Читать книгу Quest of Qui: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 8

Table of Contents

No one had ever honestly believed Johnny did not have an agile mind, and he used it now. He thought swiftly. His first conclusion was that it was just as well if these men seeking his life did not know about the radio transmitter and receiver. They would be certain to destroy that link with civilization.

Johnny, in common with some other scholarly men, was a bit absent-minded, however. When he left the radio set and burrowed away hurriedly under the snow, he overlooked something he might have done had he thought of it.

Johnny forgot to turn the radio transmitter off.

Men were shouting. They sounded angry. Dogs were barking, and they sounded joyful, as if they had been cooped up on the plane for some time.

Johnny found himself in snow which was particularly dark, decided that that meant the drift was deep and he was near the bottom, and concluded to lie still. The dogs at least would not hear him then. He might even get away entirely.

After he had stopped, Johnny heard a faint whine which puzzled him. It was almost two minutes before he abruptly remembered he had forgotten to turn off the radio, and this must be the generator he was hearing. It would run for hours. The generator, delivering high voltage, drew little current, and the special storage battery had a high ampere-hour capacity.

During the next few seconds, Johnny entertained ideas of burrowing back and turning the radio off, but put that out of his mind as being too risky. They might not hear it, anyway.

Johnny grinned once, but not joyfully. It was the kind of a grin put on by a man who has just been run over by a car and is too dazed to be sure how badly he is hurt, and Johnny employed the grin because he had thought of how unbelievable his present position was.

A Viking dragon ship filled with bearded freebooters had captured a yacht off Long Island, and that was somehow connected with a plane load of men who were now trying to kill Johnny. There was also something named Qui, of which no man had known for twelve hundred years. It did not quite make sense. Johnny had encountered some strange, unbelievable and mysterious things during his association with Doc Savage, but this one, thus far, made less sense than——

A dog went wur-r-r-o-o! over Johnny’s head. Another canine barked more sharply. They had sniffed him out. Johnny wished fervently that he had taken a bath more recently than the previous Saturday. It might have helped.

A copro-nickel slug came clubbing down through the snow, jarred the frozen ground close to Johnny’s fingers, and the report of the gun which had fired it sounded far less muffled than Johnny had expected. The drift must not be as deep as he had thought.

Men were crunching up. Johnny had made himself a little cave. The weight of those above collapsed that. Snow got into his eyes, mouth. Only the most heroic effort kept him from sneezing.

“Where’s that machine-gun?” bawled a voice which reminded Johnny of the sound one got by pulling a rosined string through a tight drumhead.

“Comin’, Kettler,” called some one more distant.

Kettler rasped, “Hurry it up! He’s somewhere under here where the dogs are sniffin’ and barkin’.”

There was a pause. Feet crunched in the snow.

“Here’s the gun,” said a voice.

“Don’t set it up on the tripod,” directed Kettler. “Three of you hold the damned thing so the recoil won’t knock you down. We’ll get this guy under the snow, whoever he is.”

Johnny reached a hurried decision.

“Hold it!” he shouted. “I am coming out.”

He half expected them to pay no attention, but thanked his stars when they did, and scrambled, not without difficulty, to the surface. Men grabbed him, yanked him, with the result that they all went through the crust and there was much cursing and floundering around.

Johnny perceived that a large stone upthrust near by cast a shadow, and it was this which had deceived him into thinking the snow was deep. Some one hit him with a fist, and that jarred snow out of his eyes, so that he got a good look at his captors.

He abruptly felt as if something colder than snow water were running down the back of his neck.

They were a hard, evil-looking crowd, and in size they averaged neither unusually large nor particularly small, but about what one might expect from a group assembled, not because of their size, but because their brains had the same twist, if it is a brain twist that makes a criminal.

One thing Johnny did note that all had in common. Their foreheads, noses and central cheek area was weather-beaten until it brought thoughts of the back of a toad. The rest of their visages, where a beard would have protected the skin, were quite pale. All of them, like the wounded man Johnny had found, had recently cut off heavy beards.

“Let ’im have it!” ordered Kettler.

Kettler was the tallest man in the crowd, and he had a doglike face. He was wearing a muskrat cap with earflaps that hung down and gave him a hound aspect. He bent forward, too, giving the impression that he might be more at home on all fours.

A man lifted a rifle. He looked closely at Johnny over its sights.

“Unconscionable intempestivity!” Johnny said hastily.

The man with the rifle all but dropped the weapon.

“Oh, hell!” he choked. “Oh, hell!”

Kettler put out his doglike jaw and said, “Go ahead! Pop ’im off.”

A man began, “Maybe we better——”

“Better what?”

“Better find another way.”

“What other way is there?” Kettler rasped. “He talked to that fool we shot, didn’t he? And the fool was talking his head off, wasn’t he? This guy is sure to have heard plenty, wasn’t he? Now ask me, what can we do but butter him up and put him away?”

“Aw, O. K.,” said the voice.

“Whew!” gulped the man with the gun. “Whew!”

“What’s eating you?” gritted Kettler.

“This guy——” The rifleman jabbed his gun muzzle at Johnny. “This pile of bones——”

“An uncomplaisant appellative,” snapped Johnny.

“That’s it!” exploded the rifleman. “That’s what I remembered. I mean, I thought there was something familiar about this pile of bones, on account of me having seen his picture somewhere. Then he sprung that word, that jawbreaker, and I remembered.”

“Remembered what?” yelled Kettler.

“This guy is William Harper Littlejohn,” said the other.

That apparently meant nothing to Kettler.

“And who,” he queried, “might William Harper Littlejohn be?”

“One of Doc Savage’s five right-hand men,” announced the other. “Glory be! And I almost shot him!”

Johnny, who really had no slightest idea of capitalizing on the suggestion, ventured, “Now, perhaps you will turn me loose.”

“Sure!” grated Kettler. “I’ll turn you loose from this earth!”

He hooked a bony hand down inside the waistband of his trousers, got a revolver, pointed it at Johnny’s stomach.

Johnny shifted an eye at the machine-gun. He was wearing a bulletproof vest which would protect him momentarily, and there was a bare chance that he might reach the rapid-firer. It was one of the big, heavy, old-fashioned type developed and manufactured during the Great War.

“Wait!” a man exploded.

“And why should I?” Kettler rasped.

More than ever, Kettler’s voice reminded Johnny of a rosined cord on a drumhead. He seemed to recall that in radio sound effects men used such a device to imitate roaring lions and such.

“This guy!” The objector jerked a frantic thumb at Johnny. “This guy—how’d he get up here? How’d he find the guy we bumped for letting that yellow-haired dame blow? I think we might ask the guy some questions.”

Kettler mulled that over. He uncocked his revolver.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve heard of this Doc Savage. If he’s on the job, it might help if we knew about it.”

“Help!” exploded a man in the background. “When Doc Savage comes in, I go out!”

“None of that damned talk,” Kettler growled. He stared at Johnny with small eyes. “How much does Doc Savage know?”

“Doc Savage’s knowledge is indeterminable, magnitudinous,” said Johnny.

Kettler shot his jaw out. “You mean he knows about the whole caper? How’d he get wise?”

“That guy’s kiddin’ you, Kettler,” advised some one who knew the meaning of the words Johnny had used.

Kettler instantly knocked Johnny down. The man could move with shocking speed. Johnny could recall but few times when he had been hit so suddenly and with such blinding force.

Johnny buried head and shoulders in the snow when he fell, and lying there, was conscious of a whining in his ears. He thought it was aftermath of the blow, then remembered the radio transmitter he had abandoned.

He got up hastily and staggered away from the spot until they cornered him.

“Look!” said a man, and pointed.

Twenty-five yards away, the man who had been shot, the fellow whose presence had drawn Johnny to a landing, was sitting up. He was talking loudly and coherently to no one.

“That bird is tough!” some one muttered.

Kettler, saying nothing, took a deliberate aim with his revolver. The gun let out noise, fire, and jumped. A hole, round and blue, appeared in the wounded man’s forehead and started leaking red. The victim fell back, silent, unmoving.

“He ain’t tough enough to stand that, I betcha,” said Kettler.

Johnny nearly shuddered himself off his feet. It was the coldest kind of a murder.

Kettler emitted a stream of profanity. He sprang to Johnny, jabbed him in the stomach with the murder gun.

“What’s Doc Savage know about this?” he gritted.

Breath steam—it stood out very distinctly in the cold air—ran a long plume out of Johnny’s mouth, and then there was no more breath steam for so long a time that it seemed certain he must collapse from want of breathing.

“Out with it!” Kettler roared.

“Doc Savage—don’t know—anything,” Johnny said, his words small, halting.

It was the truth. Kettler did not believe it.

“Don’t lie to me!” he yelled. “Has Savage figured out about them Vikings in that dragon ship?”

“Figured what out about them?” Johnny queried.

“Figured what they were——”

“Ps-s-s-t, Kettler!” a man hissed. “He’s pumping you!”

“Uhm!” Kettler scowled and shifted his gun from Johnny’s stomach to his mouth, with the result that the gaunt geologist’s moist, tender mouth tissues clung to the gun steel most agonizingly, and tore when Kettler yanked the weapon.

“Hah!” Kettler leered. “Does Doc Savage know about Qui?”

Johnny spat crimson, said nothing.

“Damn, I’m gonna shoot him!” Kettler proclaimed.

“Wait a minute,” grunted a man. “I ain’t so anxious to stir this Doc Savage up. We’d be prize suckers to get him on our necks by croakin’ this bony guy.”

“We may have already gotten him on our necks,” grunted Kettler in reply. “How we gonna know? This mug won’t talk. I know mugs who won’t talk when I see one.”

“Listen,” said the other.

They drew aside, where Johnny could not hear their ps-s-s-t of whispering, then both departed, shuffling carefully over the snow crust. Those behind guarded Johnny with careless efficiency. When he tried to talk, they kicked him and used their fists. He fell silent. He heard distant chopping noises.

Some fifteen minutes later a shout came from Kettler, and Johnny was hauled over the snow crust.

Kettler stood beside a stream. This was frozen over, but there was running water under the ice. It could be heard. The ice had cracked during the intense cold of winter, and pressure had shoved it up at the edges, causing a number of larger cracks. Johnny was hauled over the rugged ice to the middle of the stream.

The ice was thick, and they had chopped a trench in it, seven feet long, three wide, and almost three deep.

Johnny was now bound hand and foot. Wrists and ankles were lashed together so that he could not stand erect. He was thrown into the bottom of the trench. Chunks of chopped ice which had not been scooped out gouged his bony frame.

Some one brought a heavy rock, which had been pried from its frozen bed with difficulty. The rock was so heavy that they rolled it into the pit instead of lifting it and lowering it. It knocked air out of Johnny’s lungs with such violence that almost a minute elapsed before he could start breathing again.

“What’s—idea?” he managed to gulp.

“You’re gonna tell us where Doc Savage hooks into this,” he was informed.

Johnny only glared.

He could hear them chopping the ice near by. Their axes, no doubt, had been brought from their plane. The chopping sounded hurried. The men appeared to be no great lovers of physical labor, because there was plenty of grumbling.

Dogs—they were big sled huskies—bounded about, barked and chased rabbits. Wind whined in the cold-stunted trees along the creek bank. Listening to it, Johnny thought of the distant violins again. The sound struck him as funeral music. Snow sifted in on him. It was covering him like a shroud. A funeral shroud. He shivered.

“What are you doing with me?” he yelled, a little uneasily, unsteadily.

A man leered down at him, “The guy is forgettin’ his big words.”

Kettler came and looked down. The man had a face like a devil, Johnny thought, a canine sort of a devil. It was altogether the most unlovely face the lank geologist and archaeologist could recall.

Johnny glared up at the devil-like face. The glaring was a measure to preserve his own control. A man does not get scared so badly if he can keep his mind on doing something else.

“Gonna spill it?” asked Kettler.

Johnny said, “No!”

Men appeared. They carried folding canvas buckets, no doubt also gotten from their plane. Water was in the buckets. They must have dipped it up from a hole they had chopped through the ice.

“Pour it in,” directed Kettler.

The water splashed down the sides of the ice pit. It seemed warm at first, but that was some misinterpretation by Johnny’s nerves. It became cold. It bit through his garments, soaked him. It mixed with the snow and became a slush that began to freeze instantly.

Johnny floundered about. The rock on his chest did not allow much of that, and what motion he did manage did not help much. His legs began to feel pleasantly warm. That scared him. Horror frosted his brain. That warmth—he was freezing.

“What do you want to know?” he gasped hastily.

Kettler leered down in the pit.

“Not a damn thing,” he rasped. “I’ve decided we’ll just put you in the ice here. Hell with what you know. Maybe they’ll find you next spring, maybe not.”

Johnny writhed, knowing it would not help. Blood rammed at his eardrums. He could hear a singing. It was his own horror, of course, but it made him think of the radio transmitter that he had left switched on. The transmitter was strong enough to reach Doc Savage’s New York headquarters. If there had just been time to use it——

“More water!” Kettler called harshly. “Let’s get this guy out of the way and get at the job of finding that golden-haired dame.”

Johnny’s head throbbed. The radio—the radio——