Читать книгу The Pirate's Ghost: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 7

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When Sagebrush Smith guided two donkeys up to the Lazy Y ranch house, he was not doing it because he wanted to, but because he had to have water. There had not been enough in Meander Surett’s canteen. The Lazy Y had the only water on the route to the nearest railroad town.

The two donkeys had obviously belonged to old Meander Surett, for Sagebrush had found them hobbled in the Death Valley sand dunes after he buried the scientist and freed the half-starved coyote. He’d appropriated one donkey to carry the box, and one to carry himself, although the last hadn’t worked out; after trying to ride for twenty miles, a habit of both mountain canaries of trying unexpectedly to take a bite out of his leg had led him to favor walking.

Hoke McGee, the Lazy Y foreman, looked on the advent of Sagebrush Smith with no favor at all.

“I thought we run you away from here once,” he growled.

“Nobody ever run me away from anywhere,” said Sagebrush.

He grabbed a donkey by an ear with one hand and held the animal while he unlashed the metal box with the other hand.

“Take your brothers”—Hoke McGee pointed at the donkeys—“and get the hell out of here!”

“Maybe you’d like to make me?” suggested Sagebrush.

Hoke McGee scowled.

“Maybe,” Sagebrush said, “you and your whole danged Lazy Y outfit would like to try to make me go?”

Hoke McGee was a perfectly safe fellow to quarrel with—as long as you were looking at him. It was after dark, or when he was behind you, that he was dangerous. This was a fact that Sagebrush well knew.

Hoke McGee was not of the true west, not of cactus and purple sage. He was a product of crooked carnivals and low gypping. An old carney man of the never-give-the-sucker-a-break school. When the carney shell games went out, he took up cow-punching on the Lazy Y, the owner of which was a distant relative, as well as a bird of similar feather. They called him “Hoke” because he liked to brag about the hokum the yaps used to fall for.

Hoke McGee wasn’t yellow, but he was cautious enough not to hit out when there was a chance of getting hit back. He thought himself quite a smoothie. Physically, he was short and broad and ran more to body and arms than to legs or head.

Sagebrush Smith always said that if you could find a he-toad five feet five inches tall and take the warts off him, you would have Hoke McGee.

“I’m stayin’ for supper,” announced Sagebrush Smith.

“The hell you are!” snarled Hoke McGee.

“The hell I ain’t!” said Sagebrush.

Having unlashed the metal box, Sagebrush Smith got under it with both arms, and kneed the donkey in the ribs to make the animal jump out from under the case. Sagebrush staggered over to the shade of the bunk house and put the box down.

“What’s that?” Hoke McGee demanded.

“That,” said Sagebrush Smith, “is a gookus-wookus.”

“A what?”

“Somethin’ to make fools ask questions.”

Ten minutes later, the owner of the Lazy Y appeared, in tow of Hoke McGee.

“You’ll have to pay for your supper,” the owner said shortly.

“You’re dang tootin’ I’ll pay for it!” declared Sagebrush Smith. “I’m particular who I take favors from.”

“It’ll cost you five dollars,” said the owner of the Lazy Y.

“It’ll cost me two bits,” corrected Sagebrush, “which is more than the kind of chow you serve here is worth.”

And because he wanted to devil them, he whipped out his money belt and made them weigh out a gold nugget and give him change for twenty-five cents. He knew nothing would hurt them like letting them see that he had a nice gold dust stake. He figured he had them bluffed to a point where they wouldn’t dare do anything about it.

That was a mistake.

Hoke McGee and the owner did not eat in the bunk house with the rest of the rannys. They ate in the ranch house and had better food. To-night they had a conference.

“How much money did Smith have when he left here?” asked Hoke McGee.

“Not much more than forty dollars,” said the owner of the Lazy Y.

“Now he’s got a belt full of gold. Between six and eight thousand dollars’ worth.”

“What’s in that box?” asked the owner.

“I don’t know,” said Hoke McGee, “but I bet you it’s full of gold.”

“Why?”

“I tried to lift it. The thing weighs anyway two hundred pounds.”

“Gold, eh?”

“Why, hell, it couldn’t be anythin’ else, boss. This ranny goes off in the desert empty-handed and comes back with a belt of gold, an iron box and two donkeys. Now me and you both know that he either got the stuff by robbin’ somebody, or he found somebody that had died in the desert. And either way it stands to reason there’s gold in the box.”

“Hm-m. That’s too bad,” said the owner.

Hoke McGee grinned evilly.

“We’ll know just how bad it is,” he said, “by along about mornin’.”

Sagebrush Smith was fully aware that the Lazy Y would have its cupidity aroused by the gold dust and the box. But Sagebrush was reckless enough and salty enough that he didn’t give, as he put it, “a tinker’s damn!”

However, after supper, and immediately prior to sunset, he put on a little demonstration for effect. He had received seven silver dimes as change for his supper payment of gold dust, and he took the seven dimes outside, and four poker chips. He tossed up the seven dimes, one at a time, and hit two out of the seven with bullets from his six-gun, firing, however, twelve times.

“That goes to show,” Sagebrush declared, “that it can’t be done. Nobody can do that trick!”

Then he threw the four poker chips into the air and shot them into a myriad of pieces with four bullets from his six-shooter.

“Of course,” he announced, “that last ain’t no trick at all.”

Sagebrush blew the smoke out of his hogleg, gave it a spectacular twirl on his fingers, and smacked it into the leather. He figured he had cooled off any ambitions anybody might have had toward the box. He was rather pleased with himself.

His bubble of pleasure got a pin stuck in it when he went back to the metal box.

A man was crouched over the box, who held a scrap of paper in one hand. With the other hand, the man was trying to pick the lock with a wire. He was intent on the business.

Sagebrush walked up to the man and drew back and gave the fellow an enthusiastic kick. Various things then happened, none of them expected.

The crouching man squawked, sailed completely over the box, turned in the air and landed facing Sagebrush Smith.

Sagebrush then got a look at the man and had the impression that he had kicked a bull baboon.

The paper the man had been holding fluttered away into the sagebrush.

The baboon of a man sailed back over the box and hit Sagebrush Smith. Hit him, to the salty cowhand’s everlasting mortification, before Sagebrush could draw his six-shooter.

The punch combined electricity and dynamite. Sagebrush saw strange lights, suspected he was swapping ends in the air, and found himself flat on the ground.

Sagebrush unleathered his six-gun and threw lead. His first bullet went into the sand, the second went toward the moon, and he wasn’t sure about the next two. However, they must have come close to the apish man, because the latter turned and sought safety. He reached the tall sage and vanished by the simple expedient of bending double.

His head had cleared, so Sagebrush bounded up and charged after the stranger. The fellow had been at least a foot and a half shorter than Sagebrush, and the latter resented being knocked on his ear by such a sawed-off specimen.

However, for a man whose legs appeared to be a good deal shorter than his arms, the stranger made remarkable time.

Sagebrush did not get another glimpse of him.

The Lazy Y rannys and their husky foreman, Hoke McGee, had arrived by that time, looking puzzled and demanding to know what had happened.

“I just met,” Sagebrush explained, “a spook with hair on his chest.” He felt of his jaw and grimaced. “The homeliest dang jigger I ever seen!”

Following which he made pointed inquiries about whether or not the Lazy Y had hired any new hands during his absence, and because he was so plainly in an irritated mood, he got civil answers. Sagebrush became convinced that the short, apish marauder was as much a stranger to the Lazy Y men as to himself.

“Wait a minute!” Hoke exclaimed. “Two strange dudes sifted through here the day after you left. One of ’em was a feller built with kind of a thin waist like a mud-dauber and dressed fancy as Mrs. Astor’s horse. Hell, he even carried a cane!”

“This galoot that erupted on me didn’t look nothin’ like that,” Sagebrush grunted.

“Yeah, but there was an hombre with this fashion-plate,” said Hoke McGee, “that was dang nigh as wide as he was tall, had rusty-lookin’ hair over ’im, and a face that was somethin’ to stop a clock. After he left, one of the rannys looked in the dictionary under orang-outang and found somethin’ that looked like ’im.”

“That’s my honeybunch!” said Sagebrush.

A Lazy Y cowboy chuckled. “Don’t forget,” he said, “the pig and the monkey them two fellers had along.”

“The what?” said Sagebrush.

“They had two pets,” said the cowboy. “A pig and a monkey. Anyhow, I guess it was a monkey. There was some argument about that.”

Sagebrush Smith rubbed his jaw again. “This is sure a funny world.”

“Those two men,” said Hoke McGee, “were lookin’ for some gent named Meander Surett.”

Sagebrush stopped rubbing his jaw. “Huh?”

“Meander Surett, they called him.”

“Why, dang it, that’s the old geezer who gave me the box and gold——” Sagebrush swallowed. He hadn’t intended to say even that much.

He would have done much better to have gone ahead with explanations, because Hoke McGee had made a serious error. Hoke had misunderstood the fragment of a sentence. He thought Sagebrush had said “box of gold.”

Sagebrush Smith did some cogitating, after which he got himself a good-sized club and went looking for his donkeys. He had discovered that the jackasses would stand and let him catch them if he carried a club, but would run like rabbits if he was empty-handed.

Having captured one of the donkeys, the cowboy lashed his box to the back of the animal. This was work, but he didn’t want to leave the box lying around, even for a few minutes; not even while he rode out to have a look at his back trail before it got dark.

Sagebrush’s examination of his back trail showed him that two men, two burros, one pig and one monkey had tracked him out of the desert to the Lazy Y ranch. The two men were evidently better at hiding footprints than he was at following them, because he failed to find them before night fell.

Somewhat puzzled, Sagebrush went back toward the Lazy Y ranch house. Two men had followed him out of the desert. Not the slightest doubt of that. He frowned. He never had been quite able to convince himself that old Meander Surett had been insane. Of course, the poor old man had been mentally unbalanced during the last weeks of his life, but as for prior to that, there was a question in Sagebrush’s mind. And thinking of the dying old man’s wild and repeated insistence that there had been some one watching him.... Sagebrush got out his gun and gave it a grim examination.

“I’m gonna do some ventilatin’ the next time I see either of them jaspers!” he declared.

Reaching the Lazy Y ranch house, Sagebrush unloaded the chest, and it was while doing this that something came back to him. He snapped his fingers gravely.

“Dang!” he said. “I forgot all about that paper!”

He borrowed a flashlight from the scowling Lazy Y foreman, went to the spot where he had caught the mysterious, apish gentleman examining the box, and searched industriously for half an hour before he found what he wanted—the sheet of paper the apish fellow had dropped. Considering that it was obviously only part of a communication, it was interesting:

—theories undoubtedly substantiated, the belief being held by others besides Thomas A. Edison. The Edison experiments were unfortunately begun late in that great man’s career, and were interrupted by the gifted inventor’s death. I mention this because the work of these scientists was the starting point for my own.

The contents of the metal case cannot be considered of anything less than world-shaking importance.

The case is of vault-steel, the type which is impervious to cutting torches. It is a foot and a half deep, two feet wide and three feet one inch in length. The lock is the best obtainable.

There had originally been much more to the communication, apparently, but it ended there. This segment had been torn from the rest, top and bottom, evidently by using a ruler as a straight edge.

Sagebrush folded the paper, stowed it in a pocket and went to contemplate the box. He was having an attack of intense curiosity about the contents, but unless he was mistaken, the metal case would be harder to crack than a safe.

He was sitting on the box dragging at a cigarette when hoofbeats rattled up to the Lazy Y corral. Sagebrush shifted so that his gun was handier. He needn’t have bothered. It was only the Lazy Y wrangatang, who had ridden to town for the mail.

The mail included the usual bundle of newspapers.

Sagebrush Smith dragged the metal box into the bunk house where he could watch it; then he picked up a newspaper idly. His casualness didn’t last long.

PROFESSOR MEANDER SURETT DIES

ONE OF WORLD’S GREAT

SCIENTISTS

Body Buried Near Death Valley Laboratory

Believed He Worked Alone There

Vanished Years Ago

“Great Muley steers!” said Sagebrush Smith.

He read the two columns on the first page down to where it said “Turn to Page Two,” then discovered that page two was all about Meander Surett. The pictures were of the man Sagebrush had found in the desert, or rather, of the man as he would have been ten years ago in good health.

The story said Meander Surett pioneered wireless; ranked almost with Marconi. Meander Surett formulated the most acceptable theory of cosmic rays. Meander Surett pioneered ultra-short-wave radio.

There was almost everything about Meander Surett except what Sagebrush Smith wanted to know. And that was: Who had found the body? Sagebrush Smith had buried the old scientist three days ago, and he had not yet told any one anything. Who, then, had found out the old fellow was dead? And how had they gotten the news to the papers? There weren’t any telephones nearer to Death Valley than the one which ran from town to the Lazy Y.

“Ah, frog feathers!” complained Sagebrush Smith.

It got dark at eight o’clock. About nine the telephone in the ranch house rang and the operator said, “New York is calling Mr. Hoke McGee.”

“This is Hoke,” said Hoke McGee, who had happened to answer. “Uh—New York, you say? Who’s callin’ me from New York?”

“Mr. Barr,” said the operator. “Just a moment.”

Hoke McGee wrinkled what forehead he had. Barr—Barr. The only Barr he knew was Everett Everett Barr, the lawyer. Hoke McGee and Everett Everett Barr had run a carnival skin game in partnership, but that had been many years ago. Everett Everett had gone a long way since those days. He was an eminent New York attorney, he had written in his last letter, when he had turned down Hoke McGee’s invitation to buy a gold mine which Hoke had all nicely salted and waiting.

“Hello, Hoke. How are you?”

It was Everett Everett, all right.

“I’m all right,” said Hoke, “but if you’re after that gold mine, the price has gone up.”

Everett Everett Barr laughed. Mr. Barr had the heartiest and most convincing laugh of any man Hoke McGee had ever heard.

“Hoke, old pal, old boy, old friend”—Mr. Barr was always very effusive—“this is about something big. Something a lot better than any gold mine. It’s really gigantic. Colossal. It’s actually—well, have you read the newspapers?”

“Yeah,” said Hoke wonderingly.

“Then,” said Everett Everett Barr, “you know all about the great scientist, Meander Surett, who was found dead in the desert near your ranch?”

“All I know is what I read.” Hoke McGee was puzzled.

“Hoke, old pard, old mate, old chunk-off-the-log, you’ve got to move fast. Grab your airplane, your horse, your jackass or whatever you use for transportation out there and buzz over to where they found the old scientist. You’ll have to really step on it, because you’ve got to get there before they take the box away.”

“Box?” said Hoke McGee dumbly.

“Sure. Box. Made of steel. About three feet long, two feet wide, and a foot high. Locked.”

“I don’t get this,” Hoke complained.

“Hoke, old buddy, old sweetie, you’ve got to get this box for me. Get it at any cost. Any cost, see? Borrow, bribe, shoot, steal or say please! But get the box for me!”

The gist of this sank into Hoke McGee’s head and he leered lovingly at the telephone.

“How much in it for me?” he asked.

“Twenty-five thousand of Uncle Sam’s dollars,” said Everett Everett Barr.

“Uh—wuh!” Hoke McGee swallowed twice with difficulty. “Uh—twenty—what did you say?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars when the box is in my hands, Hoke, old son, old socks, old——”

“One box,” Hoke interrupted, “coming up!”

He hung up and got out his handkerchief and removed the wetness from his forehead. Then he played leapfrog over a chair and threw down his hat and jumped on it.

“You know what?” he asked the Lazy Y owner excitedly.

“What?”

“Old Double-Everetts wants to pay us twenty-five thousand smackeroos for that box Sagebrush Smith is totin’ around!”

“What? Huh? Great spades! That’s just like finding twenty-five thousand!”

“Twenty-five thousand—hell! It’s just like findin’ a million!”

“How come?”

“Anythin’ that old Double-Everetts would offer twenty-five grand for is worth a million at least. I know my Everetts!”