Читать книгу The Deadly Dwarf: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5
ОглавлениеTHE MAN OF MIGHT
Six little brown tents were pitched in a row under a huge rock on one side of Mount Ettilusamauma. The rock overhung and sheltered the tents. The sea was half a mile west and two thousand feet in the direction the old-time preachers claimed Hades would be found. The top of Ettilusamauma was four miles east, seven thousand feet up, and it looked as if Hades were up there instead of down below.
Tongues of flame, some apparently at least a mile long, went lunging up into the sky. Dust, smoke and rocks came whizzing out. And the crater was boiling over in one place, where a great lava river flowed.
This lava made a red snake down the mountainside, passing within four hundred yards of the six little brown tents, then ran into the sea. Where it entered the sea, it was making almost as much steam as Ethel’s Mama was making smoke.
Two small boats carrying motion picture cameramen were fooling around the steam. A plane was flying up and down over the lava river; another cameraman was leaning over the cockpit edge with his movie machine.
The tall man who used the big words, the long bag of bones who had been nearly brained by the lava rock in town, came out of the scorched jungle and approached the tents. Finding no one there he walked toward the lava stream.
Before long, he came in sight of what at first might have been mistaken for an ape lying on its back, holding a smoking cloth to its forehead. The bony man approached.
“Hello, Monk,” he said. “Where’s Doc?”
The individual on the ground sat up. He was nearly as broad as he was tall, his face was mostly mouth, and he was covered with hair which resembled rusty shingle nails. He held the smoking towel in first one hand, then the other.
“Hyah, Johnny!” he squeaked in a voice that might have belonged to a small child. “What’s wrong?”
Johnny pointed a bony finger at the smoking towel. “What’s that?”
“Dry ice of a new kind that I invented, and which is all that’s keepin’ me alive in this place. Brother, is it hot over by that rock river! What’s wrong?”
Johnny said, “What makes you think something is wrong?”
“You’re usin’ little words, professor. Something has to happen to make you do that.”
“Two newspaper reporters recognized me in town,” Johnny explained. “I think I fooled them. But later, while I was finishing up my shopping, I saw a man trailing me. He was one of these natives. I think I gave him the slip. But Doc won’t like this. He wanted our visit here kept secret.”
“That last has been eatin’ on me,” Monk announced. “Why the secrecy? Why the hurry to get here? What’s up, anyhow?”
“Why not ask Doc?”
Monk grinned. When he did this, most of his homely face became grim.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” he said. “Doc has a habit of keepin’ things, or suspicions, to himself until he is dead sure before he tells anybody.”
Johnny said, “I’m going to ask him myself.”
He walked in the direction of the lava river.
“Don’t get frostbitten!” Monk squeaked.
Monk unrolled his towel to inspect his dry ice. The diminished size of the cube—smoking because it was so cold instead of so hot—caused him to groan lustily. Monk’s ordinary speaking voice was small, but his groan was something like a piece being torn out of the side of a circus tent. He lay back and replaced his cooling invention on his forehead.
When the earth shook and red light washed over the ground, he raised up on his elbow to glower at the top of Ethel’s Mama. Monk was just in time to see something happen.
The plane with the cameraman was flying over the upper end of the lava river, near the crater’s lip. The plane lifted straight upward many scores of feet. It turned end over end as it went. There was no visible reason for this occurrence.
The aircraft fluttered about regaining equilibrium. Then it sailed around, and like a hen which had been bitten unexpectedly by a harmless-looking worm, it buzzed back cautiously to investigate.
Almost the same thing as before happened to the plane. Something invisible seemed to knock it through the air. It traveled straight backward this time.
Monk scrambled erect, still holding his dry ice poultice to his head.
“Maybe Doc and the others didn’t see that!” he grunted. “I better tell ’em. Come on, Habeas!”
Monk looked around, waiting.
“Habeas!” he rapped.
A remarkable-looking pig reluctantly left the shade of a rock. The shote had long thin legs and ears which a bat would have considered suitable for flying. He was Habeas Corpus, Monk’s pet. If the surroundings had not been so hot, Monk would probably have been training Habeas. He spent most of his spare time educating the pet hog.
Monk started off. Habeas followed him a dozen paces and stopped.
“Habeas!” Monk squeaked. “C’mon, or I’ll tie knots in your legs!”
Habeas paid no attention. He seemed interested in a clump of scrub palms.
Monk said, “Come on, Habeas, or I’ll give you to Ham!”
The rusty-looking bristles on Habeas’s back began to stand on end.
Monk frowned at the scrub palm cluster. “What the heck!” He started over to investigate.
A barefooted, brown man with a big revolver came out of the palm cluster.
“You fella savvy stand still!” he said fiercely.
Monk savvied. He put out his jaw. “Say, what’s the big idea?”
The brown man wore denim pants, no shirt, and an ugly look. He got down to business immediately.
“You fella talk chop-chop,” he said. “Why all same fella Doc Savage come ’longside Fan Coral?”
Monk squeaked, “You wanta know why Doc came here?”
“Savvy,” said the other. “You bet. Me fella want know.”
The man’s revolver had a big barrel and a big cylinder, and the sun was just right for Monk to get a look at the round, shiny noses of the cartridges. They were impressive.
“Who sent you to ask that question?” Monk growled.
The brown man started to answer when he saw a shadow looming on the ground beside him. It was a big shadow, and it had not been there an instant before.
The shadow was all the brown man ever saw of the fate that overtook him. Fate in the shape of a giant of bronze.
The big bronze fellow had come silently out of the jungle, and he got the gun and dropped the native with one blow, all as if it had been rehearsed a thousand times. His remarkable bronze features had not changed expression, had in no way showed that the ghostly silence with which he moved was at all unusual, or that dropping an armed native was anything out of the ordinary.
Strangely, there was enough of the unusual about the big bronze man to make it seem that the incredible was rather to be expected from him.
There was more about the bronze man than bigness. The tendons on the backs of his hands resembled round files, and the rest of his sinews looked as if they were made up of cables of the wires they brace airplane wings with.
He wore nothing above the belt, and his muscular development was fabulous, yet so symmetrical that, had he been fully clothed, and seen at a little distance, he would have appeared no more Herculean than an ordinary man.
Probably the most striking thing about the bronze giant was his eyes. They were like pools of flake-gold, always stirred by some tiny force. They contained a weird quality, something compelling, hypnotic.
“Doc!” Monk exploded a relieved grunt. “How’d you happen along just then?”
“Coming to warn you,” the bronze man said.
“Huh?”
“Better run for it. You saw what happened to that plane a moment ago?”
The bronze man’s voice was like the rest of him—remarkable. It was a trained voice, unexcited and subdued, but somehow giving the impression that it could carry for miles if necessary.
“I was comin’ to tell you about the plane when this bird jumped me,” Monk explained. “Say, what——”
“Run,” Doc Savage interposed quietly. “If the thing comes this way, the ledge under which the tents are pitched will probably be the safest place.”
“Thing!” Monk squeaked. “What thing?”
But the bronze man had already whipped back into the jungle. He reappeared immediately, carrying a large metal case which seemed to contain a great deal of delicate apparatus. He had evidently put this down while he crept upon Monk’s captor.
The bronze man raised his voice. It was a crash of volume, as if stepped up by a power amplifier.
“Long Tom, Johnny!” he called. “Renny, Ham!”
“Coming!” came a faint shout from the direction of the lava stream.
Monk scooped up the unconscious native. “Instead of this lad askin’ me questions, he’s gonna answer some!”
The bronze man and Monk ran through the jungle, then worked among a legion of boulders evidently deposited there by Ethel’s Mama in some past eruption. There was a stretch of brush beyond, then the camp of the six little cinnamon-colored tents under the overhanging ledge.
Doc Savage put down the instrument box and Monk dropped his captive.
Four men appeared on one side of the campsite, running toward the tent and the ledge. One of them was the gaunt archæologist and user of big words, Johnny. Dangling from one of his eyes was a monocle, in reality a powerful magnifying glass that had served many uses.
The second man was the dapper lawyer, Ham, the best-dressed man in America and one of the world’s cleverest lawyers. In one hand he gripped a sword cane whose point was coated with a drug producing unconsciousness.
The third member of the group was a formidable tower of a fellow who would weigh in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds—but if he had been built in proportion to his hands, he would have weighed in the neighborhood of a ton. It was doubtful if he could have put either fist in a gallon pail. He had a long, naturally gloomy face which would have been excellent stock in trade for an undertaker.
The big-fisted man was Colonel John Renwick—“Renny”—noted for three things: his ability as an engineer, his boasted ability to knock the panel out of almost any wooden door with either fist, and his membership in Doc Savage’s little group of five aids.
Major Thomas J. Roberts, the electrical wizard, was the fourth man. He had the complexion of a mushroom and the physique, as far as outward appearance went, of a fellow who had spent his life in a wheelchair. He had collected the name of Long Tom after a ludicrous adventure with a type of ancient cannon designated by that name.
The four were carrying more complicated-appearing instruments.
“We will set the apparatus up inside the shelter of the ledge and continue to watch it,” Doc Savage said.
The bronze man bent over the instruments, adjusting dials, knobs, watching indicator needles, and twice plugging in a telephone headset to get frequency hums. Long Tom, Johnny, Ham and Renny looked on curiously.
Monk looked around, saw his pet pig, Habeas, nowhere about, and hastily ambled outside. Monk’s apish physique gave him a strange, short-legged gait which made him seem in no hurry even when running at full speed.
Doc Savage continued to watch the dials. The gold flakes of his eyes seemed to be moving a little faster, but there was nothing else about his expression to show he was excited.
“It is undoubtedly following the lava stream down and getting close,” he said.
It was very quiet under the ledge. Ethel’s Mama made a rumbling now and then. One of the instruments hummed faintly.
“It is very close,” the bronze man said.
Outside, Monk’s voice blared.
“Blazes!” the homely chemist squawled. “What the heck’s got hold of me?”
