Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 028 - The Roar Devil
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THE ROAR DEVIL
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2003 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. THE DEVIL IN THE WOODS
? Chapter II. CALAMITY
? Chapter III. THE BRONZE MAN
? Chapter IV. THE PERIL PUZZLE
? Chapter V. RENNY AND THE SIREN
? Chapter VI. A NIGHT FOR TRADING
? Chapter VII. WATERLOO FOR TWO
? Chapter VIII. THE DEAD MAN'S VOICE
? Chapter IX. THE DEVILS COLLIDE
? Chapter X. TRAIL
? Chapter XI. HIS HONOR
? Chapter XII. THE WRONGED INVENTOR
? Chapter XIII. ONE BY ONE
? Chapter XIV. CANDIDATES FOR DEATH
? Chapter XV. THE BREAK
? Chapter XVI. THE UNSUCCESSFUL SURRENDER
? Chapter XVII. MAYOR RICKETTS
? Chapter XVIII. RENDEZVOUS
? Chapter XIX. CACHE
? Chapter XX. HELL IN A ROCK BOX
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I. THE DEVIL IN THE WOODS
THE flat-faced man looked tough. He also gave the impression of one who had been around a bit. Yet
he was deceived by a very simple ruse.
He had been looking into the radiator of the gray car to see how much water there was, and when he
straightened, he saw the purse and the wrist watch.
He should have realized they had not been there a moment before. He didn't.
He had been a fighter once. There were mounds of gristle about his eyes, his nose was flat and his ears
did not have their original shape. He looked evil, but not stupid.
The flat-faced man rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand, which held a stubby black pistol, then he
walked over to the hand bag and the watch and examined them.
The hand bag looked expensive, but it was hard to tell, because the makers of imitations have become
skillful. Six diamonds around the wrist watch dial sparkled in the afternoon sun in a manner which could
not have been equaled by glass. That was not cheap.
Then the man made his mistake. He pocketed his gun, so as to pick up both bag and watch at once. It
was hard to say why he did that. Greed, possibly. He got his hands on the articles.
“Now hold onto them!” directed a woman's voice.
She came out from behind a bush that was thick with new, green spring leaves. She held a light
.22-caliber automatic rifle pointed at the flat-faced man.
The man made an awful face that he must have practiced back in the days when he was a fighter, to
scare opponents in the ring.
“You're the babe what's been followin' us!” he growled. He scowled at the little rifle.
The girl—she was in her early twenties—let him look more directly into the muzzle of the .22.
“The hole where they come out may not look big,” she said. “But don't let that fool you. They're the new
high-speed cartridges. Hold onto the bag and the watch.”
The flat-faced man held onto them.
“You are Stupe Davin,” said the girl.
“Never heard of the guy,” the man denied promptly.
“Bend over and write it out in the dust of the road with your finger.”
“Huh?” The man looked blank.
“I am deaf,” said the girl. “Write it out.”
The man used a finger and scratched, “D-o n-o-t k-n-o-w D-a-v-i-n,” in the dirt.
“Liar,” snapped the girl. “You pretend to be the private secretary of Maurice Zachies, known as the
Dove of Peace, or Dove Zachies. Actually, you are his bodyguard and hired killer.”
The man scraped, “N-o!” in the road.
The girl now searched him, and found a driver's license made out to Albert W. Davin.
“You are Stupe Davin,” she said, and pocketed the license.
The man suddenly abandoned pretense. His flat face went purple with rage.
“The devil with you!” he snarled. “I got your number!”
“Write it!” the girl commanded.
“You're workin' for the Roar Devil!” the man yelled.
THE girl stood very still, and there was on her features the slightly blank and inquisitive look of those who
do not hear well.
“I cannot hear you,” she said. “Write it.”
The man only snarled stubbornly.
She poked him with the gun. “Write it!”
He growled, “Listen, babe, I ain't opening my face to no—”
He did not finish, for the girl struck him suddenly and unexpectedly with his own automatic pistol, which
she had taken from his pocket. She was tall, athletic, and there was nothing mincing about the way she
swung the gun against his temple. The flat-faced man did not move after he fell.
There was a cheerful recklessness in the girl's manner as she held the fellow's wrist to ascertain that he
was only senseless. She seemed to be enjoying herself hugely, as if it were only a game. She dragged the
man over and dumped him into a thick brush clump.
“And you are Dove Zachies's number one killer,” she sniffed.
A pocket of her khaki hunting jacket yielded a small box which, according to the label, held capsules of a
standardized sleeping potion to be sold only upon prescription. She got three capsules down the
senseless man's throat, doing it in a manner which a physician could not have improved upon.
She seemed in a hurry, but took time for a brief examination of the car—the doors, particularly. Their
glass was thick and bulletproof. She compared the license numbers with the notation in a small green
book, and seemed satisfied.
“Zachies's car,” she said aloud.
She struck out through the woods, eyeing the ground.
It had been a wet spring in this mountain section of New York State, and the vegetation was luxuriant,
the earth soft enough to hold footprints.
The girl found tracks before long. They had been made by a man with small feet, and the fellow was
evidently not dressed for the woods, because he walked around brush clumps which a man in stout garb
would have breasted.
The manner in which the trail meandered showed something else, too. The fellow was seeking the high
spots, rocks and small hills. He was undoubtedly searching for something.
Once, where he had stumbled and fallen, there was a print which showed he was carrying a submachine
gun. The mark left by the drum magazine was unmistakable.
The girl was eyeing the marks when the roaring sound came.
THERE must have been some intangible forewarning before the sound came, for a jaybird in a nearby
tree had a sudden, frightened spasm. The jay screeched and beat madly among the treetops, as if evading
some nameless and unseen horror. Experts concede that nature's creatures, birds and animals and the
like, frequently sense dangers which humans miss, and possibly this accounted for the jay's animation in
the warm spring sunshine.
Then came the roar. It was very faint at inception, almost inaudible, then it became as a locust swarm,
and the locusts, invisible, expanded to titanic proportions, so that eardrums ached and heads nearly split
from the clamor.
All through the woods, birds beat above the treetops in frightened haste, and down in the brush, rabbits,
chucks, squirrels and an occasional deer broke cover.
Of all in the woodland, only the girl seemed to behave in a normal manner. She stood perfectly still and
looked at the frightened wild life. Then she lifted hands and touched her ears. Her features were puzzled.
Then, with wild suddenness, she raced out from among the trees, sought the center of a clearing and flung
herself prone. She was motionless there. It was as if she awaited some incredible happening.
But nothing occurred, except that the fantastic roaring died as mysteriously as it had arisen, leaving only
the uproar of the birds.
The girl waited a long time. When she finally arose, her features—she was remarkably attractive in a
satisfying way—wore a puzzled expression, as if she had expected something that had not happened, and
was disappointed.
She continued following the footprints of the man. It was not long before she saw him.
He was a man small in stature but exceedingly plump, and he had gray hair, a neat gray beard. He wore a
gray suit, a gray beret, and the impression was of a rotund little fellow, a peaceful dove of a man.
He held a submachine gun with both hands, and he seemed frightened; puzzled. He drove nervous
glances about.
“Dove Zachies!” the girl murmured, and lifted her light rifle.
Her rifle was a costly target weapon, equipped with a mount for a telescope sight. She clipped the
telescope in place and drew a deliberate bead on the man with the submachine gun. She held her position
for a time, then lowered the gun.
“He must be taken alive,” she told herself, almost inaudibly. “That was the order.”
The plump gray man, “Dove” Zachies, moved on through the woods, and the girl trailed him, her manner
one of infinite caution.
Dove Zachies was obviously familiar with the region, for he made directly for certain vantage points
which gave him a view of his surroundings. His object seemed to be to make sure no one was about.
Zachies held a general course to the westward, and shortly came upon a cabin of some size. The cabin
windows were open, but the door closed.
Zachies knocked upon the door. There was no answer, and he knocked twice more, then tried the knob.
The door was not locked, and he entered, his machine gun alert.
Something less than five minutes later, he popped outdoors. He had received a shock. It showed on his
face. He was terrified.
He scuttled into the woods as if terribly afraid of being seen, or being overtaken by some dire calamity.
From her concealment behind bushes, the girl stared after him. Curiosity on her features, but no fear.
Suddenly, as if she intended to inspect the cabin, then overtake Dove Zachies, she ran forward. Entering
the cabin, she kept the .22 rifle alert.
She came into a large room, with a fireplace at one end, a table in the middle, and on each side a wall of
bookshelves. The shelves were laden with plain-looking volumes which bore dry, profound titles. She
glanced at the back of one. Its title read:
BOSTANTI'S PAPERS ON THE
ELECTROKINETICS OF
VOLATILIZATION
The girl made a face and glanced at others. They were all heavy scientific tomes, many being merely
binders in which scientific pamphlets had been inserted.
The cabin had more than one room. The girl advanced to a door, shoved it open with the muzzle of her
rifle, and started to enter.
She jerked into a sort of frozen motionlessness and stared at the living dead man in the room.
LIVING and at the same time dead, was the only thing which adequately described the man's
appearance. He was a comparatively young man—no more than twenty-five—and he was freckled, had
somewhat coarse features. He was in khaki trousers and an undershirt, with a rubber apron about his
middle.
One end of a rope was tied to one of the young man's ankles. The rope was some fifteen feet long, and
the other end was tied to a roof beam. A child with moderately strong fingers could have untied the
young man. But he had obviously been there for days. He looked gaunt, starved, pitiful.
He was standing slackly erect. If he saw the competent young woman with the rifle, he gave no sign. He
did not even look at her.
“You!” the girl said sharply. “What's the gag?”
The starved-looking young man swayed slowly, erratically. He was like a mechanical robot with some of
his cogs and levers out of order. He was trying to turn around, but he fell down.
“It's a good act!” the girl said dryly.
Then her eyes became wide. The young man had fallen on a piece of glass, and it had cut his hand, so
that crimson was sheeting slowly over the floor; but he gave no sign of feeling or knowing.
The girl whipped a glance over the room. It had been a laboratory, but its contents had been ravaged.
Apparatus was broken. Empty stands and pedestals indicated much of it had been carried off bodily.
There were ax marks on some of the tables, in some of the coils of the gutted electrical paraphernalia.
Some one had systematically wrecked the place.
The young woman lunged to the starved man, tore off his undershirt and tied it about his cut hand. She
felt of his skin. He was almost as cold as the dead. She shuddered, then shook him.
“Snap out of it!” she urged. “Who are you? What's wrong with you?”
He made blubbering sounds that were quite horrible.
She tried again, shaking him and demanding, “What is your connection with Dove Zachies?”
Dove Zachies, in the door where he had appeared so silently that the girl had not heard, said, “I hope
that you will let me assure you that he has no connection whatever.”
Chapter II. CALAMITY
THE girl had laid her rifle on the floor. She reached for it instinctively, then withdrew her hands when she
saw the submachine gun Zachies had trained upon her.
Zachies looked even more peaceful and dovelilke at close range.
“I started back to my car and ran across the tracks you left in trailing me,” he told the girl. He had a
smooth, cooing manner of delivering his words. “Wasn't I lucky?”
Zachies advanced, put a foot on her gun, grasped the barrel and smashed the light weapon, ruining it.
Then he scrutinized the girl curiously.
“I've seen you,” he said grimly. “Been trailing me the last few days, ain't you—have you not?” He made
the grammatical correction as an afterthought.
The girl shrugged, did not answer.
Zachies grunted, “Working for the Roar Devil, are you not?”
The girl blinked, seemed about to say something, but did not.
“You'll sing plenty before I'm through with you, sister,” Zachies told her. “For a long time, I've wanted to
get my hands on one of your crowd. You can tell me things. For instance, who is this Roar Devil? How
does he manage to accomplish the infernal things he does?”
The girl said nothing. Instead of being afraid, she was bright-eyed with interest. She even smiled slightly.
“A lot of babes would be scared silly,” Zachies said dryly. “You're a queer one. But leave it to the Roar
Devil to pick the tops. Whoever he is, he is good.” Zachies suddenly made a hard fighting jaw queerly at
odds with his meekly birdlike exterior. “But not good enough, babe!”
The girl had tucked a small purse into a pocket of her canvas hunting jacket, and Zachies wrenched that
out and went through it. There were initials on the outside:
R.M.K.
Inside was a case of cards which bore a name corresponding with the initials. He eyed them.
“Retta Marie Kenn,” he said. “Is that your name?”
The girl smiled, “You will have to write it out. I am quite deaf.”
“Yes?” The man scowled at her, as if not sure whether she were telling the truth. He shook his hand and
continued going through the purse, keeping, however, a close watch on the girl and on the
starved-looking young man who was picketed by the rope.
Zachies came upon the driver's license which had belonged to the burly driver of the car back at the
road. He had no trouble fathoming how it had come into her possession.
“So you gathered in Stupe Davin,” he said grimly. “I'll kick his flat face off for this!”
The girl smiled nicely at him.
Zachies snarled. Then he went on with his search of her belongings. He came upon a telegram, opened it,
and read it with much interest:
MISS RETTA KENN
POWERTOWN N Y
TRAIL ZACHIES AND REPORT EACH MOVE HE MAKES STOP IF POSSIBLE SEIZE HIM
AND DELIVER HIM TO ME
V VENABLE MEAR
“Who the devil is V. Venable Mear,” Dove Zachies yelled.
“Write it out!” the girl pleaded.
DOVE ZACHIES made snarling sounds and tramped the room. He was the kind of a man who could
not possibly look dangerous, however, and his present rage gave the impression of a pigeon pouting.
He came to a stop with an arm leveled at the starved young man who seemed gripped by some weird
stupor.
“Who is this fellow?” Zachies demanded. “What ails him? What makes the fool stand there with that rope
around his leg? Why doesn't he untie himself?”
The girl said, “If you will write it. I have a pencil and paper which I carry for—”
“Ahr-r-rr!” Zachies howled. “Shut up!”
Zachies glared at the girl's paper and pencil—he could see them protruding from the upper pocket of her
jacket. But he made no effort to write out his queries. Instead, he ripped off stout copper wire from a
ruined electrical coil in a corner of the room and used it to tie the girl.
She resented that. She scratched his face, hit him in the eye and managed to kick him once, but he got
her tied. Then he made a circuit of the place, looking it over, examining discarded shipping crates, old
envelopes, the names on newspaper wrappers. He came back and confronted the strange-acting young
man who looked so starved.
“You Flagler D'Aughtell?” he demanded. “Or are you his helper, Mort Collins? You two guys are
inventors or something, ain't you?”
The starved young man made a bubbling noise.
Zachies eyed him closely and shuddered.
“There's somethin' sure wrong with you,” he muttered.
Zachies found a lean-to addition in the rear, which had served as a kitchen. On a table stood a bucket of
water. It had been there for days, judging by the number of insects which had fallen into it. Zachies got a
dipperful, sloshed some in the starved young man's face, then tried to make the fellow drink some.
The young man did not seem to know how to drink. When Zachies held his head back and poured water
down his throat, it was like pouring water into a hose. The young fellow made no struggle, did not even
swallow.
“Are you D'Aughtell?” Zachies questioned again. “Or are you Mort Collins? If you're Collins, where is
D'Aughtell?”
But the young man had not revived sufficiently to talk. Indeed, if he had revived at all, it was not
perceptible.
Zachies scratched his head. Then a bright idea seemed to come. He leaned close to the strangely afflicted
young man.
“Roar Devil!” he bellowed. “Roar Devil!”
The young man moved a little, as if by terrific effort. One of his arms came up slightly. It was as if he
were trying to get it protectingly across his face.
“Darned if you don't know something!” Zachies muttered. “But the problem is—how to get it out, of
you.”
He considered, and apparently concluded the girl was a more ready source of information, for he turned
upon her.
“Who is this Roar Devil?” he growled.
“Write it out,” the girl requested.
Zachies snarled, then wrenched the wires off her wrists and from the pocket of her hunting jacket
withdrew the paper and pencil.
He started his writing with a fierce jab of the pencil point at the paper. He started violently, emitted a
sharp cry, and peered at his finger tips. They bore a strange brownish stain where the pencil had rested.
Zachies made a hoarse sound. He began to sway. He seemed about to faint.
The girl got up calmly from the floor.
Zachies stared at her. He seemed to be growing weaker and weaker.
He gulped, “You did something—”
“The pencil,” the girl said dryly. “It's covered with a chemical mixture you probably never heard of. It
won't kill you, if that's any consolation.”
Zachies sighed loudly and fell flat on his face.
THE girl's ankles were still wired. She freed them without particular haste, then used the same tough
copper strands to bind Dove Zachies.
The chemical mixture which had made Zachies senseless when he touched the pencil, apparently did not
last long, for the man began to stir feebly before the girl finished tying him, so that she had to hold his
limbs. She found an upset tool drawer among the laboratory wreckage and from its litter unearthed a roll
of black friction tape.
“Got adenoids?” she asked Zachies, who had opened his eyes.
“Naw!” Zachies was shortsighted enough to growl.
The girl grabbed his head, pinched it between his knees and began draping strips of tape across his lips.
“I once heard of a man dying after they taped his lips shut in a robbery,” she said conversationally. “He
had adenoids.”
With Zachies fastened securely, the girl gave attention to the starved young man who was picketed by the
rope. She tried Zachies's trick.
“Roar Devil!” she yelled at the young man.
There was enough reaction to prove conclusively that the name Roar Devil meant something momentous
to the young man.
The girl now tried to revive the young man enough to talk. She gave him water, forcing it down his throat,
and forced down part of a can of corn which she found in the lean-to kitchen. She got nowhere. To her
urging to speak, he only blubbered and mumbled.
The young woman apparently did not trust him to remain picketed by the rope, for she used copper wire
on his ankles and, after some hesitancy, tape on his lips.
It became apparent that she was going to leave the cabin. Zachies made whizzing noises through his nose
and flounced about. The girl, thinking he had something important to say, pulled part of the tape free of
his lips.
“What is it?” she demanded.
“You ain't deaf, after all, are you?” Zachies growled.
“Is that all you wanted to know?” she snapped.
“I got to wondering—”
She jammed the gagging tape back in place. Her rifle was hopeless, she saw upon examination. She
picked up the submachine gun of Dove Zachies and balanced it thoughtfully.
“Never do to walk into Powertown with this,” she concluded, and discarded it.
She picked up the trick pencil which had been Zachies's Waterloo, using a handkerchief so that her
fingers would not come in contact with it, and clipped it back in her pocket. Then she left the cabin.
She walked rapidly, and since the sun was hot for this portion of the spring season, she was soon
carrying her jacket. She was setting a definite course to the southward, but when a bare knob of a hill
appeared off to her left, she angled over to it and used a pair of diminutive binoculars to scrutinize the
surrounding country.
It was mountainous terrain—some of the most rugged in the eastern United States. Woodland covered
the ridges, leaving few bare spots, but the size of the hills and the sweeping depth of the valleys was
almost awe-inspiring.
Directly below, a glittering blue mirror under a line of tremendous cliffs, was a sheet of water. The lake
was confined by a towering white concrete dam at the lower end.
Within view from where the girl stood there were portions of two other dams, one of these a structure of
tremendous size. This section—hundreds of square miles in area—was the great Powertown Drainage
Basin Project.
It consisted of several auxiliary dams and one main dam of vast size. The purpose of these dams was not
only the generating of power, but also as a water supply for New York City. The metropolis had become
so vast that the older and smaller reservoirs were inadequate.
The young woman seemed to have stopped to rest as much as for any other reason, and now she went
on, setting a crow-flight course as nearly as the brush and the precipitous going permitted. This seemed
to be a short-cut across the mountains.
Unexpectedly, she stopped. Her face assumed a queerly set expression.
THEN it came, not gradually out of nothingness as it had before, but suddenly, violently, with a whooping
moan that sent birds shrieking. It was the roar, fantastic, unearthly, a sound that was like no other. It did
not throb, did not travel in waves, and there was no gobbling syncopation of echoes such as might have
been set up by an ordinary noise—or if there was, the roaring that was the father of them all drowned out
all else.
Then it stopped. Abruptly, like something broken off. And it left behind it a world that did not seem
normal.
There was no sound now. Where there had been tumult, there was now profound quiet. The birds
wheeled in the sky—and they must have been crying out excitedly. Yet there was no slightest noise
audible.
The ordinary silence of the woodland had not fallen. It was more than that. All sound had completely
stopped. Then other things happened.
The earth jumped—jumped like a live thing that had been kicked. The girl reeled, flailed her arms trying
to keep her balance, then fell. Rocks rolled on the ground like popcorn on the bottom of a pan, only not
as violently.
After the first tremor, there were others, but they subsided rapidly in violence. The entire surface of the
earth had apparently shifted.
The girl arose from where she had been flung, ran to a tree, eyed it doubtfully, then began to climb.
She was halfway up when, as if an electric switch had been turned on, the world seemed to come alive.
Before, there had been utterly no sound. Now there was plenty.
She could hear the scrapings of her own climbing efforts, could hear her own labored breathing. And the
birds were making a great uproar. There was something else, too—a distant rumbling. She looked
toward the source of that noise.
Below her was the dam which she had viewed earlier. It was collapsing. The central section was already
gone. A vast torrent of water poured through. On either side, more of the big concrete wall was rapidly
upsetting. The valley below was filling with a writhing monster of water that uprooted trees, toppled along
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THEROARDEVILADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2003BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.THEDEVILINTHEWOODS?ChapterII.CALAMITY?ChapterIII.THEBRONZEMAN?ChapterIV.THEPERILPUZZLE?ChapterV.RENNYANDTHESIREN?ChapterVI.ANIGHTFORTRADING?ChapterVII.WATERLOOFORTWO?ChapterVIII.THE...
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