Читать книгу The Gold Ogre: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 7
ОглавлениеTHE OGRES AND THE BOYS
Don Worth jerked upright, would have exclaimed aloud had Mental not pressed a hand over his mouth.
“Sh-h-h!” Mental whispered. “The little gold fellow is poking around the outside. He might hear.”
“Show him to me!” Don ordered, as quietly as he could manage in his excitement.
The two of them crept to a window, and stood looking out in the moonlight. Mental pointed.
“There!” he breathed. “And I’m glad you can see him, too! I am afraid people would think I was crazy.”
Don Worth stared.
“Great Gulliver!” he gasped.
His eyes had some difficulty distinguishing the little gold-colored man on the lawn. Then the midget figure stepped out into brighter moonlight, and it was more clearly visible.
The head of the little golden ogre would not reach to the belt of even Funny Tucker, whose belt was closer to the ground than any of the others. The dwarf was naked except for a brown fur loincloth and sandals, and his hideously gnarled hands gripped a club.
The tiny one trotted across the lawn and disappeared into shadows.
Don Worth gripped Mental’s arm.
“We’ve got to follow that ... that—whatever it is!” Don gasped.
“Well, we know now that your father wasn’t crazy,” Mental said tensely.
They awakened Funny Tucker and B. Elmer Dexter. It was no task to arouse B. Elmer silently, but they had the good judgment to jam a pillow over Funny’s head and sit on it until he understood what it was all about. Funny’s awakenings were something like a bull walrus having a spasm.
As swiftly as possible, they crept out into the night. All four were Boy Scouts, and Crescent City was in a forest section, so they all had some experience at woodcraft. Moreover, the art of trailing a quarry silently had been practiced in games at Camp Indian-Laughs-And-Laughs.
“Say, an Indian couldn’t do a better job than this,” whispered Funny Tucker.
They came upon the little golden dwarf so suddenly that they almost gave themselves away. Flattening their bodies in dew-wet grass, they watched.
The small ogre was obviously conducting a search. He was squatting and peering, giving particular attention to the vicinity of a stone fence. He began picking up rocks and peering under them.
Suddenly they heard him give a small, unpleasant grunt. He had found something under a rock.
“Maybe he’s hunting his supper,” Funny Tucker whispered.
But it was no fat grub or cricket that the little fellow had found. It was a paper, as nearly as the watchers could tell. Nearby was a corner street light, and the dwarf carried the paper to this, where they saw him peer at it for some time.
Another unpleasant grunt came from the weird creature.
He picked up a stick, poked around, found a soft spot, and carefully buried the paper. They watched him scatter the debris over the spot to cover his handiwork.
Acting satisfied, as if he had completed his night’s work, the small man strolled away.
Don Worth scuttled swiftly to the spot, and aided by Mental and Funny, dug up the paper. They could read, by the street-light luminance, the words scrawled upon it.
THE GOLD OGRES HAVE SEIZED ME. THEY WERE AFRAID I COULD LEAD THE POLICE TO THEIR CAVERN.
Don Worth gasped, “That’s my father’s handwriting!”
None of the four boys were slow-witted. The significance of what they had found became plain to all of them at about the same moment. Mental Byron voiced it.
“They must have carried your father away, and he managed to leave a note by the stone fence. They seem to have found out about the note, and one of them came back to hunt it. He found it, and buried it where he thought nobody would ever locate it.”
Don Worth nodded. “That’s what it looks like. But how come they didn’t find out about the note immediately?”
Mental gave his theory of the explanation reluctantly. “Your mother said that your father claimed he had been tortured.”
“You think they’ve made dad tell about the note?” Don asked.
“Maybe.”
Don shuddered.
“This is such an impossible thing,” he said. “It’s plain fantastic. I wouldn’t believe such stuff, even in a book.”
B. Elmer Dexter groaned. “Wish I had a camera and photoflash bulbs.”
“Camera?”
“Think of what the newspapers would be willing to pay for pictures of that little golden man!” B. Elmer explained. “Boy, I’ll bet I could sell the picture for a thousand smackers.”
“Come on,” Don growled. “We’ll follow him. Maybe he’ll lead us to my father.”
Their quarry was not exercising much caution, so they did not have difficulty following him.
The forest that bordered Crescent City on three sides—the lake made the fourth side—came close to the city limits at some points, and this was one of them.
The dwarf plunged into the woods, and immediately it was hard to follow him, for it was very dark. The four stuck close together. Each of them would have been reluctant to admit it, but the night was giving them a large case of the creeps. They were modern boys of the twentieth century, and nobody could have told them that something like this could happen. But it was happening. They had stepped, literally, into a fairy story.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a goblin in here,” B. Elmer whispered, feeling his way in the forest blackness.
“There’re no such things as goblins,” Funny Tucker told him.
“There’re no such things as little golden cavemen, either,” B. Elmer retorted.
“Sh-h-h!” breathed Mental Byron. “Look!”
They strained their eyes in the shadows.
“Two of them!” Don exploded.
The dwarf they had been following had joined another, and the two were standing in the moonlight glade, leaning on their clubs and conversing.
Don and Mental crawled close enough that the guttural little voices were understandable. They watched the two little ogres—one of them was pointing with his club at something in the distance.
“Yah, yah,” the midget said.
“Yah, yah,” agreed the other.
Funny Tucker crawled up behind Don and breathed. “Quite a vocabulary.”
The midget continued to point with his club—and Don craned his neck to see what the club indicated. He saw a man—a fully grown man clad in disheveled garments—stumbling through the woods, some distance away.
The poor man was weak, hardly able to travel. His progress was a series of stumbling runs from one tree to another.
“My father!” Don exploded.
Don Worth was as quiet and patient as a mountain—but he was the kind of mountain that could turn into a volcano. He erupted now.
In a wild rage, Don leaped up and charged at the dwarfs.
Don thought only of what had happened to his father, what these little horrors had done. He wanted to seize them, punish them severely, put them where they could not harm anyone else.
Both dwarfs ran. Vanished into dark underbrush. Don plunged after them. He cornered one, launched a football tackle for the fellow. The midget dodged. He walloped Don’s head with his club. The blow was stunning. Don saw assorted pain-lights.
Funny yelled, “There goes the other! I got ’im!”
Judging from the noises, Funny got more than he bargained for. They all began to get more than they bargained for.
Don heaved up—only to have a terrific blow send him sprawling. He crashed into a thorn bush. In spite of himself, he yelled in pain. He clawed out of the tangle. Hands grabbed his ankles. He went down. He was struck several blows—with a fist, he thought—that were agonizing.
More desperate now, Don floundered around. His big, strong hands found a limb as thick as his wrist. He flailed with the huge club, striking random blows at the smothering darkness.
It was intensely dark. He could not see what he was hitting.
Abruptly, the club was wrenched out of his hands with incredible force! Don was very strong. But the club was yanked from him as if he was a child.
He could tell from the struggle and confusion in the shadow-blackened underbrush that his three friends were faring as badly as himself. They were, in fact, getting whipped! If this kept up, the little gold dwarfs would capture them all.
Moreover, they weren’t fighting two midgets. There must be at least a dozen!
It was Don Worth, the quietest one of the four, who made their decisions in the emergency.
“Beat it!” Don barked. “We’ve bit off more’n we can chew!”
“Wait!” B. Elmer Dexter yelled. “I wanna catch one of these dwarfs! I could get rich showin’ him in a sideshow!”
Then B. Elmer howled painfully. He must have gotten a whack that discouraged his collecting instincts. In fact, B. Elmer thereafter took the lead in the running.
The four boys ran headlong until they decided they had outdistanced their pursuers. Then they stopped for a sheepish conference.
“Fine bunch of heroes we turned out to be,” Don Worth said grimly.
“Don’t they say that he who fights and runs will be around to fight another day?” Mental asked dryly.
Funny Tucker produced a flashlight and started examining himself.
“What gave you that black eye?” B. Elmer asked him.
“It wasn’t any gift,” Funny groaned. “Boy, I fought for it.”
Don Worth said soberly, “I formed a suspicion during that fight, fellows. I wonder if any of you formed the same idea.”
“All I felt forming was knots on my head,” Funny Tucker said. “What do you mean, Don?”
“We had more than two foes in that fight,” Don explained. “And I got the idea that some of them were perhaps grown men.”
“Grown men—I got the same idea,” Mental said. “Somebody had me by the neck for a while, and I’ll swear it wasn’t any dwarf.”
“You guys,” said Funny, “wouldn’t be making excuses for our failure?”
They weren’t sure. It had been very dark, and the excitement furious. Whether they had fought some grown men, they couldn’t tell.
“What about my father!” Don Worth said impatiently. “We’ve got to find him!”
They went looking for the man they had glimpsed dimly, staggering through the moonlit open spaces in the woods. They found him, sprawled in a clearing.
“Dad!” Don Worth shouted, and dashed forward.
But it wasn’t his father.
