taking them to downtown offices.
    This thing happened along the lake shore in a particularly deserted sand-dune region. It happened at a little after one o’clock in the afternoon. That was fortunate. At that hour, there were less people on the train to which it happened than there would have been during the commuters’ rush hour.
    The five-car train of passenger coaches was rattling over the roadbed at a sixty-mile clip. The engineer was looking ahead all right, but not very attentively. There was no reason why he should be especially alert.
    He had been over this stretch of right of way, in the other direction, two hours ago, and everything had been O.K. then. There were no crossings to watch out for. The day was clear and sunny, so vision was excellent.
    He was looking, rather inattentively, at the roadbed ahead of the speeding engine. Then he jerked straight on the seat in the cab and stared with incredulous eyes. After that, he jammed on the brakes so hard the wheels locked and steel shrieked in anguish on steel.
    Ahead, there was suddenly no railroad track to run on!
    The track ran on for a few hundred yards more, then sort of melted away. Beyond that, as far as the bewildered eye could see, there were no rails at all.
    The ties were there. Even at a moment crowded with horror, the engineer caught a glimpse of spikes in the ties in a line where rails should be. But there was no trace of the rails themselves!
    At least two miles of track had vanished as though it had never existed—though it had been there two hours before.
    The engineer was swearing in a cracked voice and jerking at the brake lever. The train was grinding along with locked wheels. And it hit the section where there were no rails to run on—
    Heavy ties flew and splintered like so many matches. Sand rose in great geysers. The engineer and fireman had tried to jump at the last moment, but before they could the engine crashed over on its side. Broken boilers poured water on the hot fire, and there was a tremendous explosion.
    The cars behind, with their hundreds of tons and mile-a-minute momentum, kept on grinding forward, pushing the debris of the engine along and piling in on each other. Then there was silence, punctuated by the crackle of flames and shattered finally by the screams of the passengers.
    The conductor and brakeman, who had been in the last coach, were shaken up but otherwise unhurt. They rescued the passengers who were still alive, from the flames. The brakeman began running ahead to the next commuters’ town, over the roadbed from which the long section of rails had been so mysteriously taken.
    The conductor raced toward a big man in ragged overalls who had helped in the wreck after appearing over the dunes a short time after the crash.
    “Were you around here before the wreck?” the conductor demanded, almost