Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (7 page)

“Whew!” Gull exploded.

Maybe he’d killed her! The fall could have broken her neck. Gulliver felt exactly as he had the last time he’d dived into the Santa Fe pond for a swim. It was much too late in the year to go swimming; he’d all but froze.

He spoke to her wildly, kneaded her slender wrists. This got no result. He began perspiring. He’d better carry her to the old farmer’s house and telephone for a doctor. But dared one move a person with a broken neck? He’d have to go telephone a doctor….

“No, thanks,” she said meekly. “You can spare me the doctor.”

Gull was so astonished he failed to notice that he had said nothing aloud about any medico.

“Glory be! You’re not—”

“I bit my tongue when I fell,” she explained faintly, and produced a small white handkerchief. “The fall must have stunned me for a moment.” She shut her eyes tightly, apparently waiting for a dizzy feeling to go away.

Gull, deciding that her throaty voice left nothing to be desired, treated himself to a sigh of relief. Then he noticed her shoes—shoes which seemed rather unfitting for such a beauty; they were heavy leather, and they also had brass caps on the toes and brass reinforcing on the moderately high heels. Her frock, he observed, was of some dark homespun stuff, about as plain a garment, in fact, as could be constructed. It appeared to be burlap. Imagine—a burlap dress! The effect was delightful, though. She certainly was a beauty. He decided it was time he told her he was sorry about making her fall….

She seized his arm. “That old man! Did he get away?”

“The one with the hairy ears?”

“That’s him!” she gasped.

“He’s still tied up. And in a drunken sleep,” Gull explained, startled by the young woman’s vehemence.

She tried to get up, made a small sound of pain, and sank back.

“Get him!” she ordered.

“Huh?”

She clutched his arm with both hands, shrilled, “Someone is trying to kill us both! You’re Gulliver Greene—I’ve heard you described. I eavesdropped, but I couldn’t learn anything about the horrible business except that you were one of those to be killed. That old man knows. I was following him. I knocked him down with a stick and was tying him up when you scared me away. Go get him!”

“But—”

“Go get him before he escapes!” she said, almost raging. “He’s the key to this whole thing!”

In her agitation, the girl tried to get up, and did reach her feet, but after two steps in her heavy brass-shod brogans, she swayed dizzily, would have fallen if Gull had not supplied an arm.

“I seem to be dizzy!” she gasped. “Oh—get that old man!”

Gull eyed her. “Who are you?”

“Saint Pete,” the girl snapped. “Oh, do go and—”

“Wait for me,” Gull grunted. “I’ll bring him here.”

FRIGHTENED sheep gave Gull an uncomfortable stare as he ran through the red oaks with the flashlight and the shotgun. In the east, there was a faint bumping noise that was probably thunder, but otherwise the night was almost unnaturally quiet and dark—the clouds, packing more tightly overheard, were slowly turning the sky into an infinitely black thing. Gull put the back of a hand against his forehead where the perspiration on his oily skin kept gathering in drops which jiggled down his face with a sensation closely akin to small bugs crawling.

The old man with the hairy ears still slept, blowing great noisy breaths of alcohol fumes. Gull stooped, lifted him, found him surprisingly heavy. Because it was a little difficult to carry a burden through the brush, Gull moved to one side, found the path which was the shortcut, and followed that, using his flashlight clumsily with the hand which also held the old shotgun.

Broken glass on the path stopped him for a moment. A shattered whiskey bottle, the liquid still splattered over the ground and the surrounding bushes. Gull decided this was where Spook Davis had been whacked over the head with a whiskey bottle.

The Great Gulliver staggered on, his thoughts more occupied with the young woman than with the rest of the mess. Saint Pete, as she had called herself, was something unique. He had distinctly liked the warm feeling he got by looking at her exquisite lines.

He reached the fence, moved along it to where he had left the girl, then poked around for some moments with the flashlight before the truth yanked him up rigid, causing his mouth to fall open and the flashlight beam to become motionless, pointing at nothing in particular.

Saint Pete had taken her departure.

Chapter VI

THE WILDEST INDIAN

THE DIRIGIBLE PASSED over the small landing field in Millard, Missouri, a little past midnight and, seeing no activity through the quartz lens, they pushed on toward the spot where the weird house was reputed to stand, somewhat northwest of the town of La Plata.

At this point, Doc Savage had donned a pair of goggles that were thick and complicated, obviously housing intricate apparatus. These enabled him to see what the infra-red searchlights disclosed to the others.

He followed a highway until he came to a dirt turnoff, then tracked that for a while.

Below, forest grew thick. Leaves had begun falling off trees. These should be brown and gold with some scarlet, but in the infra-red light, colors could not be discerned. All was an eerie world of shifting contrasts.

Suddenly, a thin white whisker of light shot up. It was amazingly intense, for all the fact that it was no thicker than a pencil. It might have been composed of hardened light.

A second rod popped into life. Then a third. They waved about like incandescent insect feelers.

“Those are our spring-generator flashlights,” called out Monk. “They’re directly below.”

“Radio them,” Doc told Monk.

The hairy chemist flew to the radio set and raised the party below. Each of Doc’s men carried small portable radio transceivers. They had a limited range, but were very effective within that range.

“Everyone O.K.?” Monk asked.

“Holy cow!”
came a booming voice that could only be Renny Renwick.
“Have I had a night!”

“It ain’t over yet,” Monk reminded him.

“First I was set upon by a scalping Indian, and then I saw a house up and disappear when I walked up to it,”
Renny thumped mournfully.

Doc Savage called over, “Ask Renny to direct us to the house in question.”

Monk repeated the request. A rapid exchange followed.

“Renny says it’s due south, about a mile and a half up the trail they’re on,” reported Monk.

A frown flickered in Doc’s golden orbs.

“No better road?”

“No. He says the only way to the house is along this path, which ain’t wide enough for an automobile.”

Doc nodded. “Tell the others to remain where they are for the time being.”

Doc Savage gave the throttles a stiff bat, and the tiny airship nudged ahead, dual propellers whirring.

Following the forest trail was easy. It was the only one.

“Looks kinda like the Indian paths of the olden days,” Monk muttered, as he watched it unreel beneath his feet in the big quartz lens.

“No doubt it was,” said Doc.

Soon, they were upon the site of the mysterious dwelling.

Except that there was no dwelling. There was a clearing all right, and a foundation. It was a slab type of foundation. No cellar hole. The path ran straight toward it and picked up on the other side. There was no sign of any water or electrical hookups.

Doc propelled the dirigible along the path for a quarter mile, just to make certain that were was no other houses in the immediate vicinity.

It was clear that there was none. Any structure would have poked its roof up through the shivering crowns of trees. Still, to be sure, Doc made slow circles around the area.

“Devilish deserted,” ventured Ham.

“This is the only spot cleared of woods for miles,” Doc agreed.

Turning the airship around, the bronze man made a beeline for the slab foundation and managed to station the dirigible over it by cutting the engines ahead of time and coasting to the spot without power.

This enabled them to hover after a fashion over the slab, although a breeze pushed them about a bit.

“No house at all,” said Doc.

Frowning, Ham got on the radio.

“We found the spot, but there’s no house there,” he declared.

“Didn’t I already say that?”
Renny returned in his bearish voice.

“But you claimed that you saw it!” Ham demanded.

“I saw the roof outlines. It was a Victorian. One of those rambling old monstrosities garnished with a lot of useless gingerbread and a tower like a wizard’s cap.”

“You saw the roof, but not the house?”

“I spotted a light in the tower,”
clarified Renny.
“Shape of a window pane.”

“So what happened?” asked Monk, leaning into the mike.

“I came up the path and saw the gabled parts of the roof,”
rumbled Renny.
“That was when the scalping party commenced.”

“Who got scalped?” put in Monk, simian features puckering with interest.

“Nobody. The redskin ran into my fist. He didn’t like it.”

That was possibly the understatement of the century. Renny’s fists were quart-sized pails of bone and gristle. Being beaned by a brick was probably a step down in discomfort.

“Describe your assailant,” requested Doc Savage.

“He wasn’t very big, but he was all wire and muscles. Wore a deerskin breechcloth, and not much else. He sneaked up from behind and tried to take my hair in one hand and slice off the top of my scalp with the other. But I heard a twig snap, and turned just in time to skin my knuckles against his nose.”

“He say anything?” asked Doc.

“Yeah. But I couldn’t make it out. It was Indian lingo. I scouted around for a time and found that I was pretty close to the house. So I made for it. I couldn’t have taken my attention off it for more than a few seconds, while I searched for that Indian. When I laid eyes on the roofline again, it plumb wasn’t there.”

“Any other phenomena?” asked Doc.

“None. By the time I reached the spot, I came upon the same slab you are looking at now.”

“A trick,” sniffed Ham. “No doubt the actual home is elsewhere and Renny witnessed some type of clever fakery.”

“I dunno,” Monk muttered. “Renny’s got pretty good eyes and his woodcraft is top-notch. He would be hard to fool.”

“A house cannot simply vanish,” Ham insisted.

“So where’s the other house—the real one?” countered Monk.

Ham Brooks had nothing to offer.

Monk looked to his bronze chief, his homely face a wide question mark.

Doc Savage added nothing further to the argument. Instead, he said, “Let us pick up the others.”

ENGAGING the engines, Doc sent the dirigible over the spot where their three remaining comrades were camped.

A blazing pencil light pierced the night. Midges could be seen swirling in its beam, and a solitary moth fluttered around its vortex curiously.

Releasing the grappling hook from its hull receptacle, Doc snagged a sturdy oak tree and winched the craft as close to the ground as the thick trees permitted. He threw open the hatch, dropped out the heavy knotted climbing rope.

One by one, they slipped to the ground, Monk sliding down one-handed, Habeas the pig cradled in his other arm. He made it look easy.

Johnny Littlejohn greeted them. He was distinguished by a shaggy mop of hair and a lapel monocle which he never wore, and which was a handy magnifying glass. He was so tall he seemed to tower seven feet high, but some of that was skeletal illusion.

Renny Renwick was another giant, but his size consisted of mass, like a well-muscled mastodon, minus the shaggy coat. He was the civil engineer of the group, and looked the part. A forbidding expression dragged down his countenance, which was perpetually gloomy of cast. Strangely, this was the towering engineer’s way of smiling. At the ends of his wrists hung a pair of fists as large as the wooden mallets seen at carnival side shows for the purpose of displaying a man’s strength by ringing a bell.

Last was Long Tom Roberts. In his own way, he looked as unhealthy as skeletal Johnny—but going in the opposite direction. Slender, his complexion resembling a cellar-dwelling mushroom, Long Tom was the smallest of Doc’s men. He made up for his lack of stature by packing around a temper which, when unleashed, was as formidable as Monk’s hairy arms, or Renny’s gigantic fists. Owing to this, the others left Long Tom strictly alone when he was riled. He was the electrical engineer of Doc’s group, and the long hours he spent in his windowless cellar workshop explained his expertise and his pale skin alike.

Doc Savage began examining the tomahawk, which he had taken from Johnny the archeologist.

Doc’s flake-gold eyes regarded it intently for almost a minute as he turned it over in his metallic hands, hefted it, judging its workmanship as well as its practicality.

The war axe was carved from granite and mounted on a hickory shaft less than two feet long. This was hollow and at the poll was a bowl receptacle for inserting tobacco.

“They would smoke tobacco from the lower end,” said Johnny.

Doc nodded. “There is dried blood on the edge,” he said.

“Not mine,” insisted Renny.

“Maybe someone should part your hair,” muttered Monk. “Indians didn’t take the entire scalp, just a patch at the top to show that they had beaten a foe. Maybe you got some hair missin’.”

Momentarily alarmed, Renny reached up with one big paw and felt of the crown of his skull. He encountered hair that had been smeared down with Pomade. No raw skin or moist spot.

Long face gloomy, Renny took an annoyed swipe at the hairy chemist. “Think you’re funny, huh?”

Monk bounced out of the way. “It never hurts to check,” he grinned.

Suddenly, a peculiar sound started up in the night.

HAD these Missouri woods harbored a bird combining the clear cry of the giant Roc out of the Arabian Nights with the call of a tiny tropical songster, such a hybrid creature might have authored the sound that filled the night. It was a mellow trilling, amazing to hear. It adhered to no tune, but was possessed of a weirdly haunting melody.