Читать книгу Red Snow: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Doc Savage saw the two fruit peddlers when they first drove up and stopped before the Hotel Biscayneville, the conservative and not overly large hostelry where he had registered. It was some moments before he suspected anything. Then, when he did, it was just a little too late.

The peddlers and their one-horse wagons were very ordinary looking; scores like them ranged the streets of Miami, peddling cocoanuts, grapefruit, and oranges. Neither was it suspicious that the two drivers should advance and begin talking. They might have been disputing over routes.

They were not. But it was not immediately that Doc Savage became aware of that.

The two drivers were stocky black fellows. However, their lips were not thick and both wore colored sun glasses of the type not at all uncommon in Florida. These latter two facts were destined to take on much significance.

Doc Savage neglected to give the peddlers the attention they deserved, because he was interested in a group of half a dozen young men who stood in front of the hotel. Two of these carried large press cameras. The others had pads of copy paper stuffed in their pockets. They all looked indignant.

They were newspaper reporters and photographers. From where he stood in his room, behind a Venetian blind, Doc Savage could not be seen by the journalists. He did not want to be seen. He wished heartily that the newspaper reporters and photographers would go away. He wished that they were not even aware he was in Florida.

Doc had tried hard enough to arrive in Miami unobtrusively, but an attendant at the airport where he had left his plane had tipped off the gentlemen of the press, and they had descended like a locust swarm.

The fact that Doc had insisted he was in Miami for nothing more spectacular than to conduct scientific experiments whereby it might be possible to eliminate mosquitoes by spreading a peculiar insect disease fatal only to mosquitoes, had not satisfied the newspaper men.

Doc Savage, rumor had it, was a man who walked always in the shadow of peril and excitement, and the reporters refused to believe he was in Florida for anything so prosaic as scientific experiments.

Doc Savage, the reporters knew, was a man who was devoting his life to the often thankless, always dangerous, and sometimes seemingly mad, task of righting wrongs, of aiding the oppressed, and of—strangely enough—not exactly punishing evildoers, but of causing things to happen to them which not infrequently moved them to change their ways.

Furthermore, Doc Savage was supposed to be something of a miracle man, a muscular marvel and a mental wizard. Practically every act of Doc’s was supposed to be good newspaper copy. That was why the scribes were indignant. Doc had refused to interview them.

Doc Savage did not like publicity. It was distasteful, for he was a genuinely modest man. Sometimes, it was dangerous.

Doc Savage took his eyes from the newspaper men and glanced at the two peddlers. His gaze became fixed. Doc Savage had strange eyes that were like pools of flake-gold, and now tiny winds seemed to stir the flakes briskly. He whirled and leaped to his hand bag. He dug out a pair of binoculars. Back at the window, he focused the lenses on the conversing peddlers.

By intensive study, Doc Savage had learned to do so many things, that he was sometimes considered to have slightly supernatural capabilities. Among other things, he could read lips. He read them now through the powerful binoculars.

The two peddlers were not speaking English, but a foreign dialect. This tongue was one which required use of the lips in forming many words. Moreover, the language was one which Doc had studied.

“The bronze man’s baggage will be here soon,” said one peddler. “We will act then.”

Doc Savage held no doubts about himself being the subject of conversation. He gave the focus screw of the binoculars a slight twist.

“There must be no slip,” said the second of the two peddlers, speaking the same foreign tongue. “Our own lives and the lives of many others depend on the outcome of the next five minutes.”

“It is true,” agreed the other. “It is even possible that the destiny of much of the world rests with our success or failure.”

Doc Savage did not move; his unusually regular bronze features did not alter expression, but into the hotel room there penetrated a weird sound, a not unmusical trilling which ran up and down a vagrant scale, a sound distinctly inspiring—unnatural, fantastic. It might have been the filtering of a wind through a denuded forest, or the call of an exotic tropical bird. Perhaps the most startling feature was the way the sound seemed to come from everywhere in the room, yet from no definite spot.

This sound was a peculiar characteristic of Doc Savage, a thing he did unconsciously when his thought processes were particularly agitated. Just now, it meant that he was surprised. He had encountered many fantastic situations. But this one was unique.

Two shabby fruit peddlers talking as if the destiny of a good part of the world depended on something they were going to do. They were quite sober about it, too. And they evidently thought no one was in earshot, so they could not be putting on a show.

A little over a score of yards distant from the peddlers, the party of newspaper men were still looking disappointed and disgusted and the cameramen were contenting themselves by taking pictures of the Hotel Biscayneville. Traffic muttered on the street; an airplane made a distant moan, and warm breezes rattled palm fronds outside the hotel window. It was a very peaceful scene.

A truck rounded the nearest corner. It was not a large truck, nor a rich-looking one. Doc Savage watched it closely. It was the vehicle which he had hired to bring his trunks, shipped ahead by several days, from the station to the hotel.

The truck pulled in to the curb and stopped, almost between the two fruit peddlers’ carts. Inside its large van of a body, various suitcases and large trunks could be seen. All the pieces of luggage were plentifully smeared with hotel and steamship stickers.

Things began to happen.

One of the peddlers barked something in his native language. He and his fellow ran toward the truck. Both drew revolvers. There were two men in the truck, the driver and an assistant to help him wrestle baggage. Both looked at the two peddlers, then displayed excellent sense by putting their hands up as quickly and as high as they could.

“Sit very still,” directed one of the peddlers.

Driver and assistant sat very still.

Doc Savage whipped away from the shuttered window, ran to his hand bag—the one from which he had taken the binoculars—and jerked up one of the flaps which separated the container into halves. This revealed five weapons which, one not knowing much about firearms, might have mistaken for automatic pistols.

Doc Savage removed one of these. Just ahead of the trigger guard, he clipped a magazine which resembled one of the reels on which film for home movie cameras is put up. Lying beside the unique weapons were five cylinders somewhat over an inch and a half thick and nearly a foot long. Doc affixed one of these to the muzzle of the oversized automatic device, by a patent coupling.

Going to the window, he lifted it without much noise. The two peddlers were searching truck driver and assistant for weapons. Doc Savage took a deliberate aim.

There was a sound as if some one had whistled and then clapped hands once in the distance. There was almost no report from the unusual gun; it was a machine pistol of Doc’s own construction, the mechanism so fashioned that, unlike the ordinary type of automatic and submachine gun, it could be operated with a silencer. The whistle was made by the bullet; the clap was the sound of the slug hitting one of the peddlers.

The man who had been hit barked a surprise and jumped, slapping a hand to his thigh.

“What is it?” demanded his companion. Then there was another whistle and clap, and he, too, started and grabbed a portion of his anatomy.

The pair cackled at each other in their native speech. They stared at small holes in their clothing, where the bullets had entered. Apparently this was their first experience with a silenced gun.

Then they returned their attention to the truck driver and his assistant, finished searching the pair. Finding no weapons, they ran around to the rear of the truck to tug at the gate fastening.

They seemed to have a great deal of difficulty with the fastening. Fumbling with it appeared to make them tired. They leaned against the gate. Both brushed hands over their eyes. Then they sat down behind the truck. Both sighed. Both fell over and to all appearances went to sleep.

Doc Savage knocked the Venetian blind aside and threw a leg over the sill. His machine pistol was charged with mercy bullets, thin metal shells filled with a chemical concoction producing quick unconsciousness. They had been effective on the two strange peddlers.

Down the street, the group of newspaper men had vanished as if some one had waved a magic wand. They had seen the peddlers’ guns. Now that the peddlers were down, the journalists thrust heads from behind palm boles and parked cars; one fat fellow ceased trying to make a fire hydrant serve as shelter.

Doc Savage swung out on the window sill and prepared to drop the two stories to the narrow lawn between the hotel front and the sidewalk.

The mounds of oranges, cocoanuts and grapefruit on the peddlers’ carts erupted like volcanoes. From each cart, three men leaped. Their faces were black, but they were obviously not Negroes; the blackness had the shine of grease paint. Each held a sawed-off automatic shotgun.

As one man, all six leveled their shotguns at Doc Savage and began shooting.

Once each day since childhood, Doc Savage had forced himself to go through a routine of exercises lasting for two hours—exercises which had not only given him an amazing physique and unusually sharp senses, but had developed his thinking processes as well.

He had, for instance, made reels of motion pictures showing the encroachment of danger in all the manners he could conceive, as well as men attacking him in various fashions. He made a practice of viewing these frequently, giving himself split parts of seconds to think of a way out of whatever difficulty presented, and striving to think of a new way out each time he viewed the scenes.

He always witnessed these films in private, because the procedure usually struck others as somewhat silly. But by this device, he had schooled himself to think swiftly in pinches.

Doc was hanging from the window sill by his hands. There was not much room to swing back up. It would take a moment. Dropping to the ground would be even more foolhardy, for there was no shelter.

But there was another window below, with a window box holding flowering plants on the sill. Doc dropped.

The window box broke under his weight, fell free, spilling rich black dirt and plants. But it held the giant bronze man for an instant, long enough for him to bundle his arms about his face and dive through the glass panes into the hotel room. He landed ungracefully in a shower of glass.

Shotgun slugs clouted at what remained of the window panes. With a loud ripping, lead came completely through the thin wall of the hotel. It was a frame building, lightly constructed, and the automatic shotguns seemed to be charged with two or three large lead slugs to the cartridge. The guns were making thunder in the street.

Doc Savage came to his feet, ran to the door, found it locked, and rammed it with a shoulder. The cheap wood panel fell off its hinges and let him through to his right. Outside, the shotguns still whooped.

From the stairway came another uproar, a grunting and squealing punctuated by irregular thumps and yells.

A pig appeared, tumbling headlong down the steps, squealing with every bump. This pig was a truly remarkable specimen of the familia suidae, having the legs of a dog, a scrawny body, a snout of incredible length, and a pair of ears which might well have been meant for wings.

A man followed the shote, head over heels, down the steps, yelling painfully each time he collided with a tread. The man had lean shoulders and thin hips which gave him a waspish contour, and he was attired in a fashion that was sartorially perfect—striped trousers, fawn vest and cutaway, and a dislodged silk hat kept pace with his progress down the stairs. Although it looked as if the man was being jarred hard enough to loosen his teeth, he still retained a tight grip on a slender black cane.

Pig and man slammed out on the floor at the bottom of the steps. The man sat up dazedly, then struck furiously at the pig with his cane. The shote jumped at just the right instant.

The dapper man got up, gave his cane a wrench, and it came apart, disclosing that it was a sword cane with a thin, flexible blade. He made purposefully for the strange-looking pig.

A voice bawled from up the stairs, “You touch Habeas Corpus and I’ll tear an arm off you, Ham!”

The dapper “Ham” yelled, “Monk, you come down here and you’ll get the same thing that your hog is going to get!”

This got a roar from upstairs.

“You heard me!” squawled “Monk.” “Lay off Habeas or I’ll tie knots in you!”

“The infernal hog tripped me!” Ham shouted back up the stairs. “I think my back is broken!”

“You’ll be positive it’s broken if you touch that hog!” Monk promised. “Anyhow, I saw what happened. You kicked at Habeas and fell down the stairs.”

Ham waved his sword cane and screamed, “Come down here, you missing link, you awful mistake of nature! I’ll hollow you out and stuff you with pork!”

“Just as you say, brother!” Monk bellowed, and came bounding down the stairs.

The man was a physical freak with all the characteristics of a bull ape, being hardly more than five feet in height, almost equally as wide, and with arms some inches longer than his legs. His pleasantly homely face was composed mostly of mouth.

The only stitch of clothing he wore was a sheet, out of which he had fashioned a loin cloth. Water dripped from the rusty bristles which studded his simian frame, indicating he had just jumped from a bathtub.

Both Monk and Ham seemed to see Doc Savage for the first time. They gaped at the bronze man.

“What’s the fireworks outside, Doc?” Monk demanded.

Doc Savage said, “That remains to be learned,” and whipped toward the lobby and the street door.

Monk and Ham followed him, trailed by the pig, Habeas Corpus. Monk was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, and although there did not seem to be room for more than a spoonful of brains behind his low forehead, he was admittedly one of the greatest living industrial chemists. Ham was Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, who was perhaps the most astute lawyer ever to pass through the portals of Harvard.

They were always quarreling, these two; no one could recall one having addressed a civil word to the other. One not knowing them could hardly conceive that they were the best of friends, that each had more than once risked his life to save the other.

Associated with Doc Savage as assistants, bound to the bronze man by a common love of excitement, was a group of five men. Monk and Ham were two members of that group.

Doc Savage, once inside the lobby, went flat on the floor as a shotgun burst slapped glass out of the large lobby window. Monk and Ham slammed down beside him. A shotgun roared again.

They took a chance and looked outside. Three of the men who had been under the fruit in the carts were using shotguns. The other three were clambering inside the baggage truck.

“They’re after your baggage, Doc!” Monk grunted.

“So it seems,” the bronze man admitted.

“Why?” asked Monk, whose voice, in repose, was small and childlike.

“I cannot imagine,” Doc replied.

Ham squinted at the bronze man. “You haven’t been cooking something up, Doc?”

“Certainly not,” Doc told him. “This came out of a clear sky. I haven’t the slightest idea of what it is about.”

Monk grunted noisily and fished inside the folds of the sheet from which he had made his breech cloth. He brought out two metallic eggs which he had grabbed when he first heard the shooting.

“I’ll lay one of these out there and see what effect it has,” he said, small-voiced.

He sailed the grenade through a window from which the glass had been shot; it hit a palm tree in just exactly such a way that it caromed under the rear of the baggage truck and burst.

The gunmen with the black grease paint on their features promptly whipped compact gas masks from under their coats and donned them.

“Hah!” Ham sneered at Monk. “A lot of good you did!”

“Hah!” Monk jeered back at him. “Watch and see!”

One of the truck attackers stepped boldly into the acrid cloud of gas fumes, seemingly confident that his mask would prove effective. He got a surprise. He seemed to double up with a great sneeze which blew the mask mouthpiece out of his teeth. An instant later—and the other two working in the truck rear began to sneeze and reel about. In their agony, they tore their masks off.

“Hah!” Monk nudged Ham. “What do you think of that? My own special product, that gas. There isn’t a mask made that is effective against it.”

“Rats,” Ham said. “Look!”

The truck attackers were running away.

Three attackers that were blinded were helped by the three that were unaffected by Monk’s gas, and these six cooperated in carrying the two who had been dropped by Doc Savage’s mercy bullets.

Monk, greatly excited, bounded out with some idea of making an attack. The pig, Habeas Corpus, followed him.

The black-faced men whirled suddenly, firing, and Monk flopped back, but the pig, Habeas, was not so lucky. He spun over and over, obviously hit by a bullet, and began squealing.

Monk emitted an angry roar, but could do nothing, not even reach the pig. The black-faced men had a touring car waiting around the corner. They reached it, and the machine moaned away.

Still roaring, Monk lunged to his pig. He made a quick examination. Great relief came over his simian face.

“Leg nicked,” he said. “Let’s get them guys.”

Doc and his two men ran to the corner, stopped a car, ejected the surprised driver, and gave chase. But an old and entirely sufficient dodge defeated them; those in the fleeing car opened a large carton of big-headed roofing nails on the pavement, and these punctured all four tires of the pursuing machine.

Doc drove it to a service station to have the tires replaced, and they walked back to the hotel.

“One thing sure,” grumbled the small-voiced Monk, “whatever they were after, they didn’t get it.”

Ham eyed Doc Savage. “Were those fellows Negroes, Doc?”

“No,” said the bronze man. “Neither were they Americans.”

“No?” Ham fingered his sword cane.

“They all had high cheek bones and a certain set to their eyes,” Doc reminded. “That would indicate they were all of one nationality.”

The pig, Habeas Corpus, hobbled to meet them, and Monk, seizing upon his pet, bore him off for bandaging—also to dress himself, for, robed in the sheet, he was the center of all eyes.

The pig was trailed by a swarm of newspaper men and photographers, and for the next five minutes, Doc Savage was the center of a verbal mêlée as the journalists tried to get stories for their papers.

When Doc Savage explained that he had no idea who had made the attack on the baggage truck, or why it was made, they naturally did not believe him. He tried to tell them that he had come to Florida to perfect a disease fatal to mosquitoes; but this only got a laugh.

The police arrived, and Doc repeated to them the same story. He was asked if his baggage held anything of especial value, and he explained that it had been packed in New York with scientific equipment and shipped some days before, and had been lying in a Miami station since. He added that he was entirely at a loss to explain the affair.

This satisfied the police, for they had a healthy respect for the man of bronze and his methods.

The truck driver and his assistant, unharmed but shaky, carried the trunks and bags inside the Biscayneville, then departed, having had an experience which would doubtless furnish them conversation for a long time to come.

The newspaper men gave up questioning Doc Savage and went off to turn their stories in. It was a good yarn.

“There’ll be more hot stuff, as long as this Doc Savage is in town,” one scribe told his fellows. “Trouble and this Doc Savage have a way of finding each other.”

The bronze man perched on one of the large trunks while a hotel maid swept up glass which had been shot out of the windows by the mysterious raiders. Monk and Ham waited until the maid departed, Monk had rigged his pet pig up with bandages and tied him to the bed. Then Doc Savage spoke.

“There is something behind this,” he said slowly. “Those men wanted my baggage. I do not know why. Perhaps, if we looked through the stuff, a reason might suggest itself.”

“An idea,” Monk grinned.

The bronze man began shifting the trunks about, handling their not inconsiderable weight with a casualness which gave indication of the tremendous strength in his great frame. He tipped one of the trunks on end. He became perfectly still, rigid.

His strange trilling note, the fantastic sound that ran up and down the musical scale without adhering to a tune or without seeming to come from any definite spot, came into being, persisted for a brief interval, then betook itself away into nothingness.

He put a finger on the trunk end and said, “Look!”

There was a round puncture through the metal case of the trunk, and through the wood reënforcing, a hole perhaps three-eighths of an inch across.

“Bullet!” Monk breathed.

“Must have been shot into the trunk when they were trying to get the baggage,” Ham added.

Doc Savage eased the trunk down and fitted a key in the lid.

“It is possible the raid was staged to fire this shot—rather than seize the baggage, as we concluded,” he said.

He opened the lid.

“Blazes!” Monk exploded.

There was a man inside the trunk—the body of a man, rather, for the bullet had made a wound in the center of the skull, which had not bled extensively.