Читать книгу The Mental Wizard: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5

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Amber O’Neel stood still and let the aviator run on. O’Neel was afraid of Aviator David Hutton’s rusty old automatic, and he also wanted to read that diary and see if it told what had kept the flier in the unexplored jungle interior for ten years.

O’Neel began to turn the notebook leaves. Flier David Hutton had started off the diary with painstaking care in writing the lettering; but, as things do, the care had petered out. However, it was all readable.

O’Neel’s interest at first was fragmentary. He glanced up each time a bird squawked, or a jungle bush moved. It was hot. He moistened his finger to turn the notebook leaves, by wiping it in the sweat on his forehead.

O’Neel began to be more absorbed in the notebook. A gaudy parrakeet with a nest near by screamed at him suddenly, and he didn’t even look up.

The birds were beginning to settle back in the thick, moist carpet of green. Bursts of excitement in the jungle are frequent. Monkeys—curious as humans—drawn by the earlier uproar, arrived and began squeaking and working closer to the reading man.

One of Amber O’Neel’s half-savage followers—unwilling—came out of the jungle growth and stood almost beside O’Neel, and the white man didn’t seem to notice.

O’Neel made a gasping sound of unbounded, unbelieving surprise.

The monkeys came closer, behaving a little like humans. One would throw himself forward with a loud outcry, as if daring the men below to fight, but ready to turn if they wanted to. Another monkey would do the same thing.

Four patriots came out of the jungle carrying the strange gold-clad girl. She was still blindfolded.

O’Neel was ogling the diary. He had it open at about the middle. Across the two pages was a picture, or sketch, of a crude map, and it terminated at something marked “Klantic.”

O’Neel read on.

“It’s impossible!” he gasped once.

He read on. His men put down the girl and glowered at the jungle.

“Why—what——” O’Neel ogled the diary.

His patriots were eying the girl. They didn’t eye her as men of their kind would ordinarily eye one of the prettiest women ever to penetrate any jungle.

They were afraid of her. They wanted to run. But two things held them: The gold of her garments, and the knowledge that El Liberator Amber O’Neel shot cowards sometimes.

O’Neel suddenly leveled an arm at the girl.

“You’re Z!” he howled.

She made no move, no sound.

“You’re mentioned in this diary!” O’Neel shouted at her. “You’re Z! Then, damn it, this whole incredible thing must be true! But it couldn’t be!”

He was so excited, he could hardly stand up.

He came over and touched the girl. The way in which he did this was strange. He did it as if she were some rare jewel, or something that might blow up.

O’Neel wrenched off her blindfold. For no more than three seconds, he stared at the girl’s eyes. Then he replaced the blindfold.

“It’s true!” he squawled.

He sprang erect. His eyes were wild; he jumped up and down, and he could hardly talk.

“I’ve got it!” he bellowed. “I’ve hit it at last! The biggest thing of my life!”

He brandished his arms at the natives, scaring them until they almost ran.

“Gold!” he jeered. “Who gives a damn about gold, when something like this comes along! Something that is something! Something worth more than—well, hell! There ain’t enough dollars and cents in the world to buy this!”

He ran at the natives, struck them.

“Catch that flier!” he shouted at them, in their tongue. “A new rifle and all the ammunition he can carry to the man who catches and kills him!”

The natives dashed off instantly in pursuit of the aviator. Which, after all, proved them just about as bad as their master, Amber O’Neel.

They did not catch the aviator, David Hutton. He got some breaks. He came to a stream, almost fell over a dugout canoe cached by some hunter, and launched it. He paddled with weak ferocity for a while, then lay down in the two inches of water sloshing on the bottom of the dugout and slept or was unconscious—he never was sure which.

The water gurgling in and out of his ears awakened him, and he found his craft aground on a mud bar on which tall birds with long, yellow legs and pouchy necks stood. He shoved the boat off the mud, got it out in the current and paddled.

Hutton watched for floating coconuts, picked them up, and finally found one that was good. Later, he landed for fruit, and killed a fat bird with a stick, and ate it raw.

That day, he slept in the canoe in the stream, and awakened conscious of water no longer around him, but with movement near. He listened. Something nudged the canoe, almost overturned it.

He looked out, and actually cried out in terror. For he was on another mud bar and there were scores of alligators around him. One had nudged the canoe. He clubbed the ’gator; luckily, it withdrew. He got the dugout afloat again.

The river was the Magdalena, and it led eventually to Cartagena. Big black natives and smaller brown natives saw him frequently and remembered, for a white man paddling a dugout alone was unusual, to say nothing of a white man who was skin and bones and who wore only a leather apron.

Amber O’Neel trailed the flier down the river by questioning the natives. O’Neel was taking chances coming into the districts of the Colombian police. He knew it, but did not hesitate. He was cautious, though. And he was raising the ante to his natives.

“Two guns, and all the ammunition he can carry in two trips to the man who gets that flier!” he promised.

A bit later, it was three guns, and three loads of ammunition. Then he thought of throwing in an outboard motor, which was a brilliant stroke. Almost any native would trade his wife for an outboard motor.

O’Neel and his natives were not more than an hour behind David Hutton when the latter tied his canoe up to the stone wall along the Cartagena water front.

David Hutton stood on the wall and looked around. That move quite possibly changed the life course of a great many people.

A crowd was gathered on the water front. David Hutton looked the way every one else seemed to be looking, out into the bay. A steamer with four funnels, flying a United States flag, was anchored out in the stream.

“A tourist boat, probably.” Hutton shuddered. “People out having fun. It seems strange—after what I’ve been through.”

His second look at the crowd showed something he had overlooked. A lot of top-hatted personages. There was also a squad of soldiers, some sailors, policemen, and two different bands.

“Who is it?” Hutton asked a very brown man in very white clothes. “What’s the blow-out about?”

The brown man looked a long time at the leather skirt the aviator wore.

“The Señor Doc Savage is on that steamer,” the man said. “What you see is a reception to welcome and honor him. The president is here, the minister of war, and many others.”

“So the day has come when they honor a doctor,” Hutton remarked.

The brown man looked surprised, and said, “Is it possible you have not heard of this Doc Savage? Every one señor, knows him. Even the devils in hell.”

“If you knew the kind of place I’ve been in for the last ten years,” Hutton replied, “you wouldn’t know much of what was going on in the world. Who is this guy, anyway?”

The brown man expanded his chest. The subject appeared to please him. And it was evident he took pride in telling it.

“Doc Savage is a wonderful man, señor. His muscular strength is said to be the greatest in the world. But most amazing of all, he possesses a keen brain with it. His scientific knowledge covers all fields, and he is a genius in every one. With him are five trusted aids, men who are masters of their respective trades. Yet, señor, this Doc Savage knows more than the whole five put together.”

“What did you say his profession was?” Hutton was suddenly more interested than he had been.

“Helping out others, señor. Those who are misfortunate, and righting wrongs. He is very wealthy, and so are his men. Look! There comes the lighter bearing them.”

“Yeah,” Hutton said, thoughtfully. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

He walked rapidly toward the spot where Doc Savage would probably land. He elbowed people aside.

He did not see Amber O’Neel, but O’Neel saw him.

Amber O’Neel’s discovery of Hutton so promptly was not luck. The steamer in the harbor had suggested the idea that the quarry might take flight by that route.

O’Neel had hurried to watch who embarked and disembarked, and to bribe the purser, if it were possible, for a look at the passenger list to see who had booked passage from Cartagena.

“Damn me, my lucky day!” grinned O’Neel when he saw Aviator Hutton.

O’Neel worked through the crowd. He looked like a pleasant, fat man, a bit sweaty and scratched by briars. Those who saw him couldn’t know that the hands in his pocket held his two guns, which he could handle dexterously with either hand.

He also looked like a harmless, plump man with a purpose. But no one dreamed of the incredible ideas turning over in Amber O’Neel’s mind.

O’Neel passed one of his men and passed the word.

“There he is—still wearing that leather apron and not another stitch,” he told his men, in their tongue. “The reward still goes. I’ll even make it two outboard motors.”

The lighter coming in from the cruise ship was really an old Mississippi River stern-wheeler which had seen its days on the Father of Waters and had been sailed down here no telling how.

The native boatmen bringing her in were not doing a job that could be bragged about. The natives having dugout canoes moored along the quay significantly got into them and paddled to the clear.

The dugouts belonged mostly to strapping, black hunters from the jungle. They brought their snake hides, leopard skins and green parrots down to sell to the tourists. They did not wear too many clothes.

The stern-wheeler angled in sidewise, swiped the quay, backed off, tried again, parted a line, and made it on the third attempt.

Every one from the captain to the deck swiper was yelling orders about how to make fast, and the crowd surged forward howling, “Viva Doc Savage!” and both bands struck up tunes. Two kids tried to jump from the quay to the side-wheeler, and for a wonder, both fell in. Their mothers shrieked.

Aviator David Hutton tried to approach the place where they were landing the gangplank. He had a time keeping from being trampled. His bare feet were walked on, hide scraped off his ribs by elbows, and his ears deafened by “Vivas!” But he made it.

He was standing so close that only an agile jump saved his naked toes from the descending gangplank. He tried to dash aboard the stern-wheeler, but half a hundred others had the same idea. They shoved at policemen, and the policemen shoved back. The policemen won.

“Viva Doc Savage!” they yelled.

David Hutton, being tall, saw a remarkable-looking apparition step from the stern-wheeler to the gangplank. The apparition had arms fully as long and as big around as his legs. It seemed a safe bet that the apparition could tie his shoestrings without stooping. The head was a nubbin, the eyes small and somewhere in pits of gristle, and the mouth astonishingly huge.

The apparition raised hands and wrists on the backs of which hair looked as coarse as rusty shingle nails. He seemed to want everybody to be quiet so he could say something.

“Viva!” howled the crowd, and the bands got tangled up in their tunes.

The excitement was rattling David Hutton. He was an ill man, a physical wreck, and he had pushed himself. He uttered a wild shriek which he hoped would reach the man on the gangplank, who he supposed must be Doc Savage.

David Hutton got a look at the black face of the devil with the knife.

“Help!” Hutton squawled. “I need some one to help me! An incredible thing has happened to me! I’ve happened upon something that the world doesn’t dream exists!”

Then he looked down and saw a sliver of stone reaching for his ribs. It was a dark-colored stone, the kind the jungle savages sometimes used for knives. The stuff was razor-sharp and worse than steel, because it sometimes broke off in the wound.

He had last seen the face in the jungle taking orders from the peaceful-looking white man who had used two guns so ambidextrously, and who had tried to kill him.

Hutton screamed and twisted, but knew he’d never dodge the knife.