Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (20 page)

The bear stumbled, actually turned a kind of somersault as it fell asleep in mid-stride, momentum sending it sliding along even after consciousness departed. The creature came to rest on its back, belly heaving as it breathed. It slept soundly.

The anesthetic gas dissipated almost as fast as it had vaporized—a property that kept it from affecting anyone standing away from it.

Squeaking shrilly, Habeas rushed up and sprang into the burly chemist’s clamping arms.

Monk demanded, “How is this possible? Did the others follow us?”

“No,” said Doc. “Habeas must have rushed the house and gotten as far as the porch when the dwelling removed itself from its foundation. No doubt the shoat’s senses were overwhelmed by the ordeal of the trip. He must have come to and followed our scent.”

“Well, hog, you’re comin’ back with us,” squeaked Monk.

At that juncture, Big Neck came rushing up and began hectoring them and gesticulating in an accusatory fashion.

“What’s he sayin’?” muttered Monk.

Doc replied, “Big Neck is insisting that we must go, but the pig has to stay.”

“What!”

“Remember that we gave Habeas to him.”

“Nothin’ doing!” Monk flared.

Big Neck howled wrath. Monk opened his comically wide mouth and showed teeth that would have shamed a bull gorilla. They were very intimidating molars.

“I am afraid,” said Doc, “that Big Neck will not take no for an answer.”

“Yes,” seconded Johnny. “He is very insistent.”

“That thick-necked tomahawk tosser will get Habeas over my dead body,” growled Monk.

“Settle down,” admonished Doc. “Let me handle this.”

Doc Savage turned to the others—for by now the other Iowans had trotted up—and made his case.

Big Neck made his in expository language, accompanied by expansive gestures. He pounded his chest for emphasis.

The Iowans, having patiently heard both parties, sided with their chief.

“They are insisting that Habeas remain behind,” translated Doc.

“Never!” bellowed Monk.

“It will be war if we do not acquiesce,” warned Doc. “Big Neck’s pride has been injured. He is spoiling for a fight.”

“I ain’t doin’ it!” yelled Monk, small eyes stricken.

Doc Savage went to Monk and laid a firm hand on one apish shoulder.

“Leave him,” he said earnestly. “We will come back for Habeas before anything dire can befall. It is the only sensible recourse we have.”

Face flushing, Monk Mayfair reluctantly set Habeas onto the ground.

Under his breath, he hissed, “Shoo. Scat. Or you’re breakfast bacon.”

Habeas needed no further encouragement. He fled, ears flying outward like pink fleshy wings.

But Big Neck was ready. He flung himself in the direction of Habeas’s curled tail and tackled the squealing porker to the ground, much like a halfback throws himself upon the pigskin football.

Howling, Monk leaped up. Doc got in his way, blocking him.

The homely chemist jumped up and down, raging like a Congo gorilla.

In a test of sheer strength, Doc Savage and Monk Mayfair were not equals. But Monk’s strength was born of sheer rage and desperation. He was no pushover.

It looked as if the two men were going to have to battle it out.

They circled one another and Doc shifted around to conceal his left hand, which stole into a pocket. Bronze fingers emerged, holding one of the tiny liquid-filled glass balls Doc usually carried. He broke this. Noticing this, Johnny held his breath, as did Doc. Monk did not.

Overcome by the invisible, odorless vapor, Monk abruptly collapsed on his feet.

Johnny murmured, “A calamitous gaseous ambuscade.”

Doc Savage bent down and lifted the slumbering chemist off the ground. Monk weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, much of it muscle, yet the bronze man picked him up without outward strain.

Without a word, he walked off, Johnny guiding the ransomed captive, while Habeas Corpus kicked sharp hooves and fought in vain to free himself from the clutches of his gleeful captor.

Chapter XIX

THE UNEXPECTED COLUMBUS

THE VACANT LOT was flat, and a little lower than its surroundings. The rain had turned it into a lake about ankle deep. Gulliver shuffled through it on hands and knees, a dark shape in the lightning. The rain flogged him. He kept the revolver above the water with one hand, holding Cass’ hat around it to keep it as dry as possible, which might be an unnecessary precaution so far as he knew since he had only read somewhere that cartridges sometimes didn’t explode after being immersed.

There had been no car attached to the gray trailer when he had followed Ivan Cass to the vehicle. One was hooked to it now. A coupé—small, black, and it was either new or the rain was making it look shiny.

The trailer’s color interested him. Gray, a mud gray. Exactly the same hue as the truck driven by the Silent Saints who were carrying the weird individual who resembled the historical Christopher Columbus.

Gull looked for a dog, but there was no dog. Listening in the rain uproar accomplished little, but he kept his eyes open in the lightning flashes. He saw no one.

Windows of the trailer were closed, but splinters of light indicated illumination inside. Gull got close beside it, and found the door. He knocked twice. He coughed. He knocked once again. It was the signal he had heard Cass use. He opened the door and followed the revolver inside.

The small man with the hound-voice and the others sat quite still on folding chairs and at the compact table.

Gulliver thought—now to get their hands up—

They lifted their hands.

Gull stiffened. He hadn’t told them… But of course it was the natural thing for them to get their hands up.

He’d make them turn around. The psychological effect of a gun at the back was greater….

They turned around.

Gulliver’s eyes narrowed, his lips pulled a little off his teeth, and he felt an absurd tightness up and down his back. They couldn’t be reading his mind like that! Gull was a magician, dealing in legerdemain. Creating the impossible, the incredible. But all his effects were mechanical, based on speed, trickery and misdirection, and like most magicians, he held no brief whatever in the genuineness of mediums, clairvoyants, spiritualists, mind-readers, or the rest of that ilk. He did not believe in extrasensory perception.

“Stay like that!” Gulliver ordered grimly.

There should be a rope or a clothes line around the trailer. He roved his green eyes, saw none, but noted a seat-locker, rather large, across the forward end of the trailer. He concluded to back up and open the locker on the chance that….

“There’s a rope in that cupboard by your elbow,” the hound-voiced little man said.

Gulliver, growing tighter all over, felt as if the water soaking his clothing had become very cold. The impossibility of the evidence occurring before his eyes appalled him, hurtled with stunning force against his smug platform of conviction that all things are of the body and reality. He felt utterly shaken, confounded by the incredible, but growing, conviction that these men were actually receptive to his own thoughts. The structure of facts which he had erected—there had been good motives for the slaying of Box Daniels and the telegraph operator—had been menaced by the impossibility that Christopher Columbus, discoverer of America, was somehow alive, but he thoroughly believed there was a sensible explanation for that, even the grisly one that the girl, Saint Pete, was unbalanced. But this new development threatened to demolish the sanity of things, to scatter and confuse with impossibility.

“Where’d you get that gun?” the hound-voiced midget asked, booming.

It was Cass’s gun, of course.

“Cass carried blanks in his gun,” the small man yelled triumphantly.

Gulliver glanced down involuntarily at the gun—and a folding chair hit him.

A MAN to the right of the group had thrown the chair. One to the left drew a gun. Spun half around by the chair, Gull saw the gun coming out, saw also other hands stealing for pockets. Gull dived out through the door, whanging it shut behind him.

Whirling, he exploded his gun at the trailer. The sides were thin and let the bullet through. Someone bawled inside. They had rushed toward the door, but the bullet drove them back.

“One of the blanks!” Gull yelled. “Here’s some more!”

He put two more bullets into the thin skin of the trailer. His breath came and went with whizzings through his teeth. He felt conscious of the hardness of his muscles, but his mind was detached from all fright for the moment, dulled by the potent drug of intense anger.

Lead came out of the trailer. The shots bumped hollowly inside. The bullets, after they were outside, made about the sounds that a man with pneumonia makes when coughing. Their menace made Gulliver change position, and when he stopped, it occurred to him that if they were really mind-readers, they could tell where he was. Evidently, this was not the case, because only one slug came close.

“Throw them guns out or I’ll make a sieve out of that thing!” Gull roared.

Even then, no unusual amount of lead came in his direction. In the trailer, they couldn’t locate his voice accurately. He waited. No guns were thrown out. He worked around in front, so his lead would range the length of the trailer, but there was a crash on the side as a window was broken, then the thump of a man hitting the ground. A gun banged from beside the window by which they were leaving. Thunder rumbled, and lightning gushed through the rain. Gull saw the men, fired at them. They shot back.

Gull turned and ran in the darkness. The capture attempt had flopped. The thing to do now was get the girl, Cass and Spook Davis and leave this vicinity.

Gull ran toward where he had left Spook. And rapid footsteps came to meet him. He halted.

“Hold it!”

Spook Davis puffed, “I heard yelling and thought maybe—”

Gun noise thumped and several bullets searched for their voices.

“They’re
shooting!”
Spook croaked. “Holy Houdini, I thought it was thunder!” He ran wildly, not back in the direction from which he had come, but off to the right, his thoughts only of getting away from the terror of guns.

The big voice of the little man bawled angrily, ordering his men to rush Gulliver. They did this enthusiastically, shooting, waving the beams of powerful flashlights. Gull retreated, dodging off in the direction Spook Davis had taken.

Then Ivan Cass began to yell, great whooping shouts which carried to the lot where the trailer stood. His men heard him and ran toward him. Gull raced with them. Their flashlights picked him up, and their lead drove him to one side again, kept him from reaching Cass and the girl before they did.

Desperate, Gulliver doubled back and sprinted through the rain and storm noise to the trailer. The door stood open, and he dived through it. He was hunting another gun—he had fired this one five times, and it only held five cartridges.

Inside, the trailer was a surprising wreck. Someone had torn the table from its fastenings, window glass was over the floor, and bullet holes were rimmed with splinters, leaking stuffing out of upholstery. Gulliver was lucky and wrenched open a tall locker beside the door which held a repeating shotgun and a broom. He pulled back the slide a little and a dark blue shell cocked up at him.

Leaving the trailer, he splashed rapidly to the small coupé, opened the door and stood beside it, holding it open, resting the shotgun inside, out of the rain. He used his other hand and located the light switch. He waited. The lights were pointed toward the street, the direction by which Cass and his men would return….

When he heard them, he turned on the lights, made out their dim figures clearly enough to know Saint Pete was not in the lead, then pumped three charges out of the shotgun. The men yelled and cursed and shot, then ran away. He waited for them to return….

They did not come back.

GULLIVER waited beside the coupé for a long time, listening, expecting an attack. The loudness of the storm decreased, and the violence went out of the rain, although it continued to pour down heartily. He saw lights come on in three houses two blocks distant—they were the nearest houses—and the residents looked out of the windows, one of them coming out on his porch. They looked and listened; after the thunder cracked a few times, they went back inside, evidently concluding that was what had made the racket.

Waiting drained from Gull Greene some of the anger that had made him, he thought to himself, go through the gunfight like a veteran. He jammed his back to the car and no longer kept the shotgun inside out of the rain, but held it tight and ready.

When Spook Davis called softly, he all but fired.

“They gug-gone?” Spook wanted to know.

Apparently, they had, for Gull and Spook crouched for many minutes and heard nothing but the rain, and the occasional lightning, distant now, showed nothing. Cass was back with his men, and they had Saint Pete again. Gull made his jaw muscles ache pulling his teeth together. He and Spook Davis were almost back to where they had started.

“We sure had us a streak of luck, didn’t we?” Spook muttered.

Gulliver asked, “You hurt anywhere?”

“My heart won’t ever be the same again.”

Gulliver considered. “Stick here.”

“Alone?” Spook gasped. “They may come back!”

Gull moved off into the night, hunting, but he located no one, although he roamed for fully half an hour. He ventured downtown, which was reckless, but saw no sign of Cass, the small man with the big voice, Saint Pete, or the other men, the mind-readers—if they were mind-readers. Sight of a State Highway Patrol car in front of a restaurant robbed the downtown district of its charm. He went back to the lot and the trailer, noting as he approached that things seemed quiet.

Spook Davis was not in sight.

“Spook!” Gull called.

“Come in out of the rain and see what I found in the big locker in the end of this thing,” Spook shouted from inside the trailer.

“See what?’

“It may be hard to believe,” Spook Davis said, “but Christopher Columbus is in here.”