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

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Five men were running across the golf links of the Widebrook Country Club. They kept in a compact group, and their manner was determined and sinister. Each carried a hooded golf bag.

The hour was near midnight. The moon sprayed a silver glow over fairways, sand traps and putting greens.

The five men drew no clubs from their covered bags. No golf balls lay on the fairways, not even luminous balls of the type sometimes used by those eccentric persons who play night golf. They were not indulging in a moonlight game—at least, not a golf game.

The five did not look like men who would turn to golf for recreation. They had calloused hands, thick necks and faces which were rocky and cold. Their skins were brown, leatherlike; their eyes had a habitual squint—marks of lives spent in a land of blistering heat and white-hot sunlight.

An observer would have wondered why they carried the shrouded golf bags, and would have been alarmed at their grim manner. But there were no observers. The Widebrook was one of the élite links in the vicinity of New York. Through the day, many persons of wealth played there. At night, there was only the watchman.

The watchman now lay in one of the clubhouse lockers. He was bound with rope ordinarily used to stretch the nets on the club tennis courts, and gagged with a sponge from the shower baths, held between his jaws by his own necktie. Moreover, he was still unconscious from a head blow delivered from behind. He had not seen his assailants.

“Get a move on, you hombres!” rapped the leader of the five runners. “We ain’t got all night!”

This man had two scars, one on either cheek. They looked like gray buttons sewed to his leathery brown features, and indicated that he had been shot through the face sometime in the past. He was more burly than the others—his weight fell but a little short of two hundred pounds. He carried his bulk with the lightness of an athlete.

The group sprinted on in silence, hugging the golf bags to keep the contents from rattling. Then, at a command from the leader, they stopped.

“This is gonna be the place,” he uttered as he waved an arm to indicate the spot.

“Are you certain about that, Buttons?” asked one of the others.

“Dang tootin’!” The wolfish smile of the man called “Buttons,” made the scars on his cheeks crawl back toward his ears. “Whitey’s telegram said it would be the No. 6 hole on this golf course. Whitey used to hang out around New York, and he knew about this place.”

In a puzzled fashion, the first man peered around. “I don’t see no number.”

“You ain’t lookin’ in the right place! Blazes! Ain’t you ever played golf?”

“Naw—and you ain’t either! Why any grown man would fiddle away his time on this cow pasture pool is more’n I can savvy.”

“Dry up. This is the sixth hole. The number was on that white box of a contraption back there. You crawl in that sand trap.”

“You mean that hole full of sand? Do they call that a sand trap?”

“Hop into it!” snapped Buttons.

The other obeyed. With his hands, he hurriedly scooped a trench large enough to receive his form. Then he plucked open the hood on his golf bag, and drew from it a short, well-worn .30-30 carbine, as well as a single-action .45-caliber six-gun.

Shoving the six-shooter inside his shirt, the man stretched face-up in the trench he had dug. He placed the rifle on his chest, throwing his coat over the breech mechanism to protect it from the sand.

Buttons now plucked a large sheet of pale-brown wrapping paper from a pocket. He wrenched off a fragment, tore eye-holes in it, and spread it over the face of the man in the sand. Then he proceeded to cover the fellow with sand, leaving the paper-masked head in the open. The job completed, he stepped back for an inspection. He was satisfied. The pale-brown paper blended nicely with the sand.

“Swell! Anybody would walk right over you and not know you was there. You savvy what you’re to do?”

“Yeah!” grunted the man in the sand. “I’m to pop out of here with my leadslingers, and get Bandy Stevens.”

“But no shootin’ unless we have to! Paste that in your bonnet. We gotta stop Bandy. Whitey’s telegram said Bandy was wearin’ somethin’ bulky in a money belt around his waist, and we want to get whatever that is. But we wanta grab Bandy alive, so we can ask ’im some questions.”

“Bandy Stevens is poison bad medicine! Don’t forget that!” spoke the man through his paper mask. “Moreover, he is gonna be expectin’ trouble, since Whitey tried to shoot him in Phoenix and missed.”

“He don’t suspect Whitey of that, the telegram said.”

“Anyway, Bandy is poison——”

“A jasper named Buttons ain’t no milk tonic, himself!” leered Buttons. “C’mon, you rannies! We’d better get set.”

On the opposite side of the fairway, another man was soon planted in a sand trap. Two more were concealed in like fashion along the sixth hole of the golf course. Each man produced weapons from his golf bag.

Buttons, after hiding all his fellows, carried the empty golf bags to a convenient tree and hung them among the branches. Then he took refuge in the foliage beside them.

Silence now enwrapped the links. In the distance, automobiles moaned on a turnpike. A night breeze shuffled the leaves of the tree which held Buttons. A furtive, hopping cottontail rabbit came out and browsed on the grass of a putting green.

The waiting men were well concealed, and they maintained the patience of savage animals in wait for prey. There was no nervousness, no stirring about. However, each strained his ears to catch a sound for which they waited.

Buttons was first to hear it. A metallic mosquito drone in the distance! The noise grew louder and louder, becoming a throbbing howl.

Downward in the moonlight spun a plane. It was a two-place biplane, painted yellow, a little shabby. The big radial motor boomed gently as the craft floated over the links.

The two occupants peered earthward. The pilot was a tall, stringy man, hard of face. One thing distinguished his features—his eyebrows and small mustache were white as cotton.

The passenger, seated in the forward cockpit, was stocky. His skin, browned by hot suns, had also been reddened, where his helmet did not protect it, by the smashing wash of the propeller. His eyes were bleak behind the goggle glass; a huge jaw strained at his helmet chin strap. He was extremely bow-legged.

“Whitey!” he yelled at the pilot. “Are you sure there’s room enough down there to land this sky bronc?”

“Plenty of room, Bandy. I told you I used to barnstorm around New York. I set my crate down on that golf course one time when my engine conked.” The pilot with the white eyebrows and mustache leveled the plane, preparatory for a landing.

“Take another circle!” shouted Bandy. “I wanta look the layout over some more. Since that shot at me in Phoenix, I figure somebody don’t want me to get to New York. That’s why we ain’t landin’ at a regular airport.”

He dropped both hands into the cockpit and withdrew them, gripping a pair of businesslike blue six-guns.

At sight of the weapons, Whitey could not suppress a qualm. When he had hidden behind a hangar of the Phoenix airport where they had halted for fuel and food, and taken a futile shot at Bandy, it was nothing but luck that he had escaped discovery. He wondered if Bandy suspected the truth.

But Bandy was hanging over the cockpit rim, interested only in the ground. The plane cast a fleeing, batlike moon shadow.

The cottontail rabbit fled in terror from the putting green where it had been browsing. Bunny fashion, it popped into the handiest depression, which happened to be a sand trap which held one of the hiding men. There, the little animal caught the man scent. Association of the odor with shotguns and dogs brought greater terror, and the rabbit sailed back out of the sand trap the way it had come.

Bandy saw the incident, largely because the rabbit was a flashing gray spot against the luxuriant green of the fairway.

Suspicious, Bandy scowled at the sand trap. He knew the ways of wild things, knew how they reacted to danger. It was plain that something in the sand pit had frightened the cottontail.

“Fly close to them there sand holes, comin’ back!” he bet lowed over the motor thunder.

The pilot obeyed. He was unaware his aides were hidden there. He had merely wired them that he would land Bandy on the sixth hole of this golf course, a procedure suggested by Bandy’s desire to avoid the commercial airports.

Bandy slanted one of his sixes at the sand pit. It tongued flame twice.

Neither bullet hit the man concealed below. But the fellow thought he had been discovered. Leaping erect he drove a rifle slug up at Bandy.

The lead spanked through both wings of the plane.

“Yi-i-p, Powder River!” Bandy bawled the cowboy yell delightedly. He was elated that he had discovered the trap in time. Stretching far over the pit rim, he fanned lead at the rifleman.

In the rear cockpit, the pilot snarled and gave the controls a convulsive movement The plane rolled over—in a flash, it was flying upside down. The object of the maneuver was to throw Bandy overboard.

Dropping both his guns, Bandy grabbed madly at the pit rim. His tough fingers gripped successfully. He kept himself aboard. But his weapons were lost.

Both cockpits of the plane held parachutes. Bandy had been using his for a cushion. It fell out, and the bow-legged little man dared not loosen his clutch long enough to seize it.

With an effort that made his arms ache, Bandy drew himself upward into the inverted pit until he could grasp the safety belt. Hanging to that, he twisted to face the pilot.

The flyer’s face was desperate. It had faded until it almost matched the white of his mustache and eyebrows. He was wishing mightily that he had his gun—he had hidden the weapon after firing the shot in Phoenix, fearing Bandy might see it on him and become suspicious.

The plane was sagging earthward—but the pilot seemed not to notice.

“Hey—we’re gonna crash!” shrieked Bandy.

The pilot saw their danger. He fought the controls. With only a few feet to spare, the plane rolled level.

Bandy leaned back and shook a horny fist under the airman’s nose. “So you’re in with them sand lizards down there! I’ll bet you’re the hombre who took that shot at me in Phoenix!”

A vicious glare was the flyer’s reply. He was getting his nerve back, for it had dawned on him that Bandy was now unarmed. Moreover, the lost parachute gave him an idea.

Recoiling low in the pit, as though fearing violence, the pilot wriggled into the harness of his own ’chute. Then he sprang erect, leaned far back out of Bandy’s reach, and stood poised for a leap.

“Climb out on a wing and stay there, or I’ll jump!” he screamed.

Bandy hesitated, then he sagged back in the bucket seat. He knew when he was checkmated. He could not fly the ship.

“You win!” he gritted.

“Get out on the wing!” the pilot bellowed through the motor clamor.

Bandy obeyed. The dangerous performance of climbing out and hanging to a brace wire did not bother him much. Bandy had plenty of nerve.

He watched the flyer. The instant the fellow gave his attention to circling the plane back to the golf course, Bandy flicked his fingers inside his shirt and unbuckled the chamois money belt he wore. A single jerk would now remove the belt.

Bandy turned so that his back was to the pilot. From a coat pocket he dug an envelope and a stubby pencil. The rushing air threatened to tear the envelope to bits in his fingers. Holding it close to his chest, he managed to scrawl words:

$500 REWARD FOR DELIVERY OF

MONEY BELT TO DOC SAVAGE.

Bandy glanced slyly over his shoulder. The pilot apparently had not noticed; he was peering downward, engrossed in the ticklish business of making a moonlight landing.

Folding the envelope, Bandy stuffed it under a flap of one of the money belt pouches.

The motor noise lessened, becoming slow explosions which barely turned the prop over. Less than a hundred feet up, the plane floated down for the golf course.

A paved road, narrow and apparently not much used, bordered the links. Just before the ship passed over this, Bandy dropped his money belt. He flashed a look at the pilot, and heaved a relieved sigh. Bandy was in partial shadow between the wings, and his furtive movements seemed to have escaped detection.

The chamois belt fell a few feet from the road. Bandy bit his lower lip savagely. He had hoped it would land on the pavement However, it reposed where it could be seen.

The note promising a five-hundred dollar reward should insure delivery of the belt to the individual Bandy wished to have it—Doc Savage.

Bandy scowled doubtfully. Suppose the finder of the belt should be unable to locate Doc Savage? But that was hardly probable.

Doc Savage—the man whose astounding reputation had penetrated even to the acrid waste land of Arizona—would be widely known here in New York.