Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 141 - Satan Black

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SATAN BLACK
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2003 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
? Chapter XIII
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine September 1944
Chapter I
The bronze man finally found a piece of rope. He had a worse time locating one than he had expected,
and toward the last he searched with a haste that was near frenzy.
The rope was three-quarter-inch stuff about fifteen feet long, and it smelled of the anti-rust off the tools
and the pipe. He found it on the fourth pipe-truck which he searched, although he had supposed there
would be rope on every truck. Rope and chain were necessities on the big multi-ton pipe-trucks, one
would think.
He clutched the rope, and he ran for the loaded pipe-truck that had broken an axle that afternoon. He
ran desperately.
Early summer darkness lay over Arkansas, warm and amiable, and there was enough breeze to bring a
slight odor, but not an unpleasant one, of the slough to the south.
The river was farther east. One couldn't say the river was a sound, but it was distinctly a presence and a
fierce power. It wasn't a fierce-looking river. It was referred to more often as a ribbon of mud. Yet it
was no ribbon, because a ribbon is something soft, something for a lady. This river was something for
garfish that tasted of carrion, mud-cats, water-dogs; it was a repelling river, unlovely to look at and
heart-breaking to deal with. It was a nasty, muddy, sulking presence in the eastern darkness.
The bronze man with his rope reached the pipe-truck with the snapped axle. He crawled under it. He
knew exactly the spot he wanted, not under the truck itself, but under the pipe-trailer, beneath the mighty
lengths of twenty-four-inch oil pipeline river-casing. This stuff wasn't the land casing, which was heavy
enough; it was the special river casing.
The bronze man made himself a sling under the pipe. A hammock, a tight, snug little place to lie
supported by the rope he'd been in such a wild haste to find. When he was done, and hauled up snug in
the sling-hammock, one could look under the truck and not see him.
But if one happened to crawl under the truck, even partly under it, and poke around with a flashlight
beam, he was sure to be seen. And once found, for a moment or two he would be helpless there. It was
a good place to hide, but it wasn't a good place to be caught hiding. Not if one took into consideration
the kind of a thing that was happening.
The bronze man lay very still. He coiled the end of the rope on his stomach. He wouldn't, he thought,
care for more than half an hour of hanging like this. But it shouldn't take that long.
He listened to the night sounds, the crickets and the frogs and the owls, the rumbling of trucks in the
distance, the heavy iron animal noises of bulldozers, the grinding of tripod-winches. The noises that go
with the laying of a twenty-four-inch petroleum pipeline.
The noises sounded sharp and hearty enough. There was nothing sick-sounding about them, nothing at
all.
There should have been.
SHORTLY another man came to the pipe-truck, coming idly, sauntering, pretending he was out for a
walk. He was whistling softly so that no one would think he was trying to sneak or prowl. He reached the
pipe-truck and leaned against the trailer duals and whistled. But he wasn't a good actor, and his whistling
was unnatural.
The second man came more quietly. “Joe?” he said.
“Right.”
“Nice night.”
“Uh-huh,” Joe said.
“Got a flashlight?”
“What you want a flashlight for?”
“Want to take a look around.”
“I ain't got one. Pack'll have one. Pack carries one alla time.”
Pack came shortly. Another man was with him, a man called Dave. Pack said he had his flashlight. He
said he'd look around.
“Want to see how bad that axle's broke,” Joe said.
He didn't want to see how bad the axle was broken. He couldn't see anyway, because a truck axle was
inside a housing, and anyway, if they broke, they broke. There wasn't such a thing as a bad break or a
minor break. They just broke.
Joe put the flashlight beam into the pipe-truck cab. He put it under the truck, under the pipe, over the
ground, around the wheels, in front of the truck, behind it, and he rammed the rod of light from the flash
down each one of the load of twenty-four-inch river-weight pipes.
“Okay,” he said. “We got the place to ourselves.”
“That's why I put out the word for you to meet me here,” Pack said. “Nobody around. Nobody got any
reason to come around. Anyhow, this won't take long.”
“Let's get it over with,” Joe said. “This is the night I'd set aside to catch up on my sleep.”
“Hell of a lot of sleep you'll get tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
Pack was chairman of the meeting. Pack was sharper, more suave than the others. Possibly he was a
little smarter. But none of them were dumb; they weren't honest, and they weren't stupid.
Pack said, “Go take another look around, Joe. Here's the flashlight.”
“Dammit, we took a look around,” Joe complained, but he moved off with the flashlight.
Pack said, “You guys keep listening and watching that light of Joe's. You might see or hear something
Joe would miss.”
“Say!” said the man called Dave. “What you trying to do, scare the hell out of us?”
Pack said, “I wouldn't want anybody to overhear this. Neither would you.”
“Why not?”
“Wait until Joe takes another look around.”
Joe had his look. He came back. He said, “Nobody around. Why so careful?”
“We got to kill a man,” Pack said. “And we've got to do it quick.”
NO one said anything, not a word. The heat lightning winked redly in the distance, and an owl hooted in
the slough. Far away, somebody began beating a pipe with a sledge, making a dull bell-like rhythm. Joe
coughed. He said, “Here, Pack, is your flashlight.” He wasn't casual. He wasn't even trying to be casual.
He sounded about like any man would sound who had been told he was going to participate in a murder
tonight. Startled, frightened, sick.
Pack said, “I don't like it either. But there's no other way out.”
No one answered him for a while. Then Dave said, “Let me say something right now: I've never killed a
man. It'll take a damned good reason to make me kill a man. A mighty damned good reason.”
“You've got it,” Pack told him.
“I doubt that! By Heaven, I doubt that!” The fear in Dave's voice crawled like a snake.
There was a silence. Probably the others were thinking about the way Dave sounded, wondering if there
would be as much gut-torn terror in their own voices if they spoke.
Pack cleared his throat. “You yellow-bellied son!” he said softly. “Lost your insides right out on the
ground, haven't you?”
Dave breathed inward and outward deeply, audibly, the way a sick man breathes.
“Take it easy,” he said. “I'm all right.”
“You sure as hell don't sound all right.”
“I'm scared,” Dave said.
“How scared?”
“Skip it!” Dave said hoarsely. “Don't push me. I'm all right. Just don't push me, is all!”
Again silence, until Joe said uneasily, “Dave will be all right. I know Dave.”
Pack told Joe, “You'd better know him. You recommended him.”
“Listen, take it easy,” Joe pleaded.
Pack lit a cigarette. His hand shook, and he stared at the trembling hand. He grunted unpleasantly. “I'm
jittery myself,” he said.
It was a diplomatic statement.
“That's what I mean,” Dave said eagerly. “I've got the jitters, is all. I didn't mean anything.”
Pack shook out the match. He grinned in the darkness. He had deliberately made his hand shake, for
there was actually no tremor in him and no touch of uncertainty. He had long suspected Dave was weak,
and a moment ago he had made certain. Dave's weakness would have to be dealt with, but this was no
time for that. With his little shaking of hand and his false admission of fear, Pack had avoided doing
anything about it now.
Pack deliberately held silence for a while, letting the other three stew. The cruelty in Pack was more than
a streak; it was the big thing in his nature, and he enjoyed it the way some men enjoy strong drink, others
a meal and others a woman. Finally he spoke.
“Jones,” he said. “The one they call Preach Jones. He's down in the paybook as Alvin Edgar Jones.
Know him, any of you?”
The last question, did they know Jones?, was a master touch, a belt-punch.
“Jones!” Joe said hoarsely. “You mean it's Jones?”
“That's right.”
THEY knew Jones. One or another of them had had Preach Jones in his hair at some time, but it was
startling to discover, out of a clear sky, that they were to murder him. Preach Jones was not an invested
minister of the gospel, nor even a preacher at all, so far as any organized religious group was concerned.
He was merely a little man, with big soft eyes behind spectacles, who was always trying to carpenter
other men's lives into a godly shape.
Oil pipeline construction is a hairy-chested job. This present Colbeck Construction Company project
was no exception; tougher, if anything, because mostly there were old-timers on the job. The armed
services had the young men. The fellows Colbeck Construction had hired were of the tough old school,
from the days when pipe-joints were put together with threads, and tongued in place with brute sweat,
when the men lived in tent camps and there were fights every night and a killing every week or so. The
nice men, the engineers and the college products, were away fighting Japs and Germans.
Preach Jones was a saintly little nuisance with the ability to make you feel ashamed for saying a mouthful
of cusswords. But he was nice. Somehow it inspired you to talk to him. You liked to talk to him; you
found yourself telling him things that were close to your heart. He was a sympathetic listener.
Pack knew what the others were thinking.
“There is no other way out of it,” Pack told them grimly. “So don't start thinking up arguments.”
No one spoke.
Pack added, “The story is a long one, and we're not too sure of the details. All we know is that Preach
Jones talked to Carl Boordling one time when Carl was sloppy drunk. You know how Carl was-when
he got sloppy, he would get to thinking about his past, and it would scare him. Well, Jones happened to
get hold of Carl, and out came the whole story.”
Pack paused for emphasis.
“There was enough in what Carl told Jones to hang all of us and wreck everything,” he added.
The fourth man whose name had not yet been used swore deeply and viciously. “Carl would do that!
Damn a man who slops when he's drunk!”
Pack said, “Time is getting short. Jones is going to go along the hill road about nine o'clock. We can head
him off there.”
“We haven't more than a half hour,” Joe said. “It's nearly eight-thirty.”
“That's right,” Pack agreed. “Joe, you and Dave will hide in the brush alongside the road. Guernsey, you
stop Jones. I'll come up behind Jones and blackjack him. If he yells, Joe and Dave will close in quick.
The idea is to get him without any noise, and get him out of there without hurting him too much. That's
why I'll do the blackjacking myself. Don't any of you other guys hit him over the head or the heart. We
don't want him killed.”
Far away, toward the river, a steamboat whistle sounded mournfully. The dogs on farms for miles
around, as if they had been waiting for such an excuse, began yapping.
Pack finished, “We'll take Jones back in the hills a ways and have a talk with him. We've got to know
how much he's told.”
There was another silence. Dave began to make his hard-breathing sounds again, deep and heavy,
panting, as if the fear and nausea were animals in his chest over which he had no control. “Who-who-”
Dave choked on the question, tried again with, “Who is going to-to-”
“We'll get to that,” Pack told him. “Killing a man is easy at the time. It's just the before and after that gets
your nanny.”
“Take it easy, Dave,” Joe said.
Pack turned away in the darkness. “Let's get going,” he said. He spat.
Chapter II
THE bronze man slipped the knots in the rope which had held him against the pipe, concealed. He
crawled out on the side of the pipe-truck where the moonshadows were thick, and for a few moments
kneaded the places where the rope had cramped him. He crawled back under the truck and got the
rope, so that no one would have his suspicions aroused by finding it there.
He set off for the so-called hill road. There was no mistaking the road. It swept in easy curves up to the
crest of the mountain which overlooked the vastness of the lowlands where the river and the marshes and
the farmlands stretched. Ten minutes should bring him to it.
The man he wanted now was Jones.
He had not learned much, hiding there. Not as much as he had expected to learn. Not enough, standing
by itself, to repay him for the tedious sherlocking by which he had learned there was to be a meeting at
the broken-down pipe-truck tonight.
He tossed the rope on to a parked cat tractor, left it there. It had served its purpose.
Jones. Jones was the man he needed now.
He had not heard of Jones before. As a matter of fact, he had heard very little about anything. The sum
total of what he had known before was hardly more than he had learned by roping himself under the
truck and eavesdropping. So he was glad to hear of Jones.
Jones was something tangible. Jones was a door. If the door could be opened it might reveal the entire
mystery.
The bronze man began running. He ran lightly, for a large man, with a long muscular spring in his legs and
an easy agility over logs and through the brush. It was not too dark to tell fairly well where the thickest
undergrowth lay, and avoid it.
He knew where the ridge road lay. The first thing he had done, one of the first things he always did in a
matter of this kind, was look over the vicinity. The things he noted were the roads, the buildings, the
paths, the short-cuts, and whenever possible he learned by inquiry the local names and nicknames for
those places.
He had not, as yet, introduced himself to anyone, or stated his purpose to anyone. No one, as far as he
was aware, knew who he was or why he was here. He had told no one. He had been careful not to ask
enough questions to seem suspicious.
He had been quiet and inconspicuous. He had observed. It wasn't an accident that he had watched Pack
quite a lot. Pack was the one name he'd known when he came.
Pack's full name was Lowell Packard. He was a welder. What else he was wasn't certain yet. His name
had merely been given the bronze man as a possible suspect.
Watching Pack, the bronze man had seen him contact the other four, one at a time, and make the
arrangements for the meeting tonight. With the aid of very good binoculars and a not inconsiderable skill
at lip-reading, the bronze man had learned that they would meet at the truck, and when.
Pack was acting, the bronze man suspected strongly, at the behest of someone else. But he didn't know
who. Nor did he know how Pack had reached the higher-up.
The bronze man came to the ridge road. He reached it near the foot of the hill, a poor place to waylay
anyone. He reasoned that Pack and the others would be in wait further up the road.
The road was graveled. There was almost no grader ditch. Weeds grew up out of the gravel beside the
road, rank and uncut. He lay in the weeds, waiting.
It seemed he waited no time at all before he heard footsteps coming. He dared not lift his head, because
the weeds weren't tall.
The footsteps came rapidly. Then they paused. They came rapidly again, and this haste was followed by
another pause. It was an unnatural way to walk.
The bronze man took a chance and lifted his head. He could see a figure, only the outlines of it. But he
saw enough to know that the person was agitated, and stopping to listen every few paces.
When the figure came abreast, the bronze man came up silently out of the weeds and seized the person.
He knew he'd made an error, that he had hold of a woman, but it was too late then.
IMMEDIATELY he made a second error, when his impulse to be polite caused him to release the
woman. He didn't quite release her. Just in time, he realized she had a gun in the waistband of her slacks.
She managed to draw the weapon, but he got hold of it. It was a revolver, a hammer model. He got his
thumb-web between the hammer and the breech so the hammer could not fall. The hammer had a
firing-spike on it which dug into his hand.
She said, “Jones, you fool! I'm Nola Morgan!”
The bronze man paid no attention, and kept working on her hand, not too roughly, until he had the gun.
Just as he got it, she peeled his shin with a kick. She tried to run. He caught her.
Because he thought Jones might come along the road, and he still wanted to catch Jones, too, he hauled
the woman off the road into the shadows.
“Take it easy.” He made his voice gentle, so as not to frighten her more.
She surprised him then.
“Jones!” she said. “Jones, what do you think you are pulling?”
So she thought he was Jones.
“Be still,” he said. “Listen for a minute.”
He wanted her to be quiet until Jones came along, then he would grab Jones, and it would straighten itself
all out, he hoped.
“This is going to get you nothing but trouble, Jones,” she said.
“Shut up,” he ordered.
She said, “Don't tell me what to do!”
He startled her by holding his fist, huge and bronze, close to her nose. “Look, how would you like to be
hit with that?” he demanded. He wanted silence urgently.
Unimpressed, she demanded, “What are you pulling?”
He didn't answer. She was speaking in a low voice, and he decided to take a chance on hearing Jones
coming before Jones heard them.
He had no idea who this girl was, any more than he could tell what she looked like in the darkness. He
decided to fish for information, and dropped in his hook by saying, “Isn't this what you expected to
happen?”
“I'm not too surprised,” she said instantly.
“That's good.”
“Listen, I told you I would pay you for the truth about the misericord,” she said. “I will pay you. I'll even
pay you more than I said.”
“Are you sure it is the right misericord?” the bronze man asked.
“It's the one Carl Boordling made in the penitentiary,” she said.
CARL BOORDLING? Who was Carl Boordling? The four men had mentioned him at their conference
at the pipe-truck. Carl Boordling was the man who got sloppy in his cups and talked too much to Jones.
Telling so much that the men felt they must now kill Jones because he had listened and was himself going
to talk. The bronze man wished he knew more about Boordling.
“When was that?” he asked.
“Before he died,” she said.
“Oh, before Boordling died,” he said.
He was going slowly, picking his way, feeling.
Suddenly she demanded, “Was Boordling killed because of that misericord?”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don't know. Was he? Oh, I know the doctor at the penitentiary decided Boordling had committed
suicide by drinking sodium sulphocyanate. They said he got it out of the chemical stock they used in the
photographic class. But he could have been murdered, couldn't he?”
“Those penitentiary physicians are usually good men.”
“But this one didn't know what was going on.”
“Have you any proof?”
“That was one of the things you were going to give me, wasn't it?” she demanded.
He was cornered. She expected some kind of a direct answer. His mind raced, and he decided to try to
evade the corner by putting her on the defensive again.
“We've got to be sure it is the same misericord,” he said.
“It is! It's the one Boordling gave me, along with that strange note.”
He said quickly, “What about the note? Let's see if it checks with what I know about it.”
He tried to keep any hint of groping out of his voice.
“Why do you want to know?” she demanded.
“I have to be sure.”
“Well, it's the right misericord-”
“The note. What did the note say?”
“The exact words were, 'This bloodthirsty looking trinket is not what it seems to be at all. It has a story
to tell. Keep it, please, because it is not a gift, and it is important. You do not know me, so you can be
sure this misericord isn't a gift. It is, incidentally, an exact copy of the one Napoleon Bonaparte owned.
But that's not why I want you to keep it. Don't tell anyone about it, please.'“
The bronze man said, “That is a long note. You remember it quite well.”
“I should as many times as I've read it.”
“It sounds as if an educated man wrote it.”
“Boordling was educated. He was an engineer for some electrical company once, wasn't he?”
Up the road, higher on the hill, there was a struggle and a low outcry.
Jones! They had caught Jones up there.
THE bronze man was on his feet instantly. He gripped the young woman's arm and spoke to her with
imperative haste.
“I'm not Jones!” he said. “They've caught Jones up there. They were lying in wait for him. They've got
him. They're going to kill him. We've got to stop it. Now don't ask questions, and come with me.”
He didn't really expect her to comply, but he was pleased when she did.
“All right,” she said.
The bronze man left the road and headed for the sounds he had heard. The road mounted the hill in
sweeping curves, and he was cutting across, saving time.
“Who are you?” the woman whispered.
“Quiet!” he said.
The going was fairly open. There was some buckbrush, a few redoaks, but mostly there was thick grass,
sopping wet with dew. Such rock as there was was sandstone, and not very noisy when they stepped on
it.
He heard sounds again. He gripped the girl's shoulder, pulling her to a stop, then down, whispering,
“They're coming this way.”
They crouched there, and soon the four men-Pack, Dave, Joe, Guernsey-came stumbling past, dragging
a fifth limp figure.
“I think he's dead,” Dave said. “Pack, I think you smashed his skull.”
“Oh, put him down. He's just knocked out,” Pack said. “Lay him down. This is as good a place as any to
work on him.”
They let Jones drop loosely on the sod. Then they waited. They were breathing heavily. Pack struck a
match and lit a cigarette, then said, “You might as well smoke if you want to. It'll be a minute.”
How frightened they were, and how dependent on Pack, was pitifully shown by the way all of them
immediately lit cigarettes. Pack must have realized this, because he laughed.
Pack was the manager, the dominant force, as he said, “You did pretty good, Dave. I was worried about
the way you were acting earlier.”
“I'll make it,” Dave said.
Suddenly there was a rushing, a scuffle, blows, grunts, a yell choked off. All was confusion for a moment.
Then strained silence fell.
“Damn him!” Joe said. “He woke up and played possum and tried to get away.”
“I told you he wasn't bad hurt,” Pack said. Pack stood over Jones. “Jones, we'll kill you next time. You
lay still and listen and answer questions, understand.”
JONES had a good voice. It still had melody and roundness in spite of the strain and terror in the man.
“Who-who are you?” he asked. “Say, are you Pack? You sound like Pack.”
“It's Pack,” Pack said.
“Whew! Gee whizz! I thought a bunch of hijackers had waylaid me. Let me up, fellows.”
Pack laughed, briefly and explosively. “Let him up, he says. Hear that? He thinks were playing. Like hell
he does.”
Jones was silent for a moment. When he spoke, the little relief that had come into his voice was gone.
“What're you pulling on me?” he demanded uneasily.
“It's a case of you pulling something on us,” Pack said. “Isn't it?”
Jones didn't answer.
摘要：

SATANBLACKADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2003BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIIIScannedandProofedbyTomStephensOriginallypublishedinDocSavag...

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