Читать книгу Mad Mesa: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5

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The penitentiary had high stone walls, and they were gray. The summer sun beat down on the place; hot desert winds blew across it and heated the interior like a furnace. In the winter, the same winds were as cold as solid ice, and refrigerated the place thoroughly. The penitentiary had a reputation as being a place of which to steer clear—the kind of a reputation a penitentiary should have—in spite of the fact that it was modern, and had a warden who was perfectly fair to every inmate.

There was a cell block to itself where the desperate criminals were confined. This was isolated. The cells were bare. No luxuries were allowed. There were no windows, but plenty of light came through the cell doors. There were great frosted windows across the corridor, and light from these fell through the cell doors and cast bar-checked shadows across the cell floors.

It was the shadows of these steel bars which Tom Idle saw when he regained consciousness.

He had the sensation of something being wrong about the way he regained consciousness. Back in Missouri, he had once fallen out of a tree while trying to twist an opossum out of a hole with a forked stick, and it had knocked him senseless. He recalled how he had felt when he regained consciousness. This awakening was different. He felt as though he had been ill for a long time. But then, everything that had happened had been different.

He stared at the bar shadows on the cell floor until his eyes hurt.

“Hey!” a voice said. “Wake up!”

Tom Idle turned his head to look at the speaker.

The man was big; he was incredibly huge—and as long as Tom Idle knew him afterward, the man appeared to get each day a little bigger. Maybe it was the increasing evil of the man that made it seem so. Each day that you knew him, you realized he was a little more vicious than you had thought he possibly could be.

“Who ... who are you?” Tom Idle stuttered.

“Big Eva,” the man growled. “Who’d you think it’d be, Hondo?”

There was nothing distorted about Big Eva’s size; he was not puffy, he did not seem to have a thick neck—just big. He was about seven feet tall.

“Where am I?” Tom Idle demanded.

Big Eva chuckled. “If it’s not the Utah State Penitentiary, I’ve wasted three years in the wrong place.”

“How long have I been here?” Tom Idle asked.

“Eleven years and three days.” Big Eva showed large snaggle teeth in a grin. “Mean to say you don’t remember?”

Tom Idle was stupefied.

“I’ve been in here eleven years?” he croaked.

Big Eva pointed at the cell wall beside Idle’s bunk. On the wall was a series of marks made with a pencil, marks in groups of seven, as if they represented days and weeks.

“Count it up on your calendar, if you don’t believe me,” the giant convict said.

Tom Idle gripped the rail of his bunk. His head ached, felt as if shingle nails were being driven into his skull. His self-control slipped, and suddenly he was on his feet, gripping the barred cell door, rattling it madly.

“The warden!” he screamed. “I want to talk to the warden!”

A burly man in uniform appeared before the door. A penitentiary guard, Tom Idle presumed.

“How’d you like solitary confinement?” the guard asked harshly.

Then Big Eva had Tom Idle by the elbow and was pulling him back.

“I dunno what’s got into you, Hondo,” Big Eva growled. “You’re startin’ the day wrong.”

That day was a nightmare for Tom Idle, and it was the first of a series. Because there seemed nothing else to do, he went to breakfast with the rest of the convicts, and later to work in the overall shop. As Hondo Weatherbee, it developed that he was supposed to know all about operating one of the sewing machines; but since he knew nothing about the device, he at once got the thread snarled, then accidentally did something which broke the machine. For this, he was put in solitary confinement the rest of the day, the guards thinking he had broken the machine maliciously.

He took off a shoe and beat the steel door of the cell. He also kept up a steady shouting, demanding to see the warden.

Later in the afternoon, they took him to the warden’s office.

The instant he entered the warden’s room, Tom Idle yanked to a stop and stared.

There was a huge mirror on the wall. Tom Idle was seeing himself for the first time since things had started to happen to him.

His face was different—and yet, not completely. It was sallow. The cheeks seemed lumpy. He brought his hands to his face and explored, discovered that there were indeed lumps in his cheeks that felt as though they might be old scar tissue. But his eyes were the same. Bloodshot with strain, it was true; but still his eyes.

“Ahem,” said a voice.

Tom Idle realized he must seem a lunatic, staring at the mirror in that fashion.

“Are you the warden?” he asked.

“Yes.”

The warden was a lean, weatherbeaten man who resembled the movie version of a cowboy sheriff. The squint that came from looking at far places was in his eyes, and he had a jaw built like the device they once put on the front of railway locomotives to knock cows off the tracks.

To this quiet, determined man, Tom Idle told his whole story exactly as it had happened, from his awakening in the Salt Lake City park to his becoming unconscious, presumably from the effects of a bullet, on the mountain road.

To all this, the penitentiary warden listened with intent interest.

“Let’s feel the top of your head,” he said.

Tom Idle let the warden’s fingers explore in his hair.

“This where the bullet hit you?” the warden asked.

“Well, it hit me on the head.”

“There’s no scar there,” the warden said.

“But something hit me!”

The warden’s voice had turned cold, and now he got to his feet, put his capable hands on his lean hips, and looked Tom Idle up and down without sympathy.

“I don’t know what your game is, Hondo Weatherbee. But you’d better not try to put anything over.”

“I’ve told you the truth!” Tom Idle said desperately.

The warden snorted. “Do you remember how you were captured eleven years ago?”

“No! Of course not!”

“You were found asleep on a Salt Lake City park bench, and you were pursued by a policeman and a lunchroom man, and you were captured fleeing up the mountains in a car driven by an accomplice.”

“I ... but—”

“In other words,” the warden snapped, “you’ve just been telling me the story of how you were captured eleven years ago. Only you trimmed the story up a bit.”

Tom Idle was stunned.

“What date is this?” he wanted to know. “What day and year?”

The warden told him.

Tom Idle repeated the date under his breath. Five days had elapsed, somehow, into blankness. Only five days. Five days ago he had been in that Salt Lake City park, and he couldn’t remember anything about how the ensuing interval had gone; that was just more of the incredible mystery.

“But I’m Tom Idle!” he said wildly.

The warden sighed. “I’m a patient man, Hondo, and a fair one. Nobody can say different and talk truth. What do you want me to do? What will satisfy you?”

“Have you got Hondo Weatherbee’s fingerprints here?” Tom Idle asked.

“Yes.”

“Compare them with mine.”

The warden had Hondo Weatherbee’s fingerprint card brought from the files, and he inked Tom Idle’s prints onto a white paper and put it side by side with the fingerprints of the outlaw.

Even Tom Idle could see that his fingerprints and Hondo Weatherbee’s were the same.

If it were possible, Tom Idle was more stunned.

Being a young man with a perfectly normal mentality, Tom Idle realized that the best thing for him to do now was to settle back and get himself accustomed to the position in which he found himself. Rushing around screaming that he was Tom Idle, a Missouri farm boy, would not help. The mental agitation might even drive him insane.

He behaved, kept his eyes open, and tried to work out some way of helping himself.

He learned that Big Eva was afraid of him. So were most of the other convicts. Or rather, they were afraid of the man they thought was Hondo Weatherbee, which gave an idea of the kind of reprobate Hondo Weatherbee must have been. There were some tough jailbirds in that penitentiary.

He obtained but slight information about Hondo Weatherbee. The man had been a prospector at odd times when he was not in assorted penitentiaries. Eleven years ago, he had stood trial for murdering his partner, and received a life sentence.

It was a tribute to Tom Idle’s character that he did not sink into a black abyss of despair. He could not, no matter how much he thought about it, understand how he had become another man serving a life sentence in a penitentiary, and the desperation of that situation might have broken his will. But Tom Idle bore up.

He took to reading a great deal.

That was how he happened to learn about Doc Savage.

Tom Idle started reading the magazine feature about Doc Savage without much interest. But halfway through the article, he became so excited he had to stop and let off steam.

“Say!” he said. “Say, boy!”

He was seeing the first ray of hope that had come his way for days.

When he had calmed himself, he continued reading about Doc Savage.

The article stated that Doc Savage was a man who had one of the most remarkable scientific minds of the day. The item added that Doc Savage made a business of solving unusual mysteries—but he did this, it was stated, only if a wrong was righted or someone was helped as a result.

Since a career of righting wrongs was an unusual one for a man to follow, the author of the magazine story went to lengths to explain that this was Savage’s most spectacular activity, hence got the most attention, but that his real career was that of a scientist.

The author of the magazine article waxed enthusiastic about the “Man of Bronze,” as he called Doc Savage; he wrote that the Man of Bronze was really a man of mystery, because he avoided publicity, and very little information concerning him came to the attention of the public.

Tom Idle realized that here was exactly the kind of man he needed to help him. But the author of the article made Doc Savage out to be such a combination of scientific genius, mental marvel and physical giant that Tom Idle was skeptical about such a super-person existing. The magazine item said that the name of Doc Savage was enough to strike terror into the heart of the most hardened crook.

Tom Idle decided to test this out. He made his experiment on Big Eva, who was a hardened crook if there ever were one.

“Doc Savage!” Tom Idle said unexpectedly.

The effect on Big Eva was impressive.

He dropped the pencil with which he was marking up the day on his own wall calendar across the cell. He whirled. His expression was stark.

“What about Doc Savage?” Big Eva snarled. “Is he mixing in this—” The huge, bestial crook swallowed two or three times. “But hell, he couldn’t have gotten wise. There’s no way—”

At this point, Big Eva appeared to realize he was saying too much.

“What about Doc Savage?” he growled.

“I was just reading about him in this magazine,” Tom Idle explained.

Big Eva took several large gulps of relief.

“What the hell do you mean,” he exploded, “by scaring people that way?”

Several days later, Tom Idle learned about the prison grapevine. This was an important event, because indirectly it saved thousands of lives.

But in the meantime, Tom Idle had given some thought to the blurtings of Big Eva when he had been so startled.

“What did you mean,” he asked, “by what you said?”

“Said when?”

“When I told you about Doc Savage,” Tom Idle explained. “You seemed worried for fear he’d found out about something.”

Big Eva stood up. He doubled his huge fists.

“Shut up!” he snarled. “If you ever breathe a word about that to a soul, I’ll kill you!”

He meant it. Nobody could doubt that.

The prison grapevine is a furtive thing. All penitentiaries have them. This was how it functioned:

Tom Idle was served four pancakes for breakfast, ate two of them, and left two on his plate with a letter secreted between them. In the kitchen, the convict dishwasher was careful to put the two pancakes, still with the letter between them, on top of the garbage can. The driver of the garbage wagon mailed the letter.

The magazine article had not given Doc Savage’s address.

But Tom Idle had a sister in Missouri. The letter was addressed to his sister. It told Tom Idle’s story, and asked his sister to get Doc Savage to investigate.

The letter got off successfully, and on its way to Missouri.

But two nights later, Tom Idle talked in his sleep, mumblingly, and told about the letter he had mailed to his sister asking her to appeal to Doc Savage for aid—and Big Eva listened in open-mouthed horror.