Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 173 - Once Over Lightly

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ONCE OVER LIGHTLY
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I
? Chapter II
? Chapter III
? Chapter IV
? Chapter V
? Chapter VI
? Chapter VII
? Chapter VIII
? Chapter IX
? Chapter X
? Chapter XI
? Chapter XII
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine December 1947
Chapter I
OUT of a clear sky came this telegram. It read, MISS MARY OLGA TRUNNELS: IF YOU ARE
MAKING LESS THAN HUNDRED A WEEK QUIT YOUR JOB. I HAVE BETTER ONE FOR
YOU. FINE SALARY, LOVELY SURROUNDINGS, WONDERFUL PEOPLE.
It was signed, GLACIA.
That didn't sound like Glacia should sound somehow, so I wired back. HAVE YOU TAKEN TO
DRINK?
This should have drawn a sassy answer, but it didn't. It got this:
WIRING YOU TRANSPORTATION. JOB IS SUPERB. HONEY YOU MUST
COME.—GLACIA.
The telegrams were coming from a place named Sammy's Springs, California, and it did not seem to be
on the map. A place called Sammy's Springs sounded as if it belonged in California, but it still wasn't on
the map. I looked.
Being a conservative girl sometimes, and also still feeling that all this didn't sound quite like Glacia, I tried
the telephone. The operators seemed to have no trouble finding Sammy's Springs.
“Glacia,” I said. “What has gotten at you? Have you married a monster, or something?”
Glacia had a voice that went well with champagne and little silver bells, and she used it to tinkle
pooh-poohings at me. Then, speaking rapidly, she told me in five different ways that it was a wonderful
job out there, and asked me four different times to come out in a hurry.
“I'll rush down and wire you a plane ticket this instant,” Glacia said.
“Why should you wire the ticket? Why not let the purveyor of this wonderful job do that. And by the
way, who is my future employer?”
“Oh! You're coming! Fine! Wonderful! Oh, I'm so delighted!”
She kept saying this in various ways for a while, then said well this was costing me money, long-distance
calls didn't come for nothing, and goodbye and she would meet the plane with bells on, then she hung up.
She hadn't told me who the job was with, nor what it was.
I decided that it had been Glacia I was talking to, because it was Glacia's voice, but that was about all.
Glacia hadn't demanded a cent of grease for getting me the job. Not like Glacia, that wasn't. She wasn't
one to do a favor without getting her bite, and she was brazen and hard-headed enough to have it
understood ahead of time that she would want a cut.
I lay awake for a while trying to figure it out, and about midnight, just before going to sleep, I began to
wonder if Glacia hadn't sounded scared, really. Still, it would take quite a fright to jolt a dollar out of
Glacia's mind.
The next morning, I went to work at the office, and waited for Mr. Tuffle to make a mistake. Mr. Tuffle
was my department boss, and could be depended on for a mistake every day. He was the
vice-president's son-in-law, which put him in a position where he could blame his subordinates for his
stupidity. I began to think he was going to miss today just to spite me, but about two o'clock he came
over to my desk roaring to know where the Glidden Account papers were and why in hell I hadn't turned
them in on time. I had turned them in on schedule, and further than that, I knew just where he had
misplaced them the afternoon he rushed off early for a game of golf. I went to his desk, dumped the
drawer contents on the floor, grabbed out the Glidden Account papers, and raised hell myself. I carried
the stuff into Mr. Roberts' office, raised more hell, and got fired.
That took care of the embarrassing matter of having to quit the job without the usual two-week notice.
Incidentally, it did the office morale some good. They gave me a party that night.
Glacia had wired the airline reservation herself. I inquired about that, and she was the one who had sent
the ticket.
The plane was one of those super-duper four-motored stratosphere jobs. It got me to Los Angeles in
less than ten hours, and they were paging me over the public address system there. I was wanted at the
reservations counter, the loudspeaker was saying.
“Oh, yes,” said the reservation clerk. “This gentleman is waiting for you.”
The gentleman was a very tall Indian, with two feathers in his hair. He was having trouble with one of his
feathers, which was cocked forward over his left eye. He straightened it, and looked at me.
“Ugh!” he said presently. “You the one, all right. You answer description.” And then he asked, “You got
heap strong stomach?”
“I don't know about that, Hiawatha. Why?”
He put a large copper thumb against his own chest. “Name is Coming Going,” he said.
“Glad to meet you, Mr. Going,” I said. “Now why this interest in my stomach?”
“Got lightplane,” said Mr. Coming Going. “Supposed to fly you like a bird to place named Sammy's
Springs.”
“Oh,” I said. “You mean that you are a pilot who has been employed to furnish me transportation the rest
of the way to my destination?”
He nodded. “That would be long-winded way of saying so,” he admitted.
“Who hired you? Glacia?”
Coming Going lifted his eyes as if he were looking at an eagle, and whistled the wolf-call.
“That would be Glacia,” I said. “All right, lets get my suitcases and be on our way.”
“Ugh,” he said, and we got my suitcase. He must have expected more in the way of baggage, because he
seemed favorably impressed.
“Squaw with one suitcase!” he remarked wonderingly. “Wonders haven't ceased.” Then he examined me
again, with more interest than before, and said another, “Ugh!”
That “Ugh!” was the end of his conversation for the trip. I found out why he was interested in whether or
not I had a strong stomach. The plane he had was a little two-place grasshopper affair, sixty-five
horsepower, the pilot seated ahead of the passenger. A kite with an engine. We flew for three hours over
desert and mountains and the thermals and downdrafts tossed us around like a leaf. My stomach stood it,
although there were times when I wondered.
The only comment Mr. Going had on the durability of my midriff was another, “Ugh!” after we landed. It
was slightly approving, however.
Glacia came running and screaming, “Mote! Darling! You did get here! How divine!”
Glacia was blonde, small, lively, and wonderful for gentlemen to look upon, with hair falling to her
shoulder, widely innocent blue eyes, a tricky nose, and other features to nice specifications. She did not
look as if she had a penny's worth of brains, although she actually had some—in an acquiring fashion.
I told her she was looking wonderful—she was—and then asked what about this job, and didn't get an
answer. I got a lot of conversation, the gushing sort, but no specific data on the job.
Glacia had a car waiting. A roadster. Seen after dark, the color of the car wouldn't put your eyes out, but
now the desert sun was shining on it, and it nearly blinded me.
“You must have taken some fellow for plenty, honey,” I said.
Glacia had no answer to that, but plenty of other words, and we got in the roadster and drove through
mesquite, cholla cactus, yucca cactus, barrel cactus—I didn't know one cactus from another, but Glacia
gave a running comment on cacti as we drove—and after a few miles it became evident that we were
approaching a rather odd sort of civilization.
“You'll love this place, dear,” said Glacia.
We got closer.
“For God's sake!” I said.
“There!” said Glacia. “I told you. Quaint, isn't it?”
“You mean this is a hotel?”
“Yes.”
“But what—”
“Oh, it isn't a bit like the ordinary hotel,” Glacia explained. “That's probably what makes it the place to
be seen. Lots of Hollywood people come here. Nothing around here is supposed to be quite
commonplace.”
I could see that it wasn't commonplace. The buildings were made of native stone and enormous logs in an
utterly bizarre architectural plan, like one of those hairbrained plans that artists think up for the magazines
when they are handed a story of a visit to Mars or some other planet to illustrate. The structures hadn't
been skimped on size, either, I discovered, when we drove into a tunnel-like portico that would have
accommodated a locomotive.
There was a whispering sound, a big door closed quietly behind us, and we were greeted by a rush of
cold conditioned air that seemed approximately zero. Outside the temperature must be past a hundred.
“You'll love it,” Glacia said.
“You're not,” I said, “implying that this is going to be my place of residence?”
“Certainly. Why not?”
“There's a slight matter of dollars involved. Or don't they use them for legal tender around here?”
“Oh, that's taken care of,” said Glacia.
“Is it? You don't say. I'd like to know—”
What I wanted to know about was this job, which was rather elusive it seemed to me, but three more
Indians stalked out of the place and without a word captured my bag and disappeared inside with it. Two
Indians carried the bag. The other walked behind them. They hadn't made a sound.
“Do they scalp anybody?” I asked.
“They're bellhops. Don't be silly,” Glacia said.
“What do they charge you for a room around here?”
“They don't call it a room. You're a tribe member. That includes your lodging, food, recreation,
everything.”
“Don't beat around the bush, dear. I asked you the charge—”
“Nothing—for you. It's taken care of.”
“Just the same, I'm not going to sign the register.”
Glacia laughed, and I found out why. There wasn't any register, or if there was one, I never saw nor
heard about it. This hotel, or resort, or whatever you would call it, was the screwiest spot imaginable.
My room was swell. Glacia managed to deposit me in it without telling me what the job was, and then
skipped, saying, “You'll want to scrub up, honey. You look like you'd been pumped here through a
pipe.” Which was more like Glacia. She normally wasn't a very civil person, to people she could bulldoze
well enough to call them her friends. I'm afraid I belonged to that category.
The room had a stuffed buffalo in it, but otherwise it was normal. The walls were pastels, blues mostly,
and the furniture was what one would probably find in the forty-dollar-a-day suite in the Waldorf. But the
buffalo rather dominated the place.
I went to the window to see whether the scenery was in keeping. It wasn't. The scenery was all right, a
swatch of authentic desert equipped with the varieties of cactus Glacia had named, sand dunes, mesquite,
probably sidewinders and scorpions too. The mountains were not far away; they were remarkably dark
mountains that tumbled and heaved up to a startlingly cyanite blue sky, and if there was a shred of
vegetation, I failed to see it. The scenery was unique in a bleak, tooth-edging way. It didn't look at all
genuine, but then that wasn't unusual in Southern California.
The scenery seemed to have an effect on me, though, or perhaps it was the hotel. Or wondering about
this job. I showered and changed, and didn't feel any more confident, and tried to find a telephone to get
in touch with Glacia. There didn't seem to be any room telephones. I went into the hall, and an Indian,
presumably another bellhop, was passing, and I asked him, “What about room phones? Don't they have
any here?”
“Ugh,” he said. “Takeum buffalo by horn and talk to him.” He walked off.
I yelled, “Listen, Pocahontas, what room is Miss Glacia Loring in?”
“Mink,” he said, not looking back and his feathered headdress not missing a bob.
So I went looking for mink. The suites weren't numbered either, it seemed, but were designated drawings
of different animals and birds on the door panels. The place was screwy enough that this touch seemed
quite sane and practical.
Glacia had changed to a bathing suit. It was small, a dab here and there. Not enough to do her figure any
harm.
“Angel,” she cried at me. “I want you to meet Uncle Waldo!”
“Whose Uncle Waldo?”
“Mine.”
“I didn't know you had one,” I said. “Listen, you beautiful wench, if you're trying to pass some antiquated
boy-friend off as—”
“Oh, don't be so stinking moral,” she said.
“He's really your Uncle?”
“My mother's brother. God help her,” Glacia said.
That should sort of prepare me for anything, I thought. I hadn't known Glacia's family too well when I
was a kid growing up in Kansas City, because we lived in the part of town where we had backyards and
washings were hung there. The Lorings had lived four blocks over, not a great distance, but quite a long
way measured in the snobbery scale. Glacia Loring and I ended up attending the same high school, and
we must have found something in common—as I recall, we were both going to become actresses at the
time, and got together in school theatricals—and we saw quite a lot of each other.
Were we friends as kids? I don't know. I doubt it, but it would depend on what the definition for
friendship was. We were together a lot. We fought over the same boys, and got stuffed at the same soda
fountains. I suppose we sort of rubbed off on each other. I toning Glacia down a little, and she giving me
more glisten. But I don't know about that either. I do know my mother didn't approve of Glacia's folks,
and Glacia evidently had similar trouble at home, because she never took me there.
Not that Glacia's folks were snobs. They were screwballs. They just plain resented common sense, and
they maintained that the conventional and the ordinary was slops for pigs. I think Glacia's mother and
father were married in an airplane circling over Kansas City as a publicity stunt, and I knew that her
grandfather on the maternal side had maintained that he, not Peary nor Cook, had been first to discover
the North Pole, and that he had sued, or threatened to sue, both Admiral Peary and Cook for daring to
lay claim to the Pole. This old fellow would be the sire of Glacia's Uncle Waldo, if there was really such
an individual. And since Uncle Waldo was a sprig on such a goofer-tree, anything might be expected of
him.
It might have been the cockeyed hotel, but I expected to find Uncle Waldo covered with monkeys. I
wouldn't have been surprised, anyway.
What I met was a nice-looking old gentleman, not much taller than I am, an old gaffer made of oak and
weather-cured hide. He wore tan flannel trousers with sandals, and a terrific checkered shirt. He was
sitting in the bar which overlooked a swimming pool, and he was the only person in the place with a glass
of milk in front of him. He looked me over.
“A seaworthy seeming craft,” he remarked.
That didn't sound too much like a compliment, but I gathered it was. He had no more to say until he had
given Glacia's scanty bathing costume a disapproving nose-wrinkling, and watched me order a drink. I
ordered ginger ale with nothing in it, because my stomach was still in some doubts about what to do over
the lightplane ride. Apparently, what I ordered met with approval, because Uncle Waldo got around to
dropping an oracular opinion.
“She'll do,” he said.
Glacia blew out her breath.
“Darling,” she told me. “Now I can tell you about the job. It's working for me.”
“For you!”
“Oh, don't look so shocked. What's so bad about that?”
“I don't know what's tough about it,” I said. “But I'm sure something will develop.”
Uncle Waldo chuckled. This sounded like a steam engine snorting once.
“The pay is good,” Glacia said hastily. “You'll get fif—” She paused and examined my expression.
“Eighty a week,” she corrected.
“That's too much,” I said. “Or is it?”
“Don't be so damned suspicious,” Glacia said.
“So there's something I should be suspicious of?”
“Of course not!” She didn't sound convincing, although she tried hard enough.
“What is this job, baby?”
Glacia evidently had an answer all ready, but suddenly decided I wouldn't believe it, and got busy trying
to think of another. While she was doing that, Uncle Waldo summarized the job.
“You hold niece's hand,” Uncle Waldo said.
He meant Glacia, of course. By holding Glacia's hand, I hoped he didn't mean what I thought he meant.
Anything that would make Glacia want her hand held probably wouldn't be easy on the nerves.
Chapter II
THE job had a snake in it somewhere. But two days passed and nothing happened and I was lulled into
a condition that might be called somewhat puzzled peace of mind—the kind of an attitude where you
don't think you'll have to swim, but you take your bathing suit along just in case.
The two days had incidents enough in them, but they weren't significant incidents. Except, it later
developed, one incident was going to lead to something. For I saw Doc Savage.
Glacia was with me at the time. We came into the lobby and there was an air of hush and bated breaths
like the Second Coming.
“The redskins must have arisen,” I said.
“It's always like this when he's passing through,” said Glacia.
“What do you mean?”
“You'd think,” said Glacia, “that if he wanted a vacation, he would go where no one knew him . . . Still,
that place would be hard to find, I guess.”
At this point the magnet for all the gaping interest appeared. He was a bronze man with flake gold
eyes—that description sounds a good deal more casual than it should sound, probably. But that was all
he meant to me at the time. A bronze man with flake gold eyes. I did notice that when he passed near
another person or a piece of furniture to which his proportions could be compared, there was the rather
odd illusion that he became a giant. Not quite seven feet tall, but almost. Otherwise he was just an
athletic-looking bronze man with gold eyes. Striking. But nothing to fall over on your face about.
Not until he had passed through the lobby and was gone did it seem permissible to resume breathing.
“Well, well, quite an effect,” I told Glacia. “Who might he be?”
“Don't you know?”
“Should I?”
Glacia looked at me as if she considered me thoroughly stupid. “You mean to tell me . . .?” She shook
her head wonderingly.
“Has my education been neglected?”
“You evidently forgot to put on your brains this morning,” Glacia said. She seemed genuinely disgusted.
“That was Doc Savage.”
“So?”
Glacia's eyes popped a trifle. “I honest-to-God believe you've never heard of him.”
“Am I supposed to have?”
Glacia said she could cry out loud, said a couple of other things not complimentary, and added, “You
must be ribbing me, dear.”
“Just be nice for a change and tell me who he is?”
“Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, the righter of wrongs and the nemesis of evildoers.”
The way Glacia said it was odd, and I looked at her. She had put considerable feeling into it, not as if she
was irked at my not knowing who this fellow was, but as if it was a personal matter with her—as if
Savage himself was a personal matter.
“Oh, a detective,” I said.
Glacia said, “Not so you would notice,” without bothering to shake her head.
“G-man, then?”
But Glacia shook her head and said, “Skip it, baby.” And the rest of the afternoon she was rather sober.
Later that evening, I found my redskin pilot, Mr. Coming Going, near the swimming pool. He wore a
swim suit and two feathers, was having trouble with one of the feathers drooping over an eye, and was
sitting with his legs cocked up on a table, watching female guests disporting in the pool.
“Ugh!” he said to me.
From that beginning, I worked the conversation around to Doc Savage, and asked for information about
the star guest. I had touched a sympathetic chord, because Mr. Going's eye brightened. He said “Ugh!” a
couple of times enthusiastically, changed to perfectly good Kansan City English, and told me that Doc
Savage was a noted celebrity, a righter of wrongs and punisher of evildoers.
“I got that same line from my girl-friend-employer,” I said. “But it sounds a little screwball.”
“That Savage fellow is no screwball,” said Coming Going. The glint in his eye was probably
admiration—not for me, but for Savage. “What gave you such an idea?”
“That evildoer nemesis and wrong-righter stuff,” I said.
“It's straight.”
“Gadzooks. It sounds like strictly from the place where the bells hang.”
“Well, that's what he does.”
“You mean that's his profession?”
“Yep.”
“How does he make it pay off?”
Coming Going shrugged. “I'm not his historian. Strikes me you should have heard of Savage. How did
you miss it?” He gazed at me with more approval than he had evidenced hitherto. “You seem to be a
pleasantly ignorant wench. The type I admire, incidentally.”
I noticed that Mr. Coming Going had blue eyes. “Just how much Indian are you?” I asked.
He pretended to be alarmed lest we he overheard. “My pop once bummed a cigarette off Chief Rose
Garden, but don't tell anybody on me.”
“What tribe did Chief Rose Garden belong to?”
“Kickapoo, I guess. He was selling bottled Kickapoo Snake Oil off the tailgate of a wagon that stopped
in our village for a while.”
I left Mr. Coming Going without being certain whether I was being kidded.
That night, Glacia asked me to share her room. Somehow I did not seem at all surprised when she did
so, which must mean that I had sensed something of the sort coming. Glacia was off-handedly high and
mighty about it. “You'd better move in with me, and cut expenses,” she said. And added, “I've already
had your things brought to my suite.”
It was all right. After all, she was paying me—she really was; I'd collected the first week's pay in
advance—and she was entitled to give the orders.
About ten o'clock, Glacia said something else that seemed a bit odd. “I'm going to say good night to
Uncle Waldo,” she told me.
“If I'm not back in half an hour, will you check up?”
“What do you mean, check up?” I asked.
She said angrily, “Just see why I haven't returned! You ask too many questions!” She flounced out,
slamming the door.
I went over to a chair and dropped into it, waiting for the clock minute-hand to move half an hour. And
presently I noticed that I had instinctively or for some other occult reason selected a chair facing the
door. My hands seemed to have a peculiar unrest of their own—they wanted to hold something, and the
fingers were inclined to bite at whatever they gripped, the latter objects alternating between the chair
armrests, my knees, a handkerchief and an Indian warclub that I chanced to pick off the table.
The warclub, it presently occurred to me, was out of place. It didn't belong in the room, which was
otherwise a fine modern hotel room. The screwball atmosphere of the hotel didn't extend to any of their
suites—except for one little touch like a stuffed buffalo or something of that sort. And that reminded
me—I looked around for the screwball item in Glacia's suite. But there didn't seem to be anything,
because the warclub wasn't enough of a zany touch to qualify.
Presently I was worrying because there wasn't a stuffed buffalo or the equivalent in the place. The logical
conclusion to be drawn from that was: I must be getting a loose shingle. The nutty desert resort, and the
intangibility of my job, might be getting me.
Twenty minutes later, I decided I was scared. There was no other emotion that would quite account for
my goose bumps. Frightened. Why? Well, Glacia wasn't back yet. But that didn't quite account for it.
Something was giving me the feeling—Feeling indeed! It was more than an impression. It was utterly
conviction—that there was considerable danger afoot. Where the notion came from, I hadn't the slightest
idea.
In the next five minutes—Glacia had been gone twenty-five now—I formed a sound notion of what was
making the roots of my hair feel funny. It was this: It didn't make sense, but it was this: Something was
waiting around to happen, and it was something violent. I had arrived at the desert resort and found an air
of suspense, of expectancy, concealed waiting, tension, fear, danger and God knows what more. How
did I know I had found these things? Somebody would have to tell me.
I was in the right mood to jump seven feet straight up when the door began to open with sinister
slowness. It had been twenty-nine minutes since Glacia left. The door to the hall opened a fractional inch
at a time. I didn't jump straight up or straight down. I just turned to stone.
Nobody more dangerous than Glacia came in. She gave me a rather odd smile.
“It's fate. Why don't you go to bed?” she said.
“What for?” I asked. “I won't sleep.”
But evidently I did sleep. I think I did, anyway, because there was a period when nightmares and
nighthorses galloped through a zone of muted terror. And once I possibly sat up in bed and looked for
Glacia and she was gone. I say possibly, because I'm not sure; I only know that I lay back—granting that
I ever sat up in the first place—and worried for a long time through a ghastly series of dreams about what
I should do about Glacia being gone. Then finally I got the answer—I should get up and find her.
Whereupon I awakened, unquestionably this time, and looked, and there was Glacia asleep where she
should be on the other bed. I didn't go to sleep again that night. It wasn't worth the effort. I was scared of
the dreams, too.
The sunlight was splattering in through the windows when Glacia arose, showered, wrapped a housecoat
about herself and said, “I'll see how Uncle Waldo is feeling.”
“Is he ill?”
“He wasn't quite himself last night,” Glacia said vaguely, and left.
She came back with her face the color of bread dough that had been mixed two or three days ago.
She said, “Uncle Waldo is—is—” She gagged on whatever the rest was and arched her neck, all of her
body rigid. She held that for a moment. Then she said, “His face—his brains are all over his face.”
Then she went down silently on the floor. Fainted.
Chapter III
HE was a short, wide, furry man with one of the homeliest faces ever assembled, and he wouldn't have to
be encountered in a very dark place to be mistaken for an ape.
“Oh, Yes,” he said. “Another female admirer. We comb them out of the woodwork every morning. . . .
摘要：

ONCEOVERLIGHTLYADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXIIOriginallypublishedinDocSavageMagazineDecember1947ChapterIOUTofacle...

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