Читать книгу The Flaming Falcons: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4
ОглавлениеA GIRL HUNTING MOONDOGS
The skull-colored bird was such a ghastly looking thing that Hobo Jones emitted a bleat of horror. It was that bad. It was—well, the most hideous apparition it had ever been Jones’ ill fortune to see.
The thing was about the size of a small goat. It was almost the same color as a goat, for that matter, and for a moment, Hobo Jones thought it might be a goat. But a goat wouldn’t be sitting perched on the back of a chair in a corner. This thing was a bird. It was foul-looking.
Hobo Jones had seen buzzards, and hitherto considered them the vilest-looking things on earth—but a buzzard was as attractive as a love bird along this hobgoblin.
“Shoo!” Hobo Jones gulped involuntarily. “Shoo! Go away!”
The thing batted its eyes at him. It had eyes that were like little blisters full of blood, but the rest of it was all one color—the hue of the skulls in doctors’ offices.
To top everything off, the bird smelled. It had an odor of indescribable vileness.
Longing for the open places seized Jones. He made a dash for the door, got it open, and piled outside. It was dark, so dark that he stopped as if he had run up against a solid.
Turning around, he slammed the door. He didn’t want that bird, whatever it was, following him.
The first impulse of Hobo Jones was to get out of the vicinity without delay, but then he decided to stick around. He hooked more sweat off his forehead with a finger. There was a dead man inside the shack camouflaged as a strawstack, and a hell hag of a bird, and Hobo Jones’ stomach had a feeling as if it had been given a dead cat by accident.
Why not telephone a sheriff? Good idea. Hobo Jones went looking for a telephone. There had plainly not been one inside the strawstack shack. The electrified fence should have a gate, and there might be a telephone at that point, so he searched for a gate.
It did not seem quite so dark, now that his eyes had accustomed themselves to the darkness. About a third of the stars were going to show, but the other two thirds of the sky was full of clouds that were as black as polecats.
Totally unexpectedly, he got a whack on the head with a piece of devil’s-walking-stick.
One does not walk across Arizona in a day, and so Hobo Jones had spent enough time in the State to become familiar with its vegetation, which to his observation was predominantly cactus, so he knew that devil’s-walking-stick was a species of cactus, which grew up in a cluster from a common root-cluster, like young willows. These long shoots of cactus had thorns every half inch or so, and ranchers and Mexicans cut them off, stuck them in the ground in a row, and they grew and became cactus fences.
Hobo Jones fell down. A piece of devil’s-walking-stick has some of the qualities of a length of water pipe. The thorns had been cut off this one.
Clutching dazedly, Jones got hold of the shillalah that had laid him low. He twisted. He was surprised at how easily he took it away from the wielder. He instantly reversed it, and took a whack at the adjacent darkness, which proved futile. He tried again.
“Ouch!” said a voice.
Hobo Jones started to land another wallop, but didn’t.
“You’re a woman,” Hobo Jones said.
“If you don’t mind, I’d as soon you didn’t hit me again,” the feminine voice said.
“I won’t,” said Hobo Jones. “I’m chivalrous.” He reached out, got hold of a rather nice ankle, and gave it a jerk. The ankle owner sat down. “You just sit there,” requested Jones. “I’ve got a match somewhere. I want to look at you.”
He found the match and struck it and inspected his assailant.
“Gosh!” he said.
The match burned his fingers and went out and left him with a disturbing vision of glorious brown eyes, a perfect little snub nose, lips too delicious for words, and a number of other features that were equally entrancing. She wore riding boots, laced breeches, and a sky-blue sweater which fitted the curves interestingly.
He felt of his jaw, which was furred with a week’s whiskers, somewhat cemented together by Arizona alkali dust. “I guess I look like an ape that they had sicked the dogs on.”
“That about describes it.”
“I’m a pretty good fellow, though,” said Jones, “when you get to know me better.”
“Heaven forbid. Now, if you’ll just excuse me—”
She started to get up. Jones jerked her ankle again. She sat down with a bump.
“After all,” he remarked, “you hit me a beauty over the head with that stick, and I think that gives me the right to ask some questions. First, who are you?”
“All right. My name is Fiesta.”
“And now, Fiesta, what were you doing out here in the dark night?”
“I was hunting moondogs.”
After more deliberation, Hobo Jones asked, “Do you mind describing and defining a moondog for me?”
“Of course not,” said Fiesta. “First, moondogs only come out when there is no moon. You would think they would come out when there was a moon, but they don’t. Only when there isn’t. And—let me see—oh, yes, moondogs have large bushy tails, and the tails are full of sparks like—well—like a cigarette lighter that isn’t working. And moondogs always walk backward. Never forward. That’s because—”
“I see,” said Jones. “Hunting moondog is kind of like snipe hunting. You’re a sassy pumpkins. Do you know what is going on around here?”
“No.”
“Can you stand something pretty grisly?”
Fiesta was slow replying. “Well, I didn’t scream when I saw you a moment ago, did I?” she asked. Then she added, more contritely, “I don’t personally guarantee my nerve, although I have been told that it is very brassy.”
“Come on,” said Jones.
They walked through the darkness toward the strawstack, and Jones, recalling the devil-bird that he had left sitting in the shack, carried along the heavy cactus cane. They stuck themselves on cactus thorns. Yucca seeds rattled like rattlesnakes, and gave them bad scares. Small creatures, lizards probably, scampered away from under their feet, and also sounded like rattlesnakes. Jones decided he didn’t like Arizona desert at night.
“Why, this is only a strawstack,” Fiesta said.
She sounded as if she really thought that was all it was, Jones reflected.
“There’s a dead man in here,” he said. “Can you stand looking at him?”
Fiesta gasped. She was silent. “I—I’ll try,” she said.
Jones shoved open the door, and there was everything just as he had left it, dead brown man sitting on the chair dressed in a breechcloth, and hideous bird sitting on the back of another chair in a corner. The odor of the horror bird was stronger in the place, Jones decided.
Fiesta saw the bird. “Ugh!” she said. “How awful!”
“That thing is some rooster,” Jones admitted. “Have any idea what it is?”
“No. I never saw anything like it before.”
“And I never saw any moondogs, either.”
Fiesta shuddered. “There—there is not such a thing—as a moondog,” she said.
“Then what were you doing prowling around in the darkness?”
“Oh, now—please!” Fiesta sounded ill through and through. “I can’t ... can’t answer that.”
Suddenly, Hobo Jones remembered a point that might be important. There had been no odor of the evil bird when the brown man had first dragged him into the shack. Therefore, the bird must have come in afterward.
“You know what?” he said.
“What?” Fiesta gasped.
“I’m going to take this club”—Jones shook the long piece of devil’s-walking-stick purposefully—“and knock the tar out of that bird, whatever it is. I don’t like the looks of the thing.”
Fiesta shuddered again, more violently.
“I’m all for it,” she said. “Go ahead.”
At this point, the ugly bird turned into an incredible sheet of white flame and a cloud of smoke, and vanished.
