Doc Savage - The Derrick Devil Part 7

Reservoir Hill walked off into the damp woods which bordered the meadow. Hill appeared consumed by gloom. The others presumed he wanted to be alone with his morbid thoughts. They did not pay him particular attention.

Doc used a pocket mirror on the oil symbols. Often a mirror will turn apparently meaningless marks around and cause them to become legible. It didn't this time. The bronze man tried covering different parts of the marks, and scrutinizing them with the mirror and without.

Homely Monk became impatient. Monk liked action. Moreover, the horrible thing that had happened to Vida Carlaw preyed on his mind. By moving about, he kept himself from thinking of that so much.

"I'm gonna see where Reservoir Hill went." Monk said. "Him and me will probably look around for some trace of which way these fellers went."

Monk ambled into the thick brush. Reservoir Hill had mashed the wet gra.s.s down with his feet. The trail was easy to follow.

None of the others paid particular attention to Monk. They were occupied with the puzzle of the symbols in oil. Ham, Renny, Johnny and Long Tom were baffled by now. As a matter of fact, they had been from the first.

Doc Savage, however, was still at it. He had produced paper and pencil, and was trying different combinations of the symbols. Once, he made the strange, trilling noise which was so unearthly, so defiant of description. It had a definitely baffled undertone this time.

The bronze man abruptly put the pencil and paper away.

"The characters have no meaning, apparently," he said.

Johnny, at least, and probably the others, knew that the metallic giant's admission covered a great deal of territory. Doc had done more than study the marks and write them down in different orders.

His agile brain had probably probed into a dozen ramifications of pictorial language, not neglecting the various systems of symbols used by hobos to indicate houses which are good and bad pickings.

Suddenly, so brief that the others almost failed to catch it, Doc's trilling sang out.

"Quick!" A crashing haste was in the bronze man's voice. "Get your weapons ready!"

Ham gulped, "But what-"

"We have fallen for a trick!" Doc told him.

MONK was at that moment having trouble following the footprints of Reservoir Hill. The old oil man, to Monk's surprise, had kept walking. The footprints had been close together, an indication Reservoir had merely plodded on. But Monk had expected to catch up with him earlier.

A haystack appeared ahead. Monk expected to find Reservoir on the other side. He walked close to the stack, rounded it, and stopped. No one was in sight. But the gra.s.s! Not one set of footprints-many-not all Hill's-what- Monk's cogitation ended there.Hay fell on him. Hay and a man. The man kicked Monk in the face as he came down. Monk made a honking noise, grabbed the fellow, banged him on the ground. The victim actually bounced. And he sounded as if he had a leak somewhere, through which a lot of air had been driven.

"Blazes!" Monk exploded.

The man answered the description of one of the crowd which had decoyed Vida Carlaw to her fate. Monk c.o.c.ked a fist and waited for the fellow to arise.

Monk was a bloodthirsty soul, and had no great scruples about hitting a man when he was down. He liked to see this one bounce. When he couldn't get up was time enough to work him over on the ground. Doc Savage had never quite succeeded in training Monk to restrain his impulsiveness.

More hay and more men arrived. One. Two. A third. Monk whooped, scooped with his arms, got two of them.

He did a neat trick and rapped the third on the top of the head with a heel. Only three! Just exercise! None of them were big.

Monk got an arm around each of the two surviving foes, jumped up and down, ape fashion, turned two somersaults, and had them dizzy. It was going to be simple.

Other men were heaving from the haystack. Hands got hold of Monk. Fists. .h.i.t him.

The tops of haystacks are weighted down. It is a precaution the farmer takes to keep his hay from being blown away. Two fence posts, joined by a wire or binder twine, usually make up each weight.

One of these fence posts was the deciding factor in the fight. For ten minutes or so after it hit him, Monk lay in abysmal darkness and dreamed he was just one jump ahead of dapper Ham who, not surprisingly, had become equipped with horns and a spike-pointed tail.

Ham caught up with Monk, and began to dig at Monk's ear with the lip of his sword cane. If Monk had had arms or legs, he could have fought back-

MONK got around to opening his eyes. There was no Ham. The sword cane in his ear was a finger. The owner of the finger was a hard, brown rascal with a face that would have interested a criminologist.

"This ticklin' always wakes 'em up," said the owner of the finger.

Monk shut his eyes and relaxed. He was going to let the other start s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a finger around in his ear again; then he was going to knock the blazes out of the lad.

There was nothing wrong with the idea, except that Monk discovered he was tied hand and foot.

"Up and away with 'em," a man said airily.

Monk decided to let out a bellow, on the chance Doc would hear. He sucked his chest full of air, got set-and they stuck a wadded felt hat in his big mouth.

The homely chemist was lifted, carried rapidly through the timber. His captors did a lot of looking behind them. They dropped a word or two which convinced Monk they were the same mob which had pursued Vida Carlaw to New York and attempted to prevent her reaching Doc Savage.

"That bronze guy isn't anybody to kid around with," one uneasy fellow remarked. "The way he moved around in New York was somethin' to see!"

"We got the girl outta his hands, didn't we?" another snapped.

"We didn't stop 'er reachin' 'im, did we?"

They came to a graveled road, one evidently not used very much. Two automobiles stood under a tree beside the road. Big cars.Monk noted they had well-worn tires. No tread marks on such tires to make identification easier. Monk scowled at the cars.

"You old pot-belly!" Monk thought. "I had a hunch you wasn't what you let on!" He'd have said it aloud, but for the gag.

Reservoir Hill sat in the front seat of one of the cars. He pushed out his mouth at Monk and spat over the side.

The captors heaved Monk in the other car. Everyone loaded aboard. The motors hooted, and the machines rolled. Both cars traveled fast for two miles.

"You figure we'll be safe in Cleveland?" a man asked, doubtfully.

"Sure," said another. "When we get to the city limits, a fake telephone company truck will meet us. We'll dress up as telephone company linemen, ride right into the burg, and n.o.body will suspect a thing."

"It'll take us right to the joint over Blackie's garage on Nineteenth, where we're gonna hang out?"

"Sure."

Monk was down on the car's floorboards, where they had shoved him. He had squirmed about, and quite accidentally, had found a pencil. It was lying where some one had dropped it, perhaps by accident.

Monk went through some motions that might have been those of a man bothered by a cootie. He got the pencil. It was stubby, just right to hide between his fingers. Furthermore, the floorboards were exposed at one end, where the carpet had been kicked up. Writing a message on them would be simple.

Monk wrote.

THE car bearing Monk drove two more miles and came to a bridge over the same creek which ran through the farmer's place. The creek was so much larger here that it could not have grown naturally. So it was probably nearing Lake Erie.

The car stopped in the middle of the bridge. The other car pulled up behind and also halted. Men got out quickly and threw their coats under the cars, directly beneath the engine pans.

"That's so no oil will leak onto the bridge planks and show we stopped here," a man said.

They yanked Monk out of the car.

The bridge was a low concrete structure. The men produced a rope and tied it to one of the bridge's rail pillars.

A motor boat was approaching. It was a big craft, but had a well-silenced motor. It was hardly more noisy than an automobile. Those in the motor boat hailed the others.

"Make it snappy!" they advised.

"Wait a minute," a man said. "It'll only take a second to see if our trick worked."

The fellow leaned into the car and examined the spot where Monk had been lying. He burst out in a harsh chuckle.

"It worked!" he said. "Here's what he wrote: 'Fake telephone company truck, Cleveland. Blackie's garage on Nineteenth." The man squinted more closely. "It's followed by some kind of mark. I guess it's this guy's private sign, or somethin'. It don't mean nothin' to me."

They all burst out laughing. Monk got a gleeful kick in the ribs."We foxed you," he was told. "We dropped that pencil on purpose. We fed you that dope. You threw Savage off the trail yourself, because we'll let him find these cars abandoned on the outskirts of Cleveland."

Monk made puppy noises around his gag. His eyes were rage filled.

THE men began climbing down into the boat. Monk was lowered. It seemed two of the crowd were going to drive the two cars to the outskirts of Cleveland and abandon them. Then old Reservoir Hill was lowered into the boat. Monk's little eyes popped.

Reservoir Hill was bound hand and foot!

"They got me, then laid for whoever followed my trail!" old Hill gritted.

The coats were yanked from under the automobile oil pans. Away went the cars.

The boat lifted its bow and began to travel.

Reservoir Hill told Monk, "I guess you can figure what they're gonna do?"

Monk nodded.

"They're gonna scrag us if Doc Savage don't forget all about this!" Hill growled.

Chapter VIII. THE HIGH EYE.

DOC SAVAGE had done one thing daily since childhood. He had devoted a two-hour period to exercise. Not merely a flexing and strengthening of the muscles, but a scientific system of actions designed to strengthen eyes, olfactory senses, vision, hearing, and the others.

Perhaps the most unusual, and no doubt the more important, was the set of mental exercises which quickened his wits, strengthened his memory, and otherwise had equipped him with the amazing physical and mental powers which he possessed.

His aids, while remarkable gentlemen, did not have the bronze man's powers. They did not need them, however, to read the story of what had happened where Monk had been seized. Monk's captors had made no effort to cover up sign, and the story was plain.

Ham, searching in the hay, came up with an object and gulped, genuine grief in his voice, "Monk had this in his pocket!"

The object was an ear of corn which Monk carried to feed his pet pig, Habeas Corpus.

Doc Savage made a quick circle, his flake gold eyes reading further sign.

"Reservoir Hill was seized first," the bronze man explained. "Monk was following Hill's trail and was seized also."

Big-fisted Renny rumbled angrily, "Doc! That writing in the plane, with engine oil, must have been done just to decoy us here!"

"It was," Doc agreed. "Here. The mob went this way."

They had no trouble following the trail to the gravel road. But not even a bloodhound could have followed it any farther.

THEY were back at the plane when the farm boy came running up."Somebody wants you on the telephone," he told Doc Savage. "He said to tell you that by now you probably know you had better talk to him."

The bronze man whipped to his own plane, entered the control cabin, and switched on the radio transmitter.

Ordinarily, it operated on a short wave, but he lengthened the wave length to that of the police broadcast band. A number of police stations maintained both transmitting and receiving equipment In not much more than a minute, police were tracing the telephone call to the farmhouse. This method of having the call traced was necessary, since the caller was waiting on the wire, and the farmhouse boasted no other instrument with which to locate a call.

Doc whipped toward the farmhouse. The boy's kite was still high in the air. It was a well-designed kite, because it remained almost stationary.

The voice on the wire was that of the man who had tried to seize Vida Carlaw on the big pa.s.senger plane from Oklahoma-the lad who had narrowly escaped from Doc.

"No doubt you are having this call traced by now," he said wisely. "Therefore, I'm not going to be sucker enough to talk very long. Get this! We've got one of your men, and we've got old Hill. Hill is a meddling old goop, so we're going to shoot him and leave him on a road somewhere. You'll hear about it when his body is found.

"This will be done to demonstrate we're not birds who can be fooled with! As long as you lay off us, your man Monk won't be damaged! But no longer, see!"

The confidence in his voice was not up to that in his words. He seemed very glad to hang up.

Not more than three minutes later, a report came that the call had come from a drug store in Cleveland, but the man had gone by the time police could get there. Another call came half an hour later. Yes, the man had escaped.

Doc went out and watched the farm boy fly his kite.

"Doing all right?" he asked the boy.

"I think so," the boy said. "I'm doing my best."

"In an hour," Doc suggested, "you can pull it down."