Читать книгу The Gold Ogre: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4

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If anyone had wanted to find the most gentle and most level-headed man in Crescent City, they correctly could have selected Thomas Worth as the individual.

And if they had wished to pick out the man who was least likely to claim that something unbelievable had happened to him, they could have taken Thomas Worth. Gentle, middle-aged Thomas Worth had told very few lies in his life.

This helped make the matter particularly terrifying.

If Thomas Worth had been a lying man, or a drinking man, or even the least bit of a half-wit, people would have been able to understand it. And they wouldn’t have taken the matter so seriously. And in that case, Doc Savage might not have learned of the mystery until it was too late to do any good.

Thomas Worth was also a poor man. The fact that he was crippled had a good deal to do with his being poor, although even before a piece of heavy machinery fell on his leg, he had never been able to make more than day wages. He was a poor, honest toiler; he just seemed never to be able to get anywhere much in life. He deserved success. God knows, he deserved it. He was thirty-eight, and looked fifty.

He had a wife who was nice, and a son who was in his teens. The son was a good boy—he was named Don Worth, and he was already a little too serious for his years, and worked a little too earnestly. At least, the boy was more serious and worked harder than other boys of his age.

The poverty of Thomas Worth probably had very little to do with the incredible thing that happened, except that it accounted for his being employed as night watchman at the airport.

Thomas Worth’s job was to hobble around the Crescent City airport at intervals each night, and stick the beam of a powerful flashlight into dark spots. Usually, he didn’t have any trouble. He never even carried a gun. Once in a while, somebody would try to pilfer light bulbs out of the field border lights, but that was about all. It was simple work, not difficult, and honest Thomas Worth was deeply grateful for it.

He religiously made his rounds of the airport at hour intervals—first at eight o’clock, when he went on duty, then at nine, at ten, at eleven, at midnight, and so on.

Thomas Worth was making his midnight round when he met the little golden dwarf.

Later, it became reasonably certain that this was the first time one of the public had seen a gold ogre.

First, there was a voice in the darkness.

“Be careful where you’re going!”

Thomas Worth jerked to an astonished stop. It was very dark. He had not been using his flashlight for a few moments; often he needed to use both hands on his cane, so he frequently kept his flashlight in his pocket when not in use.

“What?” he said.

“You almost stepped on me,” said the voice.

It came from Thomas Worth’s feet. It was a small voice, but very hoarse and harsh. It reminded Thomas Worth of the way a bull would sound, if the bull was about a foot high.

“Say!” said Thomas Worth. “Who in blazes are you?”

“Never mind that. Just don’t step on me.”

Thomas Worth decided it was either a tramp or an intoxicated man, both of which types were sometimes seen around the airport, and occasionally were found sleeping in secluded spots. He leaned on his cane, dug out his flashlight and pressed the button.

He got the big shock of his life.

It was a hideous little gold man. A man who looked to be not much more than two feet high. The fellow had a wide thick-lipped mouth, small pig eyes, and two holes for a nose. His face was not hairy; the rest of him was. Long, scraggly, golden-colored hair that looked like gilded moss.

The little golden ogre was naked except for a loincloth. This was brown, rather than golden, and looked as if it was made out of muskrat fur. His sandals were made of some kind of tree bark, held on by thongs which ran up between his small gnarled toes and tied around his hairy golden ankles.

A club was gripped by the little ogre. The club wasn’t gold either; it was made of a dark wood and studded with large thorns. The small golden ogre—he resembled a miniature caveman—gripped the club with both hands, and there was an expression of bestial ferocity on his face.

Thomas Worth took a long look—and wondered if he had gone crazy. He had been feeling all right lately; he hadn’t done more than his usual amount of worrying—it wasn’t likely his mind had slipped.

Another possible explanation for this apparition occurred to Thomas Worth.

“What carnival did you escape from?” he asked.

“Carnival?” said the golden midget. “What’s a carnival?”

“Maybe it was a circus?”

“What is a circus?”

“What are you?” Thomas Worth demanded.

The small man did not answer at once. His eyes had become accustomed to the light, and he was staring at Thomas Worth. Judging by his expression, he was just as flabbergasted as the bigger man.

“Yah, yah!” the little man said suddenly.

“What?”

“Yah, yah!” repeated the ugly golden midget.

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to say—”

The ogre struck Thomas Worth with his club. It happened with surprising speed. The club struck Thomas Worth’s serviceable leg, and the bigger man cried out in involuntary pain and fell to the ground.

It was as if electric sparks had struck Thomas Worth’s leg. The feeling spread; a kind of tingling agony rushed through his body until it reached his brain—and made Thomas Worth unconscious.

The Crescent City airport remained open day and night, as befitted the flying field of a metropolis such as Crescent City, which was a manufacturing city of some consequence located on the shore of one of the Great Lakes. Several men were on duty during the night, most of them young fellows, and all of them nice. They liked Thomas Worth, and pitied him while at the same time respecting him. For Thomas Worth was a man who was struggling along and supporting a family against tremendous odds.

They soon missed their watchman that night at the airport.

Between one and two o’clock, they began looking for Thomas Worth. At first, two mechanics and a pilot waiting for duty made a casual search. Before morning, everybody was looking, and all the giant floodlights around the airport had been turned on, making it even brighter than it was after daylight came.

They did not find Thomas Worth.

Of course, they sent messengers to Thomas Worth’s home—the Worth family was too poor to afford a telephone—and learned that the father had not merely gone home.

Thomas Worth’s wife, Mary, was home, and she naturally became quite alarmed, particularly since she knew of no reason why Thomas Worth should disappear. Her son, Don, was away from home, working at a summer camp for boys.

“It is not at all like Thomas to go away without a word,” Mary Worth said. “I am sure there must be a good reason.”

Later, she said, “Please, couldn’t we keep my son Don from learning his poor father had disappeared? Don is working his way at summer camp.”

The summer camp authorities co-operated, so Don Worth did not learn anything about the mystery just yet.

The airport men were convinced there must be a reason, too. But what was it? They didn’t know. They couldn’t find any clues. No abandoned wells, or old cisterns or anything like that.

Two days passed and everybody got worried.

The police had taken up the matter, and teletyped a description of missing Thomas Worth to every place where they thought it would do any good. The police were also keeping a sharp lookout for bodies that might float up in the lake, and the State troopers were giving tramps close examinations.

The vanishing of Thomas Worth got in the newspapers in a small way. The missing man was not an important person, so the story was a mere paragraph in a few of the metropolitan papers, to which it was carried by the wire services. Probably if Thomas Worth had been a night watchman for anything but an airport, his vanishing would not even have seen print outside Crescent City. There is still something romantic about airports, and everything connected with them.

The news item about Thomas Worth landed on the desk of Doc Savage.

It did not do any good, which was too bad. Doc Savage’s assistants merely kept a clipping file of anything that seemed unusual. This clipping was one among many. It merely looked like the case of a poor man who had skipped out and abandoned his family—judging from the clipping’s mere statement that an airport watchman named Thomas Worth had disappeared in Crescent City.

So Doc Savage showed no interest in the Thomas Worth matter at this point. Doc Savage was a remarkable individual, a man of astounding abilities, and also a man who followed one of the strangest of careers—but he was no clairvoyant. He was not superhuman. He didn’t know that Thomas Worth had met a little gold ogre of a caveman in the darkness near the Crescent City airport.

So Doc Savage just went on about his business, which was a very strange business indeed.

Four days later. Not midnight this time, but rather close to it. Ten minutes after eleven that night.

Mary Worth, the wife of missing Thomas Worth, heard a rasping sound on the front porch. Mary Worth had been sitting, hands clasped tightly, waiting without knowing what she was waiting for. She sprang up.

“Who is it?” she demanded nervously.

The dragging sound was repeated, followed by a low whimpering noise. It might have been one of the neighbors’ dogs lying down on the porch and whining, but Mary Worth opened the door anyway.

Mary Worth immediately fainted.

The Worths could barely afford electric lights, and they had to burn twenty-five-watt and thirty-watt bulbs to save money, and these did not give much light—but enough to show Mary Worth what made her faint.

Later she regained consciousness—how much later it was, she didn’t know—and she dragged what she had found on the porch into the house, without knowing how she managed that, either. It was all confused and terrible. She must have sobbed the whole time, because she realized later that her face was wet.

It was her missing husband she had found. At last he opened his eyes. He seemed to want to speak, but restrained himself, as if afraid to say what was in his mind.

Thomas Worth drank of a broth his terror-stricken wife made him; obviously he’d had nothing to eat for some time. He rested, waited for the broth to give him strength, in the meantime letting his wife bathe and dress the strange wounds on his body.

“Mary, do any of the neighbors know I have come back?”

Those were his first words.

Mary Worth shook her head. She had been too flustered to call the neighbors.

“Don’t tell them,” Thomas Worth said weakly, “until you hear my story. And maybe we had better not tell anyone my story.”

“Not tell anyone!” Mary Worth gasped. “Why?”

Thomas Worth muttered, “Wait until you hear it, and you will understand.”

He stirred a little, then groaned involuntarily. The flesh was cut deeply in circles around his wrists, and his hands were badly skinned, as if he had been bound, and had torn himself free. There were many other cuts and abrasions on his body. But the bruises were the worst. He was bruised from head to foot, not large bruises, but hideous ones; many of them had started to fester.

“What happened to you, Tom?” his wife asked with tense anxiety.

Thomas Worth lay back on the pillow, clenched his fists against the pain, and began his story.

“This will sound utterly insane, Mary, so please just sit and listen until I finish,” he said. “I was making my midnight round at the airport, and I found a hideous little gold man in the darkness. He wore no clothes except a loincloth, and he carried a club. He looked like the pictures of old-time cavemen. In height, he reached only a little above my knees. The gold-colored dwarf struck me with his club and I became unconscious instantly.”

Thomas Worth shut his eyes and shuddered.

“When I regained consciousness,” he continued, “I was in a great stone cavern of a place. There were many of the little golden ogres present. I was a prisoner. I was tied. I don’t know how many of the hideous dwarfs there were, but there must have been a lot of them, although I never saw over a dozen together in a group at any one time. They tortured me.”

He saw that his bewildered wife was about to speak, and he shook his head at her.

“The gold ogres beat me with their clubs,” he said. “It was horrible. They could speak English, although I could hardly understand some of them. They were going to do something horrible to me. I was to be beaten for days, first, then their medicine man was going to put some kind of terrible spell on me. I don’t know what they meant by the spell.”

Thomas Worth suddenly shoved himself up tensely on the cot. His face was a picture of horror.

“Mary—that wasn’t all!” he gasped. “They planned something hideous! Against Crescent City. Against everybody living here! I don’t know what it is! I just heard them talk.”

Thomas Worth shuddered again, then turned over and buried his face in his hands.

“I escaped,” he said, “before the medicine man got around to doing whatever he was going to do to me.”

The quiet of the night was very still in the modest home of Thomas and Mary Worth. The alarm clock had stopped, as it had a habit of doing, and once in a while the kitchen faucet dripped with a distinct splatter of a sound. In the neighborhood somewhere, a radio played, and a dog began barking furiously, then stopped.

Thomas Worth said, “Mary.”

“Yes?”

“Now you understand why I didn’t want the neighbors to hear my story.”

Mary Worth nodded miserably. “They wouldn’t believe it.”

“Worse. They would think I was crazy.”

“What about telling the police?” Mary Worth asked uneasily.

“Do you think they’ll have me committed to an insane asylum?” Thomas Worth asked.

Mary Worth began to tremble; suddenly she burst into tears and buried her face in the worn cover which she had spread over her husband.

“Oh, Tom, Tom! What horrible thing is wrong? What did happen to you? Think, Tom. Think! Try to tell me what really did happen to you!”

Thomas Worth shuddered.

“See,” he said. “Even you don’t believe me.”

There was no answer except his stricken wife’s uncontrollable sobbing.

“Does Don know I was—was gone?” Thomas Worth asked.

“No. They kept it from him at the summer camp.”

“It was very kind of them, because Don would have worried.”

His wife’s reaction to his fantastic tale had a distinct effect upon Thomas Worth. She was the one person in the world who was most likely to believe him. Obviously, she thought he was suffering hallucinations. What would the police think? He visualized himself committed to a mental institution, and broke out in an agonized sweat.

Thomas Worth thereafter refused to talk. Perhaps he was off mentally. Time after time, that suspicion had struck him during the course of his incredible experience. What was happening was something that couldn’t happen. Thomas Worth realized that.

When the police came, Thomas Worth only muttered incoherently. The doctors explained that he was delirious from suffering, which was what he wanted them to think. He didn’t tell them a thing about the little golden ogres. He was afraid to.

So the newspapers carried a short item, saying Thomas Worth had returned home, apparently suffering from exposure and a beating at the hands of persons unknown, probably enemies he had made in the course of his duties as a night watchman.

This item was clipped and found its way to Doc Savage’s desk, where it was filed with the article about Thomas Worth’s disappearance. And that was that. Nothing to arouse Doc Savage’s interest.

It was unfortunate that Doc Savage saw nothing in the matter that required his attention, because the Man of Bronze, as the remarkable Doc Savage was known, might have prevented what happened next.

Thomas Worth disappeared again. There was absolutely nothing to show how or why. He just disappeared.

This time, the news was sent to the missing man’s son, Don Worth.