Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (26 page)

There was red oak timber outside. Mixed in with this dominant Missouri Ozark country growth were walnut trees, evergreens, and others. Hills surrounded the highway on all sides. On one side of the road—the left—the hills looked down over a shimmering blue surface. Lake of the Ozarks, it must be, the enormous body of water brought into reality by the great engineering feat that was the Bagnell Dam.

“The Promised Land is about a mile to the west,” said Christopher Columbus.

HARVELL BRAGGS came back toward the trailer. They could hear him breathing in a way only a fat man could breathe. Gull made gestures, and Spook Davis lay down on the floor and arranged the rope around his wrists to look as if he was still tied. Gull himself lay nearer the door, in a prominent spot, with the rope draped across his ankles, but with his hands behind him, gripping a saucer heaping full of black pepper which they had found in a galley can. This was the plan they had decided upon.

It did not work.

Harvell Braggs arrived at the door, jingled a key, then was very silent—didn’t even breathe—and sidled around to the other side of the trailer. He looked in through the broken window. Gull had no idea he was there. Braggs saw the pepper Gull was holding. A surprised gasp escaped him. Gull turned his head and realized what had happened.

“That revolver!” Gull yelled. “Let him have it!”

“No! No!” Spook bawled. “Don’t kill him! Give him a chance to surrender!”

Spook did not have any revolver on him.

Harvell Braggs ran around to the front of the trailer and jerked the coupling pin. Either he didn’t want a shooting scrape, or he did not care to partake of one armed with a shotgun which would not drive slugs through the side of the trailer with any effectiveness. He waddled rapidly to the coupé and got in.

Gull kicked the trailer door, caved in the veneer lining, but the outer skin held. He told Spook, “The old one-two!” and they hit the door together with their shoulders. It opened and they slammed out onto the ground. At the same time, the front end of the trailer dropped as the coupé started and the coupling came apart.

The coupé gears wailed noisily in low, clashed into second, and Gull and Spook pursued the machine. They gained. Harvell Braggs stuck his shotgun clumsily out of the coupé window. Spook Davis screamed as if he had already been shot and dived for the nearest tree. Gull also took shelter, but without the vocal demonstration.

Harvell Braggs did not fire the shotgun. He drove the coupé rapidly out of their sight and hearing.

GULLIVER said, “He may send the police back after us.”

They went back to the trailer, entered and picked up Christopher Columbus and the liquor bottle. Then, as an afterthought, also took a loaf of bread and some boiled ham. Spook Davis, somewhat recovered from the fright the shotgun had given him, thoughtfully stuck a small jar of mustard in his hip pocket.

“Which way to this Promised Land?” Gull asked, and turned around slowly pointing until Christopher Columbus said, “That way.”

Moving through the woods, they first tried to cooperate in carrying Columbus. It proved more feasible to take turns carrying him. The brush was very thick, the route steep, mounting sharply up a hill.

Topping a ridge, they saw below them a vast valley crowded the shore line of Lake of the Ozarks. This valley was intensely cultivated, and very green. The blue and the green created a pleasant effect. Corn seemed to be the most prominent crop.

Across the middle of this lush valley ran a paved road. The traffic lanes on this showed as dark streaks of grease, indicating it was a well-traveled road.

Beside the road, on the nearer side of the valley, stood a cluster of long white-washed buildings. Except for their pale hue, they resembled military barracks. There was an impressive revival tent, white in hue so that it resembled a canvas temple. Nearby was a larger structure, an airplane hangar of a thing. It was also white.

Along the road was parked a row of trucks, trailers and small automobiles. All of these were a uniform but unprepossessing gray.

“The Promised Land,” Christopher Columbus said.

Gulliver took a breath to ask the first of many questions, changed his mind and said, “Cass has his men scattered among the Silent Saints, eh? Do you know which men are his?”

Christopher Columbus looked miserable with his eyes. “No, I don’t.”

Gull said, “Then we’re asking for it if we go down there and let anybody see us. We’ll just hang out in the hills today, and maybe by night you’ll be able to walk, and we can get around a little without being seen.”

“A good idea,” Columbus agreed. “Three will be a crowd down there tonight, too.”

“Eh?”

“Each night in the Promised Land we hold the same kind of meeting as those held by the units which we send out all over the country. This is how we bring others into the fold.”

“How is that?” asked Gulliver.

“By including mind-reading in the sermon, the better to reach into the soul.”

Gull blinked. He whistled without emitting any sound.

In the course of the next hour, Gulliver learned quite a bit about the Silent Saints. First, he was reminded that Box Daniels had himself been a mind-reader, working his pitch in carnivals and chautauquas and on the stage. This, Gull concluded, made them kindred spirits—they had even worked some of the same theaters, although Uncle Box had been there years before Gull.

Box tried turning evangelist, but had proved himself ill-adapted to it. He had done this, Columbus explained, to get away from the carnival atmosphere, of which he was weary. He was bored with the kind of fake mind-reading that mentalists practiced, but had become fascinated by the possibility that the genuine faculty existed naturally in some persons.

“You see,” Columbus said earnestly, “two of our brothers were true possessors of extrasensory perception.”

There it is again, Gull thought. Mind-reading, even if Columbus was calling it a two-dollar word. He again stated flatly he did not believe there was such a thing. They argued for some time about it, neither convincing the other.

Changing the subject, Gull learned the Silent Saints were meek, righteous souls, living for nine months of the year close to the soil, and spending the rest of their time in traveling units, spreading the doctrine of the one true way. The true way, Gull gathered, was simply the healthy satisfaction and joy of living which came to almost anyone who had sense enough to get plenty of exercise and eat plain food. He was not irreligious, but he did not feel one needed the faith of the Silent Saints, if one had will power enough to live sensibly. The results would be the same.

“Who first suggested sending out these units?” he asked.

“Why—Ivan Cass,” Columbus said.

Gull was thinking that over when Spook Davis began hissing like a snake in the top of a tree which he had climbed to watch the valley below.

“Cass just arrived in the Promised Land!” Spook exclaimed.

GULLIVER climbed the tree, but decided he was too far from the Promised Land. He left Spook with Christopher Columbus, and crept down the hill, finally posting himself in a thicket much nearer the cluster of white-washed houses and the pale temple of a meeting tent. The latter, he understood, was the temple in which the Silent Saints held their meetings to convince the public—and no doubt to pass the hat, Gull thought heretically.

Watching, he saw Cass several times. Cass seemed to be merely mingling with the other Silent Saints.

But late in the afternoon, he saw something interesting. A car drove up, a gray machine evidently belonging to the Silent Saints. The three darkly clothed Saints who got out of this vehicle were received with a reception which somehow conveyed that they had been away a long time.

Later, one of the new arrivals casually met Ivan Cass behind one of the white-washed shacks. Something changed hands. The Saint walked away. Ivan Cass took the other direction, pocketing what he had received—apparently an envelope. He went to a large trailer and climbed into it. Cass had been entering and leaving this trailer all afternoon, and Gull marked it as one object to investigate when darkness arrived.

Gull went back to Spook Davis and the enigmatic Columbus.

“Was one of your touring units due to return today?” he asked.

Columbus showed surprise. “Why, how did you know?”

“One of the returned Saints slipped something to Cass on the sly,” Gull explained.

Christopher Columbus was improving. They ate the boiled ham and the bread, and used Spook’s mustard. And it made them very thirsty.

“I’ll be able to walk a little by darkness,” Columbus decided. The drugged quality in his voice had now gone away completely, which allowed his true tones to come to the fore. Although the unusual man spoke perfectly modern English, his fully revealed accent sounded strange and stilted to their ears.

Chapter XXVI

STORM

THEY ENCOUNTERED WEATHER on the way south. A storm front began moving in from the west. Dark thunderhead clouds were forming, seeming to bang together with a sound like small mountains colliding. They looked like mountains, too. Gray, granite ones.

Renny flew the pontoon plane wordlessly. The others were sunk deep in their thoughts. The dismal atmospherics seemed a reflection of their communal gloom.

Doc Savage was stranded in the past. By all reckoning, he was long dead. Their only hope was that Long Tom Roberts could fix the device that had made the Man of Bronze a castaway in time.

The situation was so beyond understanding that they found themselves having to grapple with it mentally. It seemed unreal.

“At least Doc has Habeas to keep him company,” Monk said in the middle of his funk.

“If your dratted nuisance pig hadn’t followed him back, maybe none of this would have happened.” This from Ham Brooks.

Monk glowered as he considered a suitable rejoinder. He decided that silence was best. He was miserable. They were all miserable. It showed on their faces and the strained way they avoided conversation.

Lake of the Ozarks came up under their wings as the sun began setting.

The lake itself lay nestled in the autumnal Missouri Ozarks like a sprawling blue-gray mirror laid against a profusion of brown and gold foliage. Storm clouds were bunched all about them now.

The sturdy plane began shuddering in the violent air. It was a low-wing all-metal job, streamlined to the ultimate. But it was no air goliath.

A sizzling bolt resembling a devil’s pitchfork erupted into view directly ahead, turning the sky into a momentary flash of fire.

Renny shouted, “Holy cow!” and fought the wheel. A booming cannonade followed. The wings vibrated alarmingly.

Rain began smearing the windshield. Renny engaged the wipers, but a fierce wind immediately plucked one away. A moment later, its mate was carried off. The glass swam. Visibility became impossible.

“I’m going to put her down on the lake,” Renny decided.

“It’s as good a place as any,” Monk agreed.

“Or as bad,” murmured Ham darkly.

The big-fisted engineer wrestled the control wheel around and gave the rudder abrupt pressure, as he prepared to drag the surface of the lake.

The plane was an amphibian, fortunately. So landing on water would not be a problem. Provided, of course, the turbulent atmosphere did not interfere.

Another boom told them that a thunderbolt had struck somewhere behind them.

Johnny peered out his window, saw a white-hot trident split a tree amid a shower of eye-hurting pyrotechnics.

“Coruscating Olympian pyrotechnics,” he gasped.

“No need to translate,” Monk grumbled. “Put us down, Renny.”

The giant engineer was an expert pilot. He turned on the landing floods and blinked as their backglow impinged upon his eyes.

Commencing his first dragging pass, Renny was startled when a succession of incandescent lightning displays made sizzling spidery cobwebs on either side of him.

“Heck!” he boomed. “I can’t see a durn thing. I’m setting us down now.”

Pushing the wheel ahead, he smashed the twin pontoons onto the smooth surface of the lake. The craft jarred, bounced, and bounced again.

Cutting the engines, Renny wig-wagged the rudder to kill some of their airspeed. That helped.

Soon, the ship settled in the dark waters, and all was still as a continuous booming erupted all around them.

“Some night,” Renny grunted.

Monk went to the hatch and flung it open.

He craned his furry nubbin of a head out and was instantly drenched. “We’re pretty far from shore,” he remarked.

“You know of a dryer place than in here?” Renny thumped.

Deciding that he did not, Monk slammed the door shut and returned to his spot on the cabin floor.

“Drat!” sniffed Ham, suddenly noticing that his shoe laces had gotten untied.

After he had retied them, Monk left the laces alone. His appetite for pranking had dwindled away. He was thinking of Habeas Corpus, trapped before his time.

Red lightning blazed across the sky, making the cabin interior lurid.

Peering out into the storm, Johnny said, “Disembarkation would invite electrocution.”

“If you’re sayin’ that we’d be sittin’ ducks to be struck by lightning,” said Monk, “I won’t argue the point. Especially if we set out on a raft.”

“Might as well grab some shut-eye,” said Renny, leaning back in the control bucket. “We’re not going anywhere until this storm breaks.”

As an opinion, it made perfect sense. As a prognostication, it was far from the mark, however.

NOT an hour passed before there came a knocking at the door.

Monk was sound asleep on the floor when it came. Rousing, he made sleepy eyes at the door. The others were also gathering themselves together.

“Who the heck is that?” demanded Monk.

“Why don’t you answer it and see?” snapped Ham.

Scrambling to his feet, the apish chemist said, “Maybe I will,” and ambled over.

They had no thought of danger. The situation did not seem to warrant it.

But just to be certain, Monk put his face to the door and lifted his voice.