Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 095 - The Devil's Playground

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THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. PIG-IRON
? Chapter II. PIG-IRON’S MESSAGE
? Chapter III. FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE
? Chapter IV. DOUBLE DISASTER
? Chapter V. A TRAP FOR DOC
? Chapter VI. A WORTHLESS GOAL
? Chapter VII. THE MISCHIEF MAKER
? Chapter VIII. THE WAR DANCE
? Chapter IX. THE GENTLE GHOST
? Chapter X. MICHABOU WARNS DOC
? Chapter XI. A TOMB FOR DOC
? Chapter XII. DEATH FOR ALL
? Chapter XIII. JOHNNY IS KIDNAPED
? Chapter XIV. MICHABOU RETURNS
? Chapter XV. BENEATH THE LAKE
? Chapter XVI. THE BEARDED MEN
? Chapter XVII. AN EX-MOURNER
? Chapter XVIII. ALMOST A ROMANCE
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I. PIG-IRON
PIG-IRON HELLER had always considered himself a hot-shot salesman. He was trying his best now to
prove it.
Pig-iron was trying to sell himself the idea that there was no such thing as the Indian drums of death. He
didn’t fool himself much. And he didn’t fool anyone else in the North Woods at all.
Outside in the darkening night, the drums sounded vaguely like the harmless muttering of the summer
storm. Pig-iron Heller stalked up and down in his residence-office and glared out at the awesome night.
Great, brooding thunderheads massed in the sky, blacked out the moon and stars. The wind dropped to
an ominous whisper. A grim tenseness covered the North Woods.
Pig-iron spat savagely at a brass cuspidor. Then the old iron hunter whirled, narrowed his gimlet eyes at
the big bull of a man who stood in his office. Old Pig-iron, owner of Deep Cut mill and mines, had made
and lost fortunes in this north country.
"Get out, damn you! Go on. Get out. You’re paid off. Get off my property."
Pig-iron’s voice dripped with contempt that seemed somehow forced. The big bull of a man who stood
before him shuffled uncertainly on his feet. It took almost as much nerve to defy old Pig-iron Heller as it
would have to defy the drums.
The bull of a man’s name was Mattson Kovisti, a mine worker and ex-lumberjack. There was a silence
in the office as both he and Pig-iron listened to the mutter of the distant drums—or thunder, if you
believed that was what it really was. Pig-iron squalled suddenly in a voice that held more determination
than belief.
"There ain’t no such thing as the Devil’s Tomahawks," the old man screamed. "It’s just a damned Injun
legend."
Mattson Kovisti shuddered. He knew that rumbling noise was not thunder. And he wanted to be a long
way from there. A half-breed had translated that rumbling sound for him.
"Go away, paleface," the drums beat into the night. "You are not wanted here, paleface. Go, or the
Tomahawks of the Lost Ones—the Devil’s Tomahawks—will claim you."
Sweat dripped from Mattson’s face as he thought of those awful words. Mattson Kovisti had seen one
victim of the Devil’s Tomahawks. He did not want to see another. Mattson had got his pay. Johnny
Pinetree was waiting outside for Mattson Kovisti. The barrel-chested Finn had Johnny’s pay also. The
half-breed was afraid of old Pig-iron Heller. So he waited outside.
"Johnny Pinetree has an idea," Kovisti offered. "He thinks Doc Savage ought to know about the Devil’s
Tomahawks. He—"
Pig-iron Heller just about exploded. He ranted and he cursed. He didn’t want any outsider prying into his
affairs. Pig-iron was a dyed-in-the-wool individualist who had always fought his own battles. He was
now trying to make a mistaken investment pay, through a rising price of finished steel for a war-born
commerce.
Pig-iron’s doctor had told him he was dying of a heart ailment. The old war horse didn’t believe the
medico. But he had sent for his daughter, Iris. And he had sent for Marquette Heller, his nephew by
adoption.
Pig-iron’s eyes narrowed slightly as he thought of Marquette. But he forgot him immediately to berate
Kovisti, who was running away.
"I don’t give a damn what Doc Sav—" Pig-iron began.
Then he stopped. The sound, not unlike thunder, became suddenly more distinct. It also assumed a
steady, pounding tempo. Mattson Kovisti edged toward the door. His eyes were wide with terror.
Then came the smell. It was not the clean scent of ozone that comes with thunder and lightning.
It was a dead smell of the grave. It carried the suggestion of freshly-turned earth, of the shrouds in which
the dead are buried. There was something intangibly menacing about the odor.
Mattson Kovisti screamed. He dived toward the door. Old Pig-iron staggered toward a couch that was
partly made up as a bed. The excitement was bad for the old man’s heart. He sank wearily down on the
couch-bed. Idly, he picked up a newspaper. Then his eyes riveted queerly on one paragraph. Carefully,
he tore it from the paper.
Mattson Kovisti ran. He fled with a terror unashamed.
"Johnny Pinetree!" he yelled. "Johnny! Where are you?"
There was no answer from the half-breed. Lightning flashed and showed great stretches of
second-growth spruce and pine. The land was like a dead thing itself. The soul of the land was gone, had
vanished with the great lumber companies. Broadax and crosscut saw had eaten up the soul of the North
Woods. Fierce tongues of forest fire had blackened the ravished body that had held it.
The soul was gone. And now, after peace for a hundred years, the Devil’s Tomahawks had returned.
Mattson Kovisti panted as he ran. He knew the legends of the Tomahawks, the avenging spirits of braves
who had been tricked into death by the advancing white man. When the Tomahawks avenged, the spirits
of the braves rested more easily in the happy hunting ground.
So it had been arranged by the great Michabou, the Manitou and maker of all things. Michabou, who
created the world from a grain of sand brought him by the sturdy muskrat, had made it that way to
protect his red-skinned descendants from invaders.
That was the legend told years ago in the skin tepees and birch-bark huts of the Ojibways, the
Chippewas and the Tahquamenons. It was, of course, something no sensible person believed. It was
impossible that such things could occur.
It was impossible, for example, that a man could die of a hundred brutal slashes from a hundred
tomahawks in half a dozen seconds. It was impossible that such a thing could befall a man entirely
surrounded by his friends; happen in a soft cranberry bog marsh without an unexplained footprint
approaching the victim!
Of course that was impossible. But Mattson Kovisti had seen it happen.
"Johnny Pinetree!" Mattson called frantically, "I’ve got your pay. Where are you?"
"Here me, Mattson," the half-breed’s voice called from the darkness ahead. "Come."
Just as Kovisti plunged ahead, the tempo of the drums increased to a staggering crescendo. There was a
vivid flash of lightning. A moaning in the trees became a long-drawn wail of a war whoop. Then Kovisti
heard the scream.
It was a scream of terror and of death. Kovisti recognized the half-breed’s voice. The scream ended on
a horrid gurgle of despair. Mattson Kovisti was drawn as if by a magnet. Lightning flashed again. He saw
Johnny Pinetree—or what was left of him.
The half-breed was brutally slashed in death. Deep gashes covered his whole body. Suddenly Mattson
Kovisti screamed in newborn terror. The cadence of the drums had not decreased.
Instead, the drums of death seemed beating to a new crescendo of terror. That meant their work was not
yet done! New death must come to the North Woods before the Devil’s Tomahawks could return to the
happy hunting ground with the spirits of the braves!
A BUBBLING cry burst from Kovisti’s lips. He felt pretty sure those drums were beating now for him.
Mattson ran like an animal that knows it has to get away. He was like the lynx trapped in the spring
freshet; like the deer fleeing the licking tongues of forest fire.
He pounded down the only road there was in the North Woods. It was a winding, two-rutted path that
eventually reached Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, the city of the locks. He ran, crashing, like a frightened
moose. Only one thought beat into his brain. That was to get far, far away from the terror that stalked the
North Woods.
There was froth at the corners of Kovisti’s mouth as he ran. His heart pounded so strongly within his
chest, his pulses hammered so powerfully at his temples, that Kovisti did not at first hear the other sound
in the air. It was a steady, droning roar that gradually became louder than the drums themselves. Finally,
Mattson heard it, realized that a modern airplane was circling for a landing.
Lightning flashed again, showed Kovisti a big, high-winged monoplane. The Finn’s eyes flickered oddly.
Fear was leaving those eyes now. A cold, hard determination replaced it for the moment.
He watched the bright landing lights flash on. The plane came into a tiny landing field, maintained for
Pig-iron Heller’s planes.
Mattson Kovisti was suddenly smitten by the sort of impulse that makes a man fight for a cause in which
he believes. It was the sudden strength that makes a fellow willing to sacrifice his own welfare to spread
truth where that truth is sorely needed.
"If they leave that plane," Kovisti muttered, "I’ll get to Doc Savage!"
The Finn’s barrel chest filled out. His head came erect. Mattson had once been a mechanic at the Sault
Ste. Marie airport. He’d once taken one of the ten-passenger Boeings used on that northern route for a
trial hop. Mattson now determined that he would go to the one person who might really be able to help
stop the Devil’s Tomahawks!
Kovisti uttered a cry of hope as he plunged toward the tiny airfield. The thought of Doc Savage gave him
newborn strength. Even in the fastness of the North Woods, the name of the man newspapers termed a
physical phenomenon and a mental marvel was one to strike hope in the heart of an honest man; terror to
a crook. Mattson Kovisti knew more of the bronze giant than most woodsmen. The huge Finn had spent
many long winters in northern lumber camps. In the winter nights the jack in the bunkhouse can either
read or take part in the long-winded arguments that go on endlessly. The Finns are not a talkative race.
They either sleep or read.
A bunkhouse in the spring will yield an amazing pile of dog-eared magazines. They are dog-eared
because every page has been read and reread a dozen times or more. It was not at all strange that
Mattson Kovisti knew a lot about Doc Savage.
His reading had informed him that Clark Savage, Jr., was a man of herculean strength and mental
prowess that was a constant source of amazement to scientists. He knew that the man of bronze, as Doc
was often called, had been trained from childhood to engage in one of the strangest careers that had ever
befallen any man.
He knew that Doc Savage and his five aids had gone to the four corners of the earth to right the wrongs
that evildoers perpetrated on innocent victims. He had read that the bronze man never accepted pay for
these things; that he had a strange source of almost illimitable wealth which he used solely to benefit
mankind.
And, Mattson Kovisti was certain that the thing from which he fled was evil enough to be worth the
bronze man’s time and trouble.
THE plane’s motor spluttered jerkily as the pilot brought it down to a bumpy landing. The landing lights
flared against high, whitewashed rocks that marked one edge of the landing field. The whitewashed rocks
reflected the light, throwing a pale illumination over the whole field.
Three figures got out of the plane. The first one was a rotund, sleek-looking man. Mattson Kovisti didn’t
recognize him. In the dim light, he looked well dressed and prosperous. The second figure brought a gasp
from Mattson Kovisti’s lips. A pert hat scarcely concealed the bright blondness of the girl’s hair. Her
figure was trim in a neat business suit. Mattson did not need to strain his eyes in the dim light to examine
her features.
The childlike beauty and sharp, mature wit of Iris Heller were not unknown to the workers employed by
the old iron hunter. Iris was the daughter of old Pig-iron Heller, the daughter he said he did not want
saddled with the responsibility of fighting the sinister force that was raging through the North Woods.
Mattson Kovisti’s lips spread into a smile. To this girl, he was sure he could pour out the things he
believed, the things he feared. The Finn saw the tall figure of a man in flying clothes clamber out behind
Iris Heller. The three apparently were the only occupants of the plane.
Kovisti started impulsively toward the plane. Then two things happened to halt him. Iris spoke. Her voice
was bitter, harsh. It was unlike the gay tones he had known when she visited the wilderness of Deep Cut
Mine.
"I’ll change his mind," Iris snapped sharply. "He’ll not leave this thing to Mark. Mind my words, N. Nate,
I’ll get the right to take over."
"Now, now, Miss Heller," an oily voice purred from the fat man. "Perhaps your dad knows best.
Perhaps—"
Iris Heller stamped a dainty foot.
"Perhaps nothing!" she said irritably. "Marquette Heller didn’t even answer his summons. The Indians
have got dad terrorized."
The girl’s blue eyes flashed in the reflected brilliance of the landing lights.
"The Indians aren’t going to frighten me, N. Nathan Nathanialson," she said grimly. "And nobody is going
to stop me from fighting beside my dad."
Mattson Kovisti groaned. He was well out into the clearing. At the sound of the name of N. Nathan
Nathanialson, the big Finn dived for a dark clump of cranberry bushes. Now he recognized the fat man.
N. Nate was Pig-iron Heller’s attorney.
On N. Nate’s last trip to the North Woods, Kovisti had seen him in unexplained huddles with renegade
Indians from the copper regions. He had seen furtive movements of the fat man as he emerged from
sod-and-bark hovels that housed half-breeds addicted too much to moonshine whiskey.
Kovisti burrowed deep into the concealment of the bush. It was then that the second thing occurred
which warned him not to make his presence known.
The beating of the drums rolled down from the sky. The motor of the plane was shut off. There was a
second or so of silence. And then there were the drums, the Indian drums of death.
Their pulsing beat was now close to the ground. It had no direction. It engulfed the clearing in which the
plane had stopped.
Chapter II. PIG-IRON’S MESSAGE
IRIS HELLER heard the drums. She whipped a small compact automatic from her handbag, strode
quickly toward the edge of the clearing. It was undoubtedly chance that brought her within half a dozen
yards of the copse in which Mattson Kovisti burrowed for concealment.
Behind her strode the gaunt pilot. Behind the pilot, fat N. Nathan Nathanialson puffed like an
overworked locomotive.
"Slow down, Miss Heller," he complained. "I ain’t the antelope I used to be."
Iris Heller slowed down. But N. Nate’s plea apparently had little to do with it. The powerful flashlight in
her left hand flicked on. The girl was as tense as a young Indian on the hunt. The flashlight swept
methodically over a copse twenty yards ahead of her. In its reflection her firm jaw showed grimly.
Slowly, she brought up the automatic.
There was a scrambling noise ahead of them. The automatic blasted. But it had a short barrel, not made
for shooting at any distance. Running like a young deer, a reddish figure leaped from the copse and tore
into the thickening stand of scrub pine at the edge of the cranberry bog.
N. Nathan Nathanialson squalled like a child who had suddenly met up with an ogre. The pilot, who
apparently had no part in the proceedings aside from being an air chauffeur, gasped aloud.
The figure that tore through the underbrush was a tall, rangy Indian. The red man’s face was daubed with
the war paint of the Ojibways tribe. Brave’s feathers decorated the sleek black hair. The fleeing redskin
was barefoot, clad only in loincloth. An arrow quiver and a stone tomahawk hung from a thong over his
heavy-muscled shoulders.
As the redskin disappeared he screamed a war whoop of defiance. As if in answer, the drums of death
crashed forth in a new crescendo of wrath. Iris Heller and the gaunt pilot stood side by side, staring into
the tangle of underbrush. Then the girl whirled.
The pilot froze in his tracks as if he had suddenly been turned into stone. Back behind them, toward the
airfield, there came another awesome, chilling war whoop. It rose to a pitch of frenzy, then died slowly
into the night.
The scream that followed brought a cry of horror from Iris Heller. It was a scream of agony and terror. A
man’s voice lifted in a piteous plea for mercy. The voice screamed, then died on a bubbling, gurgling note
of despair. Iris Heller blasted into the darkness with her automatic.
Iris’ voice came again then. It was tense, tight with an unwillingness to believe.
"N. Nate!" the girl cried. "N. Nate! Where are you?"
There was silence for a moment. It was broken now only by the receding mutter of the drums. It was as
if the things had now accomplished their awful purpose and were drifting off into the recesses of the other
world where the long-dead braves of the Ojibway tribe dwelt with the master spirit of Michabou.
There was an odor in the air. Both Iris and the pilot noticed that. It was the earthlike smell of the grave
that had made Kovisti scream before he had heard the plane.
Then the lightning flashed again. N. Nathan Nathanialson was nowhere to be seen. He had apparently
vanished. The drumbeat in the sky rippled in a brief roll. It was like a hollow, awesome chuckle from the
gods of evil. Iris Heller gasped.
"The Devil’s Tomahawks!" she breathed. "Why, I hadn’t really believed in—"
An oath from the pilot interrupted her. The flash of lightning had not shown N. Nate by the cranberry
bush where he had halted, panting. But it had showed something else to the pilot. His plane was his first
concern, which was quite natural. It was his livelihood.
The flash revealed an indistinct figure racing toward the plane. The pilot let out a roar of indignation and
tore after the apparent thief. But the runner had too much of a start. The man plunged into the cabin and
the growl of the inertia starter hummed into the air. The motor was still warm. It kicked over with a
stuttering bark, that stepped up quickly into a powerful roar.
The prop bit into the night air, dragged the plane into the wind. The pilot was still waving his arms around
in excited anger. He almost got hold of the rudder. His lunge for it landed him flat on his face on the
ground. Meanwhile the plane took off and bored through the night toward the east.
The pilot scrambled to his feet and made several remarks he was just as glad the girl didn’t overhear. Her
startled scream interrupted him. It also made him forget about such trivia as thieves who steal airplanes.
IRIS HELLER trembled as if a sudden attack of malaria had overcome her. The pilot, when he came up,
sent a low breath of astonishment whistling through his teeth.
N. Nathan Nathanialson lay in a pool of blood. He was clearly defined in the light from the girl’s
flashlight. From head to foot he was gashed with wicked, ugly wounds. Each wound was shaped like a
small crescent moon. All the wounds bled.
A faint moan came from the fat lawyer’s lips. He opened his eyes and looked wildly into the flashlight.
Iris moved swiftly then. She tore N. Nate’s shirt into strips and began bandaging the wounds.
N. Nate was so terror-stricken his voice was little more than a thin scream of hysteria. The terror in his
voice was not something nice to hear. It had all happened so fast that N. Nate could tell little about it.
The war whoop, he said, suddenly seemed to surround him. Then rough hands grabbed him. Sharp
blades hacked at him, cut into his flesh. He had lost consciousness just as he heard Iris let loose with her
automatic.
"That must have frightened them away," he moaned. "If it hadn’t been for that, I’d be a goner."
Iris Heller made little comment as she bound up the majority of his wounds. There were more than fifty of
them. The pilot donated his shirt for more bandages. He shook his head and muttered about the
impossibility of the thing.
"It don’t make sense," he offered. "It ain’t possible."
Iris Heller finished the bandaging. She stood erect and answered quickly.
"Neither is it possible for a man to get that many wounds in the fraction of a minute," she observed. "And
there hasn’t been a soul in sight except that one Indian running off in another direction."
Swiftly, she flicked on her light. She examined every foot of the ground. There were a couple of fallen
trees, three or four cranberry bushes. There wasn’t a single footprint, let alone the footprints of two or
three dozen tomahawk-swinging braves. The pilot cleared his throat.
"What in tophet is it?" he managed.
Iris Heller spoke in a restrained voice.
"The Devil’s Tomahawks," she explained. "If you believe in the legends, it is a supernatural thing. I heard
about it when I was a little girl. Father used to laugh about those stories. But now he is dying. He sent for
me and—"
The next words came like an epithet. The girl snapped them through her teeth as if they were tainted,
poisoned things.
"For me and for Marquette Heller!" Iris Heller ripped.
The pilot cocked his head questioningly. He had heard the girl tell N. Nate a few minutes before that she
would not tolerate Marquette Heller’s taking over the investigation of the trouble in the Deep Cut district.
"Who is he?" the pilot prompted. Iris Heller’s blue eyes bored into the pilot suspiciously.
"I don’t know why I should tell you," she said flatly. "But it might do me good to let off steam. Marquette
Heller is half Ojibway. He was adopted and educated by my father’s brother, Luke Heller. He has a
power over these Indians that is weird. Father is an antifeminist of the old school. Rather then let me take
over while he is ill, he’d give Mark the run of the place."
Her voice grew bitter.
"Marquette is half Ojibway," she observed, "and it is the Ojibway Indians who are causing all this terror."
She pulled out a yellow telegram, handed it to the pilot. "Here," she said. "Read that."
The telegram was addressed to Iris in Detroit. It was signed by Pig-iron Heller. It read:
CANNOT LOCATE MARK. HURRY. I MUST SEE YOU BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.
DAD.
Fat N. Nathan Nathanialson forced himself into a sitting position. His face was pasty-white.
"I think," he gasped weakly, "that with help I could walk. I’m afraid to stay here."
A new voice made N. Nate gasp. Iris and the pilot whirled around.
"The rotund jurisconsult," a cultured voice announced, "displays ineffable intransigence to suffering."
Iris swung the flashlight toward the voice. The figure she saw was so thin it might have been the little man
who wasn’t there. Only this one wasn’t exactly little. He was tall, bony and unbelievably skinny. His suit
fit him as if he had gotten it from a pawnshop. A tremendous, bulging forehead gleamed in the light. But
the most incongruous thing about him for a man stalking in the North Woods was the monocle.
Of unusually thick lens, it was attached to his ill-fitting coat lapel by a black ribbon. He blinked casually,
not at the girl, who was worth blinking at, but at N. Nathan Nathanialson.
"Wh-what did you say?" the girl blurted.
N. Nate struggled to his feet.
"He said that the fat lawyer refuses to let the pain get him," explained N. Nate, who knew some long
words himself. "Now, who in hell is he?"
Iris Heller peered at the thin wearer of the monocle. Then she relaxed.
"Oh," she said. "It’s Little Johnny. The boys at the mine call him that because he’s so tall."
The skinny man bowed politely.
"Just a metallurgical adjunct to the recovery of hematite," he explained.
While they were figuring that one out, the man whom the woodsmen and miners had dubbed Little
Johnny put his arms around the fat form of N. Nathan Nathanialson. Iris and the aviator gasped at what
happened then. With as little effort as if he were heaving a sack of flour, the incredibly thin man swung the
lawyer over his shoulders. He headed back along the road toward Deep Cut Mine, bearing his burden.
"Pedestrian activity would not be conducive to efficient recovery," he explained, trying now to keep his
words short.
He did not need to explain that he had wandered into the North Woods a month before and been hired
by Pig-iron Heller because of his remarkable knowledge of hematite, the principal type of iron ore found
in the northern United States. That much was known. Pig-iron was an individualist who paid off on what
workers could do, not who they were. He hadn’t cared a whit what the skinny metallurgist’s name might
have been.
Iris explained that to the aviator and to N. Nate who was getting a free ride on a mount that didn’t seem
strong enough to carry half his weight.
But what Iris could not explain because she did not know, was that the gaunt man was really one of the
five aids of Doc Savage! When the men had dubbed him Little Johnny, they had come closer than they
realized to his real name.
William Harper Littlejohn was a geologist, archaeologist and biologist of renown wherever science was
discussed by its top-flight exponents. Doc Savage had sent Johnny, as he was known to his friends, into
the North Woods to find out what was causing the terror near Pig-iron Heller’s Deep Cut Mine!
Doc had heard rumors of that, as he heard reports of most weird evil that went on in the world. Doc had
wanted to know what might have been discovered in that area that gave new value to Heller’s mine;
perhaps value that Heller himself did not know.
Doc had told Johnny he wanted to find out if there was some unpredicted rich source of ore that previous
investigations had not revealed. He told Johnny he wanted to know if that was the basic cause of the
trouble, or if the Indians were really out of hand, for some reason of their own.
Johnny relaxed the muscles of one eye, permitted the monocle to drop to the end of the ribbon. The
monocle was in reality a powerful magnifying glass that he used in his profession.
"I am quite baffled," the geologist said half to himself. "The cause underlying this unseemly activity is
incomprehensible to me."
Johnny started to say something else. But he was interrupted by a white-haired man mountain whose
sheer size brought a gasp from the airplane pilot who was bringing up the rear.
"Igor!" Iris cried. "Thank goodness you have come."
As the newcomer came closer to the beam of the flashlight it could be seen that his hair was not white
with age. It was merely an incredible blondness that would have made girls of the platinum-hair era green
with several kinds of envy.
The man was clad in rough work-shoes and denim overalls. The only touch that gave any indication of
authority was a necktie he wore in the collar of his blue denim shirt. He bowed stiffly from the waist.
"Your father expected you, mistress," he said. His voice was a hollow roar, like wind in the night. He
turned to Johnny.
"I see you have been of assistance," he said stiffly. "You shall be rewarded." The mountain of a man
stepped forward to relieve Johnny of his burden. Johnny staggered slightly, permitted the big man to take
N. Nathan Nathanialson. It would not do to permit the people of this North Woods to suspect him of
such unusual strength. It might cause questions he did not yet want to answer.
Iris Heller performed the feat of introducing the man now on Igor’s back to Igor. It seemed sort of silly.
"This is Igor Lakonnen, our foreman," she said to N. Nate. "I don’t believe you’ve met him before,
although he’s been with dad for more than twenty-five years."
N. Nate grunted. "I’ve been on the legal end, not the mining end," he offered. "I don’t get up to the mine
very often."
Igor Lakonnen started to bow again in introduction. He decided that such a procedure would be bad for
N. Nathan who would have thus been catapulted to the ground. So he gave it up.
"Your father awaits," Igor explained. "In the house-office."
Lakonnen spoke with the stiff precision of a man who has never become at ease with an adopted
language. He never spoke at all except when it was absolutely necessary. But then, as has been pointed
out, the Finns are really a silent race. Iris spoke then falteringly. It almost seemed that she was afraid of
the answer she might get.
"Is . . . is he all right?" she asked.
Before Igor Lakonnen could reply, a whooping yell sounded from ahead. It seemed to come from the
squat house now dimly discernible in the gloom of night. There was a crashing of glass. Then flames shot
out from one window.
Igor put N. Nate gently down to the ground and began to run. Johnny was already racing toward the
building. Iris and the plane pilot were close behind. Lakonnen stamped into the building, seized a fire
extinguisher from a rack as he did. The flames were confined to one corner of the room. They yielded
quickly to the stream of carbon tetrachloride from the extinguisher.
The room was dark. Iris found a light switch and snapped it. A cry of horror gurgled from her throat. The
room was a shambles. Drawers of a big desk were ripped open. Chairs were overturned. Papers were
strewn about the floor.
In one corner, beside the huge leather couch that had been made up as a bed was the body of Pig-iron
Heller. The eyes were open, glazed. The strong lines of the iron-hunter’s face were twisted in the pain of
death. There was only a red blob where the silver hair had been.
The scalp was severed from the head. Beside the body was a bloodstained tomahawk of some flinty
stone. Pig-iron Heller had been scalped in old frontier fashion!
With a strangled cry, Iris Heller raced to the still form of her father. One outstretched hand was clenched.
A wisp of paper showed between the fingers. Her eyes wide with horror, the girl pried those fingers
apart. It seemed to be the one thing that the killer perhaps had missed.
摘要：

THEDEVIL'SPLAYGROUNDADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.PIG-IRON?ChapterII.PIG-IRON’SMESSAGE?ChapterIII.FORTRESSOFSOLITUDE?ChapterIV.DOUBLEDISASTER?ChapterV.ATRAPFORDOC?ChapterVI.AWORTHLESSGOAL?ChapterVII.THEMISCHIEFMAKER?Chapter...

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