The Polar Treasure - Robeson Kenneth. Страница 11

"I thought for a minute I'd die laughing!" he gulped hilariously. "The blind man said he wanted to feel the bumps on that wart Monk calls a head. Our fuzzy missing link of a pal let him.

"He got a telephone call first," Monk put in sourly.

"Who did?" Doc inquired.

"Victor Vail," Monk grumbled. "The phone rang. Some guy asked to talk to Victor Vail. I put the blind man on the wire. He didn't say much to the guy who had called. But he listened a lot. Then he hung up. After a bit, we got to arguin' about tellin' fortunes by the knots on people's heads. He claimed there was somethin' to it, an' offered to feel my conk an' tell me plenty about myself."

"And you fell for it!" Ham screamed mirthfully. "And he kissed the top of your noggin with that paper weight! Then he beat it!"

"You weren't here?" Doc asked Ham.

"No," Ham laughed. "I came in just as Monk woke up talking to himself."

"Aw — how was I to know the blind guy was gonna hang one on my nob?" Monk demanded.

"You have no idea why he did it?" Doc questioned seriously.

"None a-tall," declared Monk. "Unless he got the notion from that telephone talk."

"You don't know who called?"

"He said his name was Smath. But it might've been a fake name that he gimmy."

Monk took his hands away from his head. A nesting goose would have been proud of such an egg as now decorated the top of his cranium.

"That's one bump it'd be easy to tell your fortune from!" Ham jeered, his hilarity unabated. "It shows you are an easy mark for blind guys with paper weights!"

Doc Savage swung into the laboratory. The prisoners were lined up there. Each man snored slightly. They would sleep thus until the administration of a chemical which was capable of reviving them from the thing which had made them unconscious.

Doc ignored them. He lifted from the heavily laden shelves of equipment an apparatus which resembled nothing so much as the portable sprayers used to treat apple trees.

He carried this into the outer office.

Monk and Ham eyed the contrivance with surprise. The thing was a new one on them.

Monk asked: "What is — "

He never finished the query. Sounds of distant shots came to their ears.

The noise was coming from the street below. Doc whipped to the window. He looked out and down.

An extremely flashy car, streamlined almost as beautifully as the world's record-holding racer, was canted up askew of the curb. Two machine guns stabbed red flame from the racer — flame that looked like licking snake tongues.

Across the street, other guns spat fire back at them.

"It's Long Tom and Renny!" Doc rapped.

THE GIANT bronze man was whipping into the corridor with the last word. Johnny, Monk, and Ham followed. Monk had forgotten his cracked head with surprising suddenness.

The superspeed elevator sank them. Both Johnny and Ham, unable to withstand the force of the car halting, landed on the floor on their stomachs.

"Whee!" grinned Monk. "I always get a wallop out of ridin' this thing!"

Indeed, Monk had almost worn out the superspeed elevator the first week after Doc had it installed, riding it up and down for the kick it gave him.

Doc and his men surged for the street. A stream of lead clouted glass out of the doors.

Monk, Johnny, and Ham drew the compact little machine guns which were Doc's own invention. The weapons released streams of reports so closely spaced they sounded like tough cloth ripping.

Doc himself doubled back through the skyscraper. He left by the freight entrance, furtively, almost before his friends realized he was not with them. He glided down the side street, haunting the deepest shadows.

Reaching the main thoroughfare, he saw the fight still waged about as he had seen it from above. A lot of lead was flying. But nobody had been hurt. Renny and Long Tom were sheltered by the flashy racer — it was Long Tom's car. Their opponents were barricaded behind the corner of a building across the street.

Somebody had shot out the street lights at either end of

the block. The resulting gloom probably explained the lack of casualties.

Doc's bronze form flashed across the street. A bullet whizzed past, missing by ten feet. He was a nearly impossible target in the murk.

"It's de bronze swab!" howled one of the enemy. "Keelhaul me!"

The words were all that was needed to break up the fight. The gunmen fled. The had a car parked around the corner, engine running. Into this they leaped. It whisked them away.

A diminutive figure popped out from behind the racer. The small man sprinted wrathfully after the fleeing gunmen. His pistollike machine gun released spiteful gobbles of sound.

"Hey!" Doc called. "You're wasting your time, Long Tom!"

The small man came stamping back. Besides being short, he was slender. He had pale hair and pale eyes, and a complexion that looked none too healthy.

Only his extremely large head hinted that he was no ordinary man. "Long Tom," formally known as Major Thomas J. Roberts, was an electrical wizard who had worked with foremost men in the electrical world. Nor was he the physical weakling he appeared.

"The rats shot my car full of holes!" he howled irately.

The flashy racing car was the pride of Long Tom's heart. He had equipped it with about every conceivable electrical contrivance, from a television set to a newly perfected gadget projecting rays of an extremely short wave length which were capable of killing mosquitoes and other insects that might annoy the driver.

This latter device, worked out with some aid from Doc Savage, was probably destined to bring Long Tom worldwide fame. Farmers could use it to destroy insect pests. It was worth billions to the cotton growers alone!

As they approached Long Tom's racer, a mountain heaved up from behind it.

THE MOUNTAIN was Renny.

Six feet four would have been a close guess at his height. The fact that he looked nearly as wide was partially an optical illusion. He weighed only about two hundred and fifty pounds. On the ends of arms thick as telegraph poles, he carried a couple of kegs of bone and gristle which he called hands.

Renny was noted for two things. First, many countries knew him as an engineer little short of a genius. Second, there was no wooden door built with a panel so stout, Renny could not knock it out with one of his huge fists.

"How'd you birds start that fight?" Doc demanded.

Renny and Long Tom exchanged guilty looks.

"We drove up here as innocent as could be," Renny protested in a voice which resembled a very big bullfrog in a barrel. "Them guys ran out in the street and pointed a machine gun at us. Evidently we weren' t the birds they were expecting, because they lowered their guns and turned back. But we figured if they was huntin' trouble, we'd accommodate 'em. So we started a little good-natured lead slingin'!"

Doc smiled slightly.

"If the fight did nothing else, it cleared up something that has been puzzling me." he said.

"Huh?" Renny and Long Tom chorused, while Doc's other pals came up to listen. No one of the group had been injured.

"Until a moment ago, it was a puzzle to me why Keelhaul de Rosa turned Victor Vail loose," Doc explained. "But now I see the reason. Keelhaul de Rosa and Ben O'Gard are fighting each other. Just why, is still a mystery. Both were after Victor Vail.

"The reason for that is another mystery. But Keelhaul de Rosa got Victor Vail, and I be!ieve he got whatever he wanted from the blind man — something which required removal of the clothes from Vail's upper body. Then the violinist was turned loose as a bait to draw Ben O'Gard into the hands of Keelhaul de Rosa's gunmen. It was that crowd we just mixed with, because Keelhaul was along. They thought you birds were Ben O'Gard's men."