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

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It must have been half an hour later when John Winer, the penitentiary guard in the wall tower nearest the box car, heard a small sound. He peered over the tower side. At first, he saw nothing: then, near the box car, he perceived a skulking figure.

The tower was equipped with a searchlight. John Winer turned this on, pointed the thin beam, and saw a weird figure, a humpback. The humpback drew a gun; the gun banged, and the searchlight went out. It was a good shot.

John Winer knew something was wrong. He seized his rifle, leaned out and began shooting. He could discern the camel-backed figure in the gloom of the prison yard.

John Winer did not realize he himself was outlined against the moon, which was behind the tower, and furnished an excellent target. A bullet fired by the hunchback, hit John Winer almost exactly in the middle of the chest. Then it was too late to think about being a target.

Guards came running and found Winer a broken, dying heap. He was lying in a grotesque position, so they hastily straightened him out.

Words came from Winer’s lips. As a dying man sometimes will, he mouthed fragments of speech about something which had lately come to his attention.

“Doc Savage!” mumbled John Winer. “Man of bronze—trouble——”

“Eh?” exploded one of the guards. “Who shot you, Winey?”

John Winer never heard that question. His incoherent mumblings simply continued.

“Doc Savage,” mumbled John Winer. “Fights men—outside the law——”

The guard straightened and growled. “Doc Savage shot you? Who the hell is Doc Savage?”

“If I was that dumb, I’d at least keep quiet,” said another guard. “Don’t you ever read the newspapers?”

“No. Reading hurts my eyes.”

John Winer at this point gave one final great, violent kick and let out a breath that sprayed crimson over the surrounding shoes and trouser legs. When the guards looked again, he was dead.

“Poor Winey,” they said.

“It was a guy named Doc Savage who shot him,” growled the man who never read the newspapers. “Didn’t you hear him say so?”

“You’d better read the papers some, even if it does hurt your eyes,” he was advised. “You’ll learn this Doc Savage is not the kind of a lad who goes around shooting pen guards.”

A deputy warden came up, bawling orders. He wanted the prison looked over to see if anything else was wrong.

They looked the place over and they found plenty wrong.

They found twenty strange men in their penitentiary. Twenty men who had never been convicted by any court of law, or committed to the pen through regular channels. Twenty men whom nobody had seen in the pen before.

The twenty men were asleep. They could not be awakened immediately, so it was judged they had been drugged. The prison doctor went to work administering stimulants in an effort to awaken the strangers.

The senseless guards in the cell house were found. It was also realized that twenty genuine prisoners were missing from the cells in which the strangers had been found.

The siren, a big one which was used only to announce an escape, began shrilling. Squads of searching guards left the prison in cars.

The senseless guards awakened and muttered about a humpbacked witch of a creature who had invaded the place and made them senseless. There was expressed doubt as to whether the camel-backed one was male or female.

About this time, something else that was strange happened. Guards gathered about the freight car and listened. They were hearing a weird noise. It came steadily from the box car.

The noise was like nothing so much as the tiny tinkling of a child’s toy music box.

The guards did not pay particular attention to the tinkling notes at first. At least, the true importance of the sounds as relating to something mysterious having to do with the freight car did not immediately impress them. But they were curious after a bit.

“There’s a pipe organ in the car,” a man volunteered. “Gift of some bird named Sigmund Hoppel.”

“That noise must be the pipe organ,” hazarded another.

“Nut! Pipe organs don’t play themselves, do they?”

“Well, they have player pianos, don’t they? Maybe this is a player pipe organ.”

In the meantime, the small, fantastic tinkling notes were continuing to come from the freight car. A man went over and tried the freight car door. It did not give. The man failed to notice that the seal was broken and that the car door seemed to be fastened from the inside.

“Must be a mouse running over the pipe organ strings or something,” some one decided.

This got two or three laughs.

“Well, what’s wrong?” demanded the fellow with the mouse theory.

“A pipe organ don’t have strings.”

Bloodhounds were kept in the prison for the purpose of chasing escaped convicts. This old-fashioned method of pursuit had managed to hold its own in the age of radios and high-speed automobiles.

The bloodhounds now set up a baying. They came straight to the freight car and stopped. Immediately, machine guns were trained on the freight car. A squad brought up tear gas. The pups were led in a circle around the freight car and did not bay another trail. It was evident that the convicts had gone into the freight car and had not come out.

A deputy warden rapped on the car and called for those inside to come out. He got no response. An ax was brought. The deputy warden took the ax and his courage in his two hands and chopped the door in. He made an opening large enough to admit himself. He stepped inside.

Instantly, he screamed as if he had lost his legs. As, indeed, it developed, he almost had. For he fell back out of the car and shriek after shriek poured from his lips. All the while, he pointed frantically at his legs.

His shoes were gone. So was a great deal of the flesh off his feet. The awful, denuded bones of his feet clung to the stumps, and as he kicked, these flew off.

Prison guards are hard-boiled babies, but two of the onlookers fainted at the horrible sight.

Quite naturally, there was a bit of a dither during the next few minutes. The prison officials, who thought the escaped convicts were in the car and had managed in some way to take all the flesh off the deputy warden’s feet, drew back a safe distance and gave some orders that resulted in numerous drums of machine gun bullets being poured into the freight car. After the shooting, tear gas bombs were hurled into the car.

Guards charged.

But the charge was unfortunate and did not show what could truthfully be called good sense.

First guard through the freight car door emitted a screech which shamed his predecessor, and fell down in some manner. His shrieks increased in terrible violence. In a moment, he came flying out of the car.

Some gooey substance on his shoes had eaten, not only the major part of the shoes, but some of his feet. Moreover, the same stuff was consuming his hands.

The prison guards now used judgment. They brought lights and mirrors. Holding the mirrors and lights in the car, they managed to look the place over without endangering any one else.

What they found was quite a shock to everybody.

There were no prisoners in the freight car.

There was no humpbacked mystery person, man or woman.

There was no pipe organ.

The car, much to the surprise of prison authorities, and later, to the puzzled astonishment of railway officials, was floored with ordinary glass. The glass was thick. It had been covered with the board flooring of the car, every one decided, but the flooring was now gone.

The strange music box tinkling sound had stopped. It had ceased, as a matter of fact, sometime during the machine gun volley which had been poured into the car.

The car’s floor was covered to a depth of something like two inches with a gooey mess. This goo was potent. When they thrust a stick into it, the stick was consumed in a remarkably short space of time.

The prison guards stood around muttering profane, puzzled comments, and the guard and deputy warden who had been burned whimpered and moaned as the prison doctors worked on them.

The warden arrived. His coming focused attention upon the twenty strangers who had been found in the cells vacated by the missing convicts. These individuals were beginning to revive.

Newspapermen were by now on the scene, and they listened in on the interview with the twenty strangers. As a result, the newspapermen had spasms.

Not one of the twenty men could explain how he happened to get in a penitentiary cell in place of a missing convict. They were absolutely insistent upon this point. They just didn’t know.

Their stories all agreed upon one point. They had gone to sleep rather queerly after drinking various kinds of beverages with their dinners. Consensus of opinion was that they had been drugged.

The men were naturally asked to identify themselves. They did this without trouble. The result surprised every one.

Each one of the twenty men was quite a big shot in one of two lines.

Some of them were well-known financiers in charge of holding companies. These companies bought stocks and held them for a rise. Besides stocks, they bought houses, office buildings, steamship lines, blocks of farms, or anything else that could be purchased cheaply and might be sold for more money later on. All of these so-called holding companies were very prosperous, among the most prosperous of their kind.

The rest of the twenty men were directors in mutual insurance companies. The companies of which they were directors were large, but not especially spectacular. The companies of which these men were directors were known as conservative. They had never shown any great profits.

A lot of heads were scratched when the twenty men made known their identity. Just what connection twenty men who were prominent in insurance and holding companies could have with twenty convicts was a mystery.

Or was it? A puzzling angle came to light very shortly, when the warden had a brilliant idea and summoned Doc Savage.

“You say John Winer, the slain guard, mumbled that Doc Savage shot him?” the warden asked.

Confirming nods from the rest of the guards and the relating of Winer’s last words seemed to convince him.

“Send for Doc Savage,” directed the warden. “He may be able to help us. It is hardly reasonable that he could have had a hand in this murder.”

The warden knew Doc Savage by reputation.