Читать книгу The Czar of Fear: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 10

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In his eighty-sixth-floor headquarters, Doc was listening to Aunt Nora Boston and Alice Cash tell their story. The homely Monk lingered in the background, furtively admiring Alice Cash’s loveliness.

“My brother!” Alice said, white-faced. “He has vanished! We ran out of gas in New Jersey, and Jim walked ahead to find a filling station. That was the last we saw of him!”

“We thought we heard Jim scream,” Aunt Nora amended grimly. “But we couldn’t find him.”

Alice put her fingers over her pale lips and said between them: “And just before that, we heard the Green Bell from the radio!”

Aunt Nora grimaced. “The sound of the Green Bell over the radio nearly always means some innocent person is to die!”

Alice shuddered, wailed: “Poor Jimmy! I have a feeling something terrible happened to him!”

Doc Savage could do remarkable things with his powerful voice. He now made it calm and soothing, a tone calculated to quiet the excited women.

“Your story is a bit disconnected,” he told them. “Suppose you start at the first.”

Aunt Nora clenched her hands and stared steadily at them as she talked.

“The trouble in Prosper City started many months ago, when Tugg & Co. cut wages. That caused the first of a series of strikes——”

“Judborn Tugg told me about that,” Doc interposed. “All business in Prosper City is at a standstill. A gang of men, pretending to be agitators, bomb or burn every factory and mine which attempts to start operations, and terrorize all men who want to go back to work. Tugg said you were the chief of the agitators.”

“The liar!” Aunt Nora flared, “All I have done is organize my Benevolent Society to help some of the poor souls who are out of work.”

“Aunt Nora has kept lots of people from starving!” Alice Cash put in. “She has spent all of her money, and all she can borrow, in feeding those unfortunates.”

“You shut up!” Aunt Nora directed gruffly.

“I will not!” Alice snapped, “I think Mr. Savage should know the truth! You’re an angel!”

Aunt Nora blushed and stared at her big, muddy shoes. “I ain’t no angel—not with them feet.”

“What about these agitators back of the trouble?” Doc asked.

“They’re hired thugs, of course!” Aunt Nora declared. “But just who they are, nobody knows. When they appear they’re always in robes that look like black sacks, with green bells painted on the front.”

“Their leader is not known?”

“No!” Aunt Nora made a fierce mouth. “Alice and her brother and Ole Slater have been helping me try to find out who the Green Bell is.”

“Who is Ole Slater?” Doc Savage wanted to know.

“A nice young lad who thinks he can write plays. He’s stricken with the charms of Alice, here. He’s gathering material for a play, and he stays at my rooming house. I forgot to tell you that I run a boarding house.”

Doc asked: “And you think Judborn Tugg and Slick Cooley are in the Green Bell’s gang?”

“I ain’t got no proof!” asserted Aunt Nora. “But they could be! One of them might be the Green Bell, himself.”

Monk entered the conference, asking gently: “Hasn’t the police chief of Prosper City done anything about all this?”

“That old numbskull!” Aunt Nora sniffed. “His name is Clem Clements, and he thinks Judborn Tugg is the greatest man alive and the soul of honor. I don’t think Chief Clements is crooked. He’s just plain downright dumb!”

“How come Tugg exerts such a sway?” Monk wanted to know.

“Judborn Tugg tries to make himself out as the leading business man of Prosper City!” snorted Aunt Nora. “He’s fooled a lot of nitwits, including Chief Clements. Tugg has been spreading the story that I am behind the Green Bell. He has made Chief Clements and plenty of others believe it. I’ve thought several times they were going to throw me in jail!”

“They haven’t quite dared do that!” Alice Cash explained. “The poor people Aunt Nora has been helping would tear down the jail if she was in it. I don’t think they’ve dared harm Aunt Nora for the same reason.”

Aunt Nora laughed grimly. “I’ve told everybody that if anything happens to me, it’ll be Judborn Tugg’s doing! If the Green Bells should murder me, or drive me insane, my friends would lynch Tugg. That’s why I haven’t been harmed.”

“What’s this about insanity?” Doc interrupted.

Alice Cash shivered. “It’s something that happens to workmen who are persistent about going back to their jobs. No one knows how it is done. The men simply—go crazy. It’s happened to more than a dozen of them.”

For a few moments Doc and Monk mulled over what they had been hearing. It was an amazing story, the more so because the motive behind the affair was unclear.

“Why hasn’t martial law been declared?” Monk demanded.

“Chief Clements claims he has the situation in hand!” Alice Cash replied. “The distressing situation in Prosper City has come about gradually. To an outsider, it merely looks like strike trouble.”

Aunt Nora had maintained a short, tense silence. Now she exploded.

“Jim Cash as much as admitted he had found out who the Green Bell is!” she announced. “And that very thing makes me think he has been killed!”

Alice Cash gave a soft, grief-stricken moan, and buried her face in her hands.

Monk got up as if to comfort her.

There was a loud interruption from the corridor outside. Blows chugged. Men grunted and gasped.

Doc glided over and whipped the door open.

Two men stood in the hall, hands lifted, facing a third man who held a flat automatic.

The hands which one of the men held up were so huge it seemed a wonder they did not overbalance him. Each was composed of considerably more than a quart of bone and gristle. He had a somber, puritanical face.

This man of enormous fists was Colonel John Renwick, known more often as “Renny.” Among other things, he was a world-renowned engineer, a millionaire, and loved to knock panels out of doors with his big fists.

The other fellow with upraised arms was slender, with a somewhat unhealthy complexion. He had pale hair and eyes. Alongside his big-fisted, rusty-skinned companion, he seemed a weakling.

He was “Long Tom.” The electrical profession knew him as Major Thomas J. Roberts, a wizard with the juice.

Renny and Long Tom were two more of Doc Savage’s five aids.

The man with the gun was a chap Doc had never seen before. He was tall, athletic, and not unhandsome.

The fellow backed to an elevator, sprang inside, and the cage sank.

Renny and Long Tom looked sheepishly at Doc.

“We came upon that bird listenin’ outside the door!” Renny said, in a roaring voice, suggestive of an angry lion in a cave. “We tried to grab him, but he flashed his hardware on us!”

Doc was gliding down the corridor as these words came. He reached the endmost elevator. His sinew-wrapped hand tapped a secret button. Sliding doors whistled back.

This lift was a private one, which Doc maintained for his own use. It was fitted with special machinery, which operated at terrific speed. The ordinary express elevators were fast, but compared to this one, they were slow.

The floor dropped some inches below Doc’s feet, so swiftly did the descent start. For fully sixty stories, he hardly touched the floor. Then came the slow, tremendous shock of the stop. Doc’s five aids, all strong men, were usually forced to their knees when this happened.

So powerful were the bronze man’s thews that he withstood the shock without apparent effort.

He flashed out into the lobby of the towering building. The cage bearing the young man with the gun had not yet arrived.

But it came within a few moments. The young man got out, backing so as to menace the elevator operator with his weapon.

Doc grasped the fellow’s arms. Bronze fingers all but sank from view as they tightened.

An agonized wail was forced through the man’s teeth. He dropped his gun. The excruciating pressure on his arm muscles caused his fingers to distend like talons.

He tried to kick backward. But pain had rendered him as limp as a big rag. His head drooped; his eyes glazed. He was on the verge of fainting from the torture.

Doc tucked the slack figure under an arm, entered the speed elevator, and rode back to the eighty-sixth floor.

Aunt Nora, Alice Cash, and the others were waiting in the corridor.

Doc’s prisoner was hardly able to stand. His knees buckled. Doc grasped him by an arm, not too tightly, and held him erect.

Aunt Nora stared at the captive, popeyed.

Amazement also engulfed Alice Cash’s attractive features as she gazed at the young man.

“Know him?” Doc asked quietly.

“He is Ole Slater!” Alice exclaimed. “My—er—the boy who likes me!”

Half carried into the office, and deposited in a deep chair, Ole Slater found his tongue.

“I got worried and followed you to New York,” he told Alice and Aunt Nora.

“You should not have been sneaking around that door,” Aunt Nora informed him severely.

“Don’t I know it!” Ole Slater touched his arms gingerly, then eyed Doc Savage’s metallic hands as if wondering how they could have inflicted such torment. “I stopped outside the door a minute to listen. I was just being cautious. Then these men jumped me. I guess I lost my head—I thought they were Green Bells!”

Aunt Nora smiled at Doc. “This young man is our friend. I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm.”

“Of course he didn’t!” Alice Cash added her defense.

“I’m terribly sorry about this,” Ole Slater said meekly. “I was, well—worried about Aunt Nora and Jim and Alice.”

Grief returned to Alice Cash’s refined features. “Jim has vanished, Ole.”

Ole Slater now received the story of what had happened on the New Jersey road, beginning with the awesome belling sound which had come unexpectedly from the radio.

Aunt Nora Boston added a few more details about conditions in Prosper City. Although Doc questioned her closely, he learned little that had not been brought out already.

Alice Cash, it developed, was private secretary to Collison McAlter, a man who owned the Little Grand Cotton Mills. The Little Grand was the main competitor of Tugg & Co., in Prosper City, but was now closed down, like all the rest of the industries.

The master mind, the Green Bell, for some reason as yet unclear, was keeping all Prosper City business at a standstill by use of a reign of terror. That was what it amounted to.

They had been talking the situation over for about half an hour when two men dashed excitedly into the office.

One gesticulated with a slender black cane, and barked: “Doc! You’re in a frightful jam!”

The cane which the man waved looked innocent, but it was in reality a sword cane with a blade of fine Damascus steel. The gentleman who carried it was slender, with sharp features and a high forehead. His clothing was of the latest style and finest cloth.

He was Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks—“Ham” to Doc’s group, of which he was a member. He was by way of being the most astute lawyer Harvard ever turned out. He was also such a snappy dresser that tailors sometimes followed him down the street, just to observe clothes being worn as they should be worn.

“You’ve been accused of a murder, Doc!” exclaimed the second of the newcomers.

This man was tall, and so thin he seemed nothing more than a structure of skin-coated bones. He wore glasses, the left lens of which was much thicker than the right. The left lens was a powerful magnifying glass. The bony man had lost the use of his left eye in the War, and since he needed a magnifier in his profession of archæology and geology, he carried it in the left side of his spectacles, for convenience.

He was “Johnny”—William Harper Littlejohn, one-time head of the natural science research department of a famous university, and possessor of an almost universal reputation for proficiency in his line.

The addition of these two completed Doc Savage’s group of five unusual aids. Each was a man with few equals at his trade. They were men who loved excitement and adventure. They found that aplenty with Doc Savage. The strange bronze man seemed to walk always on paths of peril.

Undoubtedly the most amazing fact about this remarkable company of trouble busters was the ability of Doc, himself, to excel any one of his helpers at his own profession. Doc’s fund of knowledge about electricity was greater than that of Long Tom, the wizard of the juice; the same supremacy applied to the others in their fields of chemistry, geology, law, and engineering.

“What’s this about me being a murderer?” Doc asked sharply.

“The New Jersey police have a warrant for you!” declared Ham, still flourishing his sword cane. “They have four witnesses who say they saw you throw a man against the third rail of an interurban line and electrocute him!”

“And they’re bringing the witnesses over here to identify you!” Johnny added. Excitedly, he jerked off his spectacles which had the magnifier on the left side. “They’ll be here any time, now!”

Ham nodded vehemently. “They will! A police officer in New Jersey, knowing I usually take care of the law angles in our troubles, called me and tipped me off about the thing.”

“Who am I supposed to have murdered?” Doc queried dryly.

Ham tapped his sword cane thoughtfully. “A fellow I never heard of. His name was Jim Cash!”

Alice Cash sank soundlessly into a chair and buried her face in her arms. Her shoulders began to convulse.

Monk, who had prowled over to the window, and stood looking down, called abruptly: “Look at this!”

Doc flashed to his side.

Far below, a car was sweeping in to the curb. Men got out. In the darkness and rain, it was impossible to identify them. They numbered nine.

Faint light spilled from the front of the skyscraper, revealing, painted on top of the car for easy identification from airplanes, the lettered symbols of New Jersey State Police.

“The New Jersey officers with their witnesses!” Monk muttered.