Читать книгу The Munitions Master: A Doc Savage Adventure - Harold A. Davis - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Doc Savage leaped from the reviewing stand and fought his way to the stricken figures in the street. He did not seem to use much force, but he eased through the crowd where another would have found progress impossible.

Several hundred soldiers had fallen. They lay huddled, still in some semblance of the straight, well-ordered lines in which they had been marching.

But they would never march again. They had been crippled forever, had been left with shattered bodies.

It was as if their legs had been melted away, halfway to their knees. Their feet and the lower part of their legs had disappeared. There was a peculiar, sickening smell in the air.

Doc Savage dropped beside the body of the closest soldier, an officer.

A low, strange sound came suddenly. It was a trilling sound that apparently came from everywhere, but yet from no particular point. It was a sound the bronze man always made either when he was surprised or when he was warning of danger.

And he was surprised now.

There was nothing to indicate how the soldiers had been crippled. The stubs of their legs were seared as if from white-hot fire. That alone kept the men from bleeding to death. Had a sheet of intensely strong flame swept the street, it would have produced such a result; but there had been no such sheet of flame.

It was easy to understand, though, why the soldiers were silent. They were suffering from shock, dazed and half unconscious from pain.

There was excited calls from gendarmes. Ambulances were trying to force their way through the mob, and having little success.

The soldiers were in danger of being trampled to death beneath the feet of their crazed countrymen. A troop of cavalry was trying to take care of that problem, officers leading their men directly into the twisting, swirling mass.

The mob was fighting back, senselessly. The situation was tense, filled with danger.

Doc Savage alone was cool.

The bronze man came to his feet. His face did not change expression, but his gold-flecked eyes swept the swarming mob with calm deliberation.

Monk and Ham, with Chemistry, had also fought their way toward the stricken soldiers. They realized, as quickly as did Doc, that there was nothing to be done.

The soldiers were crippled. Their wounds had been cauterized. A majority would live, but for many it would mean lives as crippled as their bodies.

“But if there ain’t no war, what caused it?” Monk wailed ungrammatically.

Ham did not answer. The lawyer’s features were set; he was peering over the heads of the crowd, trying to locate Doc.

The bronze man’s eyes flashed. They had found what they were seeking.

A small, thin-faced man was boring furtively through the crowd. No longer was he carrying loaves of bread under his arm.

Doc’s aids knew the bronze man had a photographic mind. He could see and remember small incidents that others would have overlooked.

Just before the horror struck, the little man with the bread had been at the curb, along the line of march. As the soldiers had reached a spot in front of the reviewing stand, he had done a strange thing.

He had reached out, had knocked off the ends of each of the loaves of bread he carried. Then he had dropped the bread.

Doc dived forward.

The thin-faced man saw him. He gave a startled cheep, and was engulfed in a wave of struggling forms. He was not far from Monk and Ham.

Strange words came from Doc’s lips.

Heads turned toward him suspiciously. The words were in a weird language, certainly not French.

Monk and Ham understood. Doc had spoken in Mayan, the tongue the bronze man used when he wished to direct his aids without others knowing what he said.

Instantly the hairy chemist and the dapper lawyer dived after the little man.

The little man’s face was working strangely now. Saliva drooled from his mouth. He was trapped!

Two men in the uniforms of gendarmes smiled grimly. Their uniforms were making a path for them.

“Now!” one of them said shortly.

The other nodded. They leaped forward.

One appeared on either side of the bronze man. They grabbed Doc by the arms.

“Halte!” they cried.

Those in the crowd near by stopped their yelling to listen. Here was the famous Doc Savage being stopped by gendarmes!

“Doc Savage, you are under arrest!” one of the men shouted.

He appeared to shout even louder than should have been necessary. His voice carried a long way. Many heard him.

“We know you plotted this. We saw you give the signal for this horror to start. Even now, you shouted to your conspirators in a foreign tongue.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Monk and Ham stopped in their tracks, mouths wide, eyes unbelieving.

“There must be some mistake, messieurs,” Doc said quietly.

One of the gendarmes made a darting gesture toward Doc’s pocket. He held up his hand and waved a small vial. The cork in the vial was knocked out. A thin liquid poured to the ground.

The liquid had a penetrating, sickening smell. It was a smell such as surrounded the fallen soldiers.

“Here is proof!” the man shrieked.

A SAVAGE roar of almost unutterable ferocity came from the crowd. Suspicion had been turned toward the bronze man. Suspicion was all the mob needed.

“Tear him limb from limb!”

“Kill the monster!”

“Murder him! Slay him!”

“Death! Death!”

The yells came from scores of throats.

There was an eruption of humanity. The gendarmes were torn from the side of the bronze man.

Monk and Ham had listened, scarcely able to credit their ears. They knew the gendarmes had lied. And knew, as a consequence, that they must be fakes. But they could see the unstoppable consequences of the shrewd play that had been made.

Small, squalling sounds came from Monk. Doc Savage had gone down! The hairy chemist went berserk!

Ham’s face was more serious than it had ever been before in his life. Side by side, the two fought to reach the place where the bronze man had vanished under a sea of figures.

But if the scene had been one of almost indescribable confusion before, now it was worse.

Word of the accusation swept through the throngs. The cavalrymen, trying hard to protect their injured comrades, were swept from their horses. The horses themselves were knocked to the pavement.

Soldiers who had been only crippled before, were now pounded to death beneath plunging feet.

Sheer animal cries of savagery came from those closest to Doc Savage. Tattered pieces of clothing floated up in the air, as if hurled there by a seething cauldron.

Across the street, Carloff Traniv watched. His hand was steady as he held the binoculars to his eyes.

“The famous Doc Savage!” he muttered sardonically. “But then, he won his fame before he encountered Carloff Traniv.”

His lips split in a grin as he saw Monk and Ham forced back by the crowd they sought to get through. He saw a hairy figure—Chemistry—fighting hopelessly beside Doc’s aids. Ham was using his sword cane, but lost it in the fight finally.

Traniv grunted with satisfaction as the glasses picked up the scurrying figure of a small, thin-faced man. He appeared pleased, too, when he saw two men in tattered gendarme uniforms fight their way to one side.

“And if Doc Savage is the man they say he is, he also will contrive to escape,” he said softly. “If he does——”

His eyes caught the figures of a girl and a man, pressed back on the outskirts of the crowd, and his grin broadened.

The faces of the girl and the man were grim. The girl was slender, scarcely over five feet tall, and had been called beautiful. Her figure was one that had drawn raves from all who had seen it. And since she displayed that figure at a night club every evening, many had seen it.

It might have been only coincidence that the night club where she danced was frequented mostly by army officers and government employees.

The man beside her supposedly was her dancing partner. He was tall and lithe, but there were lines about his eyes that made him appear older than he was.

The girl had her pocketbook half opened. One hand was inside. Her fist was wrapped tight about a small, very efficient automatic.

The man’s gun was in his side coat pocket. His fingers also were firm about the butt of the weapon.

Their eyes were glued on the struggling heap where Doc Savage had last been seen.

And at that moment, radios in many countries were blaring their shocking message.

“We have additional information to add to our short item of a few moments ago, describing the horrible occurrence in France, an occurrence similar to one recently reported from China,” the clipped voice of a British broadcaster was saying.

“The crime cannot be laid at our door, no matter how much our neighbor may wish to do so,” was the statement of a guttural-voiced German announcer.

“It’s terrible. It’s beyond belief. But the news seems to be authentic,” came the sorrowful tones of an American news commentator. He paused a moment:

“The horror—and we do not know yet what that horror was, except that it took the legs from men without warning, and, so far as could be seen, without use of weapons—has been laid at the door of an American we all have revered.

“That American is known to us as an inventive genius, an adventurer and a hero, a man without a peer. But something must have slipped, must have affected that great man. At any rate, ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that the French believe they know the perpetrator of that fantastic tragedy across the seas. Many witnesses attest to it.

“That man is Clark Savage, Jr., known to his friends as Doc Savage.

“He is believed to have been torn to pieces by the mob. Rioting, however, is still going on and definite information is impossible to obtain.

“If Doc Savage was responsible, then he deserved to be torn to pieces. But let us suspend judgment if we can. Certainly, evil forces are at work on a scale never before dreamed of. We must remain calm, although the entire world is jittery; although nations are arming feverishly——”