Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (29 page)

Johnny nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I know of that treasure. Some say it was a gold table, others that it was a great gold nugget, in either case weighing over three thousand pounds. If it could be raised today, it would be worth a young fortune.”

“I did not sail with that fleet,” related Columbus, “so I could not help my captors. Then they began questioning me about the whereabouts of the sorcerous house that had plucked me out of my rightful century. But I had no idea where it now stands, either. Now that they know I am of no use to them, I believe they intend to slay me.”

“Holy cow!” boomed Renny. “These guys mean to murder Columbus.
The
Columbus.”

The thought made their heads swim.

Johnny pondered this. “I do not think that they will succeed.”

Everyone looked at him.

“What makes you say that?” demanded Ham Brooks.

“If Christopher Columbus were to be murdered out of his time before the events of his later life took place, how could history have recorded those happenings? They could not—would not—have taken place.”

Renny made a mournful face. “Makes sense when you put it that way. But what if they do manage to murder him before he can get back to 1503?”

“I do not know,” admitted Johnny. “Perhaps time will be irrevocably altered. Perhaps not. It cannot be known with any certainty because there has never in the history of the human race been a predicament such as this one.”

As the bony archeologist’s words sank in, a fresh round of thunder and lightning made the commodious aircraft hangar rattle and tremble, while the sound of rain, which had been a steady patter on the metal roof and sides, now became a fierce drumming that further depressed their spirits.

Chapter XXIX

MISDIRECTION

GULLIVER GREENE ran fingers through his upstanding pile of blackened hair. The weirdly colorless coif, the theatrical shock of it, belonged to the character of The Great Gulliver, magician, and not to Gulliver Greene, who had a snub nose, freckles, pleasant features, emerald green eyes and a large mouth. Gull Greene called himself The Great Gulliver for stage reasons, and had assumed a showy personality, likewise for professional reasons. But Gull, underneath, was an ordinary young man in that he had the average person’s capacity for wishing to high Heaven that he had taken an easy job, such as loading anvils, or a comparatively safe one—parachute jumping for instance—instead of letting himself be sucked into a dark mystery.

Disapproval of his own gumption was uppermost in his mind. Even after Gull found out he was barging into a queer mystery and plenty of trouble, there had been an opportunity to withdraw in safety and betake himself and his assistant, Spook, to healthier far-away places. But he’d passed up the chance. He’d plunged ahead, like Sir Galahad, filled with grand visions of helping a pretty girl. When he should’ve known such stuff went out of style with iron pants and broadswords. He was only a few hundred years too late. That was all.

In total, as a knight errant, modern style, he’d staged a swell flop. It was almost funny. So funny they’d probably finish hanging him. Or did they electrocute you in Missouri? He’d been trying to remember which it was and couldn’t; this happened to be the first time he had been greatly interested in the point.

Gull was most of the way out of the Promised Land campground when Spook Davis came trotting up, as scary as a rabbit in a lettuce patch.

“That black pepper I filched out of the trailer just saved my bacon,” puffed Spook. “I pretended to pull out a handkerchief to blow my nose, but I blew the stuff into their faces instead. That fixed them! I got away.”

“I thought you were guarding—” Gull began hotly.

“Those men were dressed like gunnysacks, Gull. What does that tell you?”

“Silent Saints.”

“They nabbed Columbus!” Spook blurted out.

“But not you, eh? Spill it!”

Spook took a moment to recapture his breath. He had been running, it was plain to see.

“I was outside the trailer, watching,” Spook fibbed. “Watching for you. I spotted what I thought was Ivan Cass peering from behind a tree. I decided to investigate.”

Gull bent a skeptical eye at his stooge. “Did you now?”

“Long enough to be half-sure it was him. Then I skedaddled. But they surrounded me. That’s when I pulled out the old pepper-in-the-face gag, and got away.”

“You left old Columbus to fend for himself!”

Spook said wildly, “I saw a gun in Cass’ hand! Honest. And I knew I’d better warn you, or all three of us were going to end up in scalding water.”

Gulliver turned that over in his mind. It made half-sense, putting aside Spook’s overwhelming instinct for self-preservation, not to mention his yen for prevarications.

But Spook wasn’t done explaining. “They glommed Columbus, Gull. I heard the struggle. But there was nothing I could do. There was a gaggle of them. They had gug-guns!”

“Let it ride,” Gull said softly, looking about. He mentally cursed himself for not returning to the trailer right away. But he had wandered about, hoping to run into Saint Pete. Now his disappointment had doubled.

Gull took hold of Spook’s arm and sought words that could convey the horror he felt. He didn’t need them. Something about his tense grip must have conveyed his concern.

“What happened?” Spook breathed. “What’d you learn?”

“It’s bad, this thing we’re in,” Gull said grimly.

“You’re telling me? Brother, if them cops ever catch us—”

“It is more than that, Spook. In one of those trailers is something, well, hideous.”

Spook Davis’ swallow was audible. He did not say anything. His silence was proof that he was impressed, for his words were rarely taken from him.

Circumstances seemed to be tumbling through The Great Gulliver’s brain with the demolishing effect of trains of brickbats. “Things are in a devil of a mess,” he said at last.

“South America is a thought,” suggested Spook hopefully.

Gull ignored the hint. The quicksand wasn’t yet up to their necks, but it would take a lot more than jackrabbiting south of the border to extricate them.

A fresh storm was coming up. Thunder had started whooping hollowly in the west and there was a little splintery lightning, while the night was becoming unnaturally still, as it does before storms in the middle west.

Over the grove of the Promised Land camp lay black silence, except when the glow of distant lightning licked faintly red over the great hump of the tent where the evangelists held their revivals. Of the smaller tents—the cook tent, the dining tent—nothing could be distinguished, nor were the several trailers and small trucks of the Silent Saints discernible, except as the vaguest shapes.

Then, the headlights of an automobile appeared on the road, coming from the south. The machine was a gray roadster, and it pulled a house trailer of identical hue—a mud-gray monster rumbling and splashing in the receding lightning.

Gulliver Greene and Spook Davis, walking down the road, bounded off the pavement and landed among weeds in the grader ditch before the lights of the approaching car whitened them. They lay hidden as the roadster and trailer passed. Trailers were plentiful on roads at this Autumn season; they would have given the incident no notice, except that the trailer was the one they had driven to Lake of the Ozarks only hours before!

After thunder had finished muttering in the west, Gull said, “Let’s see where that roadster and trailer go.”

Standing erect, he watched the roadster pull the jouncing trailer down the road perhaps half a mile beyond the camp, where it turned sharply to the right. Gull recalled that there was a small pasture at that point. The roadster entered the pasture, stopped, and its lights went off.

“We’ll keep an eye on that outfit,” Gull decided.

“Could be a trap,” cautioned Spook. “To smoke us out of hiding.”

They crept onward, and on the chance that someone might come from the direction of the distant roadster and trailer, they went beyond the Promised Land grove. Off to the left, across the road, lay a pile of field stones—evidently the chimney remains of an old house or cabin that had burned down long ago. Gull scavenged a pair. Spook Davis copied the action.

“Now I feel fit for battle!” Spook said vehemently.

They went back to the road where Gull sat down on the edge of the grader ditch.

Hunkering down beside him, Spook asked, “Plan?”

“Wait a while and let’s see if anybody comes from that trailer.”

They sat there for a long time while the thunderstorm pushed up out of the west, brighter and noisier by the minute, attention riveted patiently in the direction of the distant trailer.

This concentration on the trailer was nearly their undoing. A foot scuff, the leap of a flashlight beam, jerked their eyes toward the Silent Saints’ camp.

“There!” Gull breathed suddenly. “Two of them!”

Two figures—distinguishable as two forms but little else—were approaching from the grove. Then the flashlight came on, and its backglow disclosed only one of the pair….

“Cass!” Gull hissed. “I’ll take him. You get the other one.”

Spook gripped one rock tight, held it cocked.

THE TWO nocturnal strollers came on. Gull, remembering the distinct feeling of dread the last time he had wielded a brickbat, considered dropping the heavy thing and using his fists. What made him hesitate was the realization that if he injured his hands, his magician’s dexterity could be impaired. Perhaps, seriously.

Gull crouched there, sampling the horns of a dilemma—a tall young man whose muscles were not especially bulky, but instead were rather amazingly like wire. He waited, listening so hard that he could feel the muscular tension around his ears.

A roll of thunder kept Gull from hearing the conversation of the approaching pair.

Rising from the ditch, he impulsively left the stones behind anyway.

Almost at once, Gulliver had Ivan Cass by the neck.

The throat is no place to grab an opponent. All bloodthirsty stories of strangling to the contrary, men do not choke easily, as Gull now discovered. Moreover, a neck hold leaves both opponent’s hands free.

Gulliver got a slam alongside the head. Again. He dodged; a thumb nearly got his eye. Oof! A fist struck his stomach, hard. It stopped his breathing. A toe peeled his shins. Knuckles hit his ribs with drum sounds. All this, and he was having no luck with his throttling.

He let go the neck and the fight complexion changed. Gull began pummeling with his own knuckles. In a moment, the foe was down. On him, Gull ground with his knees, punched with his fists. His fists were dynamite.

The air should have turned blue with his foe’s profane shrieking. “Oh—Oh—”

Ivan Cass fainted.

At this point, Gull looked around.

The other one—Spook’s intended victim—was dodging wildly.

“Missed!” howled Spook.

He sounded horrified. He jumped around, hunting. Spook continued to stumble in the dark. Wind and trees made convulsive sounds. Then a small, scared voice put a hesitant question.

“W-Who?”

Spook echoed the inquiry. “Who?”

Two owls might have been calling.

Gull rushed in and batted the stones from Spook’s upraised hands.

The surprised stooge came stumbling toward Gull.

“Who—what?”

Gull said, “Relax.”

They were all still until lightning came—a long lurid brightness—and Gull could see the girl, her wealth of cinnamon hair awry from rough handling, her exquisite lips drawn, blue eyes wide, straining. Saint Pete was in one of the Silent Saints’ frocks of dark burlap which Gull had always thought looked fetching on her well-rounded form.

Ivan Cass lay on his sour, puritanical face, long arms outflung senselessly, a fallen crow in his dark burlap suit.

“Oh,” gasped Saint Pete. “I thought you were in jail!”

“I would be,” Gull grunted, “if I depended on you to get me out.”

HE was irked. Not at her personally, he believed, but at the unreasoning fear which he could discern on her face. It was terror, it had been there during all the time that he had known her, a grim strain that never relaxed, and he had struggled to penetrate this silence that fright forced upon her, but never had success been satisfactory; this aggravated him, because it defeated him.

“Where was Cass taking you?” Gull demanded.

She did not answer.

“Look, Pete,” Gull said grimly. “You’ve got to talk to me. You’ve got to go to the police with your story. That’s the only thing that will clear me. Tell them that Cass has been threatening you.”

But her silence continued.

Gull asked, “What has Cass got against you that is so terrible you won’t talk?”

Again, no response.

As her unanswering stubbornness continued, and the storm noises seemed to get louder, as though mounting with her determination not to reply.

“She ain’t learned any conversational habits since last time,” Spook Davis remarked.

Gull held both the girl’s arms, and felt them quivering under his fingers. She was terrified, all right. It made him angry. He had, to a degree, a masculine impatience with abject fear, although perhaps not being impervious to it himself. But it was so important to him that she talk, but she wouldn’t. So it made his temper mount.

The lightning, fortunately, still splashed red. He could see whenever the incandescent forks flashed. Rain began to fall in big cold drops, promising more misery.

“Give me your belt,” Gull grunted at Spook. But they had taken Spook’s belt from him at the police station, a precaution usually taken to prevent prisoners hanging themselves.

With Spook’s tie, Gull strapped the girl’s wrists together. He used Cass’ belt to fasten her ankles.

Meantime, Spook Davis searched Ivan Cass. He found a roll of greenbacks, very fat around, and remarked, “Boy, some profit, huh?” Gull glowered at him. Spook hastily restored the bankroll, then palmed it after Gull looked away. When his fingers encountered a revolver, Spook jerked them away as if stung, gasping, “Whew! Another gun! Cass must collect them.”