Читать книгу The Green Eagle: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 7

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The sheriff and the coroner got there late in the afternoon. Both of them were chewing tobacco. McCain and Albert Panzer followed them, riding roan horses. D’Orr, the Broken Circle owner, was riding a spectacular white Arabian mare.

“Where’s Ben Duck?” the sheriff asked.

“He rode off early in the afternoon,” explained one of the old maids. “He said he would be back by dark.”

The sheriff looked over the scene briefly. He told the coroner, “I guess it’s just a job for you, Henry.” The coroner nodded. He had two saddlebags full of instruments. “If you people have weak stomachs, you better go off where you can’t see,” he said.

D’Orr demanded in an astonished voice, “Don’t you have to have some kind of legal paper before you perform an autopsy?”

“This ain’t no autopsy,” the coroner said. “This is just an examination.”

The Sun had fallen low in the west, so that jagged hills threw long shadows. The shadows were gloomy and cold. At this altitude, the days were hot and the nights astonishingly cold.

Ben Duck rode up in the twilight. Dust had caked on the flanks of his pinto. Ben looked tired.

“Well?” he asked the sheriff.

“Hello, Ben,” the sheriff said. “Henry here”—he nodded toward the coroner—“is just finishing up.”

“I’ll tell you what he died of in a minute,” the coroner said, and went on working.

Ben slid off Patches and loosened the cinches. The pony hung his head and pulled at a tuft of buffalo grass without enthusiasm.

“Ben, did you backtrack him very far?” the sheriff asked.

“ ’Bout five miles,” Ben Duck explained. “Then I lost the trail. He come across those lava beds south of here, where nobody on earth could track him.”

“Would a bloodhound do any good?”

“I doubt it,” Ben said. “A bloodhound is all right where there is a little moisture to hold the scent. But the sun would bake the trail right off that lava.”

D’Orr said abruptly, “It seems foolish to me to waste time trying to find the poor fellow’s back trail.”

Ben looked at him. “Does it?” he said dryly.

The coroner straightened. He wiped his hands on an old undershirt he was using for a towel. “Starvation and thirst,” he said. “That’s what killed him.”

Ben stared at him. “Starvation and thirst?”

“Uh-huh. He ain’t had either food or water for two weeks, I should judge. He had some grass and cactus meat in his stomach, and something I think was a ground squirrel or a rat. He had eaten some dirt, too.”

“Dirt?”

“They eat dirt in the advance stages of starvation,” the coroner explained.

Ben scratched behind one ear. “Did you look in his pack, Henry?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d you find?”

“Food and water,” the coroner admitted.

D’Orr said abruptly, “It seems obvious that the poor fellow went insane.”

“Crazy or not,” said Ben, “he had food.”

“When people go crazy, they get strange ideas.” D’Orr shrugged. “This poor devil must have got the insane idea he did not have food or water in his pack.”

Ben rolled a cigarette, did not say anything.

“I guess that’s it,” the coroner said.

Ben licked the cigarette, lighted it, frowned at the dying match. He did not recall ever having seen a crazy man. Cowmen were always claiming sheepherders were crazy, but of course they weren’t. Ben did not believe a man could get so crazy he would die of thirst and starvation when he had food and water in the pack on his back.

“Any of you ever hear of a man named Doc Savage?” Ben asked.

McCain stared at Ben steadily. He did not speak.

No one said anything. But after a while, McCain accosted Ben Duck out of earshot of the others. “Why are you interested in Doc Savage?” McCain asked.

“Oh, I was just curious,” Ben said.

“He connected with this thing?”

Ben countered, “Do you know him?”

“I’ve heard of him,” McCain admitted.

“What have you heard about Doc Savage?” Ben asked.

McCain’s strangely pale face was inscrutable under his white hair. He said, “I don’t recall.”

Ben eyed the man. More than ever, he was convinced there was something strange about McCain. “Kinda seems,” Ben said, “that neither one of us has much to tell the other one.”

McCain hesitated. “Does look that way,” he said. Then he walked away.

The sheriff and the coroner had borrowed a new buckboard from the Broken Circle. Ben helped them load the body into the vehicle. Then he mounted his horse and rode alongside the buckboard and its tarp-covered load.

D’Orr trotted his white Arabian up beside Patches. “Got a match?” he asked. D’Orr had not mastered the Western way of riding, body moving easily with the motion of the animal. He insisted on posting.

Ben said, “You ought to get used to not bouncing around in the saddle like that, boss. That’s all right for taking a gallop in them city parks, but out here you do it all day and it’ll shake an entrail loose.”

D’Orr seemed not to hear the advice. He said, “I just happened to remember—I’ve heard of that Doc Savage you mentioned.”

Ben was interested. “You have? Who is he?”

“Why did you ask about him?” D’Orr inquired.

“Curiosity,” Ben said. “I heard his name some place. What do you know about him?”

D’Orr said, “I don’t know much, really. As I recall it, Doc Savage is in the East somewhere. New York, I believe. He is an adventurer of some kind. At least, his name is frequently connected with the wildest kind of excitement. That’s about all I know. By the way, who mentioned his name to you?”

“Feller I met.”

“Was it”—D’Orr nodded at the body in the buckboard—“him?”

Ben glanced sidewise at the adhesive tape on D’Orr’s face. The tape covered a lot of the man’s visage. It could have been D’Orr’s face he had worked on with the spur.

Ben told a flat lie.

“Of course not,” he said.

D’Orr spurred his Arabian suddenly and the great white animal bounded away with a thunder of hoofs on stone. Ben scowled after him, then looked around.

Albert Panzer was riding well behind the others. Ben dropped back and joined him. “You had any more faintin’ spells?” Ben asked Panzer.

The grin that came on Panzer’s lips was wry. “I found a book on altitude sickness today. It don’t affect a man like you and me were affected.”

“I didn’t think it did,” Ben said. He nodded in the direction of D’Orr, then toward McCain. “Both them gents are very curious about how I come to mention somebody named Doc Savage,” he said.

Albert Panzer looked around secretively. “I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said in a low voice.

“You ever hear of this Savage?” Ben asked.

“I’ll say I have!” Panzer drew a deep breath. “He’s an amazing man.”

Ben glanced at Albert Panzer slyly, and they tightened reins on their horses so as to drop even farther behind. Ben scratched his head. “Amazing man, huh?”

“Probably the greatest scientific genius of our day,” Panzer said. “He is a man who is famous in the fields of chemistry, electricity, surgery, engineering, archaeology. And, mind you, I don’t mean famous the way a movie star is famous, or a politician. Not because of a build-up. Not newspaper famous. The public does not know a great deal about Doc Savage’s work. But great chemists, electricians, surgeons, all know of his ability.”

“Ever meet this Doc Savage?” Ben asked.

“Not personally. I have heard of him, is all.”

Ben said, “D’Orr seemed to think of him as an adventurer. He said—I think these were his words—‘Savage is connected with the wildest land of excitement, usually.’ ”

“Savage might be called that.”

“But you said he was a scientist.”

“I think Savage uses his scientific skill to help people who are in trouble,” Panzer said. “I know I’ve heard him referred to as a man who rights wrongs and punishes evildoers.”

Ben said, “That don’t sound like a payin’ job to me.”

Albert Panzer shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

Ben eyed him curiously. “How come you didn’t out with this information when I first asked?”

“I figured,” Panzer explained slyly, “that you might want it confidentially.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“Didn’t the dead man mention Doc Savage to you?” Panzer asked.

Ben was all set for that. He told another lie.

“Of course not,” he said.

Panzer seemed surprised. He hardly registered belief. Then he shrugged, and they rode in silence.

Coyotes were howling on the hills long before they got back to the Broken Circle. The night sky was as clear as ice, and about the same color. They turned up their collars, for they could see their breath.

The coroner was also undertaker, and he had left his hearse at the ranch. They transferred the body. Ben assisted. D’Orr, McCain, Panzer and the others had turned their horses over to cowboys and gone into the house.

“Ben.”

“Yeah, sheriff,” Ben said.

“How’d you come to mention Doc Savage?” the sheriff asked.

“Don’t tell me you know him, too!”

“Yep. By hearsay, that is.”

Ben muttered, “My education has sure been neglected some. I never heard of the gent, but everybody else seems to know him by reputation.”

“He’s sure got a reputation,” the sheriff said dryly. “Why’d you ask if anybody knowed him?”

Ben tilted his head back and contemplated the blue-cold sky thoughtfully. “That old jasper,” he explained, “just before he died, asked me if I knew Doc Savage. I was curious about it.”

“Ummm. I see.” The sheriff drove a small coupe. This pulled a trailer in which he carried a saddle horse. “I think we’re gonna be able to find out who the old man was.”

“There wasn’t anything on him that gave his name,” Ben said.

“You looked, eh?”

“Sure.”

“You didn’t take anything off the body, did you?”

“What gave you that idea?” Ben inquired innocently.

“It just struck me as curious that he was packin’ around an empty saddlebag,” the sheriff explained.

Ben’s grunt was without humor. “He was crazy. He was so locoed that he died of starvation and thirst while he was carryin’ around a pack full of food. Why wouldn’t he be nut enough to carry an empty saddlebag?”

The sheriff said nothing more for a moment. Then he pulled out a rather new gold watch that was obviously expensive. “This watch,” he said, “was on the old man. It’s a watch that cost a lot of shekels. It’s got a number in it. Jewelry stores keep track of the watches they sell. I think we can trace him through the watch number.” The sheriff grinned. “I bet you never thought of that, Ben.”

“This county has sure got a good sheriff,” Ben said cheerfully.

He helped load the sheriff’s pony into the trailer. The officer drove away. The hearse had already gone.

An hour and forty minutes later, the sheriff was back. He arrived in the hearse with the coroner. Each man wore nothing but his underwear shorts, and they were enraged.

“We was road-agented!” the sheriff roared. “Where’s a gun? Loan me a Winchester, somebody. Where’s the telephone? I want a posse!”

Ben asked, “They get the body?”

“Heck, no. They wanted what mazuma me and Henry had, was all!” The sheriff rushed into the ranchhouse.

His neck red with rage, the officer telephoned his deputies in town, telling them to spread an alarm with the State police and the forest rangers. He described the robbers. There had been two of them. One was taller than the other by an inch. One wore denim overalls, the other gray store pants. One was wearing a gray cap. The sheriff couldn’t remember which one wore the cap.

“Sheriff,” Ben said dryly, “did they get that watch?”

“Blast it, yes!” the sheriff growled. “And I don’t remember that number in it.”

Ben said, “I got the number.”

“Huh?”

“I looked in the watch early this afternoon and got the number,” Ben explained.

“Why in billyhell you do that?”

“Sheriff, did it look to you like these highjackers might really have been lookin’ for that watch?” Ben countered.

“Huh?” The officer frowned at him. “How did you know—what gave you that idea?”

“So they were lookin’ for it,” Ben said. “Say, did you tell anybody else you was gonna trace the old man through the watch?”

“I mentioned it to the others, yes.”

“That,” Ben said, “is right interestin’.”

The sheriff stared over Ben’s head. “It ain’t as interestin’,” he said, “as what I’m gonna show you now.”

McCain’s white head showed in the darkness. He had limped up to listen to the uproar.

The sheriff grabbed Ben’s six-shooter, examined the cylinder to make sure it contained cartridges, then walked over to McCain.

Jamming the gun in McCain’s ribs, the sheriff said, “You’re under arrest! I’m charging you with being one of the road agents that just held me up.”

McCain showed no emotion. His face fixed, he said, “This is ridiculous.”

“No, it ain’t,” the sheriff growled. “I didn’t tell all I knowed about that holdup. You see, the headlights of my car picked up one of the holdup men as I turned around to come back. I saw him plain. I didn’t stop because I didn’t have no gun. I didn’t let on.”

“Utterly preposterous.” Ben Duck was fascinated by McCain’s control as the man spoke.

“Oh, it was you, all right.” The sheriff fished out a pair of handcuffs. “Ducked down in a gully and crouched against some sagebrush, didn’t you? Didn’t think I saw you, did you?”

McCain said, “I didn’t rob you.”

“You’re the feller I’m arrestin’ for it,” the sheriff told him.

The sheriff drove away with McCain his prisoner.

The following day, Ben Duck had to work hard at fixing fence, which was the only job he liked less than dude wrangling. He was therefore out of touch with what was going on until that evening, when he telephoned the sheriff and was informed the officer was out of town, hunting McCain.

“I thought the sheriff arrested McCain,” Ben said.

“He did,” the deputy advised him. “And put him in jail. Trouble is, the jail only held this McCain about thirty minutes.”

“McCain escaped?” Ben asked.

“Quicker’n you could bat an eye. Picked the cell lock, somehow.” The deputy swore. “McCain didn’t answer any questions.”

“I’ll be durned!” Ben said.

Later that night, he locked himself in his bunkhouse room and examined the puzzle. Made by hand, he decided. It was a strange item for an old man to be carrying around in his saddlebag. One sure thing, it was handmade, not a factory product. It had obviously been made painstakingly by hand, the work showing vast patience, rather than skill. The little feathers had been carved painstakingly out of lead. Ben noted some machine markings on one of the feathers that led him to decide they had been whittled out of bullets.

It was a tough puzzle. He spent an hour getting all the leaden feathers into the eagle. But still he did not have anything sensible.

He used his jackknife and took it apart. He did not learn anything. He put it back together carefully.

The puzzle would exactly fit inside a large flat tin which had contained cigarettes. Ben closed it inside the tin, then pressed adhesive tape carefully around the edges. He applied more tape until he was sure the thing was waterproof.

Next Ben got two of his dirty shirts and a pair of Levis and hid the taped cigarette tin containing the puzzle in these. He walked out to the horse-watering tank.

D’Orr was a tightfisted ranch owner. His cowboys had to do their own laundry, and it was customary to do the hurry-up jobs at the horse-watering tank.

There was nearly a foot of mud in the bottom of the horse tank. After he had been washing his shirts for a while, Ben jammed the sealed cigarette tin down into the mud.

It was as good a hiding place for the puzzle as any Ben could think of, since there was no chance of the mud being cleaned out of the tank. They had cleaned the mud out that spring, only to discover that the tank leaked like the dickens with the mud out. They had been forced to shove the mud back in.

Washing finished, Ben hung the garments on a corral fence. He went back to his room. He noticed that his pillow was not lying where it had been. Also he found tiny holes in his Sunday boot soles which looked as if someone had been exploring with a darning needle.

He loaded his six-shooter with real bullets and slept with it under his pillow.

The Broken Circle was thirty-six miles from town. Ben was supposed to spend the next day fixing fence again, but he merely rode over the hill, picketed Patches within reach of grass and water, and headed off the ranch station wagon as it went in after the mail. He climbed in. The driver of the station wagon grinned, said, “Fancy britches didn’t say anything about a passenger into town.”

“D’Orr?” Ben returned the grin. “He told me to fix fence.”

The town had one street, no railroad. Visitors arrived by stage—it was actually a common bus, but this was dude-ranch country so everybody called the bus a stage—and freight was trucked in.

The sheriff was brushing the dust off a five-gallon white beaver hat he used for rodeos and special occasions.

“I’m headin’ for the stage station,” he told Ben. “Come on, if you wanta.” He scowled. “I can’t find that McCain gent.”

They walked down the street. Ben asked, “You do anything with the numbers of that watch I give you? You learn anything?”

“The old man’s name,” said the sheriff, “was Pilatus Casey.”

“Pilatus Casey, eh. Funny name.”

“He lived in New York.”

“Oh. He wasn’t a prospector, then?”

“Niece said he came out here about a month ago for his health.”

“Niece?”

“Only livin’ relation, far as I found. She was his sister’s daughter. That makes her a niece, don’t it? I always forget just what relation a niece is.”

“I think that would make her his niece,” Ben said. “What’s her name?”

“Mira. Mira Lanson. I’ll introduce her to you.”

“You’ll what?”

“She’s due on the stage in a few minutes.”

Ben scratched his jaw. “She sure hightailed it out here.”

“I telegraphed her, and she called me back by telephone. Then she caught an airplane.”

Ben bought the sheriff a cigar in the stage station, the place also being a soft drink, tobacco and general merchandise store. They stood there contemplating a stuffed elk head over the back bar. The stage was about due.

Mira. So the dead man’s niece was named Mira. He had promised to give Mira the puzzle where you feathered an eagle. He’d promised the old man while he was dying. But he wished he knew what the darned thing was.

A long yellow bus pulled up in front of the door.

“Here’s the stage,” the sheriff said.

As soon as he saw Mira, Ben wished he’d thought to comb his hair. He wished he’d put on his Sunday clothes, too.

The sheriff had come to life. He reminded Ben of an old red bull. He held her hand and said, “Mira Lanson, this is Donald Duck, a cowboy out at the Broken Circle.”

“The name is Ben,” Ben said, angrier at the sheriff than he had ever imagined he could get.

“You look like a real cowboy,” Mira Lanson said. She took Ben’s hand and almost electrocuted him. She was not so tall but that he could look over her coppery head, little brown hat and pert feather and all, into the sheriff’s eyes. She added, “I believe you were the one who——”

“That’s right,” Ben said uncomfortably. The male loafers were straightening their hats and neckerchiefs. “I’ll take your bag,” Ben said.

It was a very small and very new bag. It did not look expensive.

The sheriff bustled around in his office, dusting off chairs unnecessarily, shoving the spittoon under his desk, and turning on the fan. Ben was irritated. The sheriff, the old goat, was old enough to be her grandfather, even if he was a bachelor.

“I was hopin’,” said the sheriff, “that you could tell us what we don’t know.”

In a surprised voice, she asked, “What is that?”

She had seated herself. She was wonderfully shaped; her traveling suit gave you a good idea.

“What was your uncle, Pilatus Casey, doing out in these mountains?” the sheriff asked.

“Why, he came to Wyoming because he thought the altitude would do his sinus trouble some good. He had hay fever very badly, and he was also convinced he had a touch of tuberculosis, although I don’t think he had. That is the only reason I know of for his coming.”

“I see.” The sheriff hesitated delicately. “Then you do not know of any reason why anyone should try to keep us from identifying his body.”

Her eyes flew wide. They were the color of new pennies. “Oh, no!”

The sheriff squirmed. “Reason I ask, some road-agent hombres held me up t’other night and robbed me of your uncle’s watch. Course, these bandits took my pocketbook, too, so I guess it was just a holdup. Robber I’m after is named McCain.”

“I don’t know him,” the girl said. “Can I—might I see my uncle’s body?”

The sheriff sprang up. “I’ll go find Henry, the undertaker, and have him unlock his place for us. You stay here. I’ll come back.”

After the sheriff had gone, Ben studied Mira Lanson shyly. The presence of pretty women always embarrassed him.

Suddenly he blurted, “Was your uncle crazy?” Then, seeing how completely shocked was her expression, he added hastily, “That was what the sheriff really wanted to ask you. Only he didn’t get around to it.”

She turned her copper eyes on him and his toes seemed to come loose.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Coroner’s verdict is that your uncle died of starvation and thirst,” Ben explained. “But he had plenty of food and water in his pack.”

She turned a little pale. Not at once did she answer. Her hands twisted a tiny brown handkerchief.

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.

There was coldness in her tone that set him back.

Ben sat there a moment. The silence was heavy. Then Ben said, “Excuse me a minute,” and got up and went into the back room.

He had sat in poker games in the back room, and he remembered what pictures were on the wall. He took down one of the pictures. It was a small photograph of the sheriff’s father. He pulled out the tacks and removed it from its frame.

He carried the photograph of the sheriff’s father back and handed it to the girl.

“I thought you might want this picture of Pilatus Casey,” he said, his manner completely innocent.

The girl took the photograph. She looked at it, then quickly took out her handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.

“He—he was a wonderful man,” she said brokenly. “I think this picture was taken within the last year.”

Ben swallowed with difficulty.

She was more than a pretty girl. She was one of the world’s biggest liars.