Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 049 - The Mental Wizard

VIP免费
2024-12-19 0 0 219.13KB 98 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
THE MENTAL WIZARD
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? PROLOGUE
? Chapter I. THE WEIRD GIRL
? Chapter II. LAST TESTAMENT
? Chapter III. THE REMARKABLE TOURIST
? Chapter IV. AROUND THE DYING MAN
? Chapter V. SNAKES
? Chapter VI. SPELL!
? Chapter VII. EXPEDITION
? Chapter VIII. RAID
? Chapter IX. THE SECRET OF KLANTIC
? Chapter X. A JUNGLE AND FOUR PLANES
? Chapter XI. WHAT MONK SAW
? Chapter XII. TOO FAR IN!
? Chapter XIII. FEAR JUNGLE
? Chapter XIV. THE BIG MAN
? Chapter XV. PRISONER LEGION
? Chapter XVI. UPROAR
? Chapter XVII. SIEGE
? Chapter XVIII. THE KLANTIC
? Chapter XIX. THE GOLDEN KNOT
PROLOGUE
FACTS do not lie, the old saying goes. What follows, being in general excerpts from newspapers over
the past few years may, therefore, be taken for what they are worth. The full items from the newspapers
will not be reprinted here, for they have filled scores of news columns and many Sunday pages; and
moreover, some of them would make uninteresting reading.
But the clippings and the story they tell, considered as a whole, are more than interesting. They are
absorbing to a point where there is a hint of something incredible.
These newspaper clippings deal with one of the unexplored regions of the world, of which there are still a
few. Rather, the news stories deal with men who went into the region during the past few years. Never
have the news stories dealt with what happened to these men after they penetrated the region. No one
knows about that. No one, that is, belonging to what is called the civilized world.
Some of the men went in by foot, with native porters. They never came back. In cases, some, but rarely
all, of the natives turned up at distant points, and almost invariably they had strange stories to tell—stories
so inarticulate and fantastic that they did not warrant belief from the level-headed managers of frontier
trading posts who heard them.
Some of the lost men went by air, their planes equipped with the latest radio apparatus, burdened with
plenty of rifles, ammunition and spare food. They have not been heard from.
Expeditions have gone in search of these men. In no case was a substantial trace found of the lost men. In
an instance or two, the searchers were not heard from again.
The American Legion organization in the Panama Canal Zone recently sponsored, it is reported, a search
for one of these lost men, an aviator. This aviator’s name was Redfern. Many attempts have been made
to find another prominent individual who was lost, Fawcett by name.
In no case has a great deal of success greeted the searchers, for the region they had to penetrate is the
terrible jungle country on certain headwater branches of the Amazon River in South America.
What is there in that particular jungle which has kept so many men from coming back?
Chapter I. THE WEIRD GIRL
MIRACLES do not occur too often. El Liberator "Amber" O’Neel very nearly fell over with surprise
when one happened to him. But he lost no time in taking advantage of it.
It was, incidentally, a fact that if O’Neel had known what he was letting himself in for, he would probably
have crawled under the roots of the nearest mangrove and let the miracle go moaning past.
Carl O’Neel, alias Amber O’Neel, alias El Liberator—he was El Liberator Amber O’Neel just
now—was a brave Yankee, too, which was bad, because he was also crooked, cruel, without morals,
and all other kinds of a rascal.
Bravery and such qualities are a rare mixture, and a bad one. But O’Neel did not crawl under a
mangrove. Instead, he bellowed enthusiastic orders.
"Quick!" he squawled, in Spanish. "Get out there in the clearing! Line up and wave your arms!"
El Liberator
Amber O’Neel had been standing at the edge of an open glade in the South American jungle, wishing
that a plane would happen along. No sooner the wish, and presto! The sound of an airplane motor was
approaching!
"Wave your arms, damn you!" O’Neel howled. "Get that plane down! Then see that it does not get up
again!"
Amber O’Neel was in great need of a plane, because the authorities of this South American country of
Colombia were looking for him to stand him against a stone wall and see if he were bulletproof. This by
way of proving that it is not wise to murder and rob under the guise of being a leader of a gang of patriots
trying to make Colombia a land of the free. Colombia was already enough of a land of the free to satisfy
almost every one.
"Wave, damn it!" bawled O’Neel. "Wave them arms!"
If he had a plane, Amber O’Neel reflected, he could scout for groups of Colombian soldiers or police,
and there would be less likelihood of his raiding a trading post when authority was too near. He
chuckled. He would claim the plane was his military air force.
"Get the pilot’s attention!" O’Neel yelled. "Make him think we’re in distress or something!"
The plane, thought O’Neel, would make a swell get-away vehicle when the going got too tough.
O’Neel’s patriots waved their arms as if their lives depended upon it. They were all for their chief, who
was as swell a general as they had ever had. Of course, he flew into a rage and shot somebody now and
then. But jungle life was cheap, and El Liberator O’Neel was a lad who raided where the raiding was
good.
The patriots were a scurvy-looking bunch. Some were natives, jungle savages who looked as if they
would be more at home drying human heads. Indeed, they had dried a few.
There were a couple of bums from up Nicaragua way, a bit of scum from Panama, Colombian riffraff.
But no whites. O’Neel was white, and he didn’t like more of his own color. Sometimes a white man
objected to some of the things O’Neel did.
But El Liberator Amber O’Neel’s rabble patriots were better trained than they looked. Six of them,
indeed, were good military aviators, trained by Colombia and other South American republics at some
expense.
They all waved their arms vigorously at the plane cruising overhead.
THE plane was a model ten years old, and not a pilot in a thousand would have cared about being in it
while it was over this kind of jungle. The ship had been flying north, so it must have left behind an
unexplored stretch of jungle where, for all any one knew, landing grounds might be a hundred miles
between. No place, certainly, for a bus as old as this one.
The pilot flew like a war-time kiwi—a kiwi being a bird with wings that can’t fly. He was going to land.
He wabbled down. He tried to skid air speed away, narrowly missed scraping a wing, came down hard,
bounced twenty feet straight up, came down on one wing, and the plane began to fall to pieces.
O’Neel cursed wildly. "Looks like that pilot deliberately wrecked his wagon!"
The propeller tied itself into a strange knot. The plane—what was left of it—turned over on its back, and
a cloud of splinters and bits of fabric settled on it, and the episode was over. That plane would never
take to the air again.
Amber O’Neel produced two long-barreled, small-bore pistols from holsters next to his sides, and he
handled them as if each of his hands was a right hand. In fact, that was how Amber O’Neel had gotten
one of his nicknames.
He was ambidextrous, could use both hands with equal ease. He boasted about his being ambidextrous.
Men who couldn’t pronounce that word had taken to calling him "Amber."
Amber O’Neel ran toward the plane. He planned to shoot the occupants, if still alive, and take whatever
they had. He poked his head and his guns into the interior of the ship.
For some time, he remained in exactly that position.
When he withdrew his head, he looked wide-eyed, startled. His lips made words, but not sounds.
His patriots, who had drawn near, withdrew. Amber O’Neel was fat, innocent-looking. Just a benign,
chubby gentleman to the eye. To look at him, you’d trust him with your bank roll. Those who knew him
didn’t even want to be around him.
That look on Amber O’Neel’s face scared his patriots.
Amber O’Neel showed no signs of being aware of the flurry among his lovers of liberty—and loot. His
guns hung limply in his hands. His mouth kept working, and he swallowed with a great deal of effort, as if
trying to down half a banana without chewing it.
"Fever!" he exploded. "That’s what it is! Blast me, I’ve got it, and I’m delirious!"
Then he did something that would have made an onlooker laugh—but not to Amber O’Neel’s face.
He hit himself on the head with the barrels of both guns simultaneously, just hard enough to convince
himself he was awake. He looked somewhat childishly pained, then shoved his head into the plane’s
cabin again.
"At first, I figured I was seein’ things," he said, sharply. "What’s the idea of the regalia, lady?"
The fantastically garbed young woman said nothing,
SHE was a fabulous creature.
Her hair, perhaps, was most striking of all. It was spun gold. Not the spun gold that the poets rhyme
about. They mean their girls’ hair to be only like unto spun gold in color and texture. This girl’s hair was
spun gold. At least, it had been treated with some gilt process.
She had an oval face with a tendency to length, and there was something absolutely aristocratic about the
chiseling of her features. She was not the kind of a beauty every man would try to flirt with. They would
hold their breath when she went by.
But it was her attire which held Amber O’Neel breathless. The garments were scanty, in a sense. First
was an affair to take care of the upper body, leaving arms and shoulders bare.
It was something like the halter of a modernistic bathing suit. Only halters of modernistic bathing suits are
not usually made of cloth composed of chain mesh of heavy gold.
The lower part of the strange ensemble was a pair of shorts of the same rich yellow material, and tall
sandals of an unusual-looking leather, which was apparently very pliable.
"Hey?" Amber O’Neel barked. "You knocked speechless or something when the plane crashed?"
The strange-looking young woman pointed with an arm instead of answering. The pointing gesture
focused O’Neel’s attention on a strange set of adornments on the exquisitely formed arm. Men’s wrist
watches. Six of them, strung in two bracelets.
All seemed to be running, and keeping only slightly different time. They were not alike, and they were
styles of different years, as well as having been manufactured in different countries.
Amber O’Neel took his eyes off the watches and stared at what the young woman’s arm was pointing. It
was a man, the pilot of the plane, and the only other occupant.
The flier seemed to be senseless. There was a heavy copper ring—not gold, O’Neel made sure—around
each ankle, and from the rings dangled a short length of chain. It looked as if the chain had once
connected his legs, but he had managed to cut it so that he could run. He wore only a long leather skirt.
He looked like something out of a coffin, this pilot. There was almost seven feet of him, and in his day he
had been very much a man, but now his bones might weigh a hundred pounds, the rest of him not nearly
so much.
The pilot lay on his side. Amber O’Neel scowled. Obviously, the strange girl with the metallic hair
wanted him helped.
O’Neel brought up his two guns. Help him? Sure! Help him keep his mouth shut!
But the gaunt pilot had not been senseless. He had been faking, as was evident when he spoke in a
perfectly calm voice.
"If you’ve ever seen anybody shot with .45s , you’ll think again before you lift them things any higher," he
said.
Simultaneously, he rolled a trifle. A big army automatic showed. It looked rusty, but there is nothing to
guarantee a rusty gun won’t go off. O’Neel stood very still.
O’Neel had shot men in his time, and knew what happened. They didn’t always die when they were
supposed to do. There was a time in Rio when a man with three bullets as nearly in his heart as O’Neel
had been able to put them had gotten up and chased O’Neel a block. This flier might pull the automatic
trigger even after a bullet hit his brain.
Amber O’Neel put his hands up.
"Drop the guns!" ordered the wasted flier.
O’Neel dropped them, and said nothing.
"Head inland and run!" grated the aviator. "We’re going the other way, and it’ll be tough if you follow
us!"
THE flier paused. He seemed to have something else on his mind, and it did not sit pleasantly. His mouth
became a grim line, and he shoved his head forward.
"I hope you go as far inland as I did!" he gritted. "And I hope you find what I found, and what a lot of
others have found!"
O’Neel was wishing he had shot it out with the flier. He didn’t like the way the fellow’s gun hand shook.
"What’d they find?" he asked, trying to be sociable.
The pilot got up from the mangled floor of the plane.
"Never mind!" he barked shortly. "Forget it!"
"Who found what?" O’Neel asked, suddenly interested.
"Forget it, I said!" barked the aviator.
Amber O’Neel jerked his head toward the girl. "Did you find her inland somewhere?"
The emaciated flier said, in a disquietingly earnest tone, "I figure maybe I should shoot you because
maybe I was excited a minute ago, and now you know too much!"
O’Neel had used that tone himself a time or two. He whirled, fled wildly. At every jump, he expected a
shot, but none came. When he finally gained the jungle and flopped behind a tree, he caught his breath
and made a resolution: More caution in the future.
That pilot must have seen him coming with his guns drawn and had faked senselessness until he had a
chance to get the upper hand.
"I wonder," muttered O’Neel, "what he meant by that stuff about finding something inland?"
He crawled cautiously for a spot where he could watch the clearing unobserved.
"Probably he found the dame inland," he decided. "Some looker after her style, but I’ll take mine a little
more baby-faced. But I could use some of the stuff her bathing suit was made out of—if the whole thing
ain’t some phony set-up!"
He got a look at the clearing. His natives were cackling happily among themselves. Gloating over his
ignominious flight!
The flier was fleeing with the girl.
O’Neel stared, then emitted a low, hissing noise, his way of indicating surprise. The girl was not going
willingly with the aviator. He had her by one wrist, was dragging her along toward the opposite side of
the clearing.
IN his emaciated condition, the flier was not equal to the girl in strength. She got her wrists free of his
clutch, and swung on him. Her punching would have done credit to a pugilist with medical training. She
knew just where to hit. She staggered the flier away with a blow, then whirled and ran.
O’Neel held his breath. The aviator had a gun. He’d have to use it to stop the girl. But the flier did not try
to fire his automatic.
"Danged rusty thing ain’t no account!" decided Amber O’Neel, and promptly charged out into the
clearing, drawing a tiny, flat pistol out of each hip pocket.
The jumping at conclusions nearly cost him his life. The pilot lifted his big automatic. It banged. O’Neel
shrieked, grabbed one arm and fell down.
The aviator saw he could not overtake the girl. He whirled and, traveling in a staggering lope, vanished
into the jungle.
Amber O’Neel got up and ran in the opposite direction. He still held his arm, although he knew by now
that the bullet from the flier’s .45 had only burned it.
The patriots were also running. They had started with the shot, and were sprinting madly in all directions.
Amber O’Neel began to curse them.
He was still cursing his "army" when he caught sight of the girl.
Chapter II. LAST TESTAMENT
THE young woman with the strange golden hair and metallic cloth garments approached with a calmness
which was somewhat unnerving. Amber O’Neel felt an impulse to run, and he could not explain it. There
was just something about the girl. She seemed to have some power.
She came close to O’Neel and lifted an arm. He half ducked, thinking she was going to strike him. But
she waved, instead, that he should pursue the fleeing aviator.
O’Neel thought of the big .45 automatic, and was not enthusiastic about the pursuit. Anyway, he had
some ideas, and wanted to ask questions.
"Look!" he said. "That aviator guy found you inland somewhere, and he wants to know where you got
the gold that queer cloth you’re wearing is made out of. Right?"
The girl said nothing. She jerked her arm, directing O’Neel to pursue the aviator.
"What tribe are you from?" O’Neel asked.
She continued to point, to say nothing.
"Hablah Espanol?
O’Neel asked, his Spanish bad.
Apparently she didn’t speak Spanish. O’Neel tried Portuguese, one or two Indian dialects, and
French—all the languages he knew. Results were zero.
"Aw, heck!" he exploded finally. "The cat got your tongue?"
When the girl still said nothing, he glowered at her with the idea of causing her to avert her gaze. She had
been staring at him steadily. Her eyes were a most unusual shade of blue, he noted, and there was
something disquieting about them.
As he watched the eyes, they seemed to radiate something like an invisible solid that gripped him and
held him. He tried to move his hands, but the idea somehow didn’t quite seem to get to his hands, so that
they did not move.
The girl’s eyes seemed to get more and more potent, until they were incredible magnets of blue. O’Neel
felt the world begin to turn slowly under his feet—
He gave a violent jump, whirled, got his back to the girl, and began to beat himself in the face.
"Hell’s bells!" he squawled. "Hypnotizing me! She’s two thirds witch!"
He had snapped the spell. He ran to the spot where he had been forced by the aviator to drop his guns.
They were still there, and he used them to menace such of his patriots as he could find.
"Grab that girl!" he yelled at them, in their native tongues. "Tie her with bark rope."
The patriots, afraid of the two guns, ran swiftly and encircled the girl, then came toward her. There was
nothing subtle about them. They came in crouching, with arms open ready to grab, like so many wrestlers
approaching an opponent.
They stopped. They did it as if they were one man. And all of them stared at the girl.
"Rush her!" O’Neel yelled.
They not only didn’t rush her, but they acted as if they were going to sleep on their feet.
O’Neel knew a little about hypnotism. He lifted his guns, and they roared, almost together. Two patriots
howled as the bullets burned grooves in their skin. It was amazing shooting.
"Grab her!" O’Neel barked, in the aboriginal tongue.
They grabbed her, four of them—and the next instant all four were flying backward.
IT was as if they had tackled the flying weights on a big engine governor. Amber O’Neel, pop-eyed,
knew he had seen as blinding a bit of applied self-defense as he had ever witnessed.
He had started to rush in himself. But now he held back. One of the men had been barely touched by the
strange girl, it seemed, but now he had a broken arm.
"Seize her, all of you!" O’Neel bawled, and his two guns cracked like vicious whips.
The patriots ran in. They swarmed over the girl, so many of them that she was lost to sight. Out of the
pile of struggling forms came moans and screams. All of these sounds were emitted by the natives. When
the mêlée moved a few yards to the right, senseless forms were left behind.
Unexpectedly, the girl broke free. She got clear. As she ran, her fleetness of foot was startling. Her
bright, golden garments, unscathed by the fray, glistened in the sunlight as she crossed the clearing.
O’Neel, excited and not wanting to lose the wealth represented by the girl’s golden attire, lifted his guns.
"Stop, or I’ll kill you!" he shrieked.
He meant it.
The girl stopped. She stood perfectly still. O’Neel ran toward her, stopped before he was too close, and
howled for the natives to seize and bind the girl.
"I’ll kill you if you try to fight them!" he snarled.
He still meant it.
The remarkable young woman let herself be bound. Two patriots used cords braided out of the same
tough bark strands which they used to make their clothing, and it was not likely she would break loose.
Amber O’Neel crouched beside the young woman, taking care that her eyes did not meet his. This was
easy. She seemed to be watching one of the natives.
O’Neel dug into a pocket and brought out a bottle holding one of the regular acids for making a gold
test. His business was platinum, but there was gold in this country. He doused some of the stuff on the
upper part of the girl’s garments. It was gold.
"Where’d this stuff come from?" he yelled at her.
She didn’t answer, and she was still staring at the native.
"C’mon an’ answer me!" O’Neel commanded angrily. "You can speak some kind of language, can’t
you?"
She still stared at the native.
O’Neel looked at the native. The act kept the world from losing a fellow who was doing it no good. It
saved Amber O’Neel’s life.
The native had slipped his machete from its sheath, raised it, and was creeping forward. He sprang, eyes
glaring a desire to kill. O’Neel dodged. Quarters were too close for his guns. Yet the guns still saved his
life, for he got them up before him.
The machete blade hit the steel and stopped, which was lucky, for the native had spent a lifetime
chopping paths through jungles with a machete, and he had swung a blow that could have cut O’Neel in
two. O’Neel grunted loudly, then clubbed a gun to the native’s head.
The native fell senseless, and O’Neel was too shaken to do something he ordinarily would have
done—shoot the native.
"You done that!" he yelled at the girl. He met her strange eyes, then wildly shifted his gaze away from
hers.
He was panting excitedly, and not until he had wrenched off his shirt and tied it around the girl’s head to
cover her eyes did he breathe anywhere near normally.
"A confounded witch!" he gulped.
He tested her bonds to make sure the patriots had done a good job of tying her, muttering as he did so,
"She hypnotized that native, made him jump me! But how’d she do it without tellin’ him what to do?"
He stood up, satisfied she was tied.
"Come here, you fellows!" he yelled at his patriots. "We’re going to catch that aviator!"
THE aviator was traveling like a fellow who would be easy to catch. He hooked the ground with his toes
as he ran. At times, weaving to pass trees, he did not quite make it, and the shocks knocked him reeling.
Almost any kind of a bush tripped him.
He was collecting mud and scratches. The unusual leather skirt which he wore did not protect him much.
He kept the . 45 automatic in his hand, as if afraid of losing it. And frequently he stopped to listen.
He, like Amber O’Neel, had a habit of talking to himself, and Ireland was now in his voice. It hadn’t
been so noticeable before.
"Sure, and they’ll follow me!" he muttered. "The gold Z is wearin’ will make that white devil greedy. And
Z won’t tell the scut where it came from, so he’ll be followin’ me ve-r-ra soon!"
He pronounced it as "Z," the last word in the English alphabet.
He smashed his face against a tree which he either didn’t see or couldn’t avoid, got up, then ran out.
"Or mayze Z will steer the scamp wrong long enough so that I can get away." He thought a bit, then
amended: "No, she won’t! She’ll do anything she can to keep me from gettin’ to the outside with news of
Klantic and the secret!"
A sharp stick would have disemboweled him, except that he saw it in time.
"Mother of Mercy!" he mumbled. "I’ve gotta get to the world with this! It’s the biggest thing that’s ever
happened to mankind!"
He stumbled into a thorn thicket and came out a sight that was not pleasant to look at. That stopped his
muttering to himself, and evidently started him thinking. Finally, he stopped.
"Sure, and I can’t make it!" he told himself hollowly.
He tried to sit on the ground, but fell, utterly exhausted.
"Overwork—strain—planning to escape—got me down!" he mumbled. "Shouldn’t have saved—so big
share of rations—for escape food supply. Starved myself. Didn’t need it when—found they hadn’t
destroyed plane. But how was I—know they hadn’t destroyed it?"
He shook his head solemnly over that mistake.
"If was only some way—of getting diary—outside." His voice had a whine of despair.
He fumbled in a pocket cleverly contrived to strap to his leg under his leather skirt. The notebook which
came out was an expensive one. Otherwise it would not have stood the wear it had stood.
Amber O’Neel came out of the jungle about the same time the notebook came out of the pocket.
THE meeting was an accident, in a sense. Amber O’Neel had not expected to meet his quarry so soon,
so he walked out boldly, feet making some swishing noises in the rank jungle weeds.
The aviator looked up, saw his enemy, dropped the notebook and grabbed at the automatic. The gun
banged the instant he got his hand on it.
By rights, Amber O’Neel should have died then. But the aviator was either a poor shot or very much out
of practice. He missed. O’Neel yipped like a dog just missed by a rock, and flashed his two guns.
Immediately, there was a great thundering of guns in the little glade in which the men had met. Both men
moved rapidly as they fired. Weeds were tall, bushes rank. Neither man was exactly sure where the
other was. Both guns went empty about the same time.
Neither man made a sound. Amber O’Neel, not proud of the shooting he had been doing, lay still and
strained his ears, guns ready.
The South American jungle is noted for its noisy birds. The shooting had stirred them up. Parrakeets
squawked raucously. Gaudy birds made squawking, whistling and moaning noises, and there was one
that sounded like a clear bell.
Amber O’Neel was so on edge that he failed to notice something that should have caught his attention.
One particular uproar of bird cries was receding. When O’Neel did notice this, he sprang erect and
cursed.
"The aviator guy’s runnin’ away!" he gritted.
摘要：

THEMENTALWIZARDADocSavageAdventureByKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2001BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?PROLOGUE?ChapterI.THEWEIRDGIRL?ChapterII.LASTTESTAMENT?ChapterIII.THEREMARKABLETOURIST?ChapterIV.AROUNDTHEDYINGMAN?ChapterV.SNAKES?ChapterVI.SPELL!?ChapterVII.EXPEDITION?ChapterVIII.RAID?...

展开>> 收起<<
Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 049 - The Mental Wizard.pdf

共98页,预览20页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：98 页 大小：219.13KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-19

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 98
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注