Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (6 page)

Now the facility was dedicated to turning out future operatives of the bronze man’s new information-gathering organization. It was another reason for the expansion of the crime-curing college to several open-air structures. The former mountainside chambers were still in use, but not so much as before, and now only after dark, where such activity would not be noticed. Passing airplanes might observe hidden stone doors rolling open in the gray hillside and this would attract curiosity that a germ research complex would not.

A great deal of thought had been given to the expansion of the Crime College.

Doc Savage conferred with a man who headed the surgical wing of the operation. He gave swift instructions for the new inmate, and with that accomplished, rejoined Monk and Ham.

“Everything is set,” he said. “Six months from now our newest student should be fit for release, ready to take his place in decent society.”

Ham nodded soberly. “Some such scheme as this should be substituted for our penitentiaries. Why don’t you take it up with our government?”

“Our esteemed and opinionated senators would not touch it,” Doc explained patiently. “The idea of catching a criminal, cutting his head open and doing something to his brain that he does not wish to be done is entirely too hard-boiled. The editorial writers and the women’s clubs would be up in arms.”

There was no denying the bronze man’s words. Doc knew prisons actually breed crime. But this institution cured it!

“We will head for the Missouri woods in the dirigible,” he announced. “Let’s roll, brothers.”

THERE was a weather front forming over the Adirondack Mountains when Doc Savage got the small airship turned around and pointed west.

The front consisted largely of angry clouds and a stiff wind. This retarded their forward progress some.

Doc Savage had the controls. The compact size of the airship required that it be piloted from a command chair, rather than a standing position, as would be the case on a full-sized commercial dirigible.

Progress was rapid, given the atmospheric conditions. But the airship was no airborne goliath boasting multiple motors. Two were sufficient to push it along, and so the passage took some time. Dusk began falling.

It was a boring succession of hours.

Monk Mayfair passed the time by scrutinizing the ground passing below through a great luminous quartz lens that had been installed in the floor of the gondola. This was on the order of a giant magnifying glass. Combined with an infra-red projecto-receptor searchlight set in the lower hull, it caused the ground to stand out in sharp relief, darkness notwithstanding.

In the aft portion of the gondola, Ham Brooks was perched on a stack of equipment cases, carefully honing the razor sharp edge of his sword cane. From the tip of the blade he had wiped off the sticky brown compound adhering to it. This was a drug, the presence of a slight quantity of which in an open wound would produce instant unconsciousness. Ham’s sword cane had merely to inflict a tiny scratch on a foe to drop him senseless.

This explained the fate of the captive back in Doc’s headquarters library.

A slight noise drew Ham’s eye. Howling rage, he bounded erect.

“You bobtailed baboon!” he bellowed. “You beetle-browed misfit! You hairy mishap of evolution!”

Ham usually addressed Monk in this vein when aroused. Yet Monk was nowhere in sight.

Ham flourished his sword cane and glowered at the creature which had inflamed his rage. This was a pig.

This pig was unique—a homelier specimen of the porker family was probably never created. The animal had a lean body, razor back, and legs as long as a dog’s. His ears were phenomenal. They looked big enough to serve as wings.

Just now, the comical aspect of the pig was enhanced by the addition of the white whiskers which Ham had lately worn. The shoat was walking on his rear legs. Wedged between the toes of one forefoot was a small black cane.

Someone had made the pig up as a caricature of Ham in his disguise.

Ham had no trouble guessing who had done it—Monk. The pig, who was called Habeas Corpus, was Monk’s pet.

Habeas Corpus eyed the perturbed Ham. What happened next would have been quite a shock to a superstitious person.

The pig seemed to begin to speak—with a Harvard accent, such as Ham sometimes affected.

“Jolly good detectives old Harvard turns out, eh, topper?” the pig apparently queried.

Ham squawked, and made a wrathy rush for Habeas. The pig had obviously experienced these attacks before. He bounded away with startling agility, losing the white whiskers and the black stick in the process. He darted under a shelf containing ammunition boxes.

Glaring indignantly, Ham looked around for Monk. He knew that Monk was a ventriloquist, and had put the words in the homely porker’s mouth.

A squeaky peal of laughter came from behind the door to the washroom. Monk had been unable to contain his mirth any longer.

Ham started purposefully for the source of the glee.

Doc Savage, gigantic man of bronze, turned and said, “Renny should have reported by now.”

The bronze man’s voice was quiet enough, but Ham came to a sharp halt. Doc was not in the habit of showing excitement. His simple statement portended trouble.

Monk jutted his simian head out of the washroom, saw that Ham was no longer violent, and ambled out, impossibly long arms swinging.

“Let me try and raise the big-fisted freak,” he volunteered.

“You should talk!” Ham snapped. “About freaks, that is!”

Renny was Colonel John Renwick, the civil engineer of Doc’s group of assistants. He had been in Chicago, and the bronze man had radioed him to fly to Missouri to case the vicinity of the mystery manse in anticipation of their arrival.

The hairy chemist worked the radio for a time and came back saying, “His plane landed in a government landing field, all right. But he ain’t come back for it. Must be still searchin’ around.”

“Maybe we had better ask the Missouri State Highway Patrol to investigate,” Ham suggested.

“Long Tom and Johnny are near,” Doc told him. “We will have them look into the thing.”

Ham looked slightly surprised. “Where are Long Tom and Johnny?”

“En route to the scene from Toronto.”

The bronze man turned over the controls to Monk then switched on the radio microphone. Behind inspection ports, tubes glowed.

“Long Tom—Johnny!” he called into the microphone.

“Johnny speaking,”
answered a rather scholastic voice from the loudspeaker.

Johnny was William Harper Littlejohn, the long-worded geologist and archeologist of the group. He was addicted to the linguistic equivalent of jawbreakers, which he never inflicted on Doc Savage. Johnny was an individual so tall and thin that it had been said of him that he could take a bath in a rifle barrel—an exaggeration, of course. But not much of one.

Doc gave the location of the landing field, which was a government-operated emergency field in Millard.

“You fellows had better drop up there and see if anything has happened to Renny,” he directed. Then he switched off the apparatus.

Hours later, they heard from Long Tom Roberts.

“We found Renny. He’s pretty bunged up. Claims a wild Indian tried to scalp him.”

“What happened to the Indian?” prompted Doc.

“Renny says he got clean away. But he got Hiawatha’s tomahawk away from him, and he’s talking about hunting him down and giving him a close haircut with it.”

“Tell Renny to hold his horses. We are less than an hour away.”

“Right,”
said Long Tom.

“Anything else?” asked Doc.

“Yeah. Johnny says the tomahawk looks like the ones they used to make in the old days. But it’s not old-looking at all.”

Doc requested, “Put Johnny on.”

A moment later, Johnny came over the loudspeaker.

“Salutations, Doc.”

Which was actually a modest greeting for the bony archeologist. He loved his big words, a relic from the days when he occupied the Natural Science chair at a prestigious university.

“Tell me about the tomahawk,” Doc requested.

“It looks as if it was made last week. The rawhide thongs show no signs of aging. But to make one like this, you would have to be practically a woods-dwelling Sac or Fox.”

“What did he say?” Ham asked, brow puckering.

“Johnny just named two of the tribes who formerly inhabited Missouri and surrounding states,” explained Doc.

“Have you investigated the mystery of the disappearing house?” asked Doc into the microphone.

“Not yet. We were too busy hunting down Renny.”

“Do so now. We will be there directly.”

“Signing off,”
said Johnny. The loudspeaker went dead.

Ham spoke up. “What do you make of it, Doc?”

“It is very strange,” admitted the bronze man.

Monk scratched behind an ear, noticed that Habeas had ventured out into the open and, picking him up, scratched one of the shoat’s ludicrously long ears, too.

“Which?” he wondered. “The disappearin’ house, or the scalpin’ wild Indian?

“Both,” said Doc Savage, turning his attention back to the night sky visible through the airship’s windshield.

Chapter V

BEAUTY IN BURLAP

THE OLD MAN with the hairy ears was injured—the side of his hairless head had been clubbed with something a time or two. Four of his pockets, two in the pants and two in the coat, held pint whiskey bottles; two of these had the seals unbroken. And there was no reason to doubt that he was gloriously drunk.

Gull frowned, suddenly suspecting that Spook Davis and this old wolf had merely gotten tight together, retreated to this brush patch, and had a drunken fight. Such a possibility would explain this part of the night’s events in a satisfactory manner.

The ancient giant began to mumble and Gull switched off the light and bent close to listen to the gibberish.

“Alive—Columbus alive—positive,”  The old fellow said with unexpected distinctness.

Gull put his teeth together until he could feel the tightness in his jaw muscles. It didn’t appear that this part of the mystery was going to be explained merely as a fight between two stews.

Gull said, “Aren’t you stretching it a little, dad?” grimly.

He was surprised when the old man heard that and reacted to it by opening his eyes.

“Who’re you?” he wanted to know.

There was no reason why he shouldn’t be told, Gull decided.

“Gulliver Greene,” explained Gull.

“Liar!”

“What makes you think so, dad?”

The old fellow hiccoughed with exactly the same sound as if a dog had barked. He was very drunk, even if he could talk.

“Gulliver dead—they killed him—”

Gull experienced a sensation between his shoulder blades which he didn’t particularly care for.

“Why the killing, dad?” he asked tensely.

The old man reared up suddenly and began to mumble, his voice thick and vague, hardly understandable.

“—that dwarf—on my trail—The Great Gulliver’ll know whash shush-should—aw, hecksh wizzit—shoo—shouldn’t never monkey wish—wish—”

Gull shook him. “Who tied you up?”

“Huh?” He roused slightly. “Mush shaw your light and run.”

“What! Someone was here just now?”

“Sush-sure!” He rocked and his eyes closed.

“Where did they go?” Gull demanded.

But the old man made noises which sounded as if an idiot was trying baby talk, then went to sleep.

Gull straightened, held the scattergun tightly, listened, and heard nothing but the alcoholic breathing of the old man at his feet, but did not feel reassured. If there was someone around…. Well, they’d be escaping while he stood there—would be gone before the police arrived.

Gull shoved his jaw forward suddenly, angrily deciding he’d had about enough pushing around for the night. He didn’t like being baffled, didn’t enthuse over this stuff about people going to kill him—the more he thought about it, the more wrathful he became. He’d grab this prowler. Then he’d knock some explanations out of somebody….

He began to prowl through the brush, searching. The undergrowth was red oaks and was being pastured with sheep, hence the ground was free of weeds and tall grass except for now and then a bunch of buckbrush. Silent progress was not difficult, and he got along excellently until he stepped on something which lunged, emitted a bleat and upset him. A sheep. There were other sheep, a whole brush patch full of them, and they now scattered through the darkness in all directions. They could go, “Baa-a-a!” louder than any sheep Gull had ever heard.

Since there was nothing to be lost, he took out with the sheep, running south, hoping that he sounded like another sheep. He came out of the brush and unexpectedly ran into a barbed wire fence, but had luckily slowed. It was intensely dark due to the thickening clouds.

Gull had hold of the top strand of barbed wire, feeling to learn which way it ran, when it went taut. It had been very slack; now it not only tightened, but moved in a revealing way—someone was climbing over the loose fence not many yards away.

Gull yanked the wire. The other person overbalanced, fell off the fence; a hard fall, from the sound. Rather approving of himself, Gull leveled the shotgun and poked light out of the flash lens.

Then he did not feel so proud of himself because the cinnamon-haired girl on the ground looked as if she might be lifeless.

GULLIVER leaped to the young woman, who lay face down, and turned her over, wondering if the wealth of entrancing cinnamon-hued hair would carry out a promise that the girl would be a knockout. It did, and so satisfactorily that he was distinctly aware of something turning a handspring in his chest.

She was a long girl, possessing a sinewy curvaceousness that was pleasant to behold. It made tiny goosebumps appear on his wiry forearms—prickles that had nothing to do with the freshening October night wind. Her makeup was very subdued, or she wore none; she certainly didn’t need it. Her eyes were closed, and a trickle of scarlet crept from one corner of her shapely mouth.