Читать книгу The Mental Wizard: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 3

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Miracles do not occur too often. El Liberator “Amber” O’Neel very nearly fell over with surprise when one happened to him. But he lost no time in taking advantage of it.

It was, incidentally, a fact that if O’Neel had known what he was letting himself in for, he would probably have crawled under the roots of the nearest mangrove and let the miracle go moaning past.

Carl O’Neel, alias Amber O’Neel, alias El Liberator—he was El Liberator Amber O’Neel just now—was a brave Yankee, too, which was bad, because he was also crooked, cruel, without morals, and all other kinds of a rascal.

Bravery and such qualities are a rare mixture, and a bad one. But O’Neel did not crawl under a mangrove. Instead, he bellowed enthusiastic orders.

“Quick!” he squawled, in Spanish. “Get out there in the clearing! Line up and wave your arms!”

El Liberator Amber O’Neel had been standing at the edge of an open glade in the South American jungle, wishing that a plane would happen along. No sooner the wish, and presto! The sound of an airplane motor was approaching!

“Wave your arms, damn you!” O’Neel howled. “Get that plane down! Then see that it does not get up again!”

Amber O’Neel was in great need of a plane, because the authorities of this South American country of Colombia were looking for him to stand him against a stone wall and see if he were bulletproof. This by way of proving that it is not wise to murder and rob under the guise of being a leader of a gang of patriots trying to make Colombia a land of the free. Colombia was already enough of a land of the free to satisfy almost every one.

“Wave, damn it!” bawled O’Neel. “Wave them arms!”

If he had a plane, Amber O’Neel reflected, he could scout for groups of Colombian soldiers or police, and there would be less likelihood of his raiding a trading post when authority was too near. He chuckled. He would claim the plane was his military air force.

“Get the pilot’s attention!” O’Neel yelled. “Make him think we’re in distress or something!”

The plane, thought O’Neel, would make a swell get-away vehicle when the going got too tough.

O’Neel’s patriots waved their arms as if their lives depended upon it. They were all for their chief, who was as swell a general as they had ever had. Of course, he flew into a rage and shot somebody now and then. But jungle life was cheap, and El Liberator O’Neel was a lad who raided where the raiding was good.

The patriots were a scurvy-looking bunch. Some were natives, jungle savages who looked as if they would be more at home drying human heads. Indeed, they had dried a few.

There were a couple of bums from up Nicaragua way, a bit of scum from Panama, Colombian riffraff. But no whites. O’Neel was white, and he didn’t like more of his own color. Sometimes a white man objected to some of the things O’Neel did.

But El Liberator Amber O’Neel’s rabble patriots were better trained than they looked. Six of them, indeed, were good military aviators, trained by Colombia and other South American republics at some expense.

They all waved their arms vigorously at the plane cruising overhead.

The plane was a model ten years old, and not a pilot in a thousand would have cared about being in it while it was over this kind of jungle. The ship had been flying north, so it must have left behind an unexplored stretch of jungle where, for all any one knew, landing grounds might be a hundred miles between. No place, certainly, for a bus as old as this one.

The pilot flew like a war-time kiwi—a kiwi being a bird with wings that can’t fly. He was going to land. He wabbled down. He tried to skid air speed away, narrowly missed scraping a wing, came down hard, bounced twenty feet straight up, came down on one wing, and the plane began to fall to pieces.

O’Neel cursed wildly. “Looks like that pilot deliberately wrecked his wagon!”

The propeller tied itself into a strange knot. The plane—what was left of it—turned over on its back, and a cloud of splinters and bits of fabric settled on it, and the episode was over. That plane would never take to the air again.

Amber O’Neel produced two long-barreled, small-bore pistols from holsters next to his sides, and he handled them as if each of his hands was a right hand. In fact, that was how Amber O’Neel had gotten one of his nicknames.

He was ambidextrous, could use both hands with equal ease. He boasted about his being ambidextrous. Men who couldn’t pronounce that word had taken to calling him “Amber.”

Amber O’Neel ran toward the plane. He planned to shoot the occupants, if still alive, and take whatever they had. He poked his head and his guns into the interior of the ship.

For some time, he remained in exactly that position.

When he withdrew his head, he looked wide-eyed, startled. His lips made words, but not sounds.

His patriots, who had drawn near, withdrew. Amber O’Neel was fat, innocent-looking. Just a benign, chubby gentleman to the eye. To look at him, you’d trust him with your bank roll. Those who knew him didn’t even want to be around him.

That look on Amber O’Neel’s face scared his patriots.

Amber O’Neel showed no signs of being aware of the flurry among his lovers of liberty—and loot. His guns hung limply in his hands. His mouth kept working, and he swallowed with a great deal of effort, as if trying to down half a banana without chewing it.

“Fever!” he exploded. “That’s what it is! Blast me, I’ve got it, and I’m delirious!”

Then he did something that would have made an onlooker laugh—but not to Amber O’Neel’s face.

He hit himself on the head with the barrels of both guns simultaneously, just hard enough to convince himself he was awake. He looked somewhat childishly pained, then shoved his head into the plane’s cabin again.

“At first, I figured I was seein’ things,” he said, sharply. “What’s the idea of the regalia, lady?”

The fantastically garbed young woman said nothing.

She was a fabulous creature.

Her hair, perhaps, was most striking of all. It was spun gold. Not the spun gold that the poets rhyme about. They mean their girls’ hair to be only like unto spun gold in color and texture. This girl’s hair was spun gold. At least, it had been treated with some gilt process.

She had an oval face with a tendency to length, and there was something absolutely aristocratic about the chiseling of her features. She was not the kind of a beauty every man would try to flirt with. They would hold their breath when she went by.

But it was her attire which held Amber O’Neel breathless. The garments were scanty, in a sense. First was an affair to take care of the upper body, leaving arms and shoulders bare.

It was something like the halter of a modernistic bathing suit. Only halters of modernistic bathing suits are not usually made of cloth composed of chain mesh of heavy gold.

The lower part of the strange ensemble was a pair of shorts of the same rich yellow material, and tall sandals of an unusual-looking leather, which was apparently very pliable.

“Hey!” Amber O’Neel barked. “You knocked speechless or something when the plane crashed?”

The strange-looking young woman pointed with an arm instead of answering. The pointing gesture focused O’Neel’s attention on a strange set of adornments on the exquisitely formed arm. Men’s wrist watches. Six of them, strung in two bracelets.

All seemed to be running, and keeping only slightly different time. They were not alike, and they were styles of different years, as well as having been manufactured in different countries.

Amber O’Neel took his eyes off the watches and stared at what the young woman’s arm was pointing. It was a man, the pilot of the plane, and the only other occupant.

The flier seemed to be senseless. There was a heavy copper ring—not gold, O’Neel made sure—around each ankle, and from the rings dangled a short length of chain. It looked as if the chain had once connected his legs, but he had managed to cut it so that he could run. He wore only a long leather skirt.

He looked like something out of a coffin, this pilot. There was almost seven feet of him, and in his day he had been very much a man, but now his bones might weigh a hundred pounds, the rest of him not nearly so much.

The pilot lay on his side. Amber O’Neel scowled. Obviously, the strange girl with the metallic hair wanted him helped.

O’Neel brought up his two guns. Help him? Sure! Help him keep his mouth shut!

But the gaunt pilot had not been senseless. He had been faking, as was evident when he spoke in a perfectly calm voice.

“If you’ve ever seen anybody shot with .45s, you’ll think again before you lift them things any higher,” he said.

Simultaneously, he rolled a trifle. A big army automatic showed. It looked rusty, but there is nothing to guarantee a rusty gun won’t go off. O’Neel stood very still.

O’Neel had shot men in his time, and knew what happened. They didn’t always die when they were supposed to do. There was a time in Rio when a man with three bullets as nearly in his heart as O’Neel had been able to put them had gotten up and chased O’Neel a block. This flier might pull the automatic trigger even after a bullet hit his brain.

Amber O’Neel put his hands up.

“Drop the guns!” ordered the wasted flier.

O’Neel dropped them, and said nothing.

“Head inland and run!” grated the aviator. “We’re going the other way, and it’ll be tough if you follow us!”

The flier paused. He seemed to have something else on his mind, and it did not sit pleasantly. His mouth became a grim line, and he shoved his head forward.

“I hope you go as far inland as I did!” he gritted. “And I hope you find what I found, and what a lot of others have found!”

O’Neel was wishing he had shot it out with the flier. He didn’t like the way the fellow’s gun hand shook.

“What’d they find?” he asked, trying to be sociable.

The pilot got up from the mangled floor of the plane.

“Never mind!” he barked shortly. “Forget it!”

“Who found what?” O’Neel asked, suddenly interested.

“Forget it, I said!” barked the aviator.

Amber O’Neel jerked his head toward the girl. “Did you find her inland somewhere?”

The emaciated flier said, in a disquietingly earnest tone, “I figure maybe I should shoot you because maybe I was excited a minute ago, and now you know too much!”

O’Neel had used that tone himself a time or two. He whirled, fled wildly. At every jump, he expected a shot, but none came. When he finally gained the jungle and flopped behind a tree, he caught his breath and made a resolution: More caution in the future.

That pilot must have seen him coming with his guns drawn and had faked senselessness until he had a chance to get the upper hand.

“I wonder,” muttered O’Neel, “what he meant by that stuff about finding something inland?”

He crawled cautiously for a spot where he could watch the clearing unobserved.

“Probably he found the dame inland,” he decided. “Some looker after her style, but I’ll take mine a little more baby-faced. But I could use some of the stuff her bathing suit was made out of—if the whole thing ain’t some phony set-up!”

He got a look at the clearing. His natives were cackling happily among themselves. Gloating over his ignominious flight!

The flier was fleeing with the girl.

O’Neel stared, then emitted a low, hissing noise, his way of indicating surprise. The girl was not going willingly with the aviator. He had her by one wrist, was dragging her along toward the opposite side of the clearing.

In his emaciated condition, the flier was not equal to the girl in strength. She got her wrists free of his clutch, and swung on him. Her punching would have done credit to a pugilist with medical training. She knew just where to hit. She staggered the flier away with a blow, then whirled and ran.

O’Neel held his breath. The aviator had a gun. He’d have to use it to stop the girl. But the flier did not try to fire his automatic.

“Danged rusty thing ain’t no account!” decided Amber O’Neel, and promptly charged out into the clearing, drawing a tiny, flat pistol out of each hip pocket.

The jumping at conclusions nearly cost him his life. The pilot lifted his big automatic. It banged. O’Neel shrieked, grabbed one arm and fell down.

The aviator saw he could not overtake the girl. He whirled and, traveling in a staggering lope, vanished into the jungle.

Amber O’Neel got up and ran in the opposite direction. He still held his arm, although he knew by now that the bullet from the flier’s .45 had only burned it.

The patriots were also running. They had started with the shot, and were sprinting madly in all directions. Amber O’Neel began to curse them.

He was still cursing his “army” when he caught sight of the girl.