Читать книгу The Land of Terror: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5

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Doc Savage, seated in his large and powerful roadster, saw the cloud of grayish vapor lift above the landscaped shrubbery.

Although it was sixty yards distant, his sharp eyes instantly noted an unusual quality about the vapor. It did not resemble smoke, except in a general way.

But at the moment Doc was doing a problem of mathematics in his head, an intricate calculation concerning an advanced electrical research he was making.

The problem would have taxed the ability of a trained accountant supplied with the latest adding machines, but Doc was able, because of the remarkable efficiency of his trained mind, to handle the numerous figures entirely within his head. He habitually performed amazing feats of calculus in this fashion.

Hence it was that Doc did not investigate the cloud of ash-hued fog at once. He finished his mental problem. Then he stood erect in the roadster.

His keen eyes had discerned the play of tiny electric sparks in the lower part of the cloud! That jerked his attention off everything else. Such a thing was astounding.

The rumble of machinery in the nearby manufacturing plant of the Mammoth concern blotted out whatever conversation or sounds which might have arisen in the neighborhood of the weird fog.

Doc hesitated. He expected his old friend, Jerome Coffern, to appear momentarily. There was no sign of the eminent chemist, however.

Doc quitted the roadster. His movements had a flowing smoothness, like great springs uncoiling in oil.

The grounds of the manufacturing plant were surrounded by a stout woven wire fence. This was more than eight feet high and topped off with several rows of needle-sharp barbs. Its purpose was to keep out intruders. A gate near by was shut, secured by a chain and padlock. No doubt Jerome Coffern had carried a key to this.

Doc Savage approached the fence, running lightly.

Then a startling thing happened.

It was a thing that gave instant insight into Doc Savage’s physical powers. It showed the incredible strength and agility of the bronze giant.

For Doc Savage had simply jumped the fence. The height exceeded by more than two feet the world record for the high jump. Yet Doc went over it with far more ease than an average man would take a knee-high obstacle. The very facility with which he did it showed he was capable of a far higher jump than that.

His landing beyond the fence was light as that of a cat. His straight, fine bronze hair was not even disturbed.

He went toward the strange gray cloud. Coming to a row of high shrubs, his bronze form seemed literally to flow through the leaves and branches. Not a leaf fluttered; not a branch shook.

It was a wonderful quality of woodcraft, and Doc did it instinctively, as naturally as a great jungle cat. It came easier to him than shoving through the bushes noisily, this trick he had acquired from the very jungle itself.

Suddenly he stopped.

Before him a pit gaped in the concrete walk. The black, rich earth below the walk was visible.

On this black earth reposed a crumpled bit of metal that resembled wadded tinfoil.

Beside the pit lay a grisly hand and forearm. About the gruesome wrist was an expensive watch.

Doc studied the watch. Strange lights came into his amazing golden eyes.

Of a sudden, a weird sound permeated the surrounding air. It was a trilling, mellow, subdued sound, reminiscent of the song of some strange jungle bird, or the dulcet note of a wind filtering through a leafless forest. Having no tune, it was nevertheless melodious. Not awesome, it still had a quality to excite, to inspire.

This sound was part of Doc—a small, unconscious thing which accompanied his moments of utter concentration. It would come from his lips when a plan of action was being evolved, or in the midst of some struggle, or when some beleaguered friend of Doc’s, alone and attacked, had almost given up hope of life. And with the filtering through of that sound would come renewed hope.

The strange trilling had the weird essence of seeming to emanate from everywhere instead of from a particular spot. Even one looking directly at Doc’s lips would not realize from whence it arose.

The weird sound was coming now because Doc recognized the watch on that pitiful fragment of an arm.

It was the token he had presented to Jerome Coffern. The eminent scientist had always worn it. He knew this grisly relic was a part of Jerome Coffern’s body!

Doc’s unique brain moved with flashing speed. Some fantastic substance had dissolved the body of the famous chemist!

The bit of crumpled metal that resembled tinfoil had obviously escaped the ghastly effects of the dissolver material.

Doc picked this up. He saw instantly it was a capsulelike container which had split open, apparently from the shock of striking Jerome Coffern’s body.

It was the air gun missile which had carried the dissolving substance. The metal was of some type so rare that Doc Savage did not recognize it offhand. He dropped it in a pocket to be analyzed later.

Doc’s great bronze form pivoted quickly. His golden eyes seemed to give the surrounding shrubbery the briefest of inspections, but not even the misplaced position of a grass blade escaped their notice.

He saw a caterpillar which had been knocked from a leaf so recently it still squirmed to get off its back, on which it had landed. He saw grass which had been stepped on, slowly straightening. The direction in which this grass was bent showed him the course pursued by the feet which had borne it down.

Doc followed the trail. His going was as silent as a breeze-swept puff of bronze smoke. A running man could hardly have moved as swiftly as Doc covered this minute trail.

Things that showed him the trail were microscopic. One with faculties less developed than Doc’s would have been hopelessly baffled. The slight deposit of dust atop leaves, scraped off by the fleeing Squint and his companion, would have escaped an ordinary eye. But such marks were all the clews Doc needed.

Squint and his aide had escaped from the factory grounds through a hole they had clipped in the high woven wire fence. Bushes concealed the spot. Doc Savage eased through.

The quarry was not far ahead. Neither of the two fleeing men had taken a bath recently. The unwashed odor of their bodies hung in the air. A set of ordinary nostrils would have failed to detect it, but here again, Doc Savage had powers exceeding those of more prosaic mortals.

Doc glided through high weeds. He reached a road, a little-used thoroughfare.

A score of yards distant, five men had just seated themselves in a touring car. The car engine started.

“How’d it go, Squint?” asked one of the five in the machine.

The man’s words, lifted loudly because of the noisy car engine, reached Doc Savage’s keen ears. And he heard the reply they received.

“Slick!” replied Squint. “Old Jerome Coffern is where he won’t never give us nothin’ to worry about!”

The touring car lunged away from the spot, gears squawling.

Before the car had rolled two dozen yards, the ratty Squint looked back. He wanted to see if they were followed.

What he saw made his hair stand on end.

A bronze giant of a man was overhauling the car. The machine had gathered a great deal of speed. Squint would have bet his last dollar no race horse could maintain the pace it was setting. Yet a bronze, flashing human form was not only maintaining the pace, but gaining!

The bronze man was close enough that Squint could see his eyes. They were strange eyes, like pools of flake gold. They had a weird quality of seeming to convey thoughts as well as words could have.

What those gleaming golden eyes told Squint made him cringe with fear. One of his companions clutched Squint’s coat and kept him from toppling out of the car. Squint squealed as though caught in a steel trap.

At Squint’s shriek, all eyes but the driver’s went backward. The trio who had waited outside the factory grounds while Squint and his companion murdered Jerome Coffern were as terrified as Squint. Their hands dived down to the floorboards of the car. They brought up stubby machine guns.

As one crazed man, they turned the machine gun muzzles on the great bronze Nemesis overtaking them. The guns released a loud roar of powder noise. Lead shrieked. It dug up the road to the rear. It caromed away with angry squawls.

But not one of the deadly slugs was in time to lodge in the bronze frame of Doc Savage. As the first gun snout came into view, he saw the danger. His giant figure streaked to the left. With the first braying burst of shots, tall weeds already had absorbed him.

Squint and his companions promptly fired into the weeds. Doc, however, was dozens of yards from where they thought. Even his overhauling of the car had not made them realize the incredible speed of which he was capable.

“Git outa here!” Squint shrieked at the car driver.

Terror had seized upon Squint’s rodent soul. He showed it plainly, in spite of a desire to have his companions think him a man of iron nerve. But they were as scared as Squint, and did not notice.

“W-who w-was it?” croaked one of the five.

“How do I know?” Squint snarled. Then, to the driver, “Won’t this heap go any faster?”

The touring car was already doing its limit. Rounding a curve at the end of the factory grounds, it nearly went into the ditch. It turned again, onto the main highway. It headed toward New York, passing in front of the factory buildings.

The speeding machine flashed past a large, powerful roadster. Squint and his companions attached no significance to this car.

But they would have, had they seen the giant bronze man who cleared the factory fence with an incredible leap and sprang into the car. Doc Savage had simply cut back through the factory yard after escaping the machine guns.

Like a thing well trained, Doc’s roadster shot ahead. The exhaust explosions came so fast they arose to a shrill wail. The speedometer needle passed sixty, seventy and eighty.

Doc caught sight of Squint and his four unsavory companions. Their touring car was turning into an approach to George Washington Bridge.

The uniformed toll collector at the New Jersey end of the bridge stepped out to collect his fee. Directly in the path of Squint’s racing car, he stood. He expected the car to halt. When it didn’t, the toll collector gave a wild leap and barely got in the clear.

An instant later, Doc’s roadster also rocketed past.

The toll collector must have telephoned ahead to the other end of the bridge. A cop was out to stop the car.

His shouts and gestures had as much effect as the antics of a cricket before a charging bull. Squint’s car dived into New York City and whirled south.

Doc followed. He slouched low back of the wheel. He had taken a tweed cap from a door pocket and drawn it over his bronze hair. And so expertly did he handle the roadster, keeping behind other machines, that Squint and his companions did not yet know they were being followed. The killers had slowed up, thinking themselves lost in the city.

Behind them, a police siren wailed about like a stricken soul. No doubt it was a motorcycle cop summoned by the bridge watchman. But the officer did not find the trail.

Southward along Riverside Drive, the wide thoroughfare that follows the high bank of the Hudson River, the pursuit led.

Squint’s touring car veered into a deserted side street. Old brick houses lined the thoroughfare. Their fronts made a wall the same height the entire length of the block. The entrance of each was exactly like all the others—a flight of steps with ornamental iron railings.

Swerving over to the curb before the tenth house from the corner, the touring car stopped. The occupants looked around. No one was in sight.

The floorboards in the rear of the touring car were lifted. Below was a secret compartment large enough to hold the machine guns. Into this went the weapons.

“Toss your roscoes in there, too!” Squint directed. “We ain’t takin’ no chances, see! A cop might pick us up, and we’d draw a stretch in stir if we was totin’ guns.”

“But what about that—that bronze ghost of a guy?” one muttered uneasily. “Gosh! He looked big as a mountain, and twice as hard!”

“Forget that bird!” Squint had recovered his nerve. He managed a sneering laugh. “He couldn’t follow us here, anyway!”

At that instant, a large roadster turned into the street. Of the driver, nothing but a low-pulled tweed cap could be seen.

Squint and his four companions got out of their touring car. To cover shaky knees, they swaggered and spoke in tough voices from the corners of their mouths.

With a low whistle of sliding tires, the big roadster stopped beside the touring car. The whistle drew the eyes of Squint and his rats.

They saw a great form flash from the roadster; a man-figure that was like an animated, marvelously made statue of metal!

Squint wailed, “Hell! The bronze guy——”

“The rods!” squawled another man. They leaped for their guns in the secret recess below the touring car floorboards. But the bronze giant had moved with unbelievable speed. He was between them and their weapons.

Squint and his men gave vent to squeaks of rage and terror. That showed what spineless little bloodsuckers they were. They outnumbered Doc Savage five to one, yet, without their guns, they were like the rats they resembled before the big bronze man.

They wheeled toward the tenth house in the row of dwellings that were amazingly alike. It was as though they felt safety lay there. But Doc Savage, with two flashing sidewise steps, cut them off.

One man tried to dive past. Doc’s left arm made a blurred movement. His open hand—a hand on which great bronze tendons stood out as if stripped of skin and softer flesh—slapped against the man’s face.

It was as though a steel sledge had hit the fellow. His nose was broken. His upper and lower front teeth were caved inward. The man flew backward, head over heels, limp as so much clothes stuffed with straw.

But he didn’t lose consciousness. Perhaps the utter pain of that terrible blow kept him awake.

Doc Savage advanced on the others. He did not hurry. There was confidence in his movements—a confidence that for Squint and his rats was a horrible thing. They felt like they were watching death stalk toward them.

No flicker of mercy warmed the flaky glitter of Doc’s golden eyes. Two of these villainous little men had murdered his friend, Jerome Coffern. More than that, they had robbed the world of one of its greatest chemists. For this heinous offense, they must pay.

The three who had not committed the crime directly would suffer Doc’s wrath, too. They were hardly less guilty. They would be fortunate men if they escaped with their lives.

It was a hard code, that one of Doc’s. It would have curled the hair of weak sisters who want criminals mollycoddled. For Doc handed out justice where it was deserved.

Doc’s justice was a brand all his own. It had amazing results. Criminals who went against Doc seldom wound up in prison. They either learned a lesson that made them law-abiding men the rest of their lives—or they became dead criminals. Doc never did the job halfway.

With a frightened, desperate squeak, one man leaped for the car. He tore at the floorboards under which the guns were hidden.

He was the fellow who had helped Squint murder Jerome Coffern.

Doc knew this. Bits of soft earth clinging to the shoes of that man and Squint had told him the ugly fact. The soft earth came from the grounds of the Mammoth factory.

With a quick leap, Doc was upon the killer. His great, bronze hands and corded arms picked the fellow out of the touring car as though he were a murderous little rodent.

The man had secured a pistol. But the awful agony of those metallic fingers crushing his flesh against his bones kept him from using it.

Squint and the others, cowards that they were, sought to reach the tenth house in the row along the street. Lunging and swinging his victim like a club, Doc knocked them back. He was like a huge cat among them.

Squint spun and sped wildly. The other three followed him. They pounded down the street, toward Riverside Drive.

The man Doc held got control over his pain-paralyzed muscles. He fired his gun. The bullet spatted the walk at Doc’s feet.

Doc slid a bronze hand upward. The victim screamed as steel fingers closed on his gun fist. He kicked—tore at Doc’s chest. One of his hands ripped open the pocket where Doc had placed the capsule of metal that had held the substance which dissolved the body of Jerome Coffern.

The capsule of strange metal flipped across the walk. It fell between the iron-barred cracks of a basement ventilator.