Читать книгу The Lost Oasis: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5

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Excited shouts rang from various parts of the Yankee Beauty. The human screams had been heard below decks. Indeed, they must have carried to the crowds of curious individuals on shore. Feet clattered as men ran about searching for the source of the cries.

A flashlight beam, long and thin as a white cord, appeared near where Jules had met misfortune. Roving, the light picked up Jules’s form.

The man lay on his back, limbs contorted in frightful fashion. His hand still gripped the revolver. His eyes protruded, his teeth were bared. His expression was that of a death mask of ghastly terror. A single horrible tear gaped in Jules’s throat. Through this, it was evident much of his blood had been sucked.

For ten seconds—perhaps fifteen, an ominous silence enwrapped the deck.

Then there came into being a weird sound. It was totally unlike the eerie fluttering which had preceded Jules’s death. This note was inspiring. It was musical, yet possessed no tune.

A strange, mellow, trilling note, it might have been the song of some exotic bird, or the sound of wind filtering through a jungled forest. Most uncanny of all was the way the sound seemed to come from no particular spot, but from everywhere, as if the very darkness were giving birth to it.

A moment later, the flashlight beam widened as some adjustment on the lens was turned. The deck planks, white from much scrubbing, reflected a glow which disclosed the man who held the flash—a statuesque giant of bronze.

Doc Savage had heard the uproar, and had lost no time in locating its source.

The strange trilling was Doc’s sound, omen of his presence. It was part of Doc, that mellow sound—a small, unconscious thing which he did in moments of utter concentration. Only when he was thinking furiously, or on the eve of some course of action, did the trilling come. And rarely did Doc realize he was making it.

Doc’s small bag opened silently under his bronze fingers. He removed a small container. This held a rather bilious-looking powder.

Doc sprinkled a thin film of the powder upon the deck, covering an area several feet in all directions from the body. The instant the powder came from the container, it glowed brilliantly. It became like liquid fire!

But after the stuff came to rest on the deck, it ceased to glow—except in spots.

The spots which still shone marked the ill-fated Jules’s footprints, as well as Doc’s own!

Doc Savage had many weird chemical mixtures at his command. Probably none were more unique than this powder. It had the quality of glowing only when jarred. The jarring caused the particles to break, exposing new surfaces to the air, and these shone momentarily because of a reaction between the compound and the air.

Why the footprints glowed was simply explained. Jules and Doc, stepping upon the deck planks, had depressed the wood to a microscopic degree with their weight. The wood fibers, still in the process of springing back into position, were jarring the unusual powder enough to cause it to expose new surfaces to the air, thus creating a phosphorescent reaction.

In Doc’s hand was a ruler. He glanced about, intending to measure the murderer’s footprints.

But there were no prints!

Doc’s golden eyes roved unbelievingly. But there was no question about it! The only footprints were his own and those of Jules. He measured the soles of Jules’s shoes, to make sure.

His flashlight roved up and down the deck, then skyward. Above, and perhaps twenty feet sternward, there was a rigging cable. On this glistened a wet, crimson stain.

If the stain was blood, it seemed incredible that any human murderer could have operated from the cable.

Doc glided down the deck. Leaping, he grasped the hawser and mounted. The wet stain was human blood, beyond question! Clinging to the cable with one hand, Doc played his light along it.

The Yankee Beauty was an oil burner, and the hawser bore a layer of sticky soot which had been deposited by the oil smoke. Had any one climbed the cable recently, the soot would have been rubbed off. But it was not disturbed!

The stain on the line was inexplicable—unless some gory, aërial thing had brushed against it!

Doc doused his light. Men were running down the deck. Stewards. They carried storm lanterns. They passed below Doc, never realizing he was clinging to the cable over their heads.

“Hey—look!” gulped one of the sailors, catching sight of the horribly contorted body.

It required only two or three minutes for a crowd to gather.

“What’s this stuff on deck?” demanded a man, indicating Doc’s strange powder. “It shines whenever you disturb it.”

“What killed this man?” pondered another.

“Pipe his throat! That’s what got ’im!”

“Yeah! Looks like the work of a vampire!”

“There ain’t no such thing.”

“Who is he?” asked a fellow in the oily garments of an engineer.

“Name is Jules Fourmalier,” replied a steward. “He had cabin No. 12. A passenger.”

Doc Savage had been awaiting information such as this. He ran, hand over hand, up the cable. He made no perceptible sound. The waterproof bag was swinging upon his back.

Reaching a mast, he located a rigging line which led to the opposite side of the ship. He descended swiftly. A very few minutes later, he was before the door of Stateroom No. 12.

The door was locked. Doc’s bag disgorged a tiny kit of locksmith’s tools. The cabin door soon opened under his practiced manipulation. He switched on the light.

The place was a wreck! The rug was torn up; the mattress on the berth was literally shredded. The washstand had been taken apart. A life preserver had been ripped open and the cork stuffing whittled to pieces. The search had missed nothing.

Doc hardly moved from where he stood just within the door. His gaze missed nothing, however.

Offhand, it might have seemed impossible to gain from the condition of the room the slightest inkling of what the searcher had sought. But to Doc’s sharp eyes, several things had a meaning.

The fact that the backs of three or four books had not been ripped off told him the hunt had not been for anything in the nature of a paper. Otherwise, the search would have extended to the book covers.

A bottle of colored shaving lotion had been emptied so that the container might be inspected. The quick-drying liquid was still quite wet. The search had been conducted only a few minutes ago!

Doc decided to try for the prowler’s footprints. He got his chemical from the bag, decided the nap of the corridor rug would be the most effective spot for its use, and stepped outside.

He noted casually that the lock on the door was a spring type. Whoever had ransacked the stateroom had no doubt merely slammed the door in departing.

The powder blazed resplendently as Doc scattered it. Then, after it had settled, the luster slowly faded, except for patches where feet had recently depressed the rug pile.

Ruler in hand, Doc bent to measure prints immediately before the door.

Down the corridor some distance, a hand appeared from around a cross passage. It held an automatic. The gun leveled at Doc. It crashed noisily!

The powder flash flushed redly on the corridor walls. The report thumped like thunder, piling echoes into the corridors, the lounge and deep into the steamer’s vitals! The bullet screamed down the passage and hit—nothing but wall paneling!

Doc had vanished as though by magic. Literally disappeared from before the bullet! As a matter of fact, Doc had whipped from sight into Jules’s cabin even before the shot was fired.

The bushwhacker down the corridor had slipped off the safety on his automatic a moment before shooting. This had made a faint click, a sound Doc had heard. A single glance had shown him his danger. His reaction was instantaneous.

Another shot thundered, proving the gunman to be somewhat excited!

In the stateroom, Doc was delving into his bag. He brought out an object about the size of a small condensed milk can. He twisted a key on this, then hurled it down the passage toward the marksman.

The object began spewing a dense black smoke. This swiftly filled the corridor.

More shots slammed. Doc counted them. When the automatic had emptied a clip, he flung into the corridor. He sped the opposite direction of the gunman. Once clear of the pall from the smoke bomb, he found a short passage and a door which gave out on deck.

Behind him, he heard a great hissing and splashing of water. Spray and an occasional splatter of water even reached to where he stood.

The bushwhacker had turned the fire hose down the passage to blot out his fiery footprints, so they could not be measured!

Doc stepped out on deck. There was nothing in his manner to show he had just engaged in a grim joust with death. It was not his first peril. Nor was it likely to be his last. Hazards were his heritage.

From forward, a chorus of excited yells was sounding! The shots had interrupted the palaver over the body of Jules. But not one of the sailors seemed willing to do more toward investigating than bellow encouragement at his fellows.

Doc glided along the deck. He found the cross passage from which the shot had been fired and dashed his flashlight in, knowing from long experience that he could duck back before an accurate bullet could be driven at him.

The passage was empty. Doc tossed his flash beam up and down the deck. No one was in sight. He sprinkled a quantity of his powder on deck. The fiery imprints which appeared were somewhat shapeless. Nevertheless, they told him the gunman had been hopping on one foot, around which he had wrapped a padding—probably cloth.

A few spots showed where the unmuffled foot had been employed as a prop. But there was certainly nothing which offered identifying measurements.

Doc bent closer to the deck, golden eyes searching intently. A moment later, his bronze hand descended. It lifted, with a yarn of gray wool gripped between thumb and forefinger. The yarn had been caught under a deck splinter, and it showed the cloth, muffling the man’s shoe, was coarse, gray.

Doc now evidenced a desire to go forward, glancing several times in that direction. But the sailors still dilly-dallied about investigating the shots. They were not inclined to risk becoming targets.

“Fire!” somebody howled suddenly. “All hands fall to! Fire! Fire!”

Doc evinced no alarm, knowing the cries meant the smoke bomb smudge had been discovered. But not so the seamen around Jules’s body. They charged, aft, filled with visions of the ship’s burning, with the consequent loss of their jobs.

Not a man remained to guard Jules’s lifeless form.

Doc Savage hurried forward. Twice, he stepped behind lifeboats to escape the notice of running men. Reaching the murdered man, he began a swift search of pockets, something there had been no time to do earlier. The proximity of death did not bother him—his training as a surgeon had inured him to such things.

The contents of the pockets were meager. There were a number of coins. Dashing the flashlight on them, Doc saw they were silver piastres, coins of various denomination, together with some United States money. He examined the Arabic characters on the piastres.

“Egypt!” he said softly, voicing the source of the coins.

An inside coat pocket held the most surprising find of all. This was a small bundle of magazine clippings, snapped around with a rubber band. Doc examined the clippings curiously.

Each item had to do with Zeppelin-type airships. Evidently they had been snipped from shipboard copies of general science magazines, since they covered the newer developments in lighter-than-air craft.

Doc played his light on the clippings, many of which bore pictures. Some of these held penciled notations, usually reproductions of the new developments depicted, as if the dead man had sought to familiarize himself with them.

Included in Doc’s almost universal knowledge was a nice fund of information on the history of airship construction. He riffled through the sheaf of clippings, putting his learning to use.

He made a discovery. The scientific attainments which had come in for the unfortunate Jules’s attention, as denoted by the penciled sketches, had all been made within the past dozen or so years. It was as if Jules had been unable to secure information on airship development for that period, and had been catching up.

In one place, the lifting capacity of a gas compartment was accurately calculated, showing Jules had been an expert on lighter-than-air craft, even though a little out of date.

On a picture portraying an entire Zeppelin, Doc made the most interesting discovery of all. Near the bows of the craft, as if absent-mindedly penciled there, were the identification letters ZX 03.

The dead man had placed the caption there, it might safely be believed. The title of a Zeppelin! It must have played a vital part in the fellow’s past or he would hardly have penciled its designation upon the picture.

Doc made a mental note to look up the airship ZX 03.

Recalling the ransacked condition of Jules’s stateroom, Doc continued his search. Some one had wanted something Jules had.

On the man’s legs, below the knees, he found several knotty protuberances. Five of them, to be exact. These proved to be objects the size of small walnuts held in place by crisscrossed strips of adhesive tape.

Doc removed and investigated them.

Each object was an uncut diamond of the first water. The stones were undoubtedly of enormous value.

Doc appropriated the gems. They might be useful in his investigation, and he could later deliver them to the heirs of the dead man. Or to whoever was the rightful owner!

He thought deeply. Diamonds—Egyptian money—a knowledge of air ships a dozen years behind the times! The clews did not lead to any sort of a direct explanation.

From the stern, shouts drifted. The sailors had evidently discovered the source of the supposed fire. Officers were bellowing questions and contradictory orders which only added to the confusion.

The murderer—be he human or some diabolic vampire thing—would have no trouble moving about unobserved in the turmoil.

Stowing the diamonds in his bag, and slinging the container on his back, Doc moved forward in the gloom. He was going to confer with the captain of the Yankee Beauty, as well as the radio operator, to learn who had offered the million-dollar reward.

There came an interruption. Toward the stern, a shrill feminine cry pealed out! It was a voice saturated in horror! A door slammed noisily. The scream continued, coupled with noises of a struggle!

A blurred flash of speed, Doc shot forward. He rounded the deck house. His flashlight beam licked down the deck.

The luminance disclosed a ghostly sight—a vision calculated to bring a cold sweat! It was a scene which, had Doc not schooled himself through the years until he was proof against all emotion, the bronze hair would have crawled on the nape of his neck.

A woman was writhing about on the deck before a closed door—evidently the door which had slammed. Her hands fought the air above her, striking mad blows! With each frenzied swing, the woman cried out in horror!

Yet, there was no visible assailant near her! She was fighting thin air, as far as could be seen.

She seemed to realize this as Doc’s flash lighted the spot brilliantly. Springing to her feet, she stared straight into the blinding eye of the flash.

She was a remarkable beauty, brown of eye and hair, features thin and aristocratic. She was very tall.

The fact that this was Lady Nelia, was something Doc had no way of knowing. Nor, blinded by the light, could she see him.

Unable to distinguish Doc, Lady Nelia whirled and fled. She reached a door which gave into the lounge, wrenched it open and sprang through.

Doc Savage slid forward in silent, swift pursuit. He was not certain what had provoked the woman’s spasmlike behavior upon the deck. She might have fled through the door from some unimaginable horror and slammed the panel upon it. So hideous, so frightsome must have been the attacking thing, that she had kept on fighting, not realizing in her hysteria that she had escaped.

But there was another angle more important. The unknown who had shot at Doc a few moments ago had muffled one shoe in a gray coat of coarse weave.

The fleeing woman was wearing a coat of such description.

Suddenly the door through which the woman had gone whipped open again. A man sprang out. He was gaunt as a skeleton. Red hair was like a blaze on his head. He held a revolver.

The young lady was at his back.

“There!” she gasped, and pointed at Doc’s brilliant flashlight beam.

The red-headed man flipped up his weapon, yelling, “Put up your hands, you!”

They had—these two who were seeking Doc Savage—mistaken the bronze man for their enemy.