Читать книгу The Pirate's Ghost: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4

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“Sagebrush” Smith was undoubtedly not the first Smith who got into trouble without expecting it.

However, Sagebrush Smith managed to confine his troubles to the ordinary ones of a cow-puncher until the advent of a certain fifteenth day of March. This fifteenth of March followed the fourteenth, which was the day Sagebrush Smith got fired. He got canned off the Lazy Y spread for giving the round-up boss, “Hoke” McGee, what he called “a bust in the snoot” over a trifling matter of who had put a deceased rattlesnake in Sagebrush Smith’s bedroll.

Sagebrush was scared of rattlesnakes, also of red-eye whisky and women. However, these three items, of all the things Sagebrush had encountered in his twenty-four years of life, were the only things he had ever been scared of. He certainly wasn’t afraid of Hoke McGee.

Sagebrush Smith was a long, gangling young man with a freckled hide, and he had no cares. He was not, fortunately or unfortunately—depending on the outlook—very ambitious. There was, in fact, only one thing he really wanted to do, if he ever got around to it: he wanted to see a fellow he had read about, a man named Doc Savage. He just wanted to have a look at this Doc Savage. He had never told any one about the yen. He figured they would think it kind of silly.

Having been fired, and having offered, in a warm moment, to unravel cartridges with Hoke McGee or anybody on the Lazy Y who wanted to unravel them, Sagebrush Smith slapped his Texas saddle on his Roman-nosed pinto, thonged his warbag and slicker on the back, and rode. He rode “slick-heeled”—without spurs—for his paint bronc didn’t need spurs. The cayuse was next thing to a broomtail, and plenty spirited.

Some one had said there was a job repping to be had over beyond Tule Canyon, at an outfit near Sugar Loaf Butte. Sagebrush thought he might as well see. To get there, he would have to ride down into the north arm of Death Valley, over the floor, and out again. He filled his water bag at a spring about sundown, and set out across Death Valley by dark.

In the first four hours of night riding, he shot the heads off twenty-six rattlesnakes, but only half the head off the twenty-seventh.

“Boy, howdy!” Sagebrush Smith remarked. “I’m slippin’!”

That, of course, was a modest understatement. He wasn’t slipping. Except for a slight technicality, he had shot the heads off twenty-seven rattlesnakes, shooting in brilliant moonlight at targets, none larger than a silver dollar, which were moving.

Then a person or persons unknown reciprocated by shooting Sagebrush Smith’s bronc through the tail.

The tail shot was a freak. Sagebrush Smith felt at once that it was an impossible shot, reflected as much when he picked himself out of the Death Valley sand. Sagebrush was about to flop down in the sand again for caution’s sake, but thought of the sidewinders and remained on his feet. He’d take his chances with bullets.

The paint pony left there as if it had a destination somewhere beyond Wyoming. The reins, Sagebrush remembered with disgust, were knotted over the jughead’s neck, so he wasn’t likely to stop going.

“The water bag!” exploded the cowboy.

The water bag was on the saddle! Sagebrush watched eagerly, hoping the bronc would buck the water bag off. The pinto was an enthusiastic bucker, with a style noted for getting rid of things, including, occasionally, the saddle. But the piebald didn’t buck. The horse loped over a sand dune and vanished.

When Sagebrush Smith looked around, he saw more sand dunes, plenty of them, a few heat-discouraged whiskers of mesquite, and some tall black mountains which appeared about two miles away. The mountains, he knew, were thirty miles distant. About two days of the kind of walking he would have. No one ever walked two days in Death Valley without water. He was already thirsty.

A fresh bullet arrived about that time. It cruised past somewhere overhead.

“The first one was too good,” Sagebrush remarked. “And this one is too poor. There’s somethin’ locoed here.”

He drew his six-gun and fanned two lumps of lead in the general direction of the moon. Then he listened.

Two shots answered, and the lead of the second one missed him so far that he could barely hear it sing, and the former was not much better.

“Nobody,” opined Sagebrush, “could be that bum at lead-slingin’.”

He had the cowboy habit of talking to himself, a failing born of the fact that for too much of his life he had been his own audience.

He banged off his gun again.

A bullet replied, and it missed him as far to the left as the others had been to the right.

“Somethin’ is sure rotten in Denmark,” the cowboy concluded. “Whoever is turnin’ loose them blue whistlers ain’t shootin’ straight because it, him or her, can’t shoot straight.”

Having thus decided, he concluded it was safe to advance, and likewise very advisable. He had to get water, or the big black birds with the raw, red necks would have a man to eat.

Sagebrush advanced. He got his boots full of sand, his exposed hide covered with ’skeet scratches, and had his hair lifted assorted times by sidewinders. Twice, scorpions did their best to sock stingers through his boots into his legs, but failed because he was wearing good twenty-dollar Justins built for service.

“Damn all deserts!” he said feelingly.

Then he came upon the old man.

The old man was wanting to shoot somebody. He had his rifle in his hand, a frantic fear and a grim desperation in his bloodshot old eyes, and awful agony working in the wrinkles of his old baboon face.

He wore scuffed old leather boots, laced khaki pants, a rag over one shoulder that had been a shirt, and he had an old body that looked as though it was made out of rake handles. He kept shooting little gouts of blood out of his mouth.

Sagebrush Smith slipped around a mesquite clump and jumped in the middle of the old man’s back. When he saw the kind of thing he had jumped onto, he got off again.

He got down beside the old duffer and straightened him out on the sand and put the rifle to one side. He wet his handkerchief with water from a canteen the old man had tied to his belt and wiped off the old fellow’s wasted face.

“Golly, pop, I’m sorry,” he said.

The old man looked steadily at Sagebrush Smith and bubbled a little as he breathed.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t make it, Doc’s man,” he said. “I kept hearing them shooting at you. Just one shot at a time. The shots kept getting closer. I knew they were trying to pick you off before you made it.”

Sagebrush Smith, who was as shaggy as a young jackass on the outside, and about as handsome, had a likeable, kindly nature; and he wanted to humor an old man who was half mad and dying in the desert.

“I fixed ’em,” he said.

The old man of the desert looked Sagebrush Smith’s long, gangling young frame up and down.

“Doc’s man,” he said, “I’m glad to see you.”

Being called “Doc’s man” had Sagebrush Smith puzzled. He finally figured it out and decided that the old fellow thought he had come from the doctor.

“Buck up, old-timer,” he said. “Stick out your horns and show some sand. You gotta last until I can take you to the doctor.”

“You came to take me to Doc?”

“Yeah. Betcher boots.”

“Won’t do no good,” the old man said. “I’ve got cancer. I’ve had it two years, and I haven’t got any insides left to speak of.”

Sagebrush Smith got up on his feet rather quickly, because he couldn’t have stayed there on his knees without feeling sick. He stamped his boots in the powder-fine sand and jammed his hands in his pockets, then took them out again and peered around for something to get his mind off the dying old man. Mentally, he added a fourth item to the list of things he was scared of: a man dying slowly.

So, in trying to get away from a sight that turned his stomach, Sagebrush Smith walked around—came upon the amazing laboratory. First, he only saw an old adobe hut, and thought: “This is a funny place for one of them things.” Then he looked inside and saw that it was really something unusual.

The mud walls had been plastered inside, and the plaster painted white. Around three walls of the room ran a bench, with shelves above and bins below; and the shelves and bins were crowded with neat arrays of copper wire, silver wire, copper rods and silver rods, coils, bakelite insulating panels, bottles, boxes, jars, and innumerable things that resembled radio vacuum tubes, and yet weren’t quite like vacuum tubes.

It was very cool in the hut, leading Sagebrush Smith to realize the interior was air-conditioned, exactly like the movie house in Goldfield. He was a little surprised.

He was more surprised as he went along. The box in the center of the room intrigued him. A skylight let moonglow in through the roof and he could see the box. It was about as tall as himself—around six feet—and about a dozen feet long by eight feet wide.

“Creepin’ Moses!” said Sagebrush Smith. “It’s solid silver!”

It wasn’t. His imagination had run away with him. It was lead, he decided, after he gave it a good scratching with the point of his pocketknife.

One whisker of shiny copper tubing stuck up out of the top of the lead box.

After he had moseyed around the thing a while, Sagebrush found a door, and being of an inquiring disposition, he opened the door and went in, after first striking a match.

He looked around the inside of the lead box. He saw a lot of stuff that he didn’t understand. In fact, he saw practically nothing that he did understand, and he began to wish he wasn’t so ignorant about electricity.

Sagebrush rubbed his jaw and scratched his head and began touching things, but an electric spark jumped out and bit him, and he stopped that.

There was a small box on the floor which aroused Sagebrush’s curiosity. He polished the lock on the box thoughtfully with the ball of a thumb. He could see it was the kind of lock you couldn’t pick. The box itself was of high-quality steel. Sagebrush tried his jackknife on it, and the metal of the box turned the razor edge of the knife blade, and didn’t even scratch. He lifted the box to test its weight, and grunted with the effort.

“Almost as heavy as Hoke McGee’s opinion of himself,” he remarked.

He went back outside.

“Your layout’s got me guessin’, pop,” he said.

The old man was propped up on his hands, straining, hurting himself listening to the whispering night sounds of the desert sands. He turned his head, and there was a wild look on his face.

“I think I heard some of them creeping!” he croaked. “Creeping over the sand!”

Sagebrush Smith put the palm of a hand on the nape of his neck, just to reassure himself that the short hairs were not standing on end.

“That’s just sidewinders, old-timer,” he said.

There was a silence filled with the kind of stillness that only comes in Death Valley—stillness of utter death and time abysmal. Then a breeze, a small lost breeze, came feeling over the dunes, seeking in the mesquite, sifting in the sands, and sighing.

Sagebrush Smith took off his hat, mopped his forehead and grinned foolishly. He felt the need of doing something to break the spell, so he kicked out, like a boy, with one foot. His toe hit a rock.

He peered at the rock, then got down on his knees, brushed sand away and kept on brushing until he had a space cleared the size of a bunk house table. The rock bore grotesque carvings and silly-looking hen-track marks.

Sagebrush Smith got to his feet, kicked around in the sand and uncovered other such rocks. Then it dawned on him that the stones lay all around; some of the huge ones were even the reason for the sand dunes being here.

“We’re in one of them mysterious ruined cities or my name ain’t Sagebrush,” he muttered.

The old man said, “That was in my letter to Doc,” very weakly.

“Some fellers that called themselves archæologists were in Death Valley one time,” Sagebrush continued. “They figured there had been cities in here thousands of years ago, but they couldn’t figure out much else about them.”^[1]

“That is why I came here,” the old man said.

“Oh,” Sagebrush Smith said.

The dying man closed his eyes for a while and rested. After a moment or two he started talking again.

“Did Doc remember me?” he asked suddenly. “Did Doc remember old Meander Surett?”

“Yeah,” said Sagebrush. “ ’Course he remembered you.”

Old Meander Surett closed his eyes. He appeared about as pleased as he could be.

“I’m not suprised that he remembered,” he said. “I was one of the world’s greatest authorities on electrical research—before I disappeared.”

[1]	These prehistoric ruins, some actually stretching for miles on the heat-seared floor of Death Valley in California, are something of a puzzle to archæologists.KENNETH ROBESON