Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (34 page)

They landed at Chicago and ate in the lunchroom. While the plane was being refueled, Gull Greene was thoughtful.

The stock in trade of most mind-readers, he knew, was a bag of tested tricks to impress, a keen judgment of human nature, common horse sense and observation. To say nothing of luck, and a quick hand at making the other fellow fail to notice any mistakes. But this remarkable girl….

“The spot we are going to is out on one of the Great Lakes,” the girl revealed. “A seaplane should be much better.”

They rented one from the airport. By that time, it was almost dawn. They took off.

Gull shouted, “I wish you’d clear up that Christopher Columbus mystery. Who is he? What is Cass trying to get out of him? Why don’t you want to tell me?”

The expression which whipped the girl’s face shocked him, it was so agonized.

“The truth is too dreadful to impart,” she said at last.

Gull didn’t know what to say to that.

“You’ll be surprised,” Saint Pete added, “when we reach the island we are headed for.”

“Island?”

“They call it Rat Island.”

Chapter XXXIV

DEAD MAN ALIVE

DOC SAVAGE USED a State Highway Patrol police radio to contact Renny’s plane.

“Doc Savage calling RR-1,” he called into the microphone. He repeated this for over twenty minutes. RR-1 was the radio designation for Renny’s ship.

The thumping of far thunder in Missouri’s warm night was making it hard to hear over the static and carrier-wave hiss coming out of the radio loudspeaker. It caused Habeas Corpus to seek shelter under a desk.

There was no answer.

Long Tom Roberts stood by, his concerned face ashen where it was not the hue of a cellar mushroom. He worried an oversized ear while pacing.

Doc snapped off switches.

“They do not answer,” he said.

“One of them should have stayed with the plane.”

Doc shook his bronze head. “Not if they have scattered in the search for Christopher Columbus.”

“It’s a safe bet that they do not know about the other problem.”

“It is,” Doc Savage said slowly, “difficult to know which situation is more grave.”

Long Tom gathered his high smooth brow into corrugations.

“You don’t suppose that all these peculiar doings could be connected, do you?”

“So far it has not seemed so. But this has turned into a complicated matter.”

“Box Daniels was an operative of yours,” suggested the pale electrical wizard.

“A graduate of our college, who was sent to St. Louis to be on the watch for trouble worth our interest,” admitted Doc. “Hence the medallion he wore and the instructions thereon.”

A trooper barged into the radio room.

“A two-motored plane answering the description you gave us has gone down in the Missouri Ozarks, during a bad storm. It landed on Lake of the Ozarks.”

Doc Savage was so stunned by that pronouncement that he actually repeated the statement.

“Did you say Lake of the Ozarks?”

“Damn!” said Long Tom. “That’s where—”

“That’s where what?” asked the trooper, frowning.

“Never mind,” interrupted Doc. “Did the plane sink?”

“No. It’s just sitting in the middle of the lake, hatch open and cabin empty.”

“What portion of Lake of the Ozarks?” asked Doc.

“The northern arm, near where those Silent Saints have their main camp and headquarters.”

“What do you know of the Silent Saints?” asked Doc Savage.

“A group of itinerant evangelists,” reported the trooper. “As I say, they got their headquarters there, but they send out groups all around, preaching the faith and doing good deeds when they don’t pass the hat for donations.”

“Of good reputation?” asked Doc.

“A woman runs it. They call her Saint Pete. Seems honest, and there haven’t been any complaints about the outfit.”

“May we borrow an official car?”

The man nodded. “You can run the siren all you want, too.”

“Thank you,” said Doc.

DOC SAVAGE drove south at a high rate of speed. He used the siren from time to time, but only to clear a path. His metallic face was very grim.

“We thought he was long dead,” Long Tom was saying. “Drowned in the ocean before we could catch up with him.”

Doc did not reply at first.

“You will recall, Long Tom, that we never found a body.”

“Sure. But I never paid that any particular mind. He was so small, like a ten year old boy, but built like a miniature adult man. I always figured his body was washed out to sea, or he went down a shark’s gullet.”

“He is calling himself Monzingo Baldwin now.”

“Baldwin,” mused Long Tom. “That was the name of that brother and sister pair that worked with him, Buddy and Bess Baldwin. You put them through the college and straightened out their crooked thinking for good.”

“Cadwiller Olden has taken their last name for an alias, possibly as a sly jest.”

“Some joke,” grunted Long Tom. His mind went back to a time nearly a year ago when they were caught up in an incredible adventure surrounding a weird rock that a South Seas volcano had coughed up. This was no ordinary stone, for it contained an element hitherto unknown on Earth, which Doc had dubbed Repel. It had the uncanny property of hurling objects as large as ocean liners great distances. It was unbelievable stuff.

Unfortunately, a criminal genius named Cadwiller Olden had acquired a covetous interest in the Repel substance. Doc Savage and his men had trailed Olden from the South Seas to Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, where a portion of the expelled Repel rock had landed. There they had tangled, with the result that the ambitious little man had successfully carried off the powerful substance.

The mite commenced a reign of terror never before witnessed. Olden began loading Repel fragments into weapons with which his criminal army went on a campaign of wholesale crime and pillaging. One thing was certain—the very small man thought big. Doc tracked the foe down to a yacht anchored off the waters of Long Island. Olden had presumably drowned during a fierce battle. But no body had ever been recovered. Doc Savage and his men had loitered in the vicinity for several weeks, seeking the mortal remains.
⁸

Coast Guard and Harbor police had been alerted to keep a weather eye out for any sighting of a midget—any midget—should they encounter one.

Doc Savage had received no such report.

Tooling the patrol car south, weaving around blacktopped turns in farmland where dull red barns showed from time to time, Doc Savage rolled grim thoughts around in his head. In the back seat, Habeas Corpus slept.

After a time, the bronze man broke the silence.

“One aspect of Olden’s subsequent behavior puzzles me. He goes in for operations on a grandiose scale. But he has kept very quiet for almost a year.”

“I’ll admit it’s not like him,” Long Tom said. “You gave him a rough time over that Repel element. Could be he doesn’t want to tangle with you again.”

“It is a possibility,” admitted Doc.

“At least the little devil doesn’t suspect we know he isn’t pushing up daisies. It will make it that much easier to sneak up on him.”

Doc rarely used the word “I” in speech. But he did now.

“I am not proud of my record in dealing with Cadwiller Olden,” he said.

“Record?”

“For better than two years, I had been assembling data on a mysterious master criminal,” Doc said quietly. “A crook so subtle and so merciless that he was only a name. For a long time in my investigation, he was only a name.”

“You’re thinking that if you were more aggressive in the beginning, we might not have had all this trouble.”

Doc nodded. “And had I been more diligent last time, this present complication could have been avoided.”

“We’ll get him this time,” Long Tom said firmly. “Now that we know he is alive.”

“There is no telling what deviltry Olden may be engaged in.”

“Well, we haven’t received any reports about any phenomenal crime sprees in this area.”

“Olden appears to have been laying low for months,” Doc said. “Yet he murdered that depot agent in order to intercept the telegram from Box Daniels to Gulliver Greene, warning that Christopher Columbus is alive. This ties him into the Columbus mystery somehow.”

“What does a flop magician have to do with anything?”

Doc Savage seemed not to hear. He went on speaking, however.

“It all hooks together, but as yet the connecting skeins are unclear.”

“Herman Bunderson never said anything about any midget,” Long Tom murmured. “Just some talk about a fat collector of Columbus items who was mixed up in it all, Harvell Braggs, and another guy, a shady private detective named Ivan Cass. They were searching for Columbus, who was supposed to have stolen some stuff from Braggs’ collection.”

Doc Savage said, “We are looking for five individuals: Harvell Braggs, Ivan Cass, Gulliver Greene, Cadwiller Olden, and as fantastic as it may seem, Christopher Columbus. Should we find any one of them, there is every reason to believe he will lead us to the others.”

Long Tom grabbed fistfuls of pale hair. “My skull aches just thinking about it all,” he complained.

Ahead, faraway lightning danced soundlessly on the horizon.

Doc Savage gave the engine more gasoline.

Chapter XXXV

WOMAN’S INTUITION

THE LONELY ISLAND might have been a nodular gray whale floating on the largest of the Great Lakes, not many miles from the Canadian shore—or so it appeared when they first sighted it from an altitude of ten thousand feet.

They could not see the water, for it was early dawn, and a fog, very thick and probably no more than a hundred feet deep, lay over the lake. A coating of milky lather, it covered the island entirely at times. It seemed to be boiling, stirring.

Gull—he was flying the seaplane now—idled the motor and slanted down gently. It was a quiet motor. They could hear the wind singing in the wing struts.

He asked, “Sure that is it?”

Petella van Astor nodded at his side. “Positive. I have never been there, but I overheard Cass giving exact instructions on how to reach the place to the pilot who was to take Christopher Columbus—here.”

Gull glanced at her intently. She had not told him more than she had earlier, and he was accepting her reticence because there was nothing else to do. Many things about her puzzled him, but most of all the strain that came into her voice when she mentioned Christopher Columbus.

He decided to test her reaction. “Your long-haired friend claims to be the discoverer of America. Claims his name really is Christopher Columbus.
The
Christopher Columbus.”

“Have you ever heard of any
other
Christopher Columbus?” the girl asked without much emotion.

“Columbus called you his adopted daughter,” Gull pointed out. “Explain that.”

“That is how we refer to one another. But you misunderstand, Columbus did not adopt me. Rather, it was the other way around. You see, he is a kind of a castaway, shipwrecked in a land that is unfamiliar to him. When I found him, I took pity upon the poor man, and took him in.”

Gulliver didn’t know what to say to that. It—this whole thing—is an impossibility, he kept telling himself.

He decided to try her again. Yes, and he’d fool her. He’d think of some utterly irrelevant question and learn if—

“You needn’t go to all of that trouble,” Saint Pete said thinly. “It is not necessary.”

Gulliver sat perfectly still, feeling as if ice water was trickling down his backbone. Up until this moment, he had been trying to convince himself that Saint Pete had been reading his facial expressions and body gestures. But now—

Profoundly disturbed, anxious to do something to take his mind out of its present channel, Gull concentrated on his flying.

“We’re getting a break,” he said with an effort. “That fog will keep them from seeing us. Notice how the fog is boiling? There’s wind down there. Wind that will keep them from hearing our motor.”

She asked, “How do you want to work this?”

“I’ve got to know what we’re tackling.”

“I do not know what is on the island.” She looked at him levelly. “That is the truth. I suspect it is Cass’ headquarters. I’m certain Cass and Christopher Columbus and Spook Davis—as well as Harvell Braggs—are there. I believe the false Silent Saints will be guarding them. If they get us, they will slay you and Spook, and perhaps others—”

Gulliver waited. She did not continue, did not say who the others were. He believed she meant one of them would be herself.

“You wouldn’t tell me where we were going,” he said suddenly, “because you were afraid I would take this whole impossible story to the police on the chance that they might clear me of those murder accusations.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “You remember that my shoe was used to slay your Uncle Box? And my fingerprints were found on the knife that murdered the poor depot agent?”

Gull remembered that very well.

“Cass did that to terrify you further,” he suggested.

“I’m sorry,” Pete said. “I—I wanted to tell you.”

A protracted silence followed that admission.

Gull considered. If he cut power, it might be possible to glide down to the lake surface. It was not calm, as he could spy through occasional breaks in the boiling mass of condensation, the wind whipping it into a driving chop. But neither was the surface dangerously turbulent. Landing under power should be comparatively safe. But without it, should the pontoons stub against a wave, the result would be a crack-up on water.

“We’ll make another pass before we decide,” he said finally.

As he took the seaplane around, Gull’s thoughts drifted back to the matter of the Silent Saints and their queer mind-reading ways.

By now, Gulliver was convinced that the majority of the Silent Saints were fine men, genuine evangelists. He had realized, too, as he listened to the sermon which one of the Saints delivered to a large crowd in the great tent earlier in the evening, that they were engaged in a good work. Possibly they were accomplishing more in their way than the average church. Where Sunday school and church attendance had decreased generally, these evangelists were drawing huge crowds, simply because they tacked some interesting and mystifying mind-reading on the end of their sermon. They sugarcoated the familiar pill of a sermon with entertainment. Gull wondered, entirely aside from his other troubles, if the system the Silent Saints were using wasn’t the answer to the problem of decreasing church attendance. At first, the idea seemed like a desecration of religion. But in practice, it worked out much differently.