The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker Read Online Free PDF Page B

out of his mind. It was the worst wreck in the road’s history. “Did you see anybody around here? Who could have taken a couple of miles of steel rails! And how, and why?”
    The farmer blinked eyes that didn’t look very intelligent. He was shambling, shabby.
    “I was around here for a coupla hours,” he said. “I didn’t see nobody anywheres near, though. Except in the sky.”
    “In the sky?” chattered the conductor. “What are you talking about? What do you mean—in the sky?”
    “I was around here lookin’ for a calf that got away,” the man said, blinking in stupid sympathy at the groaning forms laid on the sand. “I got a farm five miles in. I was in from the tracks a half-mile, mebbe. I heard a noise in the sky. It was like what a plane might make. Only there wasn’t no plane in the sky. But there was a man up there, walkin’.”
    The conductor literally staggered. Then he cursed.
    “Are you a lunatic? This is nothing to joke about. A man walking in the sky! You’d better have a better story to tell when the State police get here!”
    “You asked what I seen,” the man said. “So I’m tellin’ you. I got good eyes. The best eyes of anybody in these parts. I see things most people have to have glasses to see. And I saw what I said.”
    He shifted from one foot to the other in his earnestness.
    “Way up in the sky, a guy was walkin’. Hunder’ yards to a step. He was pushin’ something in front of him. Looked about the size of a barrel. I don’t know what it was, and I don’t know how a guy can walk in the air, but that’s what this guy was doin’. I seen him plain, before he went into the sun and I couldn’t see no more.”
    That was the man’s story, and he stuck to it.
    He had heard a weird noise in the sky at about the time two miles of solid steel rails had vanished. He had looked for a plane, but had seen no plane. Instead, with a remarkably good pair of eyes, he had seen a man walking up there. Walking, in thin air! And pushing something ahead of him about the size of a barrel.
    The crazy tale wasn’t worth paying attention to, of course. But, meanwhile, there was the theft of two miles of rail to clear up—and the thieves to be brought to justice for causing a railroad wreck of disastrous proportions.

    The small Catawbi Railroad couldn’t stand many disasters like that wreck. In the small South Chicago office building owned as home office by the road, the president of the board of directors paced his office.
    The president was Abel Darcey. He was not really a railroad man. He was a banker and a heavy investor in South Chicago industry, with a big home up along the lake.
    The directors of the road weren’t railroad men, either. The Catawbi Railroad had a curious history.
    Some years before, all the little shore towns through which the road had passed had decided that railroads were fair game for rich taxes. One after another, the townships had piled special taxes on the road till a point had been reached where its running was no longer profitable.
    It had been abandoned. But that stranded several thousand well-to-do commuters with homes on the lake and offices in the city. So the commuters had gotten the taxes rescinded, each in the districts in which they lived; then they had formed their own stock company and taken the road over, with Abel Darcey to head the board of directors.
    The road just about paid for itself, which was enough for the owners, since all they wanted was sure transportation. But there weren’t enough finances in its backing to stand shocks like that wreck!
    Darcey stopped his pacing long enough to ring for his secretary. He was a clear-skinned man of sixty, with eyes ordinarily calm enough but now very worried indeed.
    The secretary, a trim brunette, came in.
    “Have you found out who made the offer to buy the road?” Darcey asked her.
    “No, sir,” she said. “It came through the Michigan Bank. That’s all anyone knows.”
    “Well, I notified