Читать книгу Land of Long Juju: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lawrence Donovan - Страница 3

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Two weird figures came running in the white fog. Their queer garments flapped like the sheets of ghosts. Runners of the jungle should not have been so dressed. The togalike attire was pulled above bony knees, but the garments were hampering. Any white man who had been in Abyssinia would have identified these sheets as the chamma. This was distinctive of royal or official rank.

These grotesquely clad runners were far south of Abyssinia. They were now below the great Taveta forest of Central East Africa, in the foothills of the Parri Mountains. It was a green, fog-soaked wilderness of silence just now.

Doubtless the place was too silent in the judgment of the taller of the two runners. The pair was approaching a water hole.

The taller runner halted suddenly. He held up one long, skinny arm. The other runner became motionless. Both listened intently.

There came only a strange, distant throbbing; like the hard heel of a human hand beating upon some hollow vessel. The runners knew the sound for a drum. The stretched skin of a kudu, the great antelope of the country, over the end of a hollowed senecio log.

The runners had been hearing the drum talk for two days and two nights. Five days and nights before, when they had started, there had been six runners. Only these two had survived to reach this place.

“Safi maji,” whispered the tallest runner hoarsely.

He meant the pool contained clean water. Some other pools had been poisoned. Two of the original six runners had drunk of these pools.

These two had remained behind.

The taller runner directed his companion to drink while he kept watch. The skin drum continued to throb.

The shorter runner dropped to his hands and knees. He crept through the white fog to the pool. His brown hands divided the broad leaves of a senecio tree.

No sound had been given forth by the fog-drenched leaves. The taller runner rasped a warning. The shorter runner stretched on his stomach. His tongue lapped up water where his hand had pushed away the scum.

Then he made a sudden, violent effort as if to rise. His neck seemed incapable of lifting his head. His face splashed into the pool. Air bubbles arose around the man’s head.

The tall runner made no effort to rescue his companion. He whispered a word.

“Okoyong.” Then he added, “Masai, the Long Juju.”

The tall runner seemed almost to dissolve into the wall of the jungle. His companion was already a stiffening body. A small dart had appeared behind one ear of the runner who had died beside the pool.

Though he had been running for five days and nights, halting only when overpowered by sleep, the tall man slipped through the tangled vines of the liana with amazing speed.

The tall figure was the last of the six runners. On the shoulders of this single man rested the burden of the message that had been carried by six.

Whatever the encircling menace, the runner escaped temporarily. He carried but a single weapon. This was a sharp-bladed, short-hafted stabbing spear.

He had said, “Okoyong” and “Masai.” No fiercer tribes dwelt in all of Africa. The Masai were blood-drinkers and head-hunters of this interior central country. The Okoyong were from a distant place. They had come into the land of Kilimanjaro, bringing witchcraft, the worship of the Long Juju.

Perhaps the tall runner had no hope of escaping with his life. But his message must be delivered verbally.

More than one drum was talking now. The taut skins throbbed from four points of the compass.

The runner’s face was different from that of other tribes in the Kilimanjaro and Taveta forest country. His skin was lighter than the smoky black mostly to be found. The nose was thin and hawklike, an arching bone that might have belonged to an ancient Roman rather than to a native of Africa.

The thin nostrils now were twitching. The runner’s keen olfactory sense told him he was not far from his goal. The odor was that of meat being cooked as only an Inglesi would want it. All white men were Inglesi, or Englishmen.

The runner came to a wide, open glade beside a flowing stream of white water. His thirst was very great, almost unendurable.

The man hesitated for less than five seconds. His long legs plunged him forward into the open space. Then he cried out, only once. The impeding chamma fell down around his knees and entangled his legs. The stabbing spear flew from his hand.

The man lay still, except for a twitching of his muscles. From his back, between the shoulder blades, protruded a long spear haft. Ostrich feathers, dyed red with ochre, quivered in the wind.

“It was in this direction I heard it,” spoke a deep, resonant voice in English with a broad American accent.

A white man pushed aside the vines. He started into the open space where the sheeted figure lay with a spear in his back.

A big native, wearing only a garment of colobus monkey fur, thrust an ebony arm in front of the white man.

“No like, b’wana!” he grunted. “Me first go see!”

But the white man was bigger. He pushed past the restraining arm. He looked like a giant beside the other. His figure was huge, an immense bulk of perhaps more than two hundred and fifty pounds.

“Thunderation, Souho!” he boomed. “That fellow’s still living! Maybe we can save him! Here, grab a hatful of water!”

The huge white man swept off his helmetlike, tropical hat and thrust it into the native’s hands.

“Hurry, Souho!” he commanded. “We’ll see what we can do!”

“Will make do, B’wana Renwick,” muttered the native.

Souho obeyed the order of B’wana Renwick. He reached the stream by keeping close to the jungle wall.

“Come, give me a hand, Mapanda,” said B’wana Renwick. “I’ve got a hunch that fellow was trying to get to our safari. Maybe he’s from old King Udu himself.”

A quick-moving youth with a yellowish skin and snapping black eyes moved behind the white man. Mapanda was of an Arabian cast, probably from one of the upper coastal tribes.

B’wana Renwick had faced too many dangers in too many outlandish places to betray any fear.

For the white man was Colonel John Renwick, world famous engineer. To thousands he was known simply as “Renny.” He was one of the world’s most noted group of adventurers.

Clark Savage, Jr., known to the world as Doc Savage, was soon to know of this dead native runner in the African jungle. For, as Renny lifted the head of the dying native in the strange chamma, Doc Savage, in New York, was attempting to get in touch with the giant engineer over the world’s most powerful short-wave radio.

When Souho, the native hunter, brought the hat filled with water, the dying runner gulped some of it. Renny lifted the man in his arms. Death was certain. The blade of the spear had pierced the man’s body.

“B’wana—B’wana Renwick?” whispered the dying man. “It is good you come—Ras Udu—the king of Koko is going—”

The runner’s head dropped. Renny quickly produced a small hypodermic syringe. In a few seconds, the man opened his eyes. Whispered speech came to his lips through bloody foam.

Renny held him in his arms. The words were partly English and partly a native patois.

“Yes?” he said, when the runner halted and choked. “King Udu wants the railroad? And what is this other?”

The runner could say only a few words. His speech ended. Renny pulled the chamma over the man’s face.

“Doc’s got to know about this,” he said slowly to himself. “Come, Souho! Mapanda! We’ll take the body to camp! He must be buried!”

Souho and Mapanda, Renny’s head carrier, did not relish this task. Souho, the hunter, was a brave man. He had faced a man-eating simba, the great lion of the Taveta, with only his spear. But he carried the body of the dead runner as if it were some dangerous high explosive.

Equatorial night descended upon Renny’s camp as they arrived with the body. Already the carrier boys had a great fire going.

The skin drums had never ceased talking. The throbbing was spaced between beats like dots and dashes of the regular Morse telegraph code.

The carriers were eating. Their meal was a delicacy with them. It consisted of elephant feet baked for two days in a hot pit.

“Hyrax no make much talk, B’wana Renwick,” said Souho. “The spear is of Masai, b’wana. It means they make do war.”

“Holy cow!” growled Renny. “And if they make do war, as you call it, they’ll bust up the whole railroad scheme! Them Britishers won’t back any steel into war country right now!”

The night was oppressive. There had been no visit of the small colobus monkeys. Renny had been on this railroad survey for nearly six weeks. The small monkeys had followed the camp.

Only an engineer of outstanding ability could have plotted the line of steel from Muoa Pemba, on the Indian Ocean south of Mobasi, through the Parri Mountains to the great Taveta country. The line was intended to open up the rich lands of the Kilimanjaro mountains.

Renny believed their camp was being closely watched. The silence of the hyrax and the absence of the monkeys in the dense jungle could mean only one thing. Many men must be close to the camp.

Renny brought from his tent a huge square box. From this he produced a radio transmitter. The transmitter was one of Doc Savage’s system. Its short wave made it possible for his men to reach him across many hundreds of miles.

Renny set the dials to the wave lengths employed by the Doc Savage group. Mapanda’s black eyes glittered. To this native’s mind, B’wana Renwick was a greater sorcerer than the most powerful Juju priests.

The generator started humming. Still the drums were talking.

Suddenly one of the carriers let out a wild screech. Others of the native boys threw aside their platters of elephant feet.

The screech became a death scream. A native boy arose. His bony body teetered back to its heels. He fell in the edge of the big fire. His flesh burned sickeningly.

The blade of a long spear stuck through the carrier’s throat. Before Renny could get to his feet, two more native boys were impaled. The other carriers howled and dashed toward the denser jungle.

“Come back, you fools!” roared Renny. “Make cover here!”

Renny was whispering into his tent. Screams of agony came from the jungle. Souho, the hunter, threw himself flat on the ground. His hands had grabbed the most powerful gun.

This was a .450 Express, a British model. Souho exploded the big-game killer. But its high-velocity bullets only clipped leaves from the jungle where no one seemed to be moving.

Renny came out with a clumsy looking weapon. It was a superfire machine pistol, loaded with a drum of quick-firing bullets. The pistol made a noise like an immense bullfiddle. But its slugs only mowed a path a little to one side of where the carrier boys were running.

Perhaps most of the score of native boys had been killed. The others had slithered away. Renny muttered grimly.

“Holy cow!” boomed Renny. “If I could only get an eye on some of them devils!”

While the guns were whooping and banging, no more spears had fallen. If three boys had not been lying transfixed by the murderous blades, it would have seemed there had been no attack.

This was amazing. The tribal warriors usually accompany their attacks with much shouting.