Читать книгу The Midas Man: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4

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The blue cab went through the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey.

William Harper Littlejohn squirmed, and managed to get hold of the floor carpet. He took a firm grip. Then he groaned loudly. The groan was to cover the sound of the carpet tearing as he ripped a piece out. He had to groan three times and strain with all of his might before he was successful. When victory crowned his efforts, he held a piece of carpet about the size of the palm of his hand.

Thanking his lucky stars for the presence of the enveloping lap robe, William Harper Littlejohn worked with the bit of carpet.

What he was doing took almost fifteen minutes.

The lank geologist’s apparent inactivity had allayed the caution of his captors only a little. When he reared up suddenly, violently, they fell upon him. William Harper Littlejohn, however, struggled with great ferocity.

He managed to stand up straight and shove his head hard against the top. It broke through.

In the excitement, the men failed to note the bit of rug being flung from his manacled hands through an open window.

William Harper Littlejohn was wrestled down and received a booting for the trouble he had caused.

“We’re gonna lose patience with you!” one of the men gritted.

The last half hour of the journey was through sparsely settled country. The car rolled into what seemed to be an estate. William Harper Littlejohn was now blindfolded, lifted out and carried across a porch that creaked into a house. His blindfold was removed and the sponge taken out of his mouth.

He was in a dark cave of a room. The walls were painted black, which was unusual. There was a solid black rug on the floor, which was even more unique.

But the one article of furniture was most startling of all. It was approximately eight feet long and three wide—an irregularly shaped box with a lid. William Harper Littlejohn was startled into using small words, something he rarely did.

“A mummy case!” he gasped.

A man went out, evidently to the car, and came back carrying a pair of pliers. He showed these to the prisoner.

“See these?” he demanded. “They’re gonna reduce your vocabulary.”

William Harper Littlejohn could hardly help seeing them; they were almost jammed in his eyes.

“An anagrammatical conjugation of exigency!” he muttered.

“There!” growled the man with the pliers. “That’s what I mean! No more of them words! Them jawbreakers! For every big word you use, we’re gonna pull one of your teeth. A tooth for each word we can’t understand! Savvy?”

William Harper Littlejohn blinked and looked as indignant as a securely bound man could.

“I don’t understand what this is all about,” he snapped. “Why did you seize me?”

“You have no idea?” demanded the other.

“No!” retorted William Harper Littlejohn. “I’m completely puzzled!”

“Swell!” grinned the other. “You’re gonna be more puzzled, before we get done!”

They laid hands upon the skeletonlike form of Littlejohn, lifted him, and calmly plunked him down in the mummy case.

William Harper Littlejohn had been able to give the mummy case merely the slightest of inspection, but he had recognized it as being a genuine article. And the idea of lying in a mummy case failed to appeal to him.

“I object to this treatment!” he yelled.

“We know how you feel!” said one of the men, with grim sympathy.

William Harper Littlejohn growled, “Inacquiescence is—”

The man with the pliers sprang forward. He endeavored forcibly to pry the prisoner’s mouth open. There was brisk action for several moments, during which the pliers failed to get a firm hold on any of the captive’s teeth.

“I’ll let that one go!” the man with pinchers decided, grudgingly. “But for every big word from now on, you lose a tooth! Listen! They call you ‘Johnny,’ don’t they?”

“Yes,” William Harper Littlejohn admitted. “But what—”

“Johnny, you just shut up and lay there!”

One of the men left the black room. It was fully half an hour before the fellow reappeared. During this interval, “Johnny” made several attempts to leave the mummy case, but was knocked back into the sarcophagus. All he could do was to lie there and glare indignantly.

The returning man bore a newspaper.

“I see Jethro Mandebran had a son who was in Europe,” he declared.

“So what?” asked one of his fellows.

“So the son is tearing home to try to help find his old man,” announced the fellow with the paper. “It says here that he chartered a plane and flew out five hundred miles in the Atlantic to catch a transatlantic steamer. It says his plane landed on the ocean and was hauled aboard the ship. It also says that the son is gonna leave the ship in his plane as soon as he’s within five hundred miles of New York. In fact, the son is probably in the air again right now.”

“I’ll see if the chief has any orders about this,” one of the three captors said, and left the room.

Johnny strained against the handcuffs, but they were too strong. He indignantly tried to push the sides out of the mummy case, but had no luck. He tried to get out of the case, but they hit him on the head with a revolver barrel.

He lay back, pain making his eyes water. He was caring less and less for the inside of the mummy case. Possibly it was only imagination, but he thought he could smell traces of its original occupant.

Johnny yelled, “Was there any trunk full of archæological relics?”

“No!” grinned the man who had practiced that deception.

“Shut up, you fool!” snapped the other. “You should have told him there was!”

“He won’t dream what it’s all about,” retorted the first. “And, say, pal, don’t be so free about who you call a fool.”

Johnny addressed the fellow who had objected to being insulted. “You haven’t much pride, letting him call you a fool and get away with it. Shows you’re short on nerve.”

The man grinned widely.

“You ain’t kidding anybody, you bag of bones,” he chuckled. “You’re trying to start a fight. Not a chance! This guy and me are great pals, even if he does have a face built for nibbling cheese.”

The other man, whose features did have something of a mousey look, shoved out his jaw, made fists with his hands, and it seemed for a moment as if there was going to be a fight after all.

The man who had gone out of the room—to get orders from the mysterious “chief,” he had said—came back. He looked very cheerful.

He said, “Doc Savage really don’t know a thing about this business. We made a mistake when we grabbed this bag of bones.”

Johnny swallowed several times. This was the truth. But how had they learned it?

The man looked at Johnny, “We can’t turn you loose, because you would tell Doc Savage what has happened and he would meddle. So we gotta figure what to do.”

There was a silence. It did not look to Johnny as if they were doing much thinking. It looked as if they already knew what they would do with him, and it would not be pleasant.

A man demanded, “Is the Happy Skeleton business going through okay?”

“The Happy Skeleton business? Sure! No slips there.”

“You fools had better quit talkin’ so much,” the third man told the rest.

They fell silent.

All of this conversation made not the slightest sense to Johnny.

“What do you fellows want with me?” the gaunt geologist demanded, angrily.

“Nothing now,” said one of the men. “We’re through with you, brother!”

“You haven’t done anything with me!” Johnny looked bewildered. “I mean—nothing that made sense.”

“It makes plenty of sense, if you only knew!” the other assured him.

“Then turn me loose!” Johnny ordered.

The other seemed to consider this at length.

“As soon as Jethro Mandebran’s son lands in his airplane,” the man said, “I think we shall shoot you.”