Читать книгу The Squeaking Goblin: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 3

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The cream-colored yacht was anchored fully a mile from the nearest shore habitation. That in itself was vaguely suspicious.

It was night and a moon hung high, spilling a silver flood of brilliant light. By that luminance, a close watcher might have perceived two men on the yacht deck, crouched in the shadow of an upper deck awning. Both held rifles, and their attitude was one of a strained waiting and watching.

Other and better coves were to be found nearer Bar Harbor, the Maine summer rendezvous of yachtsmen, but these held anchored pleasure craft of varying size. The inlet where the cream yacht lay was otherwise untenanted. It was as if those aboard wanted solitude.

The watching men maintained silence, keeping their eyes on the shore and occasionally cupping then: hands behind ears. One used binoculars.

“See it, Tige?” asked a man with a rifle.

“Ain’t sartin,” said the one with the binoculars. “Calculate I’ll know in a minute.”

Tige continued to peer through his glasses at the shore, often lowering them as if he distrusted their prisms, and using his naked blue eyes that were like the snouts of two rifles seen from directly in front.

He was a lean, brindled man with something of the hawk in his face. His slab of a jaw moved regularly and the tobacco it masticated occasionally made a squishing sound.

Sumptuous, luxurious, flamboyant and befitting a king, were descriptives applying to the yacht. The craft hardly exceeded a hundred feet in length, yet she had obviously cost as much as a less pretentious vessel three or four times as long. The woodwork was of mahogany; upholstery was genuine and rich, and there was a profusion of built-in trinkets—bars, indirect lights, radio speakers and the like.

Rugged, rocky, misshapen, a place where anything might happen, described the cove. It was a harsh crack where the stony shore had been gouged by nature, and there were no trees and little vegetation to garnish the place. Boulders were present in profusion, ranging upward to the proportions of a railroad locomotive.

The silver light sprayed by the moon made black, awesome, shapeless shadows behind the boulders, shadows that somehow were like monsters asleep.

“That be it!” Tige breathed abruptly, “I be plumb sartin!”

“Better give the signal, huh?” asked the other man.

Tige hesitated, seemed to consider while his teeth mashed at the tobacco quid; then he shrugged.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “But lemme do it.”

A moment later, Tige walked out on a wing of the bridge and lighted a cigarette, letting the match flame up like a torch in his fingers for a moment before he twirled it over the rail. The gesture was casual, a natural one—but the match flame could have been seen from shore.

Tige strode back out of sight, dropped the cigarette on the deck and extinguished its tip with a lance of tobacco juice sent expertly through the darkness.

Perspiration droplets, not unlike spattered grease, had come out and covered Tige’s forehead while he stood in plain view on the bridge. He scraped some of the sweat off with a forefinger, eyed the moist and slightly glistening digit and shuddered violently.

“Suppose they saw the signal?” asked the other.

“Damn well better have seen it, or reckon as how they’ll get fired,” Tige growled.

The cream yacht might have been a floating sepulcher, so dead was the silence which held it. Tige and his companion waited, rifles nursed close to cheeks, eyes on the shore.

“How many times has it tried to get Chelton Raymond?” Tige asked quietly.

“Twice.” The other stirred and the moonlight glistened faintly on brass uniform buttons and the shiny visor of a yachtsman’s cap. “Thought Chelton Raymond told you?”

“He did.” Tige expectorated, and did it so that there was only the noise of the liquid hitting the deck. “You better keep down. That shiny cap bill would make a tolerable shootin’ mark.”

The yacht officer ducked lower. “Thanks.”

“Chelton Raymond gab much?” Tige inquired.

“Gab? You mean talk?”

“Yep. About this thing gettin’ after ’im, I mean.”

The other hesitated, as if thinking. “No-o-o. He did not talk; exactly. He just said two attempts had been made on his life, and that he was going to send to the Kentucky mountains for what he called ‘a real fighting man’.”

Tige’s chuckle was as emotionless as paper crackling. “Us Raymonds be all fightin’ men.”

“Chelton Raymond sent for you, and you came,” concluded the other. “That’s all I know about it.”.

Silent for a time, Tige scrutinized the shore; the shadows were too much for him, and he shook his head disgustedly.

It would have taken sharper eyes than the gaunt mountaineer possessed to follow the exact course of the skulker ashore—if there was really a skulker, for a close watcher would have doubted at times that the marauder was a flesh-and-blood reality.

There was something of the phantom about the figure, a touch of the supernatural, since the form merged with the dark shadows in uncanny fashion, making no sound appreciable to the ear. An apparition might have been a-prowl.

In the lee of a great boulder the ghostly presence came to a halt, and all of its attention seemed bent upon the yacht.

The yacht portholes—those along the upper decks, were squarish and almost as large as windows, and several were whitened by lights ablaze in the cabins behind. Framed against a port was a head and shoulders, the lines of which indicated the presence of a man in a chair inside the cabin.

On this shadowy outline the attention of the phantom figure seemed to concentrate, and there was a dead silence, stirred only occasionally by the mushy slop of a wave piling onto the stony beach.

Then, out of the black shadow jumped a tongue of flame which could only come from a rifle fired by the ghostly prowler.

Instead of the usual rifle blast, there was only a squeak. It was shrill, almost ear-splitting, a sound such as might be made by a titanic mouse.

The figure behind the yacht porthole upset, vanishing from sight.

The shore of the rocky cove blasted into life. The boulder shadows spewed men who had been in hiding, men who gripped guns, waved flashlights and yelled.

A flash beam sprouted a glaring wedge which waved and sought the spot where the rifle flame had licked. It came to rest upon a remarkable figure.

There was a ghostly quality about the form outlined by the flash, coming, perhaps, from the dead, immobile grayness of the face. The sunken holes where the eyes should have been, the rigidity of the mouth, gave it a corpselike aspect.

Most striking was the garb of the figure, for the clothing was that of a frontiersman of another century. Moccasins were of beaded deerskin; the trousers were buckskin, the blouse of doe, beaded and fringed. A powder horn was slung over a shoulder. A belt supported bullet pouch and a sheath containing a long-bladed knife.

Standing high like the headgear of a Cossack, lending an unnatural height to the strange apparition, was a coonskin cap, the tail dangling down behind.

Notable also was the rifle the figure carried. A muzzle-loader, it had an extraordinary barrel length, the barrel being thick, heavy. The weapon was obviously handmade, a rare piece.

Hardly had the flashlight outlined this fantastic form when the rifleman gave a great leap and vanished behind the boulder with a speed which defied the eye.

Half a dozen pistol and rifle slugs screamed through the space he had vacated, the lead being fired by the two men on the yacht and by the other men around the cove edge.

“Git that thar cuss!” Tige bawled from the yacht deck.

More flashlights sprayed radiance. The beams darted, searching. With its confusion of lights, the rugged cove shore became eerie in aspect. Weapons ready, the men advanced.

The rock masses through which they worked made it difficult to light every recess, so they went slowly and kept the white funnels of luminance prowling. The first excited shouts subsided, and their manners became grim, determined, deadly.

“Hit’s a crafty critter!” Tige howled from the yacht “Take a heap a’ care!”

One of the men, advancing on the spot where the weird figure in ancient frontiersman’s garb had been seen, swore softly.

“Listen to that hill-billy!” he grunted. “He’s talkin’ like that guy in the fur cap ain’t human.”

A circle of glaring flash beams, the men closed upon the spot where the deerskin-clad figure had stood. They fanned their lights, staring, and a few hands quivered with tension that arose from expected action. But after a few seconds the searchers swore softly in a low-voiced and dazed manner.

There was no trace of the weird figure in the coonskin cap.

“What’s a-happenin’?” Tige yelled. “Did that thar thing git away?”

Every man on the shore noticed that Tige was not speaking of the deerskin-garbed figure as if it were human, and that fact obviously impressed them, especially in view of the uncanny way in which the quarry had escaped.

“Looks like the guy give us the slip,” called one of the group on shore, answering Tige.

After shouting, the man brushed back his coat to hook a thumb in a suspender, and a small badge was disclosed, pinned to his vest. The shield marked him as an operative for the Coastal Private Detective Agency. From time to time, badges were visible on the other men, an indication that they were all private detectives of the Coastal Agency.

“Mought as well give up a-lookin’!” Tige bellowed. “You-all won’t find nothin’.”

“Hell!” said one of the detectives. “That bird must’ve left some tracks in this sand.”

“You ain’t agoin’ t’find nary a one,” forecast Tige.

The sleuths began to search, confidently at first, then with an almost stunned carefulness. There were no footprints to be found, although the sand was soft enough to allow them to sink in to their ankles.

“You-all find any?” Tige demanded.

“He must’ve jumped from one rock to another!” snapped a detective.

“Ya-h-h-h!” jeered Tige. “Ain’t no use scratchin’ around thar for the varmint. Come a-runnin’. We got tur see if the fisty cuss hit Chelton Raymond with thot thar bullet.”

The sleuths hesitated, puzzled. One remarked that he had seen the shadow behind the yacht porthole upset after the loud squeak which had accompanied the flash of the coonskin-capped one’s rifle. Tige overheard this statement.

“Come a-runnin’!” Tige howled urgently.

“We’d better do that,” grunted a Coastal Agency man. “After all, that hill-billy and Chelton Raymond hired us to take orders.”

“We were to be bodyguards, too,” interjected another. “A swell job we did of that, lettin’ this spook in the coonskin cap come up and take a shot at the porthole of Chelton Raymond’s cabin, even after the hill-billy warns us, by lightin’ that cigarette, that the thing is prowling around here.”

“Horsefeathers! Now you’re talking as if the thing wasn’t human.” The other sleuth was frankly skeptical.

“Well, it got around like a ghost, didn’t it?”

They ran down to the water’s edge and dragged out a small boat concealed among the boulders. Floating it, they got aboard and paddled out to the yacht.

Tige was not on deck, but the newly arrived detectives could hear loud blows from below, accompanied by an occasional expletive.

The sleuths ran below and found Tige with a fire ax, battering at the door of a stateroom. The blows had a metallic sound.

“Carn-sarned door’s locked!” snapped the gaunt Tige. “ ’Pears like she’s made a’ iron.”

The mountaineer delivered a great smash with the ax, with the result that the blade penetrated the sheet metal. He wrenched it free and struck again, opening a triangular aperture at which he chopped vigorously.

“ ’Low I kin git a hand in thar directly!” puffed Tige. “Mought be able to unlock the door.”

He struck, chopped, wrenched—and the metal squealed and bent; then he thrust a hand through the hole he had made, groping for the knob of the spring lock.

“Here, Tige!” called a new voice. “Let me go in there first.”

Tige wrenched his hand out of the hole as if he had taken a hold on something hot. He wheeled, his eyes protruding a little and his mouth sagged far open so that the little lake of tobacco juice within was revealed.

“Chelton Raymond!” he gulped. “You wasn’t in this hure cabin!”

“No,” said Chelton Raymond. “Damned lucky for me, eh?”

Chelton Raymond was a long, thin man who looked as if he bathed frequently in peroxide. He was very blond. His hair, eyebrows, and waxed and upturned mustache were almost white, and contrasted with his tanned skin. His tan, however, did not have a weathered look, but more the velvety aspect of one who had gone deliberately and carefully about the business of having the sun darken his skin.

The man’s clothes were rich of fabric, expert of cut. The frames of the spectacles perched on his sharp hook of a nose were obviously of platinum. He had an air of wealth about him.

He advanced quietly on rubber-soled shoes and reached through the rent Tige had made in the stateroom door.

“I was up forward, watching through a porthole with these.” He drew a pair of binoculars from a pocket, then let them slide back. “I kept an eye on the shore after the detectives put off.”

“Kaitch sight a’ anythin’?” asked Tige.

“Nothing.” Chelton Raymond’s voice had a drawl which marked him as having spent some time in the mountains, possibly his youth, but it was seldom that he slipped into the abused English which was Tige’s vocabulary.

The stateroom door swung open. Chelton Raymond entered, drew Tige inside, then motioned the private detectives and members of the yacht crew back, closing the door after them.

“So you-all fixed a jigger in the cheer to fool the fisty cuss,” Tige mumbled, eyeing the chair before the porthole.

Chelton Raymond went over and examined the cleverly constructed dummy of pillows and bedclothing, coat and a yachting cap, which the chair held. Particularly, he gave attention to the head.

“Look, Tige,” he suggested. “See where the bullet struck.”

Tige examined the head. “Plumb swack a-tween the eyes.”

“Amazing shooting.”

“Right peart,” Tige agreed. “ ’Tain’t nohow unusual fer thot varmint, though.”

Chelton Raymond ran the tip of his tongue under his waxed, blond mustache, keeping his eyes fixed unblinkingly on the gaunt, knobby mountaineer.

“You ever see it before, Tige?” he asked abruptly.

Tige moved over to the porthole, stood to one side of it and expectorated a noisy, slanting stream of brown fluid through the port, which was open.

“Kain’t say as I have,” he muttered. “Thot ain’t to say as how I’m a stranger to the varmint, ’cause I been a-seein’ a lot a’ his work back in my mountains.”

“I saw something about it in the newspapers,” Chelton Raymond said, nodding slowly.

“Them thar level-land newspapers hain’t been a-hearin’ the half a’ it.”

“Tige,” the other said slowly, “I want your honest opinion.”

“You be my cousin. I wouldn’t go fer tellin’ you no lies.”

Chelton Raymond made a grim mouth. “Do you think this fellow in the coonskin cap is actually a ghost? Do you really think he is the Squeaking Goblin?”

“Squeakin’ Goblin been dead nigh eighty years or thar’bouts,” Tige said slowly.

“I know.”

Tige pulled a sigh from deep in his chest. “Tige Raymond Eller ain’t never been one to believe in hants, anyhow not a hant of a cuss that’s been a-layin’ in the grave fer eighty year.”

“Don’t beat around the bush, Tige,” Chelton Raymond said dryly. “Do you think the man in the coonskin cap was human?”

Tige was silent a moment, then took a deep breath and spoke loudly and rapidly, as if desperately resolved to get the words out.

“Thot varmint wur a hant!” he exclaimed. “I’m a-tellin’ you it wur a spook, ’cause I shot right at it and thar warn’t no sign a’ the bullet hittin’ nothin’.”

Some moments of silence followed Tige’s earnest declaration, both men keeping faces long and sober, as if engaged with thoughts that were gloomy.

“It’s silly, of course,” Chelton Raymond said at last.

“Yop,” agreed Tige. He poked a bony finger thoughtfully into the hole the bullet had made in the head of the chair dummy. “This here ain’t so silly, though.”

“No.” Chelton Raymond, hardening his lips together, was suddenly harsh and wolfish of feature. “Listen, Tige; I’m thinking this is more than you and I can handle.”

“A Raymond ain’t feared a’ no man,” muttered Tige.

“Hell, no, but this Squeaking Goblin isn’t a man. He’s been dead more than eighty years, and he was almost a hundred years old when he died, if there’s anything to the story about him that my granddad told me.”

“We ain’t spook fighters, fur a fact,” Tige agreed.

“That’s the idea. Did you ever hear of Doc Savage, Tige?”

“Who?”

“Doc Savage.”

Tige puckered his brows. “Kain’t say as I have.”

“Your education has been badly neglected, Tige,” said Chelton Raymond, and there was no levity in his tone.