Читать книгу The Red Skull: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 6

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The pilot fish-tailed the plane—a maneuver effected by treading the rudder—to decrease air speed. The ship grazed a putting green, then three-pointed wheels and tail skid in a perfect landing. Bouncing a little, the craft coasted along the fairway.

Bandy came to life. He was back on his element—the earth. Briefly, he considered jumping off the plane and taking his chances on a sprint for cover. He dismissed that idea as too risky. The riflemen would pick him off.

Balancing expertly, he leaped along the wing. A vaulting spring landed him atop Whitey in the control cockpit of the plane.

“Pull a fast one on me, huh!” hissed Bandy, and speared an accurate fist through the arms the pilot raised defensively.

The blow smacked loudly on the flyer’s temple. The man gurgled. Agony made his eyes stick out. He grabbed his throat protectively with both hands.

Bandy belted him on the exposed jaw. The pilot began to tremble and make the aimless, feeble gestures of a man half knocked out.

A .30-30 slug plowed past Bandy’s head with a sound akin to that of a breaking banjo string. The five ambushers were sprinting for the rolling plane, shooting as they came.

Lifting the dazed pilot bodily, Bandy threw him out of the ship. He knew which lever was the throttle. He knocked it wide open. The craft streaked forward.

More bullets lashed the plane. Bandy dived into the rear cockpit. It offered scant shelter. Lead gored the padded pit rim. A slug dug glass out of the instrument board and the fragments cut Bandy’s leathery face.

The plane took a goatlike bound. Bandy hastily cut the throttle, not wishing to leave the earth. The ship had veered to one side in its wild charge. Bandy saw shadowy trees shoving up ahead and hastily covered his face with his arms.

There was a jarring crash. The ship spun. One wing had hit a tree. The craft nosed over, the prop digging up a cloud of grass and black earth. With a lazy crunching and a shrill tearing of doped fabric, the plane settled on its back.

Bandy was thrown out. He had not been harmed much. Bucking broncs had often given him worse shakings. He heaved up and ran.

Trees grew thickly in the copse in which he found himself, and lead began scuffing off bark and clattering fiendishly among the branches. The howling voices of his pursuers reached his ears.

“Run, you galoots! We can’t let that hombre get away!”

Bandy hissed in astonishment as he recognized the voice. “Huh! That guy is Buttons Zortell! He was workin’ on the job as a powder fitter until a couple of weeks ago!”

Collision with a tree silenced his rumination. He ran more carefully, striving for silence. But he was too bow-legged to be graceful on the ground. He jarred small bushes noisily. Twigs cracked underfoot.

Buttons and the other pursuers followed the sounds. They gained steadily.

A woven wire fence abruptly confronted Bandy. The top was armored with two strands of barbed wire. Going over, he scraped his hands on the barbs and left behind a fragment of his coat.

Ahead, across an open pasture, stood low sheds. He legged it for these. He made a hundred yards—a hundred and fifty. Then a bullet scraped through the grass underfoot. Gun sound lunged thunderously across the meadow and caromed in fainter gobbles from trees and buildings.

Bandy pitched alternately right and left as he ran, making himself a difficult target. He rounded the squat sheds.

About to go on with the buildings as shelter, he heard noisy stampings and blowings within the structures.

“Hosses!” he chortled, and dived inside.

The stable shed held several sleek animals. They were saddlers, long-legged, graceful.

Bandy flung to the halter of the nearest horse. A single wrench freed the knot. He mounted. Halters hung on a peg beside the door—four of them. Bandy grabbed all four as he rode out.

A few rods beyond was a stone fence. Bandy heeled the horse for the obstacle. The animal cleared it easily. Simultaneously, a fresh volley of rifle fire clapped out. Buttons and his men had rounded the sheds.

The pursuers did not stop for horses, but came on.

Bandy found himself riding across an oat field. The grain, yellowing with ripeness, reached almost to his dangling feet. Across the middle of the field ran a small gully. Trees were scattered along this gulch. Bullets tore the foliage of these.

Two score feet from the concealment of the trees, Bandy flung himself half off the horse, pretending to be hit. He guided the animal into cover. Then he worked swiftly.

With the four extra halters, he rigged a collar on the horse, with traces reaching back on either side. To the ends of the traces, he tied what was left of his coat forming a drag. He seated himself on that and clucked at the animal. The saddler ran away across the oat field, hauling the man.

It was an old trick of the Indians that Bandy was employing. He held onto the drag and kept his head below the level of the oats.

Buttons Zortell caught sight of the running horse. In the moonlight, he failed to discern the rude harness, or the man it pulled.

“We winged ’im!” Buttons yelled. “He fell off the cayuse! Look sharp, you hombres! He’s probably layin’ in that ditch somewhere!”

They began searching along the gully.

When a fence stopped the running horse, Bandy rolled off his improvised sled. Scratched and raw, he crept away. A wide circle took him to the narrow road, and to the spot where he had dropped his money belt. He retrieved the belt. Then he set off down the road, running easily.

“Now to get in touch with this Doc Savage gent,” he told himself.

Buttons Zortell, unable to find a trace of his quarry, was cursing his men, himself, the moonlight and whatever else came to his mind.

The frightened horse, head up, loped about the oat field. Buttons suddenly discovered the halter ropes dragging behind the animal. He released a coyote-like howl of rage.

“The bow-legged runt pulled a fast one on us!”

“I told you he was a bad jasper to monkey with,” muttered one of the men.

“We ain’t licked yet! Let’s see if we can locate ’im!”

They conducted an intensive search. The spot where Bandy had left the pad dragged by the horse, they found. But that was all.

“C’mon!” ordered Buttons. “I’ve got another plan. And we gotta get away from here. Somebody is sure to look into all that shootin’.”

“What about my plane?” wailed the pilot. “It can be traced to me, on account of the identification numbers painted on it.”

Buttons had no trouble solving that problem.

“We’ll burn it!”

They found the wrecked plane already drenched by gasoline which had leaked from a tear in the fuel tank. A lighted match thrown from a safe distance caused it to become bundled in roaring flame.

The men ran to a car, which they had secreted near the clubhouse. Not until the machine was bearing them speedily toward New York, did one of the crew voice a question.

“What are we gonna do, Buttons?”

“Bandy is tryin’ to get to a hombre named Doc Savage. We’ll head ’im off.”

“Blazes! How’d you find that out?”

The scar-cheeked leader leered knowingly. “The big boss told me, before we left Arizona. Me and him listened through the cracks in a log shanty while Bandy was gettin’ his orders. Bandy was sent east to ask help from Doc Savage, and he’s carryin’ a letter and a bunch of papers in that money belt. We gotta keep Bandy and his belt from gettin’ to Savage.”

“How?”

Buttons growled fiercely. “I’ll show you!”

Headlight beams waved stiffly ahead of the fast-moving car. Night insects looked like fluttering bits of white paper embedded in the white glare. Tire treads sucked and whistled on the pavement.

One of the men put a query. “Who’s this Doc Savage?”

“I’ll tell you the thing about ’im that hit me most,” Buttons replied grimly. “The boss has never seen Doc Savage, yet he’s scared stiff of the gent!”

“The boss—scared!” The questioner snorted unbelievingly. “With an organization like the boss has, he shouldn’t be leary of anybody.”

“Well, he is! And he’s droppin’ everything else, so as to give all his attention to keepin’ Savage from gettin’ mixed up in this business.”

Buttons, who was driving, wheeled the car around a sharp curve before he continued speaking.

“I don’t know as I blame the boss, at that. I got a newspaper on the phone as soon as we hit New York. They gave me the dope on Savage. What I mean, it was plenty! I figured at first they was kiddin’ me. So I called another newspaper—and they told me the same stuff.”

Buttons glanced around and saw he had a very interested audience. The men were leaning forward to catch his words.

“I’m still wonderin’ if the newspapers was stringin’ me,” he continued. “No one man could be all they said Doc Savage was. Accordin’ to them, this jasper is the greatest surgeon in the world, as well as the greatest engineer, the greatest chemist, the greatest electrical expert. Hell! To hear them tell it nobody can do anything better than he can! Now I ask you gents—don’t that sound like bushwa?”

The listeners blinked and exchanged doubtful glances. They did not know what to think.

“I got Doc Savage’s life history,” Buttons snorted. “It seems his dad trained ’im from the cradle to make a superman out of ’im. The old man’s idea was to fit Doc for what the newspaper gents called a ‘goal in life.’ I gathered that the goal is to go around huntin’ trouble and nosin’ into other people’s business.

“If a hombre gets in a jam, he can go to Doc Savage, and hocus-pocus, presto!—Doc fixes him up. Just as easy as that! And it don’t make any difference if the guy in the jam ain’t got no money to pay. Doc ain’t a money proposition.”

“Sounds nutty to me,” muttered a man.

“Same here. But the jasper must amount to somethin’, or he wouldn’t have a rep like that. And, remember, he’s got the big boss worried. I found out somethin’ the boss didn’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“Doc Savage has five hombres who work with ’im. They’re specialists in certain lines. One is a chemist, one an engineer, one an electrical expert, another an archæologist, and the last one a lawyer. I learned their names, what they look like, and where they live. I got the same dope on the Savage feller.”

“Knowin’ all about ’em will help us.”

“Sure, it will. We’ll have to go up against the gang if Bandy Stevens gets to ’em. I got an old newspaper an’ cut their pictures out of it.”

Buttons waited until he was piloting the car down a straight stretch of road, then fished a news clipping from an inner pocket. He spread it for the others to inspect.

The clipping was a picture. It showed a group of six remarkable-looking men. They were attired in formal fashion, with top hats and claw-hammer coats.

Buttons put a finger on the most striking character in the assemblage. “This one is Doc Savage.”

The other men stared closely. They were impressed, suddenly realizing this was no ordinary personage about whom they were talking. Even the vague printing of the newspaper cut did not diminish the aspect of strength and power about the giant form of Doc Savage.

“That hombre ain’t nobody’s pushover,” muttered a man.

“Look at the gents with ’im!” grunted another. “One is darn near as big as Doc! And pipe the hairy gorilla of a feller! Imagine meetin’ somethin’ like that in a dark canyon!”

“The skinny one with the glasses don’t look so bad. Neither does the shriveled little runt, or the one who wears his clothes so fancy.”

“What does it say at the bottom of the picture?”

Bending close, they read the fine newsprint beneath the clipping:

Clark Savage, Jr., and his five associates at the ceremonial cornerstone-laying of the Savage Memorial Hospital in Mantilla, capital city of the Luzon Union.

“What was the story with this picture?” a man wanted to know.

Buttons hesitated, then answered reluctantly: “A yarn about this Doc Savage savin’ the Pacific island republic, the Luzon Union, from a lot of pirates who had come down from the China coast and were tryin’ to take over the government. Doc wouldn’t take a reward, so they put up the hospital in his honor.”

The men seemed somewhat stunned. They moved their hands nervously.

“Jumpin’ steers!” said one uneasily. “The gent ain’t a piker!”

Buttons Zortell sneered loudly. “Don’t let a jasper’s rep get your nannies! We ain’t a bunch of slant-eyed ginks, like them pirates the paper told about. And glom onto this—the big boss ain’t a slouch himself, when it comes to brains!”

Little more was said. The car had entered New York, and driving the unaccustomed streets required all of Buttons’s attention. Due to the late hour, there was little traffic.

Locating Broadway, Buttons drove along that thoroughfare. A halt was made at a shabby hotel where he and his men had taken rooms.

Buttons entered the hostelry. He reappeared within a few minutes, carrying a metal-bound steamer trunk.

An opening in the end of the trunk was covered by a stout metal screen. Through this came scratchings and whimperings.

“What the blazes?” demanded one of the crew. “I been wonderin’ why you brought that——”

“Wait and I’ll tell you!” Buttons snapped. He stared about to make sure no one was near, then leaned over and spoke in a low voice: “The big boss knowed we might have to do some croakin’! So, before we left for the East, he gimme some sweet tools to do our work with!”

“Whatcha mean?”

Buttons leered at him knowingly. He dropped a hand on the steamer trunk from which the weird noises came. “This is one of the little things the boss gimme! What’s in this trunk will salivate Bandy Stevens plenty! It’ll do the job so there won’t be a chance of us gettin’ caught.”

Entering the car, Buttons wheeled it downtown. He was heading for one of the tallest skyscrapers in the city—a towering structure, the eighty-sixth floor of which housed Doc Savage’s headquarters.