Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 139 - Weird Valley

VIP免费
2024-12-23 0 0 374.62KB 74 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
WEIRD VALLEY
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
Chapter I
THE old man deceived Monk Mayfair completely.
In one sense, though, Monk deceived himself. This deceiving himself was a thing he did not often do.
Ham Brooks, the lawyer, often contended that Monk Mayfair had been born deceived, as well as:
sawed-off, box-bodied, small-eyed, big-mouthed, hairy, lop-eared and generally worthless. All but the
first and last of these contentions were patently true, as a look at Monk Mayfair would show. The last
adjective, generally worthless, depended on the viewpoint.
Naturally no man is born deceived, and Monk had acquired a suspicious nature. Ham Brooks was just
prejudiced. Ham and Monk were great friends, in a violent way.
The old man paid them a visit one afternoon when Doc Savage happened to be away, out on Long
Island looking through a microscope at a new germ some fellow had found.
The old gaffer came bustling in on them with a big grin.
“Hello, sonny,” he said to Monk.
Ham Brooks laughed at the idea of Monk, who was a world-renowned industrial chemist, being called
sonny.
Monk was irritated. “Take another look, Pop. Do I look like your sonny?” he suggested sourly.
The old chap examined Monk. The old man was quite old indeed, and appeared to be constructed of
sinew, rocks and brown leather.
“God help me, no!” he said. “No, siree!”
Ham Brooks laughed again.
The laugh caused the elderly duffer to turn to Ham and ask, “What's so funny, pretty-pants?”
Which got Ham's goat. Ham gave a great deal of attention to his clothes. During normal times he had
spent much effort pursuing the title of Best Dressed Man in New York City, and to win such a
distinction, you had to be distinctly high-class with your dressing. It was crude and jarring to be called
pretty-pants.
The old fellow looked at them. “Now you don't like me,” he complained.
“We don't like you or dislike you, because we don't know you,” Monk told him.
The old gentleman was becoming indignant.
“I come in here to be friends!” he said, his voice getting a little louder with each word. “And you get mad
at me right off the bat.”
“We're not mad,” Monk said, “but you're hot on your way to getting us mad.”
The old chap flapped his arms.
“Get mad!” he bellowed. “Get mad and insult me! Call me a liar! Go ahead, call me a liar! Tell me I'm
not two hundred and ninety years old!”
MONK said, “Oh, sit down and calm yourself. And if you've got any business around here, get it off
your mind.”
The old gentleman snorted loudly. He looked around and picked out a chair and planted himself in it.
“World gets more discourteous every time I come out for a look,” he said angrily.
Ham Brooks frowned at the ancient visitor. “What was that you said a minute ago about how old you
are. Did I misunderstand you?”
“Why should you misunderstand?” yelled the old fellow. “Your hearing is all right, ain't it?”
Monk jumped, recalling that the old fellow had said that he was two hundred and ninety years old.
“Just who are you?” Monk asked.
“Call me Methuselah. Methuselah Brown,” the old fellow said.
“And just what kind of a gag are you trying to pull on us?” Monk continued.
“There you go—call me a liar!” yelled Methuselah Brown.
“So you're two hundred ninety.”
The old man snorted. “Don't like your tone. Shouldn't have come down here in the first place.”
Ham Brooks stood up and said, “Will you excuse Mr. Mayfair and myself for a few moments? Just wait
right here, and we will be back shortly.”
“Go ahead.” The old fellow snorted. “Gonna put your heads together and decide I'm crazy. I know how
it goes.”
Monk and Ham retired to an inner room, which was Doc Savage's scientific library, and did just exactly
that. They closed the door and lowered their voices.
Monk said, “The old coot is obviously a nut. You could tell that the minute he walked in and started
getting his feelings hurt every time we said anything to him.”
Ham Brooks as a matter of policy hated to agree with Monk about anything. But he was equally
convinced that their visitor was mentally deranged.
“We can't be bothered with him hanging around here,” Ham said.
“No, I've got some laboratory work to do,” Monk agreed.
“Why don't you take him out for a walk, and maybe buy him a meal? Sometimes food quiets them. Find
out where he lives and take him home to his folks,” Ham suggested.
“Why me? What's the matter with you?”
Ham said, “Oh, all right. I'll match you to see who does it.”
Monk sneered at him. “Nothing doing. The last six times we've matched, I've lost. You've got some kind
of a trick coin or gimmick.”
“Well, we can just put him out.”
“Better talk to him first, and decide whether he's the harmless kind of lunatic or not. If he's not harmless,
we'll call the birdie wagon. If he is, one of us will take him home, or something.”
They went back into the reception room. Their elderly, leathery visitor looked at them with small blue
eyes in which wrath sparkled. He was now smoking a large corncob pipe which was reminiscent of a
polecat.
“Decided I was crazy, didn't you?” he bellowed.
“Oh, lower your voice,” Monk said. “After all, the side might fall out of the building.”
The old fellow flapped his arms again.
“Shouldn't have come here!” he howled. “Told that Doctor Frederick Rayburn I would just get insulted!
Told him it wouldn't do any good!”
Ham and Monk exchanged somewhat slack-jawed looks. Doctor Frederick Rayburn was probably the
most eminent physician in his field, his field being a broad one which could best be described as the
chemistry of living organisms. Biochemistry was the word.
“JUST exactly why did you come here, Mr. Brown?” Ham asked.
“I was told to see a fellow named Doc Savage.”
“Who sent you?”
“I just as much as told you. Doctor Frederick Rayburn sent me.”
“Why?”
“Doc Rayburn told me Doc Savage would be interested in my case.”
“Interested because of what?”
‘The old man spouted smoke indignantly from his malodorous pipe.
“Words, words, words!” he yelled. “All words and no action, like everybody these days! Is this where I
find this Doc Savage, whoever he is, or isn't it?”
“This is where you find him.”
“Well, trot him out!”
Ham explained patiently, “Doc is not in right now.”
“Then get hold of him!” shouted Methuselah Brown. “I'm tired of talking to office-boys!”
Monk, who was not noted for patience, now did some shouting himself. “Listen, old-timer, you're
aggravating us unnecessarily. We don't believe you, and nobody else would believe you, and either quit
blaming us for that or quit howling at us. If you want to see Doc Savage, behave like a white man, and if
we think it's worth while, we'll call him in. Otherwise, out on your ear you go.”
“You couldn't throw me out, sonny!”
“One of us would be mighty surprised if I didn't,” Monk assured him. “Now are you going to behave
yourself.”
The old fellow surprised them by subsiding somewhat.
“What do I have to do to convince you children!” he demanded.
“The first thing,” Monk told him, “is just sit there and stink up the place with that pipe while we call
Doctor Rayburn and find out how much of this is imagination.”
“Go ahead, kiddy.” With a snort.
Monk and Ham went back into the library to make the telephone call. The telephone had two pony sets
there, so that they could both talk and listen.
“The screwball things that happen around here!” Ham said. He began to grin. “I don't know but what this
is the goofiest one that has come along. Two hundred and ninety years old!”
“It's a gag,” Monk declared. “It's got to be a gag.”
“This Doctor Frederick Rayburn is a serious kind of a chap, with more dignity than a new congressman.
Somehow I doubt if he would pull a practical joke on Doc.”
“I suppose the old bag of bones is two hundred ninety years old!” Monk said violently.
Ham laughed. The thing was beginning to strike him as funny.
He got Doctor Frederick Rayburn's office on the telephone, and a very staid-voiced office girl told him to
hold the wire. Ham waited, mentally picturing Rayburn's ultra-swank offices on middle Park Avenue in a
building which you hardly dared enter unless wearing a silk hat and cutaway.
Ham recognized Doctor Rayburn's rather preoccupied and over-dignified voice immediately. The man
might sound slightly like a stuffed shirt, but he wasn't.
“I imagine you are calling about Mr. Methuselah Brown,” said Rayburn self-consciously.
Ham said, “That's right, but this isn't Doc, it's Ham Brooks. We are checking up to see whether this is
something we should bother Doc with.”
“It is my opinion Savage should be called at once,” Rayburn said. “Of course you can use your own
judgment. But you might be interested in knowing how the case came to my attention.”
“You bet we would,” Ham assured him.
DOCTOR FREDERICK RAYBURN began, “I was born in the state of Chiapas, which is one of the
states in southern Mexico, adjoining the Guatemala border. My father was doing research for a fever
foundation fund at the time, and my mother had gone along as assistant. I lived there until I was seven
years old, during which time I met an old fellow named Davis. He called himself Arctic Davis.”
Ham asked, “Pardon me, Doctor, but is all this personal history a part of it?”
“I want to explain how I became involved,” Rayburn said stiffly. “It is such an unusual matter that I would
prefer to give such an explanation. In other words, if this turns out to be something other than it seems to
be—and God knows, it seems utterly impossible—I should like for you to know exactly how I happened
to meet this old man and send him to you.”
“I see your point,” Ham admitted.
Doctor Rayburn continued, “The section of Chiapas where I lived those years is very remote and very
lovely, and it has always held a fascination for me. It might be, too, that there is something in man's
psychic makeup which makes him want to return to the scenes of his youth. At any rate, all of my life I
have gone back to Chiapas on visits. I think the longest interval that I allowed to elapse between visits
was four years, when I was in Europe studying. On some of these visits, I would see this old chap, Arctic
Davis, again. He liked me, I am sure. I can not say that I particularly liked Davis, but he fascinated me,
because there was something strange and mysterious about him. I could never figure out exactly what it
was, but the impression of mystery always persisted.”
“This old fellow who says his name is Methuselah Brown—is he Davis?” Ham asked.
“No, no. No indeed,” Rayburn said quickly. “Let me get to the point. Arctic Davis recently came to me
here in New York.”
“When was that?”
“Three days ago,” Doctor Rayburn replied. “I was quite surprised to see Davis, because I had never
heard him speak of leaving the Chiapas wilderness. But here was old Arctic Davis in New York—and he
had a most remarkable request. He didn't call it a request. He referred to it as a gift. He said the thing
was so unbelievable that he would not attempt to convince me, or even tell me what it was, by the use of
words. He would, instead, suggest that I examine a friend of his—he referred to the man as his very best
friend, in fact—and draw my own conclusions. The man to be examined turned out to be this old
Methuselah Brown, as he calls himself.”
“You examined him—Brown?” Ham asked.
“Yes.”
“What did you conclude?”
Doctor Rayburn's voice went up a few notches. And Ham suddenly realized that the specialist was
laboring under considerable emotional excitement. Rayburn was actually wrought up about this
Methuselah Brown business.
“I concluded that I had better have a man of Doc Savage's capability look into the thing,” Rayburn said.
Ham said, “But I would like to know exactly what—”
“Your curiosity is quite understandable, but I am sorry,” said Rayburn flatly. “I am going to keep my
conclusions to myself, and I will tell you why: frankly, they make me wonder if I'm not mentally
unbalanced. This is all the information I feel I should give you. You had better call Doc Savage. I'm sorry
if you are displeased. Good bye.”
And the specialist hung up.
Chapter II
MONK and Ham looked at each other blankly. The conversation with Rayburn was disturbing, because
they knew the specialist was not a flighty man.
“Rayburn was worked up,” Monk said, voicing an obvious conclusion.
Ham nodded. “Well, he actually sent this old bag of rocks to see Doc. We found that out, anyway.”
“You suppose we had better call Doc Savage?”
“Two hundred ninety years old,” Ham said bitterly. He leaned back and frowned at the ceiling. “No, I
don't think we had better call Doc. That old guy in there isn't two hundred and ninety years old, for the
simple reason that nobody lives to be two hundred and ninety years old these days.”
“You figure it follows therefore that somebody is lying?” Monk asked.
“Or joking. This thing could still be a gag.”
“Rayburn didn't sound as if it was any gag.”
“You can't tell about that. These medical men pull the dangdest practical jokes on each other sometimes.
Maybe Rayburn isn't the tower of dignity we thought he was.”
“That guy,” said Monk, “is so serious and dignified that he creaks.”
“Let's go in and give that old goat the third degree,” Ham suggested. “Maybe we can shake the joker out
of the deck.”
Methuselah Brown was sitting blissfully in a fog of choking blue pipe smoke when they went back into
the reception room.
“Got fooled, didn't you,” he said. “Found out Doc Rayburn sent me.”
Monk coughed. “What on earth are you smoking?”
“My private stock,” said the old man. “Grow it myself. Have grown it for a hundred and twenty years.
Got it from an Indian named Potato, who once met George Washington.”
“My, my, so now you knew George Washington,” Monk said.
“Never said it. Met his half-brother, Lawrence, once, though. Lawrence raised George after he was
about eleven years old. Just barely met Lawrence, though. Don't know a thing about him.”
Monk couldn't help grinning. The thing was absurd. “That's fine,” he said. “Knew Lincoln too, I
suppose.”
“Stop kidding me,” the old man said. “I know you don't believe me. Wouldn't have good sense if you
did, would you?”
Monk eyed the old gentleman thoughtfully, not sure exactly how to take Methuselah Brown.
“Are you serious about this thing?” Monk asked.
“What thing? Never get too serious about anything, on account of that's the way you get heart trouble
and things.”
“I refer,” said Monk, “to the very dubious matter of you being two hundred and ninety years old.”
“Sure, I'm serious. Anyway, it's the truth. I guess that's what you mean.”
“If you're lying, we're going to find it out,” Monk warned.
“If! If!” The old man snorted. “Why say if? Just say you know I'm lying, why don't you?”
Monk told him patiently, “Look, Pop, we're giving you the benefit of the doubt, at the expense of making
fools out of ourselves. So why not coöperate?”
“Coöperate how?”
“Tell us just who you claim to be, and what's on your mind.”
The old man popped a hand on a knee. “By cracky, why didn't you say that before! That's what I came
here to do. Now you two kids just sit back and listen.”
HIS proper name, said the old gentleman, was Christopher Brown, and he was born in Colonial Salem in
the year 1654. These were the days when old puritanical Salem was at its worst, when the burning for
witchcraft was in full sway. Christopher Brown had apparently been a young man who sowed a wild oat
or two, and was a non-conformist, as well as a practical joker.
His practical joking got him into trouble at the age of twenty. This was the year 1674, on November 24,
when he was charged with holding conversations with the Devil. This was all an outgrowth of a plain lie
which he had told as a joke.
“What made me maddest,” said Methuselah Brown, “was that what really got me in the mess was saying
that the Devil appeared to me as a gentleman, a fellow in genteel clothes and with decent manners. That
really set those old Puritan witch-chasers up on their ears. The result was that I had to get busy as heck,
tell another bunch of lies, and convince them I was fibbing in the first place. They took this witchcraft
seriously in those days.”
He warmed up on the subject.
“Why, the year before, in 1673, a poor girl named Eunice Cole was tried on a charge of associating with
the Devil. There was a whole cycle of Devil-meets-girl about that time, and—”
“How clearly do you remember all this?” Ham interrupted.
“Clear enough. Why?”
“With enough distinctness to describe Salem as it was in those days, and the people who lived there?”
“Sure.”
“Put on your hat,” Ham said briskly. “And if you're not lying, we'll darn soon know about it.”
Monk trailed along downstairs. Doc Savage's office was on the eighty-sixth floor of one of the prominent
midtown skyscrapers. They maintained a private garage in the basement which usually contained several
cars, all of them special machines which they had equipped for their peculiar needs. They took a dark
sedan which was the least unorthodox of the cars.
They headed uptown.
“Hey, shyster, where we going?” Monk demanded of Ham.
“I've got a friend,” Ham said. “He's the world's leading authority on witchcraft, Salem, and the Salem
period. What he doesn't know about Salem just didn't happen.” He glanced at Methuselah Brown.
“We'll soon have our two-hundred-ninety-year-old friend smoked out of his bush.”
The old gaffer snorted.
“You're in for an awful shock,” he said.
HAM'S friend lived in one of the more impressive stone houses in Westchester County. By the time the
ride up there ended, Monk and Ham were losing their confidence, and their patience with themselves
along with it. They felt it reflected on their good sense to believe that there could be any truth in such a
preposterous thing.
But the ride had given them a chance to inspect old Methuselah Brown at close range, and they could see
unusual evidences of, if not ageless antiquity, at least something strange. His skin, for one thing, had a
leathery quality that was not quite natural. In fact, the more they looked at it, the more it looked like a
hide that might have been on a man for nearly three hundred years.
The old gaffer's teeth were worn off nearly to the gums. Not decayed. Worn off. They were sound teeth,
but they were worn the way no man's teeth become worn in a normal lifetime, or even two or three
lifetimes.
Monk caught Ham eyeing him, and grimaced, muttered, “We're getting sucked in to something.”
Old Methuselah Brown chuckled. “You fellows are making fools out of yourselves, did you know it?”
“That's just what we were thinking,” Monk assured him.
“No, no, by bein' so sure I am either crazy or a practical joker,” said the old man. “That's what I mean.”
Monk and Ham mentally threw up their hands.
“Here is where my friend lives,” Ham said.
The witchcraft-collector friend was a tall, lean, spectacled gentleman with a merry smile and twinkling
eyes. Monk liked him immediately, and kept on liking him until he discovered the fellow was one of the
bluest of the bluebloods, controlled a fortune reputed to be more than a billion dollars, and was a society
leader. After that, Monk's admiration cooled. There was no sensible reason for this. The man was still a
fine fellow. But Monk had become so accustomed to grumbling at and about Ham's social-leader friends
that he just couldn't stomach the idea of one of them being a nice guy.
The collector's name was John Winthrop Widman, and he was interested in witchcraft because his
ancestors had been prominent witch-chasers around old Salem, Hampton, Newberry, Hartford and
other centers of agitation.
After the hand-shaking and ribbing were over, Ham made a little speech in which he said, “Now look,
Winthrop, I know you're going to laugh at us, but try to keep your sense of perspective while you do it,
will you? We've been laughing at ourselves, and it isn't funny.”
The collector laughed as they had expected him to do when he heard about Methuselah Brown being
two hundred and ninety years old. He said, “This is a rib, of course.”
Monk and Ham agreed that it probably was a rib, that it couldn't very well be anything else, but would
John Winthrop Widman put the old man over the jumps, and unmask him now as a fellow who had never
been near Salem in 1674, or thereabouts.
“Where was your father buried?” was the first question.
“In the new burying-point on the South River bluff,” the old man said instantly. “He died in 1688. Name
was Sebastian Brown.”
The collector got out a book giving a listing of the headstones in Burying Point and Broad Street
cemeteries. He grimaced, and looked vaguely surprised.
“The name there?” Monk asked.
“Yes.”
“Doesn't prove anything,” Monk said. “Anybody can read history.”
JOHN WINTHROP WIDMAN seemed vaguely disturbed. He began firing questions: Did you know
Roger Conant? What color eyes did he have? Hair? Did he know John Winthrop, the governor? No?
Why not? What about Governor Phelps?
Methuselah Brown held up a hand.
“Now wait a minute,” he said. “In 1674, I got snaked into court on a witchcraft charge myself, which I've
explained to Monk and Ham, here. Being tried like that made me mad.”
He grinned happily at them
“It made me so mad,” he added, that I cleared out of the Colony. I went to sea, and wound up in—well,
where I wound up is the part of the story that comes after you decide whether I'm telling the truth.”
Ham asked the collector, “Have you caught him in a lie yet?”
“No,” said Widman irritably. “But wait until I get going on him. This stuff I've been asking could all have
been dug out of encyclopedias or historical works on Salem.”
Old Methuselah Brown snorted. “Trot out your questions.”
The collector did that. He asked questions out of his head for a while. He began to perspire. He began to
dig into books on the shelves. Once in a while there would be a question that wasn't satisfactory, and
there would be an argument about it, the argument invariably ending with Methuselah Brown shouting,
“The guy who wrote that book wasn't there. I was!” Or he would bellow, “How could one man know
anything and everything that happened in town?” John Winthrop Widman swore and wiped his forehead.
“Caught him lying yet?” Monk demanded.
“No, darn it,” Widman snapped. “Why did you fellows bring him around. This is going to make me a
nervous wreck.”
Old Methuselah Brown had been studying the face of an old Salem resident in one of the books spread
open on the table. Now he pointed, “Hey, that says Bill Garritt. That's wrong. That ain't Bill Garritt.
That's old Custis Ewing.”
“Custis Ewing!” said Widman. He seemed to jump a foot off the floor. “My Lord! Oh, my Lord!”
“What's the matter?” Monk yelled.
What was the matter was plenty. The fact that the man in the picture was Custis Ewing and not Bill
Garritt was something that no one, absolutely no one on earth, but John Winthrop Widman could have
known. The reason: Custis Ewing was a Widman ancestor on the maternal side, and he had been a
common thief and had changed his name for that reason, a fact that had been kept in the family closet
with the rest of the skeletons.
John Winthrop Widman looked at Monk and Ham with stunned acceptance.
“This old man really lived in Salem in 1674,” he said.
THAT was enough for Monk and Ham.
“Get hold of Doc Savage,” Monk said.
Ham made the call to the Long Island laboratory where Doc was getting acquainted with the new germ.
Ham went to great pains to make Doc understand that they had left no stone unturned to prove the thing
couldn't be true, and that, actually, they still didn't believe it.
But Doc was impressed.
摘要：

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

展开>> 收起<<
Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 139 - Weird Valley.pdf

共74页,预览15页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

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

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：74 页 大小：374.62KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

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

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 74
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注